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 1:5
The first day. Literally, one day, a cardinal number, while every later day uses an ordinal.
Genesis 1:5, in every translation this tool compares.
English happily uses day one and the first day interchangeably. Hebrew does not default that way: yom echad is built like counting day: one the way you might count reps, while yom sheni, the second day, and every day after it, uses a true ordinal, like second, third, fourth. Only day one breaks the ordinal pattern.
Because the first day of creation is numbered one, a plain cardinal number, while every day after it is numbered with an ordinal, second, third, fourth, a grammatical inconsistency that has been read as everything from a stylistic accident to a deliberate theological statement that there was, as yet, nothing to count the first day against.
Most versions read the first day, smoothing yom echad into the ordinal pattern the rest of the week uses, treating the grammatical oddity as insignificant.
יוֹם אֶחָד yom echad · H3117 + H259
Yom echad, day one, uses the cardinal number one rather than the ordinal rishon, first, which Hebrew does have and uses elsewhere. Every subsequent day in the creation week switches to a true ordinal. One classical explanation, offered by the medieval commentator Ramban, is that first only makes sense once a second exists to compare it to, so before any other day existed, only one, a simple count, was possible; other proposed explanations range from stylistic variation to marking this day as categorically different from the rest.
English first day is a normal, expected ordinal with no oddity to notice, so nothing in translation signals that the underlying Hebrew grammar actually breaks its own pattern on exactly this one day, a small irregularity commentators have found worth explaining for centuries.
When Hebrew breaks its own established grammatical pattern, as the cardinal yom echad does against the following days' ordinals, treat the break as a detail worth investigating rather than noise a fluent translation can safely smooth away.
The first day, the standard English rendering, treats the Hebrew oddity as insignificant variation. Reading yom echad more literally as day one, following Ramban's logic that no second day yet existed to make first meaningful, keeps the grammatical irregularity in view as a deliberate feature rather than papering over it.
- Ramban's commentary on Genesis 1:5
- The switch to ordinals starting with yom sheni, the second day, at Genesis 1:8
