Wednesday, January 13, 2010

What Would Joshua Do?

It REALLY bothers me that almost all the Biblical names have been westernized and Anglicized to the point that they are all but unrecognizable.

My family is really connected with the local Jewish community for various reasons, and my mom works at a Jewish school.

My dad only reads Tom Clancy books or things related to Biblical scholasticism. Between the two of them, I have heard so many rants about how the names we use in the modern American church often aren't even close to correct. Sure, maybe they start with the same letter, but chocolate and cat both start with the same letter, and if you go to take a nice bite of cat when you're PMSing, you're basically screwed.

Take King Soloman. I don't know how to spell it, but his name is basically Schlomo. Yeah, it makes him sound kind of like a schmuck. But personally, I think it's kind of nice that someone supposedly so wise and who supposedly wrote such great poetry could have as dorky sounding a name as Schlomo. And Jesus. His name should be pronounced as something more along the lines of Joshua. Yep, the guy our religion is centered around is getting his name pronounced wrong. Super classy. I think if somebody's gonna die for our sins, we at least ought to call him by his proper name.

I am really hoping to learn more about this. In the mean time, I'm just a little appalled at how the church has gotten so far away from the actual roots of our religion over time and sad that we've lost such a connection to our past, even as people attempt to find Noah's Ark and crud like that, and even as they reconsider the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek.

So I dunno...food for thought I guess?

1 comment:

  1. Names are important. God often re-named people in the Old Testament when he interacted with them. Think Abram/Abraham and Jacob/Israel. I want to ponder on this some before I go off on a tangent but I do rather think you're on to something here.

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