LandonWillis

Category: Etymologies

  • What Are The Beatitudes?

    Jesus started His Sermon on the Mount by calling several different groups of people blessed. We typically call this section of His teaching “the beatitudes”.

    But why?

    Well, in Matthew 5:3-11, in our English translations, He starts every sentence with the word “blessed”. In the Latin translation of the New Testament (the Vulgate), the word used is beati.

    From this Latin word, beati, we get the word “beatitude”, which we use to talk about this short passage.

    Well, what does beati mean?

    “Blessed” is certainly a good translation in the context of this passage. But, the more common translation of the Latin word is “happy” or “fortunate”.

    In fact, when the word “beatitude” first entered the English language, it could just mean “supreme happiness”. However, it very quickly developed a purely religious context.

    From beatus (another form of the word beati), we also get the name “Beatrice”. Naming your daughter Beatrice would be like naming your son Felix (felix is another Latin word for “happy”).

    And, even though the Sermon on the Mount was originally written in Greek, it seems that the Greek word used, makarios, could similarly mean “happy” or “blessed”.

  • Eucharist

    “Eucharist” is another name for the Lord’s Supper, also known as Communion.

    It comes from the Greek word eukharistia (εὐχαριστέω), which literally means “thankfulness” or “gratitude”.

    This refers back to what actually happened during the Last Supper (Luke 22:17-19):

    “17 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks (eucharistēsas), He said, “Take this and share it among yourselves…19 And when He had taken some bread and given thanks (eucharistēsas), He broke it and gave it to them, saying…”

    So, the Lord’s Supper is a “giving thanks” meal. And that’s why the term Eucharist is commonly used to describe it.

    Plus, as a fun language tidbit, the modern Greek language gets a word from this. The Greek word Eυχαριστώ (pronounced something like “ef-ha-ree-sto”) means “thank you”.

    If you’re ever in Greece and want to tell someone thank you, just remember the word “Eucharist” and try to say it with a Greek accent. You’ll probably end up with something close to “ef-ha-ree-sto”.

  • The Four Songs In Luke’s Gospel And Their Latin Names

    When reading through the first two chapters of Luke, you’ll notice four separate times when people (or angels) break into song.

    Each of these songs is typically known by its name in Latin. This is because the Catholic Church pretty much only used Latin translations of the Bible for a long time. And they’re the ones who included these songs as commonly sung hymns.

    Mary’s Magnificat

    Now, the first one, which you’re likely most familiar with, is Mary’s song: the Magnificat.

    Why is it called the Magnificat? Well, in the Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible prepared by Jerome in the late 300s AD) the first word of Mary’s song is Magnificat.

    In Latin, Magnificat means “it magnifies”. It comes from the words magnus, meaning “great” and facere, meaning “to make”.

    So, “to magnify” is literally “to make great”.

    Luke 1:46 reads:

    46 Et ait Maria: Magnificat anima mea Dominum 

    46 And Mary said: “My soul magnifies the Lord

    Zechariah’s Benedictus

    Next, we see the song of Zechariah.

    The first word of his song in Latin is Benedictus.

    Benedictus means “blessed” and itself comes from two other Latin words, bene, meaning “well”, and dictus, meaning “said”. So, it literally means something like “spoken well of”. But we normally just translate it as “blessed”.

    His song begins in Luke 1:68:

    68 Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel, quia visitavit, et fecit redemptionem plebis suae

    68 “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel,
    For He has visited and redeemed His people

    The Angels’ Gloria In Excelsis Deo

    When the angels are announcing the birth of the Savior to the shepherds, they make a quick statement/song that takes up all of one verse.

    In the Vulgate, this song starts with the phrase Gloria in altissimis Deo. As you can tell, that’s slightly different than the popular title of the song: Gloria In Excelsis Deo.

    So, why the difference?

    Well, it seems that there was a certain other Roman Christian who lived a few decades before Jerome compiled the Vulgate. This Christian (some speculate it was Hilary of Poitiers) decided to translate the Greek word hypsístois (meaning “highest”) as excelsis.

    And that’s a plenty good translation. Excelsis does mean “highest” in Latin. But, when Jerome translated the Greek texts a few decades later, he decided to translate it as the Latin word altissimis, which is another word for “highest”.

    In the end, the slightly older translation ended up sticking, so that’s why we still call this song Gloria In Excelsis Deo and not Gloria In Altissimis Deo.

    Luke 2:14 reads:

    14 Gloria in altissimis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

    14 “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”

    Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis

    Finally, when the baby Jesus is presented at the temple, a man named Simeon breaks into a song praising God.

    The Latin translation of his song starts with the words Nunc dimittis servum tuum, which literally means “now you dismiss your servant” or “now you send away your slave”.

    This song starts in Luke 2:29:

    29 Nunc dimittis servum tuum Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace

    29 “Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace,
    According to Your word

    Conclusion

    So, we’ve got four famous songs in the first couple chapters of Luke’s Gospel. All four of them are commonly known by their Latin names: the Magnificat, the Benedictus, Gloria In Excelsis Deo, and Nunc Dimittis.

  • Alamoth And Sheminith

    In 1 Chronicles 15:20-21 we read:

    …Maaseiah and Benaiah were to play the lyres according to alamoth, 21 and… Jeiel and Azaziah were to play the harps, directing according to sheminith.

    So, what on earth do Alamoth and Sheminith mean?

    Well, if you’ve got footnotes in your Bible, you might see a note on both these words which says something like “probably a musical term”.

    Or, in other words, we’ve got no clue what they mean. But they’ve got something to do with music.

    Plenty of scholars have taken some pretty solid guesses about what they mean though.

    Alamoth

    First, Alamoth.

    It likely comes from a word meaning something along the lines of “young, unmarried women”.

    So, a lot of people take this to mean that Alamoth refers to the pitch of the lyres. Specifically, soprano. Like the pitch of a young woman’s voice.

    I read another source describe Alamoth as probably sounding like a bunch of girls laughing.

    Alamoth also appears in the heading to Psalm 46.

    Sheminith

    Sheminith is even more difficult to nail down than Alamoth.

    It seems to come from the Hebrew word shaman, which could mean either “eight” or “dripping fat/oil” (don’t ask me why it means both those things).

    So, most scholars apparently think that Sheminith means “eighth”.

    If that’s correct, it might refer to an eight-stringed harp/lyre. However, others think it is a reference to a specific note, like how the word “octave” in English just comes from the Latin word octo, also meaning “an eighth”.

    I saw one source that suggested Sheminith was meant to stand in contrast to the soprano of Alamoth; so, it specifically means a note “one eighth (one octave) below the tenor”. In other words, bass.

    But, there are also potential connections between the definition of “dripping fat/oil” and Sheminith. Overall, nobody really knows for sure what these words mean.

    And Sheminith also appears in the headings of Psalm 6 and Psalm 12.

  • Why Is The Word Angel In EvANGELism?

    We often hear words that have religious ideas connected to them. So, it becomes easy to just hear words like “Evangelism” or “Messiah” or “Gospel” and pass right on over them without thinking on what they actually mean.

    One great example has to do with the word “evangelism”.

    Evangelism means “the act of spreading the Gospel”.

    But, have you ever noticed the word “angel” in “evANGELism”? Well, the two words are indeed related.

    What a lot of people don’t realize is that we get the word “angel” from the Greek word angelos, which just means “messenger”. So, whenever we see a reference to an “angel” in the Bible, the translators just decided to not actually translate the word; it really means a messenger. In fact, when we do see the word “messenger” in our Bibles, it is the exact same Greek word: angelos (or the Hebrew mal’akh for the Old Testament).

    Alright, so “angel” is just the word “messenger”. How does that help us?

