Hebrew Language Quotes

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.

Hebrew word for "charity" tzedakah, simply means "justice" and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.

To Alef, the letter that begins the alphabets of both Arabic and Hebrew- two Semitic languages, sisters for centuries. May we find the language that takes us to the only home there is - one another's hearts. ... Alef knows That a thread Of a story Stitches together A wound.

Latin! The language of God! Or perhaps He speaks Hebrew? I suppose that’s more likely and it will make things rather awkward in heaven, won’t it? Will we all have to learn Hebrew?

Like Hebrew, Greek is an emotional language—a language of the heart. Latin, not as much.

Let’s take some extra time to talk about one: Only the number one can create all numbers with this simple equation, 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321. One, expressed nine times, multiplied by itself, produces all subsequent numbers progressively and then inversely. Zero is not a number.

Adam was told to name the animals. Adam studied each kind and gave them a name based on his observations. Every animal “kind” has some behavior or characteristic that is unique to that animal type. When you know the Hebrew name for an animal, you get a peek at how a perfect man, speaking a perfect language, understood that perfect animal.

The special knowledge you are about to learn will reveal a “letter theory” that was set into motion from the very first verse in your Bible. It is as though the divine author is telling the reader to expect Hebrew letters and numbers to weave messages, in the sub-text, through the rest of the Bible—starting with verse one.

There are four tongues worthy of the world’s use,” says the Talmud: “Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech.

It has always been difficult for Jews to take Christians serious, mostly because Christians lack the fundamentals that religious Jews learn in their youth. It remains an embarrassing fact, that modern Jews can comprehend the New Testament better than modern Christians. There is no excuse for this. Christians have dropped the ball and should be anxious to remedy that neglect. Not only would they benefit themselves, but their community too.

Not only does every Hebrew word have its own definition, but every Hebrew letter, within the word, has its own meaning. God placed before you a great banquet of universal truths. All this in 22 Hebrew letters. Every letter contains a progressive curriculum designed to teach you about this marvelous world that God gave us. These letters will flavor each word’s definition claiming its place in God’s well organized universe.

Abba is not Hebrew, the language of liturgy, but Aramaic, the language of home and everyday life … We need to be wary of the suggestion … that the correct translation of Abba is ‘Daddy.’ Abba is the intimate word of a family circle where that obedient reverence was at the heart of the relationship, whereas Daddy is the familiar word of a family circle from which all thoughts of reverence and obedience have largely disappeared … The best English translation of Abba is simply ‘Dear Father.

God's true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit. As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth. I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars. [...] I learned God's true language is only silence and breath.

Jesus probably studied this same information, in his youth. The apostle Paul probably studied this same information. How can I make such a bold assertion? Because, without this knowledge, much of the New Testament would make no sense. Many of the idioms used in the New Testament are the result of lessons learned from this ancient Hebrew education system. Unfortunately, what was common in their day, has become forgotten in ours. For a Hebrew, math doesn’t get in the way. It blazes the way. Other languages are disconnected from this mathematical relationship . . . and it shows.

The nature of a letter can also be revealed within its numeric value. All letters and numbers behave in a certain but recognizable way, from which we can deduce its nature. The number two is the only even prime. There is an inherent mathematical dilemma with, “one.” No matter how many times you multiply it, by itself, you still can’t get past “one” (1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1). So, how does “one” move beyond itself? How does the same, produce the different? Mathematically, “one” is forced to divide itself and work from that duality. Therein, hides the divine puzzle of bet (b). To become “two,” the second must revolt from wholeness—a separation. Yet, the second could not have existed without the benefit of the original wholeness. Also, the first wanted the second to exist, but the first doesn’t know what the second will become. Again, two contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. (Ge 25:24)

What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.

If this letter system works, it should be reproducible and consistent. If this letter system works, it should be demonstrated in biblical narrative—with consistency. It has. It does. It will. For instance: Daniel interpreted the handwriting on the Babylonian wall. (Da 5:1-31) The question has always been, “What method would produce the same interpretation?” If you will pull out your Strong’s Concordance and translate those same four words, you won’t get the same results that Daniel got. Was Daniel using a different method than modern Christians? Yes, obviously.

The Bible frequently uses symmetries and inversions. By such comparisons (parallels and contrasts) the unique aspects of reality begin to emerge. Comparing two objects makes their differences increasingly apparent. Only then can we ask, “Why does this one have that, and the other does not?” For instance: The phrase, “and it was 6 good” is present on all the days of creation—except the second day. Why? Because, “two” contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. We could not have discovered that insight, unless we contrasted God’s description of the creative days.

Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that—if Herodotus can be believed—was “unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.

At Ge 1:1 God used a matrix of sevens: (1) Seven words. (2) 28 letters (28 ÷ 4 = 7). (3) First three words contain 14 letters (14 ÷ 2 = 7). (4) Last four words contain 14 letters (14 ÷ 2 = 7). (5) Fourth and fifth words have seven letters. (6) Sixth and seventh words have seven letters. (7) Key words (God, heaven, earth) contain 14 letters (14 ÷ 2 = 7). (8) Remaining words contain 14 letters (14 ÷ 2 = 7). (9) Numeric value of first, middle and last letters equal, 133 (133 ÷ 19 = 7). (10) Numeric value of the first and last letters of all seven words equal 1,393 (1,393 ÷ 199 = 7). (11) The book of Genesis has 78,064 letters (78,064 ÷ 11,152 = 7). So, what is the big deal about seven? Jesus is our Shiva (7), our Shabbat (7th day). (Lu 6:5) You couldn’t see this messianic reference, however, unless you are reading in Hebrew. This book is the beginning of an amazing pilgrimage.

Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.

The problem is obvious, once the Father began creating, He risked that, although perfect, His new and autonomous family could choose badness. How else did we get demon angels? Two is a risky number. The solution is unifying, or amening, with the original “one.” Only recently has science been able to monitor a quasar. The elements that compose the stars is too base for the creation of higher forms of life. When these stars die, however, they go through two steps: First, the star implodes. Second, the star explodes. Only after the second step does the quasar create higher elements, from which we are formed. Stardust: We are made of stardust. The universe we come from is lyrical. From polarity, matter, energy and light eventuate. Even a black hole emits a super-charged jet. For the birth of any new thing, there must be polarity. For any children to exist, there must be a man and his opposite, woman. It is no mystery why the ancient Sumerian words for, “one” and “two” are the same words for, “man” and “woman.

We should expect nothing less from the language that was originally given by God, to His human family. Hebrew was the method that God chose for mankind to speak to Him, and Him to them. Adam spoke Hebrew—and your Bible confirms this. Everyone who got off the ark spoke one language—Hebrew. Even Abraham spoke Hebrew. Where did Abraham learn to speak Hebrew? Abraham was descended from Noah’s son, Shem. (Ge 11:10-26) Shem’s household was not affected by the later confusion of languages, at Babel. (Ge 11:5-9) To the contrary, Shem was blessed while the rest of Babel was cursed. (Ge 9:26) That is how Abraham retained Hebrew, despite residing in Babylon. So, Shem’s language can be traced back to Adam. (Ge 11:1) And, Shem (Noah’s son) was still alive when Jacob and Esau was 30 years of age. Obviously, Hebrew (the original language) was clearly spoken by Jacob’s sons. (Ge 14:13)

Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language; While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.

All our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters" from other tongues and cultures.

Where the Israelis find it difficult is actually in escaping the description of the reality as colonialist when trying to do this in Hebrew. Any translation into another language of the Israeli terminology of settlement is bound to expose the colonialist nature of the project.

no word in the Hebrew language of that period for “religion.” Religion was not a separate, identifiable category of beliefs and activities. It was an inseparable, pervasive part of life.

Those religions arose among peoples speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively.

The Hebrew tongue, above other languages, is very plain, but withal it is majestic and glorious: it contains much in few and simple words, and therein surpasses all other languages. — Martin Luther

In the Hebrew language, the word for “anointed one” is mashiach, from which we get our word messiah. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the translation of mashiach is christos, whence we get our word Christ.

The stadium was quiet. Cohen raised his hands and parted his fingers. He switched from English to Hebrew—not the new Hebrew of the Tel Aviv streets but the archaic language of the synagogue and the Diaspora, of the old men at the Gate of Heaven, the language of the priests, fifteen words. He blessed the people, and left the stage.

1. My contention is that "Surah" is an arabicized form of the Hebrew name 171'01 B' surah, that is, Gospel, given to the Christian Gospels during the early centuries of Christianity and adopted in the Qur'an for "revelation.

Only Merlin and her guards ever woke her in the mornings, and her guards only shouted to her through the doors. Britt picked her head off her pillow. “Merlin?” Merlin, once again standing out in the hallway, hissed through the door.“You’re still in bed.” “Yeah, so?” “It is indecent for you to allow a man into your bedchambers when you are still in bed!” Britt rolled her eyes and sat up. “What did you want?” “Get up. We’re going to mass.” “No, we’re not. You might be, but I’m not.” “Oh yes you are, you little heathen.” “It’s boring. The pastor only talks in Greek or Hebrew or whatever that language is.” “He’s the archbishop, and he conducts the service in Latin.” “Mmm, yeah that,” Britt said, falling back into her bed with a thump. “Do not lie back down you unschooled foundling!” “Too late,” Britt said. “If you want me to go to mass you’re going to have to drag me out of here. How indecent would that be?

One way to express love emotionally is to use words that build up. Solomon, author of the ancient Hebrew Wisdom Literature, wrote, “The tongue has the power of life and death.”2 Many couples have never learned the tremendous power of verbally affirming each other. Solomon further noted, “An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up.

People caught in a homeland-trap: to speak now in this weary language, a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled, it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.

Of all the languages that have existed upon the Earth, the Hebrew language is unique and extraordinary in its ability to paint vivid pictures with words that lodge within the heart conveying deep and profound Truth". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]

Jonathan Sacks; “One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God. The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.”Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.

The word helper is ezer in Hebrew. It sounds derogatory in English, like God made Adam a personal assistant. But it’s not that way at all in the original language. Ezer can be translated “partner” — one who comes alongside to help achieve a goal.

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

Bible consists of sixty-six books written by some forty different authors over a period of about 1,500 years. The authors came from every imaginable background—“kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen and scholars. It was written on at least three different continents in three different languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—yet, there is a thread of continuity from Genesis to Revelation.

Our language is older than theirs. The Lepcha language is older than Hebrew. It is older than Sanskrit, Tibetan and even your English. Lepcha is the original language of the world. It was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden! In 1987 our written language was 5675 years old.

