 should we use a dictionary to define repentance? This doesn't happen too often but I have occasionally had people comment on the channel trying to defend the repent of sins gospel so called based on the dictionary definition of repentance and if you have seen my documentary on the repent of sins issue you may remember that it featured Franklin Graham explaining what repentance means based on Merriam-Webster's definition of it to turn from sin and to dedicate oneself to the amendment of one's life. Now in video number two we looked at the question what does repentance mean and we came up with several definitions of repentance from the bible but I didn't actually look at the dictionary. In fact the Merriam-Webster's dictionary doesn't even list some of the definitions that we saw from video two such as a change of action a change of course to turn from or towards something that's not necessarily a sin issue. The only definitions that Merriam-Webster lists is sorrow and remorse for which it instead uses the words regretting contrition but notice how the change of mind and regretting contrition are listed as sub-definitions under the same number leading the reader to think that the change of mind is specifically in relation to regret or contrition and not a less dramatic change of mind. So the question to be asked is does the dictionary definition carry any weight whatsoever? Sometimes the dictionary may be helpful to understand some of those complicated words that we struggle to understand when we read the bible because the dictionary can sometimes strip out some of the christianese word salad that gets slapped on top of words and centuries of legalistic dogma to get to the core words and how we use those words in a secular manner. For example the words justified and sanctified if we take out our christian doctrine and connotations the word justified simply means to have a sufficient reason for doing something or that an action is just. The word sanctified means to be set apart or separated for a religious purpose. The problem with dictionaries is that they define words based on how we predominantly use them in our own language particularly in the modern age. The dictionary will say that repentance means to turn from sin and dedicate oneself to the amendment of one's life because that is how christians use this word in today's language. A dictionary will not base its definition on the word in another language from 2000 years ago that a particular set of literature was translated from. Another problem with dictionary definitions is that language itself is a clumsy medium of communication. Languages change and evolve over time. The definition of words change. Words will evolve independently in those languages from different concepts than in other languages. Some languages inherit words from other languages before them. Therefore equivalent words in different languages will have different etymologies that they evolved from. So let's just take various words that are equivalent for repentance. The Hebrew word nachem is a relatively primitive root word meaning to feel sorrow or to comfort oneself. The Greek word metanoia is formed from the Greek words for change, meta and think and understand, neo. In other words a change of mind. The traditional Chinese character foigai in Cantonese or foigai in Mandarin meaning regret composes of the first character having two different parts which one of them is shin a variant of hearts, one of them is mui a bit meaning each or every and the second word meaning to correct or improve or change. The English word repent comes from the French repentia which comes from the medieval Latin word le poinitere which comes from a late Latin word poinitere if you pardon my pronunciation and this has its roots in a proto-indo-european word patior meaning to hurt. Penitence and penance are separate words used interchangeably with repentance particularly by Catholics also evolving from the similar Latin root words. Latin based languages such as Spanish will get their equivalent words from the Latin root as well. Contemporary English is a heavily adulterated language although it is considered a Germanic language a lot of our words actually come from French or Latin or Nordic languages because of the Vikings and because it's an international language and the most widely spoken language in the world it even picks up words and phrases from many other languages as well including those in the Far East and in the age of the internet new words are frequently being invented. If you wind back just 400 and such years to the earlier modern English the King James Bible is already noticeably archaic but we can understand it though. Wind back a little bit earlier to Middle English and the Wycliffe Bible and it's already getting very difficult to understand and all the English is pretty much completely unintelligible to contemporary English speakers and even if we could understand it it wouldn't really matter because there's not really a great deal of reading material from that era anyway. Much of English history prior to the 15 or 1600s was either written in Latin or lost to the just bit of time and since we got our word repent from the Latin at a time when Britain was a Catholic country centuries of Catholic dogma and preserving the Bible in Latin in which they often replaced the word for repent with the Latin word for due penance by the way has shaped how we interpret the word repentance in English that we insist that it means to have all this pity and sorrow and penitence about sins. Greek and Hebrew have changed far slower than English though. Just as the King James Bible is slightly archaic to us, Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek