H1613

• {"n":"Genesis 6:14b","s":"Gopher wood. A word used exactly once, and no one knows for certain what tree it names.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-6-14b","r":"Genesis 6:14","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads gopher wood, transliterating rather than translating, because there is no second occurrence anywhere to translate from. Some modern notes suggest cypress or another conifer as a guess, never as a certainty."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Every English Bible just says **gopher wood**, which sounds specific but is really a translator's shrug: this word occurs nowhere else, so rather than guess at a species, translators simply carried the Hebrew sound into English wholesale."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Gopher occurs only at Genesis 6:14, a true hapax legomenon with no other biblical or extrabiblical Hebrew attestation to compare it against. Every proposal for its botanical identity, cypress being the most common modern guess, is inferred from context, from shipbuilding plausibility, or from similar-sounding words in related languages, not from a second usage that would confirm it."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English gopher wood looks like a specific, confident botanical term, the way oak or cedar would be, but it is a transliteration standing in for total uncertainty. An English reader cannot tell the difference between a well-attested wood name and a total guess dressed in the same grammatical clothing."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"A transliterated word in an English Bible is often a flag, not a translation: it usually means no one has been confident enough to translate it. Treat every untranslated Hebrew term you meet in English as an invitation to ask why it was left that way."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"No real choice was available to translators; there is nothing to choose between since the word has no second occurrence to weigh against another. Every specific identification, cypress or otherwise, is an educated guess dressed as a footnote, not a finding."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d2\u05b9\u05bc\u05e4\u05b6\u05e8 gopher \u00b7 H1613"}],"src":["Only occurrence in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 6:14","No cognate attested in other ancient Northwest Semitic languages","Cypress as the most common modern scholarly guess, offered without certainty"]}