Interesting words in the Bible

Opening prayer

Let us open with prayer.

Lord God, your Word is profound. Be with us as we look this evening at a handful of words within the Word. Where these words are central to your Word, guide our thoughts and make us always aware of your awesome presence. Where these words are peripheral to your Word, forgive us as we have fun with them. In every case do not let our thoughts wander far from you. Amen.

The name יהוה

The first word that I should like to look at is a profound one. It is the name of the God of Israel. In Hebrew it looks like this:

יהוה

Let me say at the outset that I don’t know any Hebrew. I hope I know enough about Hebrew for the purpose of this talk. The four Hebrew letters, reading from right to left as always in Hebrew, are Yodh, He, Waw, He [jod he wɔ he]. In our own familiar Latin script that the English language is written in, they are transliterated as YHWH or JHWH. This four‐letter biblical name for the God of Israel, whether in Hebrew lettering or in our Latin script, is known as the tetragrammaton, which is just a fancy Greek word meaning four letters. I will pronounce it as ‘Yahweh’ [ˈja⁠ˌhwe] but you won’t find out why it’s pronounced like that for a few minutes yet. It may be written ⟨Yahweh⟩ or ⟨Jahweh⟩ also.

Now, the God of Israel is referred to by many different terms in the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. One term is El [ɛl], which is a generic word for a god. Another is Elohim [ɛlo⁠ˈhiːm], which can mean a god or gods in general, or a specific god. A third is El Shaddai [ɛl ʃa⁠ˈdai], which is usually translated “God Almighty”. That is the how God was known to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A fourth is Adonai [⁠ˈʔado⁠ˈnai], which means “the Lord”. But Yahweh is special. The reason is that El, Elohim, El Shaddai and Adonai are merely ways of referring to God; whereas Yahweh, by contrast, is God’s name. It’s rather like the way we can refer to Jesus as Prince of Peace, the Light of the World, and in many other ways: but his name is Jesus. So God can be referred to in many different ways, but in Hebrew thinking his name is Yahweh.

It used to be supposed that the religion of the Israelites was monotheistic from the outset, but scholarship of the last hundred years or so has cast doubt on that. Early Israelite religion was influenced by Canaanite religion, and the Canaanites worshipped dozens of deities. Many scholars consider that ancient Israelite religion was at first not so much monotheistic as monolatristic, which means “one‐worshipping”^[Note 1]: it recognized the existence of many gods, but worshipped only one of them, Yahweh, as the God of Israel. Many Biblical texts suggest this: I’ll mention just two of them. Psalm 86 says: “There is none like you among the gods, O Lord.”^[Note 2] The question for the psalmist was not whether there is only one elohim, but whether there is any elohim like Yahweh. Deuteronomy 32 verse 8 reads: “When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humanity, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods; the Lord’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.”^[Note 3] I find it fascinating to think that when the early Israelites said El Shaddai – God Almighty – Almighty wasn’t just a courtesy title: it was a necessary defining adjective to distinguish the god who was almighty from all the other gods. It is only from the time of the second part of Isaiah, written in the 6th century BC, that there is any clear and unambiguous denial of the existence of gods other than Yahweh. Yahweh became the only god in the cosmos.

God is not consistently called Yahweh throughout the Old Testament. The Old Testament is compiled from a number of different sources. In one early source, known as the Elohist source, God is consistently called Elohim. In a later source known as the Yahwist (or Jahwist) source, God is called Yahweh. We can see the contrast in the two creation myths in Genesis. In the story in Genesis 1 where God made the cosmos in 6 days, God is consistently called Elohim. In the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2, God is consistently called Yahweh.

Yahweh can come across as more of a personal God than Elohim. Yahweh walks with Adam in the Garden of Eden in a way that Elohim could not have done.

We are now going to look at the opening of the 23rd Psalm, and Joe has kindly agreed to read the first three verses for us.

Pslm twntthr. Th Lrd s m shprd, ‌ shll nt wnt. H mks m l dn n grn pstrs; h lds m bsd stll wtrs; h rstrs m sl. H lds m n rght pths fr hs nm’s sk.^[Note 4]

The English text looks very odd when we leave out the vowels, doesn’t it? And yet all the ancient Hebrew texts do that. Here are the first two words of the psalm as they appear in the ancient texts:

יהוה רעי

Reading from right to left, you may recognize the first word as the tetragrammaton, the name of the God of Israel, spelled Yodh, He, Waw, He:

YHWH [ˈja⁠ˌhwe] (is) my shepherd.

