Mother Tongue

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!” Deuteronomy 6:4 NASB

Hear – Most scholars shy away from any discussion of Paleo-Hebrew. Everyone knows that Paleo or Proto Hebrew was the written language of Israel prior to the Babylonia captivity. There are some significant examples confirming this in archeological discoveries (you can see them in the Israel museum). But because the language is pictographic (and variations of such), and because we have no extant biblical texts in Proto-Hebrew, and because pictographic languages do not display a singular correspondence with ideas (a single pictograph can have multiple meanings), scholars of the post-Babylonia block script found in the oldest extant documents are loath to attempt to reconstruct the Paleo text. Nevertheless, it is without doubt that Moses wrote in an alphabet derived from the Phoenicians, not in the kind of script we find in the Masoretic text today.

This raises an interesting path of inquiry. Given the cautions that must be in place when backward translating the Masoretic text into Proto-Hebrew, would we find any useful enhancement to our understanding if we pretended that we received the text as Moses wrote it?  In other words, if we supposed that we were in the original audience and read the original characters, what would we find? This doesn’t mean we will replace what we know from post-Babylonia script. After all, the text of the Tanakh has been canonized in its post-Babylonia form. It is the standard. But the fact that the original written Torah was transmitted with a different alphabet is tantalizing. Just suppose we could investigate it. What would we find?

Let’s look at only this one verse, the foundation of all Jewish monotheism, the single most important distinction between Judaism and every other religion, including Christianity. In Paleo-Hebrew it looks like this:

If we disassemble the words into consonants and represent the consonants as pictures, we may get something like this:

Shema – (teeth-water (chaos)-eye) – a series of pictures that contain the ideas of consuming or destroying, chaos and experience. Perhaps we could understand this as “experiencing the consumption of chaos,” or, “eating” chaos. Something along the lines of destroying chaos by consuming its threat. This might suggest that listening to YHVH, the one true God, paying attention to Him and obeying Him is an activity that removes chaos from our lives. We know that shema means both “hear” and “obey,” but we might be surprised to discover that these ideas are connected to overcoming chaos. Overcoming chaos would be important to the original audience since Egyptian mythology placed great emphasis on the primal sea, the realm of chaos, as a constant threat to life. The picture represented by shema, that includes the idea that obedience destroys chaos, is a powerful one, and one that would resonate with the ex-slaves coming out of Egypt. Without the Proto-Hebrew, we wouldn’t see this connection.

Israel – (work-consume-person-strength-authority) – Israel is described as the combination of these pictures. This might suggest ideas like “Israel is the collective person (“my son”) whose task is to act with the strength of authority.” Or perhaps we should follow up on the previous idea of destroying the threat of chaos and read these pictographs as “Israel’s work of destroying chaos is found in its strength as authority.” No matter how the translation of these images is ultimately represented in a sentence, it seems clear that Israel is expected to act in a way that demonstrates its authority by overcoming chaos. Its work is to exhibit as a chosen people what God is capable of doing. Once again, this makes sense in the context of Israel’s exodus. YHVH calls His people to be His royal priesthood, to act with such obedience that the nations see YHVH’s hand in the lives of these people and are attracted to YHVH. Israel’s job is to be the vanguard of those who overcome the chaos of the world, and as such, to be the guiding light for all the nations of the earth. Kushner’s comment contains these images: “The name Yisrael is a combination of a verb that means “to rule” in the future tense—yisrah—and el, a noun that means ‘God’.”[1]

