How to do a Greek word study, step by step

In short: read the passage, find the Greek word behind the English, note its dictionary form and Strong’s number, read the parsing, read full lexicon entries, read every occurrence, compare the words around it, and only then read the commentaries.

1. Read the passage before the word

   Read the whole paragraph, ideally the whole chapter, in English. Write down in a sentence what you think the verse means. A word means what it means in its sentence; the Greek will refine your reading, not replace it.

   Romans 12:2 opens the practical half of Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.” We will study be transformed.

2. Find the Greek word behind the English

   Use an interlinear, or tap the word in Rightly, to see which Greek word sits behind the English. Here the two English words “be transformed” translate one Greek word, μεταμορφοῦσθε (metamorphousthe). English often needs several words for one Greek word, and the reverse.

3. Get the dictionary form and Strong’s number

   The form in the verse is inflected; lexicons list the dictionary form, or lemma. Here it is μεταμορφόω, Strong’s number G3339. The number is a handle: it finds the same word across the whole New Testament, whatever English word translates it (what is a Strong’s number?).

4. Read the parsing

   The parsing describes the form. For μεταμορφοῦσθε it is “Verb, present middle or passive imperative, 2nd person plural.” Three things follow plainly: it is a command (imperative); it is addressed to more than one person (plural — the Roman church together); and it is middle or passive, because in the present tense Greek uses one form for both.

   Note what the parsing tells you and stop there. Whole sermons have been built on a single tense or voice; the form narrows the meaning, but the context still decides it.

5. Read the lexicon entries

   A gloss is a hint; the lexicon entry is the evidence. Strong’s gives a short definition: “to transform (literally or figuratively, ‘metamorphose’).” Thayer’s (1889) goes further: “to change into another form, to transfigure, transform,” and it places our verse explicitly — “used of the change of moral character for the better, Rom 12:2.”

   Lexicons often sort a word’s uses into senses. Find which sense the lexicon gives your verse, and why.

6. Read every occurrence

   This is the step most people skip, and the one that teaches the most. μεταμορφόω occurs only four times in the New Testament:

   • Matthew 17:2 — “There He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun.”
   • Mark 9:2 — the same event: “There He was transfigured before them.”
   • Romans 12:2 — “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
   • 2 Corinthians 3:18 — “are being transformed into His image with intensifying glory.”

   The same verb describes Jesus’ transfiguration and the believer’s change into his image. You do not need to press that into a theory; noticing it is the study.

7. Compare the words around it

   Romans 12:2 sets our verb against another: “Do not be conformed,” συσχηματίζεσθε, from συσχηματίζω (G4964), “to fashion alike, i.e. conform to the same pattern” (Strong’s). It occurs just twice: here and in 1 Peter 1:14, “do not conform to the passions of your former ignorance.” Paul’s contrast is between being pressed into the world’s pattern and being changed from within.

8. Then check the commentaries

   Now read what others saw. Albert Barnes, on this verse: “This word would properly refer to the external appearance, but the expression which the apostle immediately uses, ‘renewing of the mind,’ shows that he did not intend to use it with reference to that only, but to the change of the whole man.”

   If your conclusion and the commentators’ differ, go back to the text and the occurrences and see why (commentaries included in Rightly).

Four mistakes to avoid

• Reading English back into Greek. Our word “metamorphosis” comes from this Greek verb, but Paul did not have caterpillars in mind. An English derivative tells you about English, not about the first century.
• Defining a word by its roots. μετά (“with, after”) plus μορφή (“form”) is how the word was built, not necessarily what it meant when Paul used it. Usage, not etymology, decides meaning.
• Loading every sense into one verse. A word can mean several things, but in a given sentence it usually means one. The linguist James Barr called the opposite habit “illegitimate totality transfer” (The Semantics of Biblical Language, 1961).
• Confusing a word with a theme. Transformation is a theme far bigger than four verses. A word study tells you about a word; a theme needs the passages that teach it, whatever words they use.

Doing this in Rightly

Steps two to six are one tap in Rightly: the word sheet shows the Greek word, its dictionary form, Strong’s number, plain-English parsing, Thayer’s and Strong’s entries, and every occurrence, all offline. The commentaries are a swipe away. The same method works for Hebrew, with Brown-Driver-Briggs in place of Thayer’s (see the word sheet).