Glossary

The everyday word for a father in the language Jesus spoke, used by small children and by grown sons alike, and the word he used to God in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36). Mark keeps it in Aramaic and adds the Greek, and so does this translation. Paul says that the Spirit has the churches, Greek-speaking Gentiles among them, crying the same Aramaic word (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6), which is the surest sign that they learned it from Jesus's own prayer. Mark 14:36.

Something God finds repugnant. The word covers idolatry above all, and also dishonest weights (Proverbs 11:1), forbidden sexual unions (Leviticus 18), and a sacrifice brought by a person living wickedly (Proverbs 21:27). In Ezekiel it is the word for what was being done in and around the temple, over forty times. Greek bdelygma translates it, and Daniel's "abomination of desolation" is the phrase Mark 13:14 uses for what defiles the temple. Ezekiel 5:9.

The legal act by which a Roman took someone, usually a grown man, as his son and heir. Old debts were canceled, a new name was given, and the adopted son stood in law exactly where a son by birth stood. Paul uses it of what God has done for those in Christ (Romans 8:15), of what they still wait for (8:23), and of Israel's own privilege (9:4). Romans 8:15.

One called to stand beside another. Greek writers used it of someone who stood beside a person in a court of law and spoke for him, and more widely of any helper or intercessor. Jesus gives the name to the Spirit on the night before he dies: "another Advocate," since he has been one himself (John 14:16). The Advocate will teach the disciples and remind them of what Jesus said (14:26), testify about him (15:26), and convict the world about sin, righteousness, and judgment (16:8). First John gives the same word to Jesus, who speaks to the Father for those who sin (1 John 2:1). Older translations have "Comforter," and others "Counselor" or "Helper." This translation says "Advocate" because the word's home is the court, where one person speaks for another. John 14:16.

A long span of time, an era. Jews of Paul's day spoke of two: "this age," marked by sin and death, and "the age to come," when God sets the world right. Paul holds that the age to come has already begun in Christ while this age still runs, which is why his hearers live in both at once. Older translations often have "world" or "forever" where this word stands. Romans 12:2.

Aid, and the one who gives it, from a party able to help: used of God (Psalm 33:20; 121:1-2; Deuteronomy 33:29) and of military allies (Isaiah 30:5; Ezekiel 12:14; Hosea 13:9). The word never names a subordinate. At Genesis 2:18 and 20 it stands with kenegdo, "corresponding to him." The standard lexicons gloss it "help" or "helper," not "ally"; the rendering is chosen because English "helper" has narrowed to mean an assistant, which the Hebrew never means.

Literally "place of slaughter." A raised place of earth or uncut stones (Exodus 20:24-25) on which offerings were burned. To build one was to worship there, and to mark the place as belonging to the God who was worshiped. Noah builds the first (Genesis 8:20), and Abram builds one wherever God meets him, with no temple and no priest. Genesis 13:18.

Esau's grandson by a concubine (Genesis 36:12), and the people named for him, nomads of the Negev who attacked Israel from behind on the way out of Egypt (Exodus 17:8-16; Deuteronomy 25:17-19). Yahweh swore war on them from generation to generation; Saul was rejected as king for sparing their king Agag (1 Samuel 15), and Haman in Esther is "the Agagite," which Jewish readers took as that king's line (Esther 3:1). Genesis 36:12.

"Firm," "reliable": the word with which Israel answered a prayer or an oath, "so be it" (Deuteronomy 27:15; 1 Chronicles 16:36). Jesus put it at the front of his own sayings instead, "Amen, I say to you," which no one before him is known to have done; it stakes his word on his own authority. The Gospels kept the Hebrew word in their Greek, and this translation keeps it in its English; "truly" translates what the evangelists chose not to. In John it is doubled (John 3:3). Mark 3:28.

Both words mean "messenger," and both are used of human messengers as well as heavenly ones (Genesis 32:3; Luke 7:24). Angels in the Bible have no wings and are hardly described. They appear as men, and are often not recognized until they have gone (Genesis 18:2; Judges 13:16). "The angel of Yahweh" in Genesis, Exodus, and Judges speaks as Yahweh himself, in the first person, and is answered as him; the note at Genesis 16:7 gives the ways this has been understood. Where the messenger is a human being this translation says "messenger." Genesis 16:7; Romans 8:38.

To pour oil over someone or something to move it out of ordinary use and into God's. Priests are anointed here, and then kings (1 Samuel 10:1; 16:13), and the tent and its furniture as well. The noun is the title this translation renders "Messiah," and the Greek for it is Christos (see "Christ"): a reader meeting "the anointed one" in the Gospels is meeting this verb. Exodus 28:41.

One sent with a commission to speak and act for the sender, as an envoy speaks for a king. Jesus gave the name to the twelve. Paul uses it of himself, "called to be an apostle," and sometimes more widely of others sent out by the churches (Romans 16:7). Romans 1:1.

To mark out, fix, or appoint: a boundary, a day, a person to a task. Jesus is "appointed Son of God in power" (Romans 1:4), and those God knew beforehand he "appointed beforehand to be shaped to the image of his Son" (8:29). "Predestined" is the Latin for the second word, and it carries centuries of argument that the Greek word does not. Romans 8:29.

A chest; the English word comes from the Latin for one. The ark made at Sinai was a box of acacia wood overlaid with gold, carried on poles, that held the two tablets of the Testimony, with the atonement cover and its two cherubim on top (Exodus 25:10-22). Exodus calls it "the ark of the Testimony." Later books call it "the ark of the covenant" (Numbers 10:33) and speak of it as God's footstool (1 Chronicles 28:2). Noah's ark is a different Hebrew word (tevah, Genesis 6:14). The same aron is Joseph's coffin (Genesis 50:26) and the collection box Jehoiada set beside the altar (2 Kings 12:9). Exodus 25:10.

An ordered muster. Of Yahweh, his armies, as in the title "Yahweh of Armies"; of the heavens, the stars in their ranks (Deuteronomy 4:19). Genesis 2:1 uses it of the heavens and the earth together: everything set in its order.

The lid of the ark, solid gold with two cherubim worked into it, and the place God says he will speak from (Exodus 25:22). The name is from the verb for covering over an offense, and once a year blood was put on it (Leviticus 16:14-15). "Mercy seat" is Tyndale's phrase after Luther's; it is not a seat, and "mercy" settles something the Hebrew leaves open. The Greek translation used hilasterion, the word Paul uses of Jesus at Romans 3:25, where this translation says "the place of atonement." Exodus 25:17.

The Greek verb means to plunge something under water. Outside the Bible it is used of ships going down and of a person overwhelmed by debt or by wine. The baptisms of John and of the first Christians gave this ordinary action a meaning, and at Romans 6:3-4 the meaning leans on the action: going under the water is a burial. Churches differ on how baptism should be done, who should receive it, and what it does, and Thread leaves those questions to them. Romans 6:4.

A chest or box. The word is used of only two things in the Bible: the ark Noah built (Genesis 6:14) and the basket of papyrus that Moses is put in (Exodus 2:3). Both are boxes made watertight with pitch, neither has a rudder or a sail, and both are shut over a life while the water outside is killing everything else. Genesis calls the first an ark because it is a vessel, and this book calls the second a basket because it is a basket; the Hebrew does not distinguish them. Exodus 2:3.

The verb of "faith," one word with it in Greek: to rely on someone and act on it, not merely to hold an opinion. "Everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16) and "from faith to faith" (Romans 1:17) are the same word twice, and "I believe! Help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24) is the word and its negative in one breath. The Hebrew verb is the one Genesis uses of Abram, "he believed Yahweh" (Genesis 15:6), and Isaiah's "the one who believes will not panic" (Isaiah 28:16) is what Paul quotes at Romans 9:33 and 10:11. See "faith." John 3:16; Mark 1:15; Isaiah 28:16.

The town north of Jerusalem where Jacob slept on a stone and saw the stairway, named for what he said when he woke (Genesis 28:17-19); Abraham had camped and built an altar there before him (Genesis 12:8). Jacob came back to it with his household to bury their gods and hear the promise again (Genesis 35:1-15). Under the divided kingdom Jeroboam set one of his golden calves there and made it the northern kingdom's royal sanctuary (1 Kings 12:28-29), which is why Amos was told to leave it and Hosea renames it "house of nothing" (Amos 7:12-13; Hosea 4:15). Genesis 28:19.

A village in the hills south of Jerusalem, called Ephrath in Genesis; Rachel dies on the way to it and is buried there (Genesis 35:19; 48:7). It is Ruth's town and David's (Ruth 1:19; 1 Samuel 16:1; 17:12), and Micah names it as the place Israel's ruler will come from (Micah 5:2), which is why Matthew and Luke set Jesus's birth there (Matthew 2:1-6; Luke 2:4). Genesis 35:19.

The standing of the firstborn son: a double share of the inheritance and the headship of the family when the father died, "the right of the firstborn" (Deuteronomy 21:17). It was property, and it could be sold or forfeited. Esau sold his for a meal (Genesis 25:31-34), and Reuben lost his for a wrong (1 Chronicles 5:1-2). Hebrews holds Esau up as the man who traded what lasts for what was in front of him (Hebrews 12:16). Genesis 25:31.

To give life and increase, or to ask God to give it: children, harvests, flocks, safety, peace. God's first words to living things are a blessing (Genesis 1:22, 28). A blessing once spoken was held to carry real force, which is why Jacob and Esau struggle over one. When humans bless God they are giving back thanks and praise (Genesis 9:26). This is a different word from "blessed" as the description of a person who is well off. Genesis 12:3.