Do you think God speaks Arabic or Hebrew? Can he hear your prayers or mine?"... "I do not know." "What do you think, Nabi?" The boy thought about this for a long time before replying. "I think God must speak all the languages." His tone was confident. "I think he can heal all of us.

It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth. ‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some think French fulfils this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, might.

In the wake of the Reformation, as the correct reading of scripture became a matter of increasingly high stakes, Hebrew, as well as Aramaic, Samaritan, Ethiopian, Armenian, and other languages that preserved versions of scripture and documents of the early church, became essential weapons of theological warfare.

For example, missionary linguists are working on modified Roman alphabets for hundreds of New Guinea and Native American languages. Government linguists devised the modified Roman alphabet adopted in 1928 by Turkey for writing Turkish, as well as the modified Cyrillic alphabets designed for many tribal languages of Russia. In a few cases, we also know something about the individuals who designed writing systems by blueprint copying in the remote past. For instance, the Cyrillic alphabet itself (the one still used today in Russia) is descended from an adaptation of Greek and Hebrew letters devised by Saint Cyril, a Greek missionary to the Slavs in the ninth century A.D. The first preserved texts for any Germanic language (the language family that includes English) are in the Gothic alphabet created by Bishop Ulfilas, a missionary living with the Visigoths in what is now Bulgaria in the fourth century A.D. Like Saint Cyril’s invention, Ulfilas’s alphabet was a mishmash of letters borrowed from different sources: about 20 Greek letters, about five Roman letters, and two letters either taken from the runic alphabet or invented by Ulfilas himself. Much

In Hebrew, the Lord’s language, the word for time is ZeMaN, which is linked to the word for invitation. This serves to remind us that the passage of time is an invitation to make the most of it, to manage it effectively, and to integrate our understanding of how the world works with a true and accurate perception of the reality of time.

Being born a human was not the first time God made Himself small so that we could have access to Him. First He shrunk Himself when He revealed the Torah at Mount Sinai. He shrunk Himself into tiny Hebrew words, man's finite language, so that we might get to Him that way. Then He shrunk Himself again, down to the size of a baby, down into manger finiteness.

Hebrew was not a language Len knew; he had grown up observant only in the sense that he noticed things.

Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages.

His grandfather believed in spirits and learned Hebrew, because he thought that was the language of heaven.

the LORD God said: 'Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil;

Now, that may be the correct translation, but the Hebrew doesn’t say thigh, it says yarek, which means, approximately, soft bits.

how modern Hebrew has recently coined a rather recherché template, the passive of the reflexive (‘he was made to snog himself’),

Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all, it has only aspects.

ABAD'DON, noun [Hebrew Chaldee Syriac Samaritan to be lost, or destroyed, to perish.] 1. The destroyer, or angel of the bottomless pit. Revelation 9. 2. The bottomless pit. Milton.

The ancient Hebrews did not write the name of God. I often wish the Christians would follow suit, as never was a word more misused in writing and speaking than the name of the Lord.

No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the Text.

Ten years of Hebrew school, and it comes to that? So what?” “Let me tell you something,” says my mother. “Those are two of the most powerful words in the English language. Right between them is a free and happy life.

books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.

In principle, to be sure, the Reformation idea of the universal priesthood of all believers meant that not only the clergy but also the laity, not only the theologian but also the magistrate, had the capacity to read, understand, and apply the teachings of the Bible. Yet one of the contributions of the sacred philology of the biblical humanists to the Reformation was an insistence that, in practice, often contradicted the notion of the universal priesthood: the Bible had to be understood on the basis of the authentic original text, written in Hebrew and Greek which, most of the time, only clergy and theologians could comprehend properly. Thus the scholarly authority of the Reformation clergy replaced the priestly authority of the medieval clergy.

In the wisdom of God, the revelation of his will was given in the Hebrew tongue, with an alphabet of twenty-two letters, some of which, as inscribed on the Moabite stone, b.c. 900, are identical in form and sound with those now used in English books. This Hebrew alphabet, so simple that a child might learn it in a day, has never been lost or forgotten. The Hebrew language in which the Oracles of God were given to man, has never become a dead language. Since the day when the Law was given to Moses on Mount Sinai, there never has been a day or hour when the language in which it was written was not known to living men, who were able to read, write, and expound it. And the Hebrew is the only language of those ages that has lived to the present time, preserving the record of a divine revelation, and being conserved by it through the vicissitudes of conflict, conquest, captivity, and dispersion; while the surrounding idolatrous nations perished in their own corruption, and their languages and literature were buried in oblivion.

As was the case in many left-wing Jewish homes, I learned a different version of “Never again”—that it was a directive, a sacred duty, to oppose hate and discrimination in all its forms, no matter who was the target. But, for the same reasons that she selected my biblical name, my mother insisted that I go to Hebrew day school to cement the bond to our tribe, to learn the songs, rituals, and languages (both Hebrew and Yiddish) that our adversaries had been trying to annihilate since before the Inquisition. And at that school, “Never again” did not mean “Never again to anyone,” as it did in our home—it meant “Never again to the Jews.” It meant “Never again because of Israel.” It meant “Never again because we who have been haunted by Shylock forever have our own double now—and he has a great many guns.

In the Hebrew language, there is no distinction between knowing and doing. Knowing is doing and doing is knowing. In other words, if you aren't doing it, then you don't really know it... The phrase all out literally means "maximum effort." It's giving God everything you've got -- 100 percent. It's loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. It's not just worshiping God with your words. It's worshiping God with blood, sweat, and tears. It's more than sincere sentiments. It's sweat equity in kingdom causes. You cannot be the hands and feet of Jesus if you're sitting on your butt.

Relax. Do not become anxious. Be afraid of nothing. Everything is working out for the best (Romans 8:28). How can you ever fear change when your life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3 AMP), and I am God who does not change (Malachi 3:6)? I am “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8 NKJV).

But hold on: Didn’t I remember that the original language of the Bible was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that unimpeachable scholarly source, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the language I was looking for was Aramaic.

Jossi had been slow in agreeing with Ben Yehuda and the others. Hebrew had to be revived. If the desire for national identity was great enough a dead language could be brought back. But Sarah was set in her ways. Yiddish was what she spoke and what her mother had spoken. She had no intention of becoming a scholar so late in life.

years ago one of the translators working on the original Dead Sea scrolls, Professor Schonfeld, discovered a recurring cipher in some texts. A hidden language, if you like. He called it the Atbash Cipher. Ever heard of it?” Savage nodded. “Sure. I thought it was found in scrolls written in Hebrew.” “It seems it may occur in Aramaic texts too.

It is not without significance that Hebrew was the language used by Abraham, and that he could not hand it on to all his descendants but only to those who were derived from him through Jacob, and by uniting to form the people of God in the most evident and conspicuous fashion, were able to keep the covenants and to preserve the stock from which Christ came. And

Ibn Rushd's writings were translated into Latin and Hebrew by European scholars. There soon appeared super-commentaries on his commentaries. Many of the writings exist only in these two languages, the original Arabic writings being long lost. This itself is a commentary on the extent to which Ibn Rushd, as a rationalist philosopher, was able to influence the mood of his times

No more peeping through keyholes! No more mas turbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible-it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age. A classic purity, then-and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human boneswhilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!

Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we possess.216 The early Jews loved his sparkling prose with its brilliant images, many of which have since passed into the literature of all civilized nations. But more important than the language was the thought: Isaiah was pushing humanity towards new moral discoveries.

Before he died in 2013, the great sociologist Robert Bellah said that his view of everything he’d studied across his life was tilted on its axis by this late recognition: when mammals began to bring forth offspring from the center of their bodies, spiritual life became possible. With apes and far more with humans, the period of necessary parental care—care in order for the offspring to survive—became longer and longer. The long helplessness of the child generated a sphere of softening, experimentation, and creativity in self-understanding and shared life. This is the biological groundwork for the axial move—stepping out of fear and into care beyond one’s self. The religions apprehended this long ago and wove it into language; compassion in both Hebrew and Arabic derives from the word for womb.

We will need to give you a Muslim name…does Leila suit you?” “I don’t deserve this kindness,” she whispered. “That you, Muslims, should help a Jew—” “Come now!” Serif said, realizing that she was about to cry. “Jews and Muslims are cousins, the descendants of Abraham. Your new name, do you know it means ‘evening’ both in Arabic, the language of our Holy Koran, and also in Hebrew, the language of your Torah?

But Anra was far cleverer than I at reading. He loved letters as passionately as I did the outside. For him, they were alive. I remember shim showing me some Egyptian hieroglyphs and telling me that they were all animals and insects. And then he showed me some Egyptian hieratics and demotics and told me those were the same animals in disguise. But Hebrew, he said, was best of all, for each letter was a magic charm.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays notes that there is not “an exact equivalent for ‘homosexual’ in either Greek or Hebrew.”22 The Bible, in its original Hebrew and Greek, has no concept like our present understanding of a person with a homosexual orientation. Indeed, the concept of an ongoing sexual attraction to people of one’s own sex did not exist in European or American language until the late nineteenth century.23

Hebrew idiom that the translators interpreted literally and so failed to appreciate the general drift of the text. The idiom “to rise up early to do something” actually means “to do something continually.” Hence the second of the quotations just noted has the following meaning: “They did not listen to my words which I sent unto them by my servants the prophets; even though I sent them continually they still would not listen to them.

Let this meeting be as cryptic—as representative/nonrepresentative—as the Arameans, a people that never had a land of their own but still managed to leave behind their language—the only thing they left behind, their language. Aramaic. Ha lachma anya. This is the bread of affliction. Eli Eli lama shavaktani? Father, Father, why didn’t Christ quote the Psalms in Hebrew—was he that inept, or does excruciation always call for the vernacular?

A Tourist On a great rock by the Jaffa Gate sat a golden girl from Scandinavia and oiled herself with suntan oil as if on the beach. I told her, don’t go into these alleys, a net of bachelors in heat is spread there, a snare of lechers. And further inside, in half-darkness, the groaning trousers of old men, and unholy lust in the guise of prayer and grief and seductive chatter in many languages. Once Hebrew was God’s slang in these streets, now I use it for holy desire.

For her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it. 3 There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased, so that in her interviews with Barbarians she very seldom had need of an interpreter, but made her replies to most of them herself and unassisted, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes or Parthians. 4 Nay, it is said that she knew the speech of many other peoples also, although the kings of Egypt before her had not even made an effort to learn the native language, and some actually gave up their Macedonian dialect.

