So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading, Nehemiah 8:8.
A consistent complaint made about modern lexicons has been that the words when defined are often explained without regard to the context wherein they are found. All too often a Greek or Hebrew word is defined in a narrow or constricted way in which the wide variations of the word are scarcely considered. As a result, an enterprising bible reader seeking to gain a fuller knowledge as to the exact Greek or Hebrew word from the original text ends up with a limited definition that seems awkward in the context from which it originated in the text.
One of the side benefits to the scholarship with which the Lord has tasked me in reading old texts and cross referencing research through the centuries is that occasionally I run across a true historical gem. Back in a time when no man was ever considered worthy of entering into higher education unless he already had a fully functioning understanding of Greek and Hebrew, a group of English scholars combined their considerable knowledge and understanding to leave their nation a book wherein could be found exact renderings of each and every word found in the underlying texts of a King James Bible.
Instead of just listing a Greek and Hebrew word in a dictionary-like format and enumerating various definitions, care was taken to see to it that minor nuances of meaning that might shift ever so slightly as contexts themselves shifted were kept true to the intended meaning. These linguistic experts took care to make the reader understand with a one or two word English replacement exactly what a reader of that original language would have thought when reading that word in that particular context. So for example, if they had already rendered a certain word a certain way in a reoccuring context, when they perceived that the particular defining word which they had previously used no longer adequately conveyed the original intent as found in that specific underlying text, they give you the reader a different word that fulfilled their goal of making you to understand.
In this book verbs were carefully defined by using one or two English words which correspond exactly to what the Greek or Hebrew text said with their respective verb choices. Unlike a modern lexicon, the authors of this work sought to give specific verb endings to English verbs to correspond to the practice of the original languages in affixing verb endings. Whereas a modern rendering of certain verb forms might show just one form of a present or continual tense verb, these thoughtful scholars rendered verbs with an est or eth ending to distinguish whether they should be associated with a second person case or a third person.
The word find would be rendered in one case as findeth because the original language assigned the verb to a third person construction, and then uses findest to convey to the English reader that the same underlying verb in the original text now gendered to a second person construction. In other words, it might say, "he findeth", but the same word would be modified later to say, "thou findest".
I could go on at length to illustrate how these scholars rendered pronouns in various ways to reflect the understanding of the original languages and give many other examples. Suffice it to say that a modern reader who wants to know exactly what each and every word meant that was used in the original texts from which the King James translators worked, may pick up this book with a certainty that he fully understands the intent of each word in context. A reader can hold the corresponding Greek or Hebrew text and find the exact meaning of each word in its original context with a 100% certainty that they fully understand that word.
If you are wondering what this book is called, it's called the King James Bible.