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 2:6
A mist went up. A word used only here and once in Job, and nobody is certain what it names.
Genesis 2:6, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a word that survives in only two sentences of an entire library. Every dictionary entry for it is built from those two sentences alone. Now picture two ancient translations disagreeing about which of two very different pictures, fog or flood, the word was even pointing at.
Because the verse that explains how the ground got watered before it ever rained rests on a word that occurs in just two verses of the Old Testament, and the ancient translators already disagreed about what it named.
Most English versions read mist or streams. The Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate both read spring or fountain, not mist, showing the fog reading is not the oldest one on record.
אֵד ed · H108
Ed occurs at Genesis 2:6 and Job 36:27, and nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. The traditional mist reading leans on the Job passage; an alternative connects the word to Akkadian edu, a flood or high water, which would make the verse describe subterranean water welling up to irrigate the ground rather than fog settling on it.
English mist and spring point to two different weather pictures, and a word attested twice cannot arbitrate between them. Whichever English word a translator picks quietly closes a question the Hebrew itself leaves open.
A word this rare is a live question, not a settled fact, however confident a single English gloss makes it look. Check how many times a word occurs before resting an argument on its dictionary definition.
Mist keeps the older picture of dew or fog settling. Spring or stream follows the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the proposed Akkadian cognate, and fits a garden being irrigated by water rising from below rather than settling from above. Both are defensible; neither is provable from two data points.
- Only two occurrences: Genesis 2:6; Job 36:27
- Septuagint reads pege, spring or fountain, at Genesis 2:6; the Vulgate reads fons, fountain
- Proposed cognate: Akkadian edu, flood or high water
