The Most Common Word
in the Ancient Hebrew Scriptures


by Harvey Block
(2023/07/20 rev 2023/09/06)

Ancient Hebrew is a most interesting language in many ways. The treasures filling the Hebrew Scriptures are deep and profound. The idea "lost in translation" is greatly applicable to all other languages into which the Hebrew Writings of the ancient Israelites have been made.

It has been reported that Martin Luther said "Hebrew is the source, that is the spring, and Greek is the stream that flows out of the Hebrew source, and Latin is the downstream puddle."

Jeremiah speaks of the fountain (or spring) of living water:

“For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, And hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.
(Jeremiah 2:13 NKJV)

O Lord, the hope of Israel, All who forsake You shall be ashamed. “Those who depart from Me Shall be written in the earth, Because they have forsaken the Lord, The fountain of living waters.”
(Jeremiah 17:13 NKJV)

There is nothing like the cool refreshing water that flows out from a mountain spring. God refers to himself as this spring of living water. And it is a great evil to forsake that! The very words that God spoke through Moses and the prophets were the water flowing from that fountain. Those words He spoke were in Hebrew.


Lost in Translation

Nehemia Gordon, a Karite Jew,
A Karite Jew is a Jew who considers the written Torah (the Hebrew Old Testament) to be the final authority. That is, he does not accept the "Oral Torah" or the writings of the many rabbis as authoratative.
is a scholar who has traveled the world looking at many ancient manuscripts of the scriptures and has found many interesting things. He has said that there are "Hebrew word plays", that is, "puns" in nearly every page of the Hebrew scriptures.

Puns can almost never be translated into any other language.

Here is my favorite hospital joke:

Q: What are waiting rooms for?
... (wait for answer)

A: Patients / Patience.

When I tell the joke in person, (after waiting for a guess,) I just say one word. But when I write it, I have to pick which of the two words are in the word play, because while they sound exactly the same, they are spelled differently.

So you see even within the same language a pun that you can say isn't necessarily the same when written. And the reverse can also be true. For example a word play can be written, but when you say it, you would have to say the word with two different pronunciations. Think, for example, of the name of the store "Petsmart." You may hear either "Pet's Mart" or you may hear "Pet Smart." They want you to be smart for your pet, and buy at the Pet's Mart.

So all those many puns in the Hebrew Old Testament are lost when translating into any other language. Now, today, in English, we use puns mostly for humor. But in the Hebrew writings given to us by God, they are more often given for poetic beauty, and more importantly for additional meaning. In the quote, given above, Jeremiah 17:13 has a play on words. I will show it this way:

O Lord, the hope (= pool) of Israel, All who forsake You shall be ashamed (= dry). “Those who depart from Me Shall be written in the earth, Because they have forsaken the Lord, The fountain of living waters.” (Jeremiah 17:13 NKJV)

So here, in the first part of the verse the Hebrew word for 'hope' is the same word as 'pool' and the Hebrew word 'ashamed' and 'dry' look the same.

So the first part of the verse is linked to the second part through the word play.

If you forsake the 'hope' of Israel, you will be 'ashamed'.
could also be translated as,
If you forsake the 'pool' of Israel, you will be 'dry'
which then corresponds to,
forsaking the fountain ... (you will be dry.)


I will give one more example of a pun, also in Jeremiah:

Moreover the word of the Lord came to me, saying,
 “Jeremiah, what do you see?”

And I said,
 “I see a branch of an almond tree.”

Then the Lord said to me,
 “You have seen well, for I am ready to perform My word.”
(Jeremiah 1:11-12)

In our typical reading of the Bible, do we even notice that there is something odd here?

Open my eyes,
that I may see Wondrous things
from Your law.
(Psalm 119:18)

In this case the English reader, if he even notices, is left wondering what 'a branch of an almond tree' has to do with God being 'ready to perform [His] word.'

Any guesses?

(I didn't think so.)

Here's what is lost in translation:

v. 11 in Hebrew שקד (shaqed) means 'almond'.
v. 12 in Hebrew שקד (shoqed) means 'ready' or 'diligent'.

The vowels were added centuries later, as little dots and marks around the letters. So as originally written these two words looked identical.

So the word play would be completely obvious (and necessary to see) in Hebrew, but is lost in translation, leaving the reader in any other language wondering, 'how does that make any sense?'

While there are a great many things lost in translation from the Hebrew because of word plays, those are not the only things lost! There are many more, and profoundly interesting things lost as well.


The Most Common Hebrew Word

Here we get to the reason for writing this article.

I will list a few of the most common words in the Hebrew scriptures. But first I must explain that what we have in English as 'a word' does not, in some cases, correspond to what is 'a word' in Hebrew. In English, very common words like 'the', 'in' and 'and' are 'words', but in Hebrew these are not separate 'words', but rather they are almost always a single letter that is prefixed to the word that they apply to, that is, the next Hebrew word.

So, for example, the very first word in the Bible is "In (the) beginning", or better just "In beginning" because the definite article 'the' is not in the Hebrew here. Now the word 'In' is just a single letter 'bait' like our letter 'B' prefixed to the word 'beginning' you could think of such a single word in English as 'Inbeginning' (one word.)

