Hebrew Myths and Word-Study Traps

Proverbs 30 is headed 'the words of Agur son of Jakeh', and Agur begins by confessing how little he knows: he is 'the most ignorant of men' and has 'not learned wisdom'. Then he states what he is sure of. In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) verse 5 opens כָּל־אִמְרַת אֱלוֹהַּ צְרוּפָה (kol-imrat eloah tserufah, every word of God is refined), and verse 6 begins אַל־תּוֹסְףְּ עַל־דְּבָרָיו (al-tosef al-devarav, do not add to his words). Verse 5 is almost a quotation of Psalm 18:30, and verse 6 applies Deuteronomy 4:2, 'You must not add to or subtract from what I command you'. Agur's wisdom is borrowed wisdom, and he knows it.

The warning is aimed at anyone who would put words in God's mouth, and that includes the teacher who announces that the Hebrew says something it does not. Such a teacher rarely means to deceive. He has usually heard something striking from a book, a website or another preacher, it has moved him, and he passes it on with the authority of the original language. His hearers cannot check. That is exactly why the warning matters. A false claim about Hebrew is an addition to God's words dressed as an explanation of them, and verse 6 says how it ends: God will 'prove you a liar'.

The Koine Greek lesson What the Tools Cannot Do sets out the general word-study fallacies, using Greek examples: reading a word's history into its meaning, loading every sense of a word into one verse, reading later meanings back into earlier texts, and treating a lexicon as if it could decide what only context decides. All of them apply to Hebrew, and that lesson should be read alongside this one. D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies (1984; second edition 1996) remains a clear guide to them. This lesson deals with three traps that are particular to Hebrew, or that come in a Hebrew costume, and then with how to cross-examine a claim.

The first myth is that each Hebrew letter is a picture with a meaning, and that a word's meaning can be read by adding up its letters. You will meet it in books, on websites and in sermons. A typical example: the word for father, אָב (av), is spelled aleph and bet; aleph is said to be a picture of an ox's head, meaning strength, and bet a picture of a house; so father means the strength of the house. The conclusion is pleasant, and something like it may even be true of fathers in Israel. But the method that produced it is false, and a false method will produce false conclusions as easily as true ones.

There is a real historical fact underneath. The alphabet that became Hebrew grew out of early alphabetic writing, known from inscriptions in Sinai and Egypt from roughly the first half of the second millennium BC, whose signs began as simple pictures. Each picture stood for the first sound of the word it showed: a sign shaped like an ox's head stood for the first sound of the word for ox, and a sign shaped like a house for the first sound of the word for house. That is why the letters are called aleph and bet. But by the time any book of the Old Testament was written, those signs had long since become letters standing for sounds, as the letters of the English alphabet stand for sounds, even though our A descends from the same ox's head. No Israelite reading אָב thought of an ox and a house, any more than an English reader thinks of an ox when he reads the word art.

Three further facts finish the myth. First, the letters on your screen are not the old shapes at all. Israel in the time of the kings wrote in an older script, now called paleo-Hebrew; the square letters of our printed Bibles were adopted from Aramaic writing after the exile. A picture-meaning read from a square letter is read from a shape the biblical writers before the exile never used. Second, the method contradicts itself. The same two consonants, aleph and bet, also spell a rare word for green shoots or blossoms, found in Job 8:12 ('While the shoots are still uncut') and Song of Solomon 6:11, which has nothing to do with strength or houses. Third, the biblical writers do play with words, often, but they play with sound. In Amos 8:2 the prophet sees a basket of קָיִץ (qayits, summer fruit), and the LORD answers that הַקֵּץ (haqqets, the end) has come; in Jeremiah 1:11-12 Jeremiah sees an almond branch, שָׁקֵד (shaqed), because God is watching, שֹׁקֵד (shoqed), over His word. Those are puns a listener hears. Nowhere does a biblical writer explain a word by the shapes of its letters.

In fairness, letter interpretation has an old history. The rabbis sometimes drew moral lessons from the shapes and order of the letters; the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 104a) records a children's reading of the alphabet as a string of short lessons. Psalm 119 and other alphabet poems use the letters to order a poem. But the rabbis offered their letter readings as devotional play alongside the plain sense, not as the meaning of the words, and an alphabet poem uses letters for structure, not for meaning. If you want to use an alphabet image in teaching, say plainly that it is an illustration. Never say the Hebrew means it. The same goes for claims about the object marker אֵת (et) as aleph and tav, the first and last letters, hiding a meaning about Christ as the first and the last. The word is a grammatical marker used thousands of times, including before the names of idols and enemies.

The second myth is the sentence that begins: Hebrew has no word for. Hebrew has no word for obey, only hear. Hebrew has no word for religion. Hebrew has no word for nature. Sometimes the first half is roughly true. The conclusion drawn from it, that the people who spoke the language could not think the thought, or always thought two ideas together, almost never follows.

Take obey. It is true that the ordinary verb behind obedience in the Old Testament is שָׁמַע (shama), the verb for hearing, which occurs well over a thousand times. The BSB renders it obey, or by a related word, in many places: 'if you will indeed obey My voice' (Exodus 19:5); 'All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient' (Exodus 24:7); 'obedience is better than sacrifice' (1 Samuel 15:22). And it is a fine thing to tell a congregation, from those verses, that God's word is spoken to be acted on, so that hearing it and ignoring it is not really hearing it at all. That is preaching from usage, and it is sound.

