This Reading Mama

Ep 20: The Original Languages of the Bible

• Becky • Episode 20

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Welcome back to This Reading Mama’s podcast! We are delighted that you're here!

In today's episode, we're focusing on something a bit more "heady," the original languages of the Bible. We think this is an important topic to understand, as it helps followers of Jesus understand where your Bible and the English translations come from.

Note: The visuals from this video can be accessed as a Podcast+ Member. You can join HERE or login HERE.

Not only do we cover the original languages, but we also discuss what Scripture says the Bible was recorded on (the materials used) as well as more about how we got our English translation.


Past Episodes Mentioned in this Show:


More Bible Resources:


*Find links to these book in my blog post.

Let's Connect!


SPEAKER_00

Welcome back to this Reading Mama's Podcast. I am Becky. This is Amy. Thank you all for joining us again. A quick reminder that we have the podcast plus membership on our YouTube videos, we do not put advertisements on there so that you can learn without interruption and for your convenience. It is $5 a month. It provides for you all Bible reading plans that we've created, like the last one that we did on episode 19 that walks you through 31 days of the Divided Kingdom. It has other resources and visual tools like graphs and charts that will help you engage not only with the podcast, but so that you can use it to teach a Sunday school or aid in leading a Bible study. By becoming a member, you come alongside of us to teach others why Bible literacy matters.

SPEAKER_01

So today we're going to tackle the original languages of the Bible. In episode 18, we talked about the English translations of the Bible. We didn't go through all of them, but we talked about a good number. It's important to understand that the translators, when they created our English Bibles, they were going back and looking at the original Hebrew, the original Greek to help them translate. This is not a game of telephone where the people who could read the Hebrew and Greek whisper into the next people's ear and they just keep passing this message along until we get the English translation. No, our translators, we even talked about this in episode 18, how you want a Bible scholar or group of scholars who know how to read English and Greek. Nope, not English, but Hebrew and Greek, so that they can translate it into English. Before we jump into the original languages, though, we thought it would be helpful to talk about how God's word was written, what it was written on.

SPEAKER_00

The Bible actually tells us different ways in which God communicated his word through men to other people. One of them is in Exodus 34, verse 1. It says, The Lord said to Moses, chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets which you broke. And we know this to be the Ten Commandments. So that was one way that God would communicate his word on stone. Another way would be wooden and or clay tablets. We have two verses on here. There's other ones in the Bible. We have Habakkuk 2.2 and Isaiah 38. I like the way Habakkuk 2.2 says it, so I'm gonna read that. It says, Then the Lord replied, Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. Oh someone is running with the word of God written down on these tablets. It doesn't specify what type of tablet, but we do know based off of the findings in what's the A-word? Archaeology? Yes, okay. It was like I don't know agriculture.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

So based off the findings in archaeology, they find these tablets, wooden or clay.

SPEAKER_01

Can you imagine how heavy they could have been to carry that? So then they began to use scrolls made of papyrus or made of leather. We see in Jeremiah 36, 2, that Jeremiah is told to take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah, and all the nations from the time I first spoke to you during Josiah's reign until today. So we see here there's scrolls. We also see scrolls mentioned again in Revelation 10, because John takes a scroll from the angels or from an angel. Then we see in the fourth century AD into the Middle Ages, we see parchment being used. This would have been from animal hides, and this was an expensive process. And then we move to the codex, which is a book form. And Wes, if you ever watch Wes Huff speak, he almost always tells this dad joke. He says, We moved from tablets to scrolls to books to have us today scroll on tablets to read books. I thought that was kind of funny. That is. And then after codex form, which we still have today, but we have it because of the printing press. That was in the 1400s. The Gutenberg press was invented. And then Bibles could be printed. My grandfather had a printing press, and he would print bulletins and maybe I don't know, I don't think his sermon notes, but wedding, I remember wedding, uh, what do you call those things? Invitations. Invitations, thank you. This is like charades here. And I remember going into his basement and watching him. It was a fascinating process because you have to put the letters in backwards for them to print forward. But a really cool fact about the printing press and the language we use today, this is free, but that that the uppercase letters, we think of capital letters, are kept in the uppercase, the upper cases because you don't need them as often. Where the lowercase letters, which you would need more often, are kept in the lowercase, and that's where we actually got those terms from.

