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 6:3
My spirit shall not always strive with man. A verb used only this once, and nobody is fully certain what it says God's spirit will stop doing.
Genesis 6:3, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a verb that shows up exactly once in every book you own. You would have exactly one sentence to reconstruct its meaning from, and reasonable readers could disagree. That is the situation with the verb translated strive here.
Because the verb describing what God's Spirit will stop doing to humanity shows up exactly once in the Hebrew Old Testament and nowhere else, and translation committees have split between two genuinely different pictures, one of God arguing with people and one of God's presence simply not staying.
Most versions read strive or contend, following one proposed derivation. A minority tradition reads abide or remain, following a different proposed derivation, giving a noticeably different picture of what is ending.
יָדוֹן yadon (roots proposed: דין din, judge, or דּוּן dun, remain) · H1777
Yadon shows up nowhere else in the Hebrew Old Testament outside this one verse. One proposal derives it from din, to judge or contend, giving strive or contend, God arguing with or opposing humanity's corruption. A second proposal derives it from a root meaning to remain or abide, giving my spirit will not remain in man forever, a statement about withdrawal of presence rather than a legal contest. Both derivations require reasoning from other roots rather than from other occurrences of this exact form.
English strive and English abide describe different relationships, contest versus presence, and a translator must choose one before an English reader ever sees the sentence. With only one occurrence to work from, Hebrew itself does not settle which picture is correct, and English cannot show that uncertainty within the text.
A word attested exactly once anywhere in a corpus is being reconstructed from etymology and context, not read off a body of established usage. Hold single-occurrence definitions more loosely than a lexicon's confident gloss might suggest.
Strive or contend fits a chapter about escalating human violence and portrays God as long-suffering rather than instantly punitive. Abide or remain fits a chapter about the Spirit's presence being withdrawn from corrupted humanity, closer to an exhaustion of patience than an argument. Both readings are defended by serious grammarians working from the same single data point.
- Only occurrence: Genesis 6:3
- din, to judge/contend, as one proposed root: standard lexicons
- An alternative root related to abiding/remaining, argued by other grammarians, given the word's singular attestation