    Well, the word “evangelism” comes from two Greek words: eu, meaning “good” and angellein (the verb form of angelos), which means “to bring a message” or “to announce news”.

    So, to evangelize is literally to bring good news.

    And, if we’re using the proper Greek terms, we are called to be angels (messengers) of the evangel (an old English word for the good news/Gospel).

  • Word Of The Week No 10: Enamored

    Enamored is a very interesting English word.

    If you’re enamored with something, you love it. We get the word from the Latin word amare, which means “to love”.

    Language scholars like to argue over certain terms, but some people would call this the only deponent verb in the English language.

    A deponent verb is a verb that has no active meaning, only a passive one that acts as an active meaning.

    Imagine the word “eat”. I can say “I eat”, and that’s active. But, if I say “The steak was eaten”, that’s passive.

    But, “enamored” is unique. You can’t ever say “I enamor chicken”. But you can say “I’m enamored with chicken” (i.e. you love chicken).

  • What Was The Masoretic Text?

    When you’re reading through your Old Testament, you’ve probably noticed how the footnotes will commonly mention the “Masoretic Text”.

    So, what on earth is the Masoretic Text?

    Well, in the centuries following Christ, there were many Jews who still tried to maintain the Old Testament. These Jews would act as scribes, copying the entire Old Testament line by line.

    Eventually though, a number of scribes decided that they didn’t like certain aspects of the process of copying the Old Testament. So, starting around the 5th century AD they began to try and fix certain flaws they saw in the copying process.

    First of all, they added something called the Masorah. The word Masorah appears to come from two other Hebrew words. The first word, Masoret, means “a bond” or “chains”, while the second Hebrew word, Meser, means “a message”. When combined, we end up with the word Masorah, which could literally mean “a chained message”.

    But, a better translation for Masorah would be “tradition”.

    So, these scribes added the Masorah (tradition) in the 5th century. What does that mean? Basically, the Masorah was a whole bunch of notes made in the margins of the paper or in-between lines of text or at the end of a scroll or book.

    What were these marginal notes? Mostly notes about things like pronunciation, spelling, and statistics (for example, how many times a certain word is used in the whole of the Old Testament).

    Since these scribes added all these Masorah notes, they became known as the Masoretes (or Ba‘aley Hammasora, literally, “Masters of the tradition”). Then, the copies of the Old Testament that they created earned the name of the Masoretic Text, because it was made by the Masoretes.

    But, the Masorah notes weren’t all that the Masoretes added. They also created section, chapter, and verse divisions for the Old Testament. Most of the chapter and verse divisions that they made are still what we use in our English Old Testaments (there are slight differences for certain verses though, especially in the Psalms).

    Plus, the Masoretes added a system of vowels to the Old Testament. Now, this might sound strange to us. But Ancient Hebrew didn’t use vowels in its writing system. They just left vowels out and spelled everything with consonants.

    As you could imagine, this created some confusion over the centuries. So, the Masoretes created a system where they could add vowel sounds to their copies of the Old Testament without messing anything up. To do this, they represented vowel sounds with little dots and lines that they could put underneath letters. This allowed them to show how something was supposed to be pronounced without having to really take up more space on the paper since they just could just fit small dots right under letters in a preexisting manuscript.

    In addition to all this, the Masoretes were famous for their accuracy in making copies. They developed processes where they would count how many letters were supposed to be in each Book of the Old Testament. And they would count to see what the middle verse, middle word, and middle letter were supposed to be. This helped ensure that they could copy every single letter correctly every time.

    Now, they still made mistakes on occasion, but their copies are considered very reliable and accurate. Even so, they didn’t start their work until the 5th century, so they were making copies of copies of copies…

    Because of this combination of great accuracy with the fact that they were stuck with copies that might have already had small mistakes, the Masoretic Text is very useful for making translations of the Old Testament, while still not being a perfect source.

