Tag Archives: Hebrew Letters

One and the Same

19 Monday Jun 2023

Posted by in Walking in the Way

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Hello and welcome-or welcome back-to Renaissance Woman where, this week, I continue looking at the Hebrew word sane (saw-nay) often translated by the English word “hate”. 

In last week’s post, I shared an article by Chaim Bentorah where he says a nineteenth Century Hebrew master and linguist named Samuel Hirsh applies the English word “rejection” to sane rather than hate.  A post on the Light of the World blog (linked below) says a closer translation of sane would be “turn aside”.  This post also points out the original Hebrew picture of the word sane shows us what Hate/Rejection/Turning Aside does, not how it feels as that picture is not one of an intense negative emotion.  This is a subject I’d like to explore in the upcoming weeks.  For the sake of this post, I want to share some thoughts I had as I considered the different ways to translate sane. 

I wasn’t sure “rejection” was thoroughly supported by the context of the passages in which sane appeared.  For example, Leah was “hated” but she was not “rejected” in the sense that Jacob had nothing to do with her.  On the contrary; Leah was obviously the recipient of Jacob’s attentions as she bore him children.  So, she was not “rejected” in the way I think of the word which is “to have nothing more to do with” but she did not have Jacob’s heart. 

I saw the same picture where scripture states God “hated” Esau.  I can see a bit more support for the idea of rejection in the story of Esau but there is a passage worth noting.  It is Deuteronomy 2:4-7 where God warns the Israelites to take care as they passed through the lands of the descendants of Esau saying He had given Mount Seir as their possession and not one bit of their land would be given away.  The Israelites were also admonished not to meddle with them in any way and to buy any food and drink that might prove necessary.  So, God “hated” Esau but did not utterly reject him in the sense that He had nothing more to do with him or his descendants.  However, Esau didn’t share in God’s heart the same way Jacob did. 

Since “rejection” didn’t sum up the meaning of sane for me, I looked it up on thesaurus.com hoping a list of synonyms might help fill in some of the gaps.  I was especially curious to see if “incompatible” was included in the list.  It was not but “cast aside” was.  This fascinated me and I was reminded of something I’d just read in Andrew Murray’s commentary on the Book of Hebrews.  He was speaking on Hebrews 12:1 which says, “Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us”.  Andrew Murray quotes the latter part of that passage and writes:

“One of the first thoughts connected with a race is the laying aside of everything that can hinder.  In the food he eats and the clothing he wears, how resolutely the runner puts aside everything, the most lawful and pleasant, that is not absolutely necessary to his success.  Sacrifice, self-denial, giving up, and laying aside is the very first requisite on the course.  Alas, it is this that has made the Christian life of our days the very opposite of running a race.  The great study is, both in our religious teaching and practical life, to find out how to make the best of both worlds, how to enjoy as much as possible of the wealth and the pleasure and the honor that the world offers.  With many Christians, if their conversions ever were an entering through a straight gate, their lives since never were, in any sense, a laying aside of everything that might hinder their spiritual growth.  They never heeded the word, “Whosever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33).  But this is what we are called to as indispensable: “lay(ing) aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily best us.”  Yes, laying aside every-sin-however little it seems, however much it be our special weakness; it may not be spared.  Sin must be laid aside if we are to run the race.  It is a race for holiness and perfection, for the will of God and His favor; how could we dream of running the race without laying aside the sin that so easily bests us?” (Murray, Page 493)

Andrew Murray had spoken on the idea of perfection in an earlier chapter where he was discussing Hebrews 11:39-40: “’That apart from us they should not be made perfect.’ He writes, “The better thing God has provided is perfection.  The word ‘perfect’, or forms of it, is used fourteen times in the epistle.  The law made nothing perfect.  Jesus Himself was, in His obedience and suffering, made perfect in His human nature, in His will and life and character, to us.  As the Son, perfected forevermore, He is our High Priest; having perfected us forever in His sacrifice, He now brings us, in the communication of that perfection, into real, inner, living contact with God.  And so, He is the Perfecter of our faith, and He makes us His perfect ones, who press on unto Perfection.  And our life on earth is meant to be the blessed experience that God perfects us in every good thing to do His will, working in us what is pleasing in His sight.  Apart from us, they might not be made perfect; to us, the blessing of some better thing, of being made perfect, has come.” (Murray, Page 489).

