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 8:4
The mountains of Ararat. A region, plural mountains, not a single named peak.
Genesis 8:4, in every translation this tool compares.
The ark landed in the Rockies names a mountain range. The ark landed on Pikes Peak names one mountain. Genesis says the first kind of thing, and centuries of popular tradition, and most maps and paintings, quietly upgraded it to the second.
Because the verse never says Mount Ararat, a single peak, but the mountains of Ararat, a whole highland region corresponding to a historical kingdom, and the popular picture of one specific volcano is a later identification the text itself does not make.
Every version reads the mountains of Ararat, plural, correctly matching the Hebrew. Popular usage, hymns, and most modern maps nonetheless speak of Mount Ararat, a single volcanic peak in eastern Turkey, as though that were what the verse specifies.
הָרֵי אֲרָרָט harei Ararat (הַר har, mountain, plural construct) · H2022 + H780
Ararat corresponds to Urartu, a real historical kingdom attested in Assyrian records, centered on the highlands around Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey, Armenia, and northwestern Iran, roughly the ninth through sixth centuries BC. The Hebrew names a mountainous region, not a single summit; the specific volcanic peak now called Mount Ararat received that name only later, as a traditional identification laid onto the biblical region rather than a claim the text itself makes.
English the mountains of Ararat is grammatically plain, but centuries of art, hymnody, and geography teaching have collapsed the region into a single named mountain, an identification English readers absorb from culture rather than from the actual wording of the verse, which never narrows the landing site that far.
Check whether a familiar geographic identification is actually in the text or was supplied later by tradition. A named region in Hebrew narrative is not automatically a named peak, however confidently later maps draw it that way.
Every version renders the wording the same way, mountains, plural; that much is settled. The dispute, where there is one, is entirely about a post-biblical identification, whether the traditional Mount Ararat is the right guess for where in the ancient region of Urartu the ark actually came to rest, a question the Hebrew text does not itself try to answer.
- Ararat corresponding to the kingdom of Urartu in Assyrian records: standard ancient Near Eastern historical geography
- The mountains of Ararat as a region, not a single peak, in the Hebrew text
- The specific modern Mount Ararat as a later traditional identification, not a biblical claim
