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 103:12
As far as the east is from the west. A deliberately chosen pair of directions with no meeting point, unlike north and south.
Psalm 103:12, in every translation this tool compares.
Travel far enough north and you reach a point where north stops meaning anything, the pole; the same happens going south. Travel east, though, and you are still traveling east forever; there is no eastern pole where the direction runs out. The psalm's choice of east and west, not north and south, pictures a separation with literally no endpoint.
Because the psalm specifically picks east and west rather than north and south to describe how far God removes our sins, and that choice is not arbitrary: north and south have fixed endpoints, the poles, where the directions meet, while east and west never converge anywhere on earth.
Every version reads east and west, accurately translating the specific pair of directions the Hebrew names, though without necessarily prompting a reader to notice why this particular pair, rather than north and south, was chosen.
מִזְרָח וּמַעֲרָב mizrach u-ma'arav · H4217 + H4628
Mizrach, east, and ma'arav, west, name directions that never converge anywhere on the earth's surface, unlike north and south, which meet at the poles. The poetic choice is precise: describing the removal of sin as far as the east is from the west pictures a genuinely infinite, ever-increasing distance, not simply a very large but ultimately bounded one, the way north and south, converging at fixed points, would have implied.
English readers hear east and west as simply one reasonable pair of opposite directions among several, north and south being equally obvious alternatives, with no built-in signal that the poet specifically avoided the pair that has actual meeting points on a globe.
When Hebrew poetry chooses one pair of opposites over an equally available alternative, ask whether the specific pair chosen carries a meaning the alternative would not. Here, the choice of east/west over north/south is doing real conceptual work: describing infinite rather than merely large distance.
East and west as the rendering is not in dispute. What is worth making explicit is the deliberate reasoning behind the choice, a pairing of directions with no geometric meeting point, that most readers absorb as simply poetic without registering as a precise, considered image.
- North and south converging at the poles, a basic geographic fact underlying the poetic choice
- Standard commentary observation on this verse's specific choice of directions
