Aramaic Word Study – Save Now –‘Oshanna’ – אוּשַׁענָא  Aleph Vav Shin Ayin Nun Aleph

Psalms 118:25:  “Save now, I beseech thee, O LORD: O LORD, I beseech thee, send now prosperity.”

Matthew 21:9: “And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed [is] he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.”

We have used the word Hosanna often throughout our lives as Christians.  There are songs written with the words Hosanna and we shout Hosanna during our times of worship.  Hosanna throughout Church History has come to the liturgical meaning of an expression of adoration, praise and joy. Hosanna in its original form was a compound word hoshi’ah na. It appears in the New Testament as Hosanna.  In linguistics this is called a semantic shift.  A semantic shift is the evolution of word change usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. 

Some may hold as a classic example of semantic shift that what we are hearing today with politicians and in the movie industry is that the meaning of sexual harassment has changed over the last fifties years. What was considered sexual harassment today was not such fifty years ago.  Well, try telling that to a person who was the victim fifty years ago.  In fact it is not the word that has changed but the way a law is viewed or defined. That is not a semantic shift.

A good example of a semantic shift is the word gay which has evolved over the last sixty years from meaning a happy, party type person to one’s sexual orientation.  However, most semantic shifts are not so obvious.   The word fear, for instance, once referred to a sense of respect and reverence for someone or something at the time the KJV came out.  Today it represents the feeling a person has for their own safety.

This is one reason we need a new modern translation of the Bible as opposed to the old King James Version as there are many semantic shifts with words that have undergone an evolution of word change.  However, there are revisions of the KJV to account for these changes.  This is an evolution we Christians must accept.

The word in Hebrew used for save in Psalms 118:25 is hoshi’ah na which comes from the root word  yasha which is where the Hebrew name of Jesus yashuah comes from which means salvation.  However in this case yasha’ is used as a verb in a Hiphal (causative) form – cause us to be saved.

But is that what the people were shouting during the triumphal entry when people shouted Hosanna in the highest – cause us to be saved – in the highest?   Not exactly.  The Aramaic uses the word  oshanna which would indicate that they were using a first century use of the word Hosanna which was an expression of adoration and praise as it is used today.  Had the Jewish people who were praising Jesus wanted to express the idea of a Savior or deliverer they  would  not have likely  spoken the Hebrew word Hosanna as Hebrew was a dead language at that time and used only for ceremonial purposes.  Thus, hosanna preserved the original idea of save us now rather than praise and adoration. 

The point is that there are many Bible translations out there and some are simply word for word translation accomplished without the help of skilled linguists who would have spotted many semantic shifts in the Hebrew Bible.  A word written during the time of Moses might have undergone a complete semantic shift by the time the word was used by Isaiah. There is a period of over a thousand  years.  Language changes over a thousand years, look at English a thousand years ago.  Have you ever tried to read Chaucer in its original form?   Even Shakespeare is difficult to understand and he lived only 500 years ago. 

So when you scratch your head over the differences in nuances for many words from one Modern English translation to another, realize the difficulties a translator faces in trying to translate a word into a modern setting that will help us understand the intent of the writer of that day.  I mean a word could mean something different to someone growing  up in Texas today and  someone growing up in New York.  

Years ago a linguist with two PhDs, Clarence Jordan, worked with the poor in Southern Georgia and found that the people he worked with could barely understand the Bible because of their lack of cultural experience, so he wrote a translation of the Bible putting it in the local dialect for the Southern  United States, particularly the area around Atlanta , Georgia.  It was called the Cotton Patch Version of the Bible.  Thus Matthew 3:4 reads “This guy John was dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, and he was living on cornbread and collard greens. Folks were coming to him from Atlanta and all over north Georgia and the backwater of the Chattahoochee.  And as they owned up to their crooked ways, he dipped them in the Chattahoohcee.”

We call that a paraphrase, very, very loosely translated.  However, people in that area could understand and relate to the people of the first century in a way our modern translations fail. We need to remember that it is the original documents that are inspired, not our modern translations.  Times, culture and language change and God’s Word never changes but the way we translate God’s Word does and must change to fit the language of the time.

Again, I am speaking of the value of studying the Bible in the original languages for then the Holy Spirit can whisper to you the English word that best expresses the meaning of the passage to you.   That is why the translators did not just say hoshi’ah na in Psalms 118:5 because they realized there was a semantic shift so they said save now in Psalms and used the word Hosanna in Matthew as an expression of praise and adoration which was the intent of that day.

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