I was still in the Gymnasium when this short pamphlet, penetrating as a steel shaft, appeared; but I can still remember the general astonishment and annoyance of the bourgeois Jewish circles of Vienna. What has happened, they said angrily, to this otherwise intelligent, witty and cultivated writer? What foolishness is this that he has thought up and writes about? Why should we go to Palestine? Our language is German and not Hebrew, and beautiful Austria is our homeland. Are we not well off under the good Emperor Franz Josef? Do we not make a decent living, and is our position not secure? Are we not equal subjects, inhabitants and loyal citizens of our beloved Vienna? Do we not live in a progressive era in which in a few decades all sectarian prejudices will be abolished? Why does he, who speaks as a Jew and who wishes to help Judaism, place arguments in the hands of our worst enemies and attempt to separate us, when every day brings us more closely and intimately into the German world?

Spirit Is an Old, Old World The earliest meaning of spirit that we can trace derives from the world 'breath' - 'breath' of the body {'closer than breathing'}, 'breath' of life, then later 'wind' of the cosmos. The root form in Hebrew is 'ruach,' of feminine gender. However 'spirit' appears to be far older than the Hebrew language. Breath {spirit} was seen as provided by the mother at birth. Broadened to cosmic dimension the image became that of the early Goddess - the source and nurturer of all living. Out of her very dust came the first creature and in the stirring dust breathed the living energy {spirit} of life. In this creation, the body is not separated from spirit, nor spirit separated from woman, nor history separated from nature. Of the same movement derives 'transcending' - rising up out of what already is. The ancient and proud history of spirit may be seen as a clear thread - a deep subliminal stratum of the feminine - running through patriarchal literature, suppressed and distorted but never entirely snuffed out.

Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew-Aramaic, from anything which came its way. On the other hand it contributed: to Hebrew, to English-American. Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.62 It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer, its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power.

Languages were his principal study; and he sought, but acquiring their elements, to open a field for self-instruction on his return to Geneva. Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew, gained his attention, after he had made himself perfectly master of Greek and Latin. For my own part, idleness had ever been irksome to me, and now that I wished to fly from reflection, and hated my former studies, I felt great relief in being the fellow-pupil with my friend, and found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I

One author, in writing of the Bible’s uniqueness, put it this way: Here is a book: 1. written over a 1500 year span; 2. written over 40 generations; 3. written by more than 40 authors, from every walk of life— including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars, etc.: Moses, a political leader, trained in the universities of Egypt Peter, a fisherman Amos, a herdsman Joshua, a military general Nehemiah, a cupbearer Daniel, a prime minister Luke, a doctor Solomon, a king Matthew, a tax collector Paul, a rabbi 4. written in different places: Moses in the wilderness Jeremiah in a dungeon Daniel on a hillside and in a palace Paul inside a prison Luke while traveling John on the isle of Patmos others in the rigors of a military campaign 5. written at different times: David in times of war Solomon in times of peace 6. written during different moods: some writing from the heights of joy and others from the depths of sorrow and despair 7. written on three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe 8. written in three languages: Hebrew… , Aramaic… , and Greek… 9. Finally, its subject matter includes hundreds of controversial topics. Yet, the biblical authors spoke with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. There is one unfolding story…

This is what the human race has been ever since. The Anunnaki have been overtly and now covertly ruling the planet for thousands of years. The mistranslation of the Bible and symbolic language taken literally has devastated the original meaning and given us a fantasy story. Genesis and Exodus were written by the Hebrew priestly class, the Levites, after they were taken to Babylon from around 586 BC. Babylon was in the former lands of Sumer and so the Babylonians, and therefore the Levites, knew the Sumerian stories and accounts. It was from these records overwhelmingly, that the Levites compiled Genesis and Exodus. The source is obvious.

In his Bible translations, Tyndale coined such phrases as: “the powers that be” (Romans 13); “my brother's keeper” (Genesis 4); “the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5); and “a law unto themselves” (Romans 2). These phrases continue to be used, even in modern English, precisely because they are so well shaped in terms of their alliteration, rhyme, and word repetitions. Tyndale also introduced or revived many words that are still in use. He constructed the term “Jehovah” from the Hebrew construction known as the “tetragrammaton” in the Old Testament. He invented the English word “Passover” to refer to the Jewish festival known in Hebrew as Pesah.

It is a remarkable fact that the Greeks, who were so inquisitive about nature, and so quick to pick up foreign technology and artistic skills, were quite incurious about alien languages. They were in Egypt for a millennium but never bothered to learn anything except trading demotic; Pythagoras was apparently the only Greek scholar who understood hieroglyphics. They had exactly the same blindness towards Hebrew, Hebrew literature and Jewish religious philosophy. They ignored it and knew of it only from inaccurate hearsay. This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension.

English speakers will readily agree that dogs and cats do not end with the same sound once that fact is pointed out, but most will not realize it for themselves. Likewise, in Spanish, too, the pronunciation of the letter s differs from word to word. And in Russian, the pronunciation of the letter g (Γ) differs from word to word (though, admittedly, the Russian g is somewhat anomalous, in that most Russian letters show less variation from word to word); the pronunciation of the vowels also varies considerably from word to word. The imperfect match between sounds and letters in these languages reflects the fact that even native speakers often do not understand the sounds of their langauge.

You said somewhere that you would like to write in one of the Nordic languages because they have more vowels, and vowels are more serious.’ You: ‘Did I say that? But Latin languages have more vowels than Nordic ones! I think what I meant was that I would like to write in one of those ancient northern tongues which were almost entirely made up on vowels. I’ve always felt it had something to do with the climate. They were hot languages, insulated by all those heaped up vowels.’ Me: ‘Ancient Hebrew only had consonants. Presumably so that there was no risk of them accidentally writing the secret name of God.’ You: ‘Or perhaps that was to do with the climate too. Consonants were more open and airy, more suited to a language of the desert.’ ‘You also said that you hated sans serif typefaces.’ ‘Oh, yes, they’re terrible! All those naked letters, reduced to their stark scaffolding. No-one can possibly recognise their mother tongue when printed in a Futura typeface. It lacks maternal warmth, it lacks friendliness.’ ‘I fear Cuervo may be right: we are somewhat unscientific.’ ‘And prejudiced too. Vowels can be dispensed with. A text written solely using vowels would be illegible, but in a text using only consonants, one could guess the vowels. A text in which X replaced all the Os, as in that story by Poe, might prove difficult to read, but would, ultimately, be decipherable.

I realized then and there that this word “right” is completely meaningless. And who, pray tell, has the obligation to fulfill this right? Anytime somebody tells you that you have a right to anything, be very suspect. Ask them who you can call to make sure that this right gets fulfilled. Because if there isn’t anybody who accepts the obligation to deliver on that right, you don’t have that right. That right is absolutely worthless if you cannot collect on it. And so the word “right” is, on its face, nonsensical. It just doesn’t mean anything. How can something be guaranteed to you if there is no guarantee that someone can and will deliver it to you? It wasn’t until later that I thought to recheck the water supply. To my amazement and relief, there was plenty of water. In my exhaustion I had somehow misread the dipstick we use to gauge how much water is left. Embarrassing, yes, but what a relief to know we were going to live! Everything was going to be fine, but the ordeal had taught me a lesson. It had reminded me that the English language is full of words that are pure nonsense. These words define concepts that do not exist. There is no word for rights in the Lord’s language. There is no Hebrew word that translates to even roughly the same thing. And you can be sure that, if a word doesn’t exist in the Lord’s language, that thing does not exist at all. It is not real. Otherwise, God would have named it.

More specifically, the Hebrew Bible tells the story of a people who move away from slavery under Pharaoh—a system that requires many people to produce more and more with less and less for the few with power, that requires them to give their lives to production in order to enhance the wealth of the powerful (in other words, the “rat race”)—into a covenant with their God and with each other. This covenant lifts up the ideal of “neighborhood”—a community in which the members care for one another, share in abundance, acquire no more than is needed, and especially look out for the poorest or the least powerful of those in the neighborhood (in the language of the Old Testament prophets: “the widow, the immigrant, and the orphan”).

There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled, that, in a noble breast, should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes. Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own. You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. Be he Englishman, Frenchman, German, Dane, or Scot; the European who scoffs at an American, calls his own brother Raca, and stands in danger of the judgment. We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality—whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves. No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother. For who was our father and our mother? Or can we point to any Romulus and Remus for our founders? Our ancestry is lost in the universal paternity; and Caesar and Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, and Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world's as our own. We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in Eden. The other world beyond this, which was longed for by the devout before Columbus' time, was found in the New; and the deep-sea-lead, that first struck these soundings, brought up the soil of Earth's Paradise. Not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so, at God's good pleasure, and in the fullness and mellowness of time. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our children's children, on the world's jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions round about; Italians, and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire.

Being the High Priest I have the duty of shepherding my flock, and since proselytizing is illegal, I must do so by more subversive means. I opened my school under the throne of King Nebuchadnezzar, I taught mathematics, science, astronomy, archeology, antiquities, languages, and fingers to lips (theology). I tootled the Kings children, as well as those of the nobles, I also taught the Hebrew servants. There were four young men who stood out among the others Belteshazzar, whose Hebrew name was Daniel, and his three friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. These men were already well versed in many disciplines and made discussions a delight. They were devout men who chose not to defile themselves with the royal rations and wine. Daniel had the gift of Yoseph he could interpret dreams.

Bible translations succeed or fail based on Christian trust, because only a vanishingly small percentage of Bible readers can, and even fewer do, go through the laborious process of checking their English translations against the Greek and Hebrew. The vast majority of Bible readers simply take—they have to take—the word of others that the translations in their laps are faithful. When scholarly Christians and ministry-leading Christians go to battle over Bible translations, in dog fights far above the it’s-all-Greek-to-me heads of people in the pew, some of the flak falls on the flock. The sheep today have many resources—like this book—and can do some good homework, but if they can’t read the original languages of Scripture they must still take sides based largely on whom they trust.

The other approach, probably more widely appealing in contemporary Western culture, is so to fix on the painful circumstances of life that one gives up on faith. The harsh realities of life show that Christian (or other) faith in God is no longer tenable. It might have been once, when one was a child, perhaps in Sunday school. But when one grows up and acquires scientific understanding of how the world works, together with an awareness of increasingly uncertain general prospects—global warming, continuing wars, terrorism, famines, growing disparities between rich and poor, transience of romantic relationships, familial instabilities, social anomie, disillusionment with grand claims about the world, or just existential moments of “Why?” when confronted by needless and innocent suffering—then it becomes clear that “Our God reigns” is empty language that trivializes the realities of the world.

