Michelangelo’s statue of Moses: the head, with two short horns above the brow. — Michelangelo’s Moses, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Photograph: Jörg Bittner Unna, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, cropped.

The Bible across languages

Moses’ horns, the camel and the needle, the wall of water: what the Hebrew, Greek, Latin and the 1688 Bucharest Bible say

Q: The wall of water in Exodus: who put it in the story?

The wall was in the Hebrew from the start. The word ḥōmâ in Exodus 14:22 is the one used for city walls, and every translation keeps it. What changes is the wind. The Hebrew says it blew from the east. The Septuagint makes it a south wind. The Vulgate calls it “burning”, the way Jerome usually renders the hot east wind of the desert (at Jonah 4:8, vento calido et urenti). The Bucharest Bible says “vânt den austru silnic”, a strong south wind again, as in the Greek.So one passage shows two things. The most spectacular image was already in the original. The detail that looks technical, the direction of the wind, changed from one language to the next.

Q: The young woman of Isaiah 7:14: what the word says and what the context says

The rows show three distinct steps. The Hebrew has ʿalmâ, “young woman”, a word that, according to the NET and USCCB notes, describes age without specifying virginity. The Greek translation chooses parthenos, the word usually used for a virgin. Matthew quotes the prophecy in Greek and links it to the birth of Jesus. Here the Bucharest Bible follows the Greek in the construction “în pântece va lua”, but writes “iată fecioară”, with no article, like the Latin virgo.The notes of the NET Bible and of the American Catholic USCCB edition treat the meaning of the Hebrew word, the Greek translator’s choice and Matthew’s reading separately. Each is a different question.

Nine verses you know from sermons, paintings or lists of “translation errors”, followed word by word down to the Bucharest Bible of 1688, the first complete Bible in Romanian. Some images were born in a translation. Others were in the text from the start, and sometimes a detail nobody watched is what changed.

Start with Moses ↓

Each case sets the same verse side by side in several languages and editions. The followed word is highlighted in every row, and the line on the left says what happened to it compared with the first row. On the 1688 page, a frame marks where it appears. The ancient texts are quoted from named editions; the explanations under them are this page’s working translations.

starting text the verse’s first row, which the others are compared with
same meaning the word has the same meaning
different word the translator used a word with another meaning
another possible sense the translator chose another sense the starting word can have
different reading the manuscripts do not have the same letters here
another interpretation the words are the same, the reading differs
image added the image comes from artists or readers, not from the text
ambiguous form the form fits more than one reading

Case 1 of 9 · Exodus 34:29

Why does Moses have horns?#

Moses comes down from Sinai with the tablets and does not know that his face has changed after speaking with God. What changed depends on the language you read the verse in. The rows below set the Hebrew text beside the ancient translations, Michelangelo’s statue and the Bucharest Bible of 1688.

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 64, col. II: Exodus 34:29. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Exodus 34:29Follow: Moses’ face

The horns do not come from a misread letter. The Hebrew uses a rare verb, related to a word that means both horn and ray. The Septuagint translated the idea, glory. Aquila and Jerome kept the root’s basic sense. Horns appear in Western art centuries before Michelangelo: among the earliest known examples are the illustrations of the Old English Hexateuch, a manuscript from before about 1050 now in the British Library.

In the Bucharest Bible, Moses has no horns. The Romanian translators wrote “se-au mărit”, and at this verse their wording matches the Greek.

Nine verses at a glance: where the image changes#

Each cell shows the followed word and what happens to it compared with the starting text. The grey cells matter as much as the coloured ones: they show where translation changed nothing.

Verse	Hebrew	Greek	Latin	Romanian, 1688
MosesExodus 34:29	קָרַ֛ןstarting text	δεδόξασταιdifferent word	cornutaanother possible sense	se-au măritdifferent word
CamelMatthew 19:24	written in Greek	κάμηλονstarting text	camelumsame meaning	cămilasame meaning
Luke 2:14Luke 2:14	written in Greek	εὐδοκίαςstarting text	hominibus bonæ voluntatissame meaning	bună voiredifferent reading
The eyeMatthew 6:22–23	written in Greek	ἁπλοῦςstarting text	simplexsame meaning	curatsame meaning
The seaExodus 13:18	יַם־ס֑וּףstarting text	ἐρυθρὰν θάλασσανdifferent word	mare Rubrumdifferent word	marea Roșiedifferent word
Wall of waterExodus 14:21–22	חֹמָ֔הstarting text	τεῖχοςsame meaning	murussame meaning	păretesame meaning
Isaiah 7:14Isaiah 7:14	הָעַלְמָ֗הstarting text	ἡ παρθένοςdifferent word	virgodifferent word	fecioarădifferent word
The fruitGenesis 3:6	מִפִּרְי֖וֹstarting text	καρποῦsame meaning	fructusame meaning	roadasame meaning
JuniaRomans 16:7	written in Greek	Ἰουνίανstarting text	Juniamambiguous form	Iunieisame meaning

Case 2 of 9 · Matthew 19:24

The camel and the needle’s eye: camel or rope?#

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” An explanation has circulated for a long time: the Greeks supposedly confused kamēlos, “camel”, with kamilos, “rope”. The words really do differ by a single letter. The rows below show which texts carry each one.

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 764, col. II: Matthew 19:24. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Matthew 19:24, with Mark 10:25 and Luke 18:25Follow:

The camel appears in all three gospels, in the critical text and in the Renaissance printed text, in Latin and in the Bucharest Bible. The rope appears in a few Greek witnesses, most of them late, in the Armenian version and in Cyril of Alexandria, in the 5th century. The gospels use different words for the needle and its hole, but none of them changes the camel.

Peter Gainsford, who traced the attestations of kamilos, finds no solid independent evidence that it meant “rope” before this debate began. The story of a Jerusalem gate called “the Needle’s Eye” has even less support: the NET note says there is no evidence such a gate ever existed.

Case 3 of 9 · Luke 2:14

“Good will toward men”: what one letter changes#

The angels sing to the shepherds of Bethlehem. Many English readers know a three-part blessing: glory to God, peace on earth, good will toward men. In Greek, the difference between a blessing in three parts and one in two is a single letter, the sigma at the end of εὐδοκία.

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 790, col. I: Luke 2:14. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Luke 2:14Follow: good will

This is not a mistranslation. The Greek manuscripts themselves disagree. With the sigma, the verse says peace comes on the people with whom God is pleased. Without it, the verse adds a third wish. The NET note judges the sigma reading better attested and more difficult, and the NET translation follows it, as does the critical edition used here.

Jerome’s Latin has the construction with the sigma. The Bucharest Bible has three wishes, like the text without it.

A test: what would you check first?#

So far you have seen three kinds of change: a word with two senses for Moses, a late reading for the camel, a manuscript letter in Luke. Here is a new verse, from the Sermon on the Mount. In short: “If your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness.” What should be checked first?

See the verse in every language ↓

Case 4 of 9 · Matthew 6:22–23

“If your eye is evil”: a sick eye or a stingy person?#

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 754, col. II: Matthew 6:22–23. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Matthew 6:22Follow: the good eye

The manuscripts agree, and the translations say the same thing: evil eye, good eye. The question is what the phrase meant to those who heard it. The verses sit between the advice not to store up treasures on earth and the saying that no one can serve both God and money. The NET Bible note translates “sound”, as most scholars do, and presents as a minority reading the one in which the good eye means generosity.

Case 5 of 9 · Exodus 13:18

Red Sea or Sea of Reeds: does the name show where the crossing was?#

The Bucharest Bible, like the Greek and the Latin, says the Israelites left Egypt toward the Red Sea. In Hebrew the sea is yam sûf, and elsewhere sûf means reeds. Hence the idea that translators moved the crossing from a reedy marsh to a deep sea.

