The Weight of a Single Letter

There is a moment in Galatians where Paul stops the letter, points at one word in the Old Testament, and builds the entire doctrine of how Gentiles get saved on whether that word ends in an s.

Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ (Galatians 3:16).

Notice what kind of argument that is. Paul is not appealing to a theme, or a trajectory, or the general drift of the Old Testament. He is appealing to the grammatical number of a single noun. God said seed, not seeds. One, not many. And on that distinction Paul rests the claim that the promise made to Abraham was aimed, from the beginning, at one person, and that person is Christ.

It is one of the boldest exegetical moves in the New Testament. It is also, in most modern English Bibles, an argument you cannot follow, because the word Paul is pointing at is no longer in your Old Testament.

The Philosophy Underneath the Problem

Before we look at the verse, look at the decision that governs every modern version.

There are two ways to translate. You can render the words, or you can render what a committee believes the words meant. The first is called formal equivalence. The second is called dynamic equivalence, and it is the reigning philosophy behind most Bibles printed in the last sixty years.

It sounds harmless. It is not. Once you grant that a translator may deliver the thought instead of the word, you have placed a man between the reader and the text, and he is doing your interpreting before you ever see the sentence. Henry Morris said it as plainly as it can be said: if only the thought counts, then the words are flexible, but then the thoughts themselves become flexible too, and translators adjust the words to convey whatever thought they have decided was intended. Precise thoughts require precise words. That was the principle guiding the King James men, and it is the principle that has been quietly abandoned.

This is why I do not think of the modern versions as harmless variety. When a version alters the words, it alters what you are able to see. And Galatians 3:16 is the clearest proof of it in the Bible, because here the apostle himself is arguing from a word, and a version that changes the word disarms the apostle.

Where the Promise Was Spoken

Find the verse Paul has his finger on. The best scholarship traces it to Genesis 22:18, and the setting should stop you cold.

That is Moriah. Abraham has just come down off the mountain with the knife still warm in his hand and a ram in the thicket where his son had been. The angel of the LORD calls a second time out of heaven, God swears by Himself, and the promise is this: And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.

So the sentence Paul is parsing was spoken on the mountain where a father raised a knife over his only son and God provided a substitute instead. That is not an accident of filing. The promise about the one Seed through whom all nations would be blessed was given at the exact place where God showed Abraham a picture of what it would cost Him to keep it.

Watch what God does across two adjacent verses. In verse 17 He promises seed as numerous as the stars and the sand, which is plainly many. In verse 18 He promises that in Abraham's seed all nations will be blessed, which cannot be many. Abraham had Ishmael. He had six more sons by Keturah. The nations of the earth are not blessed in Ishmael, and they are not blessed in Midian. The blessing narrows even as the descendants multiply. Same word, two senses, one verse apart, and Paul catches the second one.

The Objection, and Why It Fails

The standard charge is that Paul does not know Hebrew grammar. The word is zera, a collective singular like the English “offspring,” which can name one child or a thousand. So Paul, they say, is building doctrine on a grammatical accident. The word could not have been plural.

The charge collapses on contact with the text, for two reasons.

First, Paul obviously knows the word is collective, because he uses it collectively himself thirteen verses later. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29). Same word, used of a multitude, same author, same argument. A man does not forget the meaning of a word between verse 16 and verse 29.

Second, the collective sense is exactly what makes the singular form significant. Zera is morphologically singular. Hebrew has ways of saying plural offspring outright, and Greek has spermata sitting right there available. God did not use them. He chose a word that holds the many and the one in the same syllable, and He used it in a promise that logically cannot apply to the many. Paul is not claiming the word must be singular. He is claiming it is permitted to be singular in a promise that requires it to be, and that this is precisely what God intended. That is not sloppy exegesis. That is reading a text the way its Author wrote it.

The rest of the Old Testament reads it the same way. Psalm 72:17 says men shall be blessed in him, singular, and all nations shall call him blessed. The Psalmist saw one man in the promise too.

The word could have carried a crowd. God used it to carry a Person.

What the Modern Versions Do to It

Now open your Bible and try to trace what Paul traced.

In the King James you can do it in ninety seconds with a concordance. Seed in Genesis 3:15, where the woman's Seed bruises the serpent's head. Seed in Genesis 12:7, 13:15, 17:8. Seed on Moriah in Genesis 22:18. And seed in Galatians 3:16, where Paul says the chain terminates in Christ. One English word all the way down, because there is one Hebrew and Greek word all the way down. A reader who has never opened a lexicon can see it.

Now try the modern versions, in ascending order of damage.