Said of someone whose situation is to be envied: how well off. It names a state, not a feeling and not a wish; "happy" is too much a mood, and "fortunate" suggests luck. A different word, said of God, is rendered "praised" (eulogetos, Romans 1:25). Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with it nine times, and says it of people nobody envied (Matthew 5:3-11). Romans 4:7-8, quoting Psalm 32:1-2; Matthew 5:3.

In the Bible blood is life itself: "the life of the flesh is in the blood" (Leviticus 17:11). Life belongs to God, so blood may not be eaten, and blood that is shed "cries out" and has to be answered for (Genesis 4:10). It is also why blood on the altar can make atonement, a life given for a life. When the New Testament speaks of the blood of Jesus (Romans 3:25; 5:9), it means his life given up in death. Genesis 9:4.

A Roman officer commanding a century, nominally a hundred men, the backbone of the legions, promoted from the ranks. Mark uses the Latin word in Greek letters, where Matthew and Luke use the Greek term; it is one of several Latin words in his Gospel. The centurion at the cross is the first human being in Mark to say "Son of God" (Mark 15:39), and it is his report that satisfies Pilate that Jesus is dead (Mark 15:44-45). Mark 15:39.

In most of the Bible the people of southern Babylonia, and so a name for the Babylonians and their empire: Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans (Genesis 11:31), and the Chaldeans are the army that takes Jerusalem (2 Kings 25:4-10). In Daniel the word does both jobs. It names the people (Daniel 5:30) and it names a profession, the trained experts in dreams, omens, and the stars who stand alongside the magicians and enchanters in the king's court (Daniel 2:2; 4:7; 5:7). Greek and Roman writers later used it the second way, as a word for astrologers. Daniel 1:4.

A turning of the whole mind and direction, the Greek for the Hebrew prophets' "return" (Jeremiah 3:12; Hosea 14:1). "Repent" is not used, because it has come to mean remorse and penance, which the word does not say. In Mark the verb is "turn" (Mark 1:4, 15). Romans 2:4.

Winged guardian creatures of the ancient Near East, composite like a sphinx, set at thresholds to keep them. In Israel they flank the ark (Exodus 25:18-20) and carry Yahweh's throne (Psalm 18:10; Ezekiel 10). At Genesis 3:24 they guard the way to the tree of life. The plural is the Hebrew's; one is a cherub. They are not the infants of later art.

The people God has picked out and claimed as his, the word Israel used of itself (Isaiah 65:9; Psalm 105:6) and the churches took over for themselves (Romans 8:33; 1 Peter 2:9). Older translations say "the elect." In Mark the word belongs to the speech about the end: the days are cut short for their sake, false messiahs try to lead them astray, and the Son of Man gathers them from the four winds (Mark 13:20, 22, 27). The word says whose they are; it does not by itself say how they came to be chosen, and the note at Romans 8:29 sets out what this translation holds and what it leaves open. Isaiah uses the word of the servants within Israel who inherit the land (Isaiah 65:9, 15, 22). Mark 13:20.

Not a surname. It is the Greek for the Hebrew title mashiach, "Messiah," which means "anointed one": the king of David's line whom Israel awaited. To say "Jesus Christ" is to say "Jesus the King." Where the title is heard as a claim among Jews, this translation writes "the Messiah" (Romans 9:5). Romans 1:4.

A gathering of people called together. Greek cities used the word for their citizens meeting to decide public business, and Israel's Greek scriptures use it for the people gathered before God. In the New Testament it is always people and never a building, and in Paul's day the people were a group small enough to meet in someone's house (Romans 16:5). Read "the church in their house" as the normal size. Romans 16:1, 5.

Philippi was a Roman colony, and its people held the citizenship of Rome while living in Macedonia: they kept Rome's laws, used its coins, and looked to Rome for protection. Paul uses their word twice, "live as citizens" (Philippians 1:27) and "our citizenship is in heaven" (3:20), and means the same thing: live here by the laws of the capital, and wait for the capital to come to you. Philippians 1:27.

Fit to come near what is holy. It is not a word about dirt, and it is not a word about sin. An animal, a person, or a thing is clean or unclean, and Leviticus 11 to 15 sets out which is which and how the unclean is made clean again. Only clean animals could be offered or eaten. Uncleanness came from ordinary things, such as childbirth, a skin disease, or touching the dead, and was no disgrace in itself. The fault lay in bringing it near the sanctuary. Genesis 7:2.

A chest. The word covers any box made to hold something: the coffin Joseph is laid in at the end of Genesis (50:26), the chest Jehoiada set beside the altar for the temple offerings (2 Kings 12:9-10), and the ark that held the covenant and traveled with Israel through the wilderness (Exodus 25:10). Noah's ark is a different word. Genesis 50:26.

To bring someone through grief, as Isaac was comforted after his mother's death (Genesis 24:67) and as no one could comfort Jacob (Genesis 37:35). It is the first word of the second half of Isaiah, "Comfort, comfort my people" (Isaiah 40:1), said of Zion's ruins (Isaiah 51:3), of God himself (Isaiah 51:12), and, in the book's last chapter, of a mother with her child (Isaiah 66:13). The same root in other forms is "get relief" and "regret" (Genesis 5:29; 6:6). In Greek the same comfort is what Simeon was waiting for, "the comfort of Israel" (Luke 2:25). Isaiah 51:3.

A court. In the plural it is the local courts of the towns, which could have a man beaten in the synagogue (Mark 13:9). In the singular it is the great council at Jerusalem, chief priests, elders, and scribes under the high priest, which tried Jesus by night and handed him to Pilate in the morning (Mark 14:55; 15:1), and which Joseph of Arimathea belonged to (Mark 15:43). Under Rome it could judge but, on the usual reading of the evidence, could not execute. Mark 13:9.

A binding agreement that makes two parties kin or allies, with sworn promises and usually a sign. Nations made them as treaties and families as marriages. In the Bible God binds himself this way: to Noah and every living thing (Genesis 9:8-17), to Abraham (Genesis 15; 17), to Israel at Sinai, to David, and in the "new covenant" of Jeremiah 31:31-34. Jesus says the word over the cup at his last supper, in Moses's phrase from Sinai with "my" added (Mark 14:24; Exodus 24:8). Genesis 6:18.

In the sense "create," a verb the Bible uses only with God as its subject. Kept distinct from asah "make," yatsar "form," and banah "build," all of which Genesis 1-2 also uses; the four are never merged into "made." Genesis 1:1, 21, 27; 2:3, 4.

A stake, or a stake with a crossbar, the Roman way of executing slaves, rebels, and provincials, in public and slowly, as a warning. A condemned man carried the crossbar to the place. Jesus names it before anyone has spoken of his death, as the thing a follower takes up (Mark 8:34), and that is the first time the word appears in Mark. To hearers under Roman rule it was not a figure of speech. Mark 8:34.

In the prophets, the day when Yahweh acts in person to set things right, which means judgment on his enemies and, when Israel has become one of them, on Israel (Amos 5:18-20; Joel 2:1-2; Zephaniah 1:14-16). Obadiah 15 turns it on all the nations; "the day of your brother" in Obadiah 12 is Jerusalem's own day of ruin.

A league of Greek-speaking cities, most of them east of the Jordan and the lake, Gentile in religion and manner, founded after Alexander and favored by Rome. The man who had the legion is sent home to proclaim there (Mark 5:20), and Jesus passes through it on the way back from Tyre (Mark 7:31). Mark 5:20.

Mark uses the two names for the same beings: spirits that take hold of a person and speak and act through him. The Gospels do not explain where they came from; the Jewish books of the time traced them to the spirits of the giants of Genesis 6 (1 Enoch 15). They know who Jesus is before anyone else does, and he silences them (Mark 1:24-25, 34). Driving them out is one of the three things the Twelve are appointed to do (Mark 3:15). Mark 1:34.

A Roman silver coin, the ordinary wage for a day's work (Matthew 20:2), stamped with the emperor's head and title (Mark 12:15-16). Two hundred of them was the better part of a year's pay. Mark 6:37.

Seeking knowledge of what is hidden or still to come by reading signs: in Genesis, Laban says he has learned by it that Yahweh is blessing him (30:27), and Joseph is said to use a cup for it (44:5, 15), an ancient practice, best known from Babylonian handbooks, of reading the shapes a liquid makes. Israel's law forbids it along with the other ways of consulting the unseen (Leviticus 19:26; Deuteronomy 18:10-14), and the prophets treat it as the trade of the nations. At Philippi a slave girl with a python spirit brings her owners much profit by it, until Paul commands the spirit to come out of her (Acts 16:16-18). Genesis 44:5.

The solid vault of the sky, from a verb meaning to hammer metal thin (Exodus 39:3). It holds back the waters above (Genesis 1:6-8) and carries the lights (1:14-17). "Firmament" is the Latin for the same thing; "expanse" is not. Ezekiel 1:22.

Wine poured out on an altar or a stone as a gift to God. The first in the Bible is Jacob's at Bethel (Genesis 35:14); the law fixed one for every daily offering (Exodus 29:40-41; Numbers 28:7), and Paul twice calls his own death one, poured out over the offering of other people's faith (Philippians 2:17; 2 Timothy 4:6). The same word is used of what was poured to other gods (Jeremiah 7:18; Isaiah 57:6). Genesis 35:14.

