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 2:21-22
One of his ribs. The same word names the side chambers of the tabernacle everywhere else.
Genesis 2:21-22, in every translation this tool compares.
He built a shelf from one board. He built an addition onto the side of the house. One is a single piece; the other is a whole section. The word behind rib usually means the second kind of thing: a side, a flank, a chamber.
Because the word for what God takes from the man to build the woman is not the ordinary word for a rib, and in thirty-nine of its other forty-one appearances it names something else entirely.
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof… And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
Every major English version reads rib. A minority of scholars and some newer study notes argue for side, but no widely used translation has switched, so rib remains the reading every reader meets.
צֵלָע tsela · H6763
Tsela occurs forty-one times in thirty-two verses. Only these two, Genesis 2:21-22, are ever rendered rib. Everywhere else, the tabernacle's side chambers and boards at Exodus 25:12 and 26:26-27, the temple's side chambers at 1 Kings 6:5, 34, even a hillside at 2 Samuel 16:13, it is side, side chamber, board, or slope. The single-bone reading rests on these two verses alone.
English rib names one specific bone; English side is broad enough to mean a flank, a section, or a chamber. The Hebrew word defaults to the broad sense everywhere except here, and only the traditional reading of this one story keeps the narrow sense attached to it in English.
When a word is translated one way in exactly two verses and a completely different way everywhere else, check what is driving the outlier. Sometimes it is genuine context; sometimes it is a translation tradition nobody has revisited.
Rib keeps four hundred years of English reading and the picture most people carry of the story. Side follows the word's overwhelming usage elsewhere and reads the operation as taking a whole section, not extracting a single bone. The Hebrew consonants support either; the tradition has settled on the rarer sense.
- Forty-one occurrences in thirty-two verses; side or side chamber elsewhere: Exodus 25:12; 26:26-27; 1 Kings 6:5, 34; hillside at 2 Samuel 16:13
- Septuagint renders it pleura, side or rib, at Genesis 2:21-22, carrying the same ambiguity into Greek
