It is impossible to know our Abba Father with English translations. The Holy Spirit is the bridge to understanding, but we will miss his teaching if we do not embrace him. Here is a “mechanical” translation of Genesis 1:1-2. It is ancient Hebrew with the order in English grammar. “In the summit Elohiym and the land had existed in confusion and was unfilled and darkness was upon the face of the deep sea and the wind of Elohiym was much fluttering upon the face of the water, fattened the sky and the land . . .”[i])
The journey from ancient Hebrew to English, either “Olde English” or modern English, is biased because it has to be. The question for each translation is, what is the bias? Literal or contextual are the two main options. This message is an overview to get us started in some more profound discussion. The starting point for intermediaries conforming the Scripture to ELB is the English translations of the Holy Bible. And in some cases, the Greek translations of the Hebrew Old Testament (the Septuagint or LXX).
Translating is a great opportunity to rewrite the Scripture in ELB. Ancient Hebrew has no abstract; it describes things we can touch, see, hear, smell, and taste, the five senses. To truly relate to the full majesty of our Abba Father, we must get out of the English language for all keywords in the Scripture and go back into the minds of the ancient farmers and nomads. They expressed anger as “having a nose” because our noses supposedly flare when we are angry.
The translator then has to compose an English narrative, as seen above. NKJV says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” Hopefully, this will help us understand translators’ challenges and the liberty taken in ELB.
Several critical English language issues have their message in Chapter 5. I want to plant the seed about how destructive ELB English can be. I cannot imagine how much extra work the Holy Spirit must do in teaching us the Scripture with English-speaking believers. Please pray on that.
Please remember that the pastime of Scripture interpretation has little to do with our redemption. Our Abba Father can call by name, and Jesus can knock on the door of anyone anywhere in the world whenever they want. Interpretation of Scripture does help us get to know our Abba Father and his/our Family much better and experience his full blessings in this life. That is why I bring scholarly work into my preaching when I find a nugget that inspires people with our Abba Father.
I believe it is safe to say that by the 4th century, ELB was in control of presenting the Word, then hid it in Latin, and I think that the Holy Spirit is now pushing back on ELB by working to bring us closer to our Abba Father. BibleGateway is a website that delivers sixty-two English translations for study, which are very interesting but also underscores English’s weakness in delivering our Abba Father to the world. The total number of translations in libraries is over 900. My observation is that the problem is not English; it is the incredible magnitude and complexity of our Abba Father. When asked what Holy Bible translation I use, my answer is all of them.
I used to think that so many versions of our Abba Father’s Word could not possibly glorify him or give anyone confidence in what he is saying. But I learned it took many translations because the ancient Scripture is a genuinely complex, magnificent creation. When our goal is to be in a close relationship, not just intelligent, several translations and curiosity are life changers.
Scholars have learned much from recent discoveries, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumran Caves documents, and an entire library in Ugarit. Every known copy, fragment, and tick is digitized, cataloged in computers, and cross-studied in depth. That is a massive amount of fairly recently translated and cataloged material. All the ancient autographs and their accidental and intentional variations are now fully revealed to scholars.
Contrary to what people might think, there is no “right” published translation. Translators must choose a bias to translate. As written, the different translations add depth and meaning, and their differences deliver more of our Abba Father. He is everything that everyone translates.
I always start with the New King James Version (NKJV) because I am used to it, and it requires thought and the Holy Spirit’s help. More than half of all believers use it, and there are many companion resources for the NKJV. But that is just the starting point for studying to build our relationship.
Mining the Scripture is a lifelong and gratifying experience. But how to do it is rarely taught in church. I observed that the ESV translation is the most friendly to the supernatural world. Translations that read like prose are too easy, and we can quickly lose the Holy Spirit to boredom. The prose translations feel like looking in the back of a book for the quiz answers. Which I sometimes do to move an idea along. We are looking for the majesty and glory our Abba Father brings to our lives, not just his story. The Scripture is the first source to see his glory. His presence with the Holy Spirit is the second.
We dedicated Chapter 5 to a review of the keywords of faith and redemption in the ancient language that significantly weakened our faith in English. None of the keywords of faith in the ancient language mean what they mean to us in modern English.
Doctrine and creeds are ELB’s solution to the weakness of English. If we cannot explain something in the Scripture with certainty, then intermediaries step in and declare the meaning in English for us. Doctrine and creeds then become “God for Dummies” or “Cliff’s Notes” for too many. Too many believe that if we know the creed or doctrine, we are good to go; who needs the Scripture? That may seem like an unintended consequence, but it happens too often in ELB.