    Throughout your Old Testament, you’ll see footnotes referencing how the Septuagint, Masoretic Text, and Dead Sea Scrolls might disagree with each other on minor issues of wording. It’s all very interesting to study, but we also need to always remember that all of our ancient manuscripts agree on almost every point. And no major point of teaching is ever really at stake when it comes to these issues of which translation is right.

    I hope I didn’t make any of that too confusing. And I hope that you now better understand what the Masoretic Text is.

  • Why Do Certain Numbers Mean Words In The Bible? Thanks To Gematria And Isopsephy.

    You’ve probably heard about some famous examples of numbers being used as codes in the Bible. Specifically, you’ve likely heard that the number 666 was probably a reference to the Emperor Nero.

    But why on earth do numbers mean words? And how does this “code” work?

    Well, a lot of people try to make it sound all complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple.

    In English, we obviously use a certain system of numbers (also called numerals): 1,2,3,4,etc.

    What you may not know is that these numbers (1,2,3,4,etc.) are Arabic numerals. A system of numbers that comes to us from Arabic.

    So, before we began using these Arabic numerals just a few centuries ago, what did we use?

    Well, think back to the Romans. They had a system of Roman numerals (ring a bell?). In this system, the Romans used numbers such as I,V,X,L,C,etc.

    As you can see, all of their numbers were just letters. The only way to tell whether something in writing was meant as letters or numbers was through context. If you saw V CANES, you could assume that the “V” represents “5”, so you could translate the phrase as “5 dogs”.

    This system of Roman numerals is very similar to what the Greeks and Hebrews did.

    Records are unclear, but it appears that the Greeks were the first to develop this system of counting (using their letters to represent numbers instead of spelling out the full name of the number).

    The Greeks called this “isopsephy”, which comes from isos, meaning “equal” and psephos, meaning “count”.

    Then, it appears that following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the east, the new Hellenistic (hellenistic just means Greek) Jews began to develop their own system of isopsephy.

    However, just to keep us a little bit confused, the Hebrews made sure to change the name of isopsephy to “gematria”. Gematria still comes from Greek, but specifically it derives from the word geometria, which is also where we get our word “geometry”. It’s basically just a word that had to do with math, so naming a number system after a math word makes sense.

    So, these systems of isopsephy (for Greek) and gematria (for Hebrew) were pretty much just the same sort of thing as Roman numerals.

    The only big difference is that for the Romans, only a few letters were used as numbers and the rest were always just letters. For Hebrew and Greek though, every letter had a numerical value to go along with it.

    Because of this, you could take any word in Hebrew or Greek, add up all the numbers/letters, and get a total value. This was done pretty commonly for different purposes. Again, the famous example of 666 alludes to Emperor Nero because if you add up the letters of his name in Greek, Neron Kaisar, you get 666.

    Overall, a lot of people like to make this stuff sound all confusing, but just remember, it’s pretty much the same as Roman numerals.

  • Gilead: The Witness Heap

    When reading through the Bible, have you ever noticed how it just lists off the origins of all sorts of words? Often, we can’t make sense of the explanation without looking at the footnotes. And so, we commonly pass over these things without a second thought. But the history behind the words is fascinating and gives us something to think back on whenever we see that word elsewhere in the Bible.

    One great and detailed example is “Gilead”.

    In Genesis 31:43-49, we read about how Jacob and Laban made peace with each other after Jacob had fled from Laban:

    43 Laban answered Jacob, “The women are my daughters, the children are my children, and the flocks are my flocks. All you see is mine. Yet what can I do today about these daughters of mine, or about the children they have borne?44 Come now, let’s make a covenant, you and I, and let it serve as a witness between us.”

    45 So Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. 46 He said to his relatives, “Gather some stones.” So they took stones and piled them in a heap, and they ate there by the heap. 47 Laban called it Jegar Sahadutha, and Jacob called it Galeed.