Preface WITH THE ADVENT OF multiple modern English translations of the Bible being published over the last fifty years, Christians have come to realize that there can be a wide range of meanings and renderings of various words from the Bible in the original language. As a Hebrew teacher and student of ancient languages one of the most common questions I get is, “What is the best translation?” This is usually followed by the question, “Which translation is the closest to the original Biblical language?” The answer I give to both questions is, “All of them.” With few exceptions, every translation and paraphrase of the Bible is done with much scholarship and prayer by the translators. Every translator is convinced that he or she has presented the best renderings for each word and firmly believes they have given the rendering that is closest to the original language. So we now ask the question as to why there are

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.

People ask me often, ‘Why do you write in a dying language?’ And I want to explain it in a few words. Firstly, I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it. Secondly, not only do I believe in ghosts, but also in resurrection. I am sure that millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be: “Is there any new Yiddish book to read?” For them Yiddish will not be dead. Thirdly, for 2000 years Hebrew was considered a dead language. Suddenly it became strangely alive. What happened to Hebrew may also happen to Yiddish one day, (although I haven’t the slightest idea how this miracle can take place.) There is still a fourth minor reason for not forsaking Yiddish and this is: Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead. [Isaac Bashevis Singer’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1978]

Yes, you say, but many of the fathers were saved and even became teachers without the languages. That is true. But how do you account for the fact that they so often erred in the Scriptures?…Even St. Augustine himself is obliged to confess…that a Christian teacher who is to expound the Scriptures must know Greek and Hebrew in addition to Latin. Otherwise, it is impossible to avoid constant stumbling; indeed, there are plenty of problems to work out even when one is well versed in the languages...it is a still greater sin and loss that we do not study languages, especially in these days when God is offering and giving us men and books and every facility and inducement to this study, and desires his Bible to be an open book. O how happy the dear fathers would have been if they had had our opportunity to study the languages and come thus prepared to the Holy Scriptures! What great toil and effort it cost them to gather up a few crumbs, while we with half the labor—yes, almost without any labor at all—can acquire the whole loaf! O how their effort puts our indolence to shame! Yes, how sternly God will judge our lethargy and ingratitude!

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition. Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500—except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin. Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called “literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief courses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.

Prehistoric peoples probably charged interest on loans of corn and livestock. The association between interest and the fruit of a loan is embedded in ancient languages. Across the ancient world the etymologies of interest derive from the offspring of livestock. The Sumerian word for interest, mas, signifies a kid goat (or lamb).2 The ancient Egyptian equivalent ms means to give birth.3 In ancient Greek interest is tokos, a calf. Among the several Hebrew words for interest are marbit and tarbit, meaning to increase and multiply. The Latin for interest, foenus, connotes fertility, and for money, pecunia, is derived from pecus, a flock. Our word capital comes from caput, a head of cattle. These derivations, claim Sydney Homer and Richard Sylla, imply that interest originated with loans of seeds and of animals. These were loans for productive purposes. The seeds yielded an increase. At harvest time the seed could conveniently be returned with interest. Some part or all of the animal’s progeny could be returned with the animal. We shall never know but we can surmise that the concept of interest in its modern sense arose from just such productive loans.

This canvas of human prehistory is distinctively modern. The renowned theorist of culture W. J. T. Mitchell once remarked that dinosaurs are the quintessential modernist animal, since in Shakespeare’s time no one knew such creatures had ever existed. In a similar way, until quite recently most Christians assumed anything worth knowing about early humans could be found in the Book of Genesis. Up until the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘men of letters’ – scientists included – still largely assumed that the universe did not even exist prior to late October, 4004 BC, and that all humans spoke the same language (Hebrew) until the dispersal of humanity, after the fall of the Tower of Babel sixteen centuries later.1 At that time there was as yet no ‘prehistory’. There was only history, even if some of that history was wildly wrong. The term ‘prehistory’ only came into common use after the discoveries at Brixham Cave in Devon in 1858, when stone axes, which could only have been fashioned by humans, were found alongside remains of cave bear, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species, all together under a sealed casing of rock. This, and subsequent archaeological findings, sparked a complete rethinking of existing evidence. Suddenly, ‘the bottom dropped out of human history.

The cry of the poor in the Old Testament was a cry for justice. It was a cry made by free men and women, often of moderate—some even of considerable—means. It was the cry of victims. But these were not the victims of poverty so much as they were the victims of violence and oppression brought upon them by persons more powerful than themselves.28 It was this relation of petition to justice that gave weight to the Hebrew assonance by which ze‘aqah—“the cry”—was expected to be met by zedaqah—“righteousness.” And “righteousness” was achieved through an act of justice granted by the powerful to the weak. The word only later came to mean alms given by the wealthy to the poor. This “elegant juxtaposition of words” did not escape the alert eyes of Jerome, in 408–10, as he commented on the classic phrase of the prophet Isaiah: He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness (zedaqah) but, behold, a cry (ze‘aqah) (Isa. 5:7).29 The absorption of the language and history of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Christian communities between the fourth and sixth centuries slowly but surely added a rougher and more assertive texture to the Christian discourse on poverty. The poor were not simply others—creatures who trembled on the margins of society, asking to be saved by the wealthy. Like the poor of Israel, they were also brothers. They had the right to “cry out” for justice in the face of oppressors along with all other members of the “people of God.

We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way. In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.

In addition, Christ Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic. While He was born Jewish and could read the Hebrew sacred texts, it is probable that He did not speak Hebrew with his Apostles or with those people who came to hear Him speak. For, it was not common during the time of Christ Jesus for the Jewish people to speak in Hebrew. Extremely few people in ancient times could read or write. The Jewish people of the time of Christ Jesus spoke Aramaic. The New Testament Gospels, on the other hand, were written in Greek. Thus, before even beginning to speak about all the errors created by innumerable scribes re-copying the Gospels over and over again, we must confront the fact that when Christ Jesus spoke, he spoke in Aramaic. We know that the authors of the Gospels in the New Testament were not the persons traditionally named as the authors of these Gospels: Saint Mark did not write the Gospel of Mark; Saint Matthew did not write the Gospel of Matthew and so on. In order to create each one of the New Testament Gospels, some author who spoke and wrote in Greek had to have read a document already written in Aramaic (or possibly Hebrew, although this is unlikely), or possibly sat and listened as one of the Apostles or followers of Christ Jesus related the stories to him in Aramaic and then the author who spoke and wrote in Greek, translated the Aramaic tales into Greek. So, straightaway, we realize that it is impossible that we are reading the exact words of Christ Jesus; the best that we can hope for is that we are reading the best translation of Christ Jesus’ words from Aramaic, into Greek and finally into English.

Of course L has not been reading the Odyssey the whole time. The pushchair is also loaded with White Fang, VIKING!, Tar-Kutu: Dog of the Frozen North, Marduk: Dog of the Mongolian Steppes, Pete: Black Dog of the Dakota, THE CARNIVORES, THE PREDATORS, THE BIG CATS and The House at Pooh Corner. For the past few days he has also been reading White Fang for the third time. Sometimes we get off the train and he runs up and down the platform. Sometimes he counts up to 100 or so in one or more languages while eyes glaze up and down the car. Still he has been reading the Odyssey enough for a straw poll of Circle Line opinion on the subject of small children & Greek. Amazing: 7 Far too young: 10 Only pretending to read it: 6 Excellent idea as etymology so helpful for spelling: 19 Excellent idea as inflected languages so helpful for computer programming: 8 Excellent idea as classics indispensable for understanding of English literature: 7 Excellent idea as Greek so helpful for reading New Testament, camel through eye of needle for example mistranslation of very similar word for rope: 3 Terrible idea as study of classical languages embedded in educational system productive of divisive society: 5 Terrible idea as overemphasis on study of dead languages directly responsible for neglect of sciences and industrial decline and uncompetitiveness of Britain: 10 Stupid idea as he should be playing football: 1 Stupid idea as he should be studying Hebrew & learning about his Jewish heritage: 1 Marvellous idea as spelling and grammar not taught in schools: 24 (Respondents: 35; Abstentions: 1,000?) Oh, & almost forgot: Marvellous idea as Homer so marvellous in Greek: 0 Marvellous idea as Greek such as marvellous language: 0 Oh & also: Marvellous idea but how did you teach it to a child that young: 8

It was a story no one could tell me when I was child. The story of Russian Jewry had been told in English, by American Jews; to them, it was a story that began with antiquity, culminated with the pogroms, and ended with emigration. For those who remained in Russia, there had been a time before the pogroms and a time after: a period of home, then a period of fear and even greater fear and then brief hope again, and then a different kind of fear, when one no longer feared for one's life but fear never having hope again. This story did not end; it faded into a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table poring over an atlas of the world, or of me sitting on the bedroom floor talking at my best friend. The history of the Soviet Union itself remains a story without an narrative; every attempt to tell this story in Russia has stopped short, giving way to the resolve to turn away from the decades of pain and suffering and bloodshed. With every telling, stories of Stalinism and the Second World War become more mythologized. And with so few Jew left in Russia, with so little uniting them, the Russian Jewish world is one of absences and silences. I had no words for this when I was twelve, but what I felt more strongly that anything, more strongly even than the desire to go to Israel, was this absence of a story. My Jewishness consisted of the experience of being ostracized and beaten up and the specter of not being allowed into university. Once I found my people milling outside the synagogue (we never went inside, where old men in strange clothes sang in an unfamiliar language), a few old Yiddish songs and a couple of newer Hebrew ones were added to my non-story. Finally, I had read the stories of Sholem Aleichem, which were certainly of a different world, as distant from my modern urban Russian-speaking childhood as anything could be. In the end, my Jewish identity was entirely negative: it consisted of non-belonging. How had I and other late-Soviet Jews been so impoverished? Prior to the Russian Revolution, most of the world's Jews lived in the Russian Empire. Following the Second World War, Russia was the only European country whose Jewish population numbered not in the hundreds or even thousands but in the millions. How did this country rid itself of Jewish culture altogether? How did the Jews of Russia lose their home? Much later, as I tried to find the answers to these questions, I kept circling back tot he story of Birobidzhan, which, in its concentrated tragic absurdity seemed to tell it all.