The doctrine also becomes a tool of exclusion. It is like drawing a circle. Those who believe can come in, and those who disagree cannot. Despite Ephesians 4, unity does not have a priority outside individual churches. That does not help our Abba Father, but I pray we may open some minds. Message S2M6 dives into a few minor doctrines, followed by a dive into the 3-in-1 doctrine and the Nicene Creed. I will warn you here I am not a fan of either because I do not see them as the Scripture.
I have a very personal ministry in jail and prison and can see up close and personal what lights people up because, most of the time, their immediate life does depend on it. This book is a result of several years of experience with the Holy Spirit lighting people up in my presence.
I would like to see a translation that uses a “word borrow” of numerous ancient keywords and then adds a commentary on the meanings of the words. We would have to reach for the entire purpose and can still experience it in the Scripture. A “word borrow” is simply using the original word. It would read like this, “God so ēgapēsen the world that he gave his only son.”
Most readers will recognize that the Greek Word ēgapēsen means “loved” in English. Study-Bibles are a start, but they keep us in English for the most part. My experience is that to lift our lives to our Abba Father fully; it helps to understand his language as much as we can and come as close to it as we can. Scholars have already done it for us; that is the good news.
There are many study tools that serious students learn to use. Still, most people do not go to an interlinear Holy Bible to get the ancient words and then look up the ancient Hebrew/Greek words in a concordance, such as Strong’s or others, because they do not know there is an issue. Fortunately, hundreds of people have already done the work in “commentaries.”
A man in our church is doing his own Holy Bible translation, and it is incredible what he finds. Every week he comes to church with an exciting discovery. He is not a lofty scholar, by the way; he is a homeless person using obsolete technology. That is another anecdotal example supporting my belief that the Holy Spirit is on the move again, taking back control of the Word.
With word borrows, Sunday School and Bible Study groups would have to become original language literate. Message S7M5 presents this in detail, and I still get goosebumps every time I share it. No message lights believers up like explaining what Jesus’ challenge of Peter three times with, “do you love me” actually says in ancient Greek (John 21:15-25).
The second most crucial Word in Scripture, “love,” has a vast understanding problem. 1 John 4:16, “We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” ELB intermediaries want us to feel warm and cuddly with this verse, but that is not what the Greek word “agape” (love) means.
Message S7M5 presents that in detail. The big difference is that the Greek language uses four words translated into one Word in English, love. Three appear in Scripture, and the fourth is what most Americans think love means. No problem there, right? That is a fundamental disconnect. Ask one hundred Americans what love means, and we could get one hundred different answers. What does it mean to say “God is love “if we do not know what love (agape) means? Another example is that there are seven Hebrew words for praise that all get translated into one English word, praise.
But our Abba Father’s name is essential to our relationship him. His names are how he relates to us. We discuss it further in S7M2, which explains how our Abba Father attached all his majesty to his name to make it possible for God’s children to relate to our infinite, almighty, spirit Abba Father.
In ELB English, we make his name “God” and disobey, curse, and destroy him. I am inspired, in that context, to change the narrative. What follows is my first kick of the hornet’s nest, and there are several. I implore my readers to understand that I do not claim that I am right, only that I might be, and I hope it opens your heart to come closer to our Abba Father and away from false prophets. If we discount love and praise in the English Holy Bibles, I have to ask, what else in ELB do we dismiss?
God, Elohiym, and Yahweh
Since everything we know about our Abba Father starts with his many names, we must deeply understand them. The word “elohiym” is the Hebrew word translated as “God” and “gods” in the Old Testament. Elohiym is a plural noun that means “powers.” S7M2 discusses how Hebrew names are “information packets” loaded with meaning, and the meaning IS the name, not our English word translation.
When we use a plural word with a singular pronoun, it is understood to be a name or title. The Scripture starts with Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, elohiym created . . .” If there were more than one of them, the grammar would have said “the elohiym created.” Therefore, we treat elohiym as a singular name that means “powers” to the ancient reader.
Let’s look at Psalm 82:1 ESV, “God (elohiym) has taken his place (singular pronoun) in the divine council; in the midst of the gods (elohiym) he holds judgment.” Both singular and plural elohiym are in one line. We only know how many elohiym we have from the context. To be in the midst of something, there must be more than one something.
Elohiym, as a plural word, does not point to the Holy Three in the name, but that is conventional teaching in ELB. Being a name renders it singular. Ancient Hebrew depends greatly on verse context for word meaning which we are not used to. Today we tend to use a word’s meaning to define the context, which is how ELB can weaken the Scripture so quickly. My point here is that it is an ELB strategy to minimize our relationship with our Abba Father, and the word “God” does not carry enough meaning by itself; it needs context.
In Genesis 1:1, the vital word in context is “created,” not elohiym. In this case, created from nothing. The Creator of the entire universe must be unique and the greatest elohiym. “Our Creator” is a much more meaningful thought than the name “God” because it connects us.
