Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Ancient Languages

I have written before on this blog about Jordan B. Peterson, a professor emeritus of psychology from the University of Toronto who rose to fame in 2016 when he publicly spoke out in opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Over the past seven years since then, he has attracted an enormous number of devoted followers as a self-help author and YouTube personality, appealing primarily to an audience of young, mostly white, straight, cisgender men from middle-class backgrounds who hold conservative political opinions. Peterson has used the platform he has built to publicly promote misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and occasionally even white supremacist ideas.

In a blog post I wrote back in April 2021, I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them. I would recommend that readers who have not already read that post from two years ago go back and read it before continuing with this one, since this post is something of an addendum to that one.

In this post, I want to discuss the troubling way in which Peterson often tries to support his positions by making wildly unsupported claims about ancient languages, mainly Hebrew and Ancient Greek, despite the fact that he has never studied either of these languages in his life and he does not know them or any real information about them.

Concerning my own qualifications

Before I discuss Jordan Peterson’s misrepresentation and misuse of ancient languages, I want to make a brief statement of my own qualifications for those who don’t already know them. I have a bachelor’s degree in Ancient Greek and Latin languages from Indiana University Bloomington and, as of the time I am writing this in May 2023, I am one semester away from graduating with a master’s degree in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies from Brandeis University, in the ancient languages and literatures track.

As of this time, I have completed eight semester-length courses in the Ancient Greek language (four of which have been graduate-level seminars focused on reading and analyzing ancient Greek literature in the original language) and nine semester-length courses in the Latin language (three of which have been graduate-level seminars).

In addition to studying Ancient Greek and Latin, I have also just completed a semester-length graduate-level course in Aramaic, an ancient Northwest Semitic language closely related to Hebrew that is known for, among other things, having been the native language of Jesus of Nazareth and his earliest followers (a topic which will come up shortly). I have also studied a very small amount of Biblical Hebrew on my own, but my knowledge of the language remains quite limited.

Peterson’s claims about the word ἁμαρτία

In Ancient Greek, the verb ἁμαρτάνω (hamartánō) means “to fail,” “to make a mistake,” or “to miss the mark.” The first-declension feminine noun ἁμαρτία (hamartía), which etymologically derives from this verb, simply means a “mistake” or an “error in judgement.”

As I discuss in this post I wrote back in April 2019, high school English literature teachers when teaching about classical drama often incorrectly teach their students that ἁμαρτία means a “fatal flaw” in the personal character of a tragic protagonist that results in the protagonist’s downfall. This, however, is a misunderstanding of the term. In Ancient Greek, ἁμαρτία has nothing to do with any intrinsic flaw in a person’s character. Instead, the word denotes an action or decision that a person makes.

Jordan Peterson, however, has some, shall we say, creative things to say about the meaning of this word. He’s actually pontificated about the word’s supposed meaning in many places, both in his various lectures, recordings of which he has posted online, and in his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which he published in 2018, so it seems to be one of his favorite topics to talk about. He makes some of his frankly most baffling claims about the word, however, in a clip of himself lecturing that he posted on his official TikTok account on February 9, 2023. He begins by saying:

“By the way, sin. There’s two derivations of the word sin: one is chet, which is from the Hebrew, and the other is hamartia, from the Greek. And they both are archery terms that mean to miss the target.”

ABOVE: Screenshot from the video posted to Jordan Peterson’s official TikTok account showing him lecturing (a.k.a., spouting misinformation) about the supposed true meaning of sin

In these few short sentences, Peterson has already made three serious errors. First, he mispronounces the Hebrew word חֵטְא (ḥeṭʾ)—a noun derived from the verbal root ח־ט־א (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ)—as /t͡ʃɛt/ (pronouncing the ⟨ḥ⟩ at the beginning like the ⟨ch⟩ in cheese) when it should actually be pronounced /χɛt/. This is a pronunciation mistake that no one who actually knows anything about Hebrew would make, since the sound /t͡ʃ/ does not exist in ancient or modern Hebrew. By mispronouncing the word in this blatant manner, Peterson clearly demonstrates that he does not even know the Hebrew alphabet.

