Good Morning Yamon Ki Yesepar;
Isaiah 63:9: “In all their affliction he afflicted…”
Here is something I have never understood about the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or the Kittle which is the standard Masoric text used by our Western Christian translators. For you Hebrew students, check out the word “lo” in this passage in your Hebrew Bible. You will notice a (.) above the word. In your Kittle or Stutgartensia you will see a (o) above the word. What that little mark means, that even translators tend to ignore is that this is not what is found in the original text, it is Oral Tradition.
To those of us who believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, that little mark is very important. Jesus warned in Matthew 5:18; “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”
I found my seminary teachers taught me quite wrongly about the jot and tittle, which is scary in way. The standard teaching was that the “tittle” was the tagin found in the Sefer Torah and the Magilan Esther (hand written portions of the Bible). You also find it on the terrillin and mezuzahs. This made little sense to me, as the tagin each have special meanings which are not inspired, so why would Jesus condemn the changing of something that was not inspired. So I went with the secondary explanation that the “tittle was like the foot on the “taw” and if you eliminate that, you have a “chet.” (A rabbi recently laughed at me when I mentioned this).
A Hebrew scholar who was an ultra orthodox rabbi, pointed out that in the Greek the word that has been translated as tittle is keraia. The word tittle comes from the Latin which was first used in the 11th Century to distinguish the letter “i” from strokes of nearby letters. Although originally a larger mark, it was reduced to a dot when Roman-style typefaces were introduced. It is called a diacritic. Hence the word tittle means the dot above the lower case “i” or “j.” In Greek the word “keraia” means a hook or serif and was most likely referring to a Greek diacritic. Iota is the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet and was used as a small diacritic called a hypogegrammeni. The Iota is like the yod in the Hebrew as the smallest letter of the alphabet, but where do we find the keraia (tittle) or the diacritic in the Hebrew. Well we have one in Isaiah 63:9 over the word “lo” and Jesus is telling us go with the original manuscript and not what Oral Tradition tells us.
Hence your Kittle or Stuttgartensia will not give you the original word, it only gives what oral tradition dictates with a little tittle above it to alert you to the fact that there is another word used here and I could only find that word in the Sefer Torah or other Jewish copies of the original Hebrew.
You see the word “lo” in this verse is written differently than it is read. It is originally written as “lu.” The original uses a “vav” and not an “aleph.” “Lo” mean “no” or “there is not.” “Lu” means “he.” Both readings were meant to be combined so it could be translated correctly. Because our English versions overlook this “tittle” our rending of this passage in Isaiah 63:9 is “In all their affliction He was afflicted.” That is comforting, but there is more to it. If we pay close attention to this “tittle” and as a good Christians should, we see this passage as clearly speaking of Jesus, the proper rendering would be: “In all their afflictions, He is afflicted, THEN THERE IS NO AFFLICTION.” The rabbi (who sees the “he” as God and not Jesus) pointed out this little oversight we Christians make and added: “When one knows how to praise God in this way, the suffering will disappear by itself.” In other words when a person realizes that God is present in all his afflictions, then the afflictions themselves cease to exist.”
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