is archaic to a modern Hebrew or Greek speaker but that is over a much longer course of time. They can still read the Bible in its original written language in the same way we can read the King James Bible. Even if words change in spelling or pronunciation slightly their definition could still change quite considerably over time. Let's take the word conversation for example. Today we use this word to mean a verbal communication between a group of people like when people have a chat after church. Historically the word meant to behaviour or conduct particularly regarding morals and the King James Bible uses the word conversation in this context quite frequently but this is an obsolete or archaic definition of it now and in fact some dictionaries may not even list this definition. If a word's meaning can change that much in the space of 400 years imagine how much it can change over 2,000 years especially when you hammered by Christianity's dogma constantly. I once asked a native Greek speaker could I in Greek say I was going to go to this supermarket but then I repented and I went to that supermarket would that make sense in Greek and she said yes it would but it would sound quite strong to use a word like repent in that way. Well it's the same in English I could say just what I've just said in English and it would sort of make sense but it would come across a little bit strong to a lot of people because of the religious connotations that that word carries. So the dictionary is only going to tell you what a word means in today's language because that's how people use that word today. That doesn't reflect how the word was used in the Bible necessarily though. What many people don't realise is that the Bible is such an extensive collection of literature that it can be used as its own dictionary. Where words such as repentance are used frequently in the Bible we have enough verses for the surrounding context to give us an indication of what that word means or did mean at the time the Bible was written. Where possible we should allow the Bible to define the words for us rather than letting our doctrines in centuries of Christianity's tradition define what we think the word ought to mean and then plant such an idea into the text when it's not evident in the text. Let's take for example the Hebrew word teshuva or teshuva. You can search online to find many articles or videos of today's Jews telling you about the meaning of the word. While they will tell you that the simple definition of it is to return they won't treat it as a simple word rather they will treat it as a sort of ritual or a process. The explanations will vary but broadly speaking one repents of their sins and returns to the Lord. So if you search for teshuva that is probably what you're going to find. Many many Jewish sources or Christian sources when they have an Israel fetish telling you about how to return to God in repentance and make atonement for sins and it ties in with Yom Kippur etc etc. But if you search for the word in the Bible you're going to find this word used in quite some mundane ways. So for example let's look at one Samuel 7 15 17. Now the blue word is translated from teshuva and the red and green words are the context. So Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life and he went from year to year in circuit and it noticed it lists these places Beth El Gilgal Mispar in all those places and then this is the word it's translated from and his return was to Ramah so that's a locational change for there was his house and there he judged Israel. So we see that Samuel returned from one physical location to another as he was judging Israel and going about from place to place. This had absolutely nothing to do with turning from sins and absolutely nothing to do with returning to the Lord but it is translated from teshuva. That's one example let's take another. In 1 Kings 20 22 it says and the prophet came to the king of Israel and said on to him go strengthen thyself and mark and see what you do for at the return of the year the king of Syria will come up against you. So again the translated word is in blue you can see on the screen and the green and the red text represent context. The return or the teshuva here is referring to the calendar year and if you read the passage it's about the northern kingdom of Israel going to war against the Syrians not about a particular person turning from sin but even so the context is the change of the year according to the calendar. That's what teshuva means here. In fact I looked up the word teshuva on the Hebrew concordance on biblehub.com and by teshuva I mean the noun specifically not the verb because the verb has hundreds of mentions which is shub just the noun teshuva and it only came up with eight occurrences and looking through those eight occurrences of teshuva not one of them had anything to do with turning from your sins not one of them and in fact you could even argue from one or two verses in Job that teshuva was an act of an act of sin or at least an accusation of doing a sin. So the idea that teshuva is some biblical doctrine about crying your heart out in sackcloth and ashes and being all penitent and broken over your sins and returning to get your salvation back from the Lord is completely nonsensical because the bible never uses teshuva in that way. You got that from listening to too many Jews tell you what the bible means instead of just studying it yourself to show yourself approved and see what it means. Likewise we are often told that the Greek metanoia which is the noun or metaneo which is one of two verbs means to turn from a life of sin. The Greek speaking Orthodox Church often embellishes the definition of