Re: [Worship] Hebrew praise and worship

["Bruce L. Johnson" <bjohnson@worshipmap.com>]

Rebecca,

Can I advise you to be very careful about the popular "word studies" on
Hebrew worship words?     I know they are meant sincerely, but unfortunately
in this case most are based on misunderstandings of the sources.

Let me illustrate:
One thing people do is look up the Hebrew word in the dictionary at the
back of Strong's concordance.  Now the first thing listed under many of the
words in that dictionary is a guess about where the word came from.   Notice
I say 'a GUESS'.  In the case of English we may have written records of the
history of a word over centuries, including what it meant in "Old English."
But for Biblical Hebrew we don't have any such thing,  only guesses based on
the variety of uses a word has in the Bible, and on the use of 'distant
relatives' of the word in other Semitic languages, such as Arabic.  (It's
not surprising then that Hebrew dictionaries sometimes vary widely in their
guesses about where a word came from.)

Yet, even supposing that we DID have a record of the "original" meaning of a
Hebrew word,
or that some of our guesses are fairly reasonable, there is a problem.
Is that ancient
pre-Biblical meaning of the word it's "real" meaning?

Simple answer.  NO!      Just try it with English.  Look up the word "nice".
"Originally" it meant "ignorant" (as did the Latin word it came from).   But
if someone tells you what a "nice person" you are today, would you be
insulted because they had "really" said you were ignorant??        Of course
that's not what they meant.     And why should we think that a Biblical
writer's words would mean what they had meant a thousand years before (which
he probably knows nothing about!) and NOT what the word was used for in his
OWN time??

The second sort of mistake is to look up the listed meanings of the words
(in Strong's or some other dictionary) and pick ANY one (or even
all!)  of those meanings whereever you run across the word.   But again
that's not how language works, nor how a dictionary works.   Suppose I said
to you,  "I only did a fair job of explaining things."   You decide to look
up "fair" in the dictionary to be sure of what I meant,  and in the list of
meanings you find "beautiful," "light-skinned"  and "just".    Can you
simply substitute any of these meanings and conclude that's what I meant?
Is it likely that I even gave these other meanings any thought at all?
Yet that's what people sometimes do with the listings in a Hebrew
dictionary.

(BTW, this last point illustrates how we communicate NOT by using words in
isolation,  but by using them in STATEMENTS.    Words work TOGETHER to
convey meaning.)

One other thing to consider about "word studies."    Doesn't it strike you
as odd and somewhat disturbing when someone informs you the the word
"really" means something that you couldn't even begin to guess from reading
any English translation?      I'm not talking about something that perhaps
"adds" an emphasis that wasn't as clear to you in the English, but something
that seems completely unrelated,  sometimes even contrary to the
translation!             If the word  HALLELU(jah), for instance, actually
DOES have something to do with being '(clamoroulsy) foolish'**  then WHY is
that not at all hinted at in ANY of our English translations?          The
reason, I submit, is that the translations are correct and trustworthy, and
the word simply does NOT mean what the popular "word studies" claim.

(One of my major concerns in this is that I find people beginning to think
that their English translations are not to be trusted --though they are
actually very solid, and the debatable points are on the whole quite minor.
Scholarly work is necessary and helpful,  yet people who read ONLY English
and are devoted to the Word can still gain a firm understanding of its
teaching.)

So, where does that leave us?       I would suggest that the best way to
understand what the Bible teaches about "praise" or any other subject is NOT
to track down the "word studies"  but to read and study the Scriptures
themselves  in the form we have them  --read the paragraphs, chapters and
books of the Bible, and see how they explain what the people do in
worshiping, and why they do it.

I hope this is of some help.    Please feel free to raise questions.


Bruce Johnson
www.worshipmap.com




Rebecca <ForteRRT@aol.com> writes:

>Does anyone know of a sight that has a study of all the words and meanings
in
>Hebrew of OT praise and worship?  I am doing a personal study that is
spilling
>into the music bulletin, covering the praise and worship mostly of the
Davidic
>tabernacle but not exclusively.


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