This idea, of running the race for holiness and perfection and that that perfection is ours in Jesus Christ, the Perfect One, is one that has stuck with me as I’ve sought to understand the meaning of sane.  The Hebrew letters comprising sane are the Shin (ש), the Nun (נ), and the Aleph (א).  The picture of the Shin is of teeth representing Sharp, to Eat, Devour, Destroy, Consume, like a fire, and is also representative of a process that repeats.  The Nun represents a seed, sperm, sprout, continuation, offspring, life, activity, and emergence.  The Aleph is a picture of an ox and represents strength, power, leader, master.  It is also the letter that represents God Himself and Unity with God. 

Thinking of sane as a devouring, consuming fire rooted in and springing from God, I am reminded of Hebrews 12:29: “our God is a consuming fire.”  I am also reminded of a passage in Romans 2 which, from The Message, is, “God is king, but he’s not soft.  In kindness he takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life-change.  You’re not getting by with anything.  Every refusal and avoidance of God adds fuel to the fire.  The day is coming when it’s going to blaze hot and high, God’s fiery and righteous judgment.  Make no mistake: In the end you get what’s coming to you-Real Life for those who work on God’s side, but to those who insist on getting their own way and take the path of least resistance, Fire!” (Verses 4-8, MSG). 

I recently conducted a study on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares where I shared scriptures that spoke of each one of us being tried by the same fire.  The results of this testing were good or ill based on whether or not we were united to Christ.  I wonder if sane isn’t the same?  Again, the Light of the World blog pointed out the original Hebrew picture of sane shows us action rather than feeling.  Perhaps the same fire I welcome into every aspect of my life feels like rejection to someone who does not long to, or perhaps does not feel able to, know the heart of God.  Perhaps whether we experience the consuming fire of God as sane or ahab (love) is akin to the idea expressed by Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians: “For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.  To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death and to the other the aroma of life leading to life” (2 Cor.: 15-16.) Perhaps the fire of God is life to us pressing ever deeper into Him but rejection to those who are not.

It is something I will meditate on in the coming days and I hope this has been food for thought for each of you as well.  I will continue looking at sane next week.  Until then, let us each one go on unto perfection, that perfection that is Christ in us, our hope of glory.

Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all Scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

Scripture notations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson.  Used by permission of NavPress.  All rights reserved.  Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

References

WORD STUDY – HATE – שׁנה | Chaim Bentorah

Hate (Sane), the Ancient Hebrew Meaning – Light of the World (wordpress.com)

Did God Really Hate Esau? – Israel Bible Weekly (israelbiblecenter.com)

Murray, Andrew, Holiest of All: A Commentary on the Book of Hebrews, Whitaker House, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, 1996, 2004

Peterson, Eugene H., The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, NavPress, The Navigators, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1993, 2002, 2018

Do I Not Hate Them Who Hate You?

12 Monday Jun 2023

Posted by in Walking in the Way

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Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Hello and welcome to another post on Renaissance Woman!

Psalm 139 is one of my favorite Psalms.  It is the first one I ever memorized in its entirety and I often use the verses contained within it as prayers and reminders.  However, there is a passage towards the end of the Psalm that does feel like it doesn’t belong.  It starts in verse 19 but, for the sake of this post, I want to focus on verses 21 and 22: “Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate You?  And do I not loathe those who rise up against You?  I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.”

There is an interesting story related in the Gospel of Luke Chapter 10.  Verse 25 states, “And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’”  The complete Jewish study Bible begins this verse with; “An expert in Torah stood up to try and trap him by asking…” Jonathan Mitchell’s New Testament describes the man as “a certain man versed in the Law (a Lawyer and a legal theologian; a Torah expert)”.  Jesus replies, “What is written in the law?  What is your reading of it?”  The lawyer answers, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself’.”  Jesus says to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”  But the lawyer, “wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’”

The story Jesus tells after the lawyer’s question is the one often called “The Good Samaritan.”  It is a fascinating story with many layers to it.  An important point to realize when reading it the deep and abiding hatred that existed between Jews and Samaritans.  For Jesus to use a Samaritan in His story, especially when speaking to an expert in Torah, was one of those times we must pay close attention because Jesus is making a crucial point.

