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 41:51-52
Manasseh, for God hath made me forget; Ephraim, for God hath caused me to be fruitful. Two more names built from the naming sentence itself.
Genesis 41:51-52, in every translation this tool compares.
By now the pattern should look familiar: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and now Manasseh and Ephraim, thirteen names in a row each built as a pun on the parent's own explanatory sentence. English transliteration keeps none of the wordplay, in Canaan or, as here, in Egypt.
Because Joseph names his two Egyptian-born sons with Hebrew puns on his own experience, forgetting his suffering and being made fruitful in it, continuing the family's long-running habit of building children's names directly out of a parent's own words, now transplanted into a foreign land and a foreign language.
Every version reads Manasseh and Ephraim as bare transliterated names, with Joseph's explanatory statements translated separately and accurately, but without connecting either name back to its own root the way the Hebrew explicitly does.
מְנַשֶּׁה Menashsheh (נָשָׁה nashah, forget) / אֶפְרַיִם Ephraim (פָּרָה parah, fruitful) · H4519 / H5382 / H669 / H6509
Menashsheh echoes nashah, to forget, from Joseph's own words, God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house. Ephraim echoes parah, to be fruitful, from for God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction. Both names complete the pattern established across every one of Jacob's own sons' births, now applied one generation later, to children born not in Canaan but in Egypt, under Joseph's Egyptian name and Egyptian wife.
English Manasseh and Ephraim are bare proper nouns; the sentences explaining them read as separate commentary rather than as the linguistic source the names were extracted from, so the pattern completing itself one generation later, in a foreign land, is invisible without the Hebrew roots.
Continue tracking the birth-naming-pun device established across Genesis 29-30 all the way through the Joseph narrative. The device does not stop with Jacob's own sons; it continues into the next generation, even after the family relocates to Egypt.
Neither name nor its accompanying explanation is in dispute in any version. This entry rounds out the pattern already established for the rest of the twelve tribes' names, showing it persists one generation further, into Joseph's own Egyptian-born sons.
- The same naming-pun pattern across all twelve tribal names: Genesis 29:32-30:24; 35:18
- Joseph's own explanatory statements: Genesis 41:51-52
