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 11:1
The whole earth was of one language. Literally, one lip, and one set of words.
Genesis 11:1, in every translation this tool compares.
English keeps lip service and read my lips as fixed idioms, small leftovers of using a body part to mean speech. Hebrew safah, lip, is the ordinary, everyday word for language itself, not a special poetic flourish, and this verse uses it in its most literal sense: one lip for the whole earth.
Because the sentence introducing the Babel story says, word for word, one lip, using the body part for the language it produces, a figure of speech English keeps for a handful of fixed idioms but does not use as its ordinary word for language the way Hebrew does.
Every version reads one language, correctly capturing the sense, but the substitution of the abstract noun language for the concrete body part lip is invisible once translated.
שָׂפָה safah (lip, language) · H8193
Safah, lip, functions as Hebrew's standard word for language or speech throughout the Old Testament, a settled use of the body part for its function, technically called metonymy. This verse pairs it with devarim achadim, one set of words, so the sentence names both the form of speech, one lip, and its content, one shared vocabulary.
English can say language directly without borrowing a body-part word to do it, so the sentence's underlying image, everyone sharing a single lip, disappears the moment lip becomes the abstract noun language in translation.
When a Hebrew abstraction is built on a concrete body-part word, notice the image before it dissolves into an English abstraction. Hebrew regularly builds its vocabulary for inner or abstract realities out of very physical, embodied words.
One language is the only workable English rendering, and no version disputes it. What's worth flagging is the concrete image, a single lip shared by the whole earth, that the abstract translation necessarily leaves behind.
- safah as the standard Hebrew word for language: e.g. Isaiah 19:18; Zephaniah 3:9
- devarim achadim, one set of words, as the sentence's second half
