The words your Bible left in their own language

"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 one place in the Bible where Jesus himself makes an argument from the shapes of letters — and the argument is that every stroke is kept.

English still keeps the word: to "jot something down" is to write the smallest possible note.

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: with one stroke, "word" (davar) becomes a different root entirely. Jesus's promise reaches down to that stroke — the text is kept not just to the letter, but to the parts of letters.

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.

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 Jehovah" 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.

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 that cometh in the name of Jehovah." They knew exactly which psalm they were standing inside.

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.

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.

Shemaʿ is a command: "Hear!" — and in Hebrew, hearing and obeying are one word. The verse it opens — "Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God, Jehovah 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.

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.

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 Jehovah'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.

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.

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 the oldest recorded prayer of the church, and Revelation ends the whole Bible with its Greek echo: "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Yovel means "ram's horn" — the trumpet blast that announced the fiftieth year, when slaves went free, debts were released, and every family's land returned to it. The word for the year is the sound that started it.

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.

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.