H6213

• {"n":"Genesis 1:26a","s":"Let us make. A plural announcement followed immediately by a singular act.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-1-26a","r":"Genesis 1:26","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads let us make. The disagreement is entirely about who us refers to, and no translation can help."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"**Let's build a shed.** **I built a shed.** The first sentence includes other people. The second says who swung the hammer. Both can be true of the same shed, and nobody thinks the second contradicts the first."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Na'aseh is a cohortative, the Hebrew form for let me or let us. Verse 27 then uses a singular verb three times. Whatever the plural is doing, it is not distributing the act of creating, because the next verse assigns that to one actor."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English let us is the same whether it includes an audience or is a royal flourish. Hebrew has a specific form, and the argument is about what that form is doing here."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When a verse is famous for one grammatical feature, find out what the next verse does with the same subject. Adjacent verses settle more arguments than lexicons do."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"A plural of majesty has trouble with this verb form. A Trinitarian reading may be true and still does not describe what a first hearer understood. Address to a divine council explains the plural and leaves the singular in verse 27 intact. All three leave something unexplained, and this one leaves the least."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e0\u05b7\u05e2\u05b2\u05e9\u05b6\u05c2\u05d4 na'aseh \u00b7 H6213"}],"src":["Cohortative plural elsewhere: Genesis 11:7, 'let us go down'; a comparable first-person plural addressed to the divine council, though grammatically a prepositional pronoun rather than a cohortative verb, at Isaiah 6:8","Singular verbs throughout Genesis 1:27","Heiser, \u201cMonotheism and the Language of Divine Plurality,\u201d Tyndale Bulletin 65:1 (2014): 85-100"]}