H1818

• {"n":"Genesis 4:10","s":"Thy brother's blood crieth. The Hebrew word is plural, bloods, and English cannot say that.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-4-10","r":"Genesis 4:10","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads blood, singular, because bloods is not usable English. The Septuagint and Vulgate also read the singular, so the flattening is not only a modern-English problem."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English blood does not pluralize the way apple does; **bloods** is not a normal English word at all. Hebrew can pluralize dam, blood, to intensify or generalize it, and does so here, and every English version has to silently drop the plural to produce a normal sentence."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Damim, the plural of dam, blood, appears here instead of the ordinary singular. The plural of this word elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible regularly marks bloodguilt, violence, or blood shed by violence, rather than blood in the ordinary biological sense, so the grammar itself is already doing some of the accusing before the sentence's meaning is even considered."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English blood is a mass noun with no plural that carries meaning the way Hebrew damim does; bloods simply is not English. A translator has no live option but to render the plural as a singular, which quietly erases a grammatical signal Hebrew readers would have registered automatically."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Some Hebrew nouns carry meaning in their plural form that has no equivalent plural in English. When a translation looks like a straightforward singular noun, check whether the Hebrew behind it might be plural, and if the plural itself might be idiomatic."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Translators never had a real choice here; blood is the only workable English rendering. The interesting question, whether the plural points to bloodguilt generally, multiple wounds, or Abel's unborn descendants, as one old Jewish tradition suggested, cannot be settled by grammar alone and is not something any English translation can flag either way."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d3\u05b8\u05bc\u05de\u05b4\u05d9\u05dd damim (\u05d3\u05b8\u05bc\u05dd dam) \u00b7 H1818"}],"src":["Damim in the sense of bloodguilt or violent bloodshed elsewhere: Exodus 22:2; 2 Samuel 16:8","Rabbinic tradition (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, echoed by Rashi) reading the plural as the blood of Abel's descendants","Standard lexicons (BDB, HALOT) distinguish dam, blood, from the idiomatic plural damim"]}
• {"n":"Genesis 9:6","s":"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The Hebrew word order is a mirror around the center.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-9-6","r":"Genesis 9:6","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed, correctly following the sense, but English sentence order, subject before verb, cannot reproduce a mirror shape the way Hebrew's more flexible word order can."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English can say **the punishment fits the crime**, but that is commentary, a sentence about the sentence. Hebrew builds the fit directly into word order: sheds, blood, man, man, blood, shed, the same words running forward and then backward around a hinge in the middle."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"The Hebrew runs shofekh dam ha'adam, ba'adam damo yishafekh: sheds blood-of-man, by-man his-blood shall-be-shed. The verb for shedding opens the first half and closes the second, the noun for blood and the noun for man swap positions around the center, a structure grammarians call a chiasm, an A-B-C-C'-B'-A' pattern that visually and aurally enacts the very reciprocity, blood for blood, that the sentence is announcing."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English word order is comparatively fixed, subject-verb-object, so it cannot rearrange itself into a mirror shape the way Hebrew's freer word order allows here. A translation can state the principle of equal retribution but cannot make the sentence's shape perform it the way the Hebrew does."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Look for chiastic word order whenever a verse states a principle of exact correspondence, reciprocity, or reversal. Hebrew narrative and law use mirrored word order as a rhetorical device in its own right, not merely as a stylistic accident, and it rarely survives translation intact."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"The legal content itself isn't contested; every version agrees on the sense. What is lost is entirely formal: the chiastic shape itself, which is not a matter of word choice but of an arrangement English syntax is not free enough to reproduce."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e9\u05b9\u05c1\u05e4\u05b5\u05da\u05b0 \u05d3\u05b7\u05bc\u05dd \u05d4\u05b8\u05d0\u05b8\u05d3\u05b8\u05dd shofekh dam ha'adam (chiastic word order) \u00b7 H8210 + H1818 + H120"}],"src":["The chiastic ABCC'B'A' structure of the Hebrew clause: standard treatments of Hebrew poetic and legal syntax","Genesis 1:26-27's image of God as the stated ground for the principle"]}