LandonWillis

Category: Greek

  • Word of The Week No 9: Hosanna

    We only see the word “Hosanna” in two places in our English translations of the Bible, Mark 11:9-10 and Matthew 21:9,15.

    These examples both happen during Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Here are all the verses where we can find “Hosanna”:

    Mark 11:9-10: 9 Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted,

    “Hosanna!”

    “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

    10 “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”

    “Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

    Matthew 21:9: 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

    “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

    “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

    “Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

    And Matthew 21:15 15 But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant.

    So, what on earth does “Hosanna” mean?

    Well, the word in the original Greek manuscripts is hosanna, which is just a transliteration of hosha’na, which is either a Hebrew word or an Aramaic word.

    Either way, this word, hosha’na, seems to be a contraction of the Hebrew word hoshi’ah-nna. And this word, hoshi’ah-nna, does appear in other parts of the Bible, specifically in Psalm 118:25.

    In Psalm 118:25-26, we read: 25 Lord, save us!
        Lord, grant us success!

    26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

    That first phrase, “Lord, save us!” (also translated as “Save, we pray”), is the Hebrew word hoshi’ah-nna. When this got shortened down to hosha’na, it started to be used by Jews as a common part of a hymn/prayer.

    And over time the word began to mean not just “Save us” but something more along the lines of “Honor to the one who saves”. This explains why the crowds were shouting Hosanna as a shout of praise. The crowds meant “Honor to the Savior” and “Honor to the Messiah” when they were shouting out Hosanna.

    Plus, as an interesting connection, Jesus’ Aramaic/Hebrew name was Yehoshua, which translates as “The Lord is Salvation” or “The Lord is deliverance”. So, the shouts of Hosanna had an extra connection directly to His earthly name.

    Also, notice how in Psalm 118:26, it says “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” This is exactly what the crowds shouted in both Mark 11:9 and Matthew 21:9. That is a major piece of evidence which lets us know that the word Hosanna does indeed originate from hoshi’ah-nna in Psalm 118:25.

    The Gospel of Luke, per usual, does not contain this Hebrew/Aramaic expression. But in Luke 19:38, we see again the slightly altered phrase “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

    So, “Hosanna” was originally a cry of distress meaning “Save us!”, but over time it changed into a shout of praise to the Lord/Savior/Messiah. And this shout of praise was most fulfilled during Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, just a few days before He would in fact save us.

  • Golgotha, Calvary, And The Place of The Skull

    The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John all tell us that Jesus was crucified in a place called Golgotha.

    They also all tell us that Golgotha is a Hebrew word meaning “place of the skull”. (Technically, Golgotha is an Aramaic word, but Aramaic is commonly called Hebrew, since it was the common language of the Hebrew people at the time).

    Plus, the Gospel of Luke simply tells us that they crucified him at a place called “The Skull”.

    Every time we see the word “skull” in these passages, it is a translation of the Greek word Kranion, which means “skull” and is also where we get our modern word “cranium”.

    But, where do we get the word “Calvary” out of all this?

    Well, when the translator Jerome was compiling all the Bible into Latin in the late 300s AD, he properly translated that Greek word Kranion into the Latin word for “skull”, Calvaria.

    Then, as the centuries went by, some people translated the Latin Bible into English. When they did this, they just borrowed the Latin term and called the place “Calvary”, from Calvaria.

    Most modern English translations actually use the original manuscripts (Greek) when translating The New Testament though. So, now most Bibles will call it “the place of the skull”.

    But, we still have the word “Calvary” now, which is entirely unrelated to an army of horses, a “cavalry”.

    And, as for the place where Jesus was crucified, there’s been a whole lot of guessing about where it is and why it’s called the place of the skull.

    First, as a quick note, in the original Greek it’s more accurate to say “of the skull” and not “of a skull”.

    Anyhow, all four Gospels just call Golgotha/Calvary a “place”. Tradition has said that this was probably a hill, but we don’t really know for certain.

    A lot of people seem to think the place was called Golgotha because it was on a hill that kind of looked like a skull. Some other people say that it might have been because it could have been close to some tombs. And there are a good deal more guesses that scholars have made over the years.

    The gist of it is all pretty simple though. Jesus was crucified at a place called “place of the skull”. The Hebrew (Aramaic) term for “place of the skull” is Golgotha. And “Calvary” is just pretty much the Latin word for the same thing.

  • Word of the Week No 5: Bible

    Where does the word “Bible” come from?

