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 118:22
The head stone of the corner. Either the foundation stone set first, or the capstone set last at the very top.
Psalm 118:22, in every translation this tool compares.
English cornerstone today usually suggests a foundation, the first stone laid, everything built outward from it. But rosh, head, can just as naturally suggest the topmost position, a capstone or keystone placed last to complete an arch or wall. The Hebrew phrase does not clearly specify which end of the building process is meant.
Because head of the corner could mean either the foundational cornerstone set first, the base everything else rests on, or the capstone or keystone set last at the very top, two structurally opposite positions in a building that carry very different implications for what kind of rejection-then-honor this verse is describing.
Most versions read cornerstone, assuming the foundational sense. Some scholars argue for capstone or keystone instead, the crowning stone rather than the base, and note that the Greek phrase quoted in the New Testament, kephale gonias, head of the corner, preserves the same ambiguity rather than resolving it.
רֹאשׁ פִּנָּה rosh pinnah · H7218 + H6438
Rosh pinnah, head of the corner, could describe either the first stone set at a building's foundation, establishing the entire structure's alignment, or the final stone set at the top of an arch or wall, completing rather than beginning the construction. Both are attested architectural uses of similar terminology, and scholars including R.T. France and Ulrich Luz have argued that Matthew's own quotation of this verse deliberately keeps both images alive rather than committing to one.
English cornerstone has settled almost entirely into the foundational sense in modern usage, a building's first and most important stone; readers rarely consider that the Hebrew, and the Greek that quotes it in the New Testament, may instead or additionally be picturing a capstone crowning a structure already built, a different and arguably more dramatic image of exaltation after rejection.
When an architectural metaphor is quoted repeatedly across Scripture, check whether the underlying term specifies which part of the building process is meant before assuming the modern default sense. Ancient building vocabulary did not always map onto modern architectural categories the way translation can imply.
Cornerstone, the foundational reading, pictures the rejected stone becoming the very basis the whole structure depends on from the ground up. Capstone or keystone, the completion reading, pictures the rejected stone becoming the final, crowning piece that finishes and holds together a structure already otherwise built, arguably a more dramatic reversal from rejection to climactic honor.
- Septuagint's kephale gonias preserving the same ambiguity
- Matthew 21:42, Acts 4:11, and 1 Peter 2:7 all quoting this verse
- R.T. France and Ulrich Luz on the deliberate double reading in Matthew's use
