HEBREW WORD STUDY – DEATH – MUTH מות Mem Vav Taw

Genesis 47:29, “And the time drew nigh that Israel must die: and he called his son Joseph, and said unto him, If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt:”

There is a curious choice of words here and a real question of syntax. I was reading this passage in the Midrash and the rabbis render the phrase, “And the time drew nigh that Israel must die as And Israel’s days drew near to die. In other words, Israel is the adjective and the noun is days. Israel is modifying days not days modifying Israel. It is the days that were dying, not Israel. The Midrash teaches that Israel (Jacob) did not die it was just the days that were dying.

Well, of course, Jacob died, the Bible even talks about him being buried. So how can the rabbis say that Jacob never died? You know sometimes we hear a joke, laugh, find it humorous but we never stop to consider why it is humorous. For instance, we’ve all heard the joke about the old boy holding up is King James Bible and saying, if it was good enough for the Apostle Paul it is good enough for me. We laugh, ha ha, because it is absurd, we know the King James Version of the Bible was translated 1600 years after the Apostle Paul lived. We know the Apostle Paul did not speak English because English, as we know it today, did not exist. That is just pure common sense knowledge. Yet, even knowing this we still read the Bible as if it were originally written in twenty-first century English. Only our Western arrogance causes us to read the Bible as if it were written in modern English in Western culture.

I remember as a child growing up in a fundamentalist church where there was a time the church was looking for a pastor. We had a big meeting where everyone would give their input as to what they were looking for in a pastor. I remember one old boy getting up and saying, “I don’t want one of these pastors who studied Greek and is always saying ‘in the Greek this means.’ I want him to just teach the Bible.” Well, we forget that the Bible was written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic and it was written from the mindset of early Semitic Eastern culture. We have to come down to their level if we want to grasp the many nuances in the Bible rather than it coming up to our level.

In English when we say someone is dead, we mean they are physically dead. So don’t try to read anything else into it. If the Bible says dead then dead means dead. Yet, in an ancient Semitic mindset dead can mean different things to different cultures. In an unscientific culture, the spiritual world was much more real than it is in our technological, scientific world. The ancients believed their dead relatives were ever-present with them, giving them strength and sharing knowledge. In many cultures death was only a step into something much greater than life, it was freedom from pain. Death was so common in those days that it was not as feared as it is in our culture. David said in Psalms 23 that if he walks through the valley of the shadow of death, he will fear no evil. He did not say he would not fear death, he would not fear the evil of death.

The word in Hebrew for death is moth. This word basically means an ending. It is sometimes used with the word courage, strength, wisdom, etc. Jesus even said that Lazarus did not die, he only sleeps. Although we use the English word death figuratively at times we somehow will not see it in Scripture as being used figuratively even though it is used more often figuratively than it is in English. Thus we read that the dead in Christ shall rise and never stop to consider that maybe this is a figurative use of the word. Or even we who are alive and remain will be caught up to be with the Lord and never once consider that the word alive might be figurative as well. I am not saying yea or nay to the rapture, I am only saying that we never stop to consider the possibility of the words death and alive being used in a figurative sense which is far more common in a Semitic culture than it is in ours.

So if the Midrash is right in saying that it was the days that died or ceased and not Jacob does that make any difference in what we read? I think it gives us a stunning message. We who are in Christ Jesus shall never die, we are eternal. Every day we live, that day will die, that day that we have in the flesh, a day that we will never get back, a day that God has given us to accomplish something for him will come to an end and we will never be able to go back and redo or recapture that day. It is dead, gone, buried, over with, ceasing to exist. This flesh will someday end, but we will not, we will not end, not as a day will end.

People today are living in fear of the coronavirus. They are afraid of catching the virus and dying or a member of their family may die. But if you are a Christian you will not die, your body may cease to exist, your dreams and plans will come to an abrupt end but you will not die. You will be separated from your loved ones for only a short time, actually for no time at all since you will enter a dimension where time does not exist. You will continue to exist to live.

So, it really comes down to the question of what am I going to do with that which dies. Do I hid out and waste those days clinging to something that will pass anyway, or do I spend those days which are nowadays of isolation and quarantine trying to connect with the God you will spend eternity with? Now is the perfect time to do this. In fact, perhaps God designed this period to be a time of isolation, social distancing so He can get you alone and have a few words with you about where you are going once your body gives out. My choice is to stay in the city, in the midst of all that madness, and reach serve where I can and where I cannot use my quiet to reconnect with the God I love.

Did not the Apostle Paul say, “For me to live is Christ to die is to gain.” Philippians 1:21. Think about that from a first-century Semitic mindset and not a twenty-first-century Western technological and scientific mindset. Maybe you too will choose to use this precious time where God has hit the pause button to give us a moment to reconnect with Him, for that is all physical death is, is just a pause button.