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 19:26
His wife looked back from behind him. The verb is a deliberate, longing gaze, not a startled glance.
Genesis 19:26, in every translation this tool compares.
English she looked back covers everything from a half-second reflex glance to a long, wistful stare. Hebrew nabat leans hard toward the second: an intent, lingering look, closer to gazing after something you want than to a quick backward check.
Because the verb for Lot's wife looking back is not the word for a quick, involuntary glance; it is the verb Hebrew uses for a deliberate, lingering gaze, so her punishment answers a real choice to look longingly, not an understandable reflex.
Every version reads looked back, an accurate but broad English verb that does not distinguish a reflex from a deliberate gaze the way the underlying Hebrew word does.
נָבַט nabat · H5027
Nabat means to look intently, to regard with attention, sometimes with implied longing or favor, distinct from more neutral seeing-verbs elsewhere in the same episode, including the different verb the text uses when the two visiting men look down toward Sodom at 18:16, and again when Abraham himself looks toward Sodom the next morning at 19:28. The choice of nabat for Lot's wife signals a fixed, desiring look back at the life and city she was leaving, not a startled reflex any fleeing person might have had.
English looked back is neutral about intent; it fits both an accidental glance and a deliberate lingering gaze equally well, so the verse's implicit moral distinction, that this was chosen longing rather than reflex, requires knowing which Hebrew verb is actually being used.
When a narrative's moral weight depends on whether an action was deliberate or reflexive, check the specific verb Hebrew chose rather than assuming a general seeing-verb was neutral. Hebrew has multiple words for looking, and the choice among them often carries the judgment English has to state separately, if at all.
Looked back as the basic sense is not in dispute among translators. The nuance, that nabat specifically implies a lingering, desiring look rather than a glance, is a matter of vocabulary precision that most English translations do not have the means to flag without an added phrase.
- nabat as intent gazing, sometimes with longing or favor: standard Hebrew lexicons
- The different verb, shaqaph, used for looking toward Sodom: Genesis 18:16 (the two visiting men look down toward the city), Genesis 19:28 (Abraham himself looks down the next morning)