    48 Laban said, “This heap is a witness between you and me today.” That is why it was called Galeed. 49 It was also called Mizpah, because he said, “May the Lord keep watch between you and me when we are away from each other…”

    So, before anything else, the obvious. “Gilead” does not appear in this passage. And that’s true… sort of.

    Back in Genesis 31:23, we learn that this encounter takes place in “the hill country of Gilead”. But, remember, the Book of Genesis probably wasn’t written down until several centuries after this event. So, by the time that it was written down, it appears that the Hebrew pronunciation of the word had changed. Originally, the place was called “Galeed”, but after a few centuries of the language naturally changing, people started pronouncing it as something more along the lines of “Gilead”. And that’s why Genesis tells us that the place is Gilead and then goes on to tell us that they named it Galeed.

    Galeed/Gilead

    Alright, so now that we’ve figured out why this place is called both Galeed and Gilead, we can look at why it’s called these names in the first place.

    The Hebrew word gal means “heap” or “mound”. And the word ‛êd means “witness” or “testimony”. So, Jacob and Laban did indeed name the place after the pillar they set up as a covenant. Or, in other words, they made a heap of rocks to memorialize witness towards the peace they reached with each other.

    Jegar Sahadutha

    So, why on earth did Laban call this place Jegar Sahadutha?

    Well, that’s just Aramaic for “witness heap”, so it’s just a translation of Galeed/Gilead from Hebrew to Aramaic. Maybe Aramaic was the language that Laban was more familiar with?

    Mizpah

    But guess what! There’s another other other name for this place!

    As we see in verse 49, the place was also called Mizpah.

    Mizpah is Hebrew for “watchtower” (which lines up with what Laban says, also in verse 49). Mizpah is an interesting word used throughout The Old Testament for several different place names.

    Gilead, The Man

    To throw just one more wrench into this fascinating word, we can look at Numbers 26:29. Here, we learn that a man named Gilead was a great-great grandson of Jacob.

    Specifically, he was the grandson of Manasseh, who is the patriarch of the tribe of Manasseh.

    We also see a reference to the “Gileadite clan”. Thanks to this and the fact that the half tribe of Manasseh on the east of the Jordan controlled Gilead, it seems that the man Gilead was perhaps in some way named for this region. And, it was his descendants, the Gileadites, who would control the region as a clan in the half tribe of Manasseh.

    That last paragraph might not be entirely correct, but from what I’ve read, that seems to most likely be the case.

    Gal’azu

    During the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the Assyrians of course took the region of Gilead.

    When they did so, they also renamed it to the province of Gal’azu.

    Conclusion

    And so, we have seen that the word Gilead is a direct reference to a certain heap of rocks meant to bear witness to a covenant.

    It’s sometimes so easy to just pass over these etymologies that we see in Hebrew. But they are often fascinating and can serve to give us a greater understanding of what the word really means.

  • What Is The Shema?

    The Shema is a famous and still very important prayer in Judaism. It comes from Deuteronomy 6:4, where it is written:

    “4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

    In Hebrew, that first word “hear” is the command Shema, which itself comes from the Hebrew word “to hear”, Shama.

    The modern Jewish prayer consists almost entirely of Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Deuteronomy 11:13-21, and Numbers 15:37-41. And since the first word of this prayer is Shema, the whole thing is now just referred to as “the Shema”.

    Even during Jesus’ time, the Shema was recognized as a very important section of the Scriptures. Think of when Jesus said in Mark 12:29 that the greatest command was “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

    And, strangely enough, the word Shema was also the name of four men and one city recorded in The Old Testament. You can find all references to these men and this city in 1 Chronicles 2:43, 1 Chronicles 5:8, 1 Chronicles 8:13, Nehemiah 8:4, and Joshua 15:26.

    It seems that the name was probably from the noun form of Shema, which would mean “sound”. So, their names were something along the lines of “sound”, “hearing”, or “fame”.

    Plus, this is where we get the modern names Simeon and Simon.