Now to Abraham and his seed the promises were made. He does not say, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to your seed, which is Christ. — Galatians 3:16
Father, please forgive me for I know not what I do
I just never had the chance to ever meet you
Therefore I did not that I would grow to be
My mother's evil seed and do these evil deeds -- Eminem
From St. Paul and Eminem we may deduce two things. First, that the exact grammatical details of how the word “seed” is used in the Old Testament are important to Paul. And from Eminem, that seed for offspring is not too difficult a metaphor for the modern mind.
In the Hebrew Bible, the reproductive activity of plants, animals, and humans results in the production of seed, Hebrew zera.1 What follows is based on looking at every place where the word zera appears in the Hebrew Bible, and examining how the World English Bible translates it in every case. While it would be tedious to go over every single example, what follows should contain every single type of translation decision made by the World English Bible when it comes to zera.
Seed of plants
Let us begin with the simplest case. When referring to the seed of plants, the WEB is straightforward.
God said, “Let the earth yield grass, herbs yielding seeds, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with their seeds in it, on the earth;” and it was. — Genesis 1:11
Similar references to plants producing seed, translated as “seed” by the WEB, include Genesis 1:12, 29. In Leviticus 26:5, zera refers to the sowing time of the year, and is translated sowing time.
Seed of animals
In Genesis 7:3, we find the following:
Also of the birds of the sky, seven and seven, male and female, to keep seed alive on the surface of all the earth.
It would seem that the WEB’s editor is treating seed as a perfectly understandable metaphor here, but for some reason, when it comes to humans, he avoids the word.
Seed as human offspring
Whenever zera appears to to refer to multiple human descendants, the WEB usually reads offspring, as in Genesis 3:15:
I will put hostility between you and the woman, / and between your offspring and her offspring …
The WEB will use the translation “offspring” often: in Genesis 9:9, 12:7, 13:15, 15:13, 18, 16:10, and many other verses.
In Genesis 13:16 we read:
I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring may also be counted.
The comparison of seeds with dust makes for a nice mental image, to which the WEB has taken an eraser. A similar mental image, but where seeds are compared to stars, gets translated the same way in 15:5.
Child and Children
In some cases, we find child or children.
In Genesis 4:25, the WEB translates seed as child:
Adam knew his wife again. She gave birth to a son, and named his Seth, saying, “for God has given me another child instead of Abel, for Cain killed him.”
The singular child also appears as an equivalent of zera in Leviticus 22:13, and has no child.
In Genesis 15:3, WEB translates seed as “children”. Behold, you have given no children to me … The WEB does likewise in Leviticus 18:2, Psalm 37:25, 69:36.
A Mistranslation
In Job 21:8, the WEB makes a surprising move. The context is Job’s complaint about the prosperity of the wicked. Here we read the following in the ASV:
Their seed is established with them in their sight, And their offspring before their eyes.
While, in the abstract, zera as a metaphor for offspring can conceivably refer to offspring singular or plural, in this case there are two considerations that should tip the scales in favor of the plural. First, the context is a complaint about the prosperity of the wicked — thus, the complaint should be about the plural children of the wicked, not some single “child” that the wicked (collectively?) have. In addition, in the poetic parallelism, zera is made parallel to ṣeʾeṣaʾeihem, which is certainly plural. So it is strange that WEB reads:
Their child is established with them in their sight, their offspring before their eyes.
A Man-Child
In 1 Samuel 1:11, Hannah asks God to grant her zera anashim, literally, ‘a seed of men’, which the ASV renders ‘a man-child’. The WEB follows this basic line of reasoning, and reads, ‘a boy’.
Seed as descendants
In Exodus 30:21, Deuteronomy 30:19, 31:21, Psalm 22:23, and Esther 9:27 (but not 28), 31, 10:3 we find descendants. In most of these cases, I am not sure why this is.
Seed as lineage
In Genesis 19:32 and 34, seed from our father is translated as our father’s family line.
In at least one instance reading zera as offspring seems to miss the literal meaning of the verse as well. Speaking of returnees from the Babylonian captivity, we read in the ASV (Ezra 2:59):
And these were they that went up from Tel-melah, Tel-harsha, Cherub, Addan, and Immer; but they could not show their fathers’ houses, and their seed, whether they were of Israel.
In this case, if I am a returnee, I am interested in proving that I am offspring of Israel, but it would not make much sense for me to be concerned about the lineage of my children or grandchildren, because their lineage is an easily solved problem once you know about mine. And so if there is a problem about my father’s house and my seed, we must regard both of those concepts as referring to my lineage. But WEB goes with offspring:
And these were they that went up from Tel Melah, Tel Harsha, Cherub, Addan, and Immer; but they could not show their fathers’ houses and their offspring, whether they were of Israel …
The same thing, almost word for word, occurs in Nehemiah 7:61.
