Using Strong's Tagged Bibles – Olive Tree

Anyone can use a Strong's Tagged Bible to learn more about the original languages of the Bible. Here we have a tutorial for you about how to use the basic features of a Strong's Bible in the Olive Tree Bible App.

If you have not already done so, you can find links in this article to download your Strong's Bible to your various devices.

We will be using the ESV with Strong's in our iPad app as an example, but these steps will work with any Strong's Bible on any supported device.

Strong's Tagged Words

The first feature is the most straightforward. As soon as you tap a word in the Strong's Bible, you will see the original Greek or Hebrew word in a pop-up window.

As you'll see in the image above, black words do not have a Strong's number. This means that the word isn’t explicitly in the Greek or Hebrew text. The word was added by the translators in order to help the sentence make sense in English.

Show Strong's Numbers in Text

There is a setting in the Olive Tree Bible App that allows you to show or hide Strong's numbers in the Bible text.

Here are the steps you can follow to turn this setting on or off:

Tap the Settings icon on the toolbar (gear icon).
Tap Advanced Settings.
Tap Display.
Turn the Show Strong's Numbers switch off (or on).

Olive Tree Enhanced Strong's Dictionary

When you tap on a word that does have a Greek or Hebrew word, the Enhanced Strong's Dictionary appears. The dictionary shows you all the ways the word gets translated throughout the Bible and how common each translation of the word is in the Bible text. This can give you a more complete idea of what the word meant in the original language.

Strong's Popup Details

This shows the original Greek or Hebrew word, as well as the Strong's number for the word/number you tapped on.
Here you see the gloss for the original Greek or Hebrew word, including a transliteration and a link to any root words (e.g. g5463 in the example shown).
This shows a list of terms used to translate that Greek or Hebrew word, as well as how many times each word was used in the English translation. 'AV' stands for 'Authorized Version,' which is also known as the King James Version.
Here is an outline defining the 'semantic domain' of the word, which is the range of different meanings the word can have given the actual sense of meaning that it carries in Greek or Hebrew. These are not synonyms for the word in English.
If the definition entry is too long for the popup, a link will appear to 'View Full Definition'.
This allows you to search your current book for the Strong's number or the word in the original language.
"Search for..." offers the same function as the search in #6, but is part of the UI (user interface). "Look Up..." allows you to look up the original word in any Greek or Hebrew dictionaries that you have downloaded in the app.

Search and Lookup

When you have a Strong's pop up open on the screen like in the image below, you will see the option at the bottom of the pop-up that says “Search for [Strong's number]”. Searching for the Strong's number will pull up every place in the Bible where that particular Greek or Hebrew word is used. This feature will show you the breadth of ways a single Greek or Hebrew word is translated into English. Here is an example of how this works:

The Look Up feature (see the circled option below) allows you to look up a word in any Greek or Hebrew dictionaries that you have downloaded in the app.

There are many helpful dictionaries available that are written by scholars who have already done the work of a detailed word study. They may also include information about where the word came from and how it was used in books outside the Bible. Here are a few you might find helpful:

Conclusion

We hope that this introduction to using Strong's Bibles in the Olive Tree Bible App has been helpful for you. You can find all of our Strong's Bibles on our website!

If you have any more questions, please submit a request to our Customer Support team here. They are happy to help!