walk this way

Ha-lak (Hawlak)

Yesterday I was chatting with Scott about followers and how the church has really lost the concept of what it means to follow. It got me thinking about a Hebrew word that is sometimes translated as follow or following.

It’s a really great term, one of my all time favorites. Halak is a verb that at its heart means to walk.

But in the Hebrew a verb changes meaning a bit when it changes form. It keeps the idea of walking but in one form (The Niphal verb stem) the word stops being to walk and translates better as to cause walking or to lead.

I’m convinced that as believers we are called to both and can do neither well without the other.

We must walk with God, and lead for God. (Follow, and invite followers.)

We can’t lead well without first following. We can’t really follow for long without leading.

Following and Leading should be tied together, continuously bound, as at their heart they mean the same thing -- walk.

Walk. And cause to walk. It seems like it should be simple but it is very hard to find folks who strive to do both. 

A Sunday Supplement

Over the last couple of weeks we've been talking about the words "LORD" and "God." Specifically this Sunday we're looking at how often when we see LORD in our English bibles we're actually looking at God's name. I didn't bore you with too many of the details of how that came about...at least not until now.

My son’s name is DALTON. But, if you were to write his name in ancient Hebrew it would be written as DLTN. Why? Well the Hebrews didn’t write the vowels sounds in their alphabet. In fact the Hebrew alphabet is all consonants. If you knew Dalton you’d now his name even if it were written this way all the time: DLTN. This seemed alien to us just a few short years ago but in this day and age of text messaging we tend to leave the vowel sounds out of our English words as well. Hebrew was a language that was passed down through an oral tradition and they simply knew where the vowel sounds went because they heard the spoken words so often.

You could do the same thing in English without too much trouble with words that we hear often. For example:

DLTN WNT DWN TH HLL.

The context and knowledge of Dalton would tell you if this were:

Dalton went down the hill.

...or...

Dalton went down the hall.

...or even some other similar combination.

For much of its written history the Hebrew language was like that – no vowels, well they had vowel sounds, just no written vowels. Later a certain group of scholars/scribes/language dudes decided that the written text was being used infrequently enough that they needed to add/preserve the vowel sounds. There was one major problem, the text was seen as sacred so stuffing “A, E, I, O, and U sounds in would have been considered sacrilegious. So instead of adding more letters they added various points and dashes around the letters to show us which vowels sounds went where. So Dalton would be written something like this with the “a” and the “o” being placed under or over the text.

D_ALT_ON

None of this would matter too much because in modern Hebrew and in many Hebrew Bibles we have these dots and dashes that make the vowel sounds clear (at least for the most part.) But let’s imagine that the name DALTON was in the sacred text and that the folks that added the vowels sounds had never heard his name spoken aloud. How would they know which vowels to add? They wouldn’t. He could be:

D_ALT_ON

D_ELT^AN
D_ULT_IN

D^ILT_EN

Or some other combo, it could get even crazier if we started adding vowel sounds between the L and the T.

If you’re still reading I promise I’m getting to the point. For most words this wasn’t an issue because as I mentioned above people knew how to pronounce them as easily as I know how to pronounce DALTON today. But there was one very important word/name in Hebrew that folks didn’t pronounce. Apparently very early on the Jewish folks decided that pronouncing the name of God was akin to taking God’s name in vain. They were very, very cautious with God’s name.

God’s very real very clear and obvious name in the Scripture is something like this when transliterated into English consonants:

YHWH

When the Hebrews would read the text aloud they would substitute another word instead of the actual name of God. They would say “The Name” or they would say “LORD” because they simply found it too sacred to say YHWH. The trouble is after not saying YHWH for a long period of time folks forgot the original pronunciation. To make things even a bit more complicated the dudes that put in the vowel points many years later either left this word un-pointed or used the points for the vowels in their word for LORD which would remind the reader not to say the actual name aloud but to substitute the word LORD instead.

That leaves us with piles of potential pronunciations for the name YHWH.

Plus, certain languages have some sounds while not having others or they have letters that made one sound at one time only to be replaced with another sound later. The Hebrew “W” can also be pronounced as a “V” and I think it’s when the German language translations came about that they started replacing the “Y” sound with a “J” sound. So over the years as things have been translated we’ve seen a great deal of variations on God’s name.

Imagine all the combinations of vowels you can put over and under YHWH. Now consider changing the consonant Y to a J or the W to a V.

The two most popular pronunciations that we have today are:

Jehovah and Yahweh, with most modern scholars thinking Yahweh is our best guess.

Regardless of how you say it God’s name has meaning--we'll discuss it on Sunday (or if you missed it download the podcast.) 

God’s name means the existing one or the one who was and will be, or as it's most often translated into English -- I AM.