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 16:10
Neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Shachat most literally means pit, the grave, with decay only as an extension.
Psalm 16:10, in every translation this tool compares.
English corruption names a process, decaying, rotting. Hebrew shachat more literally names a place, the pit or grave itself. Saying someone will not see the pit is a slightly different claim from saying they will not experience decay, though the two ideas sit close enough together that the shift from one sense to the other carries real theological weight.
Because the Hebrew word behind corruption most literally means pit, the grave itself, and only carries the extended sense of bodily decay by association, a real translation choice Acts 2 leans on heavily when applying this verse to the resurrection.
Most versions read corruption or decay, following the extended, figurative sense the Septuagint's Greek diaphthora already carries and that Peter's speech in Acts 2:27 explicitly builds its resurrection argument on.
שַׁחַת shachat (pit; extended: corruption) · H7845
Shachat's root sense is pit, the grave as a physical location; its extended, figurative sense as corruption or decay is a natural association, since a body left in a pit decays, but it is genuinely a step beyond the word's most literal meaning. The Septuagint translates it with Greek diaphthora, decay or corruption, and Peter's sermon in Acts 2:27, 31 builds directly on that Greek sense to argue Jesus's body did not decay in the tomb, an argument that depends on reading shachat through its Greek translation's extended sense rather than its bare Hebrew literal one.
English corruption commits to the figurative, decay-focused sense; a more literal English rendering, the pit or the grave, would describe David's hope in terms of place rather than process, a real difference in emphasis that the New Testament's own use of this verse leans into rather than flattens.
A New Testament argument that depends on one specific sense of an Old Testament word is worth checking twice: is that sense the word's most literal one, or an extension the Greek translation makes more explicit than the Hebrew does on its own? Both can be legitimate, but they are not identical claims.
Corruption or decay follows the Septuagint and the New Testament's own argument, reading the verse as a resurrection promise about the body not decaying. The pit or the grave keeps closer to shachat's most literal Hebrew sense, a hope about not remaining in the place of the dead, which decay is naturally associated with but is not, strictly, the same claim.
- Septuagint diaphthora, decay/corruption, behind Acts 2:27, 31
- shachat's literal sense as pit/grave: standard Hebrew lexicons
- Peter's argument in Acts 2:29-31 explicitly building on this verse
