Pronouncing biblical names is often tricky. They’re names from other languages, after all.
Some have become standard, English names. But for every David or John there’s also an Artaxerxes and a Mahershalalhashbaz.
When you’re reading the Bible aloud and you come across a name, you may:
Use the standard English pronunciation
Use the standard pronunciation in the original language (Hebrew, Greek, etc.)
Fake it
Many readers that I hear seem to prefer option 3.
However, that’s not what I want to rant about today. Instead, I want to rant about a pet peeve of mine.
Yes, I know it’s trivial, but it drives me nuts.
Elijah and Elisha
Consider the names of these two Old Testament prophets: Elijah and Elisha.
They’re different, no? One of them has a /j/ in it and the other has an /sh/ in it.
And that’s the only difference.
So it should be the only difference in how you pronounce them, right?
The Traditional English Pronunciation
Sure enough, in the traditional English pronunciation, it is: Elijah is pronounced ee-LIE-jah and Elisha is pronounced ee-LIE-shah.
If somebody names their kid Elisha, you call him ee-LIE-shah.
At least, that’s how you do it if you’re using the standard English pronunciation.
The Traditional Hebrew Pronunciation
Normally when reading aloud, you wouldn’t want to use anything but the standard English pronunciation.
It would confuse your audience, and you could come across as just showing off.
Like if you pronounced the name David as dah-WEED in church for no reason.
However, there are situations—like in a language class—where you’d want to know the pronunciation in the original language.
So how would you pronounce Elijah and Elisha in biblical Hebrew?
There are a few things you need to know:
Hebrew doesn’t have the /j/ sound; it uses the /y/ sound instead.
Every syllable in Hebrew must begin with a consonant, even if it’s just a glottal stop—i.e., a constriction of the throat (we actually have this consonant in English, but it’s not part of our alphabet; if you pay attention, you can hear yourself saying it on the front of the word apple).
After a glottal stop, Hebrew tends to have a short vowel that’s basically equivalent to the English /uh/ sound (like in the word upper).
Both Elijah and Elisha start with a glottal stop followed by a short vowel.
Both Elijah and Elisha have a long /ee/ sound (as in seem) in the middle.
Hebrew tends to stress the last syllable of the word (in contrast, English often stresses the next-to-last syllable, as in gateway or edition).
With that in mind, you can work out how you should (roughly) pronounce Elijah and Elisha:
Elijah becomes uh-lee-YAH
Elisha becomes uh-lee-SHAH
The Newfangled Nonsense Pronunciation
In recent years—in some circles—the people who write biblical name pronunciation guides have been promoting a ridiculous, alternative pronunciation of this name.
I suspect it’s the same people who were pushing for all manner of liturgical novelties in the 1970s and 1980s, including items of Orwellian Liturgical Newspeak (e.g., “We Are Church,” which is just bad English).
The alternative pronunciation they’ve been promoting is ee-LISH-ah.
No!
This is not the standard English pronunciation, and as far as Hebrew goes, Every. Syllable. Of. This. Is. Wrong.
The /ee/ on the front is wrong because Hebrew has a short vowel here: /uh/ as in upper, not /ee/ as in seem.
The /LISH/ is wrong (a) because it’s improperly given the stress, when that should be on the last syllable, (b) because it grabs the /sh/ that must be on the beginning of the last syllable, and (c) because it uses a short /i/ sound (as in hit) when it should be an /ee/ sound (as in seem).
The /ah/ on the end is wrong (a) because it doesn’t have a consonant on the front of it and (b) because it isn’t stressed, as it should be.
Weirdly, the people promoting the ee-LISH-ah pronunciation haven’t been doing the same thing with Elijah. They haven’t been urging people to pronounce it ee-LIJJ-ah.
This makes me suspect that they wanted to use the difference in pronunciation to help people keep Elijah and Elisha straight, given how similar their names are.
But they needn’t bother. Most people today don’t know the difference between Elijah and Elisha in the first place.
And they’re doing violence to the language.
So please, do not pronounce Elisha so that it kinda-sorta sounds like the word delicious.
The fancy way of saying that one word kinda-sorta sounds like another is to say that the two words are assonant.
So please, when it comes to Elisha, don’t be an assonant.
Where do the Dead Sea Scrolls come from and do they contain secret knowledge about Jesus? Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the claims about the ancient scrolls and what we know about them, as well as their personal experiences.
