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 2:17
The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up. The verb is consume, and the tense was changed in the quotation.
John 2:17, in every translation this tool compares.
Quote a song lyric back at someone but shift it from it broke me to it will break me, and you have said something the original did not.
Because John quotes Psalm 69 and alters the tense from past to future, which is a deliberate move and invisible unless you check the psalm.
Every version reads consume or eat up.
κατεσθίω katesthio · G2719
Katesthio is to eat up, devour, consume. The Septuagint of Psalm 69:9 has the aorist, it consumed me. John has the future, it will consume me, which turns a description of past devotion into a prediction.
English can carry the tense, but a reader has to look up the psalm to see that the tense was changed.
Line up a New Testament quotation against its Old Testament source instead of assuming they match. The differences are almost always deliberate and almost never flagged.
Consume is the majority rendering and no version notes the tense change in the text.
- Psalm 69:9, quoted here
- Septuagint aorist against John's future
- Psalm 69 quoted elsewhere: John 15:25; Romans 15:3
