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 9:6
Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The Hebrew word order is a mirror around the center.
Genesis 9:6, in every translation this tool compares.
English can say the punishment fits the crime, but that is commentary, a sentence about the sentence. Hebrew builds the fit directly into word order: sheds, blood, man, man, blood, shed, the same words running forward and then backward around a hinge in the middle.
Because the sentence announcing the death penalty for murder is built as a mirror, the same words appearing in reverse order on either side of the verb, so the grammar itself performs the symmetry the sentence describes, crime answered by an equal and opposite consequence.
Every version reads whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed, correctly following the sense, but English sentence order, subject before verb, cannot reproduce a mirror shape the way Hebrew's more flexible word order can.
שֹׁפֵךְ דַּם הָאָדָם shofekh dam ha'adam (chiastic word order) · H8210 + H1818 + H120
The Hebrew runs shofekh dam ha'adam, ba'adam damo yishafekh: sheds blood-of-man, by-man his-blood shall-be-shed. The verb for shedding opens the first half and closes the second, the noun for blood and the noun for man swap positions around the center, a structure grammarians call a chiasm, an A-B-C-C'-B'-A' pattern that visually and aurally enacts the very reciprocity, blood for blood, that the sentence is announcing.
English word order is comparatively fixed, subject-verb-object, so it cannot rearrange itself into a mirror shape the way Hebrew's freer word order allows here. A translation can state the principle of equal retribution but cannot make the sentence's shape perform it the way the Hebrew does.
Look for chiastic word order whenever a verse states a principle of exact correspondence, reciprocity, or reversal. Hebrew narrative and law use mirrored word order as a rhetorical device in its own right, not merely as a stylistic accident, and it rarely survives translation intact.
The legal content itself isn't contested; every version agrees on the sense. What is lost is entirely formal: the chiastic shape itself, which is not a matter of word choice but of an arrangement English syntax is not free enough to reproduce.
- The chiastic ABCC'B'A' structure of the Hebrew clause: standard treatments of Hebrew poetic and legal syntax
- Genesis 1:26-27's image of God as the stated ground for the principle