metanoia just as Christians and Jews embellish the definition of repentance or teshuva. But even some Greek translations of the Old Testaments including the Septuagint use metanoia or metaneo in reference to God repenting and other contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with turning from sin. Even secular literature uses variants of metanoia or metanoia in a secular way for example Plutarchs Moralea Volume 2 uses metanointy but it isn't anything to do with sin and again part of my pronunciation. The Hebrew and Greek really do need their own videos separately later in the series if I can get time to do it so we can look at those in more detail another time. A dictionary can help with getting simple secular definitions of words when any religious context and emotional sensationalism is stripped out. So I mentioned these examples earlier justification simply means to have a good reason for doing something if we strip out all of the religious connotations from the word it doesn't require a sermon to explain this definition. Sanctification simply means to set something apart for religious purposes if we strip out all of the emotional sensationalism from the word it doesn't need a long paragraph going on and on about holiness and the life of a new believer and the indwelling work of the spirit etc if we just treat it as a simple word. However when we start using the dictionary to try and get a theological meaning or rather satirological meaning I suppose it will be skewed by religious interpretation and sensationalism so it will cause you to overly embellish and sensationalize simple verses. So for example if we take mark 115 repent and believe the gospel if you're just being honest and just treating it as a simple word you cannot ascertain a transformation of character to christ consciousness and a complete devotion to turn away from a life given to sin to a holy life totally surrendered to the lord all based on one word here repent somebody or something like a dictionary planted these ideas in your head to make you read this verse with such presupposition and you can find articles online of people taking this one verse and writing huge articles about what repent means but look you did not get all of that from one word in this verse. Now the great thing about the bible or the king james bible certainly as I mentioned it has its own built-in dictionary if we're not sure what a word means we simply look up every instance of that word and how it's used and at least some clear verses will give an indication of what that word means but there is also the issue of English words used in our king james bible it isn't always like for like with the same Hebrew and Greek word every single time so the same Hebrew or Greek word might get translated into multiple English words across different verses but then you can also have the same English word in different verses where it's actually different Hebrew and Greek words in those verses. If you want to search verses by the English word I recommend the kingsbible.com and using its concordance feature this allows you to search all verses that contain a particular word now you do have to search for nouns and verbs and past and present tense separately so for example you'd have to separately search repent repentance and repented it wouldn't all come in one search but it is a really useful tool to search all verses by an English word. Now biblehub.com has a lot of features including comparing English translation so it's not so ideal for searching verses by English words for that reason however it is useful for searching by Hebrew and Greek words to get every single instance of a verse that uses that word. elopost.net is a useful tool if you want to be able to look at the septuagant translation of the Old Testament and see the English and Greek side by side so you can see how the Greek bible translates those verses where God repented. Having said that while the website is easy to navigate to a particular verse it lists English and Greek in separate paragraphs on opposite sides of the pages so it's difficult to get those word for word matches. So there is an interlinear Greek you can find on archive.com where it's easier to see the Greek words matching to their equivalent English words but it's in a pdf like format so it is harder to navigate to specific verses. So rather than using the dictionary to tell us what repentance means it's better to just use the tools that we have there and search for every verse that mentions the word repentance or repent or whatever variants that happens to be. Look at the context of those verses and let the bible define those words for us. And you can search by the English word to see how Joaquin James bible defines repentance in English or you can search by the Hebrew and Greek to see how they define it in those verses and consider how as well how the ancient Greek translation matched the Hebrew that the fact that God's repented and that is metanoia or metaneo as well it's not just metamellomy because they'll try and trick you with things like that. And by seeing all of these examples of repentance that have nothing to do with turning from sin based on the context in English, Hebrew and Greek we can completely dispel the repent of your sins myth because we see that repent is an ordinary word like any other verb in the dictionary if we strip all the christianese out of it. Now yes there are verses where it does mean turning from sin but that doesn't mean you can stick sin in every single verse that uses the word repent particularly when it's an intransitive verb. This is no nonsense christianity reminding you that nowhere in the bible does it say repent of your sins to be saved.