Second, Peterson claims that these words are “derivations of the word sin,” but this is factually incorrect. Neither of these words is the etymological root of the English word sin; instead, they are ancient Hebrew and Greek words that occur in the texts of the Bible that modern translators normally render into English as the word sin because translators have decided (whether rightly or wrongly) that sin is the closest English equivalent of these terms.

Etymologically speaking, the English word sin actually derives from the Middle English word sinne, which derives from the Old English word synn, which derives from the Proto-West Germanic word *sunnju, meaning “responsibility,” “care,” “worry,” or “need.” This word, in turn, derives from the Proto-Germanic word *sunjō, meaning “truth.” This, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁sónts, meaning “a thing which exists or is true,” which is the active participle of the Proto-Indo-European verb *h₁es-, meaning “to be.”

Third and finally, Peterson claims that both the Hebrew word ḥeṭʾ and the Greek word ἁμαρτία are “archery terms,” but this is only partly true. It is true that ancient texts do use both of these words to refer to when a person shoots an arrow or throws a spear and misses their intended target. Nonetheless, ancient texts also use both of these words in a much more general sense to refer to any kind of mistake or failure that a person makes. In fact, some of the earliest attested occurrences of the word ἁμαρτάνω use it in this more general sense to mean simply “make a mistake.”

ABOVE: Detail of this photo from the SmartHistory Flickr account showing an Attic red-figure kalyx-krater painted by Niobid Painter dating to between c. 460 and c. 450 BCE, now held in the Louvre Museum, depicting the god Apollon firing his arrows upon the children of Niobe

One of the earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature is the Iliad, an epic poem in dactylic hexameter that originated in Greek oral tradition and most likely became fixed in something resembling the form in which we know it today sometime around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE.

In Book Nine of the epic, the character Phoinix, the aged former tutor of the warrior Achilleus, gives a speech in which he tries to convince his former pupil to return to the battlefield. In the process of doing this, he reminds him of how human beings can make even the deities change their minds by making offerings and praying to them, saying (Il. 9.499–501):

“. . . καὶ μὲν τοὺς θυέεσσι καὶ εὐχωλῇς ἀγανῇσι
λοιβῇ τε κνίσῃ τε παρατρωπῶσ᾽ ἄνθρωποι
λισσόμενοι, ὅτε κέν τις ὑπερβήῃ καὶ ἁμάρτῃ.”

This means, in my own translation:

“. . . and, with burnt sacrifices and gentle prayers
and libation and the smell of burnt fat, human beings may beseech
them [the deities] to change their minds, whenever someone has overstepped and made a mistake.”

Thus, from the very earliest attestations of the word ἁμαρτία that exist, there is nothing about the word that makes it inherently connected to archery; even in the very earliest sources that we have, the word can be used in a more general, moralistic sense.

ABOVE: Scene from an Attic red-figure hydria by the Kleophrades Painter dating to around 480 BCE depicting Phoinix standing on the far left, Odysseus seated on the center left, Achilleus seated on the center right, and Patroklos standing behind him on the far right

Unfortunately, Peterson carries his spurious etymologizing further by bizarrely claiming that sporting events are a form of religious worship because they are a celebration of the human ability to successfully hit a target without missing (i.e., sinning). He says:

“And so when you go to a sports celebration, a sports ceremony, when you worship in a sports stadium—which is what you’re doing—you’re celebrating the human ability to become highly skilled at precisely hitting the target.”

“And that’ll even grip you unconsciously, you know, if you’re following one team and someone makes a particularly brilliant play and that results in an increment in the score, everybody in the stadium will rise up—at least everybody who’s cheering for that team, sometimes even the other people—will rise up like they’re one entity and, what, raise their hands in the air and cheer. It’s like: what the hell’s going on there? And it’s that everybody is participating in that act of skilled movement, skilled dramatic movement towards a goal.”