In Esther 6:13, the ASV’s the seed of the Jews becomes the WEB’s of Jewish descent.
Special Cases in Prose
Isaac and Ishmael
In Genesis 21:12-13, the Hebrew reads, literally, something like what is on the left, which is taken from ASV. On the right is what the WEB does with it.
| And God said unto Abraham, Let is not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said to thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called. And also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed. | God said to Abraham, “Don’t let it be grievous in your sight because of the boy, and because of your servant. In all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice. For your offspring will be named through Isaac. I will also make a nation of the son of the servant, because he is your child. |
What is at stake in these two verses, and only resolved somewhat ambiguously, is the status of Abraham’s zera, his seed. If the WEB wants to render that as “offspring”, so be it. But to apply to Isaac the significant word offspring, and then to choose not to apply it to Ishmael, is strange, and to my mind obscures a bit what is going on here.
The case of Onan
| And Judah said to Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother. And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother. | Judah said to Onan, Go in to your brother’s wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her, and raise up offspring to your brother. Onan knew that the offspring wouldn’t be his; and when he went in to his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother. |
The Hebrew text, like the ASV text above, uses a bit of wordplay to avoid being too explicit. Instead of giving seed to his brother, Onan spills it on the ground. This short passage also has a couple other circumlocutions: go in to, perform the duty.
The WEB’s approach wrecks the tone, and makes it inconsistent. Go in to is retained, perform the duty, and raise up offspring are all left in there, but then semen? Why should we imagine that the reader can understand the first three references, but not the last? The writers of The Office2 would beg to differ.
Shikvat-zara
There are other passages where semen is less bad a choice. For example, Leviticus 15 (verses 16, 17, 18) deals with shikvat-zara, a more a technical term, which would be difficult to bring literally into English. The ASV reads “seed of copulation”, which gets the gist across, but is still not quite literally correct — “copulation of seed” would be closer. Literally it is a “lying of seed”, in which the word lie is understood by the reader to have sexual connotations. In Leviticus 22:4, the ASV reads the whole phrase shikvat-zara as “seed”, and here it seems that the WEB genuinely does better by reading “seminal emission”.
A particularly difficult case is in Leviticus 18:20, in which the reader is instructed, “And to the wife of your fellow you shall not give shekavteka lezara,” that is, your lying of seed. Here even the ASV does not preserve a literal reading, and simply says And thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbor’s wife, and the WEB substantially follows it.
Cases in Poetry
Parallel to ṣeʾeṣaʾim
In Isaiah 44:3, however, this is easier to understand. The ASV reads like so:
For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and streams upon the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring.
Here, the Hebrew ṣeʾeṣaʾek̲a is already translated as offspring, and so the WEB instead changes seed to descendants. I suggest that, given the usual policy of reading zera as offspring, the WEB could be more consistent with its usual practice if, like NABRE or NJPS, the word zera is rendered offspring, and some other word is given for ṣeʾeṣaʾek̲a, like descendants (NABRE) or, even better, posterity (NJPS). And, in fact, the WEB manages to pull of just such a move in Isaiah 48:19 and 65:23. But in Isaiah 60:19 and Job 5:25, the WEB fumbles this parallelism in a different way, reading both words as offspring.
Parallel to Fruit
A different case of parallelism can be found in Psalm 21:10, which reads in the ASV:
Their fruit wilt thou destroy from the earth, And their seed from among the children of men.
The WEB erases both agricultural metaphors, and does so in a manner inconsistent with its seed = offspring policy.
You will destroy their descendants from the earth, their posterity from among the children of men.
In Many Waters
Numbers 24:7 contains a difficult metaphor, and in this case, the WEB reads zera as seed, perhaps due to uncertainty about whether it is offspring or something else being referred to here. “Water shall flow from his buckets. His seed shall be in many waters …”
The seed of man and the seed of beast
In Jeremiah 31:27, we encounter a verse that challenges the usual WEB policy of reading animal seed as seed, but human seed as offspring. The ASV reads
Behold, the days come, saith Jehovah, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man, and with the seed of beast.
The WEB, wisely, retains the word seed in both places, although it does replace seed of beast with the ugly seed of animal.
Super Academical Footnotes
- Sometimes it is, for reasons of dikduk, pronounced zara. We will not worry ourselves about this. ↩︎
- YouTube clip links are often unstable. If the video no longer opens, it is of a brief scene in which a character named Dwight Schrute says, “And just as you have planted your seed in the ground, I am going to plant my seed in you.” The joke requires the audience to quickly and effortlessly process the metaphor in question. ↩︎
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