Who is my neighbor?  As I carefully listen to the things being spoken today I do not think I stretch things if I rephrase this questions as, “who am I allowed to hate?”  The answer to that appears to be found in Psalm 139: we can hate those who hate God, loathe those who rise against Him, count them our enemies.  Of course, there is some difficulty in determining just who hates God.  There are times when it appears obvious who hates God but it gets trickier when we come across those who claim to be believers in Jesus but don’t quite believe the right things.  There are so many lines drawn and labels applied to people so we can distinguish our enemies from our friends.  If you belong to my denomination, if you look like me, sound like me, believe like me then you are safe but if you don’t then you are not only against me but against God.  The story of The Good Samaritan is a warning to take care because our neighbor is not who we might think.  After all we humans judge by the outward appearance but God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).  

And yet, we do live in a time where the heart seems to have been put on display.  The headlines have been full of behaviors where I think we could point a finger and say, “those people there are obviously against God so they are the ones I can hate” but then we come up against John 3:16 which says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” and 1 John 2:2: “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.”  But then, there are passages like Psalm 11:5 “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and the one who loves violence His soul hates” and Romans 9:13 where Paul quotes Malachi 1:2-3 saying, “as it is written, ‘Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated’.”  So; God hates but His commandment to us was “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27-28).  Which is it?  Was David wrong in his Psalm or could it be we don’t have an understanding of what the Bible means by hate?

As I search for an answer to that, I have to wonder why “hate” was chosen in the first place by our English Translators.  My New World Dictionary defines hate as “to have strong dislike or ill will for; loathe; despise, to dislike or wish to avoid; shrink from (to hate arguments)”.  There’s a note under the definition that says “hate implies a feeling of great dislike or aversion and, with persons as the object, connotes the bearing of malice.”  Can this really describe our God as revealed in Jesus?

The Hebrew word used by David in his Psalm is sane (H8130, pronounced saw-nay) and is spelled Shin Nun Aleph (שנא).  The Strong’s concordance defines it as “to hate (personally) enemy, foe, odious” so isn’t all that helpful in trying to understand what sane means.  As I continued looking into the sane, I found articles that said “hate” was an incorrect translation of sane and “to love less” would be more accurate.  Others have said that the ancient pictograph of sane is a thorn and then a seed denoting something unsettling that would be turned away from.  One article says “the Hebrew view of hate was more about being hurt or wounded by something because of love being involved…When we feel pain, we want to withdraw; we are made in His image” (FirmIsrael).  Chaim Bentorah has an article devoted to Psalm 139:21 and the word sane and says his studies have suggested “reject” would be better than “hate” to translate the Hebrew.

I don’t disagree with anything I read in the articles linked below (and there are some wonderful points made about how God blessed Esau even though He supposedly “hated” him-worth reading) but I see something more in the picture formed by the Hebrew letters.  The Shin (ש) represents the totality of an entire process from beginning to end and means “whole, entire, intact” or “complete”.  It also carries the idea of repetition in that the process is completed over and over again.  Shin, with its three arms, also represents fire.  Nun (נ) means “emergence” but it also means “to sprout, spread, propagate, shine, flourish, blossom”.  The Aleph (א) is the letter that represents God but also is the letter that brings all of creation into unity with God.  Thus, in the Hebrew word sane, I see the picture of fire rooted in God.  His sane is the love of His Father’s heart that burns against anything that would keep His children from relationship with Him. 

What does the sane of God look like?  It does look like some harsh dealings as we read the Old Testament but each one of those instances describe the broken heart of God and His reluctance to act.  (I have touched on this in my studies on evil).  The fullness of the sane of God looks like Jesus coming to seek and save that which was lost.  It looks like the stories of Luke 15 where, when the precious lost sheep, coin, and son are restored to their rightful place, the call is “rejoice with me!”  United to Jesus Christ, One Spirit with Him, His sane burns in us.  The apostle Paul is a perfect example of the sane of God manifested in a human life.  As the zealous protector of the Temple, Paul hated the Christians in the dictionary definition of the world.  After His encounter with the living Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul had sane against everything that sought to keep anyone from experiencing the fullness of God.  He became the one who wrote, “My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19).

There’s a quote that’s recently been shared a great deal and it has bothered me.  It’s from one of Billy Graham’s sermons and he says, “The closer you get to Christ, the more sinful you’re going to feel”.  The quote is taken out of context and I have not yet had an opportunity to hear it within the entire sermon but, as it stands, I don’t agree with it.  What I believe is the more the life of Christ is formed in you, the more you will sane.  That is not a bad thing.  Our God is a consuming fire and, as we are transformed into the image of Jesus Christ from glory to glory, the more His fire burns in us.  We live rooted in Jesus Christ and His life in us shines out of us and lights the entire world.  We sane anything that would seek to destroy the precious treasure of His life within us and, at the same time, that life in us is an irritant to the world. 