That being said, now in the list of the first few most common words in the Hebrew scriptures, the first four are prefix letters. Here is the list with the most common at the top:

RankHebrewTransNotes
1וand(prefix letter 'v')
2הthe(prefix letter 'h')
3לto(prefix letter 'l')
4בin(prefix letter 'b')
5את('et')<-- here it is!
6מןfrom
7יהוהYehovah(God's name)
8עלon
9אלto or god
10אשרthat
11כלall
12אמרsay
13לאnot
14בנson
...etc.

So number 5, 'et' is the most common word that is a stand-alone 'word', not just an attached prefix letter. So we can say that it is the most common, what we think of as a 'word'.

But I didn't tell you the word like I did with all the others, where I gave you the English equivalent. The reason is, I can't. There is no equivalent in, I think, any other language on the planet. (I could be wrong about that.) But at least there certainly is no equivalent in English or Greek.

The reason is that this word does not have a 'meaning' in the sense we think of as a meaning. In language we have nouns which are the names of objects, things or even ideas. Verbs are actions and other words are descriptive of other characteristics like 'red' or 'fast', etc. But this most common Hebrew word has no meaning like that. Rather, it has a 'grammatical function' - it marks the object of a verb. In English we do that by word order; "John loves Mary" means that John is the 'subject' of the sentence, he is the one doing the 'loving', and Mary it the 'object' of his love. In Hebrew (using English words) it might be written "Loves John et Mary." The 'et' designates which of the two people named, 'et' Mary, is the one receiving the love.

So far I have been spelling this word as 'et', but more correctly it should be 'at' (not to be confused with the English word 'at'.) So while I will continue to spell it 'et', it actually starts with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet 'Aleph' which is the Hebrew word 'ox', and this letter corresponds with the first letter in Greek 'alpha' and the English letter 'A'. But in Hebrew this letter is not a vowel like it is in both Greek and English. There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and they are all consonants. There are no 'vowels' in the Hebrew alphabet, although a few of the letters can function like vowels in some words (actually often.) This first letter 'aleph' has a consonant sound called a glottal-stop. It is often described by the 'sound' of the 'break' in the middle of the English word "Uh-Oh" where the back of your throat is momentarily closed (stopped). So words like "apple," "ate," and "honor" all start with this 'stop' sound.

What about the other letter in this word?

't' is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

So 'at' is the first and the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Does that ring a bell?

Jesus said;

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
(Revelation 1:8 NKJV)

and,

saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” and, “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.”
(Revelation 1:11 NKJV)

Now we need to look at these two verses again; what about this 'omega'? Well it is the last letter of the Greek alphabet!

But wait, something isn't quite right here.

These verses from Revelation are translated from Greek and the last letter in Greek, 'omega' ('O-mega, meaning 'Big O') is not the same as the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet, so you may think there's nothing to see here, it's just an 'almost coincidence.'

But if we look into it we find something interesting.


The Greek Manuscripts of Revelation

I gave two examples of "Alpha and Omega" from Revelation, but there are four in Revelation. They are Revelation 1:8, 11; 21:6 and 22:13. So it seems that Jesus is emphasizing this point by saying it four times.

When we look at the Greek manuscripts we find some interesting variations. In some of the Greek versions we see just the Greek letters "'Α' and 'Ω'", while other manuscripts have the 'Α' spelled out as "alpha" (in Greek letters), but the 'Ω' is not spelled out. This is an interesting and strong indication that something else is going on here.

We understand that Jesus spoke in his native language, which was Hebrew, not Greek. Now Hebrew does not have any letter corresponding to the Greek letter 'omega', therefore He certainly did not say "I am the alpha and the omega." That is only the Greek translation of what he actually said. What it would have been in Hebrew is, "I am the aleph and the tav", which are the first and last letters in the Hebrew alphabet. That is why the omega is not spelled out, but the alpha is because it more directly corresponds to the Hebrew aleph.

Now with this evidence in view, Jesus said He was the same two letters that make up this very interesting untranslatable Hebrew word 'et' (or 'at').

So the 'almost-coincidence' is now a full coincidence! But is there a significance to this coincidence?

Oh, Yes!


The Ancient 'Pictographic' Hebrew

When you read most anything in Hebrew today, the letters that you see are not actually Hebrew letters. They are Aramaic letters from the Aramaic alphabet. When the Southern Kingdom of Judah was taken in the captivity into Babylon for seventy years, they had to learn and speak Aramaic, the language of Babylon, (also called 'Chaldean'.) So at the end of the 70 year captivity a small 'remnant' of the people returned to Jerusalem in the land of Judah (formerly Israel) and they brought with them the language of Babylon, Aramaic. From that time on, much of the writing of Jewish literature was in the Aramaic language. The two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic are quite similar and each have a twenty-two letter alphabet that, although the letters look entirely different, do correspond with each other from beginning to end.

