Etymology is vital in understand and interpreting scripture

the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.

• the origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning.

Etymology (/ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/)^[1] is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.^[1] By extension, the term “the etymology (of a word)” means the origin of the particular word. When talking about place names, there is a specific term, toponymy.

For a language—such as Greek—with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods of their history and when they entered the languages in question. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information to be available.

By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word rootshave been found that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family.

Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.

The word etymology derives from the Greek word ἐτυμολογία (etumología), itself from ἔτυμον(étumon), meaning “true sense”, and the suffix -logia, denoting “the study of”.^[2][3]

In linguistics, the term etymon refers to a word or morpheme (e.g., stem^[4] or root^[5]) from which a later word derives. For example, the Latin word candidus, which means “white”, is the etymon of English candid.

reference  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology