A pun is the hardest thing in any language to translate. It depends on two words sounding alike, and the words that sound alike in one language almost never sound alike in another. Yet the Hebrew Bible uses wordplay often, and not for jokes. It names people with it, explains places with it, and in the prophets it carries some of the sharpest messages in the book.
Here are several of the best-known examples. Open Word Bible handles them in a consistent way. Literal and Balanced keep the words of the Hebrew, and say what the pun was in a footnote or in the record. Readable often explains the pun in the text itself, because without it a reader cannot see why the passage says what it says.
The human from the ground
The first wordplay in the Bible comes in the second chapter. In Genesis 2:7 the LORD God forms the man from the dust of the ground. The word for the man is אָדָם (ʾādām), and the word for the ground is אֲדָמָה (ʾădāmâ). The human is named for what he is made from.
The record’s meaning decision says so: he is called “the human” (ha-adam), a play on “the ground” (ha-adamah) that he is formed from. It adds that with the article the word is not yet a personal name. It becomes the name Adam later in the story.
Then the LORD God shaped the man out of dust from the ground. He breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
English has no pair of words that does this. Some writers have tried “human” and “humus”, which come from related Latin words, but “humus” is a gardener’s word, and it would draw attention to itself. Open Word Bible keeps “the man” and “the ground” at every level, and leaves the play to the record.
The pun comes back with force at the end of chapter 3. When God pronounces judgment after the man and woman have eaten from the tree, he tells the man he will work the ground until he returns to it:
You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, because you were taken from it. You are dust, and to dust you will return.”
The record notes that God’s warning in 2:17 is fulfilled here: the man will die and return to the ground he was taken from. In Hebrew the two words, the human and the ground, tie the beginning and the end of his life together in sound.
Genesis 2:23 has a second pair. When the man first sees the woman he says she will be called ishah, “woman”, because she was taken from ish, “man”. The record notes that the two words sound alike, though they come from different roots. This is one of the rare places where English happens to work too. “Woman” and “man” sound related, and Literal and Balanced capitalise them, “Woman” and “Man”, to show that they are names being given.
Babel: the city of confusion
At the end of the story of the tower, the narrator explains the name of the city:
Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth.
The name is בָּבֶ֔ל (Bāḇel), the Hebrew name for Babylon, and the verb is בָּלַ֥ל (bālal), “he confused”. The record explains that Babylon’s own people took the name to mean “gate of god”. The Hebrew narrator hears it differently. The proud city is remembered as the place of confusion.
This kind of explanation, linking a name to an event by its sound, is common in Genesis. It is not etymology in the modern sense.
Literal and Balanced keep the words as they are. Readable adds a short clause, and the rendering decision explains why: it explains the play on words that gives the name its point.
That is why the city was called Babel, which sounds like the Hebrew word for “mixed up.” There the LORD mixed up the language of the whole world, and from there the LORD scattered people all over the earth.
A basket of summer fruit
The prophets use wordplay in their visions. In Amos 8 the LORD shows Amos a basket of fruit. He asks what Amos sees, and Amos says, “a basket of summer fruit”. The LORD answers that “the end” has come for Israel.
The answer only makes sense in Hebrew. “Summer fruit” is קָ֑יִץ (qayiṣ), and “the end” is הַקֵּץ֙ (haq-qēṣ). The two words sound almost the same. The record’s footnote explains it: the basket of ripe fruit at the end of the harvest becomes a sign that Israel is ripe for judgment.
Here the three levels part ways, and the rendering decision says how. Literal and Balanced keep the words of the Hebrew, and a footnote gives the pun. Readable says in the text that the two words sound alike, “since without it the LORD’s answer makes no sense to a reader”:
He asked, “Amos, what do you see?” I answered, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me, “The word for ‘summer fruit’ sounds like the word for ‘end.’ The end has come for my people Israel. I will not let them go unpunished any longer.
The almond and the watcher
Jeremiah’s first vision works the same way. The LORD asks what he sees, and Jeremiah answers, “a rod of almond”. The LORD replies that he is “watching” over his word to carry it out.
“Almond” is שָׁקֵ֖ד (šāqēḏ). “Watching” is שֹׁקֵ֥ד (šōqēḏ). The record for verse 11 adds why the almond fits so well: it is the first tree in the land to blossom, in late winter, while other trees still look dead. It is the tree that wakes first. The record for verse 12 draws the line: as the almond is awake first, so the LORD is awake and watching over his word. The record also notes that the play on words cannot be kept in most translations, so the sense is given and the link explained.
