H3478

• {"n":"Genesis 32:28","s":"Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God. The name itself could mean he strives with God, or God strives.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-32-28","r":"Genesis 32:28","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads striven with God, treating Jacob as the one contending, God as the one contended with, the natural reading given the wrestling match that has just taken place, though not the only grammatically possible one."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English **God-wrestler** and **God wrestles** are opposites built from the same three words in different order. Hebrew's Yisrael compresses el, God, and a form of the verb sarah, strive or contend, into one word without ever clarifying, the way separate English words would, which one is doing the striving."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Yisrael combines sarah, to strive, contend, or have power, with el, God, and the construction can be parsed with Jacob as the subject striving against God, or, less commonly but not impossibly, with El as the subject, God contends or God rules. The immediate narrative context, an all-night wrestling match Jacob has just survived, strongly favors the first reading, but the bare grammar of the compound name does not by itself rule out the second."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English has to build a sentence with an explicit subject and object, he strives with God, that names who wrestles whom; Hebrew's compressed name-formation does not require that clarity, so the ambiguity that exists in the two Hebrew roots alone disappears the moment English supplies a subject."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When a Hebrew proper name is built by compounding a verb with a divine element, el or yah, check whether the divine element is functioning as subject or object of the verb before assuming the more natural-sounding English translation is the only grammatically available one."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Jacob strives with God (and prevails) fits the immediate context of the wrestling match and is the reading every translation adopts. God strives, or God rules, is a grammatically live alternative given how compound Hebrew names work, though it fits the narrative less naturally here."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d9\u05b4\u05e9\u05b0\u05c2\u05e8\u05b8\u05d0\u05b5\u05dc Yisrael (\u05e9\u05b8\u05c2\u05e8\u05b8\u05d4 sarah, strive + \u05d0\u05b5\u05dc el, God) \u00b7 H3478"}],"src":["sarah as strive, contend, or have power: standard Hebrew lexicons","The compound name construction paralleled in other -el names throughout the Hebrew Bible"]}