A Rose Is a Rose; Or Is It?
A few years back, I was teaching some students in a remedial reading class. I remember working with a young boy named Jacob. As we were sounding out the words on the page, we
A Rose Is a Rose; Or Is It?
A few years back, I was teaching some students in a remedial reading class. I remember working with a young boy named Jacob. As we were sounding out the words on the page, we came to a couple of sentences like these:
John rose from the table.
John smelled a pink rose.
The task was a relatively simple one: Determine which sentence contained the word “rose” that meant “a flower.” In spite of the fact that my second grade pupil was a remedial reader, he had little difficulty discerning the difference between the two words. Even though they looked and sounded the same, the two words had different meanings. The context determined which word was under consideration.
The word “rose” is in a family of words called “homographs.” A homograph is a word that has the same spelling and sometimes the same pronunciation as another word, but has a completely different meaning.
For example, when Paul writes of those who “by their smooth and fair speech” beguile the hearts of the innocent (Rom. 16:18), he isn’t warning us of those who discuss the livestock exhibit at the county fair. The two words sound and look alike, but have completely different meanings.
If we were unable to determine from the immediate context that Paul was talking about polished language instead of the annual midway, we could settle the issue once and for all by examining the original Greek word from which our word “fair” was translated. In this case, we would see that the original word is eulogia meaning: “a fine discourse, polished language” (Thayer, 260).
And in Galatians 6:12, we find the word “fair,” but here it translates the Greek term euprosopeo, meaning: “to make a fair show; to please”(Thayer, 261).
Homographs can be confusing, but with the proper tools and a little common sense, the correct meaning of a word may easily be determined. Which is why the following “definition” is somewhat distressing.
A popular Bible-related web site, with various study tools, has an online version of what is reported to be a “lexicon” of New Testament Greek “based on Thayer’s and Smith’s Bible Dictionary and others.” (See sources, “Thayer and Smith.”) If you review their entry for the Greek preposition, eis, you will find the standard, initial definition given by Thayer,
1. into, unto, to, towards, for, among
Then in seamless fashion, we find this expanded explanation:
“‘For’ (as used in Acts 2:38 ‘for the forgiveness...’) could have two meanings. If you saw a poster saying ‘Jesse James wanted for robbery’, ‘for’ could mean Jesse is wanted so he can commit a robbery, or is wanted because he has committed a robbery. The later sense is the correct one. So too in this passage, the word ‘for’ signifies an action in the past. Otherwise, it would violate the entire tenor of the NT teaching on salvation by grace and not by works.”
I have searched through the entire entry in Thayer and found no reference to “Jesse James.” Likewise, in Smith’s Bible Dictionary, no mention of a Jesse James wanted po