Good Morning Yamon Ki Yesepar;
Exodus 34:14: “For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”
There are really only two words in the Hebrew for worship. One is ‘atsab’ which is used only once for worship and has the idea of sorrow. The word “‘abad” which means service is sometimes used for worshipper. However, when all is said and done there is really only one word in Hebrew for worship “shachah” which simply means to bow down, or fall prostrate, at least that is what your lexicon will tell you. There really is not too much more we can get from the word except to view how it is used in Scripture and there we see it used as paying homage to God or someone or something. This verse in Exodus 34:14 suggest that bowing down to another God brings about jealously from God. So there must be something pretty bad about bowing down before some other God. We can assume such an act means the giving of yourself, your devotion and your dependence upon that one that you bow to. In the last month I have attended many worship services and I have not once seen someone bow. In fact, it is usually the opposite, everyone standing with their arms wide spread. I rarely see shacah in worship services.
Still, for such an important word in our Christian vocabulary, there seems to be very little insight into the dynamics of what worship really is. We seem to be left to doing what seems to work or what tradition tells us worship is. Within high church, worship is the recitation of liturgical traditions. In moderate churches it is an order of service that last about an hour. In Pentecostal or Full Gospel circles it is lifted hands, singing a little chorus about love and mercy. Yet, worship or shacah means to bow down or prostrate yourself before God. It has nothing to do with music, nothing to do with up lifted hands, in fact it has nothing to do with praise and thanksgiving. These are just manifestations of worship. Still, the Hebrew Sages chose this combination of letters to express the most intimate aspect of our relationship with God.
The word “shachah” is spelled “shin, chet, he.” At lest the masorites spelled it with a shin, some Jewish scholars will argue that is should be a “sin.” The difference between a shin and sin is the shin has the dot on the right side of the letter and the sin has the dot on the left side of the letter. In the original state, there was no dot at all. If spelled with the sin it would mean to swim or an overflow. The shin or sin both represent wholeness, completeness, nearness to God. The chet represents an intimate joining of man to God and the “he” represents the breathe of God, the presence of God and God’s feminine nature. Hence worship is any act that joins man with God in to a completeness surrounded by presence of the Spirit of God. That is where the swimming comes in, when you swim you are surrounded by water. Worship can occur in reading Scripture, midrashing the Word with other believers, singing, or just sitting quiet before God, Anything or time when God has your full attention and he can surround you with his presence and love.
When I was in graduate school I studied the Ugaritic language. The Ugaritic language was discovered in 1928 and next to the Dead Sea scrolls it has been the single most important tools for Hebrew scholars in clearifying Biblical Hebrew texts. It was written in the cuneiform abtar, style yet, it’s grammar and style is clearly Hebraic and it is to Classical Hebrew what the Anglo Saxon is to the English language.
At the time I was a graduate student there were only 5,000 people in the world who actually studied this language. We had to get our text books from the Vatican, which cost a fortune as I remember and had a paper cover with the pages attached by strings. Very Martin Lutherish. I remember translating a poem about a goddess who fell in love with a mortal man and had a intimate relationship as only a goddess could have with a mortal man. I mean it knocked the old boy flat on his face, like a WWF spread eagle. The old gal, in her passion, sort of forgot she was a goddess. However, it did end up to be quite gentle and passionate. Take that you people who call seminaries, cemeteries. Nothing dead about that study, with an “XXX” rating to boot. Ok enough of classical pornography.
The word in the Ugaritic to describe this intimate relationship was none other than “shachah.” The sages simply took that Ugaritic word to describe the intimate relationship between a human man and a goddess to describe our relationship with God and we translate it as “worship.” The ancient concept of shachah is a god sharing his/her passion with a human and the human sharing his/her passion with the god. Although our God is in control of His passions, sometime we tend to get carried away with our passions and it will knock us flat, but that is ok, that is still shachah.
That is why we have a jealous God whose name is Jealous. He get’s very jealous if we share our passions with any other god. He may get so jealous that maybe His passion for us may just knock us flat like a WWF spread eagle as He says: “You find another god who can have like this passion for you.”
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