There are several major problems with what Peterson says here. First of all, Peterson’s apparent claim that all sporting events are inherently a form of religious worship by their very nature seems to be based on a naïvely literal misunderstanding of an argument that various popular psychology and sociology writers have been making for decades. Examples of such authors include the biopsychologist Nigel Barber in this November 2009 article for Psychology Today and the communications professor Michael Serazio in this January 2013 article for The Atlantic.

The point that these writers and others like them are making is not that all sporting events are inherently a form of religious worship, but rather that aspects of sports culture and fandom can take on certain attributes that people more commonly associate with religion.

It is true that a sporting event absolutely can be a form of religious worship in certain contexts. For instance, athletic competitions in ancient Greece were commonly held during religious festivals in honor of specific deities. The Panathenaic games in Athens were held in honor of the goddess Athena, the Nemean Games at Nemea and the Olympic Games at Olympia were held in honor of the god Zeus, the Isthmian Games at the isthmus of Corinth were held in honor of the god Poseidon, the Pythian Games at Delphi were held in honor of the god Apollon, and so on.

Participating in or attending a sporting event, however, is not itself inherently a religious act and admiring the skill of an athlete is not inherently a form of worship in the religious sense.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic black-figure Panathenaic prize amphora dating to between c. 333 and 332 BCE, depicting three men running nude in the Panathenaic footrace

In addition to misunderstanding the relationship between sports and religion, Peterson also seems to either misunderstand (or perhaps even deliberately misrepresent) what most branches of institutional Christianity have traditionally taught about sin. He implicitly presents his own claim that sporting events are a celebration of the human ability to succeed and avoid sin as though it were in line with two thousand years of Christian tradition, but, in reality, what he says is starkly at odds with both historical and contemporary institutional Christian teachings on the subject.

Under the influence of the works of the Roman North African theologian Augustine of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE) and the monk John Cassian (lived c. 360 – c. 435 CE), most forms of institutional Christianity for roughly the past 1,500 years, including Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and most Protestant denominations, have taught that, as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, all human beings are born fallen and reprobate, human nature is naturally inclined toward sin, and it is impossible for any human to completely avoid sinning.

As the solution to this situation, most forms of institutional Christianity have traditionally taught that Jesus suffered and died on the cross for the atonement of humanity’s sins and that humans can attain forgiveness for their sins through some form of faith in Jesus. (Different branches of institutional Christianity differ regarding the precise nature and mechanism of salvation, but they nearly all agree that it is impossible for anyone to attain salvation simply through avoiding sin.)

What Peterson says about sports being a celebration of the human ability to “precisely hit a target” without missing or sinning, by contrast, seems to point strongly in the direction of Pelagianism, a theological position that the Roman British theologian Pelagius (lived c. 355 –c. 420 CE) most famously championed in the early fifth century CE.

Pelagianism holds that it is possible for human beings to choose to avoid sin and live morally good lives through free will and thereby attain salvation. Most forms of institutional Christianity for the past roughly millennium and a half have rejected this position as an arch-heresy of the worst kind.

To be perfectly clear, I am not the heresy police. In fact, I’m actually an atheist. I genuinely don’t care at all if Jordan Peterson espouses Pelagianism. The problem I have is that Peterson implicitly presents his own highly idiosyncratic reinterpretation of sin based on spurious etymological claims as though it were in line with two thousand years of mainstream Christian tradition when, in reality, it is anything but.

ABOVE: Detail from this photo on Dan Diffendale’s Flickr account showing a fragment of an Attic black-figure dinos by the painter Sophilos dating to between c. 580 and c. 570 BCE depicting the funerary games of Patroklos with spectators gesticulating excitedly in the stands

Peterson’s claims about Matthew 5:5

Having thoroughly taken apart that example, let’s look at another example of Peterson making factually incorrect claims about the Ancient Greek language, this time as it pertains to a specific passage in the Gospel of Matthew.

For context, the earliest surviving detailed sources about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which are collectively known as the “Synoptic Gospels.” Despite the fact that Jesus himself and all his earliest followers most likely spoke Aramaic as their primary or sole language, all of the works that are now included in the New Testament, including the Synoptic Gospels, were originally written in Koine Greek.

