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 21:31
Beersheba, well of the oath, or well of seven. One root, sheva, carries both meanings.
Genesis 21:31, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a place named Sevenswear, where the same syllable meant both the number of witnesses paid and the promise itself. English would need two separate words, seven and swear, sharing no sound. Hebrew's sheva does both jobs with one root.
Because the place name marking Abraham's treaty with Abimelech is built on a Hebrew root that means both seven and oath at once, so the well's name is doing double duty, naming both the seven lambs given as a witness and the swearing itself, a pun no single English word can hold together.
Every version reads Beersheba as a transliterated place name, or occasionally glosses it well of the oath, capturing one half of the pun but not the other, since English seven and swear share no etymology at all.
בְּאֵר שֶׁבַע Be'er Sheva (שֶׁבַע sheva, seven / שָׁבַע shava, swear) · H884
Be'er sheva combines be'er, well, with sheva, a root meaning both seven, the number of ewe lambs Abraham gives Abimelech as witness to the treaty, and the verb shava, to swear an oath, the very act the two men perform at that well. The name commemorates both the seven animals and the oath in a single word, a deliberate double meaning built into the place's Hebrew name.
English seven and swear are entirely unrelated words with no shared sound, so a place name built on their shared Hebrew root cannot be translated into English without either picking one sense and losing the other, or transliterating the name and losing both.
When a place name is explained in the surrounding narrative, as Beersheba is here, check whether the explanation is drawing on more than one sense of the underlying root. Hebrew etiological place names frequently carry a double meaning that a single English gloss cannot hold at once.
Beersheba as a transliterated name draws no disagreement. Well of the oath and well of seven are both correct halves of a single Hebrew pun; English simply cannot say both at once the way the one Hebrew root does.
- The seven ewe lambs as witness: Genesis 21:28-30
- The oath itself: Genesis 21:31
- The same double meaning noted again when Isaac's servants dig a well there: Genesis 26:33
