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 5:5-31
And he died. The same two words end almost every entry in the genealogy, on purpose.
Genesis 5:5-31, in every translation this tool compares.
Picture a list where every single line ends with the identical short sentence, on purpose, so the repetition itself becomes the message. English style guides tell writers to vary their sentences. Hebrew narrative sometimes wants the opposite, and this chapter is the clearest example of it in Genesis.
Because the same two Hebrew words close eight of the ten entries in this genealogy like a drumbeat, and English translations, forced to vary their sentence rhythm for readability, smooth away the repetition that is the chapter's entire point.
Every version reads and he died at the end of each entry, correctly. No version can show a reader that this is the identical two-word Hebrew phrase, vayamot, closing verse after verse, because English narrative prose naturally varies its wording anyway.
וַיָּמֹת vayamot (מוּת muth, to die) · H4191
Vayamot, and he died, closes the entries for Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech, eight refrains in one chapter. The formula is not filler; it is the generational answer to Genesis 3's sentence of death, tolling once per name, following directly after chapter 3's mot tamut warning finally coming due.
English narrative avoids exact repetition as a matter of style, so even a translation that renders and he died correctly every time reads as normal, varied prose rather than as a refrain. The liturgical, tolling effect of the same two words returning eight times is a feature of the Hebrew's deliberate sameness, which English convention works against by instinct.
When a formula repeats with only names and numbers changing around it, read the repetition as the message, not as a scribe's failure of imagination. Genealogies in Hebrew narrative are rarely neutral bookkeeping; the refrain here is doing theological work chapter 2's warning promised.
Every version renders and he died the same correct way, every time; that was never in question. What the English can't preserve, once the repetition is smoothed into ordinary narrative prose, is that the refrain itself is the chapter's real argument.
- The refrain closes Genesis 5:5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 27, 31: eight of the chapter's ten entries
- Genesis 2:17's mot tamut warning as the refrain's narrative fulfillment
