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.
olam
A long duration, an age, the far horizon. Usually flattened to forever.
Genesis 17:7, in every translation this tool compares.
That will take forever. You do not mean infinity. English already uses its eternity word for a long unspecified stretch.
Because everlasting covenant and everlasting priesthood are built on a word that means as far as you can see, which is a horizon rather than a guarantee of infinity.
Versions read forever, everlasting, ancient, or of old.
עוֹלָם olam · H5769
Olam covers the distant past and the distant future, whatever lies beyond the horizon of view. It is used of a slave serving his master olam, which is plainly a lifetime, and of God's covenant.
English forever means unending, so a word about an unseen horizon becomes a claim about infinity.
When a word is rendered both ancient and everlasting in the same Bible, it is about distance in either direction rather than about duration without end.
Forever and everlasting are the majority renderings; ancient and of old appear where the past is in view.
- olam of a lifetime: Exodus 21:6; 1 Samuel 1:22
- olam of the distant past: Genesis 6:4; Isaiah 63:9
- olam of God's covenant: Genesis 17:7
