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 19:24
The LORD rained brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven. The LORD is named twice in one sentence.
Genesis 19:24, in every translation this tool compares.
English would normally say he sent fire from himself, not he sent fire from him, repeating the name rather than using a pronoun. Hebrew does exactly the version that repeats the name, and readers ancient and modern have asked why.
Because the sentence naming who rained fire on Sodom mentions the LORD twice, once as the one who rains it and once as the source it rains from, a repetition ancient rabbis themselves flagged as suspicious enough to argue about, since a single, simpler wording was available and not used.
Every version preserves both occurrences of the LORD, correctly following the Hebrew text, but English punctuation and flow make the repetition read as simply emphatic rather than as a genuinely debated grammatical oddity.
מֵאֵת יְהוָה מִן־הַשָּׁמָיִם me'et YHWH min hashamayim · H3068
The verse could have read from Him, using a pronoun, but instead repeats the divine name, the LORD… from the LORD. The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 38b, records a debate in which a heretic cites exactly this repetition as evidence for two powers in heaven, two divine figures, one on earth doing the raining and one in heaven as the source, and a rabbinic answer defends the repetition as simply a feature of Hebrew style, comparing it to Lamech's poetic repetition at Genesis 4:23.
English narrative avoids this kind of repeated proper noun within one sentence as poor style, replacing the second occurrence with a pronoun by reflex, which quietly resolves an ambiguity the Hebrew leaves standing and that ancient readers found worth debating.
When a Hebrew sentence repeats a divine name where a pronoun would have been simpler and more natural, do not assume the repetition is stylistically neutral. Ancient readers, not only modern critical scholars, noticed and argued about exactly this kind of doubling.
Reading the repetition as ordinary Hebrew style, echoing the rabbis' own answer at Sanhedrin 38b, keeps the verse safely monotheistic and uncomplicated. Reading it as a genuine trace of two divine figures is a minority position with ancient roots in Second Temple and early rabbinic-era debate, not a modern invention, though it remains a minority reading.
- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 38b, recording the two-powers debate over this verse
- The rabbinic counter-example at Genesis 4:23's Lamech repetition
