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.
Psalm 1:1
Blessed is the man. The Hebrew is a plural exclamation, not a description.
Psalm 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Lucky him! is not the same sentence as He is lucky. The first is something you shout. The second is something you assess. English can do both and the difference is in the punctuation more than the words.
Because the first word of the Psalter is not an adjective describing a man, and reading it as one turns an exclamation into a character assessment. Every Beatitude in the New Testament inherits the same problem.
All versions read blessed or happy. None renders it as an exclamation, because English has no comfortable way to shout a noun.
אַשְׁרֵי ashrei · H835
Ashrei is a plural noun in the construct, closer to O the happinesses of the man who. It is not the same word as barak, which is the verb for blessing someone. The psalm opens with a cry, not a definition, and the Septuagint's makarios carries that into the Beatitudes.
English blessed is a participle and behaves like an adjective. There is no English noun you can put at the front of a sentence to mean how fortunate is the one who.
When a verse opens with a single word that feels like a verdict, check whether the original is a noun. Hebrew exclamations often arrive as nouns and English converts them to adjectives without asking.
Every version agrees on blessed; nothing here is a rendering dispute. What needs correcting is the mental picture: readers routinely take blessed as a state conferred rather than a condition observed, and the grammar points the other way.
- ashrei elsewhere: Psalm 32:1-2; 41:1; 128:1; Proverbs 3:13
- barak, the verb to bless: Genesis 12:2-3; Numbers 6:24
- Septuagint makarios, the word behind the Beatitudes at Matthew 5:3-11