Mark, the earliest surviving gospel, was most likely written sometime around 70 CE or thereabouts, around four decades after Jesus’s death. Matthew was most likely written sometime between c. 75 and c. 90 CE and Luke was most likely written sometime between c. 80 and c. 95 CE. Both Matthew and Luke rely heavily on Mark as a source.

Ever since the publication of the theologian and Biblical scholar Albert Schweitzer’s landmark 1906 monograph The Quest for the Historical Jesus, the mainstream view of critical Biblical scholars has been that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. Central to his worldview was the idea that God had temporarily stepped away from the world and allowed the supernatural forces of evil to gain influence. As a result, according to this worldview, evil people were able to gain power and influence and use that power to oppress the righteous people of the nation of Israel.

Jesus, however, preached that, soon, within his followers’ own lifetimes, God would spectacularly intervene in worldly affairs, destroy all the corrupt human kingdoms of the earth and the supernatural forces of evil they were in league with, and establish his own kingdom on earth, which would last forever.

All three Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus as teaching that, on the day of judgement, there would be a dramatic reversal of the present hierarchies of power and status. Thus, those who were lowly, oppressed, and looked down upon would be exalted. Meanwhile, those who were rich, powerful, and respected would be laid low.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Codex Aureus Epternacensis, folio 78 recto, showing how the artist interpreted the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke 16:19–31, dating to between c. 1035 and c. 1040 CE

In the Gospel of Matthew 5–7, in a scene that deliberately parallels God’s giving of the law to Moses atop Mount Sinai in the Book of Exodus, Jesus goes up onto a mountain and delivers a sermon in which he expounds upon the interpretation of the law of Moses. He begins this sermon with a series of sayings known as Beatitudes.

In each Beatitude, Jesus proceeds to name a group of people who are normally considered oppressed or unfortunate and then declare that they are actually blessed. The first four Beatitudes read as follows in the original Greek (Matt. 5:3–6):

“μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῶ πνεύματι, ὅτι αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.

μακάριοι οἱ πενθοῦντες, ὅτι αὐτοὶ παρακληθήσονται.

μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, ὅτι αὐτοὶ κληρονομήσουσιν τὴν γῆν.

μακάριοι οἱ πεινῶντες καὶ διψῶντες τὴν δικαιοσύνην, ὅτι αὐτοὶ χορτασθήσονται.”

This means:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

Blessed are those who grieve, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

These sayings deliberately, self-consciously subvert the conventional norms and values of the first-century CE Mediterranean world by describing people who are poor, grieving, meek, starving, and thirsty in the present world as the ones who are truly blessed, because they will be rewarded in the coming kingdom of God.

ABOVE: The Sermon on the Mount, painted in 1877 by the Danish painter Carl Bloch

When one understands the Beatitudes in the context of Jesus’s first-century CE Jewish apocalyptic worldview, they make perfect sense. They do, however, pose a problem for people like Jordan Peterson who consider the Gospel of Matthew an authoritative text and simultaneously also believe that power, domination, and control in the world are admirable goals for a person to pursue.

As a result of this, Peterson has to resort to an elaborate misrepresentation of what the Greek text of Matthew says in order to justify his own outlook on the world. He says the following in an interview with the UFC color commentator Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2018 (episode 1070):

“I read this New Testament line, well, decades ago and I can never understand it. The line is: ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ and I thought: ‘There’s something wrong with that line. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Meek just doesn’t seem to me to be a moral virtue.’”

“And so I did a series of Biblical lectures this year—like, fifteen of them—and that was also a weird little experience that we can talk about, but, uh, I was looking through these sayings, these maxims, and that was one of them: ‘The meek shall inherit the earth,’ but ‘meek’ is not a good translation, or the word has moved in the three hundred years or so since it was translated.”

“What it means is this: ‘Those who have swords and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed, will inherit the world’ . . . And so, like, one of the things I tell young men, well, and young women as well, but the young men really need to hear this more, I think, is that you should be a monster.”