    It first started out as the Greek phrase ta biblia to hagia, which literally means “The Holy Books”. Christians seem to have first started using this phrase to talk about the Bible as a whole by the 2nd or 3rd century.

    This got translated into Latin as Biblia Sacra, which also means “Holy Books”. However, that word Biblia is in something called the neuter plural in Latin. So it is a plural word (it means “books” not “book”), but it looks like it could be a feminine singular word. Thanks to this, during the Middle Ages, Biblia Sacra began to just mean “Holy Book”.

    That is where many languages now get their word for “Bible”. It’s just the Latin word Biblia, which, by the end of the Middle Ages, meant “book”.

    But, this wasn’t the common Latin word for the Bible until around the 800s AD. Rather, Jerome (the man who did a lot of work with translating the Bible into Latin in the 300s) and other Romans would have commonly used the word Bibliotheca, which literally means “library”. This is where we get the lesser used English word “bibliothec”, which used to be our common word for “the Bible” back in Middle English.

    Both of those words, though, Biblia and Bibliotheca, clearly have a similar root Bibli-. So, where do these words come from originally?

    Well, they both go back to the Greek word Biblion, meaning “a scroll” or “a book”. The Greeks got this word from the Ancient Egyptian word for papyrus, Byblos. And, it seems that the word was introduced into Greek through the city of Byblos, which was probably named that because they were an exporter of Egyptian papyrus.

    Overall, the word used for the Bible has a long and interesting history. But, in most languages that I’ve seen it just ends up going back to the word for “book”. So nice and simple.

  • Word of the Week No 4: Amen

    This is one of my favorite etymologies just because it’s so nice and easy. So, where do we get the word “Amen”? We get it from the Old English word “Amen”, which got the word from Latin “Amen”, which got the word from Greek “Amen”, which got the word from Hebrew “Amen”.

    Isn’t that just amazing? Over thousands of years, the word is still the same. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any word go through so much time and so many languages without any changes.

    But, what did this word “Amen” mean in Hebrew? Well, it seems that it could be used as a noun, an adjective, or an adverb. So, it could mean “truth”, “true”, or “truly”.

    It’s related to the Hebrew verb aman, which means “to be firm”. So, if you have “Amen” soil, it’s firm soil. Or if you make an “Amen” statement, you are making a true/firm statement.

    Whenever we see Jesus in the Bible saying “Truly, truly I say to you” or “Verily, verily I say unto you”, He’s just using the word Amen. It would be a perfectly correct translation to write that Jesus said “Amen, amen I say to you”. That’s what the Greek authors did when they included the Hebrew term Amen in their writings of what Jesus said. They just wrote it with Greek letters instead of Hebrew letters.

    However, Luke’s Gospel is very fascinating on this front. Apparently, when he wrote the phrase “Truly, truly I say to you”, he actually translated the word Amen into the Greek word Alethos, which also means “truly”.

    Every English Bible I’ve ever seen takes the same strategy that Luke did. They translate all those “Amen”s as “truly” and “verily” and “faithfully” instead of just keeping the word as “Amen”.

    This also explains why people will sometimes shout out “Amen!” when they agree with something. It’s like shouting “absolutely!” or “that’s true!”.

  • What’s the difference between the Pentateuch and the Torah?

    When people talk about the first five Books of The Old Testament, you’ll commonly hear the words “Pentateuch” and “Torah” thrown around. But what exactly do they mean?

    Well, first of all, “Torah” comes from the Hebrew word Torah, which literally means “instruction” or “law”. This was the word that the Jews would typically use to talk about the “five Books of Moses”.

    But, when Alexander the Great spread the Greek language across the region of Israel, this new class of Greek speaking Jews also wanted a word in Greek to refer to these first five Books. So, they named it the Pentateuch, which just means “the five books”. You can clearly see the root word Pente, which is Greek for “five” (think how a “pentagon” has five sides). And the teuch part is from Greek teukhos, which means “book” or “a case for scrolls”.

    However, the Jews also had another way to refer to these Books in Hebrew. They could call them the Chamishah Chumshei Torah, which means “the five fifths of the Torah”. (they could also just call it the Chumash, which means “a fifth”, but that was less common).

  • Word of the Week No 2: Samaria

    The Bible is full of interesting words and etymologies. And, surprisingly often, it actually explains them to us.

    One example is found in 1 Kings 16:24, where it says:

    “24 He [Omri, King of Israel] bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver and built a city on the hill, calling it Samaria, after Shemer, the name of the former owner of the hill.”

