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 26:20-22
He called the name of the well Sitnah. The same root behind the word Satan.
Genesis 26:20-22, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine naming a disputed parking spot Accuser, using the exact word your language later uses for a courtroom prosecutor or a cosmic adversary. English place names rarely carry that kind of loaded vocabulary. Hebrew does it constantly, and Sitnah is a clean example.
Because the second of three wells Isaac's servants dig is named with the very root that later gives the Hebrew Bible its word for Satan, the accuser, so a minor dispute over a well is marked, in the Hebrew place name alone, with the same vocabulary later used for cosmic opposition.
Every version transliterates Esek, Sitnah, and Rehoboth as bare place names, correctly, since none of the three carries built-in meaning once rendered in English letters.
שִׂטְנָה Sitnah (cf. שָׂטָן satan) · H7856 / H7854
Esek, contention, from a root meaning to dispute; Sitnah, accusation or enmity, sharing its root with satan, the accuser, used of the adversarial figure in Job and Zechariah; and Rehoboth, room or open spaces, mark an escalation and then a resolution across the three well-naming episodes. Sitnah is not simply an unpleasant-sounding name; it is built from the same three consonants that later name the Hebrew Bible's chief adversarial figure.
English readers meet Esek, Sitnah, and Rehoboth as bare, interchangeable-sounding proper nouns, and nothing about the spelling lets them pick up that the second one carries the same loaded root as a major theological term used elsewhere in the same Bible.
When a place name in a dispute narrative sounds unusually pointed, check its root against other, more theologically weighted uses of the same consonants elsewhere in Scripture. Hebrew narrators frequently choose or record names precisely because of this kind of resonance.
Transliterating the three names draws no disagreement among translators. The connection between Sitnah and satan is a matter of shared Hebrew root, not a claim that this well dispute was itself supernatural; this note simply makes that shared vocabulary visible.
- satan as accuser/adversary from the same root: Job 1:6-12; Zechariah 3:1-2
- The escalation across all three well names: Genesis 26:20-22
