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 21:9
Sarah saw the son of Hagar mocking. The verb, metzachek, is built from the same root as Isaac's name.
Genesis 21:9, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a story where a rival taunts a boy named Joy by literally performing the verb joying at him in a hostile way, and the sentence relies on you catching that the taunt and the name are the same word. English mocking and the name Isaac share no sound at all; Hebrew's metzachek and Yitzchak do.
Because the word for what Ishmael was doing to provoke Sarah is the exact same Hebrew root as Isaac's own name, so the verse is not simply reporting an action, it is reporting that Ishmael was, in Hebrew sound, Isaac-ing Isaac, a pun no English word for mocking or laughing can reproduce.
Every version reads mocking, playing, or laughing, correctly, but no English word can carry both the ordinary sense of the verb and its pointed echo of Isaac's own name in the same breath.
מְצַחֵק metzachek (צָחַק tsachak, piel) · H6711
Metzachek is the piel, intensive form of tsachak, the same root behind Yitzchak, Isaac, and behind Sarah's laughter at 18:12 and 21:6. What exactly the verb describes here, playing, mocking, or something harsher, is debated, but the wordplay itself is not: Ishmael is doing something to, or with, Isaac's own name-word, at the very feast celebrating that name.
One sense is what English is forced to pick, mocking or playing, and once chosen it reads as an ordinary verb with no connection at all to the name Isaac. The central pun, that the boy causing trouble is verbally performing his half-brother's name at him, disappears from view entirely.
When a verb describing an action toward a named character shares that character's own root, treat the wordplay as deliberate regardless of how the verb's precise sense is otherwise resolved. The pun itself is not in dispute even where the action it describes is.
Mocking reads the scene as open hostility, justifying Sarah's demand that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away. Playing or laughing reads it more mildly, perhaps still provoking Sarah's jealousy without describing genuine cruelty. Both readings share the same underlying wordplay on Isaac's name; they differ only in how harshly the piel stem should be taken here.
- The same root at Sarah's laughter: Genesis 18:12; 21:6
- Galatians 4:29 reads this episode as persecution, following the harsher sense
