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.
kosmos
World. The root idea is order and arrangement, which is why it also gives cosmetics.
John 3:16, in every translation this tool compares.
Cosmos. Cosmetics. Same root. One is the ordered universe and the other is putting a face in order. The idea underneath is arrangement.
Because John uses it both for the world God loves and for the system opposed to God, sometimes within a few verses, and English gives you no signal which is meant.
Every version reads world. No version distinguishes the senses.
κόσμος kosmos · G2889
Kosmos is an ordered arrangement, then the ordered universe, then the inhabited world, then the human system organised against God. John uses the last two senses close together and expects the reader to track it.
English world covers the planet and the social system, so the range survives, but the deliberate switching does not.
When a writer uses one word in two opposed senses inside a paragraph, that is a rhetorical move, not sloppiness.
World is universal in English versions.
- kosmos as the object of God's love: John 3:16
- kosmos as the opposing system: 1 John 2:15-17
- kosmos as arrangement: 1 Peter 3:3
