UPDATED: This can only make serious conservatives look bad

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 anything about Hebrew. For all his pompous statement “I will report the facts. You can decide,” he’s precious short on facts and long on 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’s a 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: barack is the Arabic cognate of Hebrew barak, which is also used as a name (so see Judges 4-5; “Barak” is the name of Deborah’s general). Barak means “he blesses” or “he kneels”; the word baruch, which we also know as a name, means “blessed” and is the noun form of this verb. Baraq may sound the same, but it’s a completely different word, with a completely different root (beth-resh-qoph instead of beth-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, yodh and vav, were used in the original Hebrew to indicate certain vowels (hē was 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 if bamah (or rather its Aramaic equivalent) was in fact the word Jesus used in Luke 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 letter waw [or vav] 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 the vav (and also the yodh and 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, vav was 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 is matres lectiones, or “mothers of reading.”) It is incorrect to say that vav “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 consonant vav is in the text, it’s serving as a “u,” and sometimes it’s serving as an “o.”However, this is different from the use of vav in the Hebrew conjunction, which is the prefix ve-.

Now, that said, one of the oddities of Hebrew is that before beth, mem, and pe, the conjunction changes from ve to a sureq, 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 that bamah underlies 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 said ubama; it’s wrong even if you assume that Jesus would have used bamah to 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 as barak. Plus, the person behind this video has forgotten that Jesus didn’t say, “I saw Satan fall lightning heaven,” but “like lightning from heaven”—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 Hebrew min-. The one before would be the equivalent to the Hebrew prefix ki-.

As such, the closest to “Barack Obama” that Jesus could have spoken would have been something like kibaraq 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 argument here. I hate it when people misuse Scripture to their own ends; this is a particularly egregious example.