There is so much more to be said on this.  I believe understanding the sane of God is the first step toward understanding spiritual warfare and is a subject I will continue to look at in the upcoming weeks.

Until then, let us remember “that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.  Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us; we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:19-20).  

Unless noted otherwise, all Scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References

Jacob I Loved, Esau I Hated – Hebrew Word for Hate — FIRM Israel

Sanay: To HATE – Hebrew Word Lessons

WORD STUDY – HATE – שׁנה | Chaim Bentorah

Did God Really Hate Esau? – Israel Bible Weekly (israelbiblecenter.com)

What Does The Word ‘Hate’ Mean In Hebrew and Greek? – Misfit Ministries

The Complete Jewish Study Bible, Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC, Peabody, Massachusetts, 2016

Bentorah, Chaim, Hebrew Word Study: Beyond the Lexicon, Trafford Publishing, USA, 2014

Guralnik, David B., Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, William Collins + World Publishing Co., Inc., Cleveland • New York, 1972, 1976

Haralick, Robert M., The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, 1995

Mitchell, Jonathan, The New Testament, Harper Brown Publishing, 2019

Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville Tennessee, 1990

The God Who Bends

24 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by in Isaiah 45:7, Studies

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It’s not an ox but it is certainly an impressive set of horns

Hello and welcome-or welcome back-to Renaissance Woman! 

This week I am back to my study of Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things”.  Some translations have “evil” in place of the word “calamity” in this passage and the idea that the Lord creates evil is one difficult to swallow.  This week, I continue looking at the Hebrew word bara which is most often translated “create” to see just what it really means.

In an earlier post, I mentioned a video I watched where the teacher said bara means to fatten or to fill.  The teacher relates bara to the following words:

Beriy = fat

Barar = clean (the teacher points out soap comes from fat)

Barah = choice meat

Beriyt = covenant (the making of a covenant included the cutting or dividing of meat)

Biyr = fat place-bountiful

Biyrah = palace

He points out the fattening or filling that took place during the six days of creation: the first three days are days of separation but then days 4, 5, & 6 are the heavens, earth, and seas all being filled with plants and animals then the culmination of creation by God creating Mankind.  I found another video on bara where the two letter root bar meaning “son of” was related to bara and this picture of mankind filling the earth with offspring confirms the meaning “to fatten” or “to fill”. (Other sources tell me bar is the Aramaic for “some of” rather than the Hebrew, which is ben, and bar in the Hebrew has a host of other meanings. Just an aside…)

I’ve already mentioned how I took that meaning and plugged it in to the various scriptures where bara is used to see if it works.  It can, I suppose, so I do not entirely disagree but I do not find “to fatten” or “to fill” entirely satisfactory.  When I try it in my study passage, I find “I fatten evil” doesn’t make sense to me at all.  “I fill evil”…okay.  If the idea is God filling evil in order to destroy it, I could come around to that definition.  My reason for not wholeheartedly committing to these definitions is this: there are other Hebrew words used for fattened (or fatted in the King James English) and fill.  There is the Hebrew word mashman (H4824) which means fatness but in terms of a rich dish or fertile field or robust man.  There is also deshen (H1880) which means fatness or abundance and specifically the fatty ashes of sacrifice. These two words are not all: I count seven different entries in the Strong’s concordance when I look up fatness, fatted, fatter, and fattest.  Why use bara?  What is the difference in its intent that the Hebrew people would use it rather than one of these other words?

Then there’s male (H4390) which means “to fill or to be full of” and is used numerous times in the Old Testament.  Again, with a perfectly good word meaning “to fill” why use bara if “to fill” is the intended meaning? What is the difference and why do I keep harping on it?  Because, it is so important to understand what the writers of scripture intended to convey.  Do the English words chosen fit the intent?  How has our understanding of the definitions of these words changed over time?  For instance, if we all truly believe “create” means “to make something out of nothing” then I have a problem.  The idea that when God says “I create darkness” and “I create evil” in Isaiah 45:7 He means neither of those things existed until He brought them into being, I run into a contradiction.  Evil is not mentioned once in creation story in Genesis 1 where God looks at everything He made and saw it was very good and then rested.  Evil does show up in Genesis 2 after God plants the garden for the man He made and we see the tree of the knowledge of good and evil growing there but I plan to look more at that during my study of evil.  There is nothing here to back up evil existing because God created it and, since I don’t believe the Bible does contradict itself, I will continue to seek out what create means.  I will say it is crucial that none of us build our theology on one fragment of scripture but equally crucial is an understanding of what this word meant to the people who used it.

