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.
John 1:13
Not of blood. The Greek says bloods, plural, and the plural is a Hebrew way of speaking.
John 1:13, in every translation this tool compares.
He comes from money. English lets you say that about a family line. It does not let you say he comes from bloods, even though several other languages do exactly that. When a language makes a word plural where yours never would, the writer is probably thinking in another language.
Because an English reader cannot see it at all, and it is one of the small pieces of evidence that the writer thought in a Semitic language. The theology of the verse survives the flattening. The window into the author does not.
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
No English version renders the plural, because bloods is not English.
αἷμα haima · G129
The Greek is ex haimaton, a plural of haima. Greek does not ordinarily pluralize blood. Hebrew and Aramaic do, most clearly for bloodshed and blood-guilt; some interpreters extend the same idiom to descent and bloodline as the sense at work here, though that extension leans more on how this verse itself is read than on independent Hebrew examples of damim meaning lineage. Either way, this is Semitic idiom coming through a Greek sentence.
English blood has no meaningful plural. Bloods reads as an error, so every translator silently singularizes it, and the trace of the underlying idiom disappears.
When a Greek noun is plural where English would never pluralize it, suspect a Hebrew or Aramaic idiom underneath. The New Testament is Greek written largely by people who thought in a Semitic language.
The core observation is not in question: Greek does not ordinarily pluralize blood, and this plural is a trace of Semitic idiom. How far that idiom extends to a sense of lineage is a separate, more interpretive question. Either way, the loss is unavoidable and worth knowing about, because it is one of the small pieces of evidence that the writer's first language is showing.
- Hebrew damim, plural, for bloodshed and for blood-guilt: Exodus 22:2; 2 Samuel 16:8
- Standard treatments of Semitic interference in Johannine Greek