Mr. Akin, could you possibly post "Abba" in Aramaic fully pointed. Why is the Beta repeated?~Thanks again
First let's look at "Abba" in Greek, which is displays the issue that the reader is wondering about. Here is how the word appears in Greek (cf. Mark 14:36 in a typical Greek New Testament):
As you can see, the term is spelled alpha-beta-beta-alpha. The reader asks why the beta is repeated, and the answer is that this is how they said it, with a reduplicated "b" sound separating the two vowel sounds. The Greek is giving us a fuller phonetic explanation of the word (how it sounds)–at least in this respect. (The Greek, like the English, does not record the invisible consonant on the front of the word.)
Now here's how the same word looks in Hebrew/Aramaic block script (which is a stylized form of the Aramaic alphabet, though it is most familiar to us as the script used to write modern Hebrew):
It's spelled aleph-beth-aleph, which prompts the reader's question: Why only one letter corresponding to "b" in this version?
The answer is that the original Semitic scripts were unpointed, meaning that they only included consonants (aleph is a consonant, believe it or not, though it later came to serve as a kind of vowel marker, making it a mater lectionis). Also, because of the way syllabification works in Semitic languages, their scripts often do not (or in unpointed versions do not) mark reduplicated consonants.
Thus even though you said the word "ABBA," you'd spell it "ABA." In an unpointed script, if you spelled it "ABBA" then the second "B" would suggest an extra syllable: "a-ba-ba" or something like that.
This reflects a fact that is also true of English (and even moreso French!): the script for the language is not fully phonetic. It is assumed that you already know the words you are reading and just need enough visual information to help you identify the word. You don't need how it's actually said spelled out in detail. That's what allowed the ancient Semites to get away without using VWLS N TH FRST PLC.
Eventually, they did come up with ways of indicating vowels–and other things–using a system of "points," which are small marks placed above, below, or within the letters. In the block script version of the word above, the marks under the first two letters (reading from right-to-left) are vowels–two different versions of the "a" sound.
The dot in the middle of the middle letter (beth), however, is not a vowel. It's a mark known as a dagesh forte (borrowing from Latin, meaning a "strong" dagesh). The dagesh forte (also called a dagesh hazak) tells you "double this consonant."
Thus even if you don't know the word "Abba," you could figure out how to say it using the modern, pointed version, because the dagesh forte tells you to say it "ABBA" rather than "ABA."
There are a variety of other Aramaic scripts that the word can be written in, and they have their own unique pointing rules, but the same basic issue applies.
In my previous post, I took on a silly video that has more than a million views of different versions of it. The video centered on Jesus’ statement in Luke 10:18 that, after the disciples had come back from a preaching mission, Our Lord had seen “Satan fall like lightning from heaven” and claimed that if you back translated this statement from Greek to Aramaic and then to Hebrew that “lighting from heaven” would come out as “baraq o baw-maw” or “Barack Obama.” This, the nameless creator of the video suggested, might mean that Jesus was telling us the Antichrist’s name would be Barack Obama.
I greeted the logic of this video with a great big gift bag full of “Nope.”
Whatever Barack Obama’s role may be in the great scheme of things, whether he’s The One who will cause the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal or whether he’s just the one who went golfing while the Gulf filled up with oil, Luke 10:18 doesn’t establish him as the Antichrist.
One reason, as previously explained, is that this passage isn’t a prophecy at all. On its face, it appears to be Jesus congratulating the disciples on a well done evangelization mission.
Another reason, as previously explained, is that if you translated “lighting from heaven” back into either Aramaic or Hebrew, you wouldn’t get “baraq o baw-maw.” Instead, you’d get something like “baraq min ha-shamayim” (Hebrew) or “barqa min shmaya” (Aramaic).
After posting my post, I thought, “Hey, this isn’t the first time somebody has translated this phrase into this pair of languages. Let’s see what we find if we look it up in a Hebrew New Testament an an Aramaic New Testament!”
Transliterating that from right to left, it reads “kbaraq min ha-shamayim” (ignoring the effect of a few Hebrew punctuation marks that don’t transliterate well into English). The “k” on the front of this is actually a different word. It’s a preposition meaning “as” or “like,” which is part of what Our Lord was just saying: “like lighting from heaven.” But if you just want the phrase “lightning from heaven,” you’d leave off the “k.”