“You know, cause like everyone says you should be harmless, virtuous, you shouldn’t do anyone any harm. You should sheath your competitive instinct. You shouldn’t try to win. You know, you don’t want to be too aggressive. You don’t want to be too assertive. You want to take a back seat and all of that. It’s like: NO! WRONG! You should be a monster, an absolute monster. And then you should learn how to control it.”

ABOVE: Screenshot of Jordan Peterson on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2018 claiming that “Blessed are the meek” actually means “You should be a monster, an absolute monster”

The Greek word gMatthew 5:5 uses that translators usually render as “meek” is πραΰς (praǘs). The Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ), the preeminent lexicon of the Ancient Greek language, lists three primary definitions for this word: “mild,” “soft,” and “gentle.” The word bears absolutely no implication about whether the person or thing it describes is armed and capable of fighting.

Let’s not just take the LSJ‘s word about the word’s meaning, though. Instead, let’s dig into some examples of how ancient authors writing in the Greek language use it. On the one hand, some Greek authors do use forms of the word πραΰς to describe people and animals who possess sufficient power that they could hurt people if they wanted to, but who choose not to. For instance, the Greek poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – c. 438 BCE) in his Pythian Ode 3.70 praises his patron King Hieron I of Syracuse by calling him:

“. . . ὃς Συρακόσσαισι νέμει βασιλεὺς
πραῢς ἀστοῖς, οὐ φθονέων ἀγαθοῖς, ξείνοις δὲ θαυμαστὸς πατήρ.”

This means:

“. . . the king who governs Syracuse,
gentle to townsfolk, not bearing ill-will to good men, and a wonderful father to foreign guests.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman marble copy of a Greek bust of the poet Pindaros of Thebes from the mid-fifth century BCE, currently held in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples

Similarly, the Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE) in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 4.108 describes how the Spartan general Brasidas exercised mercy and self-restraint after he captured the city of Amphipolis by giving the city extremely generous terms of surrender. He states (Thouk. 4.108.3):

“καὶ αἱ πόλεις πυνθανόμεναι αἱ τῶν Ἀθηναίων ὑπήκοοι τῆς τε Ἀμφιπόλεως τὴν ἅλωσιν καὶ ἃ παρέχεται, τήν τε ἐκείνου πραότητα, μάλιστα δὴ ἐπήρθησαν ἐς τὸ νεωτερίζειν. . .”

This means:

“And, when the cities that were subjects of the Athenians learned about the capture of Amphipolis and the things which were promised and that man [i.e., Brasidas]’s gentleness, they indeed very much rose up toward making new things [i.e., making political revolution]. . .”

ABOVE: Third-century CE Roman mosaic of the ancient Athenian historian Thoukydides, based on traditional iconography

Clearly, there is nothing that prohibits the word πραΰς from being used to describe people who have the power to hurt others and choose not to. On the other hand, the word is absolutely not restricted to this meaning either. For instance, the Athenian writer Xenophon (lived c. 431 – c. 354 BCE) uses the word in his Anabasis 1.4.9 to describe fish that are not dangerous:

“μετὰ ταῦτα Κῦρος ἐξελαύνει σταθμοὺς τέτταρας παρασάγγας εἴκοσιν ἐπὶ τὸν Χάλον ποταμόν, ὄντα τὸ εὖρος πλέθρου, πλήρη δ᾽ ἰχθύων μεγάλων καὶ πραέων, οὓς οἱ Σύροι θεοὺς ἐνόμιζον καὶ ἀδικεῖν οὐκ εἴων, οὐδὲ τὰς περιστεράς.”

This means, in my own translation:

“After these things, Kyros marched out four stages, twenty parasangs, toward the Chalos River, which is a plethrum in width and is full of big and tame fish, which the Syrians regard as deities and do not allow anyone to hurt, nor the doves.”

