Much easier to do this back in my office with my books to hand, so I can add a few things to my post last night.
One, the plural ofbamahinIsaiah 14:14—to which the person who did the video refers in order to justify his back-translation ofbamah—is indeedbamatey; or better,bāmātê, since theyodh there isn’t functioning as a consonant but rather as a vowel marker. (Actually, the root word should really be writtenbāmâ, since the closinghēisn’t really a consonant either, but also just a vowel marker.)
Two, now that I’ve had the chance to sit down with theNew International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis(NIDOTTE to its friends), I can say with confidence that this conjectured back-translation is completely wrongheaded. The wordbāmâis used in several places in the OT in the stereotyped phrase “to tread/ride on the heights of,” as NIDOTTE says, “to express God’s absolute sovereignty over land and sea”; Isaiah puts this phrase in the mouth of the king of Babylon to express his arrogant presumption. The word isneverused to denote Heaven, the place where God dwells, however, and never would have been, since the primary meaning ofbāmâwas a place of worship (the “high places” that the kings of Israel/Judah are criticized throughout the middle OT for not taking down); the word for “heights” thatisused in this way ismārôm. Besides, if Jesushadusedbāmâ, we wouldn’t have to guess, since it actually passed into NT Greek in the formbēma.
Instead, looking at the semantic field, the word Jesus would have actually used would have beenšāmayim(or its Aramaic cognate), which is the word that actually means “heaven” (it’s paralleled with other words that mean “height,” “sky,” “firmament,” etc., but those words aren’t used by themselves to mean “heaven”). As such, evenkībārāq min-ûbāmātê, as little as that sounds like “Barack Obama,” is clearly not what Jesus actually said; the likeliest back-translation of the words “I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven” into Hebrew, rather, would behāzâ(orrā’â)ha-śātān kībārāq min-vešāmayim.
All of which is to say, the idea that Jesus said “I saw Satan as Barack Obama” is utterly unsupported by the facts, and unsustainable on the basis of any real understanding of Hebrew; it’s contemptible nonsense to fool the credulous and pre-deceived, nothing more.
Update:Shane VanderHart’s post on thison his blog,Caffeinated Thoughts, is also well worth checking out, as he adds some good points.
Ordinarily, I just ignore things like this; but for some reason, this idiot really irks me. (HT: Allahpundit)
This guy doesn’t even fall into the “knows just enough Hebrew to be dangerous” category, because he doesn’t actually know any Hebrew at all—or, indeed, much of anythingabout Hebrew. For all his pompous statement “I will report the facts. You can decide,” he’s precious short on facts andlongon false assertions. Watch the video if you want to, and then let’s go through it, if you’re interested. (If you aren’t, don’t bother to click “Read More,” just scroll down to the next post.)
One: “Aramaic is the most ancient form of Hebrew.” That’s about like calling French the most ancient form of Portuguese. Aramaic isn’t a form of Hebrew, it’sa different language—closely related, another Northwest Semitic language, but a different language.
Two: he relies on back-translations, which are necessarily conjectural, but presents them as if they were proven fact. Sloppy. Very sloppy.
Three:barackis the Arabic cognate of Hebrewbarak, which is also used as a name (so see Judges 4-5; “Barak” is the name of Deborah’s general).Barakmeans “he blesses” or “he kneels”; the wordbaruch, which we also know as a name, means “blessed” and is the noun form of this verb.Baraqmay sound the same, but it’s a completely different word, with a completely different root (beth-resh-qophinstead ofbeth-resh-kaph); the similarity in sound is meaningless, nothing but a red herring.
Four: the person who made this video is clearly unaware that the Hebrew alphabet does not have any vowels. During the post-biblical period a group of scholars called the Masoretes added pointing (a system of dots) to indicate vowels, to preserve the reading of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, but these are not original to the text. A couple consonants,yodhandvav, wereused in the original Hebrew to indicate certain vowels(hēwas also used this way at the end of words, much as we end words with “-ah” and “-oh”); the Masoretes included notations in their pointing system to indicate when these consonants were being, essentially, used as vowels.
