Jot (iota)
Greekἰῶτα / י
iōta
Matthew 5:18, "one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law."
"Jot" is the English spelling of iota, the Greek name for the letter i, and Jesus is using it to translate yod (י), the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a stroke about the size of an apostrophe.
His point is about preservation: not even the smallest letter of God's word will be lost. It is the argument Jesus makes about the shapes of letters, and the Gospels record it twice, Matthew 5:18 and Luke 16:17, where the tittle turns up again.
English still keeps the word: to "jot something down" is to write the smallest possible note.
Lexical facts from Thayer, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (1889). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Tittle
Greekκεραία
keraia
Matthew 5:18, beside the jot.
Keraia means "little horn" — the tiny stroke of the pen that tells nearly-identical Hebrew letters apart. Dalet (ד) and resh (ר) differ by one small corner; bet (ב) and kaf (כ) by one small heel. That corner, that heel, is the tittle.
Change a tittle and you change the word. In the Shema, "the LORD is one" — ʾechad (אֶחָד, "one") becomes ʾacher (אַחֵר, "another") if that last dalet is closed into a resh. Which is exactly why the scribes wrote it oversized, and have done for centuries. Jesus's promise reaches down to that stroke: the text is kept not just to the letter, but to the parts of letters.
Lexical facts from Thayer, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (1889). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Amen
Hebrewאָמֵן
ʾamen
Everywhere, the one Hebrew word almost every language on earth borrowed unchanged.
Amen comes from the Hebrew root for firmness and faithfulness, the same family as ʾemet, "truth." To say amen is not to say "the end"; it is to say "firm, let it stand, I stake myself on that."
In the Old Testament the people answer covenant words with amen (Deuteronomy 27). In Revelation, Amen becomes a name: "These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness" — Jesus himself.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Hallelujah
Hebrewהַלְלוּ־יָהּ
halelu-Yah
The Psalms, especially the last five, each of which begins and ends with it.
Not one word but two: hallelu, "praise, all of you!" (a command to a crowd), and Yah, the short form of the divine name. "Praise the LORD" is the whole sentence, packed into one shout.
It survives untranslated in almost every Bible in every language, which means a reader in any country on earth praises God with the same Hebrew syllables the psalmists used.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Hosanna
Hebrewהוֹשִׁיעָה נָּא
hoshiʿah-nna
Palm Sunday, the crowds greeting Jesus at Jerusalem's gate.
Hosanna is Psalm 118:25 compressed into a cry: hoshiʿah-nna, "Save, we pray!" By Jesus's day it had become both a plea and a shout of welcome, the way a rescued city cheers the rescuer.
So the Palm Sunday crowd was quoting Scripture at Jesus, the very psalm that continues, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD." They knew exactly which psalm they were standing inside.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Selah
Hebrewסֶלָה
selah
Seventy-one times in the Psalms, three in Habakkuk, always mid-song.
Nobody is certain what selah means, and that is the honest headline. The best guesses, from the word's likely root "to lift up": a musical interlude (lift the instruments), a pause (lift your thoughts), or a crescendo (lift the volume).
The old Greek translation rendered it diapsalma, "a break in the song." Whatever the players did when they saw it, the effect for the reader is the same: stop here, and let the line land.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Shalom
Hebrewשָׁלוֹם
shalom
The standard Hebrew greeting, then and now, and the prophets' biggest word.
Shalom is usually translated "peace," but the Hebrew word is larger: wholeness, soundness, everything-in-its-place well-being. To greet someone with shalom is to wish them an unbroken life.
That is why "Prince of Peace" (sar-shalom, Isaiah 9:6) promises more than the absence of war, it promises the repair of everything.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Shema
Hebrewשְׁמַע
shemaʿ
Deuteronomy 6:4, the first word of Israel's daily confession, which named the whole prayer.
Shemaʿ is a command: "Hear!" — and in Hebrew, hearing and obeying are one word. The verse it opens — "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One" — is the confession Jesus called the greatest commandment's doorway.