It’s important to remember the Hebrew language is pictorial.  Every word is comprised of letters which are words in their own right and every letter has its basis in a picture.  What is the picture that forms when we look at bara?  Bara is spelled Bet (ב ) Resh (ר ) Aleph (א ).  The Bet is a picture of a tent and the word Bet means “house”.  I’ve already written about how we are ultimately the house of the Lord so won’t repeat what I’ve said here.  Resh means poverty or head/principal.  The letter is shaped like an upside down and backwards L and the picture behind it is either that of a poor person bent over from his burden or that of a bent head.  The bent head is a picture of humility and submission to one who is the head but it is also a bending of the intellect in order to be understood.  Think of how a teacher teaches a child.  The teacher knows far more than the child but no good teacher overwhelms a child by using terms that child cannot possibly understand.  No, a good teacher bends over his or her intellect and speaks to that child in a way that causes that child to learn and to grow.

How wonderful that we have a God who bends!  There are many instances of His bending towards people in the Old Testament but we see this ultimate bending in Jesus.  I cannot fathom what it meant for the Creator to empty Himself and become a member of His creation.  If that wasn’t enough, Jesus wasn’t born in a palace or to a rich family.  He wasn’t pampered from the moment of His birth and received no honors among men.  And still, knowing who and what He was, that all things were given into His hands, He bent further and washed the filth of the roads from the feet of His disciples.  This is our God.  He is nothing like anything that has been worshipped as a god at any point in history.  He is all powerful and the source of all things yet He is the God who bends. 

So we have “house” and we have “poverty and head or principal” which are two concepts that ought not harmonize with each other and yet, in the paradox of the character of God, they do.  Lastly, we have the Aleph.  It looks like a somewhat sideways squiggly X but, in the earliest script, the Aleph was an ox head with horns which symbolizes power and leadership.  So now we have house, poverty and head or principal, and power and leadership.  I can see where those who define bara as “to fill” are coming from because this is the picture I see forming:

We are God’s dwelling places so our circumstances are also His.  Thus, the circumstances of our lives will become the vehicle where He is seen and where we come to intimately know Him as He fills our lives with Himself.  Any power evil appears to possess shrivels up and blows away in the presence of our God.  Perhaps His being with us isn’t always easy to see but I am confident that, whatever evil besets us, we will be able to say like Joseph: “You meant it for evil but God meant it for good.”

I am still not satisfied with “to fill” as a definition for bara and so will be continuing to take a look at this word next week.  Until then, may the Holy Spirit open our eyes to see that no matter what evil might come against us, we will not fear: Our God is with us!  The Lord of hosts is with us!  The God of Jacob is our refuge. (Psalm 46)

Hallelujah!  Amen.

Note: Strong’s Concordance “Fatness, Fatted, etc.” entries in the Hebrew Dictionary:  4924, 1880, 2459, 8081, 75, 4770, 1277

References

Bara

Jeff A. Benner

Bet Yahudah

Bet

Shivimpanim

The Living Word

Resh

Shivinpanim

The Living Word

Aleph

Shivimpanim

The Living Word

House of the Lord

03 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by in Isaiah 45:7, Studies

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Image by Joseph Redfield Nino from Pixabay

Enough with the Latin!

Hello and welcome-or welcome back-to Renaissance Woman where, this week, I continue my study of the Hebrew word bara which is most often translated “create” in the Old Testament.  The root bara is spelled Bet (ב) Resh (ר) Aleph (א).  I have briefly examined Resh earlier in my study of Isaiah 45:7 but did find it interesting that, according to Mr. Haralick’s book, Bet means “container”, Resh means “cosmic container”, and Aleph means “the pulsating unbridled force.”  Container and Cosmic Container seem a bit redundant and I was curious what I might learn as I studied each letter.  I began with Bet.

Bet is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the word itself-spelled Bet Yod Tav (בית )-means “house, dwelling place, or home.”  In his entry for Bet, Mr. Haralick quotes Exodus 25:8: “And let them make a sanctuary that I may dwell within them.”  I looked up this verse in the New King James version and found the word used is among rather than within.  I checked the scripture in the Comparative Study Bible and each of the four translations contained therein also have the word among.  I looked up among in the Strong’s concordance and found referenced the root tavek (H8432) which means, “to sever, a bisection, in the center, among, between, in the middle, midst.”

