Matthew 6:13: “And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”

As I seek to understand a new dimension that God is leading me in my prayer life, I am finding myself using the Lord’s prayer more often.   In this use of the Lord’s Prayer I am discovering that I haven’t the foggiest idea of what I am saying.  One passage I am particularly troubled with is praying that God does not lead me into temptation.  Does not James teach in 1:3, “Let no man say he is tempted of God.”  Sounds like a contradiction to me.

One thought that might help us in understanding this passage is to consider the possibility that this passage was originally written in Aramaic. I know it is pretty controversial today with Biblical scholars weighing in on both sides of the issue as to what language the New Testament was written in.  I tend to learn towards the idea that the Gospels were written in Aramaic and translated into Greek some twenty to eighty years later. I could be wrong.  But one thing most scholars do agree upon is that Jesus and the disciples would have spoken a Northern or Old Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Hebrew had not been in the vernacular of the Jewish people for 2,500 until 1948. Unless the rocks can speak, we will never know what the original Hebrew sounded like nor will we know the correct way to pronounce God’s name or the name of Jesus in Hebrew.

The Hebrew script we use today is called the Assyrian or Square Script which Ezra and his scribes developed to replace the Phoenician or Canaanite script which some refer to as the Old Hebrew.  It is the Assyrian Square Script that I play around with and not the Old Hebrew script as I believe Ezra and his scribes had a ceremonial and spiritual purpose in developing a script which is used only by the Hebrews.

Greek was the vernacular of the West and the language of commerce for the West and East much like English is today.  Aramaic was the vernacular of the East. The people of Southern Judea spoke a Southern dialect of Aramaic and the people of the North around Galilee spoke a Northern dialect. The differences are not dramatic, much like the English of the United States is like the Northern Aramaic as the English of Great Britain is like the Southern dialect of Aramaic. This may explain why people near the crucifixion of Christ did not understand what he meant when he called out Eli, Eli as some thought he was calling out for Elijah and it was just his more informal language and accent of the Northern dialect.  Although Jesus spoke Aramaic as the common language, there is an issue as to whether his teachings were in Aramaic or in Hebrew.  Hebrew was still used ceremonially although it was considered a dead language much as Latin is today.  Yet, like Latin is the common language around the Vatican and in many Catholic churches, Hebrew could very well have been a common language in the synagogues and among the Pharisees. This becomes even more important with recent discoveries surfacing from the studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

One such very recent discovery from the Psalms Scroll shed some light on this very troubling passage in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13: Lead us not into temptation.   Why would God lead us into temptation?  If it was His divine will to lead us into temptation, why would we pray for Him not to lead us into temptation. Was Jesus actually teaching us to pray and tell God to back off? As mentioned earlier, is this in contradiction to the teachings of Jesus’ brother James in 1:3?

An identical phrase was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls following a certain rhythmic pattern. Another thing to keep in mind about this culture is that they had no recording devices and most of what was taught by the rabbis was put to a sort of rhythm, meter or rhyme.  This was done as a memory device as everything had to be taught by memory. Even today college students will put certain items that they will need to recall for a test into a rhythm or rhyme strictly as a learning tool. We know today that there was a rhythm and rhyme to the Lord’s Prayer that was lost when it was translated into the Greek. However, when transposed into Aramaic and even Hebrew you can recapture much of the meter. This is why you will find so many idiomatic expressions in the New Testament. As many college students have learned when expressing certain concepts into rhyme for memory purpose it is necessary to create an idiomatic expression in order to make a rhyme.

Scholars transposed the Lord’s prayer and the passage in James to Aramaic and Hebrew and they found that it carried the same meter or rhyme as found with the identical phrase in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus a recent understanding, thanks to the Dead Sea scrolls, has helped us to establish this phrase, Lead us not into temptation as an idiomatic expression.

The difficulty now lays in the translation of the Aramaic word for temptation which is nesiona to the Greek word peirasmon. In the Dead Sea Scrolls is found in the Hiphal form signifying a causative sense.  Hence using the Dead Sea Scrolls rendering as guide we would find a more proper rendering of this phrase: Lead us not into temptation to be: Do not allow us to enter wrongful thinking or testing.

As the Lord’s Prayer is given by Jesus we can assume it is an expression of God’s heart.  God wants us to pray that we do not enter into wrong thinking or wrong testing.  I just wonder how many of my testings were brought on by myself by my own lack of submission to God’s will or my own wrong thinking?

I know many of us recite the Lord’s Prayer on a daily basis. If you find the rendering, Lead us not into temptation a bit troubling, you might want to take advantage of the discoveries found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and offer an alternative rendering of  “Don’t allow me to enter into wrong thinking or testing’s.”