The Urban Legends in Our Sermons

I recently watched a YouTube sermon in which the preacher asserted that the name of the prophet Habakkuk could be translated from Hebrew as "to wrestle," making the prophet's name a remarkable reflection of the whole nature of the book, throughout which Habakkuk seems to "wrestle" with God.

That's a cool interpretation for a sermon.

It's also wrong.

The etymology (a fancy term for "the history and origin of a word") of "Habakkuk" is uncertain.  It likely ties to the Hebrew word chabaq ("to embrace," "to hug"), but it may go back even further to the Akkadian (i.e., Babylonian) word ḫambaqūqu (an unidentified plant or garden herb).

I can't blame the YouTube preacher for getting that idea wrong.  The "wrestle" story has been around for over 1,600 years.  Church father Jerome of Stridon creatively decided "embracing" God was a metaphor for struggling and wrestling with God (since hugs and wrestling both involve arms, I imagine).  That spin on a word that probably connects to "embrace" has been sneaking into sermons on Habakkuk ever since.  It's evolved into a pseudo-scholarly claim that Habakkuk's name actually means "to wrestle."

All of that got me thinking: Maybe it was time to dedicate one of my monthly blog posts to what I'll call the "urban legends" sneaking into our modern sermons.  Keep an ear open for these tales, and don't blame the preacher if you hear one in a sermon.  Urban legends are sneaky little things.  They're the original viral memes.

 

1. The One About the Camel

Jesus declares in Matthew 19:24 that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  Fast forward to our times, and you'll hear preachers sharing the urban legend that Jerusalem had a gate called "the Eye of the Needle" that was too narrow and too low for a camel to pass through while loaded with riches.  The camel had to be unloaded and even had to lower itself to its knees to pass through.

Thus, Jesus' message (the urban legend suggests) wasn't "the rich can't get in."  It was more like, "You can't take it with you."  What a relief!  And not just a relief for millionaires and billionaires; a relief for anyone not part of the roughly 80% of the world living under the US federal "poverty line," anyone who is rich from the perspective of 4 out of 5 fellow humans.

Except … there is zero archaeological or documentary evidence that Jerusalem ever had a gate called "the Eye of the Needle."  Zilch.  None.  Not even hints.

The Bible-softening "Eye of the Needle" gate story is first found more than 800 years after Christ uttered his warning to the rich.  The monk Paschasius Radbertus (doesn't that sound like a Harry Potter character?) wrote that "some have said that the eye of the needle was a postern gate in Jerusalem which was called by that name."  Radbertus sounds as if even he distrusted the claim.  But the urban legend held on.  It wound a path through the medieval theologian Anselm, then Thomas Aquinas, and all the way into the sermons of health-and-wealth preachers of our own times, providing salvific aid and comfort to the well-off.

 

2. The One About Agapē vs. Philia

This may break a few preachers' hearts, but their stock sermons on the differences between God's divine, unconditional love (claimed to be built into the Greek verb agapaō and its companion noun agapē) and human love (purported to be the true meaning of the verb/noun pair phileō/philia) are founded in mere linguistic fable.  That sort of distinction between agapaō and phileō appears neither in Greek philosophy nor in Scripture itself.  Their ranges of meaning overlap substantially, and Scripture sometimes uses them interchangeably to describe the same relationship.

• People agapaō the darkness (John 3:19, which makes the idea of agapē meaning "divine, unconditional love" nonsensical).
• Paul derides Demas for the man's agapaō of the present age (2 Timothy 4:10).
• The Father, who is the very essence of divine love, phileō the Son (John 5:20).
• The Father also phileō the disciples (John 16:27).
• Jesus phileō Lazarus to the point of tears (John 11:3, 36).
• The Father agapaō the Son in John 3:35 and phileō the Son in John 5:20, using both verbs for the same divine relationship.

Sermons on John 21's exchange between Jesus and Peter (the "Do you love Me?" passage) wander far afield of what's really going on if they rely on the urban legend of agapē meaning anything spiritually superior to philia.

Nonetheless, love remains the greatest.

 

3. The One About the Gehenna Garbage Dump

The Valley of the Son of Hinnom (Ge ben Hinnom in Hebrew, which evolved into "Gehenna" in Greek) had a notorious reputation in ancient Judea.  Jesus references it in all three Synoptic Gospels as a symbol of divine punishment.  Three of the New Testament's twelve Gehenna references explicitly associate it with fire.  Centuries earlier, Jeremiah 19:2-6 condemned the child sacrifices performed in the valley and announced divine punishment upon it.  By the time of Jesus, Gehenna already had a solid reputation for being a symbol of divine judgment.

But a garbage dump?  Your preacher may have embellished a sermon by stating that Gehenna was where Jerusalem burned all its trash and carcasses, which resulted in "unending" flames in the valley.  As best as we can tell, the garbage-dump tale traces back to around 1200 CE, when Rabbi David Kimhi made that claim in his commentary on Psalm 27:13.  However, no early Jewish, Greek, or Roman sources make any mention of the valley being a burning garbage pit.  That addition seems to be a medieval invention.

Archaeological excavations at Ketef Hinnom, on the shoulder of the valley, have uncovered an Iron Age necropolis containing burial caves used particularly during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.  The finds confirm that at least part of the area had a long association with burial and death.  They have not, however, produced evidence of a perpetually burning garbage dump in Jesus’ time.

There's no proof it was ever Jerusalem's junkyard.

 

4. The One About Kinder, Gentler Slavery

You'll see the Greek word doulos (or the feminine doulē) translated in many ways in different Bible versions: servant, bondservant, handmaid, servant-girl, and other terms.  But when it's being used literally, that word has only one modern-English translation: slave.  In ordinary first-century usage, a doulos was a person owned by and subject to a master – nothing more and nothing less.

You'll hear a couple sermonic twists on ancient slavery – that it was less cruel in the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds than in, for example, the antebellum American South, and that slaves could buy their freedom and even handle their masters' finances.

There are glimmers of truth there.  Some enslaved people could use accumulated funds to purchase their freedom – if the master/owner allowed it.  Some enslaved people worked as tutors, physicians, clerks, estate managers, or financial agents.  Those comparatively privileged positions, however, cannot be treated as representative of ancient slavery generally – especially of those condemned to agricultural gangs, mills, mines, or sexual exploitation.