Now there are several things to notice here. The Hebrew text consists of the consonants only, as all the ancient Hebrew texts did: the vowels are omitted. The Hebrew text uses God’s name, which I pronounced as ‘Yahweh’. But most English translations don’t say “Yahweh is my shepherd”: they say “The Lord is my shepherd.” And they mostly print the word Lord in that peculiar way, with a full‐size capital ⟨L⟩ followed by small capitals. There are good reasons for this. Let’s look at them now.

When the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon around 539 BC, they began to revere the name Yahweh so greatly that they outlawed the very saying of it, first for the common people, later for the priests. Finally, only the High Priest was allowed to say it, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement when he was alone in the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary of the Temple. The last High Priest permitted to say it was Simon, who died in 270 BC. From that moment on, no Jew has been allowed to say it. Right up to the present day. Whenever Jews come across the name YHWH, they pronounce it as ‘Adonai’ (the Lord) or ‘Elohim’ (the God). So when Jews are reading the first two words of the 23rd Psalm for example, they see יהוה רעי (YHWH roʿi) but they say Adonai roʿi.

What has that to do with us? Well, when the Bible came to be translated into English in the 16th and 17th Centuries, translators by and large followed the Jewish tradition and translated the tetragrammaton as “the Lord”. To indicate that they’d done this special thing with the translation, they printed Lord in that peculiar way. And the convention has continued to the present day: most modern translations still use these special small capitals.

Although the early translators of the Bible into English generally avoided using God’s name where it refers to God, they couldn’t avoid using it where the purpose of the text is to say what God’s name is. If for example the Hebrew text reports God as saying, “Tell the Israelites that my name is Yahweh”, then it wouldn’t make sense to translate it as “Tell the Israelites that my name is the Lord.” And this gave the translators a problem. Since only Jews used the Hebrew text and Jews never said God’s name, knowledge of how to say it had been lost. Nobody knew what the vowels were. It wasn’t even clear whether the name had two syllables or three syllables, as the four consonants were consistent with either.

The early translators thought they had the answer. They had access to a Hebrew text known as the Masoretic Text, produced in the 10th century AD by a group of middle‐Eastern Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes. The Masoretic text was filled out with marks known as Niqqud marks, invented by the Masoretes, that indicated the vowels. Sometimes they are known as vowel pointing. Niqqud marks are designed to be small compared with consonants, so that they can be added to existing texts without copying the whole thing out afresh. Here again are the first two words of the 23rd Psalm as they appear in the ancient texts:

יהוה רעי

And here they are as they appear in the Masoretic text, with vowel pointing:

יְהוָה רֹעִי

So the early translators looked at the vowel pointing of God’s name and they said, “We understand. It has three syllables, and the vowels are [ə], [o] and [a]. [⁠ˈjə⁠ˈho⁠ˈva].” And they printed it accordingly, with a variety of spellings.^[Note 5] The [dʒə] sound at the beginning of Jehovah in modern English is much more recent, nineteenth‐century in fact. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, initial ⟨J⟩ was pronounced as we pronounce initial ⟨Y⟩.

Unfortunately the translators made two mistakes. They made one small mistake, and one big mistake. The small mistake is that they thought that the Hebrew letter Waw was pronounced [və], as it is in Modern Hebrew. Actually in ancient Hebrew it was pronounced [wə]. If they had known that, they would have chosen a spelling based on the pronunciation [⁠ˈjə⁠ˈho⁠ˈwa] instead of [⁠ˈjə⁠ˈho⁠ˈva].

But their other mistake was a whopper. They didn’t realize that the vowels placed on God’s name by the Masoretes aren’t the vowels of God’s name at all. They are the vowels of the word Adonai. The Masoretes had taken the tetragrammaton and filled it out with the vowels of Adonai, as a reminder to the reader to say Adonai. The consonants are the consonants of the tetragrammaton, and the vowels are the vowels of Adonai.