But the claim usually goes further: that in Hebrew thought to hear is to obey, full stop. The concordance says otherwise. In Genesis 3:10 Adam says, 'I heard Your voice in the garden', and he hid. He heard and did not obey. The same verb with the same noun, voice, means hearing in one verse and obeying in another, and what decides is the context and the construction: in Exodus 19:5, as in many verses where the BSB has obey, the voice is joined to the verb with the little preposition בְּ (be), while in Genesis 3:10 it is marked with the object marker. Hebrew did not lack the idea of obedience. It expressed it with a verb that also meant something else, as English uses heed and mind.

The careful statement of the problem comes from James Barr, whose book The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) argued that theologians had been reading conclusions about Hebrew thought straight off the vocabulary and grammar of the language. Among the books he criticised was Thorleif Boman's Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, which had contrasted a dynamic Hebrew mind with a static Greek one, partly on the basis of words and verb forms. Barr's central point, that a language's word stock is not a map of what its speakers could think, has been widely accepted among biblical scholars and linguists since. That does not mean words carry no cultural weight. It means that claims about how ancient people thought must be argued from what they said, in sentences, not from the presence or absence of a single word.

The third trap is the one lesson 2 warned about: reading a root's sense into every word built from it, or a word's oldest sense into every use. Hebrew invites this more than Greek, because Hebrew lexicons are arranged by root and the root is printed near the top of every entry. Three examples show the pattern.

The word כָּבוֹד (kavod, glory, honour) belongs to a root whose basic sense is to be heavy. It is often said that glory in Hebrew therefore means weight, and that every mention of God's glory speaks of his heaviness. The root connection is real, and in some passages a sense of weightiness or substance may well be in view. But kavod is used for wealth: Laban's sons complain that Jacob has 'built all this wealth at our father's expense' (Genesis 31:1), and the word is kavod. It is used for honour given to a person, and for the visible splendour of God's presence. What it means in a given verse must be shown from that verse.

The verb חָטָא (hata, to sin) is often said to mean simply to miss the mark, as an archer misses, so that sin in Hebrew is an innocent failure to hit a target. Again there is a real fact underneath: in Judges 20:16 the left-handed slingers of Benjamin 'could sling a stone at a hair without missing', and the verb is this root. But that is one use among some two hundred and forty, and in nearly all the others the verb means to do wrong against God or a neighbour, often knowingly. David says in Psalm 51:4, 'Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight', and the psalm piles up three words for wrongdoing in its opening lines: transgressions, iniquity and sin. Preaching sin as a mere miss empties that psalm of its weight.

And there is Strong's own example from lesson 2, the verb לָמַד (lamad) whose definition says 'properly, to goad', with its comment about the rod. A noun from the root does mean oxgoad. The verb, in every one of its uses, means to learn or to teach. Compare Proverbs 30:5 itself. The word צְרוּפָה (tserufah, refined) also has a vivid picture behind it, the smelter's furnace, and here the picture is right to preach, because the word is used again and again of refining metal: Psalm 12:6 calls the LORD's words 'like silver refined in a furnace'. The difference between the two cases is not the vividness of the picture. It is the evidence. One picture is earned by usage; the other is imported from a guess about origins.

When you meet a claim about a Hebrew word, whether in a book, online, from a visiting preacher or in your own notes, put six questions to it before you repeat it.

First, which word exactly? Find it in an interlinear, with its pieces, its root and its Strong's number. Many claims collapse at this step, because the word in the verse turns out not to be the word the claim is about. Second, is the claim about the letters, the root, or the use? Only the use tells you what a word means in a sentence. Letters tell you nothing; a root tells you a word's family. Third, does the claim survive the concordance? Read at least ten occurrences of the word, chosen from different books, and ask whether the claimed meaning fits them. If it fits only the verse the preacher chose, it is not the meaning of the word.

Fourth, would the claim hold if it were made about English? If someone argued that nice must mean foolish because that is what it meant six hundred years ago, or that a butterfly has something to do with butter, you would laugh. Apply the same test to Hebrew. Fifth, does any good translation or any recent commentary on the Hebrew say this? If a meaning is truly in the Hebrew, careful translators and commentators will usually have seen it. If only popular books and websites know it, be very cautious. Sixth, would the writer's first hearers have heard it? A meaning that depends on a letter shape they did not use, a root history they did not know, or an English pun is not in the text.

None of this makes Hebrew dull. The true observations are better than the myths: that the word for the LORD's flawless word is a smelter's word, that the verb for hearing is the verb for obeying, that Amos's summer fruit sounds like the end. Those are things you can show a congregation, with the evidence open on your phone, and they will still be true when someone checks. Agur's warning cuts both ways. Do not add to God's words. And do not take from them the real richness of the language they were given in.

Take out the two word cards you made in lesson 2 for your passage. For each card, put the six questions from section 5 to everything you wrote, especially to the sense you chose and to any striking idea you were hoping to preach. Write the answers in the margin of the card.

Look particularly at the line where you copied Strong's statement of the word's origin, which you marked with a question mark. Now decide what to do with it: strike it out, keep it as background, or, if the concordance supports it, promote it to evidence with the verses that show it. Then look at the sense you chose for your verse and ask whether you chose it because the verse requires it or because it would preach well. If the second, look again.

Finally, take the claim you wrote down in the inquiry, the one you had heard preached or read online, and write a short verdict on a fresh page: true, partly true, or not supported, with the evidence for your verdict in two or three lines. Keep that page. Over the rest of this track you will add to it, and by the capstone you will have a short list of Hebrew claims you have tested for yourself, which is worth more than a long list of claims you have merely heard.