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 23:6
A mighty prince among us. Literally, a prince of God, using elohim as a superlative.
Genesis 23:6, in every translation this tool compares.
English intensifies with words like super or mega, or with an adverb, incredibly great. Hebrew has another option: attach the word for God to a noun to mean very or utterly. Elohim here is not claiming Abraham is divine; it is doing the job English mega does.
Because the Hittites' compliment to Abraham literally reads a prince of God, using the divine name itself as a way of saying very great, a use of elohim that has nothing to do with actual divinity and everything to do with Hebrew's habit of using God's name to intensify an ordinary adjective.
Every version reads mighty prince or great chieftain, correctly conveying the superlative sense without the literal words prince of God ever appearing in translation.
נְשִׂיא אֱלֹהִים nesi elohim · H5387 + H430
Nesi elohim, literally prince of God, uses elohim the way Hebrew occasionally uses divine vocabulary to intensify an ordinary noun or adjective to its greatest possible degree, a pattern also seen in phrases like an exceedingly great city, literally a city great to God, at Jonah 3:3. The construction is a superlative device, not a theological claim about Abraham's status.
English has no equivalent habit of using God's name as a grammatical intensifier, so a literal translation, prince of God, would mislead an English reader into hearing a theological claim the Hebrew idiom was never making.
When elohim or a divine name appears attached to an ordinary noun in a way that does not fit a normal statement about deity, check whether Hebrew is using it as a superlative intensifier rather than making a religious claim. The construction is rare but attested and easy to over-read.
Translators are not divided here; mighty prince correctly captures the sense and rightly avoids the misleading literal rendering. Worth noting is a genuine grammatical curiosity: Hebrew can reach for God's own name simply to say very, in a way English idiom has no parallel for.
- The same superlative pattern at Jonah 3:3, 'an exceedingly great city,' literally 'great to God'
- D. Winton Thomas, 'A Consideration of Some Unusual Ways of Expressing the Superlative in Hebrew,' Vetus Testamentum 3 (1953), on this construction as a Hebrew superlative device
