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 2:16-17
Thou shalt surely die. Literally dying, you shall die: the verb said twice.
Genesis 2:16-17, in every translation this tool compares.
English intensifies a verb by adding a word: you will surely die, you will certainly die. Hebrew has another option: say the verb itself twice, once as a bare noun-form and once conjugated. Dying, you shall die is what the sentence actually does.
Because the death sentence attached to the one prohibition in the garden is not phrased as an ordinary future-tense statement in Hebrew, and English has no grammatical way to reproduce the doubling that makes it emphatic.
Every version adds an adverb, surely or certainly, to carry the emphasis. None can double the verb the way the Hebrew does, because repeating die die in English reads as a mistake, not as emphasis.
מוֹת תָּמוּת mot tamut (מוּת muth) · H4191
Mot tamut pairs the infinitive absolute mot, dying, with the finite verb tamut, you will die, from the same root muth. This infinitive-absolute-plus-finite-verb pattern is a standard Biblical Hebrew device for intensifying a verb, common in legal and covenantal pronouncements, especially death sentences. The same verse already uses the same device positively: akol tokel, freely eat, literally eating you shall eat.
English cannot repeat a bare verb form next to its conjugated self and have it read as intensification rather than a typo. The only available tool is an adverb, which reports that emphasis exists without reproducing the grammatical shape that creates it.
When two words from the same Hebrew root sit next to each other, one uninflected, look for the infinitive absolute construction. It is the language's built-in italics, and English always has to translate it as a separate word rather than a repeated one.
No dispute over the sense; every version agrees the warning is emphatic. What is worth noting is the grammatical device itself: an infinitive doubling a finite verb is a genuine feature of Hebrew with no formal English equivalent, not a stylistic flourish a translator chose.
- The same construction in a death sentence: Exodus 21:12, 15-17
- The positive form in the same verse: 'akol tokel', freely eat, Genesis 2:16
- Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (GKC), the section on the infinitive absolute intensifying a finite verb
