Some of the resources you will need are an English translation of the Bible and a concordance with Strong's dictionary keyed to the translation you are using such as the Strong's Concise Concordance. .

To demonstrate this study process let us research the word "rejoice" as found in the King James Version. To begin we look up the word "rejoice" in the concordance. Below is a an example of what you will see in the concordance (The verses listed below are only a portion of what is actually found in the concordance). The left column is a the portion of the verse containing the word "rejoice" (identified as "r"). the middle column is the verse location and the right column identifies the Strong's number assigned to the Hebrew word translated as "rejoice" in that verse.

The first thing we notice in this study is that the King James Version uses the word "rejoice" 192 times (this number is located after the heading "Rejoice") but, it is an English word used to translate several different Hebrew words. In your notebook you will record each of the Strong's numbers.

The next step is to look up each of these numbers in the dictionary in the back of the concordance. Below is what you will find in the concordance for each of these numbers. When we look up the number "1523" we find that the Hebrew word is "guwl" and means to "spin round" (concrete) and is translated in the King James Version as "rejoice", "glad", "joyful", "joy" and "delight" (abstracts). The concrete meaning of the word is what we are looking for as this would be the more ancient Hebraic meaning of the word and gives a better understanding of what this word implies. Next, go through each of the numbers in our notebook and write in their concrete meanings.

We now have a more concrete Hebraic understanding of these Hebrew words as seen below.

Notice that the Hebrew word "simchah" (#8057) is derived from "sameach" (#8056) which in turn is derived from "samach" (#8055) being the primitive root to the other two. All three of these words have the three letters S, M and Ch in common, the original root and all three will be related in meaning. Therefore we can see that a "religious festival" is a "bright" time and a time of blithe or glee. We also find a similar relationship between "guwl" (#1523) and "giyl" (#1524), both meaning to go around in a circle.

We can now do a study on the actual Hebrew words themselves. If we wanted to study the Hebrew word "guwl" (#1523) we can look up every place in the Bible where this occurs. To do this we look at the dictionary entry for this Hebrew word and write down all translations for this word; rejoice, glad, joyful, delight. The number in brackets after each word tells you how many times this Hebrew word is translated with that English word. For example, the Hebrew word "guwl" is translated as "joyful" 4 times. We can go back into the concordance and look up the word "joyful" and scan down the right column looking for the 4 times the number 1523 appears as in the abbreviated example below.

We can now look up the verses above containing the word "guwl" (#1523) and read them interjecting our new understanding of the Hebrew word behind the English translation.