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 51:10b
Renew a right spirit within me. The same noun runs through the next two verses meaning different things.
Psalm 51:10, in every translation this tool compares.
A paragraph that uses one word three times is building something. A translation that renders it three different ways leaves you reading three sentences that happen to be next to each other.
Because the second half of the line asks for a right spirit, and the next two verses use the same noun twice more in two different senses. Three occurrences of one word in three verses, rendered three ways.
Versions read a right spirit, a steadfast spirit, a loyal spirit. Verse 11 reads thy holy Spirit and verse 12 reads a free or willing spirit. Same noun each time.
רוּחַ ruach · H7307
Ruach appears at verses 10, 11 and 12: a steadfast ruach in the man, God's holy ruach not taken away, and a willing ruach to uphold him. The psalm is asking for an exchange of inner dispositions and grounding it in God's own. In Hebrew that is one word repeating. In English it is a human attitude, then the third person of the Trinity, then a human attitude again.
English spirit covers the human inner life and the divine person, but readers switch registers between the two and the repetition reads as coincidence rather than structure.
Count the repetitions before you interpret the passage. Hebrew poetry argues by repeating a word, and English translation argues by varying it.
No dispute. Every version renders all three accurately and none of them can show that they are one word.
- ruach three times at Psalm 51:10, 11, 12
- The same triple range at Ezekiel 37 and Genesis 1:2
- nakon, from kun, to be firm or established