SPEAKER_00

So the Old Testament languages are Hebrew and Aramaic, and then the New Testament language would be Greek. So we have a rough timeline of the languages of the Bible. So the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, it is also known as the Tanakh. In episode seven, we reviewed what is the Bible, and we broke down the Bible by the testaments, and then we went through the category the categories of the books. So Tanakh stands for Torah, which covers the books of the law. The N is Neveim, which covers the books of the prophets, and then the K is for Ketuvim, which are all the other writings in the scriptures you find in the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_01

So in our last episode, we talked, we talked about the divided kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom being taken by Judah by Babylon. Yes, it's a Latin there. While they're in Babylon, they begin to speak Aramaic. And this would be 6th century to early 4th century BC. So it's a Semitic language. It's kissing cousins or cousins to the book to Hebrew. So they're very similar languages. This would have been a very common language spoken by the Hebrew people. So in Daniel chapter 2, 4, verse 4, all the way through chapter 7, verse 28, he actually writes in the Aramaic, which is very cool. And in Ezra, we see Aramaic in chapters 4, 6, and 7. But other than that, the rest of the Old Testament is in Hebrew. So after 70 years of being in exile in Babylon, God returns the people to Israel, to their homeland. In this particular time, the people, though, are speaking Aramaic. And so when they come back, Ezra, the scribe, finds the law, finds the Torah, finds the law, and he begins to read it to the people. But the problem is the people speak Aramaic. So they're not really understanding the Hebrew being read. It has to be translated in their language, in the Aramaic to them, because it tells us that the elders read out of the book of the law. This is Nehemiah 8.8, and they have to translate it and give the meaning so the people can understand what was being read.

SPEAKER_00

Then we get to the time of Alexander the Great. So this is after the Persian Empire. It's the late 4th century BC, on through the conquest of Alexander the Great. Greek becomes the common language. So the Old Testament is now translated to Greek. It's known as the Septuagint. And that comes from the fact that they say 70 scholars performed the work of translation from Hebrew, Aramaic to the Greek. When you're reading your New Testaments, you may see in cross-references or your study notes the letters LXX, which means 70 in Roman numerals. It is telling you that that New Testament passage is being taken from the Greek Septuagint of the Old Testament. A great example of that is Hebrews 2, 6 through 8. You'll see the LXX in your cross-reference.

SPEAKER_01

And then once we get to the New Testament, we have it being written in Greek, Koine Greek. This would be considered a street Greek or a common Greek that the everyday person would have spoken. Okay, so we want to go over a little more history of Bible translations. How did we get from the Hebrew and Greek? What's the history to the English translations? So let's first start with this. We have people like Saint Jerome, Wycliffe, Tyndale. These people believed that everyone should have access to the Bible in their own language. So Saint Jerome, he is translating Scripture into Latin with the Latin Vulgate. This was 380 to 400 AD because the people were speaking Latin. So he wanted it to be in their language so they could read the Bible for themselves. John Wycliffe comes around, he comes around just a few thousand years later, about 1300 AD, he translates scripture into English for people to understand. Now, if you were to pick up a Wycliffe Bible, you would quickly see now that that English was way different than the English we have today, very difficult to understand today. Then William Tyndale, he's about 1526 A.D. He wants to translate, if I understand it correctly, the whole Bible. He gets started with the New Testament, translating it into English, but he's tried for heresy and he's martyred before he finishes the Old Testament because they don't want him translating. Those in charge don't want him translating into English. They don't want people reading it for themselves. What's really cool to me about Tyndale is he is to the Bible what Shakespeare is to the English language. There are certain English words we use like scapegoat, Passover, that he translated into the English, and we say those words because of William Tyndale. Pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00

So, like Becky said, Wycliffe and Tyndale, they wanted the Bible to be in a language that the people could understand. And because of that, they were persecuted. I mean, Tyndale was burned. He was a martyr. He was strangled and then burned. He was strangled and then burned. So the English translations really are to be treasured because lives were taken in order to get the English version of the Bible in our hands. So then we get to the Geneva Bible. It came out in 1560, is when it was published. They were believers who were exiled from England and they went into hiding in Geneva. It was the first Bible with chapters divided into numbers and verses. I think that's pretty cool. It was used by prominent Reformation leaders and they added their notes, which angered, so they had marginal notes throughout the Bible, and it angered the Catholic bishops because it spoke against making confession of your sin to men, that it was unjustified in the Bible. And King James was very angered as well because it allowed for disobedience to tyrannical kings. It was the Bible that the pilgrims brought into the Americas when they came here, and it was the most influential English Bible through the 16th and 17th centuries. Then we have the King James Version, which was published in 1611. So as you know, King James did not like the Geneva Bible because of all of the marginal notes from the leaders of the Protestant faith. And so he made owning that Geneva Bible a felony. He made his own English version, not translation. So much of the King James Version uses the Tyndale translation. And he took out any marginal notes that existed in the Geneva Bible. And as time goes on, you see that the KJV, the King James Version, begins to replace what was known as the Geneva Bible. So why does this even matter?

SPEAKER_01

Why is it why should you even know this information? Well, Amy and I both think it's helpful to understand the story of your English translation Bible. The story of how God has moved through men so that he can be known. That's the purpose of our Bible. How it came to be so that you can be ready with an answer when someone challenges it. We both think that's important to our faith. So let's be determined as Ezra to read, do, and tell the word of the Lord. Amen. Amen.

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Becky Spence

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