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 26:8
Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife. The same root as laughed and mocked, now meaning caressed or fondled.
Genesis 26:8, in every translation this tool compares.
One English root rarely stretches to cover laughing, mocking, and marital affection all at once; English would use three unrelated words. Hebrew tsachak covers all three here, the same consonants doing joyful laughter at 17:17, hostile mockery at 21:9, and, in this intensive form, spousal intimacy.
Because the detail that gives Isaac's wife-sister lie away to Abimelech uses the same verb root already met three times over as Isaac's own namesake laughter and as Ishmael's mocking, here doing a third, entirely different job, describing marital affection, which shows how wide a single Hebrew root's range can stretch.
Every version reads sporting, caressing, or fondling, correctly conveying that the couple's behavior reveals they are not merely brother and sister, but none can show this is the same root already used twice before for laughing and mocking.
מְצַחֵק metzachek (צָחַק tsachak, piel) · H6711
Metzachek here, the same piel form seen at 21:9 for Ishmael's mocking, describes physical affection intimate enough that Abimelech, watching from a window, immediately concludes Rebekah must be Isaac's wife rather than his sister. The verb's range, from joyful laughter to hostile mockery to marital intimacy, is unified only by its root sense of vigorous, animated activity, which context alone sorts into very different English words.
No English verb flexes enough to mean laugh, mock, and caress depending on context; each sense needs an entirely different English word, so the recurring thread tying Isaac's whole family story together through one Hebrew root goes invisible across translation.
Track a rare or repeated root across a family's story rather than treating each occurrence as an isolated translation choice. Tsachak's spread across Genesis 17 through 26 is a single thread an English reader can only see by being told to look for it.
Sporting or caressing as the sense here is not contested among translators. This note rounds out the picture of tsachak's range across the whole Isaac narrative, laughter, mockery, and marital affection, three English words for one Hebrew root.
- The same verb form for Ishmael's mocking: Genesis 21:9
- The root's origin in Sarah's and Abraham's laughter: Genesis 17:17; 18:12