But what can all the other elohiym be? The Scripture is clear who the other elohiym are, divine spirit beings created by? You guessed it, the first elohiym, our Creator. It is only from seeing the elohiym in the context throughout the Scripture that we can know what the elohiym is.
Try this for translating Psalm 82:1, “Our creator has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the divine spirit beings he holds judgements.” If we make that what our heart sees, it will bring us closer to our Abba Father and away from ELB. Psalm 82:1 happens to be a life changing verse we discuss in detail in S3M4.
Notice what is missing in my translation: “other gods,” which are not other “gods” at all. They are divine spirit beings with some powers created by our Abba Father. ELB wants the bene elohiym (sons of God) discussed in S3M4 to be human, so the ELB translators declare that the word can be used for humans when that cannot be true with today’s knowledge.
We eliminate the entire issue of polytheism if we do not use “gods” in translations. I have never believed polytheism was a real Scripture issue; it is ELB in action. Scholars make polytheism an issue in ELB and then create a narrative around it that believers don’t understand, the 3-in-1 doctrine. There is a lot more to say about the divine spirit beings in Chapter 3.
Hopefully, you are starting to see how weak the word “God” is compared to his full context. If no one tells us the full context, and we do not tune into the Holy Spirit, we will have the weak faith the enemy wants us to have with ELB.
We might be far less likely to take his name in vain if we always think in the context of our relationship. Now ask yourself, what brings us closer to our Abba Father, ELB minimizing him or studying the Scripture to bring him closer?
What the translators did, and still do, with Yahweh in ELB is theological malpractice and a significant contributor to minimizing our Abba Father. The word “Yahweh” (or Yahweh) has its own story, but the translators took us backward from a personal name to an impersonal noun. But not just any name, the name our Abba Father gave us to relate to him. Please pray on that.
We discuss Yahweh in S7M2 but understand that Yahweh can mean “he will be, he is, I Am, and he exists,” but scholars use “the LORD” in all the mainstream translations. The LORD is an impersonal title in English. I’m sorry, but that is wrong and needs to end. It won’t happen because of ELB and scholarly embarrassment, but you can end it for yourself. Please pray on that.
We can debate the exact meaning of “Yahweh,” but all options contain the elements of his relationship with us and his promises. All translations that use LORD or Lord (small caps) intentionally discount our Abba Father by discounting his name and how he relates to us. With “the LORD” translation, it takes a doctrine to explain him, and that is not the Scripture.
Translators should have word borrowed with Yahweh as Yahweh users do. The result is an enormity of church fathers and scholars writing explanations of our Abba Father in doctrine, all of which are humans defining God in ELB. That has been going on for thousands of years, and none of it is godly, just tradition. Your life will change when you embrace this message; you can grow your relationship in your own heart.
But in ancient times, there was no doubt who Yahweh was, but ELB is powerful. Today’s dilution results from ELB-driven men in old times not saying Yahweh out loud and substituting another name to make sure they did not take the name in vain, the third commandment. But there is no excuse for not understanding it today.
We never hear people say, “Yahweh damn it,” which is the heart of my issue with using the word God. The name “God” is not reverent enough, and our Abba Father went to great trouble to give us better. Our Abba Father used elohiym about 2,500 times and Yahweh 6,800 times in the Old Testament. But what do most people say in ELB? God this, God that, God is, God did, etc.
You may have figured that I use our Abba Father a lot by now. It feels terrific! I am always amazed that it never occurred to the early church leaders; I attribute that to ELB as it was in charge. When we discount God’s name in translation, it is impossible to know him in English.
Another issue with the word “LORD” is the “Lord” version in the Scripture. Translated from “Adonai,” it is a third name our Abba Father’s children call him in the Scripture. It is translated as “Lord” with only the “L” capitalized. In the Old Testament, it means “master” and is a humbly reverent name used when speaking to Yahweh to show obedience.
The New Testament is written in Greek and took its lead from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint or LXX. The Word elohiym is translated into the Greek “Theos” in the New Testament, the root word for “theology,” and the meaning is similar to the Hebrew for elohiym. What is different in the New Testament is that Jesus refers to his “pater” (Father) 366 times, reinforcing the personal Father nature of Theos (God). Plus, with his Son fully present, it is easy to see the Family model in play. God is the Father in the New Testament Family relationship, and we still need to see it. Lord, Adonai, our master in the Old Testament, is Kyrios in Greek, and our Abba Father shifted that label to Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus is now the Lord, but we automatically conflate Jesus with the Lord in the New Testament; nothing in the relationship is confused. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the stars of the New Testament, where our relationship was all finally revealed. Our Aba Father did not use Yahweh in the New Testament. Father (“Pater”) was used to strengthen the relationship. Please pray on that.
[i] https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/
