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 49:6
They digged down a wall. Or: they hamstrung oxen. The consonants are the same; only the vowels, added centuries later, decide.
Genesis 49:6, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a sentence in a language written without vowels, where the same three letters could spell either wall or ox depending on how you say it aloud. That is exactly the situation here: shr can be read shor, ox, or shur, wall, and the Hebrew text as originally written does not settle which.
Because Jacob's condemnation of Simeon and Levi's violence hinges on a word that could mean either ox or wall depending only on which vowels are supplied, since the consonants alone do not decide it, and the King James chose differently than the Masoretic tradition it otherwise follows.
O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their selfwill they digged down a wall.
The King James reads wall, following the Vulgate's murum and the Targums. Most modern versions read oxen, following the Masoretic Text's own vowel pointing and the Septuagint's tauron, bull.
שור shor (ox) / שוּר shur (wall) · H7794 / H7791
The consonantal text שור can be vocalized shor, ox, matching the Masoretic tradition's own pointing and the Septuagint's Greek, or shur, wall, matching the Vulgate and the Aramaic Targums. Since vowel points were added to the Hebrew text centuries after the consonants were fixed, this is a case where two ancient, respected translation traditions genuinely disagree on which vowels the unpointed consonants originally carried.
English wall and English ox are entirely different images, one a act of vandalism against property, the other a crippling act of violence against animals, so the translation a reader receives depends entirely on a vowel-pointing decision made centuries after the consonants themselves were fixed, a decision no English reader can see happening.
Remember that the earliest Hebrew text was consonants only; vowel points were a later addition, authoritative but not infallible. Where ancient versions split over the same consonants, as they do here, the ambiguity is genuine and older than any existing manuscript with vowels.
Wall follows the Vulgate and Targums and reads Simeon and Levi's violence as including property destruction. Oxen follows the Masoretic Text's own pointing and the Septuagint, reading the violence as extending to hamstringing livestock, itself a serious act of economic sabotage in the ancient world. Both are defensible from the same unpointed consonants.
- Vulgate murum, wall; Targums Onkelos and Jonathan also read wall
- Masoretic pointing and Septuagint tauron, bull, read ox
