Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
kaleo / klesis
To call. The verb behind church, calling, and the word for those called out.
Ephesians 4:1, in every translation this tool compares.
He found his calling. English uses the word for vocation and hears nothing else in it. The older sense is closer to being summoned by someone.
Because calling in English has become a career word, and the family it belongs to in Greek is the same one that gives the word for the church.
Versions read call, calling, or vocation.
καλέω kaleo · G2564
Kaleo is to call or summon. Klesis is the calling. Ekklesia, the assembly, is built on the same root with a prefix meaning out. The family holds together in Greek and scatters in English.
English took vocation from Latin and calling from Anglo-Saxon, so the family that produced church is invisible.
Follow the root across a writer's vocabulary. Greek families argue by themselves; English translations break them apart.
Call and calling are the majority renderings; vocation appears in the King James at Ephesians 4:1.
- klesis at Ephesians 4:1, 4; Philippians 3:14
- ekklesia from the same root
- kletos, called: Romans 1:1, 6
