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 42:23
He spake unto them by an interpreter. The same root, melitz, later names a mediator or advocate in Job.
Genesis 42:23, in every translation this tool compares.
English keeps interpreter and advocate as unrelated professions, one translates languages, the other argues a case. Hebrew melitz can name either role, an intermediary standing between two parties who cannot otherwise communicate, whether the gap is language or guilt.
Because the word naming the interpreter standing between Joseph and his brothers is the same root later used of a heavenly mediator pleading a sufferer's case in the book of Job, so an ordinary logistical detail, a translator was present, shares vocabulary with one of the Old Testament's few pictures of intercession before God.
Every version reads interpreter here, correctly, with no reason for an English reader to connect the word to anything beyond ordinary translation between Hebrew and Egyptian speakers.
מֵלִיץ melitz (לוּץ luts) · H3887
Melitz names the professional interpreter mediating between Joseph, speaking Egyptian, and his brothers, speaking Hebrew, unaware Joseph understands them. The same root reappears at Job 33:23, where a heavenly melitz, one of a thousand, pleads a sufferer's case and finds a ransom for him, a figurative use scholars regularly read as intercessor or advocate, and again at Isaiah 43:27, of a divinely commissioned spokesman.
Hebrew melitz spans both a language-translator and a legal-or-spiritual advocate; no single English word does, so the incidental detail in Joseph's story and the loaded theological image in Job read as completely unconnected once each gets its own natural English word.
A word doing mundane, logistical work in one passage can be the same root doing theological heavy lifting elsewhere. Track a root's range across the whole Hebrew Bible before assuming its use in a narrative aside is unrelated to its use in a more weighted passage.
Interpreter is the right sense here, and no version renders it otherwise. Worth flagging is the shared root with Job's mediator figure, a connection of vocabulary, not necessarily of theological intent, that Genesis 42:23 on its own gives no indication of anticipating.
- The mediator/advocate sense: Job 33:23; 16:20
- A divinely commissioned spokesman: Isaiah 43:27