I must take a moment and urge anyone who wishes to go deeper into Bible Study to get an Interlinear Bible.  The Strong’s is an invaluable reference but it doesn’t give prefixes or suffixes or, in some cases, tell you which word is used in the scripture.  Case in point: John 1:1 says “In the Beginning was the word…and the word was WITH God.”  If you were to look up “with” in the Strong’s you’d have to go to the Appendix where you will find listed all the words used so frequently they’d make the concordance very unwieldly if every occurrence was included: words like A, He, Her, They, and With.  The Appendix would tell you that “with” in the Greek is sun and there’s actually an interesting lesson to learn by considering the meaning of sun in the first verse of John’s gospel.  However, an Interlinear Bible would show you the word translated “with” in John 1:1 is not sun at all but pros.  There is a different mind picture painted when the meaning of pros is meditated on in the passage. 

It’s the same looking up the Hebrew letters.  When I look up “among”, the Strong’s gives me the root tavek spelled Tav Vav Caph but my Interlinear Bible shows me the root appears with Mem as a suffix and Bet as a prefix.  The addition of the prefix and suffix make the root third person masculine plural and it would be pronounced be-tow-kum.  The Bet as a prefix means ”in, at, by, among, with, by means of, through”.  Among is a perfectly fine translation but so is within or in or in the midst.  All of this is fascinating but the word Bet means house and I have the promises of Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel 36:27 ringing in my ears and so I return to my study.

2 Corinthians 6:16 says, “What agreement has the temple of God with idols?  For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’.”  The words the Apostle Paul quotes are found in Leviticus 26:12, Jeremiah 32:38, and Ezekiel 37:27.  First there was the Tabernacle and then the Temple which served as Houses of the Lord but there were also these promises from God that the day would come when there would be no external Tabernacle or Temple but God Himself would live within us. 

Then comes the Incarnation where “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).  The Amplified uses the word “tabernacled” instead of dwelt which I like.  The Old Testament promises are beginning to be fulfilled but are not yet.  Jesus gives wonderful promises in the upper room of the One He would send: the Comforter, the Teacher, the Spirit of Truth who would guide us into all truth.  He would speak not on His own authority but will take everything that is of Jesus and declare it to us. (See John Chapters 13-17).  The same night He gives these promises, Jesus is arrested, tried, and crucified.  He dies but before dying declares “It is finished!”  What is finished?  There is far more to be said about what was happening on the Cross than I have room for here.  I think the Book of Hebrews has the best explanation for what is referred to as the “finished work of the cross”: 

Hebrews 7:26-27: “For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is Holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for all the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself.” 

Hebrews 9: 24-27: “For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another-He then would have had to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.”

Hebrews 10:12: “But this man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God.”

I used the term “the finished word of the cross” because I’ve heard it said so often but if we stop there, there are still some of God’s promises not yet fulfilled. The Old Testament promises of God putting His Spirit within us, giving us new hearts, writing His law on those hearts, and enabling us to walk in His statutes are not fulfilled in the death of Jesus.  As the Apostle Paul writes, “If Christ is not risen, then your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!” (1 Corinthians 15:17) Our faith is NOT futile and we are NOT still in our sins because Jesus is risen from the dead!  He is not only risen but ascended to the right hand of the Father.  After His ascension came Pentecost where the Holy Spirit rushed upon those gathered together.  At last, with the lavish shedding abroad of the Spirit, the promises of God were fulfilled.

“For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Amen, to the glory of God through us” (1 Corinthians 1:20).  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation…” (2 Corinthians 5:17).  Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of every promise of God which means that now, today, His Spirit is within me.  He has given me a new heart, He has written His law on it, and He is causing me to walk in His statutes.  I am in Him and thus am a new creation.  How is this possible?  Because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, ascended to the right hand of the Father, and poured His Spirit into me.  The same Spirit that is there in Genesis 1:1 is within me.  He sends forth His Spirit and I am not only created but re-created and renewed (See Psalm 104:30). 