Five: even ifbamah(or rather its Aramaic equivalent) was in fact the word Jesus used inLuke 10:18, as this video suggests, it would have been plural, not singular, and quite different in form (bamatey, I think; I don’t have my language tools with me at the moment, and Hebrew was never my strong suit).
Six: the individual who did this video declares, “the Hebrew letterwaw[orvav] is often transliterated as a ‘U.’ Some scholars use the ‘O’ for this transliteration. It is primarily used as a conjunction to join concepts together.”
This is wrong.
As I noted above, one of the ways in which Hebrew used thevav(and also theyodhand the he) was to indicate certain vowels; when the Masoretes came along to add vowel pointing to help people know how to pronounce the text, they came up with special points to indicate when, say,vavwas being used as a “u” (sureq) or an “o” (holem-vav), as opposed to when it was simply a consonantal “v.” (The technical term for those ismatres lectiones, or “mothers of reading.”) It is incorrect to say thatvav“is often transliterated as a ‘u’,” and still more incorrect to say that ‘o’ is a different transliteration used by “some scholars.” Rather, sometimes when the consonantvavis in the text, it’s serving as a “u,” and sometimes it’s serving as an “o.”However, this isdifferentfrom the use ofvavin the Hebrew conjunction, which is the prefixve-.
Now, that said, one of the oddities of Hebrew is that beforebeth,mem, andpe, the conjunction changes fromveto asureq, becoming a “u” sound, which is no doubt what the person behind this video is trying, however ineptly, to say. Again, though, “heights” is plural, and so even if his assumption thatbamahunderlies the Greek text is correct, it would not be in the singular form bamah, but in a plural form.
Thus, it is simply wrong to assert that Jesus, in talking about Satan falling from heaven like lightning, would have saidubama; it’s wrong even if you assume that Jesus would have used bamahto denote heaven, which is unproven. Thus, the last name of our president isn’t in the text of Luke 10:18 in any way. As for our president’s first name, while Jesus might have said baraq, that’s not the same asbarak. Plus, the person behind this video has forgotten that Jesus didn’t say, “I saw Satan fall lightning heaven,” but “likelightningfromheaven”—there’s a preposition before, and another one in the middle, and rest assured the one in the middle isn’t “Hussein.” It would be, rather, the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrewmin-. The one before would be the equivalent to the Hebrew prefixki-.
As such, the closest to “Barack Obama” that Jesus could have spoken would have been something likekibaraq min-ubamatey. . . and that just isn’t good enough to support this farrago of nonsense that Jesus told us that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
Update:I’ve added a few key points to this argumenthere. I hate it when people misuse Scripture to their own ends; this is a particularly egregious example.
As thevitriol,invective, anddishonest attacksagainst Sarah Palincontinue to come from the Left, demonstrating thattheir determination to destroy herremains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.
I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probablysomewho did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.
The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter oflosingin Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people,only the politics matter.
Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.
Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group thathaspolitics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.
We need to start to fight this—and byweI don’t mean somebody out there, I meanus, the common folks, theordinary barbariansof this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they canexploitthe hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level,following the exampleof (of all people)David Mamet:
Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.
And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .
The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.
We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’sopinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way peopleholdtheir opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.
The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 8
Q. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good
and inclined toward all evil?
A. Yes,1unless we are born again,
by the Spirit of God.2
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
This is the doctrine typically referred to as “total depravity,” and it’s one that confuses some people.Andrew Kuyvenhoven’s explanation(28) is helpful here:
Sin is worse than we are inclined to think, and salvation is bigger than any church can tell.
The Bible teaches that, by nature, people are “totally depraved.” This is again a technical term, and it might be helpful to say, first, what it doesnotmean. We don’t mean to say that people are as bad as they can possibly be. Most of the time, most of them are not. Neither do we mean that ordinary decent people cannot perform acts of kindness, helpfulness, courtesy, and so on. Many people do, and we thank God for the milk of human kindness and the paint of civilized surroundings.
