Sense: to teach
v. — to impart skills or knowledge to.
But I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching (διδάσκω) and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols.
Re 2:20 (NRSV)
Teaching is a multifaceted concept in most of the world’s languages. Greek and Hebrew are no exceptions. This is clear from the “relationships” section of the Bible Sense Lexicon entry for “to teach”:
In order to understand the concept of teaching, I will point out three important relationships. In biblical languages, no less than in English, “teaching” is related “learning.” This is reflected morphologically in a language like Hebrew where in one stem למדmeans “to learn” and in another it means “to teach; i.e., to cause to learn.” When looking at the passive stems, we can see that there are two senses of being taught that relate to the general concept of “to teach.” Fortunately, we also have these meanings in English. We can say “I teach a class at one o’clock.” Or, we can say “I teach Hebrew at one o’clock.” The object of the verb can be either who is being taught or what is being taught. So, if we want to explore the concept of teaching more fully, we should be sure not to neglect the causative relationship between teaching and learning and the distinction between teaching a person and teaching content. Otherwise, we may leave our study with a somewhat unclear sense of what it means “to teach.”
What is the Bible Sense Lexicon?
Sense of the Day is based on content from Logos’ Bible Sense Lexicon, which organizes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words by meaning based on a variety of semantic relationships. Sense of the Day provides examples of senses in context, along with insight into their application for theology and interpretation.
The Bible Sense Lexicon is a Logos dataset available in Logos 5 Gold and higher base packages. If you’re enrolled in the Logos Academic Discount Program, you can also find the Bible Sense Lexicon in the Biblical Languages base package. Take your studies even further by exploring semantic domains, engaging the biblical text like never before.
Learn more about the Bible Sense Lexicon.