HEBREW WORD STUDY – AND IT CAME TO PASS   VAYEHI  ויהו  Vav Yod Hei Vav

Exodus 40:17:  “And it came to pass in the first month in the second year, on the first [day] of the month, [that] the tabernacle was reared up.”

“And it came to pass.”   Who pays attention to those words?  Not any Christians I know.  They are just Biblical words like Behold, and it came about, or and it was.  All these phrases come from the same Hebrew word vayehi. It is so insignificant that many modern English translations just ignore it and go right into the meat of the text.  Some simply stick in the English word so to give it some sort of flow, but no one seems to seek any meaning behind those words. 

How quickly we Evangelicals forget that we are dealing with the very, inspired Word of God.  No, wait a minute, hear me out.  If we truly believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God then every word in that text has meaning and carries the very voice of God.  We are talking the Creator of this universe here, the Master of all things and he has given us everything He wants us to know in a book called the Bible which has only 783,137 words in the KJV.  Only 66 books in the Bible and The Creator of all things has said His peace? Most Christians have not even read through the whole Bible.  They read portions of the Bible. Some even attempt to read through the whole Bible in one year. Unfortunately, they have to wade through a whole bunch of numbers and laws before they get to the good stuff like Joshua fighting the battle of Jericho.  Most Christians barely make it through the mine field of statistics in the Book of Numbers before they hit a mine and are blown out of action. Then with tale tucked behind them they wander off to the more exciting parts of the Bible like the Gospels. 

Jewish sages and rabbis spend their lives studying the Old Testament, reading it word for word in the original Hebrew, some actually memorize every word in the Old Testament and we Christians can hardly read through it once.  What is it that these Jewish teachers see that we do not see?  

Well, for one thing they read the Bible in the original Hebrew and Aramaic. And they read their Hebrew very differently than we Christians read our Hebrew. We Christians point our heads in one direction and race through the Bible snatching little gems here and there that we pass off to each other in commentaries and study Bibles.  The Jewish sages and rabbis stroll through the Word of God, they stop to smell each little flower, listen to the song of every bird and delight in the antics of every little squirrel.  They will pay attention to every word in the Bible like watching every  little irrelevant sparrow as it hops around looking for a  morsel of food and find some hidden treasure in that bit of God’s creation. 

Vayehi (and it came to pass) is one such little sparrow that we Christians totally ignore and in fact even tell it to scat before it poops on our porch.  Like I said, some translations don’t even bother to translate it as it is considered so irrelevant. 

But what do the sages and rabbis find with vayehi after centuries of watching it dance and sing?  God Himself stuck that word in the Bible and God does not waste words. He was not trying to impress some acquisition editor to get His book published. 

In the Midrash Tanchuma the rabbis see a play on words here.  Actually, without the vowel pointings, you simply have vyhi.  It was not until seven hundred years after the birth of Christ that the Masoretes suck in the vowels to make it vayehi (and it came to pass).  It could have been rendered as vy hi (woe is it).  In fact some sages took the time to count up every time the word vyhi appears in the Old Testament and every time it appears it connotes a woeful event.  So in the context of Exodus 40:17 what can be so woeful about the completion of the tabernacle?  

The Midrash tells the story of a king who had a very argumentative, complaining and nagging wife.  So he said to her to make a beautiful purple coat for him.  For the duration of her labors over this coat she never quarreled with him and the king enjoyed some peace in his castle.  When she presented the coat to the king he was delighted with the results, declared it the most beautiful he had ever seen and then he began to cry, “Woe, Oh woe.”   His wife asked, “But you love the coat why do you mourn.”  The king replied, “Because now that you are no longer occupied with the task of making a beautiful coat for me, I fear you will begin to complain and nag me again.”

The sages teach that while the children of Israel were occupied with the tabernacle they never grumbled, but now that the task was finished, they will once again begin to start complaining and belly aching.  Thus we would translate Exodus 40:17 as “Oh woe, the tabernacle if completed.” 

There is a deep lesson in vyhi, so long as we are about our Father’s business and occupied with serving Him, we stop looking at our own condition, our own situations and somehow stop complaining to God. We know we are in the center of His will and whatever happens to us, loss of health, finances, jobs etc. we quickly see as part of God’s plan to help us accomplish his purpose.  But once we stop occupying ourselves with the Father’s business we begin to complain to God, “Oh, why did you cause me to lose my job, my health, my finances.  Why did that house, car, job I wanted so bad go to someone else?”  Poor God, He gets it in the neck every time. 

The lesson of vyhi, the word we Christians overlook but the Jews do not is that we need to keep ourselves busy and about our Fathers business so we don’t cause God to say: “Vyhi (oh woe) it’s that Chaim Bentorah fellow again complaining about his health problems, angel give him another idea for a book to write so he will be so absorbed writing that crazy thing that he’ll stop his belly aching.”