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 49, col. I: Exodus 13:18. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Exodus 13:18Follow:

1 Kings 9:26Follow: the sea’s name

starting text
Hebrew Masoretic text, Leningrad Codex (1008–1009) · WLC/OSHB edition
וָאֳנִ֡י עָשָׂה֩ הַמֶּ֨לֶךְ שְׁלֹמֹ֜ה בְּעֶצְיֽוֹן־גֶּ֨בֶר אֲשֶׁ֧ר אֶת־אֵל֛וֹת עַל־שְׂפַ֥ת יַם־ס֖וּף בְּאֶ֥רֶץ אֱדֽוֹם׃
The same yam sûf, this time beside Eloth, where King Solomon builds his ships. Eloth is linked with Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, on the far side of Sinai from Egypt.
different word
Greek · Septuagint translated in the 3rd–2nd centuries BC · Brenton edition (1851)
Καὶ ναῦν ὑπὲρ οὗ ἐποίησεν ὁ βασιλεὺς Σαλωμὼν ἐν Γασίων Γαβὲρ τὴν οὖσαν ἐχομένην Αἰλὰθ ἐπὶ τοῦ χείλους τῆς ἐσχάτης θαλάσσης ἐν γῇ Ἐδώμ.
Here the Greek translator writes “the farthest sea”, eschatē thalassa.
different word
Latin · Vulgate Jerome, around AD 400 · Clementine edition
Classem quoque fecit rex Salomon in Asiongaber, quæ est juxta Ailath in littore maris Rubri, in terra Idumææ.
The Latin returns to the Red Sea.

The gloss “sea of reeds” has support in the vocabulary. The second verse shows where that support stops: in Kings the same name, yam sûf, names the water beside Eloth on the Gulf of Aqaba, where Solomon keeps his fleet. A name that also covers the Gulf of Aqaba cannot point to one marsh in the Nile delta.

The verse’s second thread shows how the Greek translator worked. The Hebrew says the Israelites went out “armed”. The Greek, and after it the Bucharest Bible, says they went out “in the fifth generation”. The Hebrew word shares its root with the number five, and the translator probably read the number in it.

Case 6 of 9 · Exodus 14:21–22

The wall of water in Exodus: who put it in the story?#

The waters stand like two walls and the people cross on dry ground between them. The image looks made for film. Did it enter the story through a translation that took a metaphor literally? The first thread follows the wall. The second follows the wind that parted the waters one verse earlier.

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 49, col. II: Exodus 14:21–22. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Exodus 14:22Follow: the wall of water

The wall was in the Hebrew from the start. The word ḥōmâ in Exodus 14:22 is the one used for city walls, and every translation keeps it. What changes is the wind. The Hebrew says it blew from the east. The Septuagint makes it a south wind. The Vulgate calls it “burning”, the way Jerome usually renders the hot east wind of the desert (at Jonah 4:8, vento calido et urenti). The Bucharest Bible says “vânt den austru silnic”, a strong south wind again, as in the Greek.

So one passage shows two things. The most spectacular image was already in the original. The detail that looks technical, the direction of the wind, changed from one language to the next.

Case 7 of 9 · Isaiah 7:14

The young woman of Isaiah 7:14: what the word says and what the context says#

Few verses have been argued over more. The prophet Isaiah speaks to King Ahaz, during an 8th-century BC war, about a child who will be born. The Gospel of Matthew reads the same words as being about the birth of Jesus.

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 461, col. I: Isaiah 7:14. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23Follow:

The rows show three distinct steps. The Hebrew has ʿalmâ, “young woman”, a word that, according to the NET and USCCB notes, describes age without specifying virginity. The Greek translation chooses parthenos, the word usually used for a virgin. Matthew quotes the prophecy in Greek and links it to the birth of Jesus. Here the Bucharest Bible follows the Greek in the construction “în pântece va lua”, but writes “iată fecioară”, with no article, like the Latin virgo.

The notes of the NET Bible and of the American Catholic USCCB edition treat the meaning of the Hebrew word, the Greek translator’s choice and Matthew’s reading separately. Each is a different question.

