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 3:8
The wind blows where it wills. Wind and Spirit are the same Greek word, and the sentence needs both at once.
John 3:8, in every translation this tool compares.
Suppose your language had one word for a breeze and a person's inner life. A sentence could slide from one to the other and land as a single thought. Translate it into English and you get two nouns and a jump.
Because the sentence is a pun that only works in Greek, and in English it reads as an odd change of subject. One word does both halves.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof… so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
Every version reads wind in the first half and Spirit in the second, because there is no alternative. A few footnote that the Greek is one word.
πνεῦμα pneuma · G4151
Pneuma covers wind, breath and spirit. So does Hebrew ruach. Jesus is saying one thing about one word: it goes where it wants, you hear it, you cannot track it, and that is what being born of it is like. In Greek the comparison is a single image. In English it is a simile between two unrelated things.
English split what Greek and Hebrew both kept together, so a pun becomes an analogy and loses most of its force.
When a verse compares two things that share a word in the original, it is usually not a comparison at all. It is one word doing two jobs, and the translation has manufactured the gap.
No translator has an option. The only decision is whether to footnote it, and most do not.
- pneuma as wind at Hebrews 1:7 quoting Psalm 104:4
- Hebrew ruach carries the identical range; see Ezekiel 37
- Nicodemus is a teacher of Israel, verse 10, so the Hebrew word is assumed background