By reading it literally, the early translators of the Bible into English inadvertently shuffled two words together and made a nonsense. The [o] sound in the second syllable of [⁠ˈjə⁠ˈho⁠ˈva] comes from the [o] sound in the second syllable of Adonai. The [a] sound in the third syllable of [⁠ˈjə⁠ˈho⁠ˈva] comes from the [a] sound in the third syllable of Adonai. The vowels in the first syllables don’t match exactly, but I am told that they correspond in an important sense and that the difference between them has to do with the question of what vowels can go with what consonants.

Since Jews do not pronounce the tetragrammaton, the form Jehovah actually has little significance to them. It is ironic that Christians tend to think of Jehovah as a Jewish name, while Jews tend to think of it as a Christian one.

So if God’s name was not pronounced [⁠ˈjə⁠ˈho⁠ˈva], on what basis have modern scholars concluded that it was pronounced [ˈja⁠ˌhwe]? Well, first let me say that the conclusion is not a firm one. Debate continues. But it probably had two syllables not three, and [ˈja⁠ˌhwe] seems to be the best guess. There are two kinds of evidence.

The first kind of evidence is the meaning of the name. In the ancient Hebrew world, names always have a meaning, and a name communicates a person’s character. God chose to reveal himself to Moses in the name Yahweh, and so we should expect this name to communicate something about the character of God. Scholars tell us that the name means “he exists” or “he is eternal”, and that suggests, they tell us, that it was pronounced either [ˈja⁠ˌhwe] or [ˈji⁠ˌhwe].

The second kind of evidence is that there are surviving early Greek transliterations of the Hebrew text, and these suggest the pronunciation [ˈja⁠ˌhwe].

Perhaps it doesn’t matter much. The important thing about God’s name is not the pronunciation: it is that it reveals his character as the one who is eternal. It may be that we will never know for certain how the ancient Hebrews pronounced it. Unless we are lucky enough to find Moses’s audio recorder.

We will now sing a hymn that reminds us of God’s name: StF 465, Guide me, O thou great Jehovah.

Not all the words we will be looking at this evening are profound ones. The one we will look at now is distinctly lightweight.

Locust

Locusts, the swarming insects, have been known since ancient times. They appear in several places in the Bible. The eighth plague of Egypt was a plague of locusts. The Book of Revelation features an army of locusts, in appearance like horses equipped for battle, with scales like iron breastplates.

But the interesting feature of locust as a word lies in John the Baptist’s diet. Mark’s Gospel tells us^[Note 7]:

Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

Matthew’s Gospel tells us the same thing.^[Note 8]

As the centuries passed, the Church had difficulty with these words. The problem was not that locusts are nasty or that they were thought to be unfit for human consumption. The problem was that they are meat. As monasticism spread, John the Baptist was taken as a model for the ascetic life, and eating meat was regarded as an indulgence. Reading in the Holy Scriptures that John ate meat was an embarrassment. So what was the Church going to do about it?

In the second century, a Jewish Christian movement called the Ebionites, who were vegetarian, took the rather crude step of changing the word in their Gospels from ἀκρίς (akris), a locust, to ἐγκρίς (engkris), a cake.

In the fif‌th century Isidore of Pelusium, an Alexandrian ascetic monk, was more subtle. The word ἀκρίς, a locust, derives from ἄκρᾱ, a pointed end, perhaps because the locust has a pointed end or perhaps because it rests on the pointed end of plants. Isidore suggested that the ἀκρίς that John the Baptist ate was actually the pointed end of a plant. This explanation was widely accepted for many centuries.

A further explanation took hold in medieval Europe and still has its adherents. There is a tree native to the Mediterranean region known as the carob tree. Carob pods are a traditional food of the poor. The Greek word translated as “locust”, ἀκρίς, was also used colloquially to mean carob pod.

You can see the resemblance in Figures 2 and 3. Even in English, carob pods were historically referred to as locusts. Saintly men subsisting on nothing but carob pods are a documented motif in early rabbinic literature. If you visit Greece, the people will show you their carob trees, and they will explain to you with pride that its pods are what John the Baptist ate, and that they are known as St John’s Bread. They may even pour scorn on what they see as the misguided Western European belief that John the Baptist ate insects.

By the 12th century the Syriac author Jacob Bar‐Salibi was able to collect and record in his Commentary on the Gospels no fewer than eleven different explanations of this sort, all of them making John into a vegetarian.