What if I say to the church, “God chose you for salvation and Jesus died for you,” and then some of those people fall away and apostatize and end up in hell? Haven’t I lied to them? No, I haven’t. I have spoken the truth. In Scripture, truth is more than just conformity to the facts. It is trustworthiness and faithfulness.10 I have spoken to these people in a trustworthy manner. I have spoken to them in a faithful manner, a manner that they can bank their whole lives on, because I have spoken to them in accordance with God’s revelation. There is a tough, challenging, and surprising passage in Ezekiel 33:13 and following. The Lord says there: When I say to the righteous, he will surely live, and he so trusts in his righteousness that he commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds will be remembered; but in that same iniquity of his which he has committed he will die. But when I say to the wicked, “You will surely die,” and he turns from his sin and practices justice and righteousness, if a wicked man restores a pledge, pays back what he has taken by robbery, walks by the statutes of life [NASB margin] without committing iniquity, he will surely live; he shall not die. None of his sins that he has committed will be remembered against him. He has practiced justice and righteousness; he will surely live.11 Yet we want to say to God, “You said to the righteous man, ‘You will surely live’—living you will live, in the Hebrew idiom—but he died. You said to the wicked man, ‘You will surely die’—dying you will die—and he lived. You lied to them, didn’t you? You didn’t tell the truth to them.” But who are we to teach God how to speak the truth? This is how God speaks. He says to people, “You will surely live,” and then they die because they trust in their own righteousness instead of trusting in Him. But God was telling the truth when He said to them, “You will surely live.” He was not lying to them. He was saying something trustworthy. When He says to the wicked man, “You will surely die,” He’s saying something trustworthy to that man and the man takes heed to what God has said. He trusts what God has said. He believes that if he stays on the path on which he is going he will surely die. In faith he trembles at the warning and he will surely live. God speaks this way and we must learn from him how to speak. God speaks to His people and He calls them elect, and therefore we also need to speak to God’s people this way. We must. We have no other choice but to let God teach us how to address his people, even if we don’t have it all worked out in our minds. If we are not comfortable with biblical language, not only hearing it but also saying it, if biblical language sounds strange to us, and if our theology gets in the way of our speaking and receiving the language of Scripture, then what has become of us—we, who are to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord?

experience, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world around us. So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.2

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

As Arab armies conquered Syria (which had been part of the Roman and Byzantine empires), they found Syriac translations of Greek philosophical works. These writings were translated into Arabic, and for a time they became the foundation of Muslim philosophy. Eventually, they were rejected as being inconsistent with Islam. The mullahs decided that Muslims could accept practical works from the conquered people, but speculative thought was out. Christians, however, had long since made their peace with integrating pagan philosophy with the Bible. In fact, since the time of the early Christian writers, theologians had argued that just as the Hebrew prophets were the Jewish world’s road to the truth best expressed in Christianity, philosophers were the pagan world’s road to that same truth. So when Christian scholars found out about the works of Aristotle in Spain, they began to translate them into Latin, the language of the church and of scholarship. These new texts immediately caused a buzz in the scholarly community, because here was a complete, well-developed worldview that answered all of the key philosophical questions that medieval scholars had grappled with. The only question was how to integrate the “New Aristotle” into the intellectual synthesis already in place with the advent of Platonic humanism.

Summing Up • Central to the debates about the applicability of Romans 1: 24-27 to contemporary committed gay and lesbian relationships is Paul’s claim that the sexual misbehavior he describes in these verses is “unnatural,” or “contrary to nature.” We must understand the moral logic underlying this claim in order to discern how to apply these verses to contemporary life. • The Greek word that Paul uses for “nature” here (phusis) does not occur in the Septuagint, the early translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Rather, it arises in Jewish discourse after 200 BCE, when Jewish writers make use of it as a Stoic category in order to interpret Jewish ethics to Gentiles. • In the ancient world there were three dimensions to the understanding of nature, and we find each of these reflected in Paul’s use of the word: ° Nature was understood as one’s individual nature or disposition. Paul’s language in Romans 1 thus reflects the ancient notion that same-sex eroticism was driven by an insatiable thirst for the exotic by those who were not content with “natural” desires for the same sex. The ancient world had no notion of sexual orientation. ° Nature was also understood as what contributed to the good order of society as a whole. In this sense, it looks very much like social convention, and many ancient understandings of what is natural, particularly those concerning gender roles, seem quaint at best to us today. ° Nature was also understood in the ancient world in relationship to biological processes, particularly procreation. Paul’s references to sexual misbehavior in Romans 1: 24-27 as “unnatural” spring in part from their nonprocreative character. Yet there is no evidence that people in the ancient world linked natural gender roles more specifically to the complementary sexual organs of male and female, apart from a general concern with the “naturalness” of procreation. • While we as modern persons should still seek a convergence of the personal, social, and physical worlds, just as the ancients did under the category of nature, we must recognize, even apart from the question of same-sex relationships, that this convergence will look different to us than it looked in the ancient world. • The biblical vision of a new creation invites us to imagine what living into a deeper vision of “nature” as the convergence of individual disposition, social order, and the physical world might look like, under the guidance and power of the Spirit of God. This might also entail the cultivation of a vision for how consecrated and committed gay and lesbian relationships might fit into such a new order.

seem to be exactly what Hebrews is seeking to answer: was the divine “Angel of the Lord,” at the end of the day, ontologically simply the first created angel among the angels? Hebrews answers very strongly and clearly, using language and divine angel texts that are now very familiar. In Heb 1:2-4, it uses seven notable (now familiar) words to identify Jesus: Son,

tn Heb “like a lion, my hands and my feet.” This reading is often emended because it is grammatically awkward, but perhaps its awkwardness is by rhetorical design. Its broken syntax may be intended to convey the panic and terror felt by the psalmist. The psalmist may envision a lion pinning the hands and feet of its victim to the ground with its paws (a scene depicted in ancient Near Eastern art), or a lion biting the hands and feet. The line has been traditionally translated, “they pierce my hands and feet,” and then taken as foreshadowing the crucifixion of Christ. Though Jesus does appropriate the language of this psalm while on the cross (compare v. 1 with Matt 27:46 and Mark 15:34), the NT does not cite this verse in describing the death of Jesus. (It does refer to vv. 7-8 and 18, however. See Matt 27:35, 39, 43; Mark 15:24, 29; Luke 23:34; John 19:23-24.) If one were to insist on an emendation of כָּאֲרִי (ka’ariy, “like a lion”) to a verb, the most likely verbal root would be כָּרָה (karah, “dig”; see the LXX). In this context this verb could refer to the gnawing and tearing of wild dogs (cf. NCV, TEV, CEV). The ancient Greek version produced by Symmachus reads “bind” here, perhaps understanding a verbal root כרך, which is attested in later Hebrew and Aramaic and means “to encircle, entwine, embrace” (see HALOT 497-98 s.v. כרך and Jastrow 668 s.v. כָּרַךְ). Neither one of these proposed verbs can yield a meaning “bore, pierce.

pierce. The understanding of this Hebrew verb is problematic. Traditionally translated “pierce,” this Hebrew verb occurs only here, and can only be translated here as “pierce” if it is emended. As it stands, it indicates that the psalmist’s hands and feet are “like a lion” (see NIV text note), which some commentators have interpreted to mean that the psalmist’s hands and feet were trussed up on a stick as a captured lion would be. Unfortunately, despite all the lion hunting scenes that are preserved and described, no lion is shown being transported this way. If a verb is desirable here, a suitable candidate must be found among the related Semitic languages. The most likely one is similar to Akkadian and Syriac cognates that have the meaning “shrink” or “shrivel.” Akkadian medical texts speak of a symptom in which the hands and feet are shrunken. Although Mt 27 uses several other lines from this psalm (e.g., Mt 27:35, 39, 43, 46), Mt 27 is of no help here, because it does not refer to this verse. Since Matthew omits it, he likely did not read the psalm as referring to the piercing of hands and feet.

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Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? (Acts 2:5-8). Verses 11–13 again say that they were all “amazed,” but this second amazement was because of what they heard. It was not merely hearing in their own language, but it was the content of the message that they heard that amazed them. Verse 11 says they heard the “wonders of God in [their] own tongues!” They heard the Gospel. However, they were amazed because they were hearing the “wonders of God” not in the sacred Hebrew language but in Gentiles’ languages. This is the heart of the message of the miraculous sign of tongues. As we shall see, God speaking the gospel in Gentile languages instead of the sacred Hebrew language was a deliberate rebuke by God and signaled that God was turning from the Jews to the Gentiles. The Jews heard the gospel in Gentile languages. They were not drunk, but they were confused. They were witnessing the unthinkable. God was showing grace to the Gentiles and was giving the Gentiles the same privileges as the Jews.

I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?

And as we followed the news, we learned that the Israeli government was debating the controversial and racist “Basic” or Nation-State Law, which it ended up passing in July 2018. The law declares that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It establishes Hebrew as the official language of the country, with Arabic downgraded to “special status.” Finally, the law mandates that the state regard “Jewish settlement as a national value” and to “act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Israeli apartheid was now more official than ever.

This word ‘Aryan’ was a linguistic term, originally referring to the Indo-European group of languages. Since before the end of the nineteenth century it had already been distorted as a concept by a number of writers, among them Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who gave it racial connotations, and used it to denote superiority over the ‘Semitic’ races. Yet the term ‘Semitic’ itself was originally not a racial but a linguistic term, relating, not to Jews and non-Jews, but to a language group which includes Hebrew and Arabic. None of these refinements troubled the new racialism. For Hitler, ‘Aryan’ was synonymous with ‘pure’, while ‘Semitic’ was synonymous with ‘Jew’, and hence ‘impure’.

Then the application of the word egg to the ark comes thus:--The Hebrew name for an egg is Baitz, or in the feminine (for there are both genders), Baitza. Thus, in Chaldee and Phoenician, becomes Baith or Baitha, which in these languages is also the usual way in which the name of a house is pronounced. The egg floating on the waters that contained the world, was the house floating on the waters of the deluge, with the elements of the new world in its bosom. The coming of the egg from heaven evidently refers to the preparation of the ark by express appointment of God; and the same thing seems clearly implied in the Egyptian story of the mundane egg which was said to have come out of the mouth of the great god. The doves resting on the egg need no explanation.

Collaborating with someone you disagree with represents a scientific ideal. When two or more researchers who are pursuing different theories, and who disagree with one another, decide to work together, the results can transform a field. Today many consider Lew the father of the Big Five personality categories. There have been cross-cultural replications in dozens of languages and cultures, including Chinese, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Turkish. As you might expect, some minor differences emerge in disparate cultures, but the Big Five remain the best description. The Big Five dimensions are: I. Extraversion II. Agreeableness III. Conscientiousness IV. Emotional Stability versus Neuroticism V. Openness to Experience + Intellect (also called Imagination). Each of these categories includes many dozens of individual traits. As you can see, there has been some controversy around what to call the last one, but don't let that bother you- it is a well-defined dimension that includes a number of traits that cohere in real life.