The ESV blurs it. It renders both Genesis and Galatians with “offspring,” which is at least consistent. But English hears offspring as a collective. That is why the ESV's own “offsprings” in Galatians 3:16 sounds wrong on the tongue. The very singular force Paul is arguing from goes soft.

The NIV breaks it. Genesis 22:18 becomes “through your offspring,” while Galatians 3:16 keeps “seed.” Two different English words for one original word, which kills the cross-reference at the border between the testaments. When Paul says he saith not, and to seeds, and you turn back to see what God actually said, the word he is quoting is not there.

The NLT and The Message contradict it. Both render Genesis 22:18 with “descendants,” which is plural. So Paul's argument, in those Bibles, is that God said the singular and not the plural, in a verse where your own Old Testament has just printed the plural. The apostle is made to contradict the page he is quoting.

That is not a matter of taste. That is a translation philosophy reaching into an inspired argument and taking the load-bearing word out of it.

Morris, Who Had Every Reason to Say Otherwise

Here is the testimony I trust most on this, because the man had every incentive to land the other way.

Henry Morris served on the North American Overview Committee for the New King James Version. He reviewed the proposed translation of Genesis himself. He said the men who worked on it were godly, committed to inerrancy, some of them literal creationists, and he called the NKJV probably the best of the modern translations. He tried to use it. He tried to endorse it.

And he went back to the King James.

He had spent a lifetime with the text. He had tried at least twenty English versions, going back to the American Standard he was given as a wedding present in 1940. Every time he came back. His reason was not nostalgia. It was that comparative word study, tracing a single key word through all its occurrences across the canon, is one of the most fruitful things an ordinary believer can do with a Bible, and it becomes nearly impossible in versions where translators paraphrase the thought instead of rendering the word.

Galatians 3:16 is that warning made visible. Paul is doing comparative word study. Inspired, apostolic, canon-spanning word study, on a single noun, and he is inviting you to follow him back and check it. A version that renders one original word three different ways in English has not made the Bible clearer. It has removed the reader's ability to audit the apostle.

Let me be exact about what I am claiming, because good men fall off both sides of this. Inspiration belongs to the autographs the prophets and apostles wrote. Preservation is the faithful keeping of those words through the manuscript tradition. Morris said plainly that the King James is not inerrant in the sense of the originals and that some words could have been rendered better, and I hold the same. The claim is not that the 1611 English fell from heaven. The claim is that it renders words rather than impressions, and that this is what keeps the trail walkable for a man with a concordance and no Greek at all.

That is also why I am building the Whosoever Study Bible. Not to add a one hundred and twenty-first English Bible to the pile. Because a reader deserves language he can actually read, in a rendering that still holds the word-level chain intact, so that seed stays seed from the garden to Moriah to Galatians, and an ordinary believer can still see what Paul saw.

And to Thy Seed, Which Is Christ

Now the payoff, and it is far bigger than a translation argument.

If the promises were made to one Seed, and that Seed is Christ, then nobody inherits Abraham's promises by descent, or by effort, or by law-keeping, or by ethnic accident. The inheritance was deeded to a single person. There is exactly one heir.

Which raises the question the whole book of Galatians exists to answer. How does anybody else get in?

Paul answers in verse 29. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.

You do not become an heir by being counted among the many. You become an heir by being joined to the One. Election was never a lottery of individuals picked out of a crowd. It was a Person, chosen and named before the foundation of the world, a promise deeded to Him, and an open door into Him. Get into Christ and everything promised to Christ is yours, not because you earned a share but because you are in the One who owns it all.

And look how far back that door was set. The first time the word appears in Scripture is in the garden, in the sentence God speaks over the serpent while Adam and Eve are still standing there in their fig leaves. Her Seed shall bruise thy head. The promise of the one Seed is God's first recorded response to human sin. Before the flood, before Abraham, before Moriah, before the law, God had already named the Person He would send.

That is the God we are dealing with. Not a God who waited to see whether we would fix ourselves, but a God who was already naming His Son as the remedy while the wound was still fresh. Who came walking in the garden asking where art thou. Who swore on His own life on a mountain to a man who had just proven he would hold nothing back. And who finally kept the promise by doing on Calvary what He would not let Abraham do on Moriah.

He has been reaching for you the whole length of this book, and every promise He ever made is stored up in one Person and held out to you with both hands. You do not need a pedigree. You do not need a record. You need to be in Him.

And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely (Revelation 22:17). One Seed, one Heir, one open door, and a God who has never once stopped calling. Come and be Abraham's seed. The inheritance has been waiting for you since the garden.

Darren ReinhardtAuthor of Whosoever Will · whosoeverwill.bible