Word study

Route

1 Hebrew and 1 Greek words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with “route”. English often uses one word where Hebrew or Greek has several, each with its own shade of meaning. Under each word are verses where it is translated this way; choose the word itself for its full study: every verse, how else it is translated, the forms it takes and what the dictionaries say.

At a glance

How often each original word is translated “route” or one of its forms.

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • דֶּרֶךְ derekway, road, distance, journey, mannertranslated this way 8 times of its 653 uses · Strong’s H1870Noun  ·  Translated: way 204, ways 166, road 54, journey 35

    Numbers 14:25 Now since the Amalekites and Canaanites are living in the valleys, turn back tomorrow and head for the wilderness along the route to the Red Sea.”

    Deuteronomy 1:22 Then all of you approached me and said, “Let us send men ahead of us to search out the land and bring us word of what route to follow and which cities to enter.”

    Full study and all 595 verses →

Greek words (New Testament)

  • ὁδός hodósa way, road, journeytranslated this way 2 times of its 97 uses · Strong’s G3598Noun  ·  Translated: way 49, road 22, path 8, ways 6

    Matthew 2:12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they withdrew to their country by another route.

    James 2:25 In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute justified by her actions when she welcomed the spies and sent them off on another route?

    Full study and all 95 verses →
How to study a word well
  1. Start from the verse, not the dictionary. Find which Hebrew or Greek word stands in the verse you are studying. One English word often translates several different original words.
  2. Read every place the word is used. A word means what its writers used it to mean. The list of verses and the count by book show its range, and who uses it most.
  3. Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
  4. Notice the form. A command is not a statement, and a passive verb is something done to the subject. The form in your verse is part of the meaning.
  5. See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
  6. Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
  7. Come back to the verse. Context decides. A word does not carry every one of its meanings into every verse, and where a word came from does not settle what it means in a sentence written centuries later.

Scripture text and translation counts: Berean Standard Bible. Full entry: Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906, public domain), in the digital edition Brown-Driver-Briggs Enhanced by unfoldingWord (Joel Ruark, J. de Joode), based on data by Eliran Wong and Stephen Ku; its additions are used under CC BY 4.0. Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0. Hebrew-to-English verse numbering: original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb, CC BY 4.0. We reformatted the data, linked the references to this site’s Bible text and left out words in other scripts that the source holds only as images. These are historical reference works; an entry gives its authors’ view, and a word’s meaning in any verse depends on how it is used there.