Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
2 Samuel 13:1, 15
Hebrew has one word for love, and this is the chapter that proves how wide it is.
2 Samuel 13:1, in every translation this tool compares.
I love pizza. I love my wife. Same English verb, and nobody is confused, because context does everything. Now stop and notice how much work context is doing, and that it can carry the word into places you would rather it did not.
Because everything most Christians think they know about Hebrew love language collapses here. The root that carries the Shema carries this. If you are going to import Greek categories into the Old Testament, this is the verse that should stop you.
Amnon the son of David loved her. … Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.
Every version reads loved, because the Hebrew says loved. Some soften it with desired, which is an interpretation rather than a translation.
אָהַב ahav · H157
The root is ahav. It is the word for God's covenant love in Deuteronomy 6:5, for the love between David and Jonathan, for the love poetry of the Song, and for this. Hebrew does not have the four-part Greek scheme. It has one root and lets context do the work.
English readers arrive at the Old Testament already holding the Greek categories, because that is what they were taught. Those categories are not in the Hebrew, and applying them produces a sanitized reading of texts that are not sanitized.
Do not carry Greek word distinctions backward into Hebrew. The Old Testament does not run on them. When a Hebrew text uses ahav, the shade is supplied entirely by what is happening in the passage, and sometimes what is happening is horrifying.
Nothing to choose. The discomfort is the point of the entry. A single word that covers Deuteronomy 6 and 2 Samuel 13 tells you something about Hebrew that no amount of Greek vocabulary will.
- Same root at Deuteronomy 6:5; 1 Samuel 18:1; Song of Songs throughout; 2 Samuel 13:1, 15
- The narrative itself supplies the reversal in verse 15, which is the strongest internal comment on the word's range
