H6174

• {"n":"Genesis 2:25-3:1","s":"Naked, and not ashamed. Then: the serpent was more crafty. Two words that are near-twins in Hebrew.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-2-25-3-1","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads naked at 2:25 and crafty, subtil, or shrewd at 3:1, two ordinary, unrelated-sounding English words. None can show that the Hebrew words are built from nearly the same consonants."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Imagine a story ending one scene with **the couple was bare** and opening the next with **the snake was rare**. You would hear the echo instantly. Hebrew does exactly that with naked and crafty, and English naked and crafty do not rhyme at all."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Arummim, naked, at 2:25 and arum, crafty, at 3:1 share three of their root letters and are near-homonyms in Hebrew, even though most lexicons trace them to distinct roots. The narrator sets the pair back to back on purpose: the humans are arummim and unashamed, and the next creature introduced is arum, using almost the same sound to introduce the opposite of innocence."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English naked and crafty share no sound at all, so a reader moving from 2:25 to 3:1 gets no auditory cue that the story is doing wordplay across the chapter break. The literary hinge the Hebrew builds the scene transition on disappears entirely."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Chapter and verse divisions are medieval additions, not part of the original text. Read straight across a chapter break before assuming the scene has fully changed; sometimes the Hebrew is still finishing a sound, if not a sentence."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"No real translation dispute; naked and crafty are both correct. What is worth flagging is that the pun connecting them is a genuine literary feature invisible in every English Bible, not a stretch imposed after the fact."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e2\u05b8\u05e8\u05d5\u05b9\u05dd arom \u00b7 H6174 \/ \u05e2\u05b8\u05e8\u05d5\u05bc\u05dd arum \u00b7 H6175"}],"src":["Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom, on the arom\/arum pairing across Genesis 2:25-3:1","Jewish Bible Quarterly, 'Wordplay in Genesis 2:25-3:1'"]}