Hebrew Word Study – Asking For Clarification  Yakah יכה  Yod Kap Hei

Job 13:3: “Surely I would speak to the Almighty and I desire to reason with God.” 

I really can’t blame Job for wanting to reason with God.  After all, God can be so unreasonable at times.  I know I would like to just sit down with Him and explain my circumstances.  Surely once I explain everything He will come around, see the error of His way and reverse the situation I find myself in. 

Poor Job is being afflicted by the opinions of his friends and their reasoning as to why he is suffering. If he is going to reason with someone it might as well be with God.  Why not go to the source.   Perhaps he can take this up with God and convince Him to reverse his circumstances. 

The issue I have here is the word reason.  Can we really go to God, reason with Him, and persuade Him to change His mind?   No doubt our intercessory prayers will change God’s direction, but that is a matter of submitting our wills to Him.  The Hebrew word for reason is something different.  This word is yakah which means to argue, plead, contend, or reason; all with the purpose of showing how someone is wrong in their thinking and should change their mind.  Can we really argue with God and show Him that He is being unreasonable or that He has not completely thought out a matter?  That His whole thinking on a matter is wrong and we are right and He should reverse His actions?

When we as Christians need to find the meaning of a Hebrew word, what do we do?  We go our lexicon or the back of Strong’s concordance.  But we have to stop and ask ourselves.  How did someone find the meaning of a word prior to the lexicon or Strong’s concordance and how did the lexicographers and Strong come up with their definitions in the first place?   Well, they consulted what books they had, but somebody had to write their books, where did they come up with their idea on what a Hebrew word meaning?  The Hebrew language became a dead language during the time of captivity around 600 BC.  A dead language is one where a speaker’s competence in a given language decreases until there is no fluent speakers of that particular language. The most common death of a language occurs in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts to the new language.  When the Hebrews went into captivity they became bilingual speaking both Hebrew at home but Aramaic when they went about the Babylonian community.  The language gradually shifted to Aramaic and by the time of Jesus, Hebrew became just a ceremonial language, much as Latin is today.  Prior to 1960 Latin was still the language spoken in the Catholic church. No matter where you went in the world you could understand what was being said during the mass.  However, even though Latin was still being taught, even in public schools, fewer and fewer people really became fluent in the language or really understood the language enough to even understand what was being said during mass. Today, Latin is considered a dead language.  Although we have many Latin dictionaries and textbooks there is still considerable debate on how certain words in Latin should be rendered to fit the context of the many volumes of literature written in Latin. 

So it is with Hebrew. Our lexicons and Strong’s are not the final say in how a certain Hebrew word should be rendered for a particular passage.  As in Latin and other dead languages, there remain many other possibilities.  Our next bet is to go to the Jewish community where Hebrew is still studied not from lexicons or dictionaries but linguistically, the way the lexicographers wrote their lexicons.  Yet, even there you find rabbis disagreeing with each other over certain renderings or they are adding different shades of meanings and nuances to certain words and phrases.  Many times when reading Jewish literature in English, I find a little footnote that says, rabbi’s translation or rabbi’s interpretation. Rabbis take a linguistical approach to their study of Hebrew. They study it much differently than we do in our Christian Bible colleges and Seminaries.  They would examine each word in light of its origins, its association with other words or other Semitic languages and sometimes they even looked at the ancient understanding of the meaning behind Hebrew letters to serve as a sort of built-in commentary on a particular word. Theirs is a lifetime of study and not two to four three credit hours of study in a Bible College or seminary and declaring themselves a Hebrew scholar when they graduate. 

Let’s take for example today’s word yakah which our lexicon says means to argue, plead, content or reason. It is spelled Yod, Kaf, and Hei.  The Yod represents a clarification of God’s priorities, the Kaf shows the development of a strong kavanah or direction of the heart and the Hei pictures one listening for the still small voice of God.  Putting this together you have yakah as meaning more than Job just trying to reason or argue with God what he might have been trying to do was plead with God to clarify His priorities (Yod) and once he understood what God’s priorities were he would be able to set the direction of his heart (Kaf) and listen to the still small voice of God  (Hei).  

In Job 23:2 we find that Job’s friends were sitting around giving their advice and opinions and were so oppressing Job with their opinions that he could not mediate nor lift his hand in worship.  Job’s friends were operating on an entirely different level than Job.  Job’s friends were trying to point out the reason for Job’s suffering and how he could bring it to an end. Job, however, wanted to know what God’s priorities were.  Obviously, God had a priority over Job’s own comfort level and Job was fine with that, he just wanted to know what that priority was so he could set his heart in the right direction and hear God’s voice.  Job’s friends had just one purpose, to figure out why one is suffering and find a way out.  Job, the one who was suffering, was more interested in knowing God’s priorities so he could have a heart that was right and open to hearing God’s voice.  If suffering he must endure, then suffering he would endure so long as his heart was right and he could hear God’s voice.

The pronoun ani which we render as I comes from the root word anah which has a secondary meaning of moaning, suffering or having sorrow.   Hence a secondary rendering of this verse could be “Surely, my sufferings will speak to the Almighty and my sufferings desire to know God’s priority so my heart will follow the right direction and hear God’s still small voice.”

I like to believe that in Job’s sufferings he appealed to God, not to be delivered from the suffering but to understand it and submit to the Divine purpose and priorities of God.  To Job, God’s purpose and priorities were more important to him than his own gizzard.  

We all go through periods of suffering and pain, some more than others. Our general response when the roof caves in is to declare, “God, why did you do this?”  Poor God, He gets it in the neck every time.  But such a declaration does not have to be one of assigning blame. According to Job, we should ask God why, but not to assign blame but to understand what His priorities are so we can properly submit ourselves to those priorities and hear His still small voice.

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