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.
Genesis 1:26a
Let us make. A plural announcement followed immediately by a singular act.
Genesis 1:26, in every translation this tool compares.
Let's build a shed. I built a shed. The first sentence includes other people. The second says who swung the hammer. Both can be true of the same shed, and nobody thinks the second contradicts the first.
Because the plural is the single most argued feature of the creation account, and the argument usually happens without anyone naming what kind of plural it is. The verb form is the evidence and almost nobody looks at it.
Every version reads let us make. The disagreement is entirely about who us refers to, and no translation can help.
נַעֲשֶׂה na'aseh · H6213
Na'aseh is a cohortative, the Hebrew form for let me or let us. Verse 27 then uses a singular verb three times. Whatever the plural is doing, it is not distributing the act of creating, because the next verse assigns that to one actor.
English let us is the same whether it includes an audience or is a royal flourish. Hebrew has a specific form, and the argument is about what that form is doing here.
When a verse is famous for one grammatical feature, find out what the next verse does with the same subject. Adjacent verses settle more arguments than lexicons do.
A plural of majesty has trouble with this verb form. A Trinitarian reading may be true and still does not describe what a first hearer understood. Address to a divine council explains the plural and leaves the singular in verse 27 intact. All three leave something unexplained, and this one leaves the least.
- Cohortative plural elsewhere: Genesis 11:7, 'let us go down'; a comparable first-person plural addressed to the divine council, though grammatically a prepositional pronoun rather than a cohortative verb, at Isaiah 6:8
- Singular verbs throughout Genesis 1:27
- Heiser, “Monotheism and the Language of Divine Plurality,” Tyndale Bulletin 65:1 (2014): 85-100
