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 6:14b
Gopher wood. A word used exactly once, and no one knows for certain what tree it names.
Genesis 6:14, in every translation this tool compares.
Every English Bible just says gopher wood, which sounds specific but is really a translator's shrug: this word occurs nowhere else, so rather than guess at a species, translators simply carried the Hebrew sound into English wholesale.
Because the wood the ark is built from is named by a word that appears exactly one time anywhere in the Hebrew Old Testament, nowhere else in ancient Hebrew literature, and nobody today can say with confidence what kind of tree it names.
Every version reads gopher wood, transliterating rather than translating, because there is no second occurrence anywhere to translate from. Some modern notes suggest cypress or another conifer as a guess, never as a certainty.
גֹּפֶר gopher · H1613
Gopher occurs only at Genesis 6:14, a true hapax legomenon with no other biblical or extrabiblical Hebrew attestation to compare it against. Every proposal for its botanical identity, cypress being the most common modern guess, is inferred from context, from shipbuilding plausibility, or from similar-sounding words in related languages, not from a second usage that would confirm it.
English gopher wood looks like a specific, confident botanical term, the way oak or cedar would be, but it is a transliteration standing in for total uncertainty. An English reader cannot tell the difference between a well-attested wood name and a total guess dressed in the same grammatical clothing.
A transliterated word in an English Bible is often a flag, not a translation: it usually means no one has been confident enough to translate it. Treat every untranslated Hebrew term you meet in English as an invitation to ask why it was left that way.
No real choice was available to translators; there is nothing to choose between since the word has no second occurrence to weigh against another. Every specific identification, cypress or otherwise, is an educated guess dressed as a footnote, not a finding.
- Only occurrence in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 6:14
- No cognate attested in other ancient Northwest Semitic languages
- Cypress as the most common modern scholarly guess, offered without certainty
