H1931

• {"n":"Genesis 3:15a","s":"He shall bruise thy head. The Hebrew pronoun is unambiguously masculine, singular, he.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-3-15a","r":"Genesis 3:15","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Nearly every English version reads he or it, correctly following the Hebrew masculine singular pronoun. Some older Catholic translations made from the Latin Vulgate read she, following a Latin manuscript tradition that used the feminine ipsa instead of the masculine ipse."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"A single letter can flip a pronoun from **he** to **she** in translation, the way a typo can turn **him** into **her** in English. That is what happened to the Latin Bible used across Europe for over a thousand years, in the one verse that names the serpent's ultimate defeat."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Zera, seed or offspring, is grammatically singular and collective, and the pronoun attached to it, hu, is third person masculine singular: he, not she, will crush the serpent's head. Jerome's own Hebrew-based commentary on Genesis confirms the masculine reading; the feminine ipsa that later appeared in some Vulgate copies is now widely regarded as a scribal error introduced after Jerome, not his own translation choice. The modern official Catholic Latin text, the Nova Vulgata, corrected the erroneous ipsa to ipsum, neuter, simply restoring ordinary Latin grammatical agreement with the neuter noun semen, seed; it does not print a masculine ipse, since Latin gender concord here tracks the Latin noun, not a claim about the Hebrew pronoun."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English he and she map cleanly onto Hebrew masculine and feminine pronouns, so there is no translation gap here. The gap was a transmission error inside the Latin manuscript tradition, which English versions, working from Hebrew, never inherited."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"A doctrine built on a single translation's pronoun is only as strong as that translation's manuscript history. Where two major textual traditions disagree, trace the disagreement back to its source before assuming either one preserves the original by default."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"He or it follows the Hebrew directly and is essentially undisputed among Hebraists across confessional lines, including current Catholic scholarship. She survives mainly in older devotional use built on the Vulgate's feminine variant, which the Catholic Church's own modern Latin text no longer prints."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d4\u05d5\u05bc\u05d0 hu (with \u05d6\u05b6\u05e8\u05b7\u05e2 zera) \u00b7 H1931 \/ H2233"}],"src":["Jerome, Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, reading the masculine pronoun against the Old Latin","Nova Vulgata (1979, the Catholic Church's official Latin text) reads ipsum, neuter agreeing with semen, correcting the earlier feminine ipsa","Standard Hebrew grammars on zera as a singular collective taking a masculine singular pronoun"]}