Liberty Theological Seminary

Word Study: Final: “Wicked” from Psalm 1:1

A Paper
Submitted to Dr. Eric Mitchell
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Course
Hebrew Language Tools
OTCL 505

6 May 2013

STEP 1

1.Word Choice: “wicked”, from Psalm 1:1.
Transliteration: rasha
Hebrew: רָשָׁע

NASB95: wicked
NIV: wicked
NLT: wicked
MSG: not exactly translated (Sin Saloon Dead-End Road, Smart-Mouth College)

2. Strong’s Number: H7563, Could not find GK number

3. What does the word translated “wicked” in the NASB version mean in the passage Psalm 1:1?

STEP 2

1. Occurrences of the word: רָשָׁע (rasha)

-Number of occurrences: 262

-Distribution of occurrences

--In the same …show more content…

It is not an expositional or devotional commentary. In his volume on the first forty-one chapters of the book, he describes the word רָשָׁע as one that means “people who have no part in the covenant and so remain guilty before God.” The second scholarly evidence that will be shown comes from Zuck and Walvoord. They say in their study of the Bible regarding those described as wicked in Psalm 1:1: “...are not in covenant relationship with God; they live according to their passions. They are not godly. They may do kind and charitable deeds, but God's evaluation of them is that they are without eternal merit.”

3.

a. Meaning of the word in target passage: Preliminarily, this word in this passage was believed to mean “wicked, guilty of sin against God or man.” However, this is not wicked as would typically be used in today’s language. Their wickedness comes not from a necessarily evil lifestyle, but from lack of covenant relationship with God.

b. Effect of that meaning on the meaning of target passage: The verse (Psalm 1:1) in the NASB reads: “How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers!” Therefore the meaning of the word injected into this passage would read this way: How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the lost, nor