Five Things You May Not Know About Saying “Amen”

Five Things You May Not Know About Saying “Amen”

by | Aug 15, 2021 | Prayer, Strategic Notes

We are all so used to hearing people say “Amen” at the end of prayers and saying it ourselves that we seldom think about the word, but the following points may show you that there is a lot about that small word you don’t know.

1) “Amen” doesn’t just mean “may it be so.”  Many people think of amen as a kind of spiritual punctuation mark – something we put at the end of prayers to mean “the prayer is over.” Those who understand the word better think of it as meaning “may it be so” and being a way of adding our agreement to what was said, but the word means much more than that and actually has a number of meanings.  Amen comes from a Hebrew root which in its various forms can mean: to support, to be loyal, to be certain or sure, and even to place faith in something. At the most basic level, the word can mean simply “yes!” as we see in Paul’s statement: “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 1:20). But the central meaning of the word has to do with truth, as we will see.

2) Amen was not usually used to conclude prayers in the Bible.  Although it is found many times in the Bible, its main use was to affirm praise for God (Psalm 41:13; Romans 1:25; etc.) or to confirm a blessing (Romans 15:33; etc.) –  either by the speaker or the hearers.  The “amen” found at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in some manuscripts of the New Testament  affirms the expression of praise that concludes the prayer. Perhaps because of this, over the course of the centuries it became common practice to use “amen” as the conclusion for prayers.

3)  Amen is used as a characteristic of God in the Old Testament.  Although the English Bible translation you use may not show it, in Isaiah 65:16 the Hebrew text speaks twice of “the God of Amen,” and this clearly uses amen as a characteristic or even a title of God.  Because many translators feel this would be confusing in English, they choose to render the text as “the God of truth,” and although that is not a bad translation, it does somewhat obscure the original sense of what was written.

4)  Amen is used as a characteristic of Jesus in the New Testament. Just as God is referred to as the God of Amen in the Old Testament, so in the New Testament in Revelation 3:14 “Amen” is used as a title for Jesus Christ “These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation.” The combination of Amen with “faithful and true witness” clearly show the connection between amen and truth.

5) Amen was used uniquely by Jesus.  Jesus usually used the word amen at the beginning of his statements, and in those cases, it was sometimes translated by the Gospel writers into Greek as “truly” (Luke 4:25; 9:27; etc.).  The NIV translates this in turn as “I assure you …”   But a completely unique use of amen by Jesus in the New Testament is recorded by the apostle John ,whose Gospel shows us that Christ frequently doubled the word at the beginning of particularly important statements. In the King James Bible this is translated “Verily, verily,” in the ESV as “truly, truly,” and in the NIV “Very truly.”   The doubling of amen was not only used by Jesus, however. In the early 1960’s part of a Hebrew legal document dating from the time of Jesus was found in which an individual declares “Amen, amen, ani lo ashem” meaning “Very truly, I am innocent.”  It is possible, then, that Jesus borrowed this doubled form of amen from legal language of the day.  But knowing that Jesus used this expression to signify important things he wanted to stress can help us see their importance in our own study of his words. The full list of occurrences of amen being doubled in John’s Gospel is: 1:51; 3:3, 5, 11; 5:19, 24-25; 6:26, 32, 47, 53; 8:34, 51, 58; 10:1, 7; 12:24; 13:16, 20, 21, 38; 14:12; 16:20, 23; and 21:18.

It is interesting that while the New Testament writers often left untranslated certain Hebrew or Aramaic words such as abba, “father,” but immediately followed the word with a translation into Greek, they invariably left “amen” untranslated in its Hebrew form. This could possibly have been because they felt the word amen was known and understood by all their readers, but it is more likely that they knew that the word represented a range of meanings and they felt it better to simply include the word and let the reader or hearer consider the possibilities. If this is the case, we can draw a lesson from the fact. That small untranslated “amen” we read in our Bibles can mean more than just “may it be so.” We can often profitably think about what it most likely means in a given context or the intended force with which the expression was used.  Finally, we should remember that “amen” certainly is not just a spiritual punctuation mark or a simple exclamation – wherever we use it we should think of it as a solemn affirmation that we are giving our personal guarantee that what was said is true!

Archaeological Evidence of the Warrior Gideon?

Archaeological Evidence of the Warrior Gideon?

by | Aug 1, 2021 | Archaeology & the Bible

Photo by Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority.

Archaeology has been able to document an increasing number of individuals mentioned in the pages of the Bible –  including the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah as well as  King David, Hezekiah, and others  (see the other posts in this category).

Most recently –  just a few weeks ago – archaeologists officially announced the discovery of a 3,100-year-old inscription from the period of the biblical judges which may refer to Gideon, the Israelite warrior-leader famous for defeating the Midianite and Amalekite armies that invaded ancient Israel (Judges 6).  While this inscription may not provide firm proof of Gideon, it is of great importance for a number of reasons.

For one thing, before its discovery there were practically no inscriptions of this time from the area of Israel in which it was found. Some had even argued that the alphabet was unknown in the region, that there were no scribes, and that the biblical accounts must therefore have been written much later. This find helps correct that view.

The inscription itself was found in excavations being conducted as a joint project of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Macquarie University in Australia. It consists of the name Jerubbaal, known in the Bible as the nickname of the judge Gideon (Judges 6:31–32), written in ink on what remains of a pottery jar or jug.  The preserved name probably identified the owner of the vessel, which may have held a precious liquid, such as perfume.

The Bible explains why the name Jerubbaal  was given to Gideon: “because Gideon broke down Baal’s altar, they gave him the name Jerub-Baal  that day, saying, “Let Baal contend with him” (Judges 6:32).  Jerubbaal may also mean “May Ba‘al be great,” and while biblical writers often used the word ba‘al to refer to the pagan Canaanite god Ba‘al, the word could simply mean “lord,” as in the name of one of David’s heroes Baaliah (“Yah is Lord”) in 1 Chronicles 12:5 – so that the name Jerubbaal  (“May the lord be great”) could also refer to Israel’s God Yahweh.

But one of the important aspects of the newly released inscription is that outside the Bible the name Jerubbaal is otherwise unknown in archaeological or historical contexts. Even if the new inscription does not refer to the Jerubbaal we know as Gideon, it shows that Jerubbaal was a name in use in exactly the time Gideon is said to have lived. 

It is not known that the Jerubbaal inscription does not refer to the biblical Gideon in some way – especially as the name is otherwise unknown. The find was made at the site of Khirbet al-Ra‘i, thought by some to be the biblical Ziklag (1 Samuel 30, etc.), and petrographic analysis indicates it was locally made. Since the biblical Gideon lived in Oprah (Judges 6:11, 8:27), usually assumed to have been in the Jezreel Valley nearly a hundred miles away, it is thought that this inscription likely belonged to another Jerubbaal.  However, the exact location of Oprah is unknown, and so original ownership by the biblical Gideon could still have been possible.

Interestingly, the related name Ishbaal  (“Man of Baal/ the Lord”), which is only mentioned in the Bible during the time of King David, was found in stratum dated to that period at the site of Khirbat Qeiyafa in Israel, showing an emerging pattern of names previously only known from the Bible being attested archaeologically.

Ultimately, of course, we do not know if the Jerubbaal artifact was named for Gideon or some other Jerubbaal, but the fact that it demonstrates the actual use of the unusual name for the first time and that it dates to the time of the biblical Gideon makes it especially interesting.  The artifact may not be proof of Gideon, but it certainly demonstrates the reality of an important aspect of the Gideon story – the name Jerubbaal itself.