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 3:15a
He shall bruise thy head. The Hebrew pronoun is unambiguously masculine, singular, he.
Genesis 3:15, in every translation this tool compares.
A single letter can flip a pronoun from he to she in translation, the way a typo can turn him into her in English. That is what happened to the Latin Bible used across Europe for over a thousand years, in the one verse that names the serpent's ultimate defeat.
Because a single pronoun in this verse triggered a consequential translation dispute in church history, after a Latin copying error turned a masculine he into a feminine she, and the mistake shaped centuries of doctrine before it was caught.
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Nearly every English version reads he or it, correctly following the Hebrew masculine singular pronoun. Some older Catholic translations made from the Latin Vulgate read she, following a Latin manuscript tradition that used the feminine ipsa instead of the masculine ipse.
הוּא hu (with זֶרַע zera) · H1931 / H2233
Zera, seed or offspring, is grammatically singular and collective, and the pronoun attached to it, hu, is third person masculine singular: he, not she, will crush the serpent's head. Jerome's own Hebrew-based commentary on Genesis confirms the masculine reading; the feminine ipsa that later appeared in some Vulgate copies is now widely regarded as a scribal error introduced after Jerome, not his own translation choice. The modern official Catholic Latin text, the Nova Vulgata, corrected the erroneous ipsa to ipsum, neuter, simply restoring ordinary Latin grammatical agreement with the neuter noun semen, seed; it does not print a masculine ipse, since Latin gender concord here tracks the Latin noun, not a claim about the Hebrew pronoun.
English he and she map cleanly onto Hebrew masculine and feminine pronouns, so there is no translation gap here. The gap was a transmission error inside the Latin manuscript tradition, which English versions, working from Hebrew, never inherited.
A doctrine built on a single translation's pronoun is only as strong as that translation's manuscript history. Where two major textual traditions disagree, trace the disagreement back to its source before assuming either one preserves the original by default.
He or it follows the Hebrew directly and is essentially undisputed among Hebraists across confessional lines, including current Catholic scholarship. She survives mainly in older devotional use built on the Vulgate's feminine variant, which the Catholic Church's own modern Latin text no longer prints.
- Jerome, Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, reading the masculine pronoun against the Old Latin
- Nova Vulgata (1979, the Catholic Church's official Latin text) reads ipsum, neuter agreeing with semen, correcting the earlier feminine ipsa
- Standard Hebrew grammars on zera as a singular collective taking a masculine singular pronoun