Observant Jews have prayed it morning and evening for well over two thousand years. When Jesus quoted it (Mark 12:29), nobody in the room needed the reference explained.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Torah
Hebrewתּוֹרָה
torah
The Hebrew name for the five books of Moses, and a word your Bible translates "law."
Torah comes from a root meaning to point, to direct, to teach, an archer "torahs" an arrow at its mark. So "law" is a narrow translation: torah is instruction, the aimed teaching of a father to his children.
Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, is one long love song to torah and its seven synonym words: word, testimonies, precepts, statutes, commandments, judgments, sayings.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Messiah
Hebrewמָשִׁיחַ
mashiach
The title behind the title: "Christ" is simply this word in Greek.
Mashiach means "anointed one" — a person marked out for office by having oil poured on their head, the way Israel installed kings and priests. David is called the LORD's mashiach long before the word became THE title.
When the New Testament says "Christ" (Greek christos, "anointed"), it is translating this Hebrew word. "Jesus Christ" is a confession in two languages: Jesus the Messiah.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Abba
Aramaicאַבָּא
ʾabba
Gethsemane, and twice in Paul, on the lips of every adopted child of God.
Abba is the Aramaic family word for father, the word spoken at home, warm but not childish. Jesus prayed it in Gethsemane, and the church kept the original syllables because no translation carried the intimacy.
Paul's point in Romans and Galatians is that the Spirit puts this exact word in believers' mouths: the family word, because adoption is real.
“Abba, Father,” He said, “all things are possible for You. Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.”
Mark 14:36→
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”
Romans 8:15→
And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”
Galatians 4:6→
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Aramaic appendix (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Maranatha
Aramaicמָרַנָא תָא
marana tha
1 Corinthians 16:22, Paul closes a Greek letter with an Aramaic password.
Two Aramaic words: marana tha, "Our Lord, come!" (or, divided differently, maran atha, "Our Lord has come"). Paul drops it untranslated into a letter to Greek-speaking Corinth, which tells you the earliest churches prayed it so often it needed no translation.
It is one of the oldest recorded prayers of the church: Paul quotes it untranslated around AD 55, and the Didache, the earliest Christian handbook we have, puts it in the Lord's Supper liturgy. Revelation ends the whole Bible with its Greek echo: "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Aramaic appendix (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Immanuel
Hebrewעִמָּנוּ אֵל
ʿimmanu ʾel
Isaiah's sign to a frightened king, and Matthew's name for the child of Bethlehem.
Three Hebrew words fused into a name: ʿimmanu ("with us") + ʾel ("God"), "God with us." Isaiah gave it as a sign to King Ahaz; Matthew opens his Gospel by declaring the sign filled in full.
Matthew translates it on the spot for his readers, which is why your Bible carries both the Hebrew name and its meaning side by side.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Talitha cumi
Aramaicטַלְיְתָא קוּמִי
talitha qumi
Mark 5:41, at the bedside of Jairus's daughter.
Mark preserves the actual syllables Jesus spoke over the dead girl: talitha qumi, "Little girl, get up." Talitha is a tender word, the kind a mother uses; qumi is the everyday "rise."
Mark keeps the Aramaic and then translates it, as an eyewitness detail too precious to smooth away: this is what the voice that raises the dead actually sounded like, gentle, ordinary, at a child's bedside.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Aramaic appendix (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Ephphatha
Aramaicאֶתְפְּתַח
ʾeppattach
Mark 7:34, spoken over a deaf man's ears.
One Aramaic word, kept in the original by Mark: "Be opened." Jesus sighs, looks to heaven, and says it, and the man's ears open.
Like talitha cumi, it is preserved because someone who was there remembered the exact sound of the word that did it.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Aramaic appendix (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani
Aramaicאֵלִי אֵלִי לְמָה שְׁבַקְתַּנִי
ʾeli ʾeli lema shevaqtani
The cross, the fourth word, quoted in Matthew and Mark.
