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 3:15b
It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Same verb, four occurrences total, and bruise may be too gentle for either half.
Genesis 3:15, in every translation this tool compares.
She bruised her knee. He crushed the can. English has to pick one verb and commit to a severity. The Hebrew verse uses one rare verb for both the fatal blow and the survivable one, and no single English word covers that whole range.
Because the verb used for both the serpent's blow and the human's blow turns up only four times in the whole Old Testament, and the traditional gentle-sounding bruise has increasingly been judged too soft for what the word may be doing.
The King James and many traditional versions read bruise for both halves. A growing number of modern versions read crush for the head-strike and strike or bite for the heel-strike, no longer using one English verb for both.
שׁוּף shuph · H7779
Shuph occurs only here, twice, and at Job 9:17 and Psalm 139:11, four occurrences in total, possibly spanning two distinct roots tangled together across them. The attested sense ranges from crush or bruise to a more violent strike or snap at. Because the same rare verb covers a lethal head-wound and a non-lethal heel-wound in one verse, translators have increasingly split it into two different English verbs to fit the two different outcomes, something the Hebrew itself does not do.
No single English verb plausibly covers both a fatal blow to the head and a survivable bite to the heel, the way one Hebrew verb apparently does. Any English rendering has to either flatten the difference with one soft word, as the King James does, or introduce an asymmetry between the two lines that the Hebrew's own choice of vocabulary does not make.
When one rare verb covers actions of very different severity in the same verse, resist the urge to supply two different English verbs to match the outcomes. That interpretive step may be reasonable, but it is commentary, not translation.
Bruise keeps a single, symmetrical verb for both halves, closer to what the Hebrew grammar actually presents. Crush and strike, or crush and bite, read theological weight into each half separately, which fits the traditional reading of the verse as the first promise of the serpent's defeat but goes beyond what shuph alone specifies.
- Four occurrences: Genesis 3:15 (twice); Job 9:17; Psalm 139:11
- The Septuagint renders both halves with the same Greek verb, tereo, to watch for or lie in wait against, a third image distinct from either bruise or crush
- HALOT lists the attested range as crush, bruise, strike at
