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 1:14b
Full of grace and truth. That is a Hebrew pair, and it comes from Exodus 34.
John 1:14, in every translation this tool compares.
Come good and early. That is not two instructions. Good and early is one idea said with two words, and nobody hears it as a list. English does this and then forgets it does. Hebrew does it constantly.
Because it is a quotation and it does not look like one. Learning to recognise a Hebrew word-pair is what lets you hear the Old Testament under a Greek sentence, and this pair comes from the single most important self-description God gives in the Torah.
full of grace and truth.
All English versions read grace and truth. None can show that the phrase is a quotation of a formula.
χάρις charis · G5485 / ἀλήθεια aletheia · G225
Charis kai aletheia is widely taken as the Greek rendering of hesed we-emet, steadfast love and faithfulness, the pair God speaks over himself in Exodus 34:6 when Moses asks to see his glory. John has just said we beheld his glory. The allusion is to a specific scene.
English grace and truth reads as two abstract nouns joined by and. In Hebrew the pair is a fixed formula with a single referent, covenant loyalty, and the second word steadies the first.
When two abstract nouns are joined in the New Testament and both are common Septuagint words, check whether they are a Hebrew word-pair rather than two separate ideas. Hebrew often says one thing with two words.
Nothing in the translation is contested. What is contested is how firmly to press the Exodus 34 allusion, and the glory language in the same verse is the strongest argument for pressing it.
- Exodus 34:6, rav hesed we-emet, in the Septuagint polyeleos kai alethinos
- John 1:17 names Moses in the next verse, which supports the allusion