By total depravity, we mean that sin has affected every part of every human being. . . .
The only solution to total depravity is total renewal. No person can do anything that is really acceptable to God unless he or she has a new heart.
The Christian life is a life of total dependence on the grace and the power of God. There is no “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” here, and no suggestion that if you just work harder, you can be good enough (nor the corollary that if anything’s wrong in your life, it must mean you’re not trying hard enough); nor is there any trace of the idea that to keep your salvation, you have tokeepworking harder. Rather, there is the call to joyful acceptance of our deliverance by Jesus Christ, who set us free from our slavery to sin, who took our death and gave us life.
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 7
Q. Then where does this corrupt human nature come from?
A. From the fall and disobedience of our first parents,
Adam and Eve, in Paradise.1
This fall has so poisoned our nature2
that we are born sinners—
corrupt from conception on.3
Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.
Our first ancestors fouled the well, and poisoned our inheritance.Kuyvenhovenputs it well, I think, when he says (27),
[The catechism] intentionally calls Adam and Eve our “parents,” thereby teaching that, just as black parents get black children and white parents get white children, so sinful parents get sinful children, whether they are yellow, red, black, or white. None of us can escape this poison, for all of us have parents. That’s the teaching.
And none of us can avoid passing it on, for all of us are sinners. As the father of three, I can testify that I am far more aware of my own depravity now than I ever was before they came along.
A. No.
God created them good1and in his own image,2
that is, in true righteousness and holiness,3
so that they might
truly know God their creator,4
love him with all their heart,
and live with him in eternal happiness
for his praise and glory.5
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
There’s a real tendency these days to appeal to genetics to explain behavior—and increasingly, to excuse behavior, as action is reframed as identity. The church can’t appeal to the word of God with regard to homosexual activity without someone (usually a good many someones) standing up and saying, “God made me this way, and therefore this is how I’m supposed to be, and therefore God can’t really have meant that.” Unfortunately, the steady repetition of that assertion has convinced a lot of folks (especially younger folks) who consider themselves evangelicals that it must be true. That has done considerable damage to the authority of Scripture in the American evangelical church.
I have no interest in the debate over whether or not or to what degree homosexual desires are a matter of genetics. To be blunt, I consider the whole question a red herring. We recognize this when it comes to other issues. From the studies I’ve seen, the heritability of alcoholism is about the same as the heritability of homosexual preferences, but nobody uses that as a defense for driving drunk. Certain cancers, we well know, come to us through our genes, yet we don’t tell cancer patients, “God made you this way, so he must want you to die of cancer.” (The federal government might, if Obamacare passes, but that’s another matter.) It would be quite consistent to label same-sex erotic desires just another inherited disease—but we don’t do that. This makes it clear that it’s not thegeneticelement that’s driving the argument, it’s theaffectiveelement. It’s the fact that those who practice such behaviors don’t want to give them up.
Since the appeal to genetics has been effective (whether logical or not), we can expect to see it raised as a defense for other behaviors as well. In time, it will become impossible for the church to call people to holiness without hearing, “God made me this way!” As such, it’s important to remind Christians that the Scriptures give the church a firm answer to this, to which the Heidelberg bears witness: No, he didn’t. We are all sinners,we are all bentto defy the will of God and to prefer evil to good in at least some areas of our lives, and all of our natural tendencies, preferences, orientations and desires arise out of sin-distorted hearts—butGod didn’t make us that way. God created us good, in his own image. Our sinful desires are someone else’s fault altogether.
Just because something is natural to us doesn’t make it right. Just because we inherited it along with our hair and eye color doesn’t mean that God approves of it. All it means is that we’re born sinful—just like everybody else.
A. No.1
I have a natural tendency
to hate God and my neighbor.2
Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.
This is what causes all the problems. This is what people don’t want to admit; but it’s true. Left to ourselves, we can’t live up to what God wants from us, because we aren’t bent to really love God or the people around us.We’re oriented all wrong; we need to be re-oriented and straightened out.