When a man died childless, his brother was to father a son by the widow; the son counted as the dead man's, carried his name, and inherited his portion, so that a man who died young was not simply erased. Judah tells Onan to do it and Onan refuses (Genesis 38:8-10); the law sets it out, with a public ceremony for a man who will not (Deuteronomy 25:5-10), and Boaz performs a version of it for Ruth (Ruth 4:1-10). The Sadducees build their riddle about the resurrection on it (Mark 12:19-23). Genesis 38:8.

The great soaring raptor of the region, and as often as not the griffon vulture, which nests on cliffs and is bald (Micah 1:16); Hebrew does not separate the two. "Eagle" is kept because English "vulture" carries a contempt the Hebrew never does: the nesher is admired wherever it appears (Exodus 19:4; Deuteronomy 32:11; Isaiah 40:31; Proverbs 30:19). Obadiah 4.

Esau's second name, given him over the red stew (Genesis 25:30), and the name of the nation that came from him, settled in the hill country of Seir south and east of the Dead Sea (Genesis 36:8-9). Israel was told to treat Edom as a brother (Deuteronomy 23:7), was refused passage through it (Numbers 20:14-21), conquered it under David (2 Samuel 8:14), and never forgave it for standing by when Jerusalem fell (Psalm 137:7; Lamentations 4:21-22; Obadiah). The Herods were Idumeans, Edomites by descent. Genesis 36:1.

An old name for God, the one the ancestors knew him by before the name Yahweh was given (Exodus 6:3), and the usual name for God in the book of Job. Its meaning was lost early. The Greek and Latin versions guessed "Almighty," and English Bibles say "God Almighty." It may come from a word for "mountain" or from a word for "breast." Genesis 17:1.

A garment worn over the upper body by a priest. The Bible never describes its shape, because the first hearers knew it; what we are told is what the high priest's was made of, that it had shoulder pieces and a woven band, and that the breastpiece was tied to it. An ephod was also used to ask God a question (1 Samuel 23:9-12), and Gideon made one that became a snare (Judges 8:27). Exodus 28:4.

"Faith" and "believe" are one word in Greek, a noun and its verb, and English has no verb from "faith," so the translation says "faith" for the noun and "believe" for the verb and asks the reader to hear them as one. The word means reliance and loyalty before it means opinion: to have faith in someone is to lean on them and stay with them, which is what Abraham did when he "believed Yahweh" (Genesis 15:6) and what Paul means by "the obedience of faith" (Romans 1:5). Where the word names a quality of character it is "faithfulness," as of God at Romans 3:3 and of the king at Isaiah 11:5. The Hebrew verb behind it is Abraham's, from the root of "Amen"; "trust" is kept for the other Hebrew verb of relying, batach (Isaiah 50:10). Romans 1:17; Isaiah 7:9.

Of God, not terror but the awe that takes him seriously and does what he says. "The fear of God" is the basic decency God expects of every people, whether or not they know his name (Genesis 20:11; Exodus 1:17), and "now I know that you fear God" is what Abraham is told on the mountain (Genesis 22:12). "The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). Outsiders who worshiped Israel's God were called "God-fearers" (Acts 10:2). Where a person is simply afraid, the same word is used, and the context shows which is meant. Genesis 22:12.

A title of God found only in Jacob's mouth, twice (Genesis 31:42, 53): the God whom Isaac feared, or the fear itself made a name, the terror that fell on Abraham at the covenant (Genesis 15:12). Some read the word as an old term for a kinsman, "the Kinsman of Isaac," on the strength of a related Arabic word. It is not the "fear" of the glossary entry under that word, which is the awe that obeys; this is dread. Genesis 31:42.

The first son, who carried the birthright (see that entry) and the father's name. God calls Israel "my firstborn son" (Exodus 4:22), and every firstborn in Israel belonged to him from the night of the exodus (Exodus 13:2). Genesis keeps passing the position to a younger son: Isaac, Jacob, Ephraim. The New Testament calls Christ the firstborn of a large family (Romans 8:29) and "the firstborn of all creation" (Colossians 1:15), the one who holds the heir's place and shares it. Genesis 27:19.

The body as living matter, and by extension kinship ("bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh," Genesis 2:23; "one flesh," 2:24) and the human condition as bodily and mortal (John 3:6). Never "sinful nature." In Paul "the flesh" is also human life on its own resources, without the Spirit of God, which is where sin gets its grip. A person can be "in the flesh" and can leave it (Romans 7:5; 8:8-9). It is not the body as such, which God will raise (Romans 8:11).

The gate of a walled city was its public square: the place where the men of standing sat, where cases were judged, where deals were witnessed and land was sold (Ruth 4:1-11). To "sit in the gate" was to belong to the ruling men of the city. "The gates of Hades" (Matthew 16:18) are the seat of the powers of death, not their doors. Genesis 19:1.

The Bible's phrase for the deaths of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Aaron, and Moses, and of no one else. It is not the burial, which is told separately, and it is said of men buried far from their ancestors, so it does not mean the family tomb. It says that a person has gone to join those who went before, and Genesis says it without explaining it, before Israel had any teaching about what lies beyond death. Genesis 25:8.

A real ravine on the south side of Jerusalem where, under Ahaz and Manasseh, children were burned to Molech (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31), and which Jeremiah said would be renamed the Valley of Slaughter (Jeremiah 7:32; 19:6). Jewish books of the centuries before Jesus made it the name of the place of final judgment, and Jesus uses it that way without explaining it, twelve times in the Gospels, nearly always to his own followers and to the religious leaders. The story that it was Jerusalem's smoldering rubbish dump comes from a commentator writing about the year 1200 and has no ancient support. This translation keeps the name and does not use "hell," which carries pictures the word did not have. Mark 9:43.

An angel, and one of only two named in Israel's Scriptures, both in Daniel. He interprets the vision of the ram and the goat (Daniel 8:16) and comes to Daniel at the hour of the evening offering with the seventy weeks (Daniel 9:21). In Luke he announces the births of John and of Jesus and says that he stands in the presence of God (Luke 1:19, 26). Daniel 8:16.

Literally what was begotten. The formula "these are the generations of" opens each new section of Genesis (2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10, 27; 25:12, 19; 36:1, 9; 37:2), introducing what came from the thing named. The Greek Bible renders it with genesis, and Matthew opens his Gospel in the same words, "the book of the generations of Jesus Christ" (Matthew 1:1); the word is "birth" at Matthew 1:18. Genesis 2:4; Matthew 1:1.

Weight, and so what gives a person weight: honor, standing, wealth. Of God, it is his presence made visible, the cloud and fire that filled the tent and the temple (Exodus 40:34; 1 Kings 8:11). Ezekiel sees "the glory of Yahweh" on a throne with wheels, watches it leave the temple (Ezekiel 10:18), and watches it return (43:4). Paul says everyone "lacks the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), and means that standing. Ezekiel 1:28.

The ordinary word for God is plural in form, and it is the same word for the gods of the nations and for the members of God's council (Psalm 82:1, 6; Job 1:6). It is an address rather than a rank: it says which realm a thing belongs to, which is why the medium at Endor can call the dead Samuel one, "I see a god coming up out of the earth" (1 Samuel 28:13), without anyone supposing a rival deity has appeared. Rendered by what it refers to: "God" where the referent is Israel's God (Genesis 1:1), and "gods" everywhere else, the council included (Genesis 3:5, where the participle after it is plural and 3:22 has "one of us"). "Divine beings" is kept for one verse, Psalm 8:5, which ranks humanity in the created order and where English "gods" would put worship into a sentence that is not about worship. Never "angels," never "rulers." Genesis 3:5.

An announcement of good tidings, in the Roman world especially of a victory or of an emperor's accession, and in Isaiah of God's reign (Isaiah 52:7). "Gospel" is the Old English for the same two words. Romans 1:1, 16.

The district on the eastern edge of the Nile delta where Pharaoh settles Jacob's family, good grazing land near the road to Canaan and away from the Egyptian court (Genesis 45:10; 47:6, 11). Israel is still there at the start of Exodus, and the plagues pass it by (Exodus 8:22; 9:26). It is the one place outside Canaan that the book treats as the family's own ground. Genesis 45:10.

Goodwill shown, a gift given, and the thanks returned for it. In Paul's world it was the everyday word for the favor of a patron or a king, which could not be earned and which bound the one who received it in gratitude. Hebrew says the same with "find favor" (Genesis 6:8). Romans 1:5, 7.

The reparation offering of the law, brought when someone has wronged God's holy things or a neighbor, with the damage made good and a fifth added (Leviticus 5:14-16; 6:1-7); the Philistines sent one back with the ark (1 Samuel 6:3-4). It is a different offering from the "offering for sin" of Leviticus 4. Isaiah says the servant's life is made one (Isaiah 53:10). Isaiah 53:10.

The name outsiders used for Abram's people, and the name they used of themselves when speaking to outsiders (Genesis 39:14; Exodus 1:15; Jonah 1:9). It is first used of Abram. It probably means "one from beyond," that is, from beyond the River Euphrates, or "descendant of Eber" (Genesis 10:21). Texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia use a similar word for people with no settled place in society, and the two may be related. Genesis 14:13.

