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 22:2
Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac. Abraham already has another living son, Ishmael.
Genesis 22:2, in every translation this tool compares.
English only usually means a headcount: one and no more. Hebrew yachid can mean that, but it can also mean unique, singular, one of a kind, closer to irreplaceable than to a strict arithmetic count, which matters here because the count does not actually work.
Because God calls Isaac Abraham's only son at a point in the story where Ishmael, sent away only one chapter earlier, is still alive and still Abraham's son by any ordinary count, a tension the Hebrew word for only resolves differently than a strict headcount would.
Every version reads only son, following the Hebrew word choice, and most add whom thou lovest in the same verse, both details English readers often smooth over rather than noticing the apparent contradiction with Ishmael's earlier birth.
יָחִיד yachid · H3173
Yachid, only, unique, or solitary, is used elsewhere of someone singularly precious rather than strictly the sole member of a category, closer in force to beloved or irreplaceable. By the time of this chapter Ishmael has been sent away with Hagar at Genesis 21:14 and does not appear again in Abraham's household narrative, so Isaac functions, within the covenant storyline the text is tracking, as the only son who matters for the promise, even though he is not literally Abraham's only child.
English only defaults to a strict numerical claim, and a careful reader who remembers Ishmael's birth two chapters earlier will notice what looks like an outright error, when the Hebrew word itself has a broader, more relational range that does not require a literal headcount.
If a Hebrew word that looks like a strict factual claim, only, all, every, produces an apparent contradiction with known facts elsewhere in the same book, check whether its range includes a relational or covenantal sense broader than the strict English equivalent.
Only son, read as a strict count, creates a real tension with Ishmael's continued existence. Only son, read as beloved, unique, or the son who carries the covenant, resolves the tension without requiring any textual correction, and fits yachid's attested range elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.
- Ishmael sent away with Hagar: Genesis 21:14
- yachid used of a singularly precious child elsewhere: Judges 11:34, of Jephthah's daughter, his only child
- The same lech-lecha construction as Genesis 12:1 opens this verse's command
