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 3:8
The cool of the day. The Hebrew word is the same one translated Spirit.
Genesis 3:8, in every translation this tool compares.
English keeps wind, breath, and spirit as three separate words. Hebrew has one word for all three, ruach, the same word from Genesis 1:2. This verse uses it, and cool is not one of the things ruach otherwise ever means.
Because the phrase everyone knows as the cool of the day uses the same Hebrew word that means Spirit and wind everywhere else in the Bible, and that word never elsewhere describes a pleasant temperature.
Nearly every version reads cool of the day or evening breeze, following a translation tradition going back through the King James. Some recent scholarship instead reads the phrase as describing an approaching storm.
רוּחַ ruach · H7307
The phrase is leruach hayom, literally in the ruach, wind or spirit, of the day. Ruach is the same noun used of the Spirit of God at Genesis 1:2 and of breath and wind throughout the Hebrew Bible; nowhere else does it mean temperature. Some scholars argue the scene depicts God arriving the way He does elsewhere, in a rushing, forceful wind rather than a mild breeze, making this a small theophany rather than a stroll at sunset.
English cool has no connection to wind, breath, or spirit at all; it names a temperature. Ruach never names a temperature in Hebrew, so the traditional English rendering supplies a sense the word does not otherwise carry, hiding the word's ordinary link to Spirit and storm imagery elsewhere in the Bible.
When a familiar English phrase does not correspond to any of a word's attested senses, be suspicious of the phrase, not the word. Cool of the day is a translation tradition, not a lexical entry for ruach.
Cool of the day preserves the long-settled picture of a garden walk at evening. Wind, or an approaching storm, follows the word's ordinary range and the pattern of divine appearances elsewhere in Scripture. Both are argued in current scholarship; the mild-breeze picture is the inherited default rather than the only reading available.
- Septuagint renders the phrase to deilinon, the afternoon; the Vulgate ad auram post meridiem, the afternoon breeze
- ruach in storm-theophany contexts: Exodus 14:21; Psalm 18:10-15; Ezekiel 1:4
- ruach never elsewhere denotes temperature; its attested ranges are wind, breath, and spirit
