Another variation of the "dictionary approach" is the assignment of meanings to words and expressions that they can in principle have, but in this context clearly do not have. For example, Exodus 32:28 tells us how, after the creation of the golden calf, the Levites went through the camp with swords, "and about three thousand of the people fell that day." Since it is very undesirable to think that the Levites killed their fellow tribesmen, we can assume that we are talking about their moral fall, and that the Levites actually called them to repentance, but if you pay attention to the immediate context, then such an interpretation will look completely fantastic. Unfortunately, the text makes it clear that these people did die at the hands of the Levites.

3.2.3. "In the original, the construction is used..."

A similar approach can be applied to grammatical forms and constructions: they supposedly have a strictly defined meaning. For example, in Greek, aorist always means a single action, and imperfect always means continuous or repeated. In fact, there are many examples where this is not the case[7], and we know this from the example of the Russian language, where there is a fairly close analogy: perfective and imperfective aspect. You can say "I read this book" and this will mean a single completed action (although the imperfective aspect is used), or you can say "I went home" and this will mean the beginning of the action with an indefinite ending (although the perfective aspect is used).

The same applies to the middle and passive voices in Greek (analogous to Russian reflexive verbs) and verbal forms in Hebrew (see Section 2.4.2.1.). Yes, of course, verb forms have a certain meaning, their use is not accidental. But the difference between "I've read this book" and "I've read this book," between "I went home" and "I'm going home," is not in how a person reads or leaves, but rather in the way the information is presented. The statement "I have read," as opposed to "I have read," emphasizes that the book has been read in its entirety (probably very recently) and can now, for example, be returned to the library. And the statement "I went", as opposed to "I am leaving", usually means that the person is already standing in the doorway. But in many cases, these statements will be completely inhomonymous.

We feel these subtleties only because we speak Russian ourselves, but many such nuances in the use of Greek or Hebrew forms and constructions clearly elude us. Therefore, one should not rush to assert that the aorist ημαρτον in Romans 5:12 ("all have sinned") necessarily means only a single fall of the forefather Adam and no one else's, or that μετανόησον in Revelation 3:19 ("repent") allows only one repentance throughout life. Maybe so, maybe not, but the use of these grammatical forms themselves does not prove anything.

Arguments based on the use of function words (articles, the Hebrew indicator of the direct object אֵת) look especially unconvincing: of course, they are not used arbitrarily, there are certain rules and trends, but they can be easily violated, especially in the OT of poetry, where the frequency of the use of these function words is generally noticeably lower than in prose. And in prose, articles are not used according to such strict rules as in modern European languages, and this applies equally to the ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek languages. Whatever the meaning of the OT expression "sons of God," it is difficult to detect any difference in meaning between this expression with the article (בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים as in Job 1:6) and without it (בְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים as in Job 38:7).

3.2.4. "The Bible Exactly Says..."

It would seem that what could be more reliable than to directly and immediately follow what the Bible says? But in fact, it is not always possible to do it so simply, first you need to determine the degree of accuracy of the statement. For example, the book of Exodus describes how "all the cattle of Egypt perished" from the plague (9:6). Thus, the Bible clearly teaches that the Egyptians had no cattle left at all. But then we read that the Egyptian cattle that are fully alive become inflamed (9:10), then perished by hail (9:25), and finally "all the firstlings of the cattle" perish (11:5). Therefore, the words "all the cattle" in Exodus 9:6 can only be understood as an exaggeration (cf. the expressions in our everyday speech: "he spends all his money on vodka"). Of course, this also applies to many other cases of metaphorical and other figurative speech.

It is also necessary to check how accurately the interpreter himself gives the arguments, whether he expands, whether he does not narrow the boundaries of what is mentioned in the text. For example, in Acts 6:1-6 there are seven men who were deacons. The biblical text clearly shows that they were appointed to "take care of the tables," i.e., to engage in charitable work. Nowhere, however, is it said that their duties were limited to this, but nowhere is the opposite said. It has been suggested that since some of these men preached publicly (e.g., Stephen in the same chapter) and baptized converts, preaching and baptism were also part of the deacons' duties. But it does not follow from anything that those who preached did this precisely as deacons, and we do not even have evidence that all deacons did this. Only one conclusion will be legitimate: deacons were not forbidden to preach and baptize.

3.2.2. "The biblical worldview corresponds to..."

As has been said many times, context is crucial. But context can also become a source of errors and manipulations, especially context in a broad, historical and cultural sense, as a set of ideas and beliefs of the author and his first listeners or readers. Of course, we can say with certainty that they, for example, believed in God and knew nothing about modern science, that bread was the main daily food, and that people traveled on foot, or on donkeys and camels. But many subtleties are inaccessible to us, we can only guess approximately how people of that time saw the world, how they treated certain phenomena. Moreover, people were also different then.

Hence the first mistake of this kind: the creation of a certain integral system, conditionally speaking, of a "biblical worldview", which was allegedly shared by absolutely all biblical authors and positive characters, and in the same edition. For example, any references to "gods" in the OT, other than the denunciation of paganism, are interpreted in some other way (e.g., strong men or angels) on the sole grounds: for the "biblical worldview" there is only one God. But then we will have to admit that many biblical heroes, and even authors, did not adhere to such a worldview. For example, in Judges 11:24, the ambassadors of the Israelite judge Jephthah say to the king of the Ammonites: "Do you not possess what Chemosh your god has given you? And we possess all that the Lord our God has given us for an inheritance." And the author does not object in the least to such a comparison of the Lord with a pagan deity. Perhaps it is worth admitting that, at least for Jephthah and his ambassadors, Chemosh was no less real than the Lord, another thing is that only the Lord was the God of Jephthah, only to Him he was ready to sacrifice his own daughter.

The other extreme is the separation of OT and NT worldviews, or "Jewish and Hellenic mentality", which are opposed to each other even at the level of language. For example, the fact that there is no neuter gender in Hebrew, but masculine and feminine, is presented as confirmation that Semites tend to perceive the entire world around them as living. There is no doubt that different cultures have some differences in their perception of the world and that language to some extent reflects these features, but this reflection is always quite indirect, and it can be risky to draw unambiguous and direct connections between the phenomena of language and the features of mentality. If the neuter gender is necessarily something inanimate, then what about the Russian word "child" or the German word "das Kind"? Do they mean that for the Russian or German mentality, children belong to inanimate nature?

Often, when analyzing NT texts, researchers assume that in fact Greek words are used in them as a kind of replacement for Hebrew words: δικαιοσυνη has the same meaning as צְדָקָה ("righteousness"), etc. However, it would be even less adequate to try to take as a starting point some "biblical" definition of righteousness (based primarily on the Epistles of Paul) and automatically "read" it into the text every time the words δικαιοσυνη and צְדָקָה occur there. Each of these words has a whole range of meanings, partly they intersect with each other (and with the Russian words "righteousness" and "justification"), but partly they differ from each other (and even more so from the corresponding Russian words), so it is always necessary to take into account the context and peculiarities of the author's word usage[8].