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" — the opening line of Psalm 22, cried in Jesus's own Aramaic-inflected speech. He is not improvising despair; he is praying the psalm that ends in vindication, and pointing every hearer to it.
The bystanders' confusion ("he calleth Elijah") turns on the sound of the words, Eli ("my God") heard as Eli-yahu (Elijah). The Gospel writers kept the original so you could hear the misunderstanding happen.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Aramaic appendix (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Raca
Aramaicרֵיקָא
reqa
Matthew 5:22, the Sermon on the Mount's forbidden insult.
An Aramaic slur meaning "empty-head" — worthless, nobody. Jesus leaves it untranslated because his hearers flinched at the sound of it; it was the word you spat at someone beneath your notice.
His point: the contempt in the word is the seed of the violence in the act. The court of heaven hears the insult, not just the injury.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Aramaic appendix (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Corban
Hebrewקָרְבָּן
qorban
Mark 7:11, Jesus's argument with tradition that voids the commandment.
Qorban means "an offering brought near" — something dedicated to God. By Jesus's day a man could declare his property corban and claim it was locked up for God — even against his own aging parents' need.
Jesus names the practice in its own technical vocabulary and calls it what it is: a tradition used to cancel "Honor thy father and thy mother."
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Mammon
Aramaicמָמוֹנָא
mamona
"Ye cannot serve God and mammon" — the Sermon on the Mount.
An Aramaic word for wealth and possessions, likely from the same root as "amen": that which you trust in, that which feels firm. The etymology preaches by itself: money is faith's counterfeit, the other thing people stake themselves on.
Jesus personifies it, not "God and money" but "God and Mammon," as if wealth were a rival master with a name. Served, it is one.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Aramaic appendix (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Gehenna
Hebrewגֵּיא הִנֹּם
ge-hinnom
Behind the word "hell" in most of Jesus's warnings.
Gehenna is Greek for the Hebrew ge-hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom, a real ravine south of Jerusalem where kings Ahaz and Manasseh burned children to Molech. Josiah defiled it (2 Kings 23:10), and the prophets made its name a byword for judgment.
So when Jesus warns of Gehenna, he is pointing at a place his hearers could walk to, a valley whose history said: this is what becomes of what God has judged.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Sabbath
Hebrewשַׁבָּת
shabbat
The seventh day, the only day of the week the Old Testament names.
Shabbat comes from the verb "to cease." It is not first a day of worship services but a day of stopping, the deliberate laying down of work, patterned on God's own rest after creation.
Hebrew numbers its other days: first day, second day. Only the seventh has a name, which tells you where the week was pointed all along.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Jubilee
Hebrewיוֹבֵל
yovel
Leviticus 25, the fiftieth year, when the land went home.
Yovel means "ram's horn" — the trumpet blast that announced the fiftieth year, when Israelite bondservants went free and every family's land came back to it. The word for the year is the sound that started it.
It is worth keeping two laws apart here, because popular teaching runs them together. The Jubilee returns the land and frees the servants. The law that cancels debts outright is the seven-year shemitah of Deuteronomy 15. The Jubilee wipes out debt in effect, by handing back the land the debt was secured on.
When Jesus opened Isaiah 61 at Nazareth, "to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" — he was reading jubilee language, and announcing that the trumpet had sounded in him.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
Cherubim & Seraphim
Hebrewכְּרוּבִים · שְׂרָפִים
keruvim · serafim
Eden's gate, the mercy seat, and Isaiah's temple vision.
Both are Hebrew plurals your Bible left in the original (the -im ending is Hebrew's "-s"). Cherubim are the throne-guardians, stationed at Eden with the flaming sword, worked in gold over the ark's mercy seat. They are not chubby babies; that idea is Renaissance art, not Scripture.
Seraphim, literally "burning ones" — appear by name only in Isaiah 6, six-winged, crying "Holy, holy, holy." One word, one scene, and it has filled the church's worship ever since.
Lexical facts from Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Scripture from the Berean Standard Bible.
