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The following page lists concepts taken from the Bible and presents them in two different ways: firstly, it presents one concept and next to it the main words which have been found in its verses; and secondly, it separates the concepts into positive and negative groups. They are words that can frequently be found together or only appear once. Only the positive use of any meaning is included, this means that when a word such as “wise” is used, but before there is a “not”, essentially meaning “not wise”, then the use is not listed. This is because when including negations of words, then any concepts can be found together, and positive and negative behaviours do not stand out. But if we centre only on when the meaning is being instructed, then patterns start to occur.

For example, instead of directly stating something is ‘bad’, the Bible can say it is ‘not good’, therefore creating an appearance together between ‘partiality’ and ‘good’ in “partiality in judging is not good” (Proverbs 24:23). And these are the examples which have not been included.

This information can be used in a number of ways, for example, to see which words are most commonly found together; which ones are most commonly used in general; to show which words the Bible tries to reinforce as especially good or bad (i.e. the words around ‘the Lord’ are good behaviours and punishment related); gender studies; or even words that are surprisingly on the list or exempt from it.

In the lefthand column of the following table, there is a list of words/concepts commonly found in the Bible. In the righthand column there are groups of adjectives and verbs, these have been found close by in a verse to the words on the left. The following two paragraphs give examples to show how this data, with words taken solely from Proverbs, was compiled.

One example would be Proverbs 2:6 “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” In the left column you would find the word ‘Lord’ and in the righthand column the associated terms wisdom, knowledge and understanding.

Another example would be Proverbs 2:7 “he stores up sound wisdom for the upright; he is a shield to those who walk in integrity.” If you put the concept ‘wisdom’ on the left, to the right you would find upright, shield, and integrity.

The previous list follows connections you would typically expect to find, however, some words such as the following, are ambiguous and can be used to seem positive or negative. ‘Delight’ is typically positive, but it is not impossible for someone to delight in doing evil.

Poverty and wealth are another two concepts which are hard to place because in general, ‘poverty’ is bad and ‘wealth’ is good, however, poverty is considered preferable if the wealth was gained at the expense of the poor (Proverbs 22:16). Also, there are two levels to each meaning, for humans on Earth in this lifetime, ‘wealth’ is usually material items, gold, silver, jewels etc. But in the bigger picture, ‘wealth’ is considered to be the knowledge given from God and his teachings. Therefore, someone could be rich in possessions, but poor in wisdom and knowledge, and therefore thought of to be ‘simple’ which is considered a negative concept in the Bible.

Some phrases commonly repeated which show the opposite meaning than expected are:

The following shows how the Lord has different behaviours and descriptive verbs for followers and non-believers:

Here is a table of positive and negative words again taken from the book of Proverbs, on the left are the positive concepts the Bible teaches you to embrace, and on the right negatives that are considered poor behaviour.

Each concept should be understood with its relevance to the religion, and not in general terms. For example, ‘love’ is listed under positive, and ‘hate’ is listed under negative. This is obviously within the strict set of rules laid out by the religion, ‘love’ is positive as long as it is for God and his Commandments. If it were love of any concept in the negative column, then it would not be the stated use, and ‘love’ would then pass into the negative column. As with ‘Hate’ the same rules apply, it is the negative impact of the emotion that is incorrect behaviour, however, it is not incorrect to hate a person with behaviours listed on the negative side. What you must remember is that the religion wants followers to focus on their love for God, not their hate for sinful people, therefore ‘hate’ is generally considered as an emotion to stay away from. However, most terms are straight forward.

The Bible. ESV, Good News Publishers, 2007.