H3724

• {"n":"Genesis 6:14a","s":"Pitch it within and without with pitch. The noun for pitch and the verb for cover share the root behind atonement.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-6-14a","r":"Genesis 6:14","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads pitch or tar for the verse's substance and its verb, correctly and unremarkably. No version can show that the same consonants return later as the ordinary Hebrew word for atonement."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English **tar** and English **atone** share no sound, no spelling, nothing. A reader moving from Noah's ark to the Day of Atonement chapters later would never connect them. In Hebrew, the two ideas are built from the same three letters."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Kopher, pitch, and the verb kaphar, to cover, here describing waterproofing, come from the same root as kippurim, atonement, the word behind Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and kapporet, the mercy seat covering the ark of the covenant later in the Torah. The ark of Noah is, in the vocabulary of the sentence describing it, covered the same way sin is later covered."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English has entirely separate words for a waterproofing tar and a ritual atonement, so the shared Hebrew root, and the theological resonance some readers hear in it, one covering that saves from judgment prefiguring another, cannot survive translation into two unrelated English vocabularies."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When a mundane, technical instruction, here waterproofing a boat, uses a root that recurs in a book's central ritual vocabulary, that repetition is worth flagging even if the immediate context is entirely practical. Hebrew narrative frequently plants vocabulary early that ritual law develops later."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Pitch and cover are the plainly correct sense here, and no version disputes it; the verse is giving construction instructions, not making an atonement statement. The connection to kippurim is an observation about shared vocabulary across the Torah, not a claim that Genesis 6 is itself describing a ritual."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05db\u05b9\u05bc\u05e4\u05b6\u05e8 kopher \/ \u05db\u05b8\u05bc\u05e4\u05b7\u05e8 kaphar \u00b7 H3724 \/ H3722"}],"src":["kippurim, atonement, and kapporet, the mercy seat, from the same root kaphar: Leviticus 16; Exodus 25:17","kopher as pitch\/tar, this verse's only use of the noun in this sense"]}