1S-INTRO-17: God Knew That In Order To Preserve His people, He Also Had To Preserve Their Language

Let’s review some things really quick.

First of all, recall that 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings were originally one huge and unified book.

It was only when the translation from the Hebrew to the Greek began that the book was divided up into four parts.

Now don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

It’s just as harmless as breaking up a 7-digit phone number into 2 parts to make it easier to remember…

Or how the Bible was later broken up into chapters and verses.

It was all for convenience’s sake and caused no harm.

So this Hebrew to Greek translation was produced in Alexandria, Egypt about 250 years before Yeshua came on the scene and is known as the Septuagint (or LXX for short).

Now the question that arises is…is the Septuagint a good translation or a bad translation?

The answer is for the most part it’s a pretty darn good translation…

But there are always those challenging parts of Scripture where the translator has to resort to his best educated guess of what a certain word or phrase meant.

The problem a modern translator has is that he views things through the filter of his own cultural biases.

He tries to surgically remove a given word from the culture from which it sprang and then try to make sense of it.

Invariably he will fall flat on his face.

Why?

Because you can’t separate culture and language.

It’s like trying to separate meat from a bun and still trying to call it a hamburger or something.

Ya feel me homies?

That’s something really important you should grasp about the history of human civilizations.

A people’s language and their culture go hand in hand.

You can’t have one without the other.

It’s a simple historical fact that whenever one nation conquered another, the conquerer immediately set about to destroy the native language of the people they had conquered.

Because they knew if they wiped out their native tongue, they could control their identity and that would make it so much easier to enslave them.

We can see this is exactly what the British did during their heyday of colonial conquest.

And this is also why when God resurrected the nation of Israel back from the dead in 1948, He made sure to resurrect the Hebrew language right along with the Hebrew people.

When I visited Israel in 2017, I was amazed at just how entrenched the Hebrew language was in every corner of society in that land.

I mean there are really some parts of Jerusalem and other cities where you can really struggle if you can’t speak Hebrew.

This all goes back to what I was saying.

If you wanna destroy a culture and a people, destroy their language…

And then everything else will be easier after that.

Adonai knew in His wisdom that in order to preserve His people, He also had to preserve their language.