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 15:18
The LORD made a covenant with Abram. Literally, cut a covenant, and the chapter just showed you the cutting.
Genesis 15:18, in every translation this tool compares.
English cut a deal is a dead metaphor; nobody pictures an actual knife. Hebrew cut a covenant started out exactly that literal, and Genesis 15 is the one chapter where you get to watch the literal cutting happen right before the idiom is used.
Because the ordinary Hebrew way of saying make a covenant is literally cut a covenant, a phrase that only makes full sense once you have watched Abram cut animals in half and walk between the pieces two verses earlier, an idiom whose literal, physical origin English has long since forgotten.
Every version reads made a covenant, using English's own dead metaphor for finalizing an agreement, correctly conveying the sense but losing any connection to actual cutting.
כָּרַת בְּרִית karat berit · H3772 + H1285
Karat berit, cut a covenant, is the standing Hebrew idiom for covenant-making throughout the Old Testament, and this chapter preserves the ritual behind the dead metaphor: animals are cut in half, and a smoking firepot and flaming torch, representing God, pass between the pieces, a self-maledictory oath in which walking between severed halves meant may I become like these animals if I break this covenant.
English cut a deal is used and heard purely figuratively, with no live memory of an actual cutting ceremony behind it. Hebrew karat berit sits closer to its literal origin, and this chapter is the rare place in the Bible where the idiom's backstory is narrated rather than merely assumed.
When you meet a fossilized idiom, cut a deal, cut a covenant, ask whether the Bible anywhere narrates the literal action the dead metaphor came from. Genesis 15 is exactly that kind of narration, and it is easy to read straight past it if you already think of covenant-making as an abstract legal event.
Translators aren't actually divided here; made a covenant is the only workable English rendering. This note is meant to reconnect the abstract English phrase to the concrete ritual Genesis 15 actually describes just before the idiom is used.
- The ritual of cutting animals and passing between the pieces: Genesis 15:9-17
- karat berit as the standard covenant-making idiom throughout the Hebrew Bible: e.g. Genesis 21:27, 32; 26:28; 31:44