Modern scholarship assures us that none of these explanations are necessary. The word ἀκρίς, locust, appears 26 further times in the Greek scriptures^[Note 9] and every time it plainly means the insect. There is no reason to suppose that John the Baptist was vegetarian. Locusts are deemed clean for eating by the book of Leviticus. They were eaten by the poor in the Middle East in the first century, and they still are. You pull off the legs, the wings and the head. With the head, there come out the internal organs. What is left is pure muscle and very nutritious.

Two thousand years on we perhaps cannot know for certain what John the Baptist ate, but we can know what the Gospels say he ate. And modern scholarly consensus is that the Gospels say he ate the insects that we call locusts.

That tells a story of biblical interpretation that repeats again and again over the centuries. People read words in the Bible that have a plain meaning, they don’t like the meaning, and they jump through all sorts of hoops in an effort to change the meaning rather than accept what the Bible says. I’d like us to split into groups now for five minutes or so, and I’d like you to discuss within your group: what things do you read in the Bible that you don’t like, and in what ways do you manipulate the meaning so that it suits you? Is that always a bad thing to do, or are there times when it may be legitimate? You may consider for example things that Jesus said, or things that he did, or things that are said about him. I suspect that we all do it; so don’t be shy about it. For example, what about Jesus’s words, “I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword”? I’m sure you have examples of your own. Take five minutes.

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ἰχθύς

ἰχθύς [ix⁠ˈθys], ichthus [ɪx⁠ˈθus] in our Latin script, is the Greek word for fish.

Fish have a prominent position in the Gospels. Much of the Gospel narrative is set in the fishing village of Capernaum. Simon, Andrew, James and John were fishermen before Jesus called them and made them fishers of men. Jesus fed a crowd of thousands with the help of five loaves and two small fishes offered by a child. On one occasion Jesus instructed Simon and his fishing partners where to let down the nets, and they caught so many fish that the boats began to sink. Jesus in his post‐resurrection body ate fish.

Jesus used fish in his preaching too. He likened the Kingdom of Heaven to a net that is let down into a lake and catches all kinds of fish. He observed that no good father would give his son a serpent when asked for a fish.

The early Christians used both the fish and the word ἰχθύς as symbols of their faith. Figure 4 shows an early Christian inscription carved into marble in the ruins of Ephesus with the word ΙΧΘΥΣ in upper‐case letters.

Figure 5 shows an early 3rd‑century tombstone of a Christian who lived near Rome.

It shows pictures of fish along with the Greek Christian slogan ΙΧΘΥΣ ΖΩΝΤΩΝ – Fish of the Living – in uncial script. The inscription above it may come as a shock to modern Christian eyes. The letters DM stand for Dis Manibus or Diis Manibus – to the gods known as the Manēs, Roman gods of the underworld who represented souls of the departed. These letters coexisted with Christian content on Roman graves well into the Christian era^[Note 14].

Early Christian art frequently shows the Lord’s Supper with fish alongside the bread and wine. Figure 6, for example, is a 3rd‑century fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome:

Christians also used the word ἰχθύς in a pattern known as an acrostic, using its letters as the first letters of the phrase Ἰησοῦς Χριστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ – Jesus Christ, Son of God, (our) Saviour.

Discovery of that acrostic is attributed to the Erythraean Sibyl, the prophetess who presided over the Oracle of Apollo at the city of Erythrae in what is now Turkey. It may be that this Christian slogan was intended in part as a protest against the claims of the Roman emperors to be sons of God.

Persecuted Christians who were forced to take shelter in caves frequently came across inscriptions of the ἰχθύς, telling them that other Christians had preceded them. It is said that when a Christian met a stranger, he would draw the top half of a stylized fish in the ground: if the stranger was a Christian, he would respond by drawing the bottom half to complete the fish.

In 1973 a countercultural festival known as the Aquarius Festival was held in the town of Nimbin, New South Wales. It was the birthplace of the Australian hippy movement. A group of young Americans brought to the festival what they called the Jesus fish. This sparked a modern revival of the symbol. Today it may be seen as an emblem on the back of cars or on clothing or jewellery as a sign that the owner is a Christian.

There were other secret signs used by the early Christians. A striking one is the word square in Figure 10.

