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 19:37
She called his name Moab. The name echoes me'av, from a father, memorializing how he was conceived.
Genesis 19:37, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a family naming a child born under scandalous circumstances something that sounds, to everyone who ever hears it, like a quiet confession of exactly what happened. That is what Moab does in Hebrew, a permanent, audible reminder built into a nation's own name.
Because the name given to Lot's firstborn son by his own daughter sounds like the Hebrew phrase for from a father, a pun that permanently records the shameful circumstances of his conception in the very name later nations, Israel's neighbors and frequent enemies, carried forever.
Every version reads Moab as a bare proper name, transliterated, with no built-in meaning visible to an English reader at all.
מוֹאָב Moab (cf. מֵאָב me'av, from a father) · H4124
Moab, mo'av, closely resembles me'av, from a father, a near-pun rather than a formally marked possessive construction, unlike his half-brother's name, Ben-ammi, son of my people, given to the second daughter's son in the very next verse, which does mark the relationship explicitly. Both names function as the daughters' own memorial of the incestuous circumstances of their sons' births, embedded permanently in the names of the nations, Moab and Ammon, that descend from them.
English Moab is simply a place-name and a people-name with no internal meaning an English reader can access, so the built-in, self-incriminating pun Genesis records is invisible unless a reader is told what the Hebrew consonants echo.
When Genesis names a nation's ancestor at a morally loaded moment in the narrative, check whether the name itself is doing commentary. The naming device Genesis has already used for Cain, Noah, Peleg, and Japheth continues here, aimed at explaining two neighboring nations' origins rather than a single Israelite ancestor.
Moab as a transliterated proper name is not contested. The pun is a matter of Hebrew sound that no English rendering of the name itself can carry, unlike Ben-ammi the following verse, whose meaning, son of my people, is stated as an explicit possessive rather than merely echoed.
- Ben-ammi, son of my people, as the explicitly marked parallel name in the next verse: Genesis 19:38
- The mo'av/me'av resemblance: standard treatment in Genesis commentaries and Hebrew name studies
