Blessed and Holy: Understanding Them Both Better Through Isaiah 6 & Revelation 4 (Total - Part 3 of 5)

When it comes to language, it is important to realize that some words get used extremely frequently. Sometimes due to that frequency, we take them for granted.  In reading the scholarly articles or books written about the Bible, you frequently find writers trying to find the next seldom used word that needs to be better defined.  In the business world, they would call this looking for the unique rather than the common. I've come to the conclusion that sometimes we spend way too much time on the infrequently used words in the Bible text and way too little time on the frequently used ones.  "Blessed" and "holy" are not themselves the most commonly found words in the biblical text, but does that have to mean we cannot ground their meanings in those that are the most common?  I think that the correct answer is that we CAN ground the meaning of blessed and holy in common sense language.  We just have to do it.

What this means is that I and many of us have to break some old habits in reading a text of Scripture.  My tendency is to look for the key unique words in a text, but to ignore those that are more widely known or common.  We see this too in an exhaustive concordance, where words like "and", "the", "but", "a" and many others like them are relegated to an appendix.  We also see this in older lexicons (and maybe even some newer ones), where at one time in the history of their creation, only the less well-known words were included and the most commonly words were left out.  The thinking was: "Why have a dictionary for those?".  Even in a children's picture dictionary that I own, the word "strong" gets a picture dedicated to its definition, but the word "the" does not have a picture assigned to it.  The authors seem to assume that a child will grasp the meaning of "the" from a couple of example sentences.  

This situation reminds me of the Biblical principle that "the greatest shall be the least and the least shall be the greatest".  It also reminds me of another principle where Jesus warned people that "what you have done to the least of these, you have done to me".  These principles seem to apply only to people, but what if they also extend to our words?  Are we paying a big price for not paying attention to the common words as much as the special words?  Do those who read the Bible as scholars need a reprimand like the chiding Lincoln gave to the elite politicians that he understood the democratic principle to mean to pay attention to the common people, because there were so many of them?  Do we need to do the same with the least of the words in the text that are so incredibly frequent?  It is my view that we do.

Some very scholarly writing from a cutting edge linguistic model called "cognitive linguistics", in paraphrasing their point, says that the words we see or hear more frequently than others become more entrenched in our minds and tend to shape more our way of thinking more and even effect things more at the expense of the less frequent and therefore the less entrenched in our thinking.  In other words, these least words are the words that are greater than the greatest words.  The great words, the last heard at the spelling bee or the words hardest to define on the ACT or SAT are in fact the least when it comes to grounding or entrenching our views.

So what I am going to begin doing overall is looking at a text through this set of words in English:

the, a(n)
on, as (so)

and, but (not)
with, at

I (be), to (not)
of (have), had

by (do), use
for, said

this, that
or, each

So what I am going to begin doing overall is looking at a text through this set of words in Greek:

    

So what I am going to begin doing overall is looking at a text through this set of words in Aramaic:




So what I am going to begin doing overall is looking at a text through this set of words in Hebrew:



This is how I will be able to approach a biblical text in a way that is not only healthy, but also incredibly grounded or entrenched (in a good sense!).  the good news in all of this is that this will make the common person and all of those above them in expertise to have a common ground from which to begin.  Right now what happens is the expert is given the advantage and also the loopholes to escape accountability for their ways of thinking.


[this deserves a lot more work and it will get it and so will Isaiah 6 ]

In Christ,

Jon