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.
sozo / soteria
To save. One Greek verb covers rescue from danger, healing from disease, and eternal salvation.
Mark 5:34, in every translation this tool compares.
The lifeboat saved them. The surgeon saved her. He was saved. English still uses one word for all three and only the last one sounds churchy, which tells you the drift is in the ear rather than the dictionary.
Because English reserves save for the religious sense and uses different words for the others, so a reader cannot see that the same verb is used when a woman is healed and when a man is converted.
Versions read save, heal, or make well according to context. The same Greek verb is behind all of them.
σῴζω sozo · G4982
Sozo is used of rescue from drowning, of physical healing, and of salvation. Thy faith hath made thee whole and thy faith hath saved thee are the same Greek sentence.
English has the word but has narrowed its religious use so far that the overlap is invisible.
When one Greek word is rendered by several English words inside one Gospel, list the places. The range is usually the point the writer was making.
Save, heal and make well are all majority renderings in their own contexts and no version distinguishes them by a different Greek word, because there is not one.
- sozo of healing: Mark 5:34; 10:52; Luke 17:19
- sozo of rescue: Matthew 8:25; 14:30
- sozo of salvation: Romans 10:9; Ephesians 2:8
