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 50:20
Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good. The same verb, chashav, reckon, used of Abraham's faith at 15:6.
Genesis 50:20, in every translation this tool compares.
English think and mean are ordinary, general verbs. Hebrew chashav is closer to an accountant's word, to reckon or calculate a value, and the same word used of God crediting Abraham's faith as righteousness earlier in Genesis is used twice in this one sentence, once for the brothers' malicious calculation, once for God's redemptive one.
Because Joseph's famous line to his brothers uses the same accounting verb, chashav, already met at Genesis 15:6 for God reckoning Abraham's faith as righteousness, so the whole Joseph story closes with the identical ledger-word that opened the covenant's central statement about faith, now applied to good and evil rather than to belief.
Every version reads meant or intended, both reasonable general translations that lose the more technical, ledger-like flavor chashav carries, and its earlier, weightier use at 15:6.
חָשַׁב chashav · H2803
Chashavtem alai ra'ah, chashvah l'tovah, you reckoned against me evil, He reckoned it for good, repeats the same root twice with opposite objects in one verse, the very verb rendered counted at Genesis 15:6, where the LORD counted Abraham's faith as righteousness. The whole Joseph narrative, and in a sense the whole patriarchal history Genesis has been tracking, closes on the same accounting vocabulary it used to describe the foundational moment of Abraham's faith.
English think and mean are colorless, general-purpose verbs; they do not preserve the specific, weighted accounting sense that ties Joseph's closing statement back to Abraham's reckoned faith fourteen chapters and several generations earlier in the same book.
When a book's final major statement repeats a rare or theologically loaded verb from earlier in the same book, read the recurrence as a deliberate bookend, not a coincidence of common vocabulary. Chashav's return here closes a loop opened at 15:6.
Meant or intended captures the sentence's plain sense, and every version agrees on that much. What matters is the specific word choice, chashav, which ties Joseph's closing theological statement about providence directly back to Abraham's reckoned faith, a connection no English synonym preserves.
- The same verb at Genesis 15:6, God reckoning Abraham's faith as righteousness
- chashav's accounting/ledger sense: standard Hebrew lexicons
