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 20:7
He is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee. The word's first use in the Bible names an intercessor, not a predictor.
Genesis 20:7, in every translation this tool compares.
Modern English prophet usually means someone who predicts the future. The very first time the Bible uses the word for a person, at this verse, the job described is prayer on someone else's behalf, not prediction, a baseline sense English usage has since narrowed away from.
Because this is the first time in the entire Hebrew Bible that the word prophet is applied to a person, and it is given not to someone delivering predictions about the future but to Abraham functioning as an intercessor, setting the word's baseline meaning before it ever narrows toward foretelling.
Every version reads prophet, correctly, but the word's modern popular sense, foreteller of events, is not what this first, founding occurrence of the word is actually describing Abraham doing.
נָבִיא navi · H5030
Navi, prophet, appears here for the first time applied to a human being anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, and the role attached to it is intercessory prayer that will restore Abimelech's household, not prediction of a future event. The root behind navi is connected to proclaiming or speaking forth, someone who carries and delivers a message from God, of which intercession is one function among several the word will carry through the rest of the Hebrew Bible.
English prophet arrives already loaded with connotations of foretelling and prediction from centuries of usage; a reader meets that connotation before ever noticing that the Bible's own first, defining use of the word describes someone praying for others, not predicting anything at all.
When a key theological term first appears in the Bible, read that occurrence as a baseline for the word's range before importing the sense the word carries by its last or most familiar biblical occurrence, let alone its modern popular meaning.
Prophet as the rendering of navi is settled; translators are not divided here. What is easy to miss is that its first appearance defines the office more by intercession than by prediction, a nuance the English word prophet, loaded with its own later history, does not supply on its own.
- navi's root connected to proclaiming or speaking forth: standard Hebrew lexicons
- This as the first application of navi to a person anywhere in the Hebrew Bible: standard concordance data