So why do so many Bible versions say "servant" where they should be saying "slave"?  And why do some modern sermons stress a kinder, gentler slavery?  The answer is tradition.  When the 1611 CE King James Version translated doulos as "servant," it was in an age when that English word actually did include both voluntary and involuntary workers.  Over the centuries, however, "servant" came chiefly to suggest a voluntary worker or paid employee, while many Bible versions retained (and still retain) the traditional rendering.  The English Standard Version, for one, is unusually candid about its reasoning.  Its preface says that “slave” now carries associations with the brutal slavery of nineteenth-century America, and it therefore alternates among “slave,” “bondservant,” and “servant.”  Whether intentionally or not, that policy often reduces the sense of ownership and subjection conveyed by doulos.

That leads to the question: Why do some modern preachers (and modern translators of the Scriptures) feel the need to soften the idea of slavery in Bible times?  What is it about declaring oneself "a slave of God" that makes us search for less triggering terms?  Why do we require the urban myth of more agreeable slaveholding in Bible times … and in our spiritual relationship with the Lord?

 

5. The One About “Turn the Other Cheek”

Not all Scriptural urban legends hail from the distant writings of Jerome's Patristic Age or Rabbi Kimhi's Medieval Era.  Some were born within most of our lifetimes, including the recent urban legend that offering your left cheek to be struck was how you claimed social equality with your attacker.  Because this claim is a newcomer to the urban legend category, I'll spend a little extra time examining it.

"But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil.  But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." (Matthew 5:39)

According to biblical scholar Walter Wink, Jesus is really saying this: "Being struck on your right cheek by a right-handed person is a backhand slap, which shows that person is of higher rank than you.  A palm or a fist is reserved for equals.  By offering your left cheek, you force that person to respond with a return punch with the right hand, declaring yourself to be deserving of the full fist or open palm that one of equal station merits."

It's a relatively new idea from the late 1980s, but I've heard it repeatedly in sermons from American preachers and I've read versions of it on multiple Christian websites.  Granted, it sounds like a cool interpretation and a brilliant, face-saving approach to being smacked.  But it also carries a whiff of American individualist pride, dismantling the caste system of authority while boldly standing your ground.  That individualist whiff smells a little off when you realize Jesus came from a collectivist, hierarchical society where authority was still respected.

But let's take a look at Wink's claims, point by point:

"Being struck on your right cheek by a right-handed person is a backhand slap …"

Jesus doesn't specifically say you're being backhanded, but since 90% of the human population is right-handed, I can understand the argument that Jesus was building a right-handed bias into his scenario.  I accept the idea of the backhand.

"… which shows that person is of higher rank than you.  A palm or a fist is reserved for equals."

Here we need to tilt our heads skeptically.  Yes, ancient documents are clear that a backhand is a more insulting form of attack; the Jewish Mishnah Bava Kamma 8:6 even sets the fine for a backhanded slap at twice that for an open-handed slap because of its more demeaning character.  However, there don't seem to be any texts from early eras indicating that rank or authority played any role in the insult.  The truth is, a person who's your equal can demean you just as easily as a superior or an inferior.  As Jesus said, "hostis se rhapizei" – "anyone who shall strike you."

By offering your left cheek, you force that person to respond with a return punch with the right hand …

I confess I stood up and acted this out a few times because I couldn't envision it while sitting.  Backhanding with the right hand doesn't lock the striker into following up with a right-hand punch or smack.  In fact, they've spun slightly to the right on the first hit, so following up with a backhanded left slap at a left cheek is the more natural follow-through.  I know, I know … it seems silly to get to this level of detail on it.  But I'm not the one claiming that a right-handed punch is now the only remaining option for the striker.

(To be fair, Wink anticipates the left-handed backhand.  He claims the left hand was reserved for unclean tasks, noting that the Qumran community imposed penance even for gesturing with it.  But a rule from one unusually strict religious community doesn't prove that every resident of Judea, Roman soldiers included, was socially prohibited from striking with the left hand.  It certainly doesn't make a right-handed punch the striker's “only remaining option.”)

… declaring yourself to be deserving of the full fist or open palm that one of equal station merits.

This closed the deal for me.  I asked myself, "Does Jesus really want me to stand up for my equal station among others, showing them I'm just as good as they are, just as deserving, not subject to their authority?  Is that a message I believe from the one who wants the greatest among believers to be the servant of them all (Mark 10:43-44)?  Who calls on us all to submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21)?  Who did not deem his own equality with God something to be clung to, but instead emptied himself (Philippians 2:6-7)?  Or … is this urban legend simply in service to individualistic pride?

Closing note: In Luke's Gospel, the parallel to this passage (Luke 6:29) omits information on which cheek is being struck.  That might mean that Jesus sometimes tried to be inclusive of backhanding lefties.  Or, it more likely means that the rights and lefts of the teaching aren't quite as important as Walter Wink surmised.

 

6. And All the Other Ones

There are a lot more cases of urban legends popping up on the sermon circuit, too many to cover in detail, like:

• Corinthian prostitutes who shaved their heads and went veilless.  (It doesn’t explain Paul’s call for head coverings, since there’s no evidence that shaved heads and unveiled faces were a recognized custom among first-century Corinthian prostitutes.)
• A rope tied around the high priest's ankle in the Holy of Holies to pull out his body if he died (this legend first appeared in a medieval work associated with thirteenth-century Spain)
• Jesus folding his burial face cloth "like a dinner napkin" to symbolize he would be back (no ancient source records that as a dinner-napkin practice of any age)
• A shepherd deliberately breaking a wandering sheep's leg to teach it not to wander (a cool parable, I suppose, but not founded in any known ancient practice)

Again, don't blame your preacher if you hear these urban legends woven into sermons.  Some of the tales have become so widespread that it's hard to dig back to original sources to falsify them.  But be on the lookout for claims that begin with words like, "In ancient times, everyone knew …" or "The custom in that day was …"  I'm not saying everything following those words is an urban legend.  But they are a cue for you to listen more closely, research later, and ask yourself:

• What's the earliest source of this so-called custom?
• Do I need this information to understand the text?
• Does it soften or even reverse the text's surface meaning?
• Are commentators simply citing one another rather than ancient sources?

Having this sort of discernment makes you more than just a person who heard a sermon.  It makes you an active participant in the learning that the sermon offered.  You're digging in like a Berean.  You're hearing the Word, then doing something with it.

 Until next month,

 YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx 

The Unicorns in Your Bible

 

Your Bible has unicorns in it.

