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 15:6b
He counted it to him for righteousness. The verb belongs in a ledger.
Genesis 15:6, in every translation this tool compares.
Put it on my account. That is a statement about a ledger, not about the truth of anything. Whether the entry reflects what is in your pocket is a separate question from whether the entry was made.
Because the second verb in the verse is an accounting term, and knowing that changes what kind of claim is being made. This is the word Paul reaches for when he argues about reckoning in Romans 4, and it is a ledger word in both languages.
And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.
The King James reads counted. Modern versions read credited, reckoned or counted. Romans 4 uses the Greek equivalent eleven times in one chapter.
חָשַׁב chashav · H2803
Chashav means to think, to plan, and also to reckon or impute in the bookkeeping sense. The Septuagint renders it logizomai, which is likewise an accounting verb, and that is the word Paul repeats through Romans 4. Two languages, the same commercial metaphor, deliberately kept.
English credited carries the accounting sense well. Reckoned has drifted toward supposed. Counted sits between them and is what the King James chose.
When the Septuagint picks a Greek word in the same semantic field as the Hebrew, that is a translator two thousand years ago telling you what he heard. Those choices are evidence.
No real dispute about the verb. What the accounting metaphor implies theologically is a separate and much older argument, and the verb does not settle it.
- chashav in the reckoning sense: Leviticus 7:18; 17:4; 2 Samuel 19:19
- Septuagint logizomai here; the same verb eleven times in Romans 4
- Psalm 32:2 uses chashav the same way and Paul quotes it at Romans 4:8
