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 2:23
She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. A pun that sounds like a derivation.
Genesis 2:23, in every translation this tool compares.
English woman really is built from man; it comes from Old English wifman. An English reader has no reason to doubt Adam's line is doing the same thing. It is doing something else: making a pun, not reporting where the word came from.
Because Adam's own line sounds like a real etymology, woman because taken out of man, and centuries of commentators, Jewish and Christian alike, read it as one. Modern linguists trace the two words to different roots.
Every version keeps the wordplay by translating ish as man and ishah as woman, since English happens to have a matching pair. The English pair is a real derivation; the Hebrew pair, read this way, is not.
אִישׁ ish · H376 / אִשָּׁה ishah · H802
Ish and ishah sound almost identical, and Genesis 2:23 plays on that resemblance. But the words are generally traced to different roots, ish to a root meaning strength, ishah to a separate root associated with frailty or humanity in general, so the verse is a paronomasia, a sound-based pun dressed up as a derivation, not an actual etymology.
English woman genuinely does derive from man, so an English reader assumes the Hebrew must work the same way and has no signal that it does not. The pun survives in translation only because English happens to have its own unrelated derivation that looks like a match.
A wordplay that sounds like an etymology is not evidence of one. Ancient authors used sound-based puns constantly and did not intend them as historical linguistics, even where, as here, the pun is doing real literary work.
No translation avoids the pun; man and woman is the correct rendering and the resemblance is deliberate in the Hebrew. The only correction needed is not to the translation but to what the wordplay is taken to prove about where the Hebrew words themselves come from.
- Ish linked to a root for strength; ishah to a separate root, not a feminine form of ish: standard treatment in BDB and modern Hebrew lexicons
- Maimonides and earlier commentators read the pun as a genuine derivation; modern comparative Semitics does not