A. Christ teaches us this in summary in Matthew 22—
Love the Lord your God
with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your mind
and with all your strength.1
And the second is like it:
Love your neighbor as yourself.2
All the Law and the Prophets hang
on these two commandments.
Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references. Also, earlier and better manuscripts of Matthew 22 omit the words “and with all your strength.” They are found in Mark 12:30.
our Lord Jesus made the love-commandment the centerpiece of his teaching. In fact, his whole ministry was designed to teach us thatloveis God’s law, which everyone has broken, as well as God’s gift that enables all of Jesus’ followers to lead a new life.
Along with that, it must be said, his ministry was also designed to teach us what love reallyis, and to correct the false ideas we learn about love from our fallen world. We’re perfectly happy to believe that love is God’s law if we get to be the ones defining what that means . . . but we don’t.
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
For John Calvin, this is the first use of the Law: it shows us our sin by showing us our fundamental inability to keep it. It strips away our self-deception and our rationalizations and forces us to face ourselves as we really are—which is the necessary predicate for our salvation, because we won’t accept God’s grace until we accept that we need it.
As well, the Law shows us the true reason for human misery, and thus points us in the direction in which salvation can be found. This is an important gift, because even when we’ve admitted the problem, we tend to want to misdiagnose it (usually out of wishful thinking of some sort or another) as being something we can address on our own. As Jerome de Jong asks inGuilt, Grace, and Gratitude,
Man seems to be aware of the fact that he is miserable, but has he found the true source of his misery?
Left to our own devices, the answer is, “No, not really.”
When man seeks to find the source of his misery within the context of his own experience, the answers which he gives are false. His answers turn him in upon himself and the things with which he hopes to satisfy self. So far is man’s own understanding of his misery from leading him to God that all about us we see those who have experienced bitterness, despair, and utter hopelessness, who have out of this experience denied the reality of God. Man’s understanding of himself will have to come from outside himself. It must be revealed to him.
A. Three things:
first, how great my sin and misery are;1
second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;2
third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.3
Note: mouse over footnotes for Scripture references.
The 129 questions and answers of the Heidelberg Catechism are divided up into 52 parts, one for each Sunday of the year; in the old Dutch Reformed tradition, you’re supposed to go through it every year in church on that basis. I don’t know anyone who actually preaches or teaches through the Heidelberg every year, though I’ve heard there are folks in churches that still have Sunday evening services that use those to that purpose.
In any case, Q & A 1-2 make upLord’s Day 1of the Heidelberg Catechism and together serve as its introduction. #1 lays out the reason for our comfort: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” #2 then connects that to the rest of the Heidelberg, which is laid out according to that threefold structure.
Andrew Kuyvenhoven, in his Heidelberg commentaryComfort and Joy, notes that the folks who wrote this weren’t talking about comfort in any light sense (14):
The people who confessed this in the time of the Reformation were being persecuted for their faith. They feared for their lives. But, they said, even if we get killed, we belong to Jesus, body and soul, in life and in death. They confessed their comfort in the face of all threats. . . .
It istheChristian’s answer to life’s deepest questions and death’s darkest riddles. For here and for now it is the only comfort available. Without this comfort, life is senseless and death is hopeless. We need to say with great emphasis that this is the one and only comfort for all people.
And as the Heidelberg says in Q & A 2, this is a comfort which can only be found through the profound knowledge—not merely of the head but in the heart—of the bad news of human sin, the good news of our redemption, and the response of grateful and humble service. Kuyvenhoven lays this out well (16):
True faith has knowledge of sin, grace, and gratitude. If people have a superficial faith, they have a superficial knowledge of sin, of salvation, and of gratitude. Anyone who is growing in faith is growing in the knowledge of guilt, grace, and gratitude. And those of us who have deep faith have a deep knowledge of sin, a warm knowledge of our Savior, and a profound sense of gratitude.
He’s right; so was Donald Bruggink when he titled the commentary he edited on the Heidelberg in honor of its 400th anniversary in 1963Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. The Christian life isa life of gratitude, born out of the awareness of the depth of our sin and the height of our salvation, or it’s nothing at all.
