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 25:22
The children struggled together within her. A rare, violent verb: crushing, not merely kicking.
Genesis 25:22, in every translation this tool compares.
English struggled covers everything from mild wriggling to a real fight. Hebrew's word here sits at the violent end of that range, closer to they were crushing each other than to ordinary prenatal movement, and Rebekah's alarmed response in the very same verse matches that intensity.
Because the verb describing the twins moving inside Rebekah is a rare, intensive form meaning to crush or violently jostle one another, far stronger than an ordinary word for kicking or moving, and it sets the tone for a lifelong conflict before either child is even born.
Every version reads struggled or jostled, both reasonable but generic English verbs that undersell how forceful and unusual the underlying Hebrew word actually is.
וַיִּתְרֹצֲצוּ vayitrotzetzu (רָצַץ ratsats, hitpael) · H7533
Vayitrotzetzu is a rare hitpael form of ratsats, to crush or break in pieces, used here in a mutual, reciprocal sense: the children were crushing or violently colliding with one another. The verb's intensity is severe enough that Rebekah immediately goes to inquire of the LORD, alarmed by what she is feeling, and the violence in the womb previews the lifelong national conflict the LORD's answer in the next verse explicitly announces.
English struggled is a mild, general-purpose verb; it does not carry the crushing, violent-collision sense of the rare Hebrew root, so an English reader misses how extreme Rebekah's physical experience, and its symbolic weight, actually was.
When ordinary translation smooths a rare, intense verb into a generic English equivalent, check the word's root meaning elsewhere before assuming the action described was mild. The intensity of a rare verb is often exactly the detail a smooth translation loses first.
Struggled is accurate but undersells the Hebrew's violence. Crushed one another or collided violently is closer to ratsats's ordinary sense but reads oddly applied to an unborn child, which is likely why every major translation has settled on the gentler English verb despite the mismatch.
- ratsats as crush or break in pieces elsewhere: Judges 9:53; Ecclesiastes 12:6
- The hitpael stem's mutual/reciprocal sense here: standard Biblical Hebrew grammars
