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 6:16
A window shalt thou make to the ark. The word may mean light or roof rather than an opening you look through.
Genesis 6:16, in every translation this tool compares.
Picture the instructions for a boat saying make light for it rather than put in a window. Both are ways of solving the same problem, letting light in, but they describe two different building choices, and this word could be pointing at either one.
Because the word every English Bible renders window is a rare term whose root more naturally means light or brightness, and a growing number of modern translations have quietly switched from window to roof for the same Hebrew word.
The King James and many traditional versions read window, connecting the word to an idea of daylight or noon. A number of more recent versions, including the RSV, NIV and ESV, instead read roof, translating the same Hebrew word differently.
צֹהַר tsohar · H6672
Tsohar is rare, plausibly related to tzohorayim, noon or midday, and to zohar, radiance or brightness, either of which would support the sense of an opening for light rather than a framed window in the modern sense. Ancient Jewish tradition went further still, reading tsohar as a luminous stone providing light inside the ark, an interpretation preserved in targumic and midrashic sources rather than in any mainstream translation.
English window specifies glass or an opening you look through; roof specifies an entirely different structural feature. The Hebrew word's connection to light or brightness supports either English word depending on how a translator imagines the ark's construction, and the choice changes the mental picture an English reader carries of the vessel.
When a rare architectural or construction term is translated confidently, check whether that confidence is really coming from the word's root or from a translator's best guess about ancient shipbuilding. Window and roof are not close synonyms, yet both are defended translations of the same Hebrew word here.
Window preserves the traditional picture and a plausible link to daylight vocabulary. Roof, now used by several major modern versions, reads the same word as naming a covering that admits light rather than a framed opening, and neither can be confirmed against a second occurrence of the word.
- Possible connection to tzohorayim, noon: Gesenius' Hebrew Lexicon
- RSV, NIV and ESV translate tsohar as roof rather than window
- Targumic and midrashic tradition reading tsohar as a luminous stone
