5 Common Myths About the Biblical Languages

01 Myth

Paleo-Hebrew letters carry hidden meanings

Did you know? The English letter B was originally an Egyptian hieroglyph that meant “house”! This is what the progression looked like:

All true alphabets (which, by definition, connect a sound and a symbol) are derived from the same source: a Semitic group in the Sinai desert. (The Hebrews were also a Semitic group, but we do not know the precise relationship between the alphabet-inventors and the Hebrews.)

This group did something that would forever change the world. They took Egyptian hieroglyphics and started to associate a symbol with a sound rather than a symbol with a word. Before that point, all writing systems were composed of symbols representing words instead of sounds. What this group did was take the first sound of the word represented by a hieroglyph and make that the sound of the symbol.

For example, the word for “house” was beit in that Semitic group’s language. So if they wanted to use the Egyptian symbols for their language, they would say beit when they saw the hieroglyph for “house.” Under the new system, they would say b for that hieroglyph instead of beit, allowing them to spell any of their words with a limited set of symbols.

This was the beginning of the alphabet, and it revolutionized communication. It opened up the possibility for all languages to use the same basic system of writing, and indeed, that is precisely what happened.

The YHWH “hidden message” claim

This brings us to a major myth about the Hebrew language, and specifically the pre-biblical version of it often referred to as paleo-Hebrew. Some have claimed that every paleo-Hebrew letter has a special meaning corresponding to a word, and that there are hidden meanings in Scripture that come from the words associated with the symbols. God’s name, Yahweh (written with the consonants YHWH), supposedly means the following, from which they deduce that God’s name is a hidden reference to the Cross:

The first problem is that, by the scheme’s own logic, Y should mean “hand,” H should mean “window,” and W should mean “hook.” In other words, the claim is factually incorrect!

The second problem is that this isn’t how Hebrew works. As cool as it might seem to decipher hidden meanings in the Bible, God communicated in a way that anyone could understand: using normal human language.

B doesn’t mean “house,” and neither does ב

Hebrew letters were originally Egyptian hieroglyphs that had certain meanings… but so were English letters! The forms of the letters took on different shapes, but the new “meaning” developed by the alphabet-inventors, a sound, continues to hold across languages. Both the letter B and the letter ב stand for the b sound. Here’s what the Hebrew progression looked like:

When you see the letter b, you don’t think of a house, even though that’s what it originally meant in Egyptian. It’s the same with Hebrew. Even though the letter ב came from a symbol that meant “house,” it no longer meant that once the alphabet revolution happened.

That’s why it’s not correct to attribute special meanings to the letters of the paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The language was written with alphabetic letters just like ours, not hieroglyphs that stood for a full word. God did not bury His Word in code form for us to decipher. He chose to communicate through a regular human language, understandable to any who would read it.

02 Myth

The tense tells you exactly what kind of action happened

All too often I hear pastors and teachers repeat phrases like these when expositing Scripture:

• “A past action with continuing relevance”
• “A once for all completed action”

They are describing the supposed meanings contained in verb tenses. But it’s a lot more complicated than it might seem.

Start with English

Let’s think about English verbs first. Verb forms like have + -en and -ed have meanings that are far more complex than these kinds of simple descriptions, and often the simple descriptions are just flat-out wrong. Consider a simple discourse like the following, in which my two-year-old son is described as a mess:

The sentences after the first give examples of how he has wrecked things. The verbs break, smash, and take appear in both, but A uses the have + -en forms and B uses the -ed forms (which only sometimes actually end in -ed).

Here’s the point: there is no appreciable difference between the meanings of A and B in this case. There is sometimes a significant difference between these verb forms, but a number of factors govern their meaning, and pastors and teachers (and even many Greek grammarians!) often do not understand all that goes into the meaning of the verb forms.

The same overlap shows up in Greek

To illustrate, here is what G. K. Beale says about a verb form in Revelation 5:7 in his commentary on the Greek text:

“The perfect tense εἴληφεν (‘he took’) functions as an aorist.”

G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (NIGTC, 1999), 357, on Revelation 5:7

In Revelation 5:7, a perfect form (usually equivalent to have + -en in English) is translated as a simple past tense (the aorist normally corresponds to the -ed form, the normal past tense). In other words, there seems to be overlap between the perfect and the past tense, much as the two English forms overlapped above.

Many more examples could be multiplied where the verb forms do not necessarily mean what we might expect them to mean, or at least do not jibe with some current theories about what they should mean.

