Concordance Fallacy
The concordance fallacy assumes that a single Greek or Hebrew word carries one essential meaning everywhere it appears, so that finding its root definition or its meaning in one passage settles its meaning in all others. This treats living languages as if they were algebraic symbols.
Source: James Barr, Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) – Public Domain
Also known as: one-meaning fallacy, semantic uniformity fallacy, Strong's number fallacy, lexical illegitimacy
The concordance fallacy is the erroneous assumption that a biblical word — identified by a Strong's number or lexical root — carries a single, consistent meaning across all its occurrences, so that determining its 'real meaning' in one place automatically determines its meaning everywhere else it appears.
The fallacy is almost always mediated by a concordance or Strong's lexicon, tools that are genuinely useful for locating words but deeply misleading when treated as meaning-determiners. James Barr's 1961 work The Semantics of Biblical Language provided the definitive critique: meaning is not stored in words but is determined by usage in context. A word is a form that different contexts invest with different content. The Strong's number system, designed in the 19th century for reference purposes, was never intended to assert semantic uniformity across all occurrences of a root.
The practical consequence is that popular word studies frequently produce what D.A. Carson calls 'illegitimate totality transfer' — the mistake of importing the full semantic range of a word (all its possible meanings) into a single occurrence where only one meaning is operative. The reverse error, 'semantic narrowing,' occurs when a word's meaning in one specialized context is treated as its universal meaning. Both errors share the assumption that the word itself, rather than the sentence and discourse context, is the primary unit of meaning.
In Koine Greek, this fallacy most often appears in studies of agape versus phileo (wrongly claimed to be a sharp distinction), sarx ('flesh' as always meaning sinful nature), pneuma ('spirit' as always referring to the Holy Spirit), and aion/aionios ('eternal' as always referring to infinite duration). In Hebrew, olam is similarly mishandled, as are chesed ('steadfast love' treated as always meaning unconditional covenant loyalty regardless of usage) and shalom (reduced to 'inner peace' when it most often means communal wholeness and material well-being). Responsible lexical study requires checking how each author uses a word across their own corpus before generalizing further.
- 1A teaching begins 'The Greek word here is X, which means Y' and treats that definition as definitive without examining how the word functions in its specific sentence
- 2Strong's numbers are used to assert that two passages 'really' teach the same thing because they share a root word, without checking whether the contexts support that connection
- 3A distinction is drawn between two synonymous words (agape vs. phileo, sarx vs. soma) as if it were categorical and consistent across all New Testament authors
- 4A word's meaning is determined by its etymology or its most common usage in classical Greek, rather than by Koine usage contemporaneous with the New Testament
- 5The full semantic range of a word (all its possible meanings across all contexts) is imported into a single occurrence to enrich the text beyond what its sentence supports
Lexical studies are a genuine and important tool in biblical interpretation — but the word is not the message; the sentence is. Context — syntactic, literary, historical, and canonical — determines which facet of a word's semantic range is operative in any given instance. This is not a counsel of interpretive despair: it means that word studies must be done in context, with attention to how a specific author uses a specific word across their specific writings, before any broader generalizations are drawn. The tools (concordances, lexicons, Strong's numbers) are servants of careful reading, not substitutes for it.
Identify the claim being made about the word
Ask: Is the teacher claiming this word always means X, or that it means X in this specific passage? These are very different claims.
A word study that says 'shalom means wholeness and material well-being' and then applies that to every occurrence of shalom — including passages where it simply means 'greeting' or 'absence of war' — has made the stronger claim without justifying it. Identify exactly what scope the word study is asserting.
Check the word's usage in the same book or by the same author
Ask: How does this specific author use this word elsewhere in the same text? Does their usage support the meaning claimed?
Start with the author's own usage before moving to broader New Testament or LXX usage. John's Greek, Paul's Greek, and Luke's Greek are distinct literary corpora. A word Paul uses in a specialized theological sense may be used by Luke in a perfectly ordinary sense. Author-specific usage is the most relevant control.
Look at the sentence and its immediate context
Ask: What meaning does this word carry given the other words in its sentence, the surrounding argument, and the passage's genre?
Lexicons list the semantic range of a word — the space of meanings it can occupy. Context selects which meaning is operative in this particular use. The lexicon tells you what's possible; the context tells you what's actual. Never import the full semantic range into a single instance.
Consult a scholarly lexicon, not just a concordance
Ask: What does BDAG (Greek) or BDB/HALOT (Hebrew) say about this word's usage in similar contexts?
Strong's concordance numbers words and gives brief glosses — it is a reference tool, not a lexicology resource. Academic lexicons like BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich) distinguish meanings by syntactic construction, author, period, and genre, and give actual examples. Use them before drawing lexical conclusions.