So the translators of this Hebrew New Testament bore out what I said: If you translate the phrase into Hebrew, you’d expect to see “baraq min ha-shamayim,” not something that sounds like “Barack Obama.”
And if you don’t happen to know the Hebrew alphabet, don’t just take my word for it. CHECK ME OUT!
Of course the whole Hebrew thing is really just a red herring—or maybe that should be a red lox—because Jesus wouldn’t have been speaking Hebrew in this combination, but in all likelihood Aramaic. The video maker just jumped to Hebrew because he knew even less about Aramaic than he did about Hebrew.
So what happens if we check an Aramaic New Testament?
The standard Aramaic translation of the New Testament is the Pshitta, a version of which is online here. This version happens to be an interlinear, with the English words appearing over the Aramaic ones they correspond to. Just remember that the Aramaic letters read right to left rather than left to right.
Here’s the phrase from Luke 10:18:
This edition isn’t pointed for vowels, but transliterating it you get “barqa min shmaya” (there is no “k,” as in Hebrew because the Aramaic uses a separate preposition for “like” here).
Again, don’t just take my word for it. CHECK ME OUT!
(BTW, these other alphabets may look different, but they aren’t that hard to learn. Give ‘em a try!)
Anyway, either way you go—baraq min ha-shamayim or barqa min shmaya—neither sounds much like “Barack Obama.”
Consider the following video, which has been going around the Internet, with over a million hits on YouTube between different versions.
Okay. So that kind of settles it.
NOT.
I don’t know who is behind the video, but whoever it is clearly has only the most rudimentary understanding of the things he’s talking about, and he makes mistakes left and right. (Put another way: He’s totally out of his depth.) This is made clear by the annotations that start popping up in the video (you can shut them off with the controller in the lower right hand corner) that, among other things, advertise an updated version of the video, in which he tries to eliminate some of the most blatant errors that critics have pointed out.
The new one doesn’t work any better. It’s just got a few of the worst mistakes cut out.
Like this one: The claim that Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is the most ancient form of Hebrew.
NOT.
While Jesus did speak Aramaic, Aramaic is not an ancient form of Hebrew. It’s a related language, but neither is an ancestor of the other.
What he’s done is the equivalent of saying that English is the most ancient form of Dutch.
It reveals how utterly devoid of basic competence in the biblical languages this person is.
His overall strategy then becomes clear: He knows that the New Testament is recorded in Greek, but he wants to get back behind that to Aramaic so he can jump (quickly!) back to Hebrew. This is where his real interest is: Talking about Hebrew, because he’s got access to a rudimentary Hebrew dictionary. He doesn’t really know or care about Aramaic. It’s just a way of getting quickly to the Hebrew dictionary he’s discovered.
And by the way, it is evident that this man has no training in biblical Hebrew or he never would have made the mistake of saying that Aramaic was a form of it. You can’t take a class (or even read a whole book) on biblical Hebrew without learning how the two languages are related, since they’re both used in the Old Testament. He’s just some guy (possibly a minister, possibly not) who has access to a Hebrew dictionary.
A particularly, old, problematic Hebrew dictionary.
In fact, what he really has is a copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. As its name suggests, it’s not really a dictionary; it’s a concordance—a book that allows you to look up where words occur in the Bible. For example, if you looked up “faith,” you’d find a list of all the verses in which the word “faith” occurs in the King James Bible.
Strong’s happened to assign numbers to the words, and it offers a numbered word list to give a basic idea of what the original Greek or Hebrew word meant.
The problem is that Strong’s definitions are (a) more than a hundred years old, (b) extremely brief and lacking in detail, and (c) very, very prone to misuse.
Whenever I hear anyone starting to use Strong’s numbers when making an argument, I cringe because I know that misuse of the original languages is almost certain to occur.
The problem is so common that the Wikipedia entry on Strong’s Concordance devotes two paragraphs to warning people not to misuse the numbers:
Strong’s Concordance is not a translation of the Bible nor is it intended as a translation tool. The use of Strong’s numbers is not a substitute for professional translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English by those with formal training in ancient languages and the literature of the cultures in which the Bible was written.
