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 6:14a
Pitch it within and without with pitch. The noun for pitch and the verb for cover share the root behind atonement.
Genesis 6:14, in every translation this tool compares.
English tar and English atone share no sound, no spelling, nothing. A reader moving from Noah's ark to the Day of Atonement chapters later would never connect them. In Hebrew, the two ideas are built from the same three letters.
Because the instruction to cover the ark with pitch uses the exact same root later used for atonement, the covering of sin on the Day of Atonement, so the ark's waterproofing and Israel's central ritual vocabulary are built from one Hebrew root, a connection no English word for tar or pitch can carry.
Every version reads pitch or tar for the verse's substance and its verb, correctly and unremarkably. No version can show that the same consonants return later as the ordinary Hebrew word for atonement.
כֹּפֶר kopher / כָּפַר kaphar · H3724 / H3722
Kopher, pitch, and the verb kaphar, to cover, here describing waterproofing, come from the same root as kippurim, atonement, the word behind Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and kapporet, the mercy seat covering the ark of the covenant later in the Torah. The ark of Noah is, in the vocabulary of the sentence describing it, covered the same way sin is later covered.
English has entirely separate words for a waterproofing tar and a ritual atonement, so the shared Hebrew root, and the theological resonance some readers hear in it, one covering that saves from judgment prefiguring another, cannot survive translation into two unrelated English vocabularies.
When a mundane, technical instruction, here waterproofing a boat, uses a root that recurs in a book's central ritual vocabulary, that repetition is worth flagging even if the immediate context is entirely practical. Hebrew narrative frequently plants vocabulary early that ritual law develops later.
Pitch and cover are the plainly correct sense here, and no version disputes it; the verse is giving construction instructions, not making an atonement statement. The connection to kippurim is an observation about shared vocabulary across the Torah, not a claim that Genesis 6 is itself describing a ritual.
- kippurim, atonement, and kapporet, the mercy seat, from the same root kaphar: Leviticus 16; Exodus 25:17
- kopher as pitch/tar, this verse's only use of the noun in this sense
