THE WORD YOUR BIBLE LEAVES UNTRANSLATED 11,000 TIMES

THE WORD YOUR BIBLE LEAVES UNTRANSLATED 11,000 TIMES There’s a tiny Hebrew word sitting twice in the very first verse of the Bible that your English translation doesn’t show you. אֵת et Here’s Genesis 1:1 in Hebrew. בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 KJV So where did et go? It wasn’t removed. English simply doesn’t have a clean equivalent for it. Hebrew uses et as what grammarians call a definite direct object marker. It identifies the thing receiving the action. God created what? The heaven and the earth. Hebrew marks both with this little word. אֵת Here’s what makes it worth studying. This word appears roughly 11,000 TIMES in the Hebrew Bible. Eleven thousand. Most English readers will spend their entire lives reading Scripture without ever noticing it because translators usually have nothing sensible to put in its place. Then there’s the spelling. א Aleph ת Tav Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Tav is the last. That immediately catches a Christian’s attention because Jesus said, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Revelation 22:13 KJV Does that mean et secretly means Jesus? No. John already put Him there plainly. “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” John 1:3 KJV What makes this even more interesting is that ancient Jewish teachers noticed et too. Rabbis spent serious time discussing whether certain appearances carried significance beyond ordinary grammar, and even the two uses in Genesis 1:1 received special attention. So this isn’t some mysterious word scholars forgot to translate. We know what it does. The fascinating part is that one tiny two letter Hebrew word, spelled with the first and last letters of the alphabet, appears about 11,000 times throughout the Old Testament and is almost completely invisible in English. אֵת et #MoreJoyMinistries