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 6:51-58
Whoso eateth my flesh. The verb changes at verse 54 to a word for chewing.
John 6:51-58, in every translation this tool compares.
Eat and chew. If a speaker switched from the first to the second halfway through an argument, you would hear it, and you would know he was pressing.
Because John switches from the ordinary verb for eating to a blunter one in the middle of the discourse, and every English version prints eat for both, which erases the escalation.
Every version reads eat throughout.
τρώγω trogo · G5176
Verses 50 to 53 use phago, the ordinary verb for eating. From verse 54 onward John switches to trogo, a verb that can carry a more physical, audible sense of eating but that Matthew 24:38 uses for entirely ordinary eating and drinking, so the switch by itself is not proof of a deliberate shift to gnawing. The switch coinciding with the offence in verse 60 is the stronger argument that it is doing rhetorical work.
English has chew, but it is too physical to print in a solemn discourse, so every version smooths it to eat and the escalation vanishes.
When an audience reacts badly at a specific verse, look at what changed in the verses just before it.
Eat is universal in English versions. The verb change is noted in commentaries, and the NET Bible's own translator's notes flag it too, while cautioning that the switch may simply reflect a stylistic preference for one verb over the other rather than a deliberate escalation to gnawing.
- phago at John 6:50, 51, 52, 53
- trogo at John 6:54, 56, 57, 58
- trogo used for entirely ordinary eating and drinking, not gnawing, at Matthew 24:38
- The disciples' reaction at John 6:60
- NET Bible translator's note on John 6:54 flagging the verb switch and its stylistic-variation alternative
