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.
torah
Instruction, teaching. Law is a narrow rendering of a wide word.
Psalm 119:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Rules and guidance can describe the same advice from a parent and produce opposite feelings about the parent.
Because the longest chapter in the Bible is a love poem about it, which is incomprehensible if the word means legislation.
Every version reads law. Some footnote instruction or teaching.
תּוֹרָה torah · H8451
Torah is from a root meaning to throw or point, hence to direct. It covers narrative, poetry and genealogy as well as commandment, none of which is legislation.
English law means statutes and courts. The Septuagint chose nomos and English inherited the narrowing through Latin.
When a psalm expresses delight in something that sounds like paperwork, suspect the English noun before the psalmist.
Law is the entrenched majority rendering and no major version has moved.
- yarah, to throw or point: Genesis 46:28; Exodus 15:25
- Psalm 119 throughout
- Septuagint nomos, and Paul's vocabulary downstream of it