Well, let me be more precise: If you regularly read the King James Version as your Bible of choice, you're going to run into references to unicorns nine times in five different books of the Bible.

King James isn't the only version of Scripture stabling unicorns.  You'll find the word "unicorn" in many early English translations (Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva, etc.), and even in later 19^th and 20^th century translations (Webster's, Smith's Literal Translation, and Lamsa's 1950s version).

 

WHERE'D THAT UNICORN COME FROM?

Before I continue, I should definitely point out which areas of Scripture I'm talking about.

Early English renderings of the Hebrew word re'ēm as "unicorn" can be found in:

• Deuteronomy 33:17, where Moses uses the term to describe the glory and strength of the house of Joseph;
  
  
• Numbers 23:22 and Numbers 24:8, from two of Balaam's prophecies about how strong the armies of Israel are;
  
  
• Job 39:9-10, in which God challenges Job, asking if he can domesticate the re'ēm by yoking it to plow fields;
  
  
• Psalm 22:21, where the supplicant pleads to be freed from the horns of multiple unicorns;
  
  
• Psalm 29:6, describing the voice of the Lord making Lebanon skip like a calf and Sirion like a young unicorn;
  
  
• Psalm 92:10, where the Psalmist uses the unicorn's horn as a symbol of victory and exaltation over enemies;
  
  
• Isaiah 34:7, in which the Lord sacrifices unicorns as the wildest and most powerful of beasts to fall in his vengeance upon Edom.

 

We've got a pretty good description of the re'ēm's qualities in this rundown.  A re'ēm is wild, horned, strong, glorious to behold, and able to plow fields if you could only tame him.

This beast is definitely not Princess Celestia from My Little Pony.

 

THROWING DOWN FOR KING JAMES

Nearly every modern English translation of re'ēm renders it as "wild ox."  If you moused over the linked references above, that's the translation you saw.  But the fact that the King James Version and earlier English translations interpret it as "unicorn" has led to some interesting modern attempts to defend the King James translation.

Dr. Gene Kim, a pastor of Bible Baptist Church in the San Francisco Bay area, defends the KJV's use of "unicorn" by insisting that "unicorn" must have been the name of a real animal we've since forgotten.  Steve Waldron, a pastor in the Oneness Pentecostal tradition at New Hope of Albany Church, similarly insists the "unicorn" of the KJV refers to a real creature we've since forgotten, although he concedes it might have referred to a rhinoceros.

Writing for Answers in Genesis, Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell asserts that unicorns were "real creatures familiar to the people living in those ancient times."  She offers the possibility of a rhinoceros, an animal with a single horn (well, sometimes).  She offers other possibilities as well, including the extinct aurochs, a bovine with two horns "so symmetrical that they could appear as one in profile."  She even offers up the possibility of additional, unknown one-horned creatures that have since gone extinct, but which could merit the term "unicorn."

Dr. Mitchell is not a zoologist, taxonomist, or wildlife forensic biologist.  She's a gynecologist.  I've noticed that a number of Answers in Genesis "doctors" are not specialists in the fields in which they're publishing commentary, but that's a side topic that might merit its own blog post.  For my part, I am neither a taxonomist nor a gynecologist, so I'll focus on linguistics and ancient classical literature, the fields where I've wrangled my own degrees.

This will be my point: These modern defenders of the "unicorn" term are not defending the Word of God or even the existence of ancient unicorns.  They are defending a KJV-only wording and, ironically, a non-KJV tradition supporting that wording.

But inserting unicorns into Scripture is, I'll argue, a tradition of men, not the Word of God.

 

NO SINGLE HORNS HERE

"Uni-corn" literally means "one horn" … "uni-" as in unicycle or universe, and "-corn" as in cornucopia, the horn of plenty, or tricorn hats.  The word unicorn's etymology certainly suggests a one-horned creature.  The Hebrew does not.

If you're in a hurry, here's the spoiler – the Hebrew term re'ēm has nothing to do with "one horn."  In fact, the Bible's first mention of horns connected to re'ēm, Deuteronomy 33:17, makes those horns plural, not singular: literally, "and the horns of a re'ēm are his [Joseph's] horns."  Horns aplenty, and nary a uni- in sight.

Hebrew is part of a language family called "Semitic," and other languages in that family group have animal terms similar to the Hebrew word re'ēm.  All of them are two-horned animals:

Syriac: raymā, a large antelope or wild ox

Akkadian: rīmu, wild bull or aurochs

Classical Arabic: r'im, white antelope or oryx

Ugaritic: rī'm, wild bull or buffalo

 

This tiny bit of linguistic information starts to make clear why nearly all modern translations of Scripture lean toward "wild ox" for the Hebrew word re'ēm.  Scriptural context shows it's a wild animal; linguistic context shows it's likely some kind of ox or antelope.

But none of that explains why the King James and so many other early English versions of the Bible say "unicorn."  To learn that, we're going to have to do a bit of time travel.

 

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ALEXANDRIA

Roughly three hundred years before the birth of Christ, a group of Jewish scholars living in the Egyptian city of Alexandria said to one another, "Hey, we should start translating our Hebrew Scriptures into Greek so more people can read them.  Everybody's Greeking it up these days!"

That's probably not a direct quote, but stick with me.

Legend says there were seventy (or seventy-two) of these third-century BCE scholars, and that they worked alone in seventy(-two) separately locked rooms (or thirty-six separately locked rooms with the scholars working in pairs … come on, you know how dicey legends get over time).  When they'd finished their translations into Greek, they discovered that all of them had produced exactly the same translations of the first five books of Scripture, word for word.

That's a pretty suspect tale.  But we do know that these scholars started a project that continued over decades and resulted in what's known as the "Septuagint," the "Seventy."  It was, as far as we know, the first extensive Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and its wording became an important source for many Old Testament quotations used in the New Testament.

When these scholars got to Deuteronomy and Numbers, they had a decision to make about the word re'ēm.  We don't know why they made the decision they did, but for a reason lost to time, they opted to translate that word as monokeros in Greek.  Monokeros was already a term in Greek zoology.  It literally means "one-horned," and it was a term applied to a beast that early writers like Ctesias and Aristotle described as "the Indian ass," accounts probably influenced, at least in part, by reports of the Indian rhinoceros.  Descriptions of monokeros's strength and wild nature abounded among the learned in the third century BCE, and the Septuagint translators seem to have adopted the monokeros term as a workable translation capturing the strength and wildness inherent in the re'ēm concept.

