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 12:3
Ointment of spikenard, very costly. The adjective is a word nobody has settled.
John 12:3, in every translation this tool compares.
A recipe with one ingredient nobody can identify. You can still cook it. You just cannot say what it was.
Because the description of the perfume contains a word that may mean pure, or genuine, or liquid, or may be a place name, and no one knows.
Versions read pure nard, genuine nard, or expensive perfume made of pure nard.
πιστικός pistikos · G4101
Pistikes qualifies the nard. Proposals include faithful hence genuine, from pistis; liquid, from a different root; a place of origin; and a trade term. All are guesses and the lexicons say so.
English has to print something, and pure is the usual guess with no marker that it is one.
When a lexicon entry lists four unrelated possibilities, the word is undetermined and your translation has quietly chosen one.
Pure nard is the majority modern rendering.
- pistikos at John 12:3 and Mark 14:3 only
- The competing proposals set out in BDAG
- No secure attestation outside these two verses
