6:38a

Go and see how many loaves you have: The Greek phrase that the Berean Standard Bible translates as Go and see how many loaves you have is more literally “How many loaves do you have? Go. see.” It is a question and two commands. The question is a real question, not a rhetorical question. Jesus wanted his disciples to find out how much bread they already had.

You may need to introduce this as a separate speech from the question that Jesus asked in 6:37a. For example:

Then Jesus told them, “Go see.”

Go and see: The Greek phrase that the Berean Standard Bible translates as Go and see is literally “Go see.” Jesus wanted the disciples to go and find out how much bread they had.

see: In this context, the disciples were to see how much bread they had. To make this clear, you may need to translate with a verb such as “look,” “find out,” or “count.”

loaves: This is the same Greek word that the Berean Standard Bible translates as “bread” in 6:37d. You can probably translate it the same way here. It refers to pieces or units of bread, probably cooked in a round shape like buns or rolls.

In Greek, the word is plural both here and in 6:37d. In English, there is not a plural form of “bread” that can be counted, so the Berean Standard Bible uses the word loaves here. If it is natural to say “breads” in your language, you can do that here. Otherwise, you may need to say something like:

units of bread
-or-
loaves of bread

He told them: The Berean Standard Bible puts the words He told them after what Jesus said. In Greek, this comes first in 6:38a. Put the verb of speech where it is natural in your language.

6:38c

Five: The Berean Standard Bible literally translates the one Greek word Five here. In some languages, it will be more natural to say “five loaves of bread.” For example, the God’s Word says:

Five loaves of bread

and two fish: Jesus had not asked them to look for other kinds of food. But when they went to see how many loaves of bread there were, they also found two fish. Since this is new information, you may need to introduce it in a particular way in your language. For example:

We also found two fish.

fish: This was probably a small kind of fresh-water fish from the nearby lake, the Lake of Galilee. If your language has a specific word for fish that is already cooked or dried or salted so that it is ready to eat, you should use it here. Otherwise, you should use a general term for fish.

© 2008 by SIL International®

Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.