Strong Ability in Biblical Languages<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As I sought feedback on the Swahili lyrics of Baba Yetu recently, one of the most crucial kinds of feedback I received was of the sort that said "X rather\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/09\/strong-ability-in-biblical-languages.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Strong Ability in Biblical Languages\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As I sought feedback on the Swahili lyrics of Baba Yetu recently, one of the most crucial kinds of feedback I received was of the sort that said "X rather\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/09\/strong-ability-in-biblical-languages.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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{"id":31695,"date":"2015-09-24T06:40:23","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T10:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=31695"},"modified":"2015-09-24T06:40:23","modified_gmt":"2015-09-24T10:40:23","slug":"strong-ability-in-biblical-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/09\/strong-ability-in-biblical-languages.html","title":{"rendered":"Strong Ability in Biblical Languages"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

As I sought feedback on the Swahili lyrics of Baba Yetu<\/a> recently, one of the most crucial kinds of feedback I received was of the sort that said \u201cX rather than Y sounds more natural to a native speaker.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Bill Mounce pointed out in a recent blog post<\/a>, this is the kind of instinctive knowledge that only comes with great proficiency in a language. And it is why people who look up words in Strong\u2019s Concordance and pretend to be offering an informed decision about the Biblical texts in their original languages are an abomination \u2013 in the original underlying sense of the Hebrew word, of course.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"