Not one man but a family. Herod the Great ruled Judea for Rome when Jesus was born (Matthew 2:1). His son Herod Antipas ruled Galilee and Perea as a tetrarch through Jesus's lifetime; Mark calls him king, as Galilee did (Mark 6:14). He married Herodias, his brother's wife, had John the baptizer killed for saying so, and questioned Jesus at his trial (Luke 23:7-12). His nephew Herod Agrippa killed James and imprisoned Peter (Acts 12:1-4). Mark 6:14.

Local shrines, usually on a hilltop: an altar, a standing stone, a wooden pole for the goddess Asherah, an incense stand. Israel worshiped at them from the beginning, sometimes Yahweh, often other gods, often both at once. The books of Kings grade every king by whether he removed them, and the prophets preach against them. Ezekiel 6:3.

Set apart, other, belonging to God and not to be handled as if it were ordinary. Things are holy, the sabbath and the temple's vessels; people are holy, priests and then the whole people (Exodus 19:6); and God is holy in a way that makes the seraphim cover their faces (Isaiah 6:2-3). The word does not first mean morally good. It means other, and God's otherness is what makes his righteousness what it is (Isaiah 5:16). Israel's answer to it is "Holy, holy, holy," and the church's is the same (Revelation 4:8). See "holy ones" and "Holy One of Israel." Isaiah 6:3.

Zion, the temple hill, as God calls it, "my holy mountain": the place where nothing will hurt or destroy (Isaiah 11:9; 65:25), where the nations bring Israel home (Isaiah 66:20), and which the foreigner who keeps the sabbath is brought to (Isaiah 56:7). The phrase runs through the second half of Isaiah and the psalms (Psalm 2:6; 48:1). Isaiah 11:9.

Isaiah's name for God, used again and again in this book and hardly anywhere else, and it comes from the day he saw the throne and heard the seraphim call "Holy, holy, holy" (Isaiah 6:3). "Holy" means set apart, other, not to be handled; "of Israel" means that this God has bound himself to one people anyway. The two halves pull against each other, and the book lives in the pull: the Holy One is spurned by the people who carry his name (Isaiah 1:4), and the Holy One is their redeemer (Isaiah 41:14). Isaiah 1:4.

Those set apart as God's own, the term Israel's Scriptures use for the people of God (Daniel 7:18). Paul uses it of every member of a church, not of a special class. "Saints" is the Latin.

The cry of Psalm 118:25, sung at Passover and at the feast of Booths, which by Jesus's day had become a shout of praise and welcome as much as a plea. The crowds shouted it as he rode into Jerusalem, and the next line they sang is the psalm's next verse (Mark 11:9-10). Mark 11:9.

Images kept in a house rather than a temple, of the family's gods or its ancestors, consulted for guidance and connected in some texts with rights of inheritance. Rachel steals her father's and sits on them (Genesis 31:19, 34-35); Micah's shrine had them beside a home-made ephod (Judges 17:5); Michal put one in a bed to pass for David (1 Samuel 19:13), so they were not always small. Josiah cleared them out of Judah (2 Kings 23:24), and Zechariah says they talk nonsense (Zechariah 10:2). Genesis 31:19.

Ezekiel's own word for the gods of wood and stone, thirty-nine of its forty-eight uses in the Bible. It is a term of contempt, most likely built on the word for dung, so that the exiles heard something like "dung-gods" each time he said it. Isaiah's word is a different one, elilim, "nothings," which sounds like the plural of el, "god," and this translation renders it "idols" as well (Isaiah 2:8). Ezekiel 6:4.

The name of the child in the sign given to Ahaz (Isaiah 7:14), a sentence for a name like Isaiah's other sign-children, Shear-jashub, "A remnant will return," and Maher-shalal-hash-baz, "Quick spoil, hurry plunder" (Isaiah 7:3; 8:3). The book says it twice more, of the land the Assyrian flood fills (Isaiah 8:8) and as the reason the nations' plans fail (Isaiah 8:10), and Psalm 46 sings it as a refrain. Matthew quotes the verse from the Greek Bible of the birth of Jesus and translates the name (Matthew 1:23). Isaiah 7:14.

Fit for common use and so not for what is holy: the word Jews used for food and hands that the law's rules of purity set apart (see "clean"). Mark's whole argument about hands and food turns on it (Mark 7:2-23), Peter uses it of the animals in his vision, "impure or unclean" (Acts 10:14), and then of people (10:28), and Paul treats Jesus's ruling as settled at Romans 14:14. Mark 7:2. The Hebrew word behind it is tame, the law's word for what may not enter the sanctuary (Isaiah 52:1, 11).

The name given to Jacob at the Jabbok and explained there as "he struggles with God" (Genesis 32:28), then given again at Bethel (Genesis 35:10); the name's own form says rather that God struggles, or God rules. The book keeps calling him Jacob. From Exodus on it is the name of the people descended from his twelve sons, "the sons of Israel," and after the kingdom split it is the name of the northern kingdom as against Judah (1 Kings 12:19-20), so that Isaiah can say "Israel" and mean the north (Isaiah 7:1). Paul asks who Israel is (Romans 9:6). Genesis 32:28.

In current English the word names an unattractive feeling, resentment at what someone else has. The Hebrew names an exclusive claim and the refusal to share what belongs to one party only, which is why it is the word for a husband's right and why Israel's God is called qanna only where other gods are being worshiped (Exodus 20:5; 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24). The same word family is "zeal": Phinehas is qanna for God (Numbers 25:11-13), and God is qanna for Jerusalem (Zechariah 1:14), where no envy is in view. Exodus 20:5.

Covers both the people as a whole and, narrowly, Judeans as against Galileans and Samaritans. In John it often names the Judean leadership (3:1). Rendered "Jews" unless the passage makes the regional contrast explicit.

Loyalty in action: the good that one party to a bond does for the other because of the bond, whether or not it is owed. God's chesed is his keeping faith with the people he has bound himself to, and Israel sang of it more than of anything else ("his kindness endures forever," Psalm 136). Paired with "faithfulness" it is the Bible's description of God (Exodus 34:6; Genesis 24:27). Between people it is what Rahab asks of the spies and Ruth shows to Naomi. "Mercy," "steadfast love," and "loving-kindness" have all been used for it; none is a single English word. Genesis 24:12.

God's reign: the state of affairs in which what God wants is done, and the people and the place where that is so. It is not a location beyond the sky. Israel prayed for it to come on earth, Jesus announced that it had drawn near, and Paul describes life inside it as "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." It is present already and still to come in full. Romans 14:17; John 3:3, 5.

Matthew's usual name, more than thirty times, for what Mark, Luke, and John call the kingdom of God (see that entry). Jewish speech often said "heaven" instead of naming God: Daniel tells a king that his kingdom will be restored when he knows that "Heaven rules" (Daniel 4:26), and the younger son in Jesus's parable says he has sinned against heaven (Luke 15:18). The Greek is plural because the Hebrew word for heaven is always plural. The phrase means God's reign, not the place people go when they die: it draws near, it is entered, and it is like a seed, a lump of yeast, and a net (Matthew 3:2; 7:21; 13:31-33, 47). Matthew 3:2.

To know, in every sense English gives the word, and one more: of a man and a woman it is the ordinary word for intercourse (Genesis 4:1, 17, 25; 19:8). Kept as "knew" because it is the word, and because Genesis 4 turns on knowing: the man who knew his wife "does not know" where his brother is (4:9). The word can also name knowing that is a bond: God tells Israel, "You only have I known" (Amos 3:2), and at the judgment Jesus says to people who did great things in his name, "I never knew you" (Matthew 7:23). Genesis 4:1; Matthew 7:23.

Law, custom, principle; in Paul most often the law given through Moses, Hebrew torah, which means instruction as much as statute. Always lowercase, and with the article only where the Greek has it, so that "law" and "the law" can be told apart as Paul wrote them. In the prophets torah is rendered "instruction," since it is God's teaching in the prophet's mouth and not a statute-book (Isaiah 1:10; 2:3). Romans 2:12.

Not the disease called leprosy today, which reached the region later, but a family of skin conditions that made a person unclean (see "clean"): scaly patches, sores, and their spread. Leviticus 13 and 14 give the priest the job of examining them and, when they cleared, of pronouncing the person clean, with an offering. Until then the sufferer lived outside the camp and called out "Unclean" to anyone who came near (Leviticus 13:45-46). To touch one was to become unclean. Mark 1:42.

A great creature of the sea, and in the poetry of the region the monster a god defeats. The Bible uses it three ways. Some psalms say God crushed its heads at the beginning (Psalm 74:13-14). Others treat it as one of his creatures, made to play in the sea (Psalm 104:26) or described at length to show his power (Job 41). And the prophets put its defeat in the future, on "that day" (Isaiah 27:1). It appears in the same poems as Rahab and the sea monster (Isaiah 51:9; Job 26:12-13), and an older poem from Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, describes it in two of the phrases Isaiah uses. Isaiah 27:1.

The tribe of Levi, set apart to serve at the sanctuary under the priests, who were one family within it (Numbers 3:5-10; 18:1-7). A stranger who came near their work was to be put to death (Numbers 3:10). Isaiah's last chapter has God take some of the nations as priests and Levites (Isaiah 66:21). Isaiah 66:21.

Aiōnios means belonging to the age, and in Jewish usage "the age" is the one to come, when God sets the world right. The phrase is about the kind of life, not only its length; "eternal" reads as duration. Seventeen times in John, from 3:15. The Hebrew behind it is chayyei olam, which the Old Testament uses once, of those raised from the dust at Daniel 12:2.

