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 95:8
As at Meribah, and as in the day of Massah. Both place names and, simultaneously, the ordinary words for strife and testing.
Psalm 95:8, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a warning that says don't act like you did at Grudge City, where Grudge City is both a real, mappable town and, transparently, a description of what happened there. Meribah, strife, and Massah, testing, work exactly that way, and English place names like Meribah carry none of that built-in description.
Because Meribah and Massah are both real place names and, at the same time, ordinary Hebrew words meaning strife and testing, so the warning harden not your heart as at Meribah is simultaneously a historical reference and a description, a double function English proper nouns cannot perform.
Every version reads Meribah and Massah as bare transliterated place names, correctly identifying the location from Exodus 17, but without conveying that both names are, simultaneously, the ordinary Hebrew words for the very behavior being condemned.
מְרִיבָה Meribah (רִיב riv, strive) / מַסָּה Massah (נָסָה nasah, test) · H4809 / H4532
Meribah, from the root riv, to strive or contend, and Massah, from nasah, to test, both name the specific location at Exodus 17:7 where Israel quarreled with Moses and tested the LORD over water, and both function as plain common nouns describing exactly that behavior. The Septuagint and Targum translations sometimes render them as common nouns, strife and testing, rather than transliterated place names, making the double function explicit in a way the Hebrew leaves the reader to notice on their own.
English Meribah and Massah are bare geographic labels with no built-in meaning, so the warning's rhetorical force, do not repeat the very thing this place is named for, is completely inaccessible unless a reader is told what the two names actually mean.
When a warning or exhortation invokes a place name from Israel's history, check whether the name itself is also a common noun describing the event that happened there. Hebrew place names frequently double as built-in commentary the way Meribah and Massah do here.
Meribah and Massah, transliterated as bare place names, is the standard and necessary translation, since English has no way to render a word as both proper noun and common noun simultaneously. What matters is recovering the double meaning that the bare transliteration necessarily discards.
- The original naming: Exodus 17:7
- Hebrews 3:7-19 and 4:3-7 quoting this psalm at length
- Septuagint and Targum rendering the names as common nouns in places
