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 39:6
Every man walketh in a vain shew. Betselem, in an image, the identical word as image of God at Genesis 1:27.
Psalm 39:6, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a poem describing people as merely walking shadows, using the very word your culture reserves for the divine spark supposedly placed in every human being. That collision, exalted origin and shadowy transience sharing one word, is exactly what this verse may be doing in Hebrew.
Because every man walketh in a vain shew uses the exact same Hebrew word, tselem, image, already met describing humanity made in God's own image at Genesis 1:26-27, so the psalm may be making a pointed, bitter echo: the same word naming our exalted origin now naming our shadowy, insubstantial transience.
Most versions read vain shew, phantom, or shadow, all reasonable renderings of tselem's more common sense of image or likeness applied here to something insubstantial, but none can show the reader that this is the identical word from Genesis 1's creation account.
צֶלֶם tselem · H6754
Tselem is the same word rendered image at Genesis 1:26-27, humanity made betselem elohim, in the image of God. Here the psalmist says every man walks betselem, in an image, or, read more literally, as a mere image or shadow of himself, insubstantial and passing. Whether the psalmist intends a deliberate echo of Genesis or is simply using tselem's separate, attested sense of shadow or phantom is debated, but the shared vocabulary invites the connection: the very word for humanity's God-given dignity also names our fleeting insubstantiality.
English vain shew or phantom reads as ordinary, unremarkable vocabulary for transience; it carries no built-in echo of a creation account written many psalms earlier in the same collection, so the potential irony, exalted image-bearers reduced to mere images of themselves, is invisible without knowing both passages use the identical Hebrew word.
When a psalm uses vocabulary shared with Genesis's foundational statements about humanity, check whether the poet is drawing a deliberate, even ironic, contrast rather than simply reusing common religious language. Shared roots across very different genres are often doing real interpretive work.
Reading tselem here as unrelated to Genesis 1 treats it as simply the ordinary word for a fleeting shadow or phantom. Reading it as a deliberate echo turns the verse into a pointed reflection on human transience measured against human dignity, using the very word that named that dignity in the first place.
- tselem as image of God: Genesis 1:26-27
- tselem's separate attested sense of shadow/phantom: standard Hebrew lexicons
