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.
Mark 12:28-30
Deuteronomy lists three. Jesus lists four. The extra one tells you how the first century read the original.
Mark 12:28-30, in every translation this tool compares.
Someone quotes a family saying back to you and slips in an extra word. They are not correcting it. They are telling you what it always meant, in case you had stopped hearing it.
Because Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and adds a word that is not in it. That addition is the strongest evidence anywhere that the first century read the Hebrew heart as the seat of thinking, and it is sitting in plain sight in an English Bible where nobody notices it.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.
No version can flag this, because both passages are translated accurately and the discrepancy only appears when you lay them side by side.
καρδία kardia · G2588 / διάνοια dianoia · G1271
Deuteronomy 6:5 has heart, soul and strength. Mark has heart, soul, mind and strength. The added word is dianoia, mind or understanding. The Greek kardia had narrowed toward the emotional by the first century in a way Hebrew levav never had, so a Greek-speaking audience hearing kardia alone would have missed the thinking half of the original.
Neither translation is wrong. The gap opens because Hebrew put thought in the heart and Greek was already moving it out, so the same command needed four words in Greek to say what three said in Hebrew.
A mismatch between a New Testament quotation and its Old Testament source is data, not an error. Sometimes the writer is using the Septuagint. Sometimes, as here, he's spelling out a word his audience would have taken too narrowly.
There is no translation choice being made. The evidence only shows up when you lay two accurate translations side by side, which is a skill worth more than any single word study.
- Deuteronomy 6:5 in Hebrew: levav, nephesh, meod
- Mark 12:30 and the parallel at Luke 10:27, which lists the same four terms in a different order; Matthew 22:37 keeps only three (heart, soul, mind) and drops strength
- Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, on leb as the seat of intellect and will
