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 4:10
Living water. In ordinary speech it means running water from a spring.
John 4:10, in every translation this tool compares.
Running water. In a house that means plumbing. Say it to someone at a well and it means a spring rather than a cistern. Same words, two worlds.
Because the woman answers as though he means well water and he means something else, and the misunderstanding only works because the phrase has a plain everyday sense.
Every version reads living water.
ὕδωρ ζῶν hudor zon
Hudor zon is the standard phrase for fresh flowing water as against still cistern water, and it carries ritual significance in purification law. The woman hears the ordinary sense and Jesus is using it for something else, which is the same technique as anothen in chapter three.
English living water is not an idiom at all, so it reads as poetry from the first word and the double meaning collapses.
John builds several conversations on a phrase with a plain sense and a second one. Find the plain sense first or the scene stops working.
No English version renders it differently; the ambiguity is lost before any translation choice even enters the picture.
- Leviticus 14:5-6 requires running water, literally living water
- Jeremiah 2:13; 17:13 use the image of God
- John 7:38 returns to it