Since Strong’s Concordance identifies the original words in Hebrew and Greek, Strong’s Numbers are sometimes misinterpreted by those without adequate training to change the Bible from its accurate meaning simply by taking the words out of cultural context. The use of Strong’s numbers does not consider figures of speech, metaphors, idioms, common phrases, cultural references, references to historical events, or alternate meanings used by those of the time period to express their thoughts in their own language at the time. As such, professionals and amateurs alike must consult a number of contextual tools to reconstruct these cultural backgrounds.
I don’t know who wrote that in Wikipedia, but whoever it was, God bless him (or them)!
So let’s see how the video manages to botch things with Strong’s numbers.
First, it cites Hebrew words number 1299 and 1300, which Strong’s lists respectively as meaning “to lighten (lightning)—cast forth” and “lightning; by analogy, a gleam; concretely, a flashing sword—bright, glitter(-ing sword), lightning.”
Okay, fine. Fair enough. But here is where not knowing what you’re doing comes in. It’s true that the Hebrew word(s) for lightning come from the root BRQ, but that is not where Barack Obama’s name comes from. It comes from a different root: BRK.
We don’t distinguish the sounds of K and Q in English very well, but in the Semitic languages, they do. K is pronounced towards the front or the middle of the mouth, while Q is pronounced toward the back of the mouth, on the soft palette. In other words, these are two different sounds in Hebrew and Aramaic, and you can’t count on a word derived from BRQ to have the same meaning as a word derived from BRK any more than you can count on the meaning of the word “cab” to have a meaning similar to the word “cap” (B and P being similar sounds that English speakers use and distinguish but that some, such as Arabic-speakers, don’t).
(There are also other variants on the K sound in these languages, but we won’t go into them for simplicity’s sake.)
So what is the real meaning of Barack Obama’s first name?
It has nothing to do with lightning. But if Mr. Video Maker hadn’t been so fascinated by Strong’s numbers 1299 and 1300, he might have looked up at 1288 which is the real source of the name: barak, which can mean a variety of things, but the relevant one is this: blessing. People see their children as blessings, and they want them to be blessed by God, and so variants on the root BRK have been used in Semitic and Semitic-influenced languages for thousands of years. Which is why lots of people from Bible days down to ours have had names based on this root, even in other languages than Hebrew.
So much for the Barack = baraq business. President Obama’s first name has nothing to do with lightning, and a native speaker of Aramaic or Hebrew would have distinguished the two words as easily as we distinguish “cab” from “cap.”
We already have plenty of evidence that the vid is a load of hooey, but let’s keep going.
To get the word “Obama” into the picture, Mr. Video Maker seems to reason like this: Jesus said something about the devil falling light lightning from a high place, so let’s find somewhere in the Old Testament (so it’ll be in Hebrew) where the devil falls in connection with a high place.
He settles on Isaiah, which he says is the source of the Christian concept of Satan (???), and specifically on Isaiah 14.
Now the thing is, Isaiah 14 is not about the devil. Certainly not in the literal sense of the text. It involves a series of prophesies against neighboring kingdoms that have been persecuting Israel: the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Philistines—all of whom the text explicitly names, so we don’t have to be confused about it. The verses that Mr. Video Maker applies to the devil are, in fact, part of a taunt song directed toward the king of Babylon, telling him that although he is high and might now, he’s going to die and end up rotting, with all his pomp and glory coming to nothing.
Over time, Christians have lifted some of the imagery from this passage and applied it to the devil, but that is not what the text is literally talking about. It’s talking about the death of a Babylonian king.
So: More problems for Mr. Video’s thesis.
Now, it’s true that the word bamah can mean height or high place. It’s also a term referring to pagan shrines, which were built on elevated platforms (that’s the kind of high place the prophets often rail against). But it’s not the normal word for “heaven,” in Hebrew, which is shamayim. If you took Jesus statement that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Greek, ouranos) and you translated this back into Aramaic or Hebrew, the word you’d use for “heaven” would be shmaya (Aramaic) or shamayim (Hebrew). Bamah would not be the expected word.
So: Another problem.
Then there is the bizarre things that Mr. Video Maker does with the conjunction waw- (or vav-). This functions as the equivalent of the word “and,” and it is prefixed to words in Hebrew and Aramaic.
Video Guy tells us that this is often transliterated “U” or “O” by some scholars.
Uh . . . no. Not when it’s used as a conjunction. (The same letter can be used as an O in the middle of a word, when it’s functioning as a vowel, but not when it’s on the front of a word functioning as a conjunction.)
