Deuteronomy 8:6:“Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him.”

I John 4:18: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: Because fear hath torment.  He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”

I believe I should note something that many people, even Hebrew students are totally unaware.  A definitive Hebrew grammar really has its origins with the Masoretes who started their work in the 7^th – 11^th Century A.D.   This means that the Pharisees and the Apostle Paul did not know an infinitive construct from an infinitive absolute.  They studied the Holy Scriptures with just four consonants playing the role of vowels and there was no Weingreen Hebrew Grammar book. You find that scary? I find that scary. I find it scary because vowels and grammar narrow down the playing field. I find that scary because the inspired Word of God are the words in the original manuscripts which had no grammatical guides and just had consonants being used as vowels. Later men came along and took the inspired Word of God and added some vowels pointings and made the Hebrew grammar more precise and scientific.  As a result they turned a beautiful document of poetry into a scientific journal. By poetry I mean reading a document and using you heart and not a scientific formula to understand what it means.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not about to throw my KJV or ESV out the window.  I dearly love my English Bibles and every day God speaks to me through it.  Also, I have not studied Hebrew grammar for 35 years if I did not think there was any value to it.   The Masoretes depended upon almost 3,000 years of oral tradition to develop the Hebrew into a science to preserve the truth before it became lost with the scattering and assimilation of the Jewish culture.  Amen to the Masoretes, they were God’s instruments, but their resulting work is not the inspired Word of God.

Having said all that I am going to reference the grammar. Deuteronomy 8:6 promises many blessings if we do three things:  we keep God’s commandments,(I understand that), walk in His ways (I understand that), and fear Him (that I do not understand).  I mean I understand what fear is.  Every time I read the news on the internet or hear some preacher talk of the coming disasters following the blood moons, I know what fear is,   it is a distressing emotion aroused by impeding danger (Webster). Now that definition fits well with I John 4:18:  The perfect love of God should not produce a distressing emotion.  But if the perfect love of God cast out all fear, why are we commanded to be afraid of  God.  Sounds contradictory to me and it is. Well keep in mind that I John was written in Greek and the Greek word used here for fear is phobos, like in phobia and means to be afraid as we understand being afraid.

However, the word used in the Hebrew for fear as in “fearing God” is leyire’ah. We make the mistake of equating the Greek word phobos with the Hebrew word and that creates all sorts of contradictions.  The original Hebrew manuscripts had no vowels and so the word is really spelled LYR’H  (Lamed, Yod, Resh, Aleph, Hei).  The Lamed I can understand, it is obviously the preposition to but what the blazes is the Hei doing at the end.   The Masoretes did the most obvious thing, they stuck a qammets under the Aleph and turned this into an infinitive construct. Now an infinitive construct is used after a preposition, in this case the Lamed, and is inflected with a pronominal suffix (qammets, Hei) to indicate its subject or object.  The object being a her which is not at all compatible with the final pronoun him.  What was Johannes Reuchlin who published the first Hebrew grammar in the 16^th century thinking?  What were the Masoretes thinking?  What were Davidson, and Brown Driver Briggs thinking to attach the English word fear to this word LYR’H?

The answer to that and this mysterious Hei would be the bases for a doctrinal dissertation which would involve discussions with esoteric rabbis in orthodox communities in this country, Europe and Israel. It would involve time spent at the Vatican to review the Ugaritic and other Semitic documents from which the ancient Hebrew has its roots. Oh to be young again.  I suspect that after all that research one will find that a grave error was made in attaching the English word fear to this Hebrew word which comes from the root word yara’. I have a strong feeling that the mindset of the church in the Middle Ages  which controlled the people through a fear of Hell had much to do with the insertion of the word fear for yara’ and for the next 500 years Christians scholars merely moved in lockstep to tradition and continued to insert the word fear but adding a strange side note that the word  it could also mean respect, which was probably done to address an absolutely hideous contradiction to I John 4:18 which tells us that perfect love casts out all fear.

You see, when the Masoretes turned the Hebrew language into a science and as the English Christian scholars started to form their lexicons, somewhere in the process they lost track of the input of the heart and the Spirit of God.  The Old Testament suddenly lost its soul, its heart and became a boring technical document without an emotion.  Sort of like putting Shakespeare into modern English, you would literally wipe out its entire emotional context, you would have to strip the soul out of Shakespeare to put it in modern English.  Try re-writing Elizabeth Barrett Browning using modern terminology.  The only way to do that would be to remove its heart and then leave it to an uninspired translator to give his own opinion as to how she love thee.  Ok, I understand we cannot expect everyone to study the ancient languages so they can read the Bible in the original Hebrew and Aramaic like the Jews teach their children.  Still my concept of God, my understanding of God’s love, mercy, caring was literally been transformed when I started to read the Bible in the original Hebrew and Aramaic because I began to hear the heart cry of God and not the scientific, technical mind of some scholar sitting up in his ivy tower who hadn’t kiss his wife in twenty years.

The word yara’ (fear) as viewed by the ancient sages who lived long before the Masoretes viewed this word, viewed it through the heart and the Spirit of God or however you wish to term the study made by these sages of  3,000 years ago.  In the word yara’ (fear)  they saw the Yod  which  represented one who will do justly, love kindness and walk humbly before God. They looked at the Resh and saw one who adheres to the core values or commands of God and they saw the final Aleph as one who seeks a unity and oneness with God, who yolks himself to God.  As to what that mysterious Hei is doing  in the word in this verse, I see the broken letter which represents the breath of God, the life giving element of God, the letter by which He created the World.  I see a Messianic  symbol of Jesus Christ and to fear or yara‘ah God is nothing more than to accept the sacrifice of His Son, the ultimate symbol of His love.

Should some young scholar decide to do his doctoral dissertation on the scientific approach to the Hebrew, I suspect he would reach the same conclusion as the esoteric rabbis and sages did long before the Hebrew turned its grammar and vowel pointings into an exacting and precise science.  Such a study would prove that to fear or yara’ God has nothing to do with dread, or a distressing emotion that originates from concern for one’s welfare.  It has everything to do with what is just and kind in God’s eyes, to walk humbly before Him, keep His commandments and seek unity and oneness with Him.