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.
psuche
Soul. The same word is rendered life a few verses away, and it translates Hebrew nephesh.
Matthew 16:26, in every translation this tool compares.
Not a soul in sight. You mean not a person. English still has the wider sense and only uses it in fixed phrases.
Because the verse about gaining the world and losing your soul uses the same noun that is rendered life in the sentence immediately before it, and an English reader reads two different words.
Versions read soul or life depending on the verse, from one Greek word.
ψυχή psuche · G5590
Psuche covers the animating life, the self, and the person. It is the Septuagint's word for Hebrew nephesh, which carries the same range and is used of animals. It is not a technical term for an immaterial part.
English soul carries a Greek philosophical and later Christian freight the biblical usage does not require, and life sounds too plain where soul sounds weighty.
When one word is rendered two ways in adjoining verses, read the passage with a single rendering throughout and see what changes.
Soul and life are both majority renderings in their own contexts, and every version switches between them.
- Matthew 16:25-26 uses psuche four times, rendered life then soul
- psuche for nephesh throughout the Septuagint
- Genesis 1:20-30 uses nephesh of animals
