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 51:5
Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. A statement about the depth of David's guilt, later read as a doctrine of universal inherited sin.
Psalm 51:5, in every translation this tool compares.
Saying I've been like this my whole life can be an ordinary way of confessing how deep-rooted your own fault is, without making a claim about every other person who has ever been born. Whether David's statement here works the same way, or is meant to describe something true of all humanity, is exactly what later theology had to decide.
Because David traces his sinfulness all the way back to his conception, a statement later Christian tradition, beginning with Augustine, built into the doctrine of original sin, though the Hebrew itself is making a more limited claim about the depth of David's own guilt, not necessarily a formal statement about universal inherited human depravity.
Every version reads shapen or brought forth in iniquity, correctly, and in sin did my mother conceive me, tracing sinfulness back to conception, though the theological weight placed on that tracing varies enormously between traditions.
חוֹלַלְתִּי chollalti (חוּל chul/chil, writhe in birth) · H2342
Chollalti, shapen or brought forth, uses a verb for the pains and process of birth, tracing David's sinfulness rhetorically back to the very beginning of his existence, a hyperbolic intensification of his guilt in a psalm of extreme penitence rather than, on its own, a formal doctrinal statement about the inherited sinfulness of every human being. Augustine's later use of this verse as a foundational proof-text for original sin reads a universal, systematic claim into language that in its immediate context is emphasizing the depth and totality of one particular man's guilt.
English shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, read through centuries of the doctrine of original sin, now carry theological freight for many readers that the Hebrew poetry's own immediate purpose, David's personal, hyperbolic confession of total guilt, may not itself have been making as a systematic claim about human nature in general.
When a devotional or poetic statement becomes a doctrinal proof-text centuries later, check what work the language was doing in its own immediate context before assuming the later doctrine is simply reading the text straight. Intensifying personal confession and systematic theological claim are not automatically the same thing.
Reading the verse as a personal, hyperbolic confession keeps it inside David's own psalm of extreme penitence, emphasizing the totality of his guilt rather than making a claim about anyone else. Reading it as a foundational statement about universal inherited sinfulness, the reading Augustine established and much later theology followed, extends the verse considerably beyond what its immediate poetic context by itself requires.
- chollalti's root sense tied to birth pains: standard Hebrew lexicons
- Augustine's use of this verse as a proof-text for original sin
- The verse's immediate context as extreme personal penitence, Psalm 51 as a whole
