October 3rd, 2020

There is an aspect of the biblical languages that is usually overlooked these days. And I should, at the start, thank one of my teachers at Concordia Seminary, Dr. Paul Raabe, for his emphasis on such a thing.​

You could say that some of the writers of Old Testament poetry were really masters of the language. They were extremely careful with their words. And sometimes they would pick two words that were similar in sound but very opposite in their meanings. When one would hear the phrase in Hebrew, it would sound so nice. But its meaning would be so much the opposite. Something like that gets your attention quite quickly.

This happens at the end of the Old Testament text for this Sunday [Isaiah 5:1-7], the last half of verse 7 (English Standard Version):

‘…and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, an outcry!’

The footnotes at the bottom of the text are somewhat helpful (unfortunately they do not appear in the bulletin insert for this Sunday). “The Hebrew words for justice and bloodshed sound alike.” And hopefully you could have predicted the second one: “The Hebrew words for righteous (sic) and outcry sound alike.”

What to do? Usually the translation follows the meaning of the words, and should not that always be the case? But perhaps there could be a set of words that would be closer in sound than another set.


To give you an idea of how they sound, here is my try at a phonetic spelling of these four words, along with the vast majority of the main definitions as they appear in Holladay’s A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1971):

Mish-paht: 1. Decision by arbitration, legal decision 2. Legal case 3. Legal claim 4. Conformity
Mis-pah: breach of law
Tse-theh-kah: 1: Righteousness = blameless behavior, honesty 2. Righteousness 3. Justice (of a human judge) 4. Justice (characteristic of God the divine judge) 5. Righteousness = godliness….
Tse-ah-kah: Cry out, raise a cry of wailing, call for help

Dr. Raabe was very encouraging when he proposed one solution for the second pair of words that is below. Perhaps people could think of other possible translations that would be both close in meaning and in sound. I am proposing the first pair. And perhaps you could think of another for that one; it is certainly not as good as the one proposed by Dr. Raabe. 

'...and he looked for a judgment order, but behold, disorder; for what is right, but behold, a riot!'

Now to think about just one small passage of scripture for a while is certainly not a bad thing.