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 141:5
Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness… for yet my prayer also shall be in their calamities. A notoriously difficult Hebrew text; ancient and modern versions diverge sharply.
Psalm 141:5, in every translation this tool compares.
Most difficult verses in the Bible are difficult because a word is rare or a construction is ambiguous. This verse is difficult on a larger scale: the Hebrew sentence structure itself seems disrupted, producing a cluster of renderings, about oil, about the wicked, about prayer amid calamity, that do not simply vary in nuance but sometimes struggle to agree on the verse's basic subject.
Because the Hebrew of let the righteous smite me… but let not my head be void of it is widely regarded by scholars as among the most textually difficult passages in the entire Psalter, with ancient versions and modern translations diverging so sharply that some renderings barely resemble one another.
The King James reads let not my head refuse the oil of the righteous's rebuke as a kindness, continuing with a difficult clause about prayer during the wicked's calamities. Other versions rearrange the clauses substantially, and some modern scholarly translations mark the Hebrew here as simply uncertain rather than offering a confident rendering.
רֹאשִׁי rosh'i (my head), verse marked as textually uncertain in the critical apparatus
Hebrew scholars and commentators, including the editors of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia's critical apparatus, flag this verse's text as corrupt or seriously disturbed, likely the result of a scribal error at some point in the transmission process that later copyists could not fully repair. The Septuagint's Greek rendering diverges enough from the Masoretic Hebrew to confirm that the difficulty is ancient, not a modern translation problem, and it does not by itself resolve what the original Hebrew said.
English readers meeting any single confident-sounding translation of this verse would never guess that the underlying Hebrew is treated by specialists as one of the more textually uncertain verses in the Psalms, closer to an educated reconstruction than to a settled rendering.
When a verse's ancient versions diverge unusually sharply from one another and from the Masoretic Hebrew, and a critical apparatus flags the text itself as uncertain, treat any single confident English rendering with real caution. Not every translation difficulty is resolvable by better Hebrew knowledge alone; sometimes the transmitted text itself is the problem.
No single rendering can claim confident priority here; the King James, and the many modern versions that diverge from it and from each other, are all working with a Hebrew text that specialists themselves regard as disturbed. The point here is to flag the difficulty rather than to adjudicate between renderings that the evidence does not clearly decide.
- Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia's critical apparatus flagging this verse as textually disturbed
- Septuagint's substantially divergent Greek rendering
- Standard commentaries treating this as among the most difficult texts in the Psalter
