Major Biblical terms in OT & NT

Question

I received this question from a translator and am not sure how to answer it. I was wondering if it had something to do with the OT terms based on the Hebrew and the NT terms based on the Greek.

“Checking how we have spelt a name previously, I used the Major Biblical Terms and highlighted that name. This gave me a few references. I then clicked the link ‘Also Show references in other books in this project’.

I was expecting that if the name occurred in the NT that it would appear in the list of references. However it did not. It was only later that I realized that that name occurs in the NT and that in fact the way we spell the name in Genesis
and in Luke are inconsistent.

The name in question is NIV Arphaxad used in for example Gen 11:10 and Luke 3:36. I was working in Genesis at the time, because we had been inconsistent in the spelling of the name in Genesis.

I repeated the process with Lot which I knew was in the NT, but the NT references did not show up.

Is there something that I am not doing or I am doing wrong?”

Thank you,

SIL+LSS+PNG

Answer 1

As anon848905 has stated Greek and Hebrew are two different languages. The Greek is often a transliteration of the Hebrew, some times there are debates as to which person or spelling of a person name it is trying to refer to. The example of Arphaxad may be clear but others are not. (The transliterated Hebrew is “Arpachshad” while the Greek is “Arphaxad”.) Other cases are much more problematic than Arphaxad. The name/title “lord” in the English Bible has many sources, YWVH, Adonai, kurios to name a few. The approach taken in the design of the Biblical terms tool is work with each Hebrew and Greek term individually. This approach has the advantage of not obscuring things that are in the original and allowing each team to make its own decisions. It does have the disadvantage that this user has pointed out that it takes extra work to get the Old and New Testaments consistent.
I know of a person who was working on a list of names and other key terms based on English and not the source languages to eliminate the difficulty in using the Biblical terms tool to make the OT and NT names consistent. I just looked at the project being used for that and it seems there is a lot more work to be done.

Answer 2

The thing to remember with the Heb/Grk terms is that they are different languages. When you see the Heb terms they are going to have OT references and the Grk terms will have NT references. So, there are actually two entries for Arphaxad and two entries for Lot. (Some names have more entries if there are multiple people with that name.) If you sort the terms by English (rather than by Heb/Grk) then you should be able to see the two entries together, but the references will be split according to the language of the term.

Answer 3

Due to this problem of the same name occurring in two different languages, and therefore being a different name, I have created a project called BIBNAMES, which has a Biblical Terms list that has all the names, and only those names, that occur in both OT and NT.

If you sort by the English (by clicking at the top of the English column), you get the Greek form of the same Hebrew name occurring directly underneath in the list, so it is easy to compare the two spellings, and then checking of Names being spelled the same in both Testaments becomes much easier.

If you would like me to share this project with you, please get in touch, my email is [Email Removed], my Skype name is anon758749.