Category: Hebrew

The Weekly Francis – 16 January 2025

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 9 December 2024 to 16 January 2025.

Angelus

General Audiences

Messages

Speeches

Papal Twitter/X

Papal Instagram

The Weekly Francis – 9 January 2025

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 1 January 2025 to 9 January 2025.

Angelus

General Audiences

Homilies

Speeches

Papal Twitter/X

Papal Instagram

The Weekly Francis – 2 January 2025

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 28 December 2024 to 29 December 2024.

Angelus

Messages

  • [28 December 2024 – Message of the Holy Father, signed by the Cardinal Secretary of State, to mark the 47th European meeting of young people organized by the Taizé Community in Tallinn 28 December 2024 – 1st January 202

Papal Twitter/X

Papal Instagram

The Weekly Francis – 12 December 2024

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 9 May 2024 to 12 December 2024.

Angelus

General Audiences

Homilies

Messages

Speeches

Papal Twitter/X

Papal Instagram

The Weekly Francis – 5 December 2024

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 29 November 2024 to 4 December 2024.

Angelus

General Audiences

Letters

Messages

Speeches

Papal Twitter/X

Papal Instagram

The Weekly Francis – 28 November 2024

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 8 November 2024 to 28 November 2024.

Angelus

General Audiences

Homilies

Letters

Messages

Speeches

Papal Twitter/X

Papal Instagram

Pronouncing Biblical Names (Wherein I Rant)

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:

  1. Use the standard English pronunciation
  2. Use the standard pronunciation in the original language (Hebrew, Greek, etc.)
  3. 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:

  1. Hebrew doesn’t have the /j/ sound; it uses the /y/ sound instead.
  2. 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).
  3. 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).
  4. Both Elijah and Elisha start with a glottal stop followed by a short vowel.
  5. Both Elijah and Elisha have a long /ee/ sound (as in seem) in the middle.
  6. 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.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

MYS009

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.

Links for this episode:

Mysterious Headlines

Direct Link to the Episode.

Subscribe on iTunes. | Other Ways to Subscribe.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Abba: The Case of the Missing “B”

Over on Facebook, a reader writes:

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):

Abba3

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):

Abba2

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.

Hope this clarifies the case of the missing "B"!

Antichrist Update!

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!”

So that’s what I did.

Consulting this Hebrew New Testament [.pdf] online, we find that the phrase in the passage is this:

 

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.”

What are your thoughts?