Again Literal and Balanced keep the plain words, with a footnote, and Readable puts the explanation in the text:
The LORD said to me, “You are right. The name of the almond tree sounds like the word for ‘watching.’ And I am watching over my word to make sure it comes true.”
A translator could try to reproduce the effect, for example by inventing a name such as “wake-tree” for the almond. That keeps the point but invents a tree name nobody uses. Open Word Bible prefers to name the real tree and explain the sound.
Justice and bloodshed
Isaiah’s song of the vineyard ends with one of the most quoted puns in the prophets. God planted a vineyard and looked for good grapes, and it gave wild ones. Then the song is explained: the vineyard is Israel, and
The vineyard of the LORD of Armies is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are the planting that delighted him. He waited for justice, but what he found was bloodshed; for righteousness, but what he heard was a cry of the wronged.
In Hebrew the last two lines are built on sound. God looked for לְמִשְׁפָּט֙ (mišpāṭ, justice) and found מִשְׂפָּ֔ח (miśpāḥ, bloodshed). He looked for לִצְדָקָ֖ה (ṣədāqâ, righteousness) and found צְעָקָֽה (ṣəʿāqâ, an outcry). The record’s footnote puts it simply: God looked for one thing and found what sounds like it but is its opposite. The outcry, it adds, is the cry of people who are wronged, the cry that reaches God (Genesis 18:20–21; Exodus 3:7, 9).
The point of the pun is moral. The people had something that looked like justice from a distance. Up close it was its opposite. A rendering decision for this verse says why no English pun is attempted: the sound play cannot be kept without changing the sense, so the footnote explains it.
The towns of Micah 1
The most concentrated wordplay in the Bible is in Micah 1:10–15. Micah lived in the low hill country southwest of Jerusalem, and he mourns over the towns of his own district as an enemy army approaches. Almost every line plays on the name of a town.
The record for verse 11 explains the setting: the towns lay on the road an army from the coast would take toward Jerusalem, as Sennacherib’s army did in 701 BC. Some are known sites, such as Gath, Lachish, Mareshah, Achzib and Adullam. Others are not.
The plays are of different kinds, and the records note each one, mostly in footnotes:
- Gath sounds like the verb “tell”: “Do not tell it in Gath”. Micah borrows the line from David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:20).
- Beth-leaphrah means “house of dust”, and its people must roll in the dust in mourning.
- Shaphir means “beautiful” or “pleasant”, and its people will go out naked and ashamed.
- Zaanan sounds like the verb “come out”, and its people will not come out.
- Lachish sounds like the word for fast chariot horses, and its people are told to harness them and flee. The record adds that Lachish was the strongest fortress of the region, and that Sennacherib’s palace reliefs at Nineveh show its siege.
- Moresheth, Micah’s own town, sounds like the word for “betrothed”, and Judah must give it “parting gifts”, like a father sending away a daughter at her wedding.
- Achzib sounds like a word for a deceptive brook, a stream that runs dry when travellers count on it, and it will fail the kings who rely on it.
Several of these decisions are marked uncertain, and the record for verse 11 says why: the meaning of the names and the plays on them are not all certain. Some of the towns cannot be located, and one or two lines are hard to construe at all.
Literal and Balanced keep the names as names. Readable gives the meaning of each name beside it, so that the play can be heard:
People of Shaphir, the Lovely Town, go away into exile, naked and ashamed. The people of Zaanan, the Going-Out Town, do not dare to go out. Beth-ezel is weeping, and it can give you no shelter.
The rendering decisions for Readable in these verses are marked uncertain too. They say that the additions explain and do not change what is said, and they leave the wording open for a reviewer to check.
Why not invent English puns?
Some translators have tried to recreate the effect of Micah 1 with invented English sound-plays. It can be done brilliantly, but then the puns are the translator’s, not the prophet’s, and the names on the page are no longer the names of real towns.
Open Word Bible takes a different line, in keeping with the way it separates meaning from wording. The meaning decision records what the pun is and what it says. That is the same for every language. Each level then decides how much of it to put into words. Literal shows the Hebrew’s own words. Balanced reads naturally and points to the footnote. Readable, written for readers who may never open a footnote, says plainly what the sound-play means, and marks where it has added words to do so.
The result loses something. No translation can make “summer fruit” sound like “end”. But nothing is hidden. A reader who taps the verse sees the two Hebrew words side by side, and can hear for themselves what Amos heard.
For other features of Hebrew that resist English, see Hebrew poetry and parallelism and Biblical idioms. On how one meaning can be worded at three levels, see Literal, Balanced, Readable: three levels, one meaning.
Open Amos 8, Jeremiah 1, Isaiah 5, Micah 1 and Genesis 11 to see the records.