Psalms 118:10: “All nations compassed me about, but in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.”

The letter Beth can be used as a preposition for in, on or with. No English translation I know will render the Beth in this passage as with.  However, the Jewish sages do that very thing.  David could very well have said: With the name of the Lord I will destroy them.  We, of course, will not render it this way because David is literally saying that by speaking the name of the Lord he will destroy the nations that compassed him. To say with the name of the Lord sounds just too mystical.  Yet, a recent study showed that the biggest complaint people have about the church in America is that it is not spiritual enough, they want to feel and experience the presence of God, to know Him personally.  People want to connect with their creator is some overt or, shall I say, mystical way.

Why are we so afraid of that word mystical? Perhaps because we automatically think of the occult when we hear the word mystic and we associate anything with the occult as Satanic. I would then agree that with this narrow definition of mystical I would steer clear of anything that is mystical. That is the problem we face in Bible translations.  Many English words can mean different things to different people.  How do you translate a particular word from the Hebrew into English that everyone can agree upon?  If I say pond someone thinks of a little fountain in the backyard of a mansion, some think of a little body of water in the middle of a pasture on a farm. If you are from England you would think of the ocean.   

If I say Jewish mysticism most people will automatically think of a pointed hat with crescent moons and stars and a crystal ball and immediate think, “Oh no, I am not going there, I don’t want them demons to jump off on me.” Yet, in the mind of many Jews when they think of a Jewish mystic they are thinking of someone who is trying to have an experience or a personal relationship with God. The English Webster dictionary definition of the word mystic is a person who claims to transcend ordinary human knowledge and communicate with the divine or spiritual world. By this definition simply praying to God for divine intervention is an act of mysticism. We as Christians struggle to experience the presence of God, we seek to get an answer to our prayers by behaving a certain way or doing something that demonstrates our faith. I have known people who have taken their rent money and given it as an offering claiming faith that God would make a hundredfold return.  By any definition of mysticism, that is a mystical act. In their minds, however, it is not mystical because they were not instructed by someone with a pointed hat decorated with crescent moons and stars and guided by a crystal ball but by someone in a Brooks Brother suit with a Rolex watch putting his own personal spin on a Bible passage. The line between exercising one’s faith and mysticism can be very blurry if there is indeed any line at all.

Let me give you an example. I Samuel 17 tells us the story of David defeating Goliath.  We all know the story, he went to the brook, chose five smooth stones and used one of them to kill Goliath with his sling shot and then chopped off his head.  I was just playing around with the original text, not the Masoretic text developed seven hundred years after the birth of Christ.  In this text there are neither vowel pointings nor are there any divisions between words, you really don’t know where one word ends and another begins. By just translating this story without using our present understanding of this story as a guide I came up with something a little different in I Samuel 17:49.

I Samuel 17:49 is rendered in our KJV as: “And David put his hand in his bag and took a thence a stone and slang (it), and smote the Philistine in his forehead that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.”  I have a few problems with the syntax of this translation but it is an accepted translation, it is what tradition dictates and who am I to disappoint the millions of Sunday School children and teachers by saying that David did not beast the old boy with a sling shot. However, right from the Hebrew text I came up with this alternative rendering: “And from the Name, David made words with power and clapped his hands and sent the words to the mockery of the Philistine, slandering it.  And he sent out the strength (of the words) upon him and the power penetrated his mockery and he fell to earth.”

In other words according to the Gospel of Chaim Bentorah, David did not kill Goliath with the stone in the forehead.  David simply clapped his hands and spoke the name of God sending out a power which overcame Goliath such that he fell under this power and while under this power, David chopped off Goliath’s head and killed him.  He killed him by chopping off his head not by a stone in the forehead. Which is more mystical, killing Goliath with a stone guided by God or speaking the name of God?

Ok, I know Hebrew teachers all over would throw salt in the air over this rendering and I would probably be boycotted by Sunday School teachers all over the world, but I am not saying this is the correct translation, just an alternative which clearly messes with tradition.  The Jewish midrash teaches that “Knowing God’s name implies knowing how to actually make use of it.” Suppose tradition taught that David defeated Goliath with the name of God and not with a stone.  Did we cross a line into mysticism here? Is there not power in the Name of Jesus? Is there not healing in the Name of Jesus?  Do not demons tremble at the sound of that Name?

Yesterday we had wintry conditions and my study partner was driving on an icy road when suddenly her jeep went into a skid on the ice and was headed straight for an on-coming car. It appeared the car was not going to stop in time to avoid a collision when she cried out the name “Jesus.”  The car came to an immediate stop without any collision. Coincidence? Dumb luck? Or was there power in that Name?  You decide, but be careful if you choose the latter you may be called a mystic.