After his experience with the Centurion Cornelius, Peter says, “In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34).  What is true for me is true for every other believer.  The Spirit of the Living God lives within each and every one of us.  Without Him, the Christian life is impossible.  There is no ability to love anyone, especially our enemies.  There are no streams of living water flowing out of us and into the world around us.  Without Him we do not know we are in Christ and Christ is in us and thus we have no hope of glory.  We can look at scripture and do our best to keep the rules so hopefully we get to go to heaven when we die but there is no LIFE.  We can read and memorize and know about Jesus, we can even try our hardest to be like Him but, without the Spirit of truth and wisdom and revelation; we won’t ever intimately KNOW HIM because the things of God are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14).

“Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”  That is 1 Corinthians 3:16 and the question is asked again later on in Paul’s letter: “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6:19).  If the books written by Christian authors I’ve recently read are any indication, believers do not know the Holy Spirit lives within them.  May He open all of our eyes to see what is the hope of our calling.    

Bereshit bara Elohim…In the beginning, created God the heavens and the earth.  But these were not His house. “This saith the Lord, ‘The heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool.  Where is the house that ye build unto Me?  And where is the place of My rest?’” (Isaiah 66:1).  “For thus says the Lord, Who created the heavens, Who is God, Who formed the earth and made it, Who has established it, Who did not create it in vain, Who formed it to be inhabited…” (Isaiah 45:18). “Everyone who is called by My name, Whom I have created for My glory; I have formed him, yes, I have made Him” (Isaiah 43:7).

Do you declare Jesus is Lord?  Do you know God is your Father and you are His child?  Do you know He has adopted you and is placing you as a Son?  Yes?  Then know the Spirit of the Lord lives within you.  You are the house of the Lord, a living stone in His temple, a member of that great city described in Revelation whose maker and builder is God!

 Hallelujah!  God has done this! Let the House of the Lord sing praise!

Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all Scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References

Exodus 25:8 Interlinear: ‘And they have made for Me a sanctuary, and I have tabernacled in their midst; (biblehub.com)

The Comparative Study Bible, The Zondervan Corporation, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1984

Green, Jay P. Sr., The Interlinear Bible: Hebrew, Greek, English, Volumes 1-3, Authors For Christ Inc., Lafayette, IN, 1985

Haralick, Robert M., The Inner Meaning of Hebrew Letters, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, 1995

Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1990

Carried on the Water

05 Monday Sep 2022

Posted by in Isaiah 45:7, Studies

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Hello, Readers!  Welcome to Renaissance Woman and the post that almost didn’t happen.

I did spend last week focusing on my study of Isaiah 45:7 and began looking at the last letter of shalom, the Mem.  I found it fascinating but did not feel I was gaining understanding as there are so many different aspects to the Mem.  I learn a great deal from the Hebrew letters and I find there are times where it is easy to feel cast adrift in a sea of information, treading water-as it were-and searching for an anchor from which to write a post. This analogy is apropos as the closest word to the spelling of Mem (מם) is the word mim (מים) which is the word for water.

The Mem is a bit different than the other letters I’ve looked at so far in that Hebrew letters are words themselves and yet Mem is not.  It is spelled with two Mems: the open Mem at the beginning and the closed Mem at the end and, according to Robert Haralick, is not vocalized anywhere in the Pentateuch or, for that matter; anywhere in scripture.  The closest word is, again, water which is spelled with the open Mem, the Yod, and the closed Mem.  Chaim Bentorah writes, “From this we learn that water is the carrier of the Yod.  The Yod is a messenger from heaven, a message of heaven” (Bentorah, 120). 

It is in this idea of a messenger and message from heaven that I find my anchor.  The Mem is not only associated with water but with the Hebrew word for mother (ahm or em אם) and the word for womb (rechem רחם).  The opening at the lower left hand corner of the Mem is a picture of the opening in the womb through which the mother gives birth.  But, the final form of the Mem is closed. Robert Haralick says that, since the Mem is the balancing point of all manifestation, the open Mem is the female aspect and the closed Mem is the male aspect.  They are married by the Yod.” (Haralick, 199)  Reading this reminded me of Genesis 5:2: “He created them male and female, and blessed them and called them Mankind in the day they were created.” 