Case 8 of 9 · Genesis 3:6

Was it an apple? What Genesis says about the forbidden fruit#

Pick the fruit you see when you think of Eve and the serpent.

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 2, col. II: Genesis 3:6. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Genesis 3:6Follow: the fruit

None of these texts names a species. The Hebrew says “fruit”, the Greek and Latin say “fruit”, the Bucharest Bible says “roadă”, fruit. The apple comes from outside the verse, from the way readers and painters of Western Europe pictured the scene.

The most common explanation is a Latin pun: mālum means “apple” and malum, with a short vowel, means “evil”. Azzan Yadin-Israel, who traced the history of the identification, argues that the pun is not enough to explain why the apple won.

Case 9 of 9 · Romans 16:7

Junia in Romans 16:7: a woman “prominent among the apostles”?#

Bucharest Bible, 1688, p. 864, col. II: Romans 16:7. The Cyrillic text of the verse; the Latin-script reading is beside it. — Romans 16:7Follow:

There are two separate questions here. The first is the name: the old manuscripts written in capitals did not usually mark accents, and in the accusative, the form in this verse, only the accent separates the woman’s name Junia from the man’s name Junias. The critical edition, the digital Textus Receptus and the Bucharest Bible all read a woman’s name. The man’s form appears in other translations, for example the 1899 Douay-Rheims English edition.

The second question is the phrase. “Episēmoi en tois apostolois” can mean “prominent among the apostles”, counted as apostles themselves, or “well known to the apostles”. The NET Bible note presents both readings and cites a 2001 study by Burer and Wallace for the second. The SIL guide for translators recommends the woman’s name and treats the construction separately.

The Bucharest Bible, 1688#

The Bucharest Bible is the first complete Bible in Romanian, printed on the order of Prince Șerban Cantacuzino; its title page, dated November 1688, already names the new prince, Constantin Brâncoveanu. The pages on this site come from the Austrian National Library copy, shelfmark 2.P.4 ALT PRUNK, which the library publishes free of copyright restrictions.

The text is printed in Cyrillic letters. The Latin-script readings beside each detail are working transcriptions: abbreviations are resolved, diacritics and punctuation are brought close to modern spelling, and the decisive old forms are kept (“iaste”, “pren”, “părete”). For Exodus the readings were checked against the scholarly edition Monumenta linguae Dacoromanorum (Iași, 1991).

The 1688 Old Testament starts from Nicolae Milescu’s translation of the Septuagint, revised in Bucharest, and the New Testament largely takes over the Bălgrad text of 1648. That explains why, five times in these nine verses, the Romanian wording goes with the Greek where the Latin says something else: Moses “se-au mărit” (glorified), “the fifth generation”, the wind “den austru” (from the south), “în pântece va lua” (will take in the womb) and “întru oameni bună voire” (good will among people).

Page 49 of the Bucharest Bible (1688), two columns of Cyrillic text from Exodus 13–14. — The whole of page 49: Exodus 13–14, with the sea, the fifth generation, the wind and the wall of water. Bible, Bucharest, 1688, p. 49. Austrian National Library, 2.P.4 ALT PRUNK.

Which texts are quoted, and how#

The Hebrew comes from the digital Westminster Leningrad Codex with the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible annotations; it is shown with the vowels and cantillation marks of the Masoretic text, which is far later than the originals. The Septuagint is quoted from the Greek text of the Brenton edition (1851), the Vulgate from the Clementine edition. The Greek New Testament comes from the SBLGNT critical edition (2010), with only its apparatus signs removed, and from the Textus Receptus. Manuscript variants and their witnesses are taken, with attribution, from the NET Bible notes; they were not collated from the manuscripts here.

Every quotation from these editions is extracted automatically from the edition files, and the page build stops if a highlighted word is not found in its verse. The explanations under each row are working translations, not quotations from a published Bible.

The page does not judge which translation is “correct” and takes no side on questions of faith. It shows, verse by verse, which word each text has and what kind of change it is: a different word, another possible sense, a different manuscript reading, another interpretation or an image added by readers.