    So, if you’ve ever wondered what “Samaria” meant, there you have it. It’s named after some guy (or maybe a family/clan) who owned the hill on which Samaria was built.

    And, over time the name for the city spread to also mean the region surrounding the city. Eventually, it even became its own politically recognized region.

    But, in 27ish BC, right before the time of Jesus, Herod the Great renamed the city to “Sebastia”. And while I believe that Jerome only ever uses the word Samaria in the Vulgate, Sebastia was the official Latin name. In fact, Sebastia is still the name of the village that exists in modern-day Samaria.

    So, where did Herod get the name Sebastia? Well, it was actually a pretty common place name for new cities at the time. This is because it comes from the Greek word sebastos, which means “revered” or “holy”. This is just the Greek translation for the Latin word Augustus, which was what the emperor Octavian liked to call himself. So, Herod renamed the city to “Sebastia” as a sign of respect to the practice of emperor worship, seeing the emperor as “revered” and “holy”.

  • What does “disciple” even mean?

    When you read through the Gospels, they are constantly talking about how Jesus’ disciples did this thing or that thing… but what is a disciple? I mean really, if someone says the word “disciple” is there anything you think of other than those twelve guys that followed Jesus around? Is there anytime you would use the word “disciple” in a nonreligious context? Probably not.

    But that’s not how it was for first century Christians who heard about Jesus and his disciples. Why? Well, to understand that we have to dive into a bit of Greek, Latin, and English.

    First of all, the word that is commonly translated into English as “disciple” was originally the Greek word Mathetes. However, this was not a brand new word used to describe these men. Instead, it was simply the word for “student”.

    Now, Mathetes really means something a bit more specific than just “student”. It typically refers either to an apprentice or a philosophy student. This makes sense though, because those were just about the only two kinds of students in the ancient world. There were plenty of Mathetais (plural of Mathetes) who were studying how to be doctors, or leather workers, or stone masons. And there were also Mathetais who studied philosophy, like the students of Aristotle or Plato.

    This idea of a Mathetes being a student goes even a bit further though. Think for a second; in first century Israel what sorts of people would be students of philosophy or religion? The Pharisees! We actually see this clearly laid out in Matthew 22:15-16:

    “15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap Him in His words. 16 They sent their disciples to Him…”

    In the original Greek, the word used in these verses is a form of the word Mathetes. This makes perfect sense. The Pharisees had their own students, as did individual Rabbis. Followers of John the Baptist and Moses were also called Mathetais/disciples/students.

    With this in mind, everything about the Gospels makes just a bit more sense. Consider these verses from Matthew 5:1-2, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount:

    “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to Him, 2 and He began to teach them.”

    When translated more accurately as students, we read:

    “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His students came to Him, 2 and He began to teach them.”

    So, if first century Christians would have recognized the followers of Jesus as “students”, why do we use the obscure word “disciples” when talking about them?

    Why we Use the Word “Disciple”

    Like so many things in English, this goes back to Latin. You see, back in the 100s and 200s and 300s AD, when people like Jerome were translating the Books of the New Testament into Latin from the original Greek, they translated the word Mathetes quite literally. These men used the Latin word Discipulus when translating Mathetes.

    And Discipulus is just the Latin word for “student”. So, props to the Romans. They translated it well.

    Then, a thousand years later, in maybe the 1200s or 1300s or so, English started to be something like what we know today. And as some English speaking Christians wanted to talk about the students of Jesus, they looked at the Bible to see what His students were called. But, since the Catholic Church was in absolute control at the time, the only Bibles available (for the most part) were in Latin. So, these Christians looked at the Bible, saw it said that Jesus’ followers were called discipulus, and decided “Nice, that’s difficult to pronounce. Let’s call ’em disciples. It’s close enough.”

    Now, that is obviously not entirely accurate, but I feel like it paints the picture quite nicely. The Catholic Church was generally not in favor of translating the Bible into any language other than Latin. So, languages began to stop translating certain words in the Bible, but just transliterate them from Latin. (Transliterate pretty much means to just steal a word from another language and maybe change its spelling a little.)

    This is exactly what happened with this word. It went from Mathetes->Discipulus->Disciple. The Greek was translated into Latin, and the Latin was transliterated into English. This happens with plenty of words from the Bible. It commonly goes

    Greek Original->Latin translation->English transliteration.

    Overall, I think it’s very fascinating to understand the original meanings behind these words. It helps us to more clearly understand just what Jesus is doing and saying. The word “disciple” obviously isn’t incorrect, but it does give us a poor idea of just what these men truly were: students.