It also reminded me of a book I recently finished reading which I have mentioned in a previous post.  The book is Evidence Not Seen by Darlene Deibler Rose and, in it, she recounts how her husband heads into the jungle to share the gospel with the Kapauku people.  Darlene is left behind in the city of Macassar as the trail is considered to be too difficult for women.  Darlene’s husband Russell is speaking with the Kapauku chieftain who finally says the gospel is all well and good for Russell, who is obviously a spirit person who comes from the spirit world beyond the mountains, but means nothing to a mere man like him.  Russell Deibler protests and insists he too is a mere man but the chieftain doesn’t believe him because neither he nor any of the other missionaries who came with him have a wife or children.  Russell Deibler tells the chieftain he does too have a wife and the chieftain demands to know where she is.  The story is both humorous and fascinating and I don’t have space to share it all.  The upshot is, Darlene is sent for and it isn’t until she arrives in the village and the Kapauku people see her that the gospel begins to be believed.  I was struck how this story shows the importance of both men and women.  None is more important or of more worth than the other: both are necessary. 

Fascinating as the story is, since this is not a post on gender equality, I move on to an article I found titled “The Mystery of the Closed Mem” by Daniel Botkin.  The open Mem is the form that appears at the beginning or middle of Hebrew words while the final form, the closed Mem, appears at the end of words with one exception.  That exception is in Isaiah 9:7 and is the word l’marbeh which is translated “of the increase”.  Mr. Botkin points out the word marbeh appears in other places in the Hebrew bible and is always spelled with the open Mem at the beginning.  The only place where the word appears with the closed Mem is in this passage where Isaiah is prophesying the birth of the Messiah.  Like Mr. Bentorah and Mr. Haralick, Mr. Botkin also describes the closed Mem as a closed womb and the open Mem as an open womb.  His conclusion is this instance of a closed Mem where it ought to be an open Mem tells us that this child will be concealed within the closed womb of the Virgin Mary.  The Epistle to the Hebrews opens with: “God who at various times and in various ways, spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son…” (Verses 1-2a) and, in this study, I see a picture of the water of the womb of Mary carrying the best message from heaven: the Word made flesh, God from God.

Both Mr. Bentorah and Mr. Haralick say the Mem represents knowledge of God.  Mr. Bentorah uses water as his analogy and says the open Mem is like the surface of the water that can be seen from a boat and is the revealed knowledge of God.  The closed Mem is like the world hidden in the depths of the sea which cannot be readily seen and is like the hidden knowledge of God.  Mr. Haralick writes, “…the beginning Mem has an opening at the bottom.  This alludes to the fact that from below we can perceive God through the functioning of the universe.  The final Mem is closed.  This alludes to the fact that although we perceive God, the king (melek מלך), through the functioning of the universe, ultimately God remains unknowable and hidden” (Haralick, 203).

I cannot deny the truth of this.  I am finite and cannot begin to comprehend the Infinite Person, the One who created all that is and was and ever shall be.  I would not be able to know Him were it not for Jesus.  He is the interface-if I can use that word.  He is the One in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells (Colossians 1:19, 2:9-10).  He is the place where heaven and earth meet (John 1:51).  In Him we are One with The Father (John 17:20-26).  Because we are in Him we can know God because, although “No man has ever seen God at any time; the only unique Son or the only begotten God, Who is in the bosom [in the intimate presence] of the Father, He has declared Him [He has revealed Him and brought Him out where He can be seen; He has interpreted Him and He has made Him known]” (John 1:18, Amplified).

The seventh chapter of John’s Gospel records Jesus saying, “’He who believes in Me [who cleaves to and trust in and relies on Me] as the Scripture has said, From his innermost being shall flow [continuously] springs and rivers of living water.’ But He was speaking here of the Spirit, Whom those who believed (trusted, had faith) in Him were afterward to receive” (7:38-39a, Amplified).  The Holy Spirit is this living water and He carries the reality of the message from heaven that is the risen and ascended Jesus to us today in that He bears witness of Jesus and leads us into all truth (John 15:26, 16:13).  The Mem is the first letter of the Hebrew word meleah (מלאה) which means “something fulfilled, abundance”.  The living water of the Spirit fills us to overflowing, we know Jesus as our very life, and our peace is made complete.

Unless noted otherwise, all Scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References

Microsoft Word – THE MYSTERY OF THE CLOSED MEM-2.docx (jewishroots.net)

Bentorah, Chaim, Hebrew Word Study: Beyond the Lexicon, Trafford Publishing, USA, 2014, Pages 119-122

Diebler Rose, Darlene, Evidence Not Seen: A Woman’s Miraculous Faith in the Jungles of World War II, HarperSanFrancisco, Harper Collins Publishers, San Francisco, California, 1988, Pages 22-33

Haralick, Robert M., The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, 1995, Pages 193-204

Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1990