This is found scratched on walls and columns from very early Christian times, and has become known as the Rotas Square. Four of the five words are Latin: AREPO is not a Latin word, but may be read as a person’s name. Then the square can be read, with a bit of imagination, as meaning “Arepo, the sower, guides the wheels at work.” It’s not particularly good Latin. It reads the same from top left along the rows, from top left down the columns, from bottom right backwards along the rows, and from bottom right up the columns. The meaning of a Latin sentence is broadly independent of word order, and so we can also read SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS in four ways starting from the top right and bottom left corners. From its context it appeared to be a Christian symbol, but its full significance was only discovered in 1924 when a scholar named Christian Frank found that the letters could be rearranged as in Figure 11.

Pater Noster – Our Father – is the opening of the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, and is often used as a name or a title for the Lord’s Prayer. In the corners we have Alpha and Omega, Omega and Alpha: God the first and the last. The probability that there should exist by chance such a meaningful rearrangement of the letters in a 5 × 5 square is negligible, and plainly therefore the Rotas Square must have been designed with this rearrangement in mind.

The ones that got away

Before we look at our final word, I want to mention brief‌ly three words that got away. I started my preparation with a list of eight words. The following three I had to abandon.

I was going to explain that the word sincere derives from the Latin words sine cera meaning “without wax”. Apparently sculptors in marble, when they made a mistake, used to fill in the hole with wax. When a client wanted to insist that his sculpture was not to be adulterated in that way, he would specify that it was to be “without wax”. Unfortunately this turns out to be an urban myth. The word sincere does indeed come from Latin sincerus meaning clean or pure, but that Latin word is much more likely to derive from Indo‐European words meaning “one growth”.^[Note 15]

The book of Genesis tells us that, following the great flood, a united humanity speaking a single language resolved to build a tower in the city of Babel whose top would reach heaven. God was displeased and confounded their speech. I was going to explain that this was the origin of the verb babble in English. Sadly however, that is another urban myth. English babble is merely a frequentative based on the repeated syllable “ba”, typical of a child’s early speech.

Hocus‑pocus? Surely the word hocus‑pocus doesn’t appear in the Bible? Well, I was taught that it derives from the Latin words of the Catholic priests at mass, Hoc est corpus, “This is my body.” There is some evidence of this, but not enough for me to assert its truth. So that’s another one that I have to quietly drop.

Closing prayer

Well, we’ve come full circle now. We started with the Old Testament name of God, Yahweh, and we’ve ended with the New Testament word for God, θεός. Let us finish with prayer.

God of Israel, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you that through your Word you have made your character known to us. We pray that we may never take your name or your character in vain. Send us out into the world to make your name and character known to all people. We ask it through Jesus Christ, Son of God, our Saviour. Amen.

Footnotes

1. Greek λατρεύω, I worship
2. Psalm 86:8, NRSV
3. NRSV
4. Psalm 23:1–3, NRSV, with the vowels omitted
5. Iehouah, Jehouah, Iehovah, Jehovah
6. In Figure 1, I spell ADONAY with a ⟨Y⟩ because for this purpose the Yodh was treated as a consonant.
7. Mark 1:6, NRSV
8. Matthew 3:4
9. Twice in the New Testament, and 24 times in the Septuagint (the primary Greek trans­lation of the Old Testament)
10. Numbers 13:1–8, NRSV
11. Numbers 13:16
12. Matthew 1:21, NRSV
13. Acts 7:45
14. The inscription underneath is:

    Liciniae Amiati – to Licinia Amias (the name of the deceased)
    bene merenti – well deserving
    vixit – she lived…

    and her dates will have been underneath that.
15. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the Latin word sincerus derives from the Indo‐European root *sm̥kēros, itself derived from the zero‐grade of *sem (one) and the suffixed, lengthened e‑grade of *ker (grow), generating the underlying meaning of one growth, hence pure, clean.
16. Acts 12:22, NRSV: “The people kept shouting ‘The voice of a god (θεός), and not of a mortal!’” Immediately an angel strikes Herod dead, but the account tells us that this was because he had not given the glory to God: it seems it was not because of what the people shouted.
17. From 2 Corinthians 4:4, NRSV: “In their case the god (θεός) of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
18. John 10:33. NB: θεός, not ὁ θεός. This may mean that Jesus stood accused of making himself out to be a god, or to have the attributes of a god or the attributes of God. It does not necessarily mean that he stood accused of making himself out to be God.
19. John 10:34, NRSV
20. Psalm 82:6, NRSV