This is part seven of Feed Yourself, a series on learning to study the Bible with your own two hands. Today, the tool most people assume requires seminary, and the ground rules that keep it honest.
Twice, at two of the great hinge points of the Old Testament, the same command shows up. Joshua, about to lead Israel into the land, is told to meditate on the Book of the Law day and night. And the very first psalm opens the entire psalter by pronouncing a blessing on the man who does the same.
“But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night.”
Psalm 1:2 NKJV
Now, when a modern reader hears meditate, a picture forms automatically. Silence. Stillness. Eyes closed, mind emptied, maybe a cushion. That is what the word means in our culture, imported from Eastern practice and polished by a thousand apps. So the blessed man of Psalm 1 becomes a man sitting very quietly, thinking calm thoughts about the Bible.
The Hebrew word is hagah, and it does not mean any of that. It means to mutter. To murmur, to moan, to turn words over under your breath. Isaiah uses the same word for a lion growling over its prey (Isaiah 31:4), and for the low moan of a dove (Isaiah 38:14). Biblical meditation is not emptying the mind. It is filling the mouth. The blessed man walks around all day with Scripture on his lips, muttering it, chewing it, growling it over like a lion that will not be talked out of its kill. Day and night is not a posture. It is a habit of the mouth.
That one discovery reorders a believer’s whole devotional life. And here is the point of this post. You can make discoveries like that yourself, with a concordance and about twenty minutes, if you learn the method and the ground rules. So let me show you exactly how that one was made.
How a Word Study Works
In the 1890s a professor named James Strong numbered every Hebrew and Greek word in the Bible, 8,674 Hebrew entries and 5,624 Greek ones, and indexed every occurrence of every English word back to its original. That numbering system is now free everywhere, Blue Letter Bible, STEP Bible, and a dozen apps, which means the original languages are open to any reader willing to look things up. The method has four steps.
Look up your English word where it occurs, meditate in Psalm 1:2, and get the number. It is H1897. Click or look up the number and meet the word itself, hagah, with its basic definition, to moan, growl, utter, muse, mutter. Then the crucial step, read every other verse where the word appears. There are about twenty-five, a half hour of reading, and this is where the lion and the dove turn up. Then come back to your verse and let what the Bible itself showed you inform, not replace, what the translators wrote. That is the whole method. The Bible defines its own vocabulary, if you will read widely enough to let it.
| Word | Original | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| hagah | הָגָה | H1897 | To mutter, moan, growl, meditate. Joshua 1:8, Psalm 1:2. The lion’s growl of Isaiah 31:4 |
| siach | שִׂיחַ | H7878 | To muse, rehearse, go over a matter. The other meditation word, all through Psalm 119 |
| meletao | μελετάω | G3191 | To care for, practice, be diligent in. 1 Timothy 4:15. The New Testament’s meditation is likewise labor, not emptiness |
The Ground Rules
Word studies are powerful, and power tools come with safety rules. Break these and you will hurt yourself, and probably a Sunday school class along with you.
A word means what it means in its sentence. Not the sum of everything it could ever mean. English works the same way, trunk means one thing at the airport and another at the zoo, and no honest reader adds the meanings together. When a preacher stacks up every possible sense of a Greek word and applies them all at once to one verse, that is not depth. That is a pile.
Etymology is history, not meaning. Where a word came from does not control what it meant by the time an author used it, any more than goodbye secretly means God be with ye every time you say it at the grocery store. Word origins make fine illustrations and terrible doctrine. Never build a teaching on a word’s ancestry that you cannot also show from its usage.
And the humility rule. When your word study contradicts every translation ever published, the error is yours. Translation committees hold every credential the internet’s word-study merchants claim, dozens of scholars, decades of work, every manuscript on the table. The concordance lets you see more of what they saw. It does not make you their reviewer. If you find yourself concluding that every English Bible has hidden the truth of a verse and only this one number reveals it, put the shovel down and go read part one of this series again.
Biblical meditation is not emptying the mind. It is filling the mouth, turning the words of Jehovah over until they get into the bloodstream.
Why This One Matters
I did not pick hagah at random. The muttering matters, practically and pastorally. Practically, because it explains how meditation day and night is even possible. Nobody can sit on a cushion day and night. Anybody can carry a verse in the mouth day and night, over the dishes, in the truck, on the walk, the way a song carries itself all day whether you invite it or not. Joshua was told to do this while running a military campaign. This is meditation for people with jobs.
Pastorally, because your mind is going to mutter something regardless. Anxiety is meditation. Turning a worry over and over, rehearsing it under your breath, letting it get into the bloodstream, that is hagah pointed at the wrong object, and every anxious person is already an expert practitioner. Psalm 1 does not ask you to learn a new skill. It asks you to change the material. Give the mouth a verse to carry instead of the worry it has been carrying, and the promise attached is a tree planted by rivers of water, whose leaf does not wither.
Discussion Questions
- How does hagah as muttering change your picture of the blessed man in Psalm 1? What does it make possible that the cushion picture does not?
- Look up one word from your life verse in a free concordance and read five other places it appears. What did the Bible teach you about its own vocabulary?
- Which of the three ground rules have you seen broken in teaching you have heard? What was the result?
- Read Isaiah 31:4 and Psalm 1:2 with the same Hebrew word in view. What does the lion’s growl add to your understanding of meditation?
- Be honest, what does your mind currently mutter on repeat? What verse would you hand it instead this week?
Going Deeper
Do the full hagah study yourself at Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible, all the occurrences, and mark which ones surprise you. Then pick one verse, Psalm 1 commends the whole enterprise, and actually mutter it for a week, in the truck, over the sink, until it starts finishing itself. For a second study, run the same four steps on the word translated “power” in Acts 1:8 and watch what the usage teaches. D.A. Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies is the sober classic on word-study mistakes if you want the full list of ways this tool gets misused, and it will vaccinate you against half the bad teaching on the internet by itself.
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