Little did they know, their translation choice would have an impact lasting thousands of years.

Several centuries later, Latin biblical tradition complicated matters further.  Jerome's Vulgate was not simply a Latin translation of the Septuagint. For most of the Old Testament, Jerome worked directly from Hebrew, although he also knew and consulted Greek and earlier Latin versions.  Nevertheless, the Latin Bible rendered re'ēm inconsistently with words such as unicornis ("one-horned") and rhinoceros ("nose-horned").  Thus, the Greek association between the Hebrew animal and a supposedly one-horned beast passed – somewhat unevenly – into the dominant Latin biblical tradition.

 

A HABIT OF UNICORNS

Now two major biblical traditions, the Septuagint and the Vulgate, had associated the Hebrew word re'ēm with one-horned creatures.  Over the centuries, when clergy repeatedly encountered "one-horned" language in Scripture, they got an image that stuck with them.

Fantastical images evolve. Some medieval bestiaries described monokeros as "the size of a full-grown horse," and that description led to a view of the creature as an actual horse, one with a single horn protruding from its forehead.  We have dozens of pre-KJV images depicting fantasy unicorns taking their place in tapestries, carvings, illustrated versions of the Bible and books of Psalms.  And so, something like our modern view of "unicorns" was born.

Monoceros slowly started to differ from unicornis in many bestiaries.  Monoceros stayed monstrous; the unicorn became gentler, smaller, a goat- or deer- or (finally) horse-like animal fascinated with innocent maidens.

Then someone said, "Hey, we need Bibles in English."

Again, that's probably not a direct quote.

In the 1580s, an English Catholic priest began translating Jerome's Latin Vulgate, working with his team to produce an English text.  Their work solidified into the Douay-Rheims Version, a Catholic staple for centuries to come.

Meanwhile, in King James I's England, the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 led to the commissioning of a project to make an English Bible with the king's name attached.  It relied on accepted Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the time, but the translators also report consulting earlier English translations (primarily the Bishops' Bible), the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and numerous other manuscripts as references.

Earlier English translations.

The ones I mentioned above … the ones already in a "unicorn" habit, right there with the Septuagint's monokeros and the Vulgate's unicornis.  The one-horn traditions.

 

DID THEY BELIEVE IN UNICORNS?

Let's revisit those modern KJV-only apologists who argued that the translators may have meant "rhinoceros" when they wrote "unicorn."  Frankly, that's unlikely.  By the 1600s, English had already had the word "rhinoceros" in it for a couple centuries.  Our apologist friends also suggested that KJV translators may have meant the aurochs.  But English was already referring to that creature as the "urus ox," the term that eventually developed into "aurochs."  With the Hebrew term re'ēm right before them, and despite their knowledge that the term "unicorn" was transforming fully into a fantasy equine mythology in their own era, they still chose to translate the term as "unicorn."

I don't think they believed in fantasy unicorns, any more than they believed in the mythological rooster-serpent "cockatrice" of the KJV's Jeremiah 8:17 or the goatmen "satyrs" of the KJV's Isaiah 13:21.  I think they believed in human tradition.  There was no moment when the KJV translation team declared, "Unicorns are real!"  But there was a moment they chose to adhere to a few longstanding traditions of men, ossified in existing translations.

The Douay-Rheims translators fared no better.  In Psalm 29:6, they spotted the Latin word rinocerotis and said, "Hey!  For giggles, let's make that one 'unicorn,' too!"

Not a direct quote.

 

WHY IT ALL MATTERS

Obviously, my point this month isn't about whether unicorns exist.  It isn't even about whether KJV-only apologists are being disingenuous when they try to protect English mistranslations against accuracy.

Am I going to hell if I accidentally believe in ancient unicorns?  Absolutely not.  But am I growing in wisdom if I just accept unicorns without deeper thought?  Again, absolutely not.

My takeaway: Human tradition seeps into every aspect of our faith.  As I study the Word to grow and learn and employ it as a tool meant to thoroughly furnish me "unto all good works," I have to keep an eye open for where human traditions have seeped in – even in the translations of the Bible I most enjoy using.

So, here are some things I need to consider in my daily walk of faith:

• Do I keep an eye out for other human traditions that creep into my faith?
  
  
• Should I consider all traditions to be bad, or are some a worthwhile part of faith?
  
  
• Have I read the Bible closely enough to appreciate what it's really saying?
  
  
• Is that cool, new Christian song I like biblical?  Is that moving, traditional Christian hymn I adore aligned with the Word?
  
  
• Can I discern when an established organization or movement claims to be rooted in Christianity but behaves in unbiblical ways?
  
  
• Do I absorb platitudes, sayings, and internet memes that sound Christian without discernment by the Spirit within me?
  
  
• Do I test new ideas expressed by fellow believers and preachers?
  
  
• Do I ponder, pray about, and challenge old ideas to ensure they're really founded in the Word of God?

 

May truth always be our first choice.

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez

 

 

 

Slo-Mo Reflections: The Lord’s Prayer

Confession: My mind’s natural setting is overdrive.  I have to work to slow down the torrent of thoughts gushing through my prefrontal cortex.  In teaching, I do that by forcing myself to make the same point three different ways.  In business meetings, I do it by listening to the English but taking notes in Spanish using only Greek characters (not kidding).  And in Bible study, I do it by remembering: Exeraunao.

Exeraunao is a Greek word found in 1 Peter 1:10.  It means “to search out,” “to investigate carefully,” to pursue a matter until it has been examined deeply.  That’s often what my brain needs.  By slowing down and experiencing Scripture less as an act of speedreading, more as an act of exeraunao, I hear the voice of God better in my daily meditations on his word.

I’ll show you what I mean.  Let’s take a deep-dive, slo-mo walk through the best-known of all Scripture passages, the Lord’s Prayer as found in Matthew 6:9-13.  Along the way, my mind will flit and flutter among ideas – but safely within the guardrails established by the Savior’s words.

And throughout, I’m going to keep in mind that the Lord's Prayer isn’t just a collection of words meant for once-a-day recital.  Christ had just told the disciples to avoid empty phrases and vain repetitions (Matthew 6:7).  This was a guide to their life of prayer – how they should pray, and the specific elements of praying without ceasing.  That’s the approach my longtime friend Rev. Brett Bailey (who inspired this post) emphasizes for his own prayer life.

