“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…
He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside still waters. Psalm 23:2 Hebrew World He leads me – Such a familiar verse requires much more careful examination. It’s just too easy to breeze past these still waters, imagining that there isn’t much more to the sentence than its obvious imagery of…
A psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. Shepherd – Back to Paleo-Hebrew, the text David used to write this psalm. Now that we know mizmor David is memorial and emotional instruction, we can look at the next key word in the Masoretic text, roi (shepherd). The first thing we…
A psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. Psalm – We all know this most famous psalm. At least we thought we knew it. Here it is in re-translated Paleo-Hebrew. Of course, the 23rd psalm doesn’t start with “The Lord is . . .” It starts with mizmor David, “a…
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Exodus 20:8: ESV The Sabbath day – And what does this mean? Does it mean we spend the day meditating on God? Does it mean we sit around wondering if doing the next thing will violate the commandment about rest? Perhaps we need to look at the original…
“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.” Exodus 20:4 NASB Earth – The Hebrew word mitahat combines the preposition min with the adverb tahat. This combination produces the pictograph “Water/Massive/Chaos + Seal/Sign/Covenant + Fence/Separate/Surround…
“You shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:3 ESV You shall have no – When I visited the British Museum years ago, I bought a game about Egyptian hieroglyphics. It included many rubber stamps of hieroglyphs and an inkpad and provided instructions about constructing sentences by using these markings. Many years later when…
Our faithful reader, Brett R., pointed out that I (yes, even I) missed the complete Paleo-Hebraic spelling of the name. Here is my correction (in case you’re keeping track). Thanks, Brett. And God said to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM;” and he said, “Thus shall you say to Israel, I AM has sent me…
And God said to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM;” and he said, “Thus shall you say to Israel, I AM has sent me to you.” Exodus 3:14 Hebrew World translation I AM THAT I AM – It is fairly well understood that “God” is not the name of the Hebrew deity. “God” is more or…