Nephesh is the breathing, hungering, living self, never a soul separable from the body. The phrase is used of sea creatures and land animals (Genesis 1:20, 21, 24; 2:19) and of the human (2:7) alike.

Owner, master, or simply "sir"; the title of the Roman emperor; and, in Israel's Greek scriptures, the word read aloud in place of the name Yahweh. When the first Christians said "Jesus is Lord" they were saying all three at once. In this translation "the Lord" inside a quotation from Israel's Scriptures often stands where the Hebrew has Yahweh, and a note says so each time. Romans 10:9, 13; Philippians 2:11.

A priestly class of the Medes and Persians, keepers of their rites, readers of dreams and of the stars, and advisers to kings. The Greek translation of Daniel uses the word for the Babylonian court's enchanters, and Daniel was made chief over them (Daniel 2:2; 5:11). By the time of Acts it could mean a sorcerer (Acts 13:6-8). Matthew does not say how many came to Bethlehem or that they were kings; the number three was later taken from their three gifts, and the kings from reading Isaiah and the psalms beside the story (Isaiah 60:3; Psalm 72:10-11). Matthew 2:1.

The scribes of the Egyptian temples, trained in rites, omens, and the reading of dreams, for which Egypt kept written manuals. They cannot read Pharaoh's dream (Genesis 41:8, 24), they match Moses's first signs and then fail (Exodus 7:11, 22; 8:18-19), and the word travels to Babylon for Nebuchadnezzar's men (Daniel 2:2). It is not a word about conjuring tricks; these were learned men holding an office. Genesis 41:8.

A low plant of the Mediterranean with a forked root, purple flowers, and a yellow fruit that ripens at wheat harvest, held from ancient times to help a woman conceive; the Hebrew name sounds like the word for lovemaking, and the Song of Songs has them giving off their scent (Song of Solomon 7:13). Rachel trades a night with Jacob for them and stays barren; Leah gives them up and conceives (Genesis 30:14-17). Genesis 30:14.

The food Israel ate in the wilderness for forty years. It lay on the ground with the dew, fine and flaky, tasting of a honey wafer; it had to be gathered every morning and bred worms if it was hoarded; it came double on the sixth day and not at all on the sabbath; and it stopped the year they ate the produce of Canaan (Joshua 5:12). The name is the question the people asked when they first saw it, so the food was called "what is it?" for forty years. Jesus sets it against himself in John 6, where the point is that the ancestors ate it and died anyway. Exodus 16:31.

An angel, and the other of the two named in Israel's Scriptures. In Daniel he is one of the chief princes, the one who comes to help when a messenger is held up, and the great prince who stands over Israel (Daniel 10:13, 21; 12:1). Jude has him disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, and Revelation has him fighting the dragon (Jude 9; Revelation 12:7). Daniel 10:13.

Pity that acts: help given to someone in need who cannot demand it. In Israel's Greek scriptures it is also the usual word for the Hebrew chesed, the loyal love God keeps toward those he has bound himself to. So "mercy" in Romans 9 to 11 is more than leniency. It is God keeping faith with people who have not kept it. Romans 9:15-23; 11:30-32.

Two words: el, "god" or "God," and gibbor, a warrior, a man of strength. Together they are the second of the four names given to the child at Isaiah 9:6, and the same two words are used of Yahweh two chapters later, where the remnant of Jacob returns "to the Mighty God" (Isaiah 10:21), and of the God who is "the great, the mighty" in Deuteronomy 10:17 and Jeremiah 32:18. What the title claims about the child is the oldest argument in the chapter, and the study note at 9:6 sets out the readings without settling them. Isaiah 9:6.

A title of the supreme God, the one above all. In Canaan it belonged to the high god El, and Melchizedek uses it. Israel took it for Yahweh: it is his title when the nations are divided among the heavenly beings (Deuteronomy 32:8) and in many psalms, and the angel calls Jesus "Son of the Most High" (Luke 1:32). Genesis 14:18.

In the Bible a name is more than a label. It is a person's reputation and standing, and what remains of them when they are gone. To "make a name" is to win lasting fame, and to have one's name "cut off" is to be forgotten. To act in someone's name is to act with their authority, and to "call on the name of Yahweh" is to appeal to who he is (Genesis 4:26). Genesis 11:4.

The peoples of the world, first listed in Genesis 10, and in Jewish speech all the peoples other than Israel. "Gentiles" is the Latin gentes, "nations." Where Paul means people and not whole peoples, the rendering is "those of the nations" (Romans 2:14). Genesis 10:32; Romans 1:5, 13.

A gift brought to God, or tribute brought to a king (Genesis 32:13; 2 Samuel 8:2). Cain's and Abel's offerings are the first (Genesis 4:3-5). In the law the word becomes the term for the grain offering (Leviticus 2).

One of a kind; the only child of its parents (Luke 7:12; 8:42; 9:38). God says it of Isaac three times in Genesis 22, "your son, your only one, whom you love," and the Greek Bible rendered it "beloved" there. Of Jesus at John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18, where John 3:16 is built on Genesis 22:2. "Only begotten" is the Latin unigenitus, which reads a birth into a word that means uniqueness. Genesis 22:2.

Built on the verb for lifting, so either a voice lifted up or a load laid on somebody, and the prophets use both senses. It heads each section of Isaiah 13 to 23 and again at 30:6, and Nahum, Habakkuk, Malachi and Zechariah open a book or a section with it. "Burden" is the older English and keeps the weight; "oracle" keeps the speaking. Jeremiah turns the double sense into a bitter joke: people keep asking what the burden of Yahweh is, and are told that they are it (Jeremiah 23:33-40). Isaiah 13:1.

One who watches over others and answers for them. The word was used of officials, guardians, and supervisors of many kinds, and "bishop" is the Old English form of it. Paul greets "the overseers and servants" at Philippi (Philippians 1:1), and at Miletus he calls the elders of Ephesus (Acts 20:17) the overseers whom the Holy Spirit has made, to tend the church of God (20:28). In the New Testament a church has several overseers. By the early second century many churches had one bishop over the elders, and churches differ on how that order relates to the apostles' time. Acts 20:28.

A comparison: a saying, riddle, or short story that sets one thing beside another and leaves the hearer to see the likeness. In Israel's Scriptures the word covers proverbs, taunts, and riddles (Ezekiel 17:2). In the Gospels Jesus's parables are mostly about the kingdom of God, and Mark says they were meant to be heard at more than one depth (Mark 4:11-12, 33-34). The word does not appear in John. Mark 4:2.

A share in a joint venture, the word for business partners as much as for friends. Paul uses it of the Philippians because they put money into his work and counted themselves partners in it (Philippians 1:5; 4:15), and he uses it of sharing in Christ's sufferings (3:10). "Fellowship" is the usual English and has gone soft. Philippians 1:5.

The spring feast that remembered the night God struck Egypt and passed over the houses marked with a lamb's blood (Exodus 12). Every household ate a lamb, killed that afternoon in the temple, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, after sunset on the fourteenth of Nisan, and the seven days of Unleavened Bread followed. Jerusalem swelled to several times its size for it, and the Roman governor came up with troops. Jesus died at Passover, and Mark's account of his last meal is a Passover meal (Mark 14:12-25); Paul calls Christ "our Passover lamb" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Mark 14:1.

More than the absence of fighting: wholeness, things as they ought to be between people, and between people and God. It was the ordinary Jewish greeting and blessing. In Romans it is first the end of enmity with God (5:1), and then the life of a community where Jews and nations eat at one table (14:17, 19). Romans 15:33; Philippians 4:7.

The Greek name for the Festival of Weeks, the harvest feast held on the fiftieth day after the Passover, when seven weeks had been counted from the offering of the first sheaf (Leviticus 23:15-16; Deuteronomy 16:9-10). Exodus calls it "the Festival of Weeks, the firstfruits of the wheat harvest" (Exodus 34:22). It was one of the three feasts at which every Jewish man was to appear before God (Exodus 34:23), which is why Jerusalem was full of pilgrims from every nation on the day the Holy Spirit came (Acts 2:5-11). Acts 2:1.

The title of the king of Egypt, used as if it were a name. Genesis and Exodus never say which king is meant, so the Pharaoh who takes Sarai, the one who raises Joseph, and the one who will not let Israel go are unnamed and cannot be dated from the text. The word first appears at Genesis 12:15. Genesis 37:36.

A movement of laymen, several thousand strong in Jesus's day, devoted to keeping the whole law in ordinary life, including the rules of purity that applied to priests, and to the traditions that spelled out how. They were respected by the people, were at home in the synagogues, and believed in the resurrection, which the Sadducees denied (Mark 12:18; Acts 23:8). Paul was one (Philippians 3:5). Their quarrels with Jesus in the Gospels are quarrels inside Judaism about the sabbath, food, and who may eat with whom, and after the temple fell in the year 70 their heirs shaped the Judaism that survived. Mark 2:16.

A standing stone, set upright to mark a place where something happened or a promise was made: Jacob's stone at Bethel, anointed with oil (Genesis 28:18; 35:14), the stone he and Laban set up as a boundary witness (Genesis 31:45, 51-52), Rachel's grave marker (Genesis 35:20), and the twelve Moses set up at Sinai (Exodus 24:4). Canaan used them for its gods, and the law later forbade them for that reason (Deuteronomy 16:22; 2 Kings 18:4). The same word is the "stump" of Isaiah 6:13, what is left standing. Genesis 28:18.

