Catacomb Resident Blog

Hebrew Words Give It Away

16 October 2024

From college, I recall a bunch of silly theories about Old Testament stuff. Most of it was simply honest mistakes people made before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Finding them changed a lot of ideas. However, there are too many things for which I cannot see any excuse. They simply didn't bother to study the Hebrew language in depth.

For example, the term "Hebrew" as a reference to the people and language was not derived from any foreign words. It is simply the reference to genealogy after Noah. He had a son named Shem, from whence we get "Semite". Shem in turn had several sons, one of whom was Aram, from which we get Arameans and Aramaic language. A grandson of Shem from another son was Eber (also spelled Ever). The Hebrew word for Eber's descendants is where we get "Hebrew" -- it's what they called themselves.

Jeff Benner tells us that the most primitive roots of Semitic language was recorded in pictographs. The current Hebrew alphabet was adopted from Aramaic, but the original Hebrew script was pictographs. Each symbol in their alphabet had its own meaning, and combining two of them provided the most ancient roots of the Hebrew language. Thus, the Hebrew word for "father" is ab (or av), which is the first two symbols aleph (an ox head) and beyth (a tent or home). The ox (strong man) of the household was indicated by these two symbols. At it's most primitive, the word ab means "tentpole" -- think about that for a moment. Who is the center, the one who holds the household up?

From those two-letter root words, we eventually derive the more common three-letter Hebrew roots for the majority of their entire language. Their verbs and nouns were highly conjugated with other letters or combined roots. In general, there are some 800 root words which, if you can understand the etymology, you could understand the whole language. All those root words are simple concrete terms for things, people and actions.

Here's a couple of gems for you. The word torah essentially means "journey or path". The Books of Moses were referred to as your path in life. This word is derived from yarah, something thrown or something that flows; the idea is movement. Translating it into English as "law" is very misleading (see here).

Another one is "grace" -- hen (the initial "h" is more like "kh", rather harsh). The root meaning of the word indicates that something is precious or that someone is beautiful. Naturally, this extends to cover the idea that God's grace is a mark of His valuing someone (see here).

Benner offers a long collection of word studies here.


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