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 48:22
I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren. Literally, one shechem, the same word as the city Shechem.
Genesis 48:22, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine an inheritance clause that says I leave you one extra Boston, using a place name as a unit of measurement. That is roughly what Jacob's Hebrew does here, naming an amount of land with the same word as a specific city his sons had once conquered by the sword.
Because the extra portion Jacob gives Joseph is called one shechem, the same word as the city of Shechem where Jacob's sons had earlier taken bloody vengeance, so an ordinary word for a portion or ridge of land doubles as a pointed reference back to a specific, violent chapter of the family's own history.
Every version reads one portion, or a similar generic English phrase, correctly conveying the sense of an extra share but with no way to preserve the pun on the place name Shechem.
שְׁכֶם אֶחָד shechem echad (cf. שְׁכֶם Shechem) · H7926 / H7927
Shechem ordinarily means shoulder or a ridge of high ground, and functions here as a play on words with the city of Shechem, the site of Simeon and Levi's violent reprisal after Dinah's assault at Genesis 34. Jacob's phrase, one shechem, can be read as simply one portion or, more pointedly, as a wry reference to the very city his sons had taken by force, now formally assigned to Joseph's line.
English portion is a generic word with no double meaning at all, so the pun connecting Joseph's extra inheritance to the specific, bloody history of Shechem in chapter 34 disappears completely once shechem is translated as a plain, place-name-free noun.
When an inheritance or blessing names a quantity using a word that also happens to be a place name from earlier in the same book, consider that the connection may be deliberate rather than coincidental, especially where the place carries real narrative weight, as Shechem does here.
Portion is the agreed general sense in every version. The pun connecting it to the city of Shechem is, by the Anchor Bible's own description, an obscure allusion, acknowledged but not fully explained by any major commentary, which is itself part of why it is worth flagging rather than resolving.
- Shechem, shoulder or ridge, as the city's own name: Genesis 34
- The Anchor Bible's description of the wordplay as an 'obscure allusion'