Someone could perhaps try to argue that the fish Xenophon describes could hurt people if they wanted to, but they choose not to. There is, however, nothing in Xenophon’s text that particularly seems to suggest this, other than the fact that the fish are big. Instead, his main concern seems to be simply that the fish are harmless. Whatever the case may be, it’s quite evident that Xenophon’s fish do not have swords and know how to use them.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum website showing a Roman marble portrait bust dating to around 120 CE, based on an earlier Greek original, depicting the Athenian writer Xenophon

Another illustrative of use of the word πραΰς comes from the Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus (lived c. 37 – c. 100 CE) in his Against Apion 1.29(=267–268). Here, Josephus uses the word in a response to the Egyptian historian Manethon (fl. early third century BCE), who told a hateful, anti-Jewish counter-version of the story of the Exodus.

Manethon claimed that the Egyptian king expelled priests who were afflicted with leprosy from his land because they were impure. At first, he sent them to work in the mines, but then he called them out of the mines and gave them the city of Avaris in the Nile Delta to inhabit as their own.

According to Manethon, under the leadership of a heretical priest named Osarsiph (who later adopted the name Moses), these lepers formed an alliance with some shepherds and together they led a savage conquest of Egypt, in which they brutally sacked and burned the Egyptian cities and committed all kinds of horrible atrocities. He claimed that this was the true origin of the Jewish people.

Hoping to exonerate the Jewish people of Manethon’s accusations, Josephus tries to demonstrate that his account is logically improbable, insisting that, even if the lepers hated the Egyptian king at first, after he gave them a city of their own, they surely would have grown less hostile toward him:

“εἰ καὶ πρότερον ὠργίζοντο τῷ βασιλεῖ καὶ τοῖς τὰ περὶ αὐτοὺς πεποιηκόσι κατὰ [τε] τὴν τοῦ μάντεως προαγόρευσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε τῶν λιθοτομιῶν ἐξῆλθον καὶ πόλιν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ καὶ χώραν ἔλαβον, πάντως ἂν γεγόνεισαν πρᾳότεροι πρὸς αὐτόν.”

This means:

“Even if at first they were angry with the king and those around him who had done the things which were in accordance with the foretelling of the seer, when they came out from the mines and they took a city from him and a country, altogether they would have become gentler toward him.”

Notice how Josephus uses being πραΰς to mean the opposite of being angry and inclined toward violence. Also notice how he uses it to describe a group of people who are in an inferior position of power with respect to the Egyptian king. Lastly and most importantly, notice that, in the scenario Josephus describes, the lepers whom the king has banished to Avaris are not armed and ready to fight, but rather the exact opposite. Indeed, Josephus’s entire point in this passage is to show that one would expect the exiles, having been granted Avaris, to live there peacefully without taking up weapons.

ABOVE: Illustration accompanying an 1817 printed edition of William Whiston’s translation of the works of Josephus, showing what the artist imagined he might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Can you trust Bible Hub dot com?

Now that we have established that Jordan Peterson says a lot of incorrect things about the Ancient Hebrew and Greek languages, let us look at where he might be getting his incorrect information from. Thankfully, it is not difficult to find out.

Peterson very openly relies heavily on the website Bible Hub dot com, which collects entries about words that occur in the Bible from various concordances, lexicons, and devotional commentaries. He references Bible Hub at the beginning of his lecture “Biblical Series IX: The Call to Abraham” (in which he originally made his false claim about the meaning of the word πραΰς before he went on Joe Rogan), saying:

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories, trying to understand what they’re about. And then there’s all these commentaries. There’s a great—I think it’s called Bible Hub, that has every single verse of the Bible listed there. With each verse, they’ve aggregated 10 commentaries from about 10 commentators from the last 400 years. So there’s like a dense page on every line.”

Bible Hub’s webpage about the word πραΰς includes an excerpt from “HELPS Word-studies,” a free Bible study resource produced by HELPS Ministries, which describes itself on its official “About” webpage as “a non-profit, non-denominational Christian ministry headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina.” The excerpt on Bible Hub’s webpage reads as follows:

“This difficult-to-translate root (pra-) means more than “meek.” Biblical meekness is not weakness but rather refers to exercising God’s strength under His control – i.e. demonstrating power without undue harshness.”

“[The English term “meek” often lacks this blend – i.e. of gentleness (reserve) and strength.]”

