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 2:2-3
God rested. The verb means stopped, not recovered.
Genesis 2:2-3, in every translation this tool compares.
I stopped for lunch. That says nothing about being tired. I rested after the race. That does, because rest in English leans toward recovering strength. The verb behind Sabbath only ever says the first one.
Because the Sabbath verb first appears here, before it is ever commanded, and the fourth commandment eight hundred years later uses a different Hebrew word for the same seventh day. What God does on that day is not what most readers picture when they hear rested.
Every English version reads rested here, and later at Exodus 20:11 for the same day, using one English word for two different Hebrew verbs.
שָׁבַת shabat · H7673
Vayishbot, from shabat, to cease, desist, stop an activity. It is the root behind the noun Sabbath itself, and it says nothing about fatigue or recovery. Exodus 20:11, the fourth commandment, describes the same day with a different verb, vayanach, from nuach, to settle down or rest. Genesis 2 does not use that verb.
English rest almost always implies tiredness relieved. Hebrew shabat is a verb of stopping, applied here to a God the text never says grew tired. One English word covers a distinction the Hebrew draws across two different books of the Torah.
Track a key verb across its first occurrence and its most famous one. Genesis 2 and Exodus 20 describe the same seventh day with two different Hebrew verbs, and no English Bible has ever needed two different words to say it.
No real dispute over the English gloss; rested is the natural word in both places. What matters here is that the vocabulary shift between Genesis 2 and Exodus 20 disappears once both are translated rest, and it is worth knowing before building an argument about divine fatigue on either verse.
- The fourth commandment uses nuach instead: Exodus 20:11
- shabat as cease/desist rather than physical rest: standard BDB and HALOT entries
- The noun Shabbat is built on this verb
