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 2:24
One flesh. A kinship word, not only a body word.
Genesis 2:24, in every translation this tool compares.
He's my flesh and blood. English keeps this sense alive for family, but only as a fixed idiom, sitting beside the ordinary meaning of flesh as tissue. Hebrew basar carries the kinship sense as one of its normal, everyday meanings, not as a leftover expression.
Because the verse everyone quotes about marriage says one flesh, and flesh in Hebrew names kinship and identity as often as it names tissue, so the phrase is making a bigger claim than a merely physical one.
Every version reads one flesh, and the physical union is certainly included. What is harder to see in English is that basar for kinship is ordinary Hebrew usage on its own, not a special sense invented for this verse.
בָּשָׂר אֶחָד basar echad · H1320 + H259
Basar, flesh, is used of blood relatives at Genesis 29:14, Judges 9:2, and 2 Samuel 5:1, where 'your bone and your flesh' means your relative, with no reference to sex or the body. One flesh at 2:24 draws on that same kinship vocabulary: the man and woman become each other's next of kin, a new family unit, with the physical union as the sign of that bond rather than its entire content.
English flesh has narrowed mostly to the physical body, with flesh and blood surviving only as a fixed idiom for family. Hebrew basar keeps both senses live at once, so a single English reading tends to collapse the verse into the physical union alone.
When a body-part or body-substance word appears in a covenant or family context, check whether the same word carries a kinship sense elsewhere before assuming only the physical meaning is in view.
One flesh is not in dispute as a translation. The question is emphasis: whether the phrase is chiefly about sexual union, chiefly about kinship status, or, as the parallel usage suggests, both at once by design.
- Kinship sense of basar: Genesis 29:14; Judges 9:2; 2 Samuel 5:1, 'your bone and your flesh'
- Same phrase quoted at Matthew 19:5 and Ephesians 5:31