One can easily imagine how Peterson might have read this passage and, with a little bit of overzealous wishful thinking, extrapolated his notion that πραΰς really means “those who have swords and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed.”

ABOVE: Screenshot of the homepage for the website Bible Hub dot com, which is evidently Jordan Peterson’s one-stop shop for all his philological and exegetical needs

As readers may have already guessed, there are several problems with Peterson relying on Bible Hub for his information. The first problem is that Bible Hub presents resources that are freely available and not subject to copyright restrictions, which are not always the best resources for understanding Biblical languages.

For instance, the very first resource that Bible Hub gives for every single one of its word entries is Strong’s Concordance. Strong’s was originally published in 1890 and, even at the time, it wasn’t the best piece of scholarship. For one thing, it is not a real lexicon, but rather simply a concordance of the King James Version (KJV). This means that each entry in Strong’s Concordance merely states how the KJV has translated a particular Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek word, which may not always accurately reflect what the word really means in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.

Even if the KJV translation that Strong’s Concordance gives is decent enough as a translation, it may not capture the full nuance of the word or there may be ambiguity about the meaning of the word that Strong’s Concordance won’t convey in the same way that a real lexical entry would. On top of all this, Strong’s Concordance is now over 130 years old, making it quite outdated to boot.

As a result of this, real scholars in the twenty-first century do not use Strong’s Concordance. In fact, there’s a joke among Biblical scholars that, if someone tries to cite Strong’s as an authority, it is a strong indication that they do not know what they are talking about.

For Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, you’re much better off consulting Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) or A Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT). For Ancient Greek, you’re better off consulting the Liddell-Scott Jones (LSJ), Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, or the new two-volume Cambridge Greek Lexicon, which just came out in 2021.

Bible Hub does include entries from the BDB and Thayer’s Lexicon, which are among the oldest of the resources I have referenced here, on their pages, but it lists them further down the page, after a bunch of other resources that are much less trustworthy (such as Strong’s Concordance and HELPS Word-studies), and most people don’t scroll down to look at them after the less reliable resources higher up on the page have already given them what seem like satisfactory answers.

ABOVE: Title page of a first edition of Strong’s Concordance, originally published in 1890

Now let’s talk about these HELPS Word-studies. These “word studies” aren’t made by actual Biblical scholars or scholars of the Greek language, but rather by Christian ministers, the vast majority of whom don’t really know Ancient Greek.

What I mean by this is that there are a lot of ministers who took a semester or two of New Testament Greek in seminary and claim that they know Greek, but who have never read a word of Greek outside the stilted Koine of the New Testament, who rely heavily on resources like Strong’s Concordance, and who, if presented with any Greek text other than the New Testament, will understand little or nothing of what the text says.

Ministers of this kind will often gladly make up or accept new meanings or interpretations for Greek words that are not based on serious scholarship if they find that these new meanings suit their own ideological agendas and devotional purposes.

The HELPS Word-study claiming that πραΰς means “demonstrating power without undue harshness” is an example of precisely this phenomenon. The author of this so-called “word study” evidently wasn’t comfortable with the idea that Christians should be expected to exhibit meekness and therefore sought to twist the meaning of the word to make it about showing power without undue harshness.

Peterson, in turn, took this already twisted meaning and twisted it even further by making it about bearing swords and knowing how to use them. The result is a veritable telephone game of misinterpretations building upon earlier misinterpretations.

Conclusion

Jordan Peterson does not know Hebrew or Ancient Greek. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this fact in and of itself. After all, the vast majority of people who are alive on earth today don’t know either of these languages. Peterson, however, should not go around presenting himself as an expert and making wildly unsupported claims about ancient languages that he himself does not know even the most basic information about.

This is totally irresponsible behavior for any person with a public voice, especially a former professor at a prestigious university. At the very least, it is a total dereliction of intellectual diligence and frankly perhaps even intellectual honesty. It is far from the worst thing that Peterson has done publicly, but it still annoys me that literally millions of people have watched his videos and/or read his books and are getting their information about a language that I’ve spent years of my life studying from a man spouting half-remembered things that he read on Bible Hub dot com.