YHVH – Now we encounter a most difficult Hebrew word precisely because of the tradition of reverence associated with this, the personal name of God. In alphabetic script it is the Tetragrammaton, the four letters Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey, not pronounced by religious Jews for more than two millennia. No one knows what vowels should be connected to these consonants. But the pictograph is clear: “The hand, the work, the deed reveals what is secured as revealed.” Seekins suggests the following: “The Maker of all that is, In His hand is all that exists or The Self-Existent” treating the Hey as a sign of existence rather than “to reveal.”[2] Seekins may be correct but it seems that his treatment introduces philosophical concepts commensurate with Greek thinking about existence rather than ideas fashioned in the cultural milieu of Egypt. Furthermore, Egyptian religious thinking did not deal with concepts of self-existence. It dealt with ideas about creation, power and death. A pictograph representing God’s personal name would have to speak to these cultural assumptions if it were to have immediate relevance to the children of Israel. What God’s personal name suggests is that His deeds guarantee (secure) what He reveals about Himself. We might read the symbols in this word as, “Deeds reveal, security revealed,” or “The deeds reveal the certainty of what we behold.”

This is perfectly compatible with God’s response to Moses when Moses asks, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?” God responds to Moses question with a declaration of fulfillment of the prophetic assignment. That fulfillment is a bit baffling for God says that Moses will know that he has been chosen for this task when he brings the people to this mountain to worship God. In other words, after Moses has accomplished the task God gives him, then he will know that God has sent him. The deed is the guarantee of the promise. God’s personal name contains His deeds and is therefore the guarantee of His promises. In an Egyptian culture, what matters is not the claim of self-existence or first cause or maker of all that is. What matters is what the god does! The culture that surrounded the children of Israel was a culture of powerful displays of the authority of the gods. That’s the entire purpose of the plagues—battles between rival claims of divinity. Now, as YHVH sets forth His expectations for worship, the relevant background is the authority demonstrated by His acts. The guarantee of His status as the only true God is the exodus itself. He is the one who accomplishes the liberation. He is the one who establishes a new nation. He is suzerain and as such his rule is unquestioned. His acts prove His claim over the people and His right to rule in the place of Pharaoh. “I am YHVH” is more than an identification of the divine name. In Paleo-Hebrew we see that the pictograph points us directly to the acts of YHVH as the guarantee of His status and power.

‘elohenu – The common Hebrew class noun for “gods” is elohim. Here the word is modified so that it incorporates the pronoun “our” in the term elohenu. The consonants are Aleph-Lamed-Hey-Nun-Vav. The pictograph is “Strength/Leader/First + Control/Authority + Behold/ to Reveal + Life/Activity + ‘And’/to Add/to Secure.”

According to Seekins, the singular el carries the picture “strong controller.” But here we have the more common plural (elohim) modified as a genitive. The picture of the strong controller becomes the revelation (“behold”) of His character as the One who secures life. He is known as our God because He guarantees life for His people. He is specifically Israel’s God, extending His open hand toward Israel and guaranteeing His covenant commitment to Israel. The word is not simply elohim, the stronger controller revealed in his deeds over chaos, but rather elohenu, the strong controller in whom we find life. When the children of Israel are freed from Pharaoh, they are not freed to independence. They are freed from one sovereign in order to come under the reign of another, but this new suzerain guarantees them life when the past suzerain was a tyrant of death.

‘ehad – Christian theology attempts to redefine this word as “unity,” rather than singularity. That slight-of-hand opens the door for the further declaration of a tri-une God, something no Jewish monotheist could ever have imagined. ‘ehad does not mean a single unit. It means one, single, first, each, once – what is uniquely individual. The idea that ‘ehad means “unity” is often derived from Genesis 2:24 (“one flesh”), but the context makes it clear that Adam and Havvah do not become a single individual. The pictograph of Aleph-Chet-Daleth is the combination of strength/leader + to separate/fence + pathway/door/to enter. We might read this picture as “the pathway of the separated strength” or “the strength of a separate way.” Clearly ‘ehad refers to the singular status of YHVH and His way as separate from all other paths. As the children of Israel escape Egypt, they must also leave behind all the competing gods, all the other ways, all the alternatives. They must not only see YHVH as the guarantor of life but as the exclusive and only means of living.

Perhaps we have learned something in the pictures after all.

Topical Index: Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4, Paleo-Hebrew

[1] Aviyah Kushner, The Grammar of God, p. 67.

[2] Seekins, p. 169.