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 12:6
The Canaanite was then in the land. The word then implies the writer already knows a time when the Canaanite was not.
Genesis 12:6, in every translation this tool compares.
If a modern account said the mill was then still standing on Main Street, you would assume the writer already knew it later burned down. The word then does that work quietly, and Genesis uses it exactly the same way about the Canaanites.
Because a small aside noting that the Canaanite was then in the land only makes sense as a comment written after the Canaanites were no longer there, and that one-word clue about the narrator's vantage point has driven a centuries-long argument about who wrote the passage and when.
Every version reads was then in the land, correctly translating az, then, but the English reader does not necessarily catch that the word implies a later vantage point the way careful readers of the Hebrew, ancient and modern alike, have.
אָז az (then) · H227
Az, then, at this point, most naturally implies a contrast with the narrator's own time, when the Canaanite was no longer in the land, a condition that only obtained centuries after the events described, once Israel had taken the territory. The twelfth-century Jewish commentator Ibn Ezra was already flagging this phrase, along with several others, as evidence that at least some material in the Torah could not have been written by Moses in its final form, a genuinely old observation rather than a modern critical invention.
English then carries the same implication English readers would recognize in any other narrative, but Bible readers often do not pause to apply ordinary reading habits to a text they assume was written entirely at the time of the events it describes.
Read a small time-marking word like then the same way you would read it in any other narrative: as a signal about the writer's vantage point relative to the events, not only about the events themselves. Doing so here raises a genuine, old, and unresolved authorship question rather than settling one.
Reading then as an ordinary editorial aside, whether by Moses or a later editorial hand within an otherwise Mosaic Torah, treats the note as a minor updating gloss. Reading it as evidence of substantially later authorship is a larger claim the single word alone cannot carry by itself, though it has carried real interpretive weight since well before modern critical scholarship existed.
- Ibn Ezra's medieval commentary flagging this and similar phrases as post-Mosaic
- Standard critical discussions of the Pentateuch's compositional history citing this verse
