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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 9:4
Flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. Life and blood are named with the same word, nephesh.
Genesis 9:4, in every translation this tool compares.
English keeps blood and life as separate ideas connected only by biology class. This verse states outright, in one Hebrew word doing both jobs, that the blood simply is the life, not a symbol of it or a carrier of it, but the thing itself.
Because the reason given for the new prohibition on eating blood is that the blood is the nephesh, the same word translated soul or life earlier in Genesis, so the verse is making a direct claim about where life resides that English blood and English life do not obviously connect.
Every version reads some form of flesh with the life, which is the blood, correctly, though the repetition of nephesh for both life and, by implication, the animal's very self is not obviously visible in English's two separate words, life and blood.
נֶפֶשׁ nephesh · H5315
Nephesh, the same word behind a living soul at Genesis 2:7 and the living creatures of chapter 1, is used here to identify the blood directly: basar benaphsho damo, flesh with its life, its blood. The equation, blood is nephesh, becomes the basis for Israel's later dietary law and sacrificial system, restated explicitly at Leviticus 17:11, the life of the flesh is in the blood.
English requires two separate words, life and blood, connected by a verb, to say what Hebrew says by using one word, nephesh, for both. The tight equation Hebrew makes directly, blood is nephesh, becomes in English a looser statement about one thing being associated with another.
When a text says X is Y using the same underlying word for both sides of the sentence, treat the equation as stronger than an English translation using two different vocabulary words will suggest. Nephesh here is not merely near blood; the text names them with one word.
Every version agrees on the basic sense, that blood represents or carries life. The stronger reading, that nephesh here identifies rather than merely associates blood with life, is a matter of how tightly the single Hebrew word is allowed to bind the two ideas together.
- The same equation restated: Leviticus 17:11, 'the life of the flesh is in the blood'
- nephesh chayyah at Genesis 2:7 and Genesis 1:20-30
