The ancient Greeks had 4 words for "love" (as in C.S. Lewis' "The Four Loves," a good book by the way). Our word "love" is more flexible than the four words the Greeks used, and serves for all four of their meanings.
The words were:
1.) Eros: Romantic Love.
2.) Philia: The non-sexual love felt for a family member or close friend.)
3.) Agape: Divine, unconditioned Love.
4.) Storge: The natural affection felt for one's own child.
As can be seen, some of these overlap.It may be a nice goal to come up with some word to word correspondence when possible, but the reality is that the languages are actually different.
Only those truly ignorant of how languages work could think that words are simply renamed from one language to another.
As any Greek scholar (or for that matter, anyone fluent in two languages) will tell you, the "concordant method" is an unrealistic ideal. Unfortunately, you just have to understand a language enough to understand a specific sentence, then translate it according to that meaning. Some may paraphrase more or less, but you really can't decide how to translate before you understand what it says. If you want that kind of word for word correspondence, you just have to read it in Greek. A good "literal" translation comes by choosing the word correspondence based upon the meaning of the specific sentence.
Here are just some of the ways the word "love" is used in the collected works of William Shakespeare:
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes,
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet (Romeo and Juliet)
Poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men (Julius Caesar)
Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more (Julius Caesar)
I dare say you love him not so ill, to wish him here alone, howsoever you speak this to feel other men's minds: methinks I could not die any where so contented as in the king's company; his cause being just and his quarrel honourable (King Henry the 5th.)
It would be impossible to "concordantly" translate the collected works of William Shakespeare into Greek, as we would need at least three Greek words (possibly 4) to acurately convey the meaning of the word "love."
Ambiguity is frustrating sometimes, but that is where the Holy Spirit comes in. In the end, God is concerned with our hearts, not that we understand the trivia correctly.
In closing--this brings to mind something I read recently in "George Macdonald: an Anthology," by C.S. Lewis:
[ 181 ] How to Read the Epistles
The uncertainty lies always in the intellectual region, never
in the practical. What Paul cares about is plain enough to the true heart, however far from plain to the man whose desire to understand goes ahead of his obedience.
181-183 UNSPOKEN SERMONS, Third Series, The Mirrors of the Lord
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Note: I believe it can be useful to look at the contexts in which a biblical word is used (as this can help determine it's range of meaning)--but beyond that, I see little value in "The Concordant Method." I say this because A. E. Knoch himself could not consistently follow the "concordant method," and frequently had to use two or more English words to translate one Greek word.
He needed two words--woman and wife--to translate the Greek "goonay" (and according to James D. Strong, this word means "a woman of any age, whether a virgin, or married, or a widow.")
In Matthew 9: 10, the Greek preposition "en" is translated "in," and in Luke 22:49 it's translated "with."
In Mathhew 6:34, the Greek preposition "eis" is rendered "about," and in Galatians 2:8 it's rendered "for."
In the 3rd chapter of John, the Concordant Version renders the same Greek word (pneuma) as both "blast" and "spirit."
Such exceptions were necessary because a concordant (in the sense of word for word) translation is impossible. While some claim to recognize this, they seem all too prone to forget it. The very philosophy underlying the concordant method is that each word (in any language) has only one essential meaning, and that the multiple definitions given in our dictionaries are examples of figurative usage.
I believe that philosophy is flawed (because some words actually have more than one meaning, and because every language has synonyms.)
__Mike Burke