The English Bible translated more than Hebrew text; it also translated early modern English ideas about marriage into biblical text, as well as a "falsely universal language" that excluded women.

Because of their creation of a written language, the Sumerians succeeded in passing on to subsequent societies (and to us) their findings, philosophy, knowledge, and legends, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale written on cuneiform writing in 3700 BCE. The topic of this myth is similar to the tale of the deluge and the spread of Noah’s progeny all over the earth, an integral component of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible.

In Aramaic “Mar” means “Lord.” “Maran” means “Our Lord.” Maranatha can be translated as either, “Our Lord, Come” (Marana tha) or “Our Lord has come” (Maran atha). Those who argue that Jesus spoke only Hebrew admit that Maranatha is indeed Aramaic but then state that when Paul uses it he “is writing to his non-Israelite, non-Hebrew-speaking audience.”  But Corinth is between Athens and Sparta! This was a Greek and not an Aramaic-speaking region. Paul uses the “Maranatha” prayer because it is a prayer of the Aramaic speaking mother-church in Jerusalem. The Maranatha prayer has greater significance than just a prophetic significance. Ben Witherington III notes the importance of the Maranatha prayer in his book The Brother of Jesus, “In concluding his letter, Paul, in 1 Corinthians 16:22 offers up a prayer in Aramaic, “Maranatha”, which means “Come, Lord.” In other words, Jesus is already called Lord by Aramaic speaking Jewish-Christians, and he is prayed to. Now, early Jews did not pray to people who were merely revered dead rabbis, teachers, or even prophets. They might well pray for a rabbi to be raised on the last day, but they would not pray to him and implore him to come. Yet, that is what Paul is doing here, and he is probably echoing a prayer he heard offered in the Jerusalem church, where such prayers were spoken in Aramaic. The dramatic importance of such a prayer should not be underestimated. Jews were forbidden to pray to someone other than God. This prayer strongly suggests that Jesus was included within the earliest Aramaic Jewish Christians understanding of God. In other words, Jesus was already viewed very early on as divine by his earliest followers, and this included James [the Just]. The notion that seeing Jesus as a divine figure was added only late in the first century and was done so only by Gentiles  is simply not true.

Language lives. It inhales culture and history. It sprouts new limbs, sloughs off old ones. It goes through cycles of rapid growth, unremarkable periods of stable maturity, decay, and sometimes, as with Hebrew, miraculous rebirth.

The 2018 law enshrines at least three important tenets of Zionism: first, that the “right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” in other words, that the right to self-determination does not apply to Palestinians. Second, that the state language is officially Hebrew, downgrading Arabic to a language with “special status.” Third, “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.

The Zionist chapter proper in the country’s history began in 1882, after the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire (although the term was only invented a few years later). The first settlers called themselves Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups which aspired to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and, in a significant novelty, to use the reviving Hebrew language rather than Yiddish. In August that year a two-hundred-strong group from the Romanian town of Galatz landed at Jaffa, where they were locked up for weeks before enough cash could be raised to bribe the Turkish police to release them.6 Their goal was a plot of stony land that had been purchased south of Haifa. Laurence Oliphant, an eccentric British traveller and enthusiastic philo-Semite, described the scene shortly afterwards at Zamarin, a malaria-infested hamlet on the southern spur of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. It is a remarkably vivid portrayal of two very different sorts of people who were warily making each other’s acquaintance as future neighbours – and enemies: It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin [peasants], with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs [keffiyeh headdresses] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [cloaks], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labour on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter – a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves.

for writers looking to justify the significance of our word-work, it seemed too good to be true. Yet when I dug into etymological sources and consulted classical language scholars, I found it to be credible. Abracadabra is from the Hebrew-Aramaic lineage, murky but traceable. What we say is what we bring into being. The way we speak shapes our perceptions, our actions, and ultimately the outcomes we seek.

כִּ֤י ׀ לֹֽא־ תִהְיֶ֣ה אַחֲרִ֣ית לָרָ֑ע נֵ֖ר רְשָׁעִ֣ים יִדְעָֽךְ׃

The child is born to a virgin made pregnant by the Holy Spirit (1: 18–19). To the author, this fulfills a passage from Isaiah 7: 14, which in Hebrew states that “a young woman is with child, and she will bear a son.” Matthew, however, quotes not the original Hebrew-language version of the text, but an Old Greek translation in which “young woman” is rendered as parthenos, or “virgin.” Historians believe that Isaiah’s words originally referred to the birth of an heir to the then-reigning Davidic king, but Matthew sees them as forecasting the Messiah’s unique manner of birth.

The Septuagint was written by the most competent people who could be found in one of the great centres of Jewish population and Greek learning. No one today can claim to be closer to the Hebrew scriptures and the Greek of the New Testament than religious Hellenistic Jews translating the language of their fathers two centuries before Christ. Their labours were used powerfully, and their words were adopted by the Holy Spirit into the New Testament. They wrote to give a better understanding of the original. They can help us today.

A friend, assuming that I must speak Hebrew at home, goes into panegyrics about how beautiful a language it is.

7. Over against this table, near the southern wall, was set a candlestick of cast gold, hollow within, being of the weight of one hundred pounds, which the Hebrews call Chinchares, if it be turned into the Greek language, it denotes a talent. It was made with its knops, and lilies, and pomegranates, and bowls (which ornaments amounted to seventy in all); by which means the shaft elevated itself on high from a single base, and spread itself into as many branches as there are planets, including the sun among them. It terminated in seven heads, in one row, all standing parallel to one another; and these branches carried seven lamps, one by one, in imitation of the number of the planets. These lamps looked to the east and to the south, the candlestick being situate obliquely.

A Jew may say, Hebrew is the language of god. A Christian may say, Aramaic is the language of god. A Muslim will say, Arabic is the language of god. A Hindu will say, Sanskrit is the language of god. I only know that kindness is the language of a human.

Language of God (The Sonnet) A Jew may say, Hebrew is the language of god. A Christian may say, Aramaic is the language of god. A Muslim will say, Arabic is the language of god. A Hindu will say, Sanskrit is the language of god. A biologist may say, DNA is the language of god. Mathematicians say, math is the language of god. A psychiatrist may say, libido is the language of god. Physicists say, Quantum Mechanics is language of god. A politician may say, control is the language of god. A capitalist may say, currency is the language of god. A cop may say, law and order are the language of god. A philosopher may say, wisdom is the language of god. I don't know all that, I'm a being most ordinary 'n simple. I only know that kindness is the language of a human.

Prominent examples include Meir Kister, Israel Prize laureate and founder of the Arabic language departments at Hebrew University and the University of Haifa, who also worked for the Haganah’s intelligence agency.

On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.

Its supporters argued that they were anchored in other basic laws, although equality was not explicitly mentioned anywhere and was only extrapolated by the interpretation of Israel’s Supreme Court. This strengthened the conviction of many Arab citizens that Israel could not be both Jewish and democratic. The law also effectively downgraded Arabic from a second state language to one with a “special status.” It described promoting Jewish settlement as a “national value,” without specifying where. Its clauses affirmed the openness of the state for Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles and the status of the flag; the national anthem, “Hatikvah”; and the Hebrew calendar, alongside the Gregorian one, as official calendars of Israel. Netanyahu hailed the passage of the law as “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel.” Arab representatives ripped up copies of the bill and denounced it as the anchoring of racism, fascism, discrimination, and Jewish privilege. Ahmad Tibi and Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, an alliance of predominantly Arab parties, called it apartheid. Jewish critics, Jabotinskyites among them, said the Knesset would have done better to stick to Israel’s Declaration of Independence of 1948, which did ensure complete equality of social and political rights for “all its inhabitants.

The one area in which some women can claim a degree of parity is in literature. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are making their biggest impression through translations, for noble and gentry families choose to educate their daughters in languages and music above all other things. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke are foremost among these. The formidable Anne, who marries Sir Nicholas Bacon, publishes a translation from the Latin of no less a work than John Jewel’s Apologie of the Church of England in 1564. Her sister, Mildred, the wife of Sir William Cecil, can speak Greek as fluently as English and translates several works. Another of Sir Anthony’s daughters, Elizabeth, Lady Russell, publishes her translation from the French of A Way of Reconciliation touching the true nature and substance of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament; and a fourth daughter, Katherine, is renowned for her ability to translate from the Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Other families also produce female scholars. Mary Bassett, granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, is well-versed in the classics and translates works by Eusebius, Socrates and several other ancient writers, not to mention a book by her grandfather. Jane, Lady Lumley, publishes a translation of Euripides. Margaret Tyler publishes The Mirror of Princely deeds and Knighthood (1578), translated from the Spanish. And so on. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are far freer to reveal the fruits of their intellect than their mothers and grandmothers.

The answer is no, they are not all the same. Yes, they have sixty-six books divided into the Old and New Testament, but the King James, the New King James, the New American Standard, and the New International Version are translations. This means the words are translated from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages the Bible was written in. The others, such as the Living Bible, The Message, the New English Version, and all the others out there are someone’s interpretation of an existing translation. In other words, these versions are written from the perspective of what the writer or group of writers thinks is meant rather than what the original words of the text were.

In Akkadian, the word for the city of Babylon means “gateway of the gods” (bāb-ili, bāb-ilāni),11 whereas in Hebrew the word Babel sounds like the word “confusion.” The pagans saw Babel as a way to access the divine, whereas the Bible states that God judged the people at Babel because of their disobedience by confusing their languages and spread them across the whole earth.

of which are totally lost today. Jesus spoke Aramaic and preached in Aramaic to the simple and poor people who could understand Him. Latin was spoken by Roman officials and Jews who were attached to the court of the Roman Government. Greek was understood by a few cultured businessmen and merchants. But the masses spoke Aramaic. Hebrew was only spoken in the synagogues and used as a ceremonial language. Even the Hebrew Scriptures were interpreted by the priest and Pharisees in Aramaic.