In Israel's Greek scriptures, the gold cover of the ark, where the high priest sprinkled blood once a year on the Day of Atonement and where God said he would meet with Israel (Exodus 25:17-22; Leviticus 16:14-15; Hebrews 9:5). Elsewhere in Greek the word names a gift set up to win back a god's goodwill. The older English is "mercy seat." "Propitiation" and "expiation" are the Latin words in which the argument over this verse has been carried on, and neither is used here. Romans 3:25.

Someone who stands between: he brings the people's offerings to God and God's rulings back to them. In Israel the office belongs to Aaron's family, with the rest of Levi assisting, and it is inherited rather than chosen. Priests handled sacrifice, taught the law, and gave decisions (Deuteronomy 33:8-10; Malachi 2:7). Exodus 19:6 called the whole nation a kingdom of priests before any priesthood existed, and the New Testament takes that up for the church (1 Peter 2:9). Exodus 28:1.

One whom God has taken into his counsel and sent to speak for him. A prophet stands in the council of Yahweh and hears what is decided there (Jeremiah 23:18, 22; Amos 3:7), then carries it to people who did not ask for it: to kings, as Nathan and Elijah did, to the whole nation, as Isaiah and Jeremiah did, to exiles, as Ezekiel did. The word is mostly about the present, what God is doing and what he demands now, and foretelling serves that. Because a prophet stands between God and people, he also speaks the other way, pleading for them, as Moses did on the mountain and Samuel at Mizpah, and Jeremiah until he was told to stop (Exodus 32:11-14; 1 Samuel 7:5; Jeremiah 7:16); that is the side Abraham's story shows first (Genesis 20:7). Moses is the pattern (Deuteronomy 18:15-18), the test of a prophet is whether Yahweh sent him (Deuteronomy 18:21-22; Jeremiah 28:9), and Jesus is the prophet Moses promised (Acts 3:22). In the New Testament prophets are also members of the church who speak a word from God for its building up (1 Corinthians 14:3). Genesis 20:7.

The respectful address for a teacher of the law, not yet in Jesus's day the formal title it later became. The Gospels keep the word in its own language, and so does this translation; John translates it, "which means Teacher" (John 1:38). Peter says it on the mountain (Mark 9:5) and under the fig tree (Mark 11:21), and Judas says it with a kiss (Mark 14:45). "Rabbouni" (Mark 10:51; John 20:16) is a warmer form, "my master." Mark 9:5.

A sea monster of Israel's oldest poetry, one of the powers of chaos God broke when he ordered the world (Job 26:12; Psalm 89:10), and not the woman of Jericho, whose name is spelled differently. Isaiah uses it as a name for Egypt (Isaiah 30:7; Psalm 87:4), so that the arm that cut Rahab in pieces did so twice, at creation and at the sea (Isaiah 51:9-10). The Genesis 1 notes say how Israel's poets used the neighbors' stories of a god who slew the sea. Isaiah 51:9.

The price that buys a captive out, and the freedom that results. In current English the word has narrowed to what a kidnapper demands, so that "ransom" sounds like money paid to a criminal; that is not the picture here. The Bible's word looks at the other end of the transaction, the person who walks free, and it is used of buying back a slave, a prisoner of war, or a firstborn son (Exodus 13:13). The Hebrew padah is kept apart from ga'al, "redeem," which is the kinsman buying back what belongs to the family. When God is the one who ransoms, the payment drops out of the picture and only the freeing is left: he ransoms Israel out of Egypt and no one is paid (Isaiah 50:2; 51:11; Deuteronomy 7:8). Two other Hebrew words come into the same English: pedut and peduyim are padah's own nouns, and kofer is the payment that buys off a life already owed, which is what the half shekel of the census is called (Exodus 30:12). Where both fall in one verse, kofer takes "ransom" and pidyon takes "redemption" (Exodus 21:30). "Redemption" is the same picture in Latin, worn smooth by church use. Romans 3:24.

A bookkeeper's word: to enter in an account, to set down to someone's credit or charge, and from that, to count something as, or to conclude. Paul's argument in Romans 4 runs on it, eleven times, from Genesis 15:6: "it was reckoned to him as righteousness." English keeps the sense in "the day of reckoning." Romans 2:3; 3:28; 4:3-24.

To buy back what belongs to the family: a relative sold into slavery, a field sold for debt, a widow left without an heir (Leviticus 25:25, 47-49; Ruth 4:1-6). The redeemer is the kinsman who takes it on. Isaiah calls God Israel's Redeemer again and again, the kinsman who buys his people out of Babylon (Isaiah 41:14; 43:1; 44:22; 52:3, 9), and it is a different word from "ransom," which is paying a price to free a captive (Isaiah 51:10-11). Isaiah 51:10.

In Hebrew, to remember is to act for someone, not to recall something that had slipped the mind. When God remembers a person, help follows at once: he remembers Noah and the waters go down, Rachel and she conceives (Genesis 30:22), Israel in Egypt and the exodus begins (Exodus 2:24). To ask God to remember is to ask him to act, as the dying thief does (Luke 23:42). When God says he will "remember their sins no more" (Jeremiah 31:34), he means that he will not act on them. Genesis 8:1.

What is left after a disaster: the survivors of a war, the stump of a felled tree. The prophets use it of the part of Israel that God brings through judgment, and they use it both as a warning, that only a few will be left, and as a promise, that God will not let the line end (Isaiah 10:20-22; 11:11). Where the Hebrew of Amos promises that Israel will possess "the remnant of Edom" (Amos 9:12), the Greek that James quotes has "the remnant of humankind" seeking the Lord (Acts 15:17). Romans 9:27; 11:5. Isaiah 11:11.

One family of words: righteous (dikaios), righteousness, unrighteousness (adikia), a righteous decree (dikaiōma), and justify (dikaioō), which English keeps on a Latin root, so that "righteous" and "justify" look like two words and are one. It is covenant language before it is moral language: being in the right with God, and God doing right by his people, keeping faith and setting things right, which is why the prophets pair it with justice (Isaiah 1:21; 5:7) and with salvation (Isaiah 51:5-8), and why Paul can say that God "justifies the impious" (Romans 4:5). "Justice" is held for the judicial words, Hebrew mishpat and Greek krisis and krima. Genesis 15:6; Ezekiel 3:20; Isaiah 1:21; Romans 1:17.

The seventh day, on which Israel stopped work because God stopped his (Genesis 2:2-3; Exodus 20:8-11) and because Israel had been slaves who never rested (Deuteronomy 5:12-15). It ran from sundown to sundown. What counted as work was argued in Jesus's day, and the arguments in the Gospels are about that, not about whether to keep the day; Jesus kept it and taught in the synagogue on it. Mark 1:21.

A coarse dark cloth woven from goat hair, worn against the skin as a sign of grief or of appeal to God, usually with ashes and torn clothes. Jacob puts it on for Joseph (Genesis 37:34), David for Abner (2 Samuel 3:31), and a king of Nineveh for a whole city (Jonah 3:5-8); Job says he sewed it over his skin (Job 16:15). The same word is the sack a traveler carried grain in (Genesis 42:25). Genesis 37:34.

The party of the priestly families who ran the temple, wealthy, close to the Roman governors, and gone after the temple fell in the year 70. They held the five books of Moses as the chief authority, and denied the resurrection, angels, and spirits, which the Pharisees affirmed (Acts 23:8). Mark 12:18.

Rescue from danger, enemies, illness, or death. In Israel's Scriptures it is what God does for his people at the sea and in every crisis after (Exodus 14:13; Isaiah 52:10). It is bigger than going to heaven: it is God setting people and the world right, and in Romans it is mostly still to come (Romans 5:9-10; 13:11). Where plain rescue from danger is meant, this translation says "deliver," as Obadiah 21 calls Israel's rescuers "deliverers." Romans 1:16; John 3:17.

A holy place, set apart: the tent, the temple, and any place of worship (Exodus 25:8; Amos 7:13), and so also a refuge, since a person who reached the altar was safe (1 Kings 1:50). Ezekiel's charge is that Jerusalem defiled God's sanctuary (Ezekiel 5:11); Isaiah says that Yahweh himself will be the sanctuary, and to those who will not have him a stone to stumble over (Isaiah 8:14); Ezekiel promises the exiles that God will be their sanctuary for a while in the lands they are scattered to (Ezekiel 11:16). Isaiah 8:14.

"The adversary" or "the accuser." It was a title before it was a name. In Job and Zechariah the adversary is a member of the heavenly court who brings charges. By Paul's time the word names the chief of the powers in rebellion against God. Matthew, Luke, and John also call him "the devil," Greek diabolos, "the slanderer," the word the Greek Bible uses for the accuser in Job and Zechariah, and Matthew uses both names in one story (Matthew 4:1, 10). Romans 16:20; Matthew 4:10.

One who rescues, and a title. Greek cities gave it to their gods and to kings and generals who had saved them, and in Paul's day it belonged to the emperor, who was called "savior of the world" on inscriptions. Israel's Scriptures use it of God, and Isaiah most of all: "I, I am Yahweh, and besides me there is no savior" (Isaiah 43:11). The New Testament gives it to Jesus, rarely in Paul and often in the later letters, and every time it names who is not the savior. Philippians 3:20.

Experts in the law of Moses: men trained to copy, read, and interpret it, to teach it, and to give rulings on it. Some were Pharisees (Mark 2:16) and some sat on the council in Jerusalem (Mark 14:53). They taught by citing earlier teachers, which is what the crowd noticed Jesus did not do (Mark 1:22). Mark 1:22.

