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 23:6a
I will dwell in the house of the LORD. The consonants also allow I will return.
Psalm 23:6, in every translation this tool compares.
Write RD and let a reader supply the vowels. Read, red, ride, rode, rude. Hebrew was written without vowels for centuries, and the marks that fix them were added long after the words were.
Because the last line of the most memorised psalm in the language may say something other than what everyone recites, and the difference is one vowel that was not written down for a thousand years.
Every English version reads dwell. The footnotes in the NET and a handful of academic translations note the alternative.
שׁוּב shuv · H7725 / יָשַׁב yashav · H3427
The Masoretic pointing, weshavti, actually parses most straightforwardly as a form of shuv, to return, giving I will return to the house of the LORD. The traditional dwell reading instead takes the word as built from yashav, to dwell or sit, the reading nearly every version and most of Jewish and Christian interpretive tradition has long assumed, even though the pointed form's more natural derivation is from shuv; Hebrew grammarians continue to debate how to explain the mismatch. The vowel points were added by the Masoretes between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries.
English has to print one word. There is no way to render a sentence that is undecided between dwelling and returning without a footnote.
Hebrew vowel points are a later layer. When a translation footnote offers a completely different verb rather than a different shade, the consonants are usually the reason.
Dwell has the ancient versions, the Septuagint included, and nearly universal traditional usage behind it, even though the pointed Hebrew form more naturally parses as shuv, return. Return follows the pointed consonants' more straightforward grammatical derivation and fits a psalm about being led back, but stays the minority reading precisely because dwell is so deeply established. Dwell remains the better-supported reading on tradition and versional evidence; the grammar of the pointing itself is the part that actually favors return.
- Masoretic pointing weshavti; the unpointed consonants permit both roots
- Septuagint reads dwelling, supporting the Masoretic pointing
- The Masoretic vowel system dates from roughly the seventh to tenth centuries AD