It should guide my prayer life, too.

 

PATER HEMON

~ “Father of us”

I’ve heard multiple sermons focused on the fatherhood metaphor for God.  Many of those sermons emphasized how uniquely Christian it is to view the Creator as our own father (although references to God as the father of believers can be found scattered throughout Hebrew Scriptures as well, as early as Deuteronomy 32:6 and as late as Malachi 2:10).

Since I’ve heard less emphasis on the word “our,” that’s where my mind goes today.  That’s the hemon word in the Greek up above – “of us” when translated with the literal word order preserved.

"Our."  We live in a Western culture and era of individualism.  In our individualist society, the “I” comes first and the “us” and “you” are secondary.  I speak of accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.  I sing that Jesus loves me, and that this I know because the Bible tells me so.

Jesus is those things.  But Scripture was written in cultures and eras of collectivism.  In such cultures, the group, the household, the nation, and the plural “you” carry far more weight.  In a culture like that, I’d be far less likely to see every “you” in the Bible as meaning “me.”

Example: When I read Jeremiah 29, my Western brain immediately assumes it offers a promise to me, Yolanda Ramírez:

I know the plans I have for you,

Says the Lord,

Plans for peace and not for evil,

To give you a future and a hope. (v. 11)

It doesn’t matter (I presume) that the passage is actually about the entire nation of Israel... and, more poignant still, that it is addressed to a people already in exile in Babylon, many of whom would not live to see that promise fulfilled.  No, I am more than preprogrammed to rip that verse from its original context and craft a personalized theology that declares, “God has a plan of peace and a future of hope for me, and that’s what this verse is all about!”

Jesus urged me to go into a room, close the door, and pray this prayer alone (Matthew 6:6).  In the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer, however, he reminds me: It’s not my Father.  It’s our Father.  I have a family.  I pray as part of a larger group, a body, a community of siblings to Christ who are freely adopted into God’s clan of grace.  Despite my focus on myself, I can never forget you, the plural you.  Y’all, if you’re in the southern U.S.  Y’uns in Appalachia.  You lot in Britain.

But... brain flitter.  I digress.

 

HO EN TOIS OURANOIS

~ “The [One] in the Heavens”

When I learned the Lord’s Prayer in English, I was surprised that it made heaven singular.  “The heavens,” as a plural, was how the Spanish version I first learned phrased it, los cielos.  It turns out “heavens” is plural in French, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, and the original Greek of the Lord’s Prayer as well.  German and English change it to singular.

The Greek ouranois doesn’t separately distinguish (1) the “heaven” we think of as God's realm, (2) the celestial “heavens” of the stars and planets, and (3) the sky itself.  It heartens me to think of God as present throughout all of those heavens.  Not one drop of moisture in Earth’s cloudy skies, not one pebble in the rings around Neptune, not a single plasma burst on the star Arcturus, and not one massless gluon particle at the farthest reaches of galaxy MoM-z14 is beyond the reach of God.  In fact, he put them where they are.  They are the heavens of the God, and he is present through all his heavens.

 

HAGIASTHETO TO ONOMA SOU

~ “Set apart be the name of you.”

Reflections on the onoma, the Name, could fill an entire library.  For today, I’ll focus on hagiastheto, what we often translate as “hallowed be.”  As you probably know, “hallowed” means “holy.”

Cool enough, but here’s my thought: “holy” doesn’t mean “holy.”  Not in our modern sense of “morally pure” or “religiously inclined.”  In Greek, this word is saying that God’s name needs to be proclaimed as unique, one of a kind, set apart, seen as not just “different,” but as “one of one and the only one.”  Think of Isaiah 40:25, where God himself asks:

“To whom, then, shall you compare me,

That I should be like him?”

The implied answer is: nobody.  We can’t make God’s name any holier, any more one-of-a-kind.  But we can and must spread the word about just how holy it is.  We need to openly venerate his name as the Incomparable Name.  That’s what we’re asking in this prayer – that the Name be held up as All That, and that more and more of humanity see it as the Only Name it is.

 

ELTHETO HE BASILEIA SOU

~ “Let come the kingdom of you”

Ah, the human basileus, “king.”  We’re hero worshippers, we Homo sapiens.  Whether it’s top athletes, movie stars, corporate executives, or favorite megachurch preachers, we’re ready to esteem anyone outstanding in their field.

But nothing tops a human king, a basileus.  When Israel got tired of its hero-judges, the people clamored for human royalty to lord it over them.  When fans of Lord of the Rings read the books or view the films, they root for the return of the absolutist monarch.  When a political party gets their guy into executive office, they insist he have more power than anyone before him.  That’s kingship.  And we’re dying to be subjects.

The truth is, we do need a king.  There’s a purpose for that natural longing.  We’re tempted to direct it toward human heroes, but deep down we know whose kingdom ought to have first claim on our hearts.  We’re created to be subjects of the universe’s one Benevolent Monarch.  Those lesser kings and heroes?  One day, with us, they’ll bend the knee and joyfully proclaim the true Lord (Philippians 2:10-11).

 

GENETHETO TO THELEMA SOU

~ “Be accomplished the intention of you”

“Thy will be done,” I pray as I work my way through this model of prayer.  His thelema, his will, desire, plan, intention.  But I have to pause here to notice something… something about this prayer; something about his will.

I'm praying, and I haven’t asked for anything yet.

To say that better: I haven’t asked for anything… for me.

Instead, I’ve asked that God get three things he deserves.  I asked that his name be venerated, that his kingdom arrive, and that his will be fulfilled.  I will be asking for things for myself, and very soon.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But this model of prayer Jesus demonstrates is starting to convict me.  So, seeing this, I ask myself: Do I start my daily prayer time with a list of requests and grievances, or do I follow Jesus’ lead to “pray, then, like this” (Matthew 6:9)?

Does my prayer life always, always, put God’s intentions first and foremost?

• Does it glorify his unmatched Name, upfront?
• Does it long aloud for his kingship?
• Does it recognize the superiority of his eternal will over my passing wants?

Not enough in my prayer life.  Not yet.  So, I am learning.  “Pray, then, like this.”

 

HOS EN OURANO KAI EPI GES

~ “As in heaven, also upon the land”

Culture time!

Heaven gets its second mention in Christ’s prayer model, but this time it needs no final -s in English.  Jesus has switched the term from plural to singular in Greek.

