Hebrew to English

A place for those new to Biblical Hebrew to ask basic questions about the language of the Hebrew Bible.
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seekinganswers
Posts: 25
Joined: Thu Nov 07, 2013 9:10 pm

Hebrew to English

Post by seekinganswers »

Afternoon,

Does anyone know if someone has put in the work to find out the word count of Hebrew to English words in the book of Genesis?

Dustin Curlee
kwrandolph
Posts: 1531
Joined: Sun Sep 29, 2013 12:51 am

Re: Hebrew to English

Post by kwrandolph »

Dear Dustin:

I waited for a week to answer this, as I don’t think it’s possible that such a work exists, but I wanted to wait until someone proved me wrong.
seekinganswers wrote:Afternoon,

Does anyone know if someone has put in the work to find out the word count of Hebrew to English words in the book of Genesis?

Dustin Curlee
Because there’s no one to one correspondence between Hebrew words and English words, every translation will be different. Every dictionary will be different. So how can a word count be made?

Karl W. Randolph.
markofcain
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2013 9:58 am
Location: Sarasota, FL USA
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Re: Hebrew to English

Post by markofcain »

seekinganswers wrote:Afternoon,

Does anyone know if someone has put in the work to find out the word count of Hebrew to English words in the book of Genesis?
The Masoretic Text in my database has 20,704 words in Genesis. The Holman Study Bible has 34,022 words in Genesis. The RSV has 36,520. The NIV 35,219.

In my opinion, it would be hard to extrapolate something from that data.
Mark Cain
Sarasota, FL USA

http://www.markcain.com
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