The water Israel crossed. The Hebrew name means a sea of reeds, which suits marshy water rather than open sea, and the lakes along the eastern edge of the Nile delta are the usual candidates; the Gulf of Suez is the other. The Greek translators wrote "Red Sea," English Bibles followed them, and the New Testament, quoting the Greek, says Red Sea too (Acts 7:36; Hebrews 11:29). The same name is used of the gulf Israel travels along later (Numbers 21:4; 1 Kings 9:26), which is part of why the location is argued about. Exodus 10:19.

Something God had kept hidden and has now made known. English "mystery" means nearly the opposite, a puzzle still unsolved. A secret in Paul's sense can be told plainly, and he tells it. Outside the Bible the word was used for the rites of certain religions, which initiates swore never to reveal. The Aramaic word behind it is raz, which is what Daniel calls the thing God reveals to him about the king's dream (Daniel 2:18-30, 47); the Greek Bible renders that word with this one, so Paul's language of a secret now disclosed begins there. Romans 11:25; 16:25. Daniel 2:28.

Seed of plants (Genesis 1:11) and, as a collective, a person's descendants (3:15; 12:7; 22:17). Singular in form, so the pronouns that follow it are singular even when many are meant. The translation keeps the singular and leaves the reader the choice the first hearer had. Paul uses the Greek word the same way, of Abraham's one heir and of descendants like the stars (Romans 4:13, 16, 18).

The six-winged beings Isaiah saw above the throne, who cover their faces and their feet and cry "Holy" (Isaiah 6:2-7). The word is elsewhere the name of the burning snakes of the wilderness (Numbers 21:6, 8) and of a flying serpent (Isaiah 14:29; 30:6), and winged cobras guarding a throne were a familiar picture in Judah in Isaiah's day, carved on seals. Isaiah's seraphim have hands and voices and serve at the altar. They are not the cherubim, who carry the throne; see "cherubim." Isaiah 6:2.

One who carries out a task for someone else: a waiter at table, an agent, a go-between. The word is about the work and not about low rank, and it is kept apart from "slave" (doulos), except in the parables of the absent master in Matthew and Luke, where doulos is "servant" so that the familiar "Well done, good and faithful servant" stands and the same parable reads the same in both Gospels (Matthew 24:45-51; 25:14-30; Luke 12:35-48; 19:11-27). It is "servant" too where Mary calls herself the Lord's servant and where Simeon asks to be released (Luke 1:38, 48; 2:29). Paul uses it of the governing authority (Romans 13:4), of Christ (15:8), and of Phoebe (16:1). "Deacon" is this word left in Greek, and "minister" is the same word put into Latin. Romans 13:4. Hebrew eved covers both slave and servant and is rendered by referent, as at Genesis 24:2; "my servant" in Isaiah 40 to 53 (Isaiah 50:10; 52:13; 53:11) is the title the first Christians heard of Jesus, and the Readings note at Isaiah 52:13 gives the readings of who he is. The Greek Bible calls Isaiah's servant pais, a word used of a servant and of a child, and Acts gives that title to Jesus (Acts 3:13, 26; 4:27, 30). Isaiah 50:10.

The dead, as the Hebrew Bible pictures them: not nothing, but weak, down in Sheol, and without strength or speech until something stirs them (Isaiah 14:9-10; Job 26:5; Psalm 88:10; Proverbs 9:18). The same consonants spell the name of a people of great height who lived in Canaan before Israel, of whom Og of Bashan was said to be the last (Deuteronomy 2:11, 20; 3:11), and whether the two words are related has never been settled. "The dead" is the plain English and loses the word; "the shades" borrows the term English already had for the same idea. Isaiah 14:9.

A weight, about two fifths of an ounce, and only much later a coin. Silver was paid by weighing it out on scales, which is why Abraham "weighed out" four hundred shekels for a field (Genesis 23:16) and why prices in the Old Testament are given in weights. Coins came in after the exile. Genesis 23:15.

The place of the dead under the earth, where everyone goes, just and wicked alike, and from which no one comes back: a land of dust, silence, and shadow (Job 10:21-22; Psalm 6:5; 88:10-12), not a place of punishment. It has a mouth and an appetite (Isaiah 5:14; Proverbs 27:20). The translation keeps the name, because "hell" says more than the Hebrew does and "the grave" says less. The Greek Bible and the New Testament call it Hades (Acts 2:27; Revelation 20:13). Isaiah 5:14.

Something set to be seen and to mean something: the lights of the sky (Genesis 1:14), the rainbow (9:12), the plagues (Exodus 7:3). Yahweh sets a sign "for" Cain (Genesis 4:15), not on him; the text does not say what it was, and the "mark of Cain" is a tradition, not a translation. John calls Jesus's miracles signs, and numbers the first two, the wine at Cana and the healing of an official's son (John 2:11; 4:54).

Wrongdoing against God, and the single acts of it. In Paul it is also a power, spoken of almost as a person: it enters, reigns, enslaves, deceives, and kills (Romans 5:12, 21; 6:6-23; 7:8-20). Genesis has the same picture at its first use of the word, where sin is a lurker at the door (Genesis 4:7). Romans 5:21.

A person owned by another. The ordinary word, and not the word for one who carries out a task for someone else (diakonos, "servant"). Israel's prophets are called slaves of Yahweh (Amos 3:7), so the title carries honor as well as ownership. The parables of the absent master in Matthew and Luke keep the familiar "servant" for it, and so do the words of Mary and Simeon in Luke (Matthew 25:21; Luke 1:38; 2:29; 12:43; see "servant"). Romans 1:1.

Arable ground, the earth as worked. The human (adam) is named from it (Genesis 2:7) and returns to it (3:19). Kept as one word throughout so the link can be seen: Genesis 1:25; 2:5, 6, 7, 9, 19; 3:17, 19, 23.

The title of the king Israel awaited from David's line, promised an everlasting throne (2 Samuel 7:12-16; Isaiah 11:1). A blind beggar shouts it at Jesus on the road (Mark 10:47-48), the first messianic title in Mark that is not silenced, and the crowd sings of David's kingdom at the gate (Mark 11:10). Jesus accepts it and then asks how David's son can be David's Lord (Mark 12:35-37). Matthew opens his Gospel with it (Matthew 1:1). Mark 10:47.

In Hebrew, a human being, a mortal, one of the race of Adam. It is God's name for Ezekiel ninety-three times, and the point is the distance between the figure on the throne and the man on the ground. Daniel sees "one like a son of man," in Aramaic bar enash, coming to God's throne and receiving a kingdom there, set against four beasts that receive nothing (Daniel 7:13-14), and Jesus takes the phrase as his own name for himself, in both senses at once. Ezekiel 2:1.

One word for moving air in every form: wind, breath, and spirit. Rendered by what it refers to in each place. "The ruach of God" (Genesis 1:2) is a spirit, never a wind, and is set lowercase; "Spirit" takes a capital only in the New Testament, where it stands as a title (John 3:5-8). Where a passage holds two senses at once (John 3:8), a note says so.

To stay where one is: to remain, to live somewhere, to last. John uses the verb forty times, more than any other writer in the New Testament, and this translation renders it "stay" every time in his Gospel, so that the reader can follow it. The first disciples ask Jesus where he is staying, and they stay with him that day (John 1:38-39). The Spirit comes down on Jesus and stays (1:32-33). Whoever feeds on his flesh and drinks his blood stays in him (6:56), and his disciples are those who stay in his word (8:31). At the vine it is the whole of what he asks: "Stay in me, and I in you" (15:4). The noun is the "places to stay" in the Father's house (14:2), and the stay that the Father and the Son make with whoever loves Jesus (14:23). Older translations have "abide," which English no longer uses in speech, and others "remain." John 15:4.

A resident foreigner: someone living in a land not his own, allowed to stay, without the standing of a native and with no right to own its ground. Abraham lived as a stranger in the land promised to him (Genesis 17:8; 23:4), Isaac is told to (Genesis 26:3), and Israel was one in Egypt, which is the reason its law gives for protecting the strangers among it: "you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21). The psalms say it of every life before God (Psalm 39:12), and the New Testament says it of Christians in the cities where they live (1 Peter 2:11). Genesis 26:3.

The meeting of the Jews of a town for the reading of the law and the prophets, prayer, and teaching on the sabbath, and the building where they met. There was one wherever Jews lived, and by Jesus's day it was the ordinary place of Jewish religious life, with the temple far away in Jerusalem. Anyone able could be asked to read and speak (Luke 4:16-21), which is how Jesus and later Paul taught in them. Mark 1:21.

The tent Israel is told to build at Sinai so that God can live in the middle of the camp. The Hebrew name is from the verb "to dwell," the same word in "I will dwell among them" (Exodus 25:8), so the thing is named for what it is for; English cannot hold the two words together. "Tabernacle" comes through Latin tabernaculum, a tent. It is also called the tent of meeting, after what happens there, and the dwelling of the Testimony, after what is kept in it. John says of the Word that he pitched his tent among us, which is the same picture (John 1:14). Exodus 25:9.

Not testimony in the sense of speaking up for someone: it is the documentary evidence of an agreement. The two tablets are the Testimony, and they are kept in the ark the way a treaty's terms were deposited in a sanctuary in that world. The ark, the tent and the curtain are all named after it (Exodus 25:22; 38:21; Leviticus 24:3). Exodus 25:16.

