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 16:12
He will be a wild man. The Hebrew literally reads a wild-donkey of a man, animal first.
Genesis 16:12, in every translation this tool compares.
English a wild man puts man first and wild as a description. Hebrew here reverses that: pere adam is closer to a wild-donkey, a human one, animal noun first, human noun second, the reverse of the ordinary Hebrew word order where the describing word comes after the noun it describes.
Because the description of Ishmael's future is built around the Hebrew word for a wild donkey, not a generic word for wildness, and the word order even puts the animal first, making the man the modifier rather than the other way around.
Every version reads wild man, wild donkey of a man, or similar, generally preserving the sense but not always flagging the unusual word order that puts the animal image first.
פֶּרֶא אָדָם pere adam · H6501 + H120
Pere, wild donkey, stands before adam, man, reversing the normal Hebrew pattern where a modifying word follows its noun; the expected order would put man first and wild donkey as the descriptor. Instead the wild donkey, an animal proverbial in the ancient Near East for fierce independence, untamed freedom, and life beyond settled territory, is named first, making it the dominant image and man almost an afterthought clarifying which kind of creature is meant.
English word order cannot easily reproduce this reversal without sounding broken; a wild-donkey man puts the animal first the way the Hebrew does but reads as odd English, so translators default to the more natural wild man, losing the emphasis the unusual Hebrew order creates.
When a Hebrew phrase's word order runs backward from what the grammar normally expects, that reversal is itself doing rhetorical work, foregrounding whichever word was moved to the front. Do not read past unusual word order as a translator's stylistic accident.
Wild man keeps a natural English sentence but loses the foregrounded animal image. Wild donkey of a man, closer to the Hebrew word order, keeps the emphasis but reads awkwardly in English, the standard tradeoff between literal word order and natural target-language phrasing.
- pere as the untamed wild donkey, proverbial for wildness elsewhere: Job 39:5-8
- Standard treatment of the reversed noun order in Genesis commentaries and Hebrew grammars
