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 34:20
He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken. Quoted at John 19:36, itself echoing the Passover lamb's own unbroken bones.
Psalm 34:20, in every translation this tool compares.
English readers meeting John 19:36's claim, a bone of him shall not be broken, may not immediately connect it backward to this psalm, or further back still to the instructions for the Passover lamb, three texts chained together by one repeated detail most translations do not flag as connected.
Because this verse's promise that not one of the righteous sufferer's bones will be broken is quoted directly in John 19:36 about the crucifixion, itself deliberately echoing the Passover lamb regulation that none of its bones be broken, tying three separate texts into one chain of promise and fulfillment.
Every version reads not one of them is broken here and a bone of him shall not be broken at John 19:36, both accurate translations, but with no built-in cross-reference showing the deliberate three-way echo running from Exodus through this psalm to the Gospel.
עֹצְמוֹתָיו etzmotav (bones) · H6106
The promise that the righteous sufferer's bones will be kept unbroken here is picked up explicitly at John 19:36, applied to the soldiers' decision not to break Jesus's legs, itself already echoing Exodus 12:46's regulation that none of the Passover lamb's bones be broken. John's Gospel draws all three together, casting Jesus's death in the vocabulary both of this psalm's righteous sufferer and of the Passover lamb whose blood marked Israel's houses for deliverance.
English readers of John 19:36 alone may recognize the quotation as scriptural without necessarily tracing it back through this specific psalm to the even older Passover regulation, a three-text chain that requires deliberately cross-referencing rather than reading any one passage in isolation.
When the New Testament explicitly quotes an Old Testament verse using fulfilled language, check whether that Old Testament verse is itself already echoing something still earlier in the Hebrew Bible. Fulfillment quotations are sometimes the last link in a chain, not the first.
The wording of both passages translates without dispute. What's easy to miss is the full three-part chain, Passover lamb, righteous sufferer, crucified Jesus, that a reader encountering only one of the three texts at a time would likely never notice.
- John 19:36's explicit quotation
- Exodus 12:46's Passover lamb regulation, 'neither shall ye break a bone thereof'