When it’s used as a conjunction, it’s pronounced “veh-” in modern Hebrew, and it’s pronounced “u-” (as in “tube”) in Aramaic (and Arabic).
So this is just wrong. waw as a conjunction is not pronounced O.
Mr. Video then strings it all together: baraq + o- + bamah and suggests that this would be used “in Hebrew poetry” to mean “lighting from heaven” or “lightning from the heights.”
GAH!
Okay: Here is something Mr. Video should understand just from his days in grammar school. Just from English. Conjunctions are words like “and,” “but,” and “or.” “From” is not a conjunction. It is a preposition.
So in Hebrew and Aramaic, U- is a conjunction. It means “and,” not “from.”
What you want for “from” is min. “Lightning *from* heaven” would be something like baraq min ha-shamayim (Hebrew) or barqa min shmaya (Aramaic) or similar variants.
So things aren’t going well for this thesis.
But now let’s pull the rug out from under it entirely.
Consider the context. Read Luke 10, where the quotation in the video comes from. Jesus has sent out the Seventy-Two on an evangelization mission and when they come back . . .
17 The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”
18 He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. 20 However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
21 At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.
So what is the context of “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”? Is it a prophecy referring to the 21st century? No! It’s a remark about the evangelization mission that the Seventy-Two have just completed!
The disciples went out, preached, worked miracles, and struck a blow against the kingdom of Satan. So Jesus congratulates them telling them that before their evangelistic effort, King Satan fell from his throne like lightning from the sky (which is where lighting falls from; “sky,” “heaven,” same word in all these languages).
He’s not prophesying the future. He’s congratulating them on the past and how effective they were by God’s grace.
So, Mr. Video Maker is just wrong on all kinds of fronts. There is no prophecy of the Antichrist here. His video is all bunkum.
Jimmy, I NEED to hijacked this entry because you are the only competent people on this matter as far as I know. So please bear with me
Douay Rheims
Zech 9:9
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion, shout for joy, O daughter of Jerusalem: BEHOLD THY KING will come to thee, the just and saviour: he is poor, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.
Is there an “and” in the hebrew text?
I know that Zec is not talking about two different Ass. It’s a Hebrew literary style. However in the RSV, the “and” is gone. I’m thinking that they took it off to compensate for the Hebrew literary style understanding (to make the reader understand that there’s no two animals). But my guess is that there’s actually an “and” in the Hebrew.
Help!
Happy to oblige. Sorry I couldn’t do so sooner, but while I was on vacation I didn’t have a copy of the Hebrew text handy.
The answer to your question is that there is an “and” at this point in the Hebrew text of this verse.
This verse is often commented upon apologetically since some see here a difficulty regarding what Jesus rode during the triumphal entry. (As with all alleged contradictions in the Bible, however, this one has a good solution.) Let me know if you need more info on that.
BTW, when you have an off-topic question there’s no need to commandeer a comments box to get the message to me. Just use the e-mail address that I have on the site, and I’ll try to oblige. 🙂
Jimmy, I NEED to hijacked this entry because you are the only competent people on this matter as far as I know. So please bear with me
Douay Rheims
Zech 9:9
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion, shout for joy, O daughter of Jerusalem: BEHOLD THY KING will come to thee, the just and saviour: he is poor, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.
Is there an “and” in the hebrew text?
I know that Zec is not talking about two different Ass. It’s a Hebrew literary style. However in the RSV, the “and” is gone. I’m thinking that they took it off to compensate for the Hebrew literary style understanding (to make the reader understand that there’s no two animals). But my guess is that there’s actually an “and” in the Hebrew.
Help!
Happy to oblige. Sorry I couldn’t do so sooner, but while I was on vacation I didn’t have a copy of the Hebrew text handy.
The answer to your question is that there is an “and” at this point in the Hebrew text of this verse.
This verse is often commented upon apologetically since some see here a difficulty regarding what Jesus rode during the triumphal entry. (As with all alleged contradictions in the Bible, however, this one has a good solution.) Let me know if you need more info on that.
BTW, when you have an off-topic question there’s no need to commandeer a comments box to get the message to me. Just use the e-mail address that I have on the site, and I’ll try to oblige. 🙂
This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 9 May 2024 to 12 December 2024.
Pronouncing biblical names is often tricky. They’re names from other languages, after all.
