Are You Sitting Down?

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.  When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high; Hebrews 1:3

Radiance – This one might take some time.  It will be a bit difficult.  But unless you grasp what we are about to explore, there is little chance you will be able to really appreciate what our New Testament texts say.  Why can we make such a bold assertion?  Because the New Testament Greek text reflects a decidedly Hebrew view of the world and this view of the world contains some fundamentally different concepts than the Greek language employed.  If we read these translated verses with Greek ideals and ideas, we just won’t hear what the author is saying.

You will say, “Well, of course.  We all know this.  The New Testament is written from a Jewish perspective.”  But it’s a bit deeper than that.  You see, even the Jewish perspective of the first century was already influenced by Greek thinking.  So, Jewish authors like Josephus and some of the rabbis actually think like Greeks, not like ancient Hebrews.  You can find this influence even today in the Hebrew prayer book.[1] What we want to understand are the thought forms of ancient Hebrew – the thought forms that belong to the language of the Tanakh – and to the ideas of Yeshua, the reformer.  Sometimes the rabbinic material won’t help here.

We begin with one of the crucial distinctions between Hebrew and Greek.  In Hebrew, the basic meaning of verbs “always expresses a movement or activity”[2] as opposed to Greek verbs which express static states of being.  This means that “motionless and fixed being is for the Hebrews a nonentity; it does not exist for them.  Only ‘being’ which stands in inner relation with something active and moving is a reality to them.”[3] Think about what this means!  Our religious vocabulary is filled with static concepts: sin, atonement, grace, righteousness, perfection, omniscience, justification, forgiveness, etc.  We define these as “states of being.”  We do not see them as movements or actions.  We think of “forgiveness” as a fixed spiritual condition, something that is settled by God’s grace, something that grants us a legal status before Him.  But that conceptualization is absolutely foreign to the Hebrew view.  Forgiveness cannot be a fixed legal status.  That would entail that it does not exist.  Whatever forgiveness is, it is something that is either in motion or related to a condition of movement.  It is about moving either toward or away from something.  Just think about what this implies.

Now let’s look at the Greek word apaugasma (radiance).  This compound word comes from apo (from) and augazo (to shine forth, to beam upon).  But the Greek noun disguises a Hebrew verb – kavah – to burn.[4] If Hebrew verbs always express motion, then our concept of radiance cannot fit.  We think of radiance as a state of brilliance but the Hebrew idea must include movement.  What does radiance mean as movement?  It must mean that the underlying concept is the movement from impure to pure. How do we derive this?  What is burned before God is purified.  The burned offering purifies the offender by removing the offense.  Even the pictograph conveys the same imagery.  Kaf-Vav-Hey displays “what comes from securing the open hand.”  How does a follower of YHWH secure the open hand?  Through burnt offering.

If we read Hebrews 1:3 from a Greek worldview, we will think that this verse describes an attribute of the Messiah.  But if we are Hebrew, we will see that this is about the action of sacrificing.  In other words, as Greek interpreters, we think this describes a characteristic of the Messiah, but as Hebrew interpreters we know that it is about the actions of the Messiah.

If you thought you could read the letter to the Hebrews from the Greek text, you might want to reconsider.  If you thought you could read the Old Testament with contemporary, Western eyes, you came to the text with the wrong glasses.  Imagine what it will mean to your theology if Hebrew is about movement, not things.  We might have to take a second look at some of the fundamentals like perfect, eternal and immutable. We might have to start thinking of God in the doing of the world.  Are you sitting down?

Topical Index:  radiance, apaugasma, burn, kavah, verbs, Hebrews 1:3

[2] Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), p. 28.

[3] Boman, p. 31.

[4] Mikvah, see Leviticus 13:24