The Language of Heaven

While doing preparation for a recent Bible Study on Revelation 19, I discovered an amazing thing.
I know what language they speak in Heaven.

Let me show you.

Revelation 19:1-2a reads:

After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out, 
“Hallelujah! 
Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, 
for his judgments are true and just;

The author, commonly thought to be St. John the Apostle, is looking into the end times with the help of the Holy Spirit, and the last judgments on the earth are about to be completed.


But look what he says in 19:1...

"After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,"

He's telling us what the voices from Heaven said, and that's all well and good, but the interesting thing is this word...

“Hallelujah!"

I thought that was an interesting word, so I dug into it a bit to see what I could find.  The Greek word is "Ἁλληλουϊά," and in the ESV (English Standard Version, my preferred translation) the word appears exactly 4 times.  All four of those occurrences are right here, in Revelation 19.

That can't be right, I thought.  "Hallelujah" is a Hebrew phrase, meaning "Praise the LORD," or more specifically, "Praise Yah," where "Yah" is the poetic form of the Holy NAME of God.

But the Revelation was written in Greek, according to most scholars.

Well, I thought, surely it appears elsewhere in the Bible, possibly in the Hebrew?

Since the phrase means "Praise the LORD," I looked for that, and found the Hebrew phrase

הַלְלוּ־יָהּ

occurs 23 times in the Old Testament, all in the Psalms.  The first occurrence is in Psalm 104:35, the final occurrence in Psalm 150:6.  150:6 is the final verse of the Psalms, and so the book ends with the phrase
הַלְלוּ־יָהּ, or "Praise the LORD!"

So, armed with this knowledge, I went back to the Revelation and looked more closely at the Greek.

The Greek word "Ἁλληλουϊά," pronounced "Alleluia," has no meaning.

None.

Then it hit me, suddenly; John is recording what he is hearing from Heaven.  Ἁλληλουϊά is not a translation, it's a transliteration.

By this, I mean, John records the sound of the word he hears, rather than its meaning.

What sound did he hear?

הַלְלוּ־יָהּ

Hallelujah

Heaven speaks Hebrew.

The great Rabbi, Rashi, called Hebrew "לשון הקודש"... Lashon haKodesh.  The Holy Language.

I completely agree.

Atheists can too be moral!

We're not saying that Atheists cannot BE moral, we're saying they cannot tell us WHY they are moral, or why other people are not moral.

What does that mean?

It means that you can say "X is moral, and Y is immoral." But you cannot say WHY those things are so. You can say "Society has dictated that X is moral, and Y is not," but that is a flimsy argument. Based on that argument, we must conclude that the practice of Bride Burning in India was a moral thing, because it was the societal norm. (When a man would die, his widow would be thrown onto his funeral pyre to die, most often against her will.)

Was it ever moral to burn the widow? For the Atheist who demands that society determines morality, we must say yes, it was a moral thing to do.

Other atheists will say "I determine my own morality." This is an even worse argument. Why? Because you and Jeffry Dahmer are both autonomous beings. If you think it's immoral to kill and eat people, but Jeffy disagrees, to what standard will you direct him to show that he is wrong and you are right? To society? We've dealt with that. To your own sense of morality? Why is yours better than his?

Someone once asked the great Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias why he was so afraid of moral relativism. Ravi responded brilliantly: "Do you lock your doors at night?"

We're all fine with our own morality, but we want other people to behave as we do. For instance, one person might say that X is perfectly moral when he does it, but be outraged when someone else does X to him. As C.S. Lewis writes:

"But the most remarkable thing is this. whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking on to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong--in other words, if there is no Law of Nature--what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?"

Another common answer from the Atheist is that morality comes from nature. But what we find in Nature is far different from our understanding of morality. For instance, only a few species mate for life. Most species will engage in reproductive acts with several others, often in the same mating season. While this sounds good on the surface, why do people then get upset when their spouse or significant other cheats on them? Isn't that just nature?

One more brief example for morality from nature: After copulation, the female praying mantis kills and consumes her partner. Nature is not the source of our morality.

Allow me to end with another C.S. Lewis quote, and I'll thank you for having read this far:

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

Wait, I say, upon Aviv

Jesus or Yeshua? What's the deal?

The word "Jesus" appears nowhere in written form before the 16th century. It was used in the first modern English translation of the Bible and was created by William Tyndale.


Where does it come from? It's a transliteration of a transliteration of a transliteration.


What does that mean?


A transliteration is different from a translation, in that a transliteration attempts to preserve the sound of the original word, rather than its meaning. It's often done with names. The first man mentioned in the Bible, for instance, doesn't actually have a name. The Hebrew word "אָדָם" simply means "the man," but we transliterate it as "Adam," which mimics the sound of the word, without giving its meaning.


Now, Jesus had a rather common name for the time. His name was "יְהוֹשֻׁ֣עַ", which is transliterated "Yehoshua." This is also the name of Moses' lieutenant, Joshua. Translated, it means "The Salvation of the LORD."

But linguistic convention being what it is, names get shortened. We don't often call a man "Laurence," we call him "Larry." "Michael" becomes "Mike." and by the Second Temple Period, "יְהוֹשֻׁ֣עַ" had been shortened to "יֵשׁוּע"... that is to say, Yehoshua had been shortened to Yeshua.


So in Hebrew it is Yeshua...

יְשֻׁ֣וֹעַ

and it gets transliterated into Greek, which is

Ἰησοῦς (Yaysous)

which is a transliteration, not a translation. Then it goes from Greek into Latin and is spelled

Jesu

(which is still pronounced Yaysu, by the way... this pronunciation of the letter "J" is preserved in the word "Hallelujah.")

and from Latin it gets transliterated into to English as "Jesus" in a time when the J could do double duty, making the sound it makes in "jar" or possibly making the "Y" sound like in "Hallelujah."


In fact, there was an 11th century copy of the New Testament written in period English (called Old English) which calls His name

Haelend

because Haelend is the TRANSLATION of the Hebrew word, and means "Savior."


So the reality is, people call His name "Yeshua" because that's what His friends called him in that day.