The twelve men Jesus appointed "to be with him," to proclaim, and to drive out demons (Mark 3:14-15), and the name the Gospels use for them as a body. Twelve is the number of Israel's tribes, and choosing twelve was a claim about Israel being gathered again. Mark 4:10.

Not having an opinion but the settled bent of a mind: what it counts as important and lives toward. It is the key word of Philippians, ten times in four chapters. Paul asks the church to "think the same thing" (2:2; 4:2), gives Christ as the example of how to think (2:5), and says the enemies of the cross have their thinking on earthly things (3:19). "Humility" in Greek is "lowliness of thinking," on the same root. Philippians 4:2.

The tombs of Jerusalem's better-off families were cut into the soft rock outside the walls, with a low doorway, a chamber with shelves for the bodies, and a stone rolled across the entrance in a groove; after a year the bones were gathered into a box. Jesus was laid in a new tomb of this kind by a member of the council (Mark 15:43-46; Matthew 27:60), and the women knew which one (Mark 15:47). The word is the one the Gerasene man lived among (Mark 5:3). Mark 16:2.

Breaking faith with someone you owe loyalty to. The everyday use is political: a vassal king breaking with the ruler he serves, as Moab did with Israel when Ahab died (2 Kings 1:1; 3:5), as Edom did with Judah (2 Kings 8:20), and as the northern tribes did with the house of David (1 Kings 12:19). Said of people before God, it is not stepping over a line but breaking a bond, which is why the prophets pair it with forgiving and passing over: Micah asks who is a God like this one, "forgiving iniquity and passing over transgression" (Micah 7:18), and Isaiah's servant is "pierced for our transgressions" (Isaiah 53:5). Amos counts the transgressions of each nation in turn (Amos 1:3). "Rebel" in this translation is a different word, marah (Isaiah 1:20). Amos 1:3; Isaiah 53:5.

Not a treasure in general but a particular kind of property: what a king kept as his own, apart from the holdings of the state, and could do with as he pleased. The word is known in that sense from Ugaritic and Akkadian. Israel is called this at Sinai (Exodus 19:5) and three times in Deuteronomy, always with the same clause attached, that all the earth is God's anyway, so the choosing is not a shortage of options. Peter uses the Greek of it for a church of Jews and others (1 Peter 2:9), and Malachi gives the word to those who fear God, on the day he acts (Malachi 3:17). Exodus 19:5.

Literally "foreskin." Circumcision was the mark of God's covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17), and it divided Jews from everyone else so sharply that each side named the other by it: Jews called the nations "the foreskin," and were called "the circumcision" in return (Galatians 2:7-9). Paul's argument in Romans 2:25-29 turns on the contrast of the two bodily marks. Romans 2:25.

Bread made without leaven, which in the ancient world was a lump of fermented dough held back from the last baking, so that removing it meant breaking a chain that ran from batch to batch. Israel eats it on the night of the exodus and for seven days every year after, and the book gives two reasons: because God brought them out on this day, and because they left in such haste that the dough had no time to rise (Exodus 12:17, 39). Paul uses leaven as a figure for what spreads unseen through a community (1 Corinthians 5:6-8). Exodus 12:8.

Objects kept in the high priest's breastpiece and used to get an answer from God. Nothing in the Bible says what they looked like. The answer is always one of two, or silence (1 Samuel 14:41; 28:6), which suggests a lot cast between two options, and they are put into the breastpiece, which suggests a pouch. The names resemble the words for "lights" and "completeness." They fall out of use after the early monarchy, and returning exiles are left waiting for a priest who has them (Ezra 2:63). Exodus 28:30.

A valley running up from Jericho into the hills, named for Achan, stoned there for taking what was devoted to God in Israel's first battle in the land (Joshua 7:24-26). Hosea promised that God would make the Valley of Trouble a door of hope (Hosea 2:15), and Isaiah has herds lying down in it (Isaiah 65:10). Isaiah 65:10.

Of God, to come and attend to someone, taking the situation in hand for good or for ill. He "visits" Sarah with a son (Genesis 21:1) and his people in Egypt with rescue (Exodus 4:31), and he visits sins with punishment (Exodus 20:5). Zechariah sings that God "has visited" his people and that the dawn from on high will visit them (Luke 1:68, 78), and Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because it did not know "the time of your visitation" (Luke 19:44). An English "visit" is a call; the Hebrew is an intervention. Genesis 21:1.

Pay for work, and the word Jacob's twenty years in Haran turn on: Laban asks what his wages should be (Genesis 29:15), changes them ten times (Genesis 31:7, 41), and Jacob names the odd-colored animals as his (Genesis 30:28, 32-33). Leah hires her husband with mandrakes and names a son Issachar, "there are wages," for it (Genesis 30:16, 18). Yahweh had told Abram that his reward, the same word, would be very great (Genesis 15:1). Genesis 29:15.

To walk, and so to live: a person's walk is the way they conduct their life. The Hebrew form used of Enoch, Noah, and Abraham means to walk about, to and fro, as one does in someone's company, and it is the form used of God in the garden (Genesis 3:8). Paul uses the Greek word the same way: "walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4). Genesis 5:22.

The men posted on a city's walls to see what is coming, and the prophets' word for themselves: Ezekiel is made a watchman for the house of Israel (Ezekiel 3:17), Habakkuk stands on his tower to watch (Habakkuk 2:1), and Isaiah's watchmen see Yahweh coming home to Zion before anyone else does (Isaiah 52:8) and are set on the walls never to be silent (Isaiah 62:6). Isaiah 52:8.

An angel, named this way in the Bible only in Daniel 4, where a watcher, a holy one, comes down from heaven and announces a sentence, and where the sentence is called the decree of the watchers and the command of the holy ones (Daniel 4:13, 17, 23). The title is common in Jewish writings of the following centuries, above all in 1 Enoch, where the watchers are the angels of Genesis 6 and some of them fall. Daniel 4:13.

The opposite of "just." In court it is the party found in the wrong, and in life it is the person who wrongs others and does not care that they do. It is not a word for a bad mood or a private failing. The psalms open by setting the two ways side by side, the just and the wicked (Psalm 1), and Abraham's plea for Sodom turns on God's keeping them apart. Genesis 18:23. Ezekiel 3:18.

Two interjections, rendered by the one English word. Hoy is the cry raised at a funeral: Jeremiah uses it of the mourning that will not be held for a king, "they will not lament for him, Alas, my brother" (Jeremiah 22:18), and Kings has it as the cry over a corpse (1 Kings 13:30). When a prophet opens an oracle with it, the effect is of a funeral already under way for people who are still alive; Isaiah stacks six in one chapter (Isaiah 5:8, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22), adds a seventh against the men who write the laws (10:1), turns the same word on Assyria (10:5), and opens five more oracles with it over Samaria, Jerusalem, and the planners of the Egyptian alliance (28:1; 29:1, 15; 30:1; 31:1). Oy is the cry of a person in trouble, "woe is me," and it is what Isaiah says about himself when he sees God (6:5) and again at 24:16, and about the guilty twice in chapter 3 (3:9, 11). "Ah" and "Alas" are the other English for both. Isaiah 10:1.

The everyday Greek for a word spoken, a message, an account, and also for reason, the sense a thing makes. John makes it a name: "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1). A Jewish hearer knew that God made the world by speaking (Genesis 1:3), that the word of Yahweh came to the prophets (Hosea 1:1), and that Wisdom was beside God when he made the world (Proverbs 8:22-31). A Greek hearer knew the philosophers' logos, the reason that runs through all things. John takes up both and says what neither said: "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14). John 1:1.

The short form of the Name, used mostly in poetry and in praise. It is the ending of "hallelujah," which is "praise Yah," and it stands inside a great many Israelite names, the prophet's own among them: Yesha'yahu, "Yahweh saves." Its oldest appearance is in the song at the sea, "Yah is my strength and my song" (Exodus 15:2), which Isaiah quotes here and the psalms quote after him (Psalm 118:14). The full name is at "Yahweh." Isaiah 12:2.

The personal name of Israel's God, written with four consonants and, by long custom, not pronounced; "Yahweh" is the scholarly reconstruction. Most English Bibles print "the LORD" in small capitals, which is a title, not the name. "Yahweh God" (Genesis 2:4) renders the compound YHWH Elohim; "Yahweh of Armies," YHWH Tsebaoth; "Lord Yahweh" (Obadiah 1), Adonai YHWH, which the Masoretic scribes pointed to be read "Lord God." New Testament quotations that have the name in Hebrew have kyrios in Greek, and read "Lord."

Isaiah's title for God more than any other, and the prophets' and the psalms' generally; older English has "the LORD of hosts." The armies are Israel's (1 Samuel 17:45), the stars (Deuteronomy 4:19), and the court of heaven, and the title says that every force there is answers to him. The ordinary word behind it is at "array." Isaiah 1:9.

The hill in Jerusalem that David took from the Jebusites and made his city (2 Samuel 5:7), then the temple hill beside it, and then, in the prophets and the psalms, the whole city seen as God's dwelling and the whole people seen as his. "Daughter Zion" is the city pictured as a young woman, Yahweh's own (Isaiah 1:8), and "Mount Zion" is where the nations will come (Isaiah 2:3; Obadiah 21). Paul quotes the stone laid in Zion and the deliverer who comes from it (Romans 9:33; 11:26). Isaiah 1:8.