“The people were all converted unto the Lord.” To “be converted” means “to change.” The root “con” means “with,” and “vert” means “turn”—not just “turn around”—but to “turn with” or “turn together.” A person must turn toward the Lord and adapt his or her life to the Lord’s way.
A young man serving a mission in Germany had some Romanian investigators whom he was trying to teach about conversion. In his German-Romanian dictionary, he found the German word for “repent,” which literally means “turn around.” Then, he looked up the Romanian word for “repent” and discovered that he was telling his investigators that they had to “do a U-turn,” which also captures the idea of conversion well.