A close look at that word, ourano, might trigger in your brain its Latin rendering: Uranus.  In Jesus’ time, this didn’t refer to the distant planet where the gaseous skies rain diamonds (not kidding, fun planet fact).  Jesus’ culture had, for three hundred years, been "Hellenized", an adjective that means “made really, really Greek-ish.”  It was a multilingual world that was well aware of Greek culture.  Ouranos, in Greek mythology, was a primordial being, “the heavens” themselves.  He and his goddess-wife Gaia, “Earth” (in the Lord’s Prayer, we see a form of her name in ges, “Earth” or “land”), had monstrous children that brought chaos and violence to the universe.  This mythology was part of the worldview of the Greek cities Christianity was reaching.

I'm not claiming that Matthew 6:10 is secretly "about" Ouranos and Gaia.  I'm saying that, in the Greek-speaking world into which Christianity spread, heaven and earth were not culturally neutral words.  Against mythologies in which Heaven and Earth could be treated as divine powers, the Lord's Prayer places both realms under the will of the Father.

In short: mythological Heaven and Earth passed away.  But the Savior, God’s Word, can’t be made to pass away.  His will overcomes ancient Greek worldviews, overcomes all.  Our human mythologies are interesting tales, but in the light of the Lord’s will, they dissolve as vain imaginings.

His will gets done.  His will stays done.

 

TON ARTON HEMON TON EPIOUSION DOS HEMIN SEMERON

~ “The bread of us, the needed, give us today”

Finally, we begin to mention the things we may need.  Of course, Jesus told us that our heavenly Father knows what we need even before we ask (Matthew 6:8).  In a sense, our request is simply punctuation to his omniscience.

I recently discussed this portion of the prayer at length (in this post), so visit there if you’re curious.

 

KAI APHES HEMIN TA OPHEILEMATA HEMON

~ And forgive us the owings of us

True, “owings” isn’t a proper English word.  My bad.  But sometimes we’re so accustomed to a common translation – “trespasses,” “debts” – that we need to freshen it up.  We need to make the commonplace “uncommon” once again, in the spirit of the Russian literary term ostranenie, a defamiliarization for the sake of seeing something anew.

Sorry.  Flitting brain.  I warned you.

Yes, the term opheilemata is usually translated “debts” or “trespasses.”  It’s a legal term in Greek meaning a financial or contractual obligation.  “Debts” gets close in English, and it wouldn’t be unthinkable to translate the term as “outstanding balances.”  But it’s stronger than that.  In the ancient world, defaulting on one’s opheilemata could result in imprisonment or enslavement.  Asking our Father to relieve us of our debts isn’t just a request like, “Could you pick up the check this time, Dad?”  It’s a plea for redemption from the chains we very much deserve.

We should say such words as “forgive us our debts” slowly.  Very slowly.  Knowing the eternal significance.

 

HOS KAI HEMEIS APHEKAMEN TOIS OPHEILETAIS HEMON

~ “As also we pardon the owers of us”

At first glance, this part of the Lord’s Prayer looks transactional: “Hey, God, I’ve forgiven others, so how’s about a little quid pro quo?”

That isn’t how grace works, of course.  The free gift of God’s salvation (Romans 6:23) doesn’t come as an upfront purchase on my part, and it isn’t maintained through upkeep fees.  Free is free, and we couldn’t afford it even if we tried (which we, of course, attempted throughout the age of the Law).

So, what’s this “cancel our debts as we cancel others’ debts” line all about?  At one level, it’s definitional.  It defines who we are now; being forgiven of the eternal debts we owe, we turn right around and become the kind of redeemed and sanctified human beings who naturally forgive others.

Let’s be honest, though.  We’re forgiven, but we’re not perfect yet.  We need reminders to stay true to who we are as new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17).  Scripture regularly reminds us to forgive as we’re forgiven – Ephesians 4:32, Colossians 3:13, Mark 11:25, Matthew 18:35, and so many others.  I start to get the message: I am a forgiver, and I must walk that path daily.

My “enemies” belong in my prayer life.  Is there someone I dislike and can’t forgive?  Someone I find irritating and from whom I withhold love?  I need to make them part of my Lord’s Prayer practices.  After all, it’s really hard to continue disliking someone I’m praying for every single day.  The forgiveness flowed to me, so forgiveness flows from me.

 

AND SO ON

Alas, I’ve reached the maximum word count I allow myself for these blogs.  I still haven't discussed why I need to ask God not to lead me into temptation or why I think I still need to be delivered from evil!  But my self-imposed rules are what keep me from descending into chaotic rambling, so I have to draw a line for this month.

Perhaps someone will come along and do a full sermon series on this prayer so that I know how this ends!  That’s been done before, no doubt.  But each generation needs a fresh voice for an eternal message.

I want to hear that voice.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez

BIBLE: The Uninspired Parts

Okay, I confess.  That title is obviously clickbait.  I wanted you to wonder, “What on Earth is YoYo claiming?  Is she about to attack the Holy Bible?”

Not in the least.  Many versions of your modern Bible include parts that are uninspired.  The “Maps” section at the back?  Not God-breathed.  The translators’ introduction pages to the King James Version?  Not inspired.  The exhaustive explanatory notes in the Scofield Reference Bible?  Nope, not the Word of God, just opinions about it.

Before you say, “Well, duh, that’s obvious!”, allow me to throw in one more: the names of the books themselves.  The titles.  Not inspired.  Not God-breathed.  Not dictated by the Holy Spirit.

But with interesting stories behind them, nonetheless.

Because "not inspired" doesn't mean "not important."

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

While I was studying for this month’s blog (which was going to be about something else entirely), I grabbed my grandmother’s 1949 Douay-Rheims version of the Scriptures off my bookshelf to do a quick translation comparison.  I was stopped in my metaphorical tracks by the title of one of the Old Testament books: 2 Paralipomenon.

In this sharp-witted noggin of mine, I thought, “Who the what, now?”

I knew that paralipomenon was the Greek word for what we’d roughly term in English as “stuff left out,” so I wondered, “What’s this book of ‘stuff left out’?  And why are there two ‘stuff left out’ books?”

It turns out that it’s all the stuff left out of 1 Kings.  And 2 Kings.  And 3 Kings.  And 4 Kings.  All of which are also found in my grandmother’s 1949 Douay-Rheims Bible.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Oh, it’s that Roman Catholic apocrypha stuff I’ve heard about!”  Not so.  The four books of Kings and the two books of Paralipomenon are what we today call the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.  Our current titles for those books aren’t part of the original inspired text.  Neither were the book titles in my grandmother’s Bible.  And neither are the titles in most of our early, ancient manuscripts.

