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 119
Thy law. The Hebrew word is instruction, and the psalm has eight words for it.
Psalm 119:1-8, in every translation this tool compares.
Rules and guidance describe the same advice from a parent, and produce two completely different feelings about the parent. One word, and you decide in advance what kind of relationship you are reading about.
Because the longest chapter in the Bible is built on eight near-synonyms for one idea, and the English word chosen for the main one carries a legal weight the Hebrew does not. Read it as law and the psalm becomes incomprehensible as devotion.
Every version reads law for torah. Some footnote instruction or teaching. None changes the main rendering, because law is entrenched.
תּוֹרָה torah · H8451
Torah is from a root meaning to throw or point, and means instruction or direction. The psalm cycles eight terms through 176 verses: torah, edut, piqqudim, choq, mitzvah, mishpat, davar and imrah, roughly instruction, testimony, precepts, statute, commandment, judgment, word and saying. The variety is the point, and so is the affection.
English law means legislation and courts. Hebrew torah includes narrative, poetry and genealogy, none of which is legislation. The Septuagint chose nomos and English inherited the narrowing.
When a psalm expresses delight in something that sounds like paperwork, suspect the English noun before you suspect the psalmist.
Instruction is accurate and loses two thousand years of usage. Law is entrenched and misdirects. No major version has been willing to move, and the footnote is the compromise everyone has settled on.
- The root yarah, to throw or shoot, hence to point or direct: Genesis 46:28; Exodus 15:25
- The eight terms cycling through Psalm 119; see any structural analysis of the acrostic
- Septuagint nomos, and the same narrowing carried into Paul's vocabulary
