Take a look at these English phrases:

“I dunno…”

“Whaddaya think?”

“I wanna go!”

“I’m gonna do it!”

Now if you’re a native English speaker, I’m sure at first glance you wouldn’t have any problem deciphering the above.

However, if you’re NOT a native speaker, I’d have my doubts.

For example, I’m living in Japan right now and even taught some English on the side here…

And I can tell you with certainty your average Japanese homie who studies English from middle school would be scratching his head until his hair fell out if he came across the above phrases.

Here’s the point I wanna make:

Spoken language came BEFORE written language.

In early times, people didn’t communicate via writing…

Especially compared to today with all of the back-and-forth emailing and texting going on.

Remember, people did NOT develop speech from writing.

It was the other way around.

The spoken word came first.

In fact, the earliest alphabet systems in human civilization were just pictures of stuff.

If you wanted to write “horse” for example, what did you do?

You simply drew a picture of a horse.

This is especially apparent in the Asian languages.

For example, this:

Eventually became this in Chinese or Japanese:

馬

That Japanese kanji is the final result of possibly thousands of years of linguistic evolution of the word.

My point is that’s how language developed over time.

It started with pictures and then over time those pictures were replaced with letters.

And then once we had letters, another interesting phenomenon developed.

Whenever we used letters to write out a word, we wrote it the way it SOUNDED to us.

Are ya feeling me homies?

For example, when I write out Hebrew words like SHALOM or SHEMA in English, I’m writing out how those words sound to my ears phonetically when I write them.

Every written language in existence today developed the same way.

They’re just systems of individual sounds that that were assigned to a bunch of letters and characters.

So understand the alphabet was simply a tool to show us how to say a word out loud.

Now yesterday I talked about Dr. David Tsumura and how he’s famous for shooting down a lot of modern theories that claim the OT is corrupt.

How has he done it?

Simply by pointing out in a number of places in the book of Samuel that where there’s a supposed error, what actually happened is that the so-called “corruption” was just a result of how the ancient Biblical author wrote the word as it sounded to his ears.

Are you with me?

And here’s another thing we gotta take into consideration.

The way a word sounds changes over time depending on location and culture.

Heck, all you have to do is travel across the United States and you’ll see what I mean.

Someone from the Deep South speaks in a totally different way than someone from New York for example. 

Again, these types of changes are also reflected in how written Scripture developed.

Whoever was the most recent copyist of a certain passage of Scripture recorded a given word or phrase that reflected the way it was pronounced at that time.