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 37:11
The meek shall inherit the earth. Anav ranges from humble in spirit to poor and afflicted in circumstance.
Psalm 37:11, in every translation this tool compares.
English meek names a personality trait, gentle, unassuming. Hebrew anav can mean that, but just as often names an economic and social condition, the poor, the oppressed, people ground down by circumstance rather than people who have simply cultivated humility. The verse could be promising a virtue's reward or the poor's vindication, or both at once.
Because the word translated meek, anav, spans humble in disposition and poor or afflicted in social and economic circumstance, and which sense dominates changes whether the promise is chiefly about a virtue or chiefly about a reversal of fortune for the oppressed.
Most English versions read meek or humble, emphasizing character. Some scholars and a minority of translations lean toward poor or oppressed, emphasizing social and economic reversal, closer to the concerns voiced throughout the rest of Psalm 37 about the wicked prospering at others' expense.
עָנָו anav · H6035
Anav describes both a virtue, humility or gentleness, and a social condition, poverty or affliction, throughout the Hebrew Bible, including of Moses at Numbers 12:3. The Septuagint's Greek praeis, gentle, behind Matthew 5:5's meek, leans toward the virtue sense, but the wider context of Psalm 37, contrasting the wicked's temporary prosperity with the eventual vindication of those they oppress, fits the social-economic sense just as naturally, perhaps more so.
English meek carries almost entirely personality-trait connotations today, gentle, unassertive, so a modern reader easily misses that the same Hebrew word could equally, or primarily, be naming the economically and socially oppressed, whose inheritance of the land is a reversal of fortune, not merely a reward for good temperament.
If a Hebrew word spans both a character trait and a social-economic condition, check the surrounding context for which sense is doing the heavier lifting, rather than defaulting to whichever sense your own culture's translation tradition has favored.
Meek or humble, following the Septuagint's praeis and most English tradition, reads the promise as a reward for personal virtue. Poor or oppressed, following anav's equally attested social sense and Psalm 37's larger theme of reversal for the oppressed, reads the same promise as vindication for those ground down by the wicked the psalm spends most of its length condemning.
- anav of Moses: Numbers 12:3
- Septuagint praeis behind Matthew 5:5's quotation
- The social-economic sense of anav elsewhere: Isaiah 61:1; Amos 2:7
