LandonWillis

Category: Hebrew

  • 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”.

  • Word of the Week No 1: Targum

    Back when the Jews in the Old Testament were worshipping God, they spoke a language we call Hebrew. But, through a whole bunch of historical twists and turns, by the time Jesus was born, the common language of Judea was something called Aramaic.

    Aramaic is very similar to Hebrew, but it’s still a different language. One way I heard it described is to compare them to the Romance languages of Europe. For example, Italian and Spanish are both very similar languages because they come from Latin. But they’re still different languages. It’s the same way with Hebrew and Aramaic, different languages, but very similar.

    However, The Old Testament was written almost entirely in Hebrew, so the Jews needed some sort of translation to really understand it.

    This is very similar to how the Catholic Church would have their services in Latin during the Middle Ages. At a time when no one spoke Latin as a native language, the Catholics still taught in Latin and then translated verses later. Many religious traditions throughout history have tried to hold on to ancient languages and difficult to understand writings.

    So, the Jews came up with a solution for this language barrier. During their Synagogue services, one teacher would read a small section of scripture in Hebrew (think a verse or two), then some other guy would translate that into Aramaic for everyone in the crowd.

    That other guy who would translate the Hebrew into Aramaic was something called a hammeturgem, literally “a translator”. And the translation he gave was called a Targum. You can see that root word Targum in the word hammeturgem.

    However, the word in Hebrew can mean a little more than just “translate”. It can also more broadly mean “to interpret”. This is because the men who gave the translation into Aramaic would commonly add their own opinions of what the text actually meant.

    For this reason, the Jews did not allow anyone to write down any Targumim (plural of Targum), so that no one would start treating them as equal with scripture. But, over the centuries, some Rabbis broke this rule and wrote down massive Targumim, or interpretations, of The Old Testament.

    We also see this word used in Ezra 4:7, when it says:

    “The letter was written in Aramaic and translated.”

    That word “translated” is a form of the word Targum. And, if you read Ezra, you’ll see a footnote telling you that 4:8-6:18, which quotes the letter referenced in 4:7, is in Aramaic. This is one of the few sections of The Old Testament that was written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.