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.
chokmah
Wisdom. It includes skill with your hands.
Exodus 31:3, in every translation this tool compares.
He is good with his hands. English keeps skill and intelligence in separate compartments. Hebrew does not.
Because the first person in the Bible said to be filled with the Spirit and with wisdom is a craftsman building furniture, which is not where most readers expect the word to start.
Versions read wisdom, skill, or ability according to context.
חָכְמָה chokmah · H2451
Chokmah covers practical skill, craft, shrewdness and moral discernment. Bezalel is filled with chokmah for metalwork and weaving at Exodus 31. The same noun runs through Proverbs for skill in living.
English wisdom is abstract and intellectual, so the craft sense has to be rendered by a different word and the connection breaks.
When a word is rendered skill in one book and wisdom in another, the two are one idea and your categories are the problem.
Wisdom is the majority rendering; skill appears in the tabernacle passages.
- Bezalel: Exodus 31:3-6; 35:31-35
- chokmah in Proverbs 1-9
- chokmah of a shrewd woman: 2 Samuel 14:2