So if we go back to the very most ancient Hebrew alphabet, all 22 letters are actually little pictures of real things. So the first letter, 'aleph', which is the word 'ox' was actually a picture of an ox head, facing left. I say, facing left, because Hebrew is written from right-to-left, the opposite of English. Now the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet is 'tav' which corresponds to our letter 'T', and in the ancient 'pictographic' Hebrew looked like two crossed sticks just like our lower case 't' (just a straight vertical line with a shorter horizontal line crossing it.) The 'object' it was a picture of was used as a marker for something, or a destination. For example they may have used it as a marker at the edge of a field when plowing to keep their eye on so they would make a nice straight furrow with the plow.

If you think about that picture now, today, it looks like a Roman cross, upon which Jesus was crucified.

So if you put the two together, starting from the right, you have an ox head facing left, and a cross in front of it.

The Hebrew word for 'God' is "El". It is the same ox head with a 'lamed' ('L') in front of it. The ox was understood to represent God, probably because of the strength of an ox--God is strong! And the word for God, "El" represents God as a strong guide, because a lamed is a picture of a shepherd's hook for guiding sheep. So "EL" is an ox head with a shepherds hook in front of it. Also remember that when Moses was up on mount Sinai for a long time, and the children of Israel were getting impatient, they asked Aaron to make a god for them, so he made a golden calf (an ox calf.) So they certainly did associate the ox with a 'god'.

So this most common word in the Hebrew Old Testament (the old covenant) was God facing the cross!

Now this is getting to be way more than a strange 'coincidence.'

There's more.

This most common non-translatable word has a grammatical function to mark the object of the verb. Verbs denote actions. The object of an action has to do with the result or purpose of an action. So think of it as the goal and purpose of all of God's actions in the old covenant was God facing the cross. So many centuries before anyone had any idea that there would ever even be such a thing as crucifixion on a cross, God hid His plan in the most common word He ever spoke. This little word is the only word that occurs twice in the very first verse in the Hebrew Bible.

It had to be hidden in plain sight of every page of the Hebrew scriptures. It had to be hidden because, as Paul says;

"... which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory."
(1 Corinthians 2:8 NKJV)

I have tears in my eyes as I write this, because of the amazing wisdom of our God.

Jesus is that very God facing the cross from the very beginning of creation!

When you think that is such an amazing reality, and it must be the whole story...

No, there's even more!!!


Aramaic 'Estrangela' Script

At the time of the fulfillment of this crucifixion of Jesus on the cross, the Aramaic language was also spoken in Judea. Many words in Hebrew get a slight variation in Aramaic. Take the Hebrew word translated into Greek as "Christ." The Hebrew word (we say Messiah), is really more like 'Meshiach' (the -ch ending is a sound we don't have in English. It's in the back of the throat through some phlegm.) But in Aramaic the ending letters get rearranged so it ends with the 'a' sound, as 'Meshicha'. This little reversal of the letters at the end of words happens to a lot of words going from Hebrew to Aramaic. Also the writing style has changed in Aramaic from the individual letters to a script style like our cursive where the letters are connected to each other. This cursive Aramaic writing is called Estrangela.


'Ligatures'

In the Estrangela script, the letter 'aleph' has a rather stretched out shape, and a great many words end with this letter. Because of its stretched out shape, it often overlaps with the letter next to it. So there is this thing called a 'ligature'. This word 'ligature' is a typesetting term. In a printed book, in English, often the letters 'fi' as in words like 'find' will combine the letters 'f' and 'i' into a 'ligature' where instead of using two separate letters, a special combination "letter" is used where the 'i' is tucked in close to the 'f' so the dot of the 'i' nicely fits just perfectly under the hook on the top of the 'f' so the end of the hook of the 'f' serves also as the dot for the 'i'. If you examine a few books, especially older ones, you will likely see these. That is a 'ligature'.

In Aramaic books printed in Estrangela there are two very common ligatures, and many words end with these combined letters. The two ligatures are 'ta' and 'la' . (These are the only two 'ligatures' given for the Estrangela script.) Interestingly they each occur only at the end of a word (they are called 'final' forms.) Now notice that these two combinations are the same letters in the Hebrew word for God 'el' and this most common word 'et', except they are both reversed into 'la' and 'ta' . Note that the 'e' is actually the same letter as the 'a', the "aleph."


So What Does This All Mean?

Well if you remember 'EL' is 'God', the "strong guide" with the shepherd's hook in front of him, but now in Aramaic the shepherd's hook is behind him. And the other word in Hebrew the cross is in front of him, but now the cross is behind him, because the New Testament was written after He went through the crucifixion.

And finally, the word 'God' in the Hebrew Old Testament (old covenant) was like the law, where God was trying to guide the children of Israel with the shepherd's hook in front of him. But now that Jesus has come and shown us the way, the shepherd's hook is behind him. It's no longer by the law, the shepherd's hook is behind him meaning "follow me." — That works a whole lot better!

It is the glory of God
to conceal a matter,
But the glory of kings
is to search out a matter.
(Proverbs 25:2)




Copyright © 2023 by Harvey Block
(2023/07/20 rev 2023/11/01) on HarveyBlock.Net