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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 32:28
Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God. The name itself could mean he strives with God, or God strives.
Genesis 32:28, in every translation this tool compares.
English God-wrestler and God wrestles are opposites built from the same three words in different order. Hebrew's Yisrael compresses el, God, and a form of the verb sarah, strive or contend, into one word without ever clarifying, the way separate English words would, which one is doing the striving.
Because the two halves of Israel's own name could mean either Jacob strives with God or, read the other way, God strives, a genuine subject-object ambiguity in how the name's own two pieces relate to each other, present in the Hebrew from the moment the name is given.
Every version reads striven with God, treating Jacob as the one contending, God as the one contended with, the natural reading given the wrestling match that has just taken place, though not the only grammatically possible one.
יִשְׂרָאֵל Yisrael (שָׂרָה sarah, strive + אֵל el, God) · H3478
Yisrael combines sarah, to strive, contend, or have power, with el, God, and the construction can be parsed with Jacob as the subject striving against God, or, less commonly but not impossibly, with El as the subject, God contends or God rules. The immediate narrative context, an all-night wrestling match Jacob has just survived, strongly favors the first reading, but the bare grammar of the compound name does not by itself rule out the second.
English has to build a sentence with an explicit subject and object, he strives with God, that names who wrestles whom; Hebrew's compressed name-formation does not require that clarity, so the ambiguity that exists in the two Hebrew roots alone disappears the moment English supplies a subject.
When a Hebrew proper name is built by compounding a verb with a divine element, el or yah, check whether the divine element is functioning as subject or object of the verb before assuming the more natural-sounding English translation is the only grammatically available one.
Jacob strives with God (and prevails) fits the immediate context of the wrestling match and is the reading every translation adopts. God strives, or God rules, is a grammatically live alternative given how compound Hebrew names work, though it fits the narrative less naturally here.
- sarah as strive, contend, or have power: standard Hebrew lexicons
- The compound name construction paralleled in other -el names throughout the Hebrew Bible
