H8193

• {"n":"Genesis 11:1","s":"The whole earth was of one language. Literally, one lip, and one set of words.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-11-1","r":"Genesis 11:1","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads one language, correctly capturing the sense, but the substitution of the abstract noun language for the concrete body part lip is invisible once translated."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English keeps **lip service** and **read my lips** as fixed idioms, small leftovers of using a body part to mean speech. Hebrew safah, lip, is the ordinary, everyday word for language itself, not a special poetic flourish, and this verse uses it in its most literal sense: one lip for the whole earth."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Safah, lip, functions as Hebrew's standard word for language or speech throughout the Old Testament, a settled use of the body part for its function, technically called metonymy. This verse pairs it with devarim achadim, one set of words, so the sentence names both the form of speech, one lip, and its content, one shared vocabulary."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English can say language directly without borrowing a body-part word to do it, so the sentence's underlying image, everyone sharing a single lip, disappears the moment lip becomes the abstract noun language in translation."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When a Hebrew abstraction is built on a concrete body-part word, notice the image before it dissolves into an English abstraction. Hebrew regularly builds its vocabulary for inner or abstract realities out of very physical, embodied words."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"One language is the only workable English rendering, and no version disputes it. What's worth flagging is the concrete image, a single lip shared by the whole earth, that the abstract translation necessarily leaves behind."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e9\u05b8\u05c2\u05e4\u05b8\u05d4 safah (lip, language) \u00b7 H8193"}],"src":["safah as the standard Hebrew word for language: e.g. Isaiah 19:18; Zephaniah 3:9","devarim achadim, one set of words, as the sentence's second half"]}