The moral of the story: don’t read too much into the “tenses,” and understand that the precise meaning of the tenses is more complicated than you probably think.

03 Myth

A word means what its root means

All languages make use of roots. For example, the word examine is composed of a root √exam + a suffix -ine. We can attach this suffix to other roots to form other words, such as √image to make imagine.

You can see how the meanings of examine and imagine are related to their roots. In some sense, to examine something is to conduct an exam, and to imagine something is to conjure up an image in your mind. So far, so good.

Same root, different meanings

The problem is that words with the same root are normally similar in meaning, but they often differ in important ways. The Hebrew root √ראש forms all of these words:

• רֹאשׁrosh“head”
• רִאשׁוֹןrishon“first”
• רֵאשִׁיתreshit“beginning / best”

Again, you can see how these words are related, but they do not mean the same thing. When רֹאשׁ “head” is used, we think of a body part. But when רֵאשִׁית “beginning” is used, as in the very first word of the Bible, we should not think of a body part.

The trouble comes when you associate a root with one particular word formed from it, as if √ראש meant “head.” The word רֵאשִׁית “beginning” comes from a root that does not mean “head”; it means something abstract like the top or beginning of something, whether a person (“head”), a time (“beginning”), or a place (“first”).

Similarly, in English we do not think of the body part “head” in statements like these:

• Bob is way ahead of Sue.
• Mark has been making headway on his project.
• The heading of this section seems misleading.

Here’s the point: the relationship between these words is complex, and we cannot necessarily derive one meaning from the other. Other roots work in different ways and have different relationships between the words they make. It is too easy to say too much when speaking of “root meanings.”

Across languages: δύναμις is not dynamite

Another problem is that words across languages may share a root but differ in meaning substantially. Here’s a common example: the Greek word δύναμις (dunamis) means “power,” and the English word dynamite borrows that Greek root.

One can see that the two words are related; dynamite is certainly an impressive display of power. However, that does not mean δύναμις has the same meaning as dynamite. Dynamite explodes; power does not. It is just an abstract concept. When Paul speaks of the gospel being the δύναμις of God for salvation (Romans 1:16), we are not to think of explosions.

Root meanings are not wholly irrelevant when doing exegesis, but more often than not, they are presented in misleading and unhelpful ways.

04 Myth

The literal meaning is the true meaning

Related to the root fallacy is the literal meaning fallacy. In this error, words are broken down into parts, and a so-called “literal meaning” of each part is given that is supposed to be more accurate or true to the original.

The English phrase running water illustrates this well. Does the phrase mean this?

No. It is simply wrong to say that we interpret running “literally” in the phrase running water.

The same can be said of the Hebrew equivalent, which is not מַיִם רָצִים “running water” but מַיִם חַיִּים “living water.” When referring to flowing water, Hebrew uses the metaphor of living rather than running. Here again, it would be wrong to understand “living water” like this:

Does this mean ancient Hebrew speakers understood flowing water differently than modern English speakers do, because we use the metaphor of “running” and they used “living”? Probably not.

In Hebrew, it is unhelpful to say that מַיִם חַיִּים has a literal meaning of “living water,” as if some special kind of water is being referred to. The phrase refers to flowing water, just like running water in English. (The same is also probably true of the phrase in John 4, when Jesus is speaking to the woman at the well, though that story presents other complexities.)

05 Myth

Biblical Greek and Hebrew aren’t ordinary languages

Some of the things Greek and Hebrew speakers communicated were ordinary and mundane. Other messages were extraordinary, particularly those communicated by God to humans. However, God used the ordinary means of Greek and Hebrew to communicate extraordinary things. So if you want to understand His act of communication, you need to learn to understand Greek and Hebrew as real languages.

As you have been reading this article, you have not been over-analyzing all the tenses or trying to figure out how the root of a word like communicate is related to other words. Nor have you thought about the “literal meaning” of understand, and you have certainly not been thinking of a house every time you saw the letter b. As an English speaker, you have been reading through the text to understand the message I am communicating.

That is exactly what you should do with the biblical text. That does not mean there is no room for close readings. Indeed, we should read the Bible, or any important text, carefully. But we should still treat it as a text.

This is exactly our goal at Biblingo. We treat biblical Greek and Hebrew like real languages, so that you can understand the Bible the way God originally intended humans to understand it. Learning any language takes practice and work, but God’s extraordinary message is worth the effort.