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 50:26
He was put in a coffin in Egypt. The Hebrew word, aron, is the same word later used for the Ark of the Covenant.
Genesis 50:26, in every translation this tool compares.
English keeps coffin and ark as entirely separate words, one for the dead, one for the sacred. Hebrew aron names both a burial box and the gold-covered chest holding the covenant tablets, the very same noun doing both jobs, so Genesis closes with a word it will not fully cash in until Exodus and beyond.
Because the very last word of Genesis, coffin, is the same Hebrew word later used for the Ark of the Covenant, so the book ends with Joseph sealed in the same kind of box that will eventually carry Israel's most sacred object, a wordplay that closes the book on an image it will not explain for many chapters yet.
Every version reads coffin, correctly, since English has no reason to use the same word it will later use for the Ark of the Covenant, severing a connection the Hebrew text itself preserves by repeating the identical noun.
אָרוֹן aron · H727
Aron names Joseph's coffin here, the very first occurrence of the word anywhere in the Bible, and the same word later names the Ark of the Covenant carrying the tablets of the law through the wilderness. Jewish tradition already noticed the parallel: two arons traveled with Israel through the wilderness, one holding the bones of the dead Joseph, the other holding the covenant of the living God, Joseph's own bones eventually carried out of Egypt at the Exodus and buried in the promised land.
English coffin and ark share no sound or spelling at all, so the deliberate closing image, Genesis ending on the same word its sequel will use for its most sacred object, is entirely invisible without knowing the underlying Hebrew noun is identical in both cases.
Pay attention to a book's very last word as carefully as its first. Genesis opens with bereshit, a word already carrying interpretive weight, and closes with aron, a word that will not detonate its full significance until much later in the story, a deliberate structural echo across the whole Torah.
Coffin is the correct sense here, and no version renders it otherwise. What matters is the word's later, much weightier reuse for the Ark of the Covenant, a connection built entirely into the Hebrew vocabulary, invisible the moment English gives the two objects two different names.
- aron for the Ark of the Covenant: Deuteronomy 10:5; Exodus 25:10-22
- Joseph's bones carried out at the Exodus: Exodus 13:19; Joshua 24:32
- Jewish tradition noting the parallel of the two arons in the wilderness