In his 2016 book, The World’s Oldest Alphabet — Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script, Dr. Douglas Petrovich argues that it was not the Phoenicians who invented the first alphabet but rather a group of Hebrew sojourners in Egypt (Lahun, Wadi el-Ḥôl) and Sinai (Serâbît el Khadîm, Wadi Nasb) spanning the period from Joseph to Moses (1850– 1446 B.C.). If Dr. Petrovich is correct, then the Israelites played a central role in establishing one of the great pillars of civilization: the alphabet

WHEN WE BEGAN OUR JOURNEY, I SHARED WITH YOU MY OWN EXPERIENCE of venturing into the mind of ancient Israelites and the Jews and Christians of the first century and how that made it impossible to look at the Bible as I had before. It ruined me in an agreeable way. But I can only say that with hindsight. At the time of that experience, I had already taught on the college level and was in the midst of one of the nation’s most respected Hebrew Bible programs—and yet I hadn’t been thinking clearly about Scripture. I hadn’t seen much of what I’ve written in this book. I’d been blinded by tradition and my own predilection to keep certain things on the periphery when it came to the Bible. It was the worst possible time in my life to have everything put into upheaval, to have to rethink and reevaluate what I believed. It required that I be humbled, something that doesn’t come easily to an academic. The realization that I needed to read the Bible like a premodern person who embraced the supernatural, unseen world has illumined its content more than anything else in my academic life. One question I’ve been asked over the years when sharing insights that are now part of this book was one that I asked myself: Why haven’t I heard these things before? It astonished me that I could sit under years of biblical preaching and teaching and never have anyone alert me to the important and exciting truths we’ve tracked here. I’ve learned that the answer to that question is complex. Rather than dwell on it, God provoked me to do something about it. Most people aren’t going to learn Greek and Hebrew (and other dead languages) as part of studying Scripture. Most aren’t going to pursue a PhD in biblical studies, where they’ll encounter the high-level scholarship that will force them to think about what the biblical text really says and why it says it in its own ancient context, far removed from any modern tradition. But everyone ought to reap some benefit from those disciplines. And so it has become my ambition to parse that data and synthesize it so that more people can experience the thrill of rediscovering the supernatural worldview of the Bible—of reading the Bible again for the first time.

Solomon, author of the ancient Hebrew Wisdom Literature, wrote, “The tongue has the power of life and death.

AMBASSADOUR  (AMBA'SSADOUR)   n.s.[ambassadeur, Fr. embaxador, Span. It is written differently, as it is supposed to come from the French or Spanish language; and the original derivation being uncertain, it is not easy to settle its orthography.Some derive it from the Hebrew , to tell, and , a messenger; others from ambactus, which, in the old Gaulish, signified a servant; whence ambascia, in low Latin, is found to signify service, and ambasciator, a servant; others deduce it from ambacht, in old   Teutonick, signifying a government, and Junius mentions a possibility of its descent from amab  and others from am for ad, and bassus, low, as supposing the act

The Pentateuch is ascribed, in our modern translations, to Moses, and he is generally supposed to be the author. This is altogether erroneous, as Moses had nothing whatever to do with these five books. Bishop Colenso, speaking of this, says: "The books of the Pentateuch are never ascribed to Moses in the inscriptions of Hebrew manuscripts, or in printed copies of the Hebrew Bible. Nor are they styled the 'Books of Moses' in the Septuagint [92:1] or Vulgate, [92:2] but only in our modern translations, after the example of many eminent Fathers of the Church, who, with the exception of Jerome, and, perhaps, Origen, were, one and all of them, very little acquainted with the Hebrew language, and still less with its criticism." [92:3]

AMEN  (A'MEN)   adv.[A word of which the original has given rise to many conjectures. Scaliger writes, that it is Arabick; and the Rabbies make it the compound of the initials of three words, signifying the Lord is a faithful king; but the word seems merely Hebrew, , which, with a long train of derivatives, signifies firmness, certainty, fidelity.]A term

Lest anyone dispute that the Bible is not the inspired Word of God but rather the direct and dictated Word of God, let us consider the uniqueness of the 66 books of the Bible. Why is it that we can tell that a certain book of the Bible was written by one author rather than another? Why do the different books of the Bible use different languages (e.g., Greek, Hebrew) and different vocabularies? Why are the styles of books like Proverbs and Chronicles so different from one another? It is because people were vessels for the inspiration of God, but they were not empty vessels; God did not bypass their humanity. The way in which these people recorded their encounters with God bears the indelible stamp of their place in time, their culture, and their individual personalities.

In Olney, five miles southeast of Piddington, he heard Thomas Scott. Later, he talked to Scott. The Anglican seemed a perfect spiritual guide. Not only did he not hold to the hard Predestination teachings of Calvin but he too was gifted linguist. Willy was shocked to learn Scott had mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew! So, with Scott’s help and books, of course Willy began learning Hebrew too. “Now I will learn the language of the Old Testament itself!” he marveled. In

אתר האינטרנט של אוניברסיטת אררט־ניאגרה מבשר לי בגאווה על שלושה סטודנטים שנרשמו השנה ללימודי עברית בחוג ללשונות עתיקות, שם מלמדים אותה לצד לטינית, יוונית עתיקה, גאלית, ארמית, אסקימו־גרנלנדית, קאווסקר ושפת שבט הטוסקארורה שזוכה בעת האחרונה לעדנה. "הסטודנטים בני המזל הללו יזכו לקרוא את ספר הספרים בשפה שבה נכתב"... גן חיות לשפות נכחדות. בואו ילדים, נבקר בכלוב של העברית.

One reason Bible translation is a difficult task is that, in many cases, there is no direct one-to-one parallel between words in the original Hebrew or Greek languages and the English language.

But one should be suspicious of all statements about the nature of “the Hebrew mind” or “the Greek mind” if those statements are based on observations about the semantic limitations of words of the language in question.

THE VATICAN The very name Vatican comes from a surprising source. It is neither Latin nor Greek, nor is it of biblical origin. In fact, the word we associate with the Church has a pagan origin. More than twenty-eight centuries ago, even before the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, there was a people called the Etruscans. Much of what we think of as Roman culture and civilization actually comes from the Etruscans. Even though we are still trying to master their very difficult language, we already know a great deal about them. We know that, like the Hebrews and the Romans, the Etruscans did not bury their dead inside the walls of their cities. For that reason, on a hillside slope outside the confines of their ancient city in the area that was destined to become Rome, the Etruscans established a very large cemetery. The name of the pagan Etruscan goddess who guarded this necropolis, or city of the dead, was Vatika.

Does God exist? This question has plagued mankind from the beginning of recorded history. Even the saintly Mother Teresa admitted in her last years that, many times in her life, she did not know the answer to this question. Yet we live as if God does exist and as if there will be a Judgment Day when we will be judged for our good and bad deeds. But what is good and what is bad? That has become increasingly confusing in this age of relativity. There seem to be no mores that are considered universal. Can that be so? Look at the Ten Commandments. Read all of them. “Thou shall not kill.” What does that mean? Aren’t we told to kill in war? Well, if you read the original Hebrew, the word is “murder.” The commandment is “Thou shall not murder.” It does not say, “Thou shall not kill.” They are two completely different things. It takes some knowledge of the history of both the Hebrew language and of the prophets themselves to properly interpret not only the Ten Commandments but mankind’s guidebook for life on this earth, the Bible.

My aunt touched my shoulder, I opened my eyes startled for a moment. She was smiling softly but I could see the tears sparkling in the corner of her eyes. “It’s the same God, Frankie.” I could feel the tension flow out of me. Suddenly I smiled at her. She was right: the Word meant God in no matter what language you spoke it—English, Latin or… Hebrew.

The term here translated "in the beginning" signifies, as every Hebrew scholar knows, a period of such remote antiquity, that in Bible language it stands next to eternity.

The author of Ecclesiastes made this declaration: "To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die" (Eccl. 3:1-2a). Likewise the author of Hebrews says, "It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment" (Heb. 9:27). Notice the language of Scripture. It speaks of death in terms of a "purpose under heaven" and of an "appointment." Death is a divine appointment. It is part of God's purpose for our lives. God calls each person to die. He is sovereign over all of life, including the final experience of life.

Relations with the Jews of Spain and Provence led to the Arabizing style of earlier Spanish writers making its mark on the type of prose used, for example, in Poland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society of the era in Berlin, New York and India were in constant touch with Maria Orsic. Early writers of the Theosophical movement corresponded with her, and some Theosophists linguists offered her their linguistic expertise. It was a well-known fact in the metaphysical and spiritualism circles of the time, that one of Blavatsky’s associates who was an expert linguist in Hebrew, Phoenician and Sumerian took a leading part in the translation and explanation of the extraterrestrial messages Maria received in an unknown language, later to be revealed a  dead language of the Middle East which contained Ugaritic, Phoenician, Akkadian and Sumerian scripts; some passages were written  in cuneiform, and others in a script almost similar to the Byblos Script, and Ana’kh, a language the Anunnaki used to communicate with the early Mesopotamians and Phoenicians.

Joan's claim that God had France in HIs care because France was sacred to him may not be merely a medieval trope, embarrassingly old-fashioned language that today we must expunge from our vocabularies. To claim that France is sacred does not imply that only France is sacred. Throughout history, men and women have arisen everywhere who testify to the sacredness of nations. Perhaps today more than ever, we are aware that the identity and integrity of nations are supremely significant for the human race - that the facile invasion of a sovereign state and genocide are abbhorent. In this regard, the entire Jewish-Chrisian faith tradition is based on the belief that God once summoned ordinary people and through them worked extraordinary eeds for HIs own purpose, which is to bring all peoples to Himself. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the prophets were but a few of thsoe called to establish and save the nation of Israel. But Israel was brought into existence and alter triumphed over its enimies not only for its own sake. This is made clear throughout the Hebrew scriptures: God saved the nation so that all nations might be emraced. Israel was to be "a light to the gentiles," as both Old and New Testaments reiterate. God chose the ISraelites not to dominate or control but rather to serve others. The Christian Scriptures make the point more specific: the gentiles are not excluded from God's embrace, for the light of ISrael shines on the gentiles and shows the way into that embrace. All the peoples of the world are to be brought into the capacious light of the knowledge of God's friendship.Nowhere is it implied that Israel, or any other nation, should cease to exist. Because no single person or roup represents what it means to be human, its the variety of people within a nation that gives it an irreplaceable character - its national personality. As with individuals, so with nations: it is the diversity of peoples that furthers the process of the world. Although many nations have tried, none may set itself up as the only or the predominant nation, forcing its culture, ideology, religion or political agenda on any other nation. For Joan of Arc, this was precisely what England was trying to do through its nobels, armies and war machinery. France deserved its identity and, as a symbol of its people, the king.

The geographical and historical facts of Hebrew place it within the Northwest Semitic group of languages.

Over a quarter of the words in the Bible appear just once, and of these no less than 289 belong to roots used only once in BH.

According to Paul Kahle's well-known thesis, the Masoretic, especially the Tiberian, system of punctuation is not simply a representation of how Hebrew was actually pronounced in the sixth to eighth centuries; it also bears witness to the active intervention of the Masoretes, who deliberately introduced various corrections or reconstructions intended to guarantee that Hebrew woud be 'pronounced as it should be', and not as it actually had been during the previous centuries influenced by Aramaic ... However, it is possible, independently of Kahle's thesis, to accept that there might be important differences between Masoretic Hebrew and the language of the pre-exilic writings.