Which is why a still, small voice whispering in the back of my mind said, “Guess what you’re studying and writing about this month?”

LESS THAN OBVIOUS

The names of Old Testament books were added by ancient Bible copyists, commentators, translators, church Fathers, and scribes.  Sometimes the choice of a title was an obvious decision: “This is the second letter we have that Paul is writing to Timothy; let’s call it 2 Timothy.”  Other times, the choice isn’t so clear: “This one says it’s written by a guy called Qoheleth; let’s title it ‘Ecclesiastes’.”

Who made all these additions and changes to titles?  Often it was Jewish scholars themselves.  Some lived a few generations after the original writers, grabbing the first words on the scrolls to act as quick-reference headings.  Others lived long after the first texts were written, developing (over many, many decades) a Greek version of their Hebrew Scriptures, an ancient work that came to be called the Septuagint.  It’s not an insignificant text; when Jesus and the apostles quoted Scripture, they frequently quoted from forms of the Greek Septuagint.

We’ll take a walk through the 39 books of the Old Testament, quickly discussing how each got its name.  Don’t worry, this month’s post isn’t a thirty-nine-page epic.  Sometimes a title’s explanation is pretty straightforward.  But other times, you might raise an eyebrow and wonder, along with me: “Who the what, now?”

 

Genesis: “Genesis” is a Greek word that means “origin,” “beginning,” or “starting point,” just as it does in English.  But since the Old Testament was written in Hebrew (with brief lapses into what older scholars called Chaldean [look it up]), then why does this book have a Greek name?

Answer: The ancient Hebrews didn’t use titles as we know them.  They often referred to their sections of Scripture by the first word or words of the text.  This section they called Bereshit, which translates to “In the beginning.”  As Greek culture spread through the ancient world, Jewish scholars added the title “Genesis” to this part of their Scriptures, probably influenced by the fact that this scroll detailed all the generations (in other words, origins) of the nations and of the world itself.

 

Exodus: Shemot in Hebrew, which means “names,” is the second Hebrew word in this text, and per the grab-a-word tradition, became the earliest title.  The later Jewish translators of the Greek text called this book Ex Hodos, meaning “the way out.”  The book’s topic makes that choice understandable.  We’re already seeing a naming pattern: the earliest Jewish scholars grabbed titles from a text’s opening words; the later Jewish translators leaned more toward the themes of a book to craft a new title.  Thus, Ex Hodos, which became Exodus for us.

Of interest to me is that Christianity was originally called by the same Greek term, Hodos, which means Way (like in Acts 19:9).  I like calling our faith “the Way.”  It connects us to the earliest pages of Scripture.  We, like the early people of God, have to walk out of Egypt, through the age of the Law. And into the age of Grace… walking the Hodos first trodden by Israelites of old.

 

Leviticus: This book was first titled Vayikra, “And He called…”  Filled with regulations about sacrifices, holy days, and worship, it made the later Jewish translators think of the tribe of Levi, those specifically set aside for religious service.  However, this book is misnamed, in a sense.  It’s filled with priestly regulations, and priests were the descendants of Aaron.  All priests were Levites, but not all Levites were priests.  If you ask me, a better title might have been the Aaronikon, latinized in our modern texts as the book of Aaronicus.

 

Numbers: This book details censuses and headcounts in chapters 1 and 26, so the ancient translators slapped the title Arithmoi on it (“numbers”).  You might notice that of the first five books of the Bible, this is the only one shown in plain English.  More on that below.  Personally, I think the earlier Hebrew designation, Bemidbar (“in the wilderness”) captures the spirit of this particular book much better.

 

Deuteronomy: This Greek word means “Second Law.”  That doesn’t mean it’s Part Two of Moses’ laws (although there are scattered new items like laws about kings in Deut. 17:14-20).  It’s basically the law on repeat, a second telling.  Again, we see a Greek word transliterated into English – had all the first five books of the Bible been translated instead of transliterated, their names would be Origins, Departure, Priest Matters, Numbers, and Second Law.

 

Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings: Whoa!  That’s a bunch of books at once!  That’s because they were very likely part of one continuous narrative.  Called the Deuteronomistic History, this chunk of Scripture from 1 Samuel through the end of 2 Kings shares similar vocabulary, thematic development, and a unified storyline from right after the death of Moses through to the exile.

So why are they chopped up into different books if they were all part of one story?  One very practical reason: scroll length.  Hebrew scribes could fit roughly thirty- to forty-thousand Hebrew words per scroll.  That’s how many words you find in Judges + Joshua, which many scholars believe circulated as a single scroll.  You get a similar word count for the books of Samuel.  And the next, the books of Kings.  Chances are, these pairs of books were scrollmates (to coin a term).  By word count alone, they'd pair up tidily in single scrolls. 

Then comes the Greek era.  When you translate Hebrew to Greek, your word count and character count (and thus your scroll size) increases.  Greek translations needed significantly more space than their Hebrew originals, and that led to the book divisions we see today.  The translators knew they were breaking up a single narrative.  They kept the pieces unified by calling the scrolls Kingdom 1, Kingdom 2, Kingdom 3, and Kingdom 4.

Aha!  Grandma’s Bible is suddenly making sense!  And we also now understand why 2 Samuel is named after Samuel, even though he died back in 1 Samuel 25:1 and never appears in his own second book.  Originally, it was all part of one scroll.

 

1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles: We actually know who named these books.  As Hebrew texts, these were a single scroll called Divrei HaYamim, “the records of the times.”  The Jewish translators of the Greek text called it Paralipomenon (there you go, Grandma!) and had to break it into two scrolls due to its length.  But, that title, meaning “things left out,” sounded sloppy and undignified to Jerome, the Christian scholar who produced the Latin Vulgate version of the Scriptures in the late 300s C.E.  Jerome renamed the book in Latin: Chronicon Totius Divinae Historiae, “Chronicles of the Whole Sacred History.”  The first word of that name stuck.

 

Ruth (and Esther): Observant readers may have already said, “Wait!  You skipped the book of Ruth!”

