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 31:47
Laban called it Jegar-sahadutha; Jacob called it Galeed. Two languages, same meaning, spoken by two members of the same extended family.
Genesis 31:47, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine two cousins from different countries naming the same landmark, each in their own language, and the story records both names side by side without translating either into a third, shared language. Genesis does exactly that here, in the middle of an otherwise all-Hebrew book.
Because Laban names the covenant heap in Aramaic while Jacob names the identical thing in Hebrew, the two men's own words marking a real linguistic divide between them, and this is the first clearly identifiable stretch of Aramaic anywhere in the Bible, sitting inside an otherwise entirely Hebrew book.
Every version keeps both names as transliterations, Jegar-sahadutha and Galeed, usually with a footnote that both mean heap of witness, but without necessarily flagging that the first is Aramaic and the second Hebrew, two related but distinct languages, not two dialects of one.
יְגַר שָׂהֲדוּתָא Yegar Sahaduta (Aramaic) / גַּלְעֵד Gal-ed (Hebrew) · H3026 / H1567
Yegar sahaduta, Aramaic for heap of witness, is generally recognized as the first identifiable stretch of Aramaic in the Bible, distinct from the Hebrew that surrounds it on every side. Jacob's own name for the same heap, Gal-ed, Hebrew for the identical meaning, sits right beside it in the very same verse, making the linguistic difference between Laban the Aramean and Jacob the Hebrew-speaker explicit in their own recorded words rather than merely inferred from their genealogy.
English translation renders both names into transliterated proper nouns and glosses both meanings in English, so the fact that the underlying words are in two genuinely different Semitic languages, not two versions of the same language, disappears entirely once both are handled the same way in translation.
When two characters name the same thing differently in the same verse, check whether the difference is dialectal, linguistic, or simply stylistic before assuming it is incidental. This verse is doing real sociolinguistic work, marking Laban and Jacob as speakers of two related but separate languages.
Neither name's meaning, heap of witness, is disputed among translators. What matters is that Laban's version is Aramaic and Jacob's is Hebrew, two different languages rather than two names in one, a linguistic detail no English rendering of either name preserves.
- Standard recognition of this verse as the earliest identifiable Aramaic passage in the Hebrew Bible: comparative Semitic linguistics and standard Genesis commentaries
- Laban explicitly identified elsewhere as an Aramean: Genesis 25:20; 31:20, 24