The variation of place and time is also a problem, as we cannot simply accept that Biblical Hebrew, which had already ceased to be a living language, underwent a unified development in places as diverse as Alexandria and Palestine. Neither do we know if the data afforded by the transcriptions corresponds to the standard ... pronunciation of Hebrew in this period or to dialect or substandard forms. On top of all these difficulties is the fact that the transcriptions have to be studied in manuscripts that are frequently late and defective, presenting many variants and corruptions in names that the copyists found completely alien.

The translators of the LXX did not attempt to find a Greek word to correspond in sense with every Hebrew word or phrase. Sometimes they did not translate the original at all, but gave some substitute for it, whose meaning 'is, of course, to be ascertained only from Egyptian Greek.

The Hebrew inscriptions are practically all pre-exilic, and do not shed much light on the language of Palestine after the Captivity.

Ammonite, a dialect akin to Hebrew and therefore similar to Moabite, which is an older form of Hebrew and one of the dialects of the 'language of Canaan.' Though these dialects were similar, the tribes were usually hostile.

The original language of the descendants of Abraham was not Aramaic, which was changed to Hebrew when the tribes of Israel entered Canaan.

The Pharisees deliberately avoided the Late form of Biblical Hebrew (LBH), which is the language of the Bible written after the exile, presenting their teaching in the language of the spoken vernacular.

The Palmyrene dialect was a modification of the early Hebrew, and its alphabet was among the first to diverge from the more ancient letter-forms towards the later character.

Palmyrene maybe regarded as an alphabetic link between the Samaritan and the Jewish or Aramaic square character. Many Palmyrene words resemble Hebrew, but a far greater number resemble Aramaic.

In many cases the vowel-letters are omitted in Palmyrene where they are found in Hebrew.

Samaritan Targum ... maybe compared with the Aramaic of the Jerusalem Talmud and with the Palestinian Syriac. On the whole it was more akin to Galilaean than to Judaean, but was closer to Hebrew than either.

Galilaean must not be regarded as a later and more degenerate form of Judaean, any more than Aramaic itself must be regarded as a corrupt form of Hebrew.

The Judaean dialect - This form of Palestinian Aramaic was akin to Nabataean and Palmyrene ... In its earliest form the language shows a striking affinity in grammar with Sabaean, a south Arabian dialect; in vocabulary it agrees remarkably with Phoenician and the older Hebrew.

Judaean Aramaic is in no sense a mixture of Hebrew and Syriac.

The Zenjirli inscriptions supply far more suggestive criteria, and show how cautious we must be in coming to conclusions respecting the unity of the Aramaic language. These inscriptions are in many ways more akin to Hebrew and Assyrian than to Aramaic.

The Israelite tribes that settled in Canaan from the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BCE, regardless of what their language might have been before they established themselves there, used Hebrew as a spoken and literary language until the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.

The exile marks the disappearance of this language (i.e., Biblical Hebrew) from everyday life and its subsequent use for literary and liturgical purposes only during the Second Temple period.

Biblical Hebrew is not a language in the full sense of the word but merely a 'fragment of language'.

Hebrew ... belongs to the Canaanite group of languages ... this means that when the Israelite tribes settled in Canaan they adopted the language of that country, at least for their written documents. Ancient traditions ... allude to Aramean ancestors (see Dt 26:5).

In its classical form Arabic is of later date than Hebrew, but in its ancient form akin to Hebrew and Aramaic, certainly as old, perhaps older.

In any Semitic study, Arabic is a most useful adjunct, inasmuch as it often indicates the true significance of words where the Hebrew, Syriac and other dialects are faulty or doubtful.

In Hebrew and Aramaic the vowels have undergone vast modifications, whilst in Arabic they have retained to a large extent their primitive purity and simplicity.

In its ruggedness Hebrew seems an older language than Arabic, but some Arabic forms are certainly older than the corresponding Hebrew.

The relation of Moabite to Hebrew was so close that no distinction of language must be conjectured

Whether , therefore, Moabite, was a dialect of Hebrew, or Hebrew a dialect of Moabite, is no longer a problem to be solved. They are rather to be regarded as dialectic differences of one and the same language.

some many differences in each translation of the Bible. The answer to that can be anything from a translator reading his own theological persuasion, bias or prejudice into his translations to the purpose and/or intention behind the translation. By this I mean is the translator going for a literal word of word translation, attempting to put his translation into modern thought, trying to put his translation into a cultural context, trying to present a paraphrase, a commentary or any number of different purposes and/or intentions for working on a new translation. Ultimately, the answer as to why there are so many different translations lies in something that happened almost two thousand and five hundred years ago. From 597 BC to 538 BC the Jewish nation was taken into captivity. During this captivity time the language of Jewish people, which was Hebrew, assimilated into the Babylonian culture and Hebrew became a dead language, preserved only for ceremonial purposes. A dead language means that it is no longer a language used for

every day conversation. When this happens the meanings behind many words become lost and its original intent may never be positively identified. It is left to scholars and linguist to offer their best educated guess. Rarely is there one hundred percent agreement on every rendering, although a majority opinion can exist for many words and we can be relatively certain of their renderings. But for every such word there are words whose renderings are hotly debated among scholars. After Hebrew died, Aramaic became the common language of the people and was the common language spoken in Israel at the time of Christ. Jesus came from Galilee which was located in the Northern territory of Israel where they spoke a Northern or Old Galilean dialect of Hebrew which was more idiomatic and colloquial than the Southern dialect spoken in Judea where the Pharisees and other religious leaders lived. Up until just a few years ago it was believed that the Old Galilean Aramaic dialect was also a dead language until it was discovered

that a tribe of people in Northern Iraq still spoke this dialect. There is an intense study being done today into this language which is opening up a deeper and greater understanding of the Gospels. There is much debate over whether the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic or Greek, but there seems to be a general agreement that Jesus spoke Aramaic and thus, even if the Gospels were not written in Aramaic, the writers would have had to translate the Aramaic words of Jesus into Greek to write them down. If we cannot even agree as to what language the Gospels were written in, how can we even begin to understand the true meaning and intent of the words that were spoken during a different time and a different culture? For this reason I believe it is very important that our seminaries and Bible Colleges take a serious look at requiring our future Christian leaders to not only study Greek and Hebrew but Aramaic as well. That is a New Testament issue however, but

what of the Old Testament? This was written in Hebrew except for portions of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Ezra which were written in Aramaic. Hebrew, by the mere fact that it is a dead language, leaves us open to much debate as to proper modern English word to apply to an ancient word that has been dead for twenty five hundred years. When it comes to dealing with a dead language we are at the mercy of our linguist and various other scholars to guide us into tracing the origins and roots of an ancient dead language. A translator must not ignore the science of linguistics when translating the Word of God. Yet, any schooled linguist will tell you that the translations you finally arrive at are still just man’s best guess. The proof of this lies in the numerous modern English translations of the Bible that we have today. They are all good, even excellent and well documented translations, translated by skilled translators and yet they all have subtle differences because their final translations are still man’s best guess.

The potential difficulty posed by Jeremiah 18:7–10 arises, I suggest, for two reasons. On the one hand, the text is making a point about divine responsiveness in a way that, characteristic of Hebrew idiom, is generalizing—and a generalization may permit exceptions and qualifications. It is only if the generalization is read as a universal claim that a problem arises. On the other hand, the Hebrew language is notoriously short of modal forms in its verbs: may, might, should, would, and so forth. One always has to infer the correct nuance from the context (and the context may not always enable one to be precise).35 It would not be strained to render the verb depicting God’s response in 18:8, 10 as “I may relent/retract.

If the paradox is to be pondered, as part of growing in understanding the nature of the life of faith, then there are surely implications for the kind of qualities, communal and individual, that believers should over time acquire: such qualities as to dig deeper in trust, be less glib in speech and prayer, to look beyond the immediate to the long term, and to offer more support to those currently in pain and perplexity. For when the psalms are contextualized in prayer and worship, their language is not only expressive but also transformative, able to make a difference to those who use these ancient and enduring words.

The Psalms are among the oldest poems in the world, and they still rank with any poetry in any culture, ancient or modern, from anywhere in the world. They are full of power and passion, horrendous misery and unrestrained jubilation, tender sensitivity and powerful hope. Anyone at all whose heart is open to new dimensions of human experience, anyone who loves good writing, anyone who wants a window into the bright lights and dark corners of the human soul—anyone open to the beautiful expression of a larger vision of reality should react to these poems like someone who hasn’t had a good meal for a week or two. It’s all here. And astonishingly, it doesn’t get lost in translation. Most poetry suffers when translated into other languages because it relies for its effect on the sound and rhythm of the original words. It’s true that the Hebrew of these poems is beautiful in itself for those who can experience it. But the Psalms rely for their effect on the way they set out the main themes. They say something from one angle and then repeat it from a slightly different one:

The word “canon” is derived from a Hebrew word signifying “reed” (qaneh) and by extension “measuring stick.” It enters into the Greek language as “canon” (kanon) with a wider semantic range signifying exemplary standards in relation to literary works, grammatical rules, and even certain human beings. The word was coined in the early church to indicate an absolutely authoritative, complete list of God-inspired books, which was the standard of truth (Athanasius, 39th Festal Letter). Although such a list was considered closed, it is clear that the creation of the canon did not happen in an instant. It had a long and complex history before such closure occurred. The historian Josephus (AD 95) describes a closed list of inspired books that had been authoritative for all Jews for centuries (Against Apion 8).

some differences between LXX and the MT. are more frequently to be attributed to defective writing, to ignorance on the part of the writers, to textual corruption, and even to laxity on the part of the translators .. for example, the fragments of the Hebrew text of Ecclesiastieus appear to belong to two different MSS. It is interesting to find in these MSS, dating perhaps circa x-xi cent., the abbreviation of the divine name by three marks.

The 'square' character (of the Hebrew language) indeed seems to have arisen out of the Palmyrene script .. No doubt Aramaic was written in Babylonia before it was written in Canaan, and it was Aramaic influence which gradually changed the Phoenician cursive script into the uncial character.

Religion has been the larger contributor to nationality. It can be shown historically that kindred languages have not been sufficient to hold tribes together, but oneness of religion has held together peoples of variant tongues (see Max Müller, Science of Religion) .. It was their religion rather than their language which separated the Hebrews from the surrounding tribes.