Indeed, I did… because Ruth never sat after Judges, the way we have it today.  It was often placed as part of what’s called the Five Megilloth, short writings used as Festival Scrolls.  “Ruth” appears to be the book’s original Hebrew name, a shift from the “use the first words” custom.  Only two books in Hebrew Scripture carry the name of women, Ruth and Esther – one a direct ancestor of Jesus, and the other an orphan who saved Israel.  Interestingly, Esther is one of only two books in the Bible that never mention God.

 

Ezra, Nehemiah: Other books in the “named-after-me” category are Ezra and Nehemiah – again, originally a single scroll, but broken up to accommodate translations and scroll size.  The name “Ezra” bemuses me, since Ezra doesn’t even show up in the story until seven chapters into his ten-chapter book.  When he does arrive, an interesting new genre is showcased – memoir writing.  Ezra introduces one of Scripture's earliest autobiographical extended-memoir sections.  Nehemiah does this genre as well.  Bible scholars like 19^th-century theologian Julius Wellhausen suspect both works may have originally been royal records.  That would make these two works examples of some of Scripture’s earliest autobiographical writings with the authors’ names right up top.

 

Job: Another main-character naming… in a book that never mentions Israel or any Hebrews at all, and where all the action takes place outside of Israel.  All names have an original meaning (my full name, fun fact, translates to “the Purple-Flowered Daughter of Wise Counsel”).  But “Job” is a name whose meaning seems lost to antiquity, probably not etymologically tied to any Hebrew word since he was “a man in the land of Uz,” not an Israelite.

 

Psalms: This collection was called Tehillim in Hebrew, which means “Praises.”  A title like that might be surprising to those who have read plaintive, grief-filled entries like Psalm 88.  Or Psalm 22.  Or 69, or… well, you get the idea.  The Septuagint translators decided to change the collection’s name to “Songs sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument.”  In Greek, that’s Psalmoi.  Not kidding, that whole idea is built into a single word.  Latin kept in that spirit with Psalmi, and English settled on Psalms, a term that stays nice and neutral about whether praises or lamentations are being sung. But my mind wanders back to the original title; could my grief-filled calls to God also be tehillim, forms of praise and trust in him?

 

Proverbs: “Proverbs” is a fairly decent translation of the Hebrew title Mishlei.  The Greek translators didn’t mess with it much, but it should be noted that mishlei is its own broad genre – proverbs, sayings, wise instructions, parables, maxims.  Mishlei can be tiny, like “Pride goes before destruction” (Proverbs 16:18), or highly detailed, like the lengthy homage to a good wife (Proverbs 31:10-31).

 

Ecclesiastes: This book was called Qoheleth in Hebrew, after the man whose words it shares.  Qoheleth isn’t really a name.  It means something close to “the speaker at an assembly” or “the teacher of a group.”  Knowing this, the Septuagint translators chose the Greek title Ekklesiastes, meaning “assembly” or “congregation” … or, in New Testament vocabulary, what we call “the church.”

 

Song of Songs: This name perfectly preserves the Hebrew wording that opens the book, Shir ha-Shirim.  The Septuagint translators didn’t mess with it: Asma Asmaton, also meaning “Song of Songs."  The Latin Vulgate translation was just as faithful to the name: Canticum Canticorum.  It was English translations that first started juggling a title that had endured for thousands of years: “Song of Solomon,” “Canticles,” “Canticle of Canticles,” “Solomon’s Song,” or sometimes just “the Song.”

 

AND THE REST OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

You may think I’ll never get through the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures at this rate.  As I mentioned upfront, though, some books are easier to categorize than others.  And in the next batch of book titles, things get really easy.

Books Named After Their Main Character: Jonah and Daniel.

Books Named After the Prophet Whose Words and Visions They Record: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

Well.  That certainly cleared my plate!  And that leaves only:

Lamentations: One of the Bible’s gloomier books, its original title in Hebrew was its first word: Eikhah, a word that asks “How?”  According to biblical scholars Jill Middlemas (in Lamentations: An Introduction and Study Guide) and Adele Berlin (in Lamentations: A Commentary), any early Hebrew reader seeing eikhah at the start of a sentence knew an expression of grief was coming.  “How?” it demands.  “How did this happen?  How did Jerusalem fall, and how did things get so bad?”

The Septuagint translators gave this book the fitting title Threnoi, a word for “funeral songs,” which are, in fact, "laments."  Our English title retains that.  Is the book a downer?  Sure.  But it pairs nicely with the book of Job.  Job rings out an anguished “why?” about personal suffering; Lamentations balances it with a vehement “how?” over the fate of a whole fallen people.

 

SO, WHY ALL THIS TITLE STUFF?

It’s true that we work hard to rightly divide the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15), but there’s more to deep dives into Scripture (and its titles) than that.  Obviously, I have no way of knowing what you got out of learning things like this.  But I can share what this study built, revealed, and stirred up in me:

• God’s Truth comes through all types of people.  There are book titles named after great warriors like Joshua and royal noblemen like Nehemiah.  But the Hebrew Scriptures also offer me a book named for a widow, Ruth.  For an orphan among an oppressed people, Esther.  For a prophet who does everything wrong and runs away.  For a has-been favorite foreigner of God’s who has lost it all.  People I can relate to, people I might even be some day.
  
  
• God’s Word comes through human history.  With all the changing of titles, assembling of texts, and changes in book order, I realize God’s Word didn’t get delivered, done and dusted, into the laps of humanity.  No.  God chose to use humanity to develop his message through the lives people lived and the decisions they made about preserving his Word.  Decisions they hoped honored him.  Not decisions of “right” or “wrong” titles, but decisions of “good for our times” and “better for our times.”  God does that in my life, too.  The choices, the changes to better, all my daily walk of faith – those things become the Word expressed through me, always growing.
  
  
• I belong to a great cloud of witnesses (Heb. 12:1).  All these titles came to me through countless generations of believers... the changes, the reasons for the changes, and the results that arise in English that encapsulate centuries of reflection on the importance of the Word.
  
  
• God hears me in my language.  I don’t mean English or Spanish or ASL.  I mean the freedom of “language” these titles provide.  God hears my praises, Psalmoi, even when they are loaded with laments; God hears my Eikhah, my laments, not only for myself but for my family, for my nation, for many nations.  I can beg to know How?  I can cry out Why?  And I can deliver my praises to him through all of that.  The titles themselves model it for me.  I am heard.

That’s what I’ve learned this month.  I’m certain more will dawn on me, blessing me as I hold these things in my heart.  As always, I pray the same for you.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez