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 12:1
Get thee out. Literally go, for yourself, or go, to yourself: a pronoun added where none was grammatically needed.
Genesis 12:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Go. That is a complete command. Go, for yourself. That is the same command with something added that changes nothing about the instruction and everything about its weight, making the journey personal rather than merely logistical. Hebrew does exactly that here.
Because God's opening command to Abram contains a small extra word that is grammatically unnecessary, go is a complete command on its own, and that extra word is exactly what gives the phrase its force, famous enough to name the entire Torah portion after it.
Most versions read get thee out, go forth, or simply go, all reasonable renderings that lose the grammatical oddity, an unneeded reflexive pronoun, that Hebrew readers immediately notice.
לֶךְ־לְךָ lech lecha (הָלַךְ halach, to go) · H1980
Lech lecha pairs the plain imperative lech, go, with lecha, to or for yourself, a dative pronoun that is not required to complete the sentence's grammar. Its presence signals personal investment or benefit, go for your own sake, into your own becoming, rather than a bare travel instruction, and the same construction recurs at Genesis 22:2 when Abraham is told to go to Moriah, framing his story with two commands that are more than they need to be.
English go is already grammatically complete, so an English translator either drops the redundant pronoun entirely, matching ordinary usage, or must add an interpretive phrase like for your own sake to signal what the Hebrew conveys by the pronoun's mere unnecessary presence.
Watch for grammatically superfluous words in a Hebrew imperative; a pronoun that is not required to complete the sentence is often doing emphatic or reflexive work that a bare English imperative cannot carry without extra vocabulary.
Get thee out and go forth both lose the pronoun's redundancy but keep the sense of departure. No translation captures the personal-stakes nuance of lecha without either paraphrasing or adding a phrase the Hebrew itself achieves with one small, technically unnecessary word.
- The identical construction recurs at Genesis 22:2, sending Abraham to Moriah
- Standard treatment of the dative of interest/ethical dative in Biblical Hebrew grammar
