Biding Our Time
“Many nations will pass by this city; and they will say to one another, ‘Why has the Lord done this to this great city?’Then they will answer, ‘Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord their God and bowed down to other gods and served them.’” Jeremiah 22:8-9 NASB
Bowed down – After hundreds of years of divine mercy, Isreal finally learned the lesson of idolatry. It was a severe one. Ever since the Babylonian Captivity, Isreal has never worshipped a false God again. We know the history, but unless we know the vocabulary, we might think that Israel’s mistake was a religious one, that what needed correction was proper religious behavior. Unfortunately, the verbal root of this act of bowing down encompasses a lot more than religious ritual.
ḥāwâ “in its original sense meant to prostrate oneself on the ground as in Neh 8:6 “worshipped” (KJV, RSV) but more correctly “prostrated themselves” (neb, jb, nab) as the phrase ʾārṣâ “to the ground” requires. Prostration was quite common as an act of submission before a superior.”[1]
Yamauchi adds some contemporary context:
Muslims perform their salaḥ or prayer by an elaborately prescribed sgûd (cf. Heb sāgad “to bow down”) in which the forehead must touch the ground.
The Greek word proskuneō, which is used to translate hištaḥăwâ 148 times in the LXX, had a semantic development similar to the Hebrew word. Like it proskuneō can mean either “prostration” or “worship.” Whether the proskunēsis which Alexander the Great received implied “worship” or simply “obeisance” was uncertain to his contemporaries, as it has been to scholars.[2]
From this we can see what ḥāwâ implied, namely, submission. Religious ritual might be the more obvious action but it isn’t the only one. Any act of submission carries hints of ḥāwâ, but it is the full and complete act of submission that becomes worship. This demands that we ask ourselves, “What do I give myself completely to? What do I submit my will to?”
That’s not an easy question to answer. Why not? Because we tend to compartmentalize our behaviors and alliances rather than focusing on our fundamental orientation. We worship God within the boundaries of religious life, but we just as easily submit to causes, economic goals, political alignment, family traditions, addictive pressures. We think that offering God our service in religious circles circumvents idolatry, but all we really do is offer Him a part of our identity. Until service on God’s behalf rules every aspect of living, we are still skirting the edges of ḥāwâ. The Captivity is as real a warning today as it was 2700 years ago.
Topical Index: worship, idolatry, ḥāwâ, bow down, Jeremiah 22:8-9
