This is a preview of the commentary of an upcoming comic I am doing.

Sabbath, God, and Jesus

In this soapbox, I want to look at language. Specifically, the three words: Sabbath, God and Jesus. This is going to be a long post, but TL:DR: Etymology shows origins of words, and there is nothing wrong with any of these three words.

As with all things I post, I don't want you to just take my word for it. Go and research and find out if what I am presenting is true. I am providing sources where I can.

Have you seen, liked, or even shared one of those memes where it lists what Saturday is called in several different languages showing that they all stem from the word Sabbath?

For example:

Arabic: Sabet

Armenian: Shabat

Bulgarian: Sabota

Czech: Sobota

Italian: Sabato

If so, congratulations! You've just used etymology to prove a point. Etymology is the study of the origin of words and the way they change throughout history.

With this meme on Sabbath, we can see English is an outlier when it comes to the names of the days of the week. This is due to the system we use today to for our day names comes initially from the Latin names, then Roman, then German. The last bit is important to the context of the rest of this post, because many don't seem to realize that English originated as a Germanic language. Old English, which is very different from the English we speak today, comes from Old High German.

When it comes to the day naming, the German peoples changed the names of the Roman gods used in the days of the week to German gods. Except for Saturday for whatever reason.

If you were to compare the days of the week as we call them in English to another Germanic language such as Frisian and a Romance language such as French, we can see that English is closer to the Germanic language.

English: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday

Saterland Frisian: Sundai, Moundai, Taisdai, Middeweik, Tuunsdai, Fraindai, Snaivende

French: Dimanche, Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi, Samedi

See the similarities and the differences? While English has been influenced by a lot of other languages, its roots are in the Germanic languages.

One thing of note here is those memes pointing out that many languages still have a version of Sabbath for Saturday, if you look at their word for Sunday, you can see that they are differentiating "Sabbath" from "The Lord's Day". 

For example in Spanish, Saturday is Sabado (Sabbath) and Sunday is Domingo, which comes from the Latin Dominicus, which means "of the Lord".

Let's move on to the term "God". 

I've seen a couple of statements on this word and I want to look at each of them and compare it to the etymology of the word. 

"The term "god" is actually "gad" in the Bible, the false god of fortune."

"The term "god" is an exonym and means nothing."

Okay, let's keep both of these in mind. As we are dissecting the first one, we will see why the second one can't be true either.

Saying "god" (pronounced gawd) is "gad" (also pronounced gawd) in the Bible shows a lack of study in the English and Hebrew languages. While in English, they may just be a vowel off, when we look into the etymology, we can see they are in fact different. 

Much like saying "a men" (note the space) in English is the same as the Hebrew "amen". While the former is grammatically incorrect, it isn't saying "let it be so" as the Hebrew is, it is saying a group of males.

When we look at "gad" in the Hebrew, it is גד. This has a root word of גוד (pronounced good). We see both of these words used in Genesis 49:19, when Jacob is blessing his sons and says to Gad(גד), a troop shall overcome(גוד) him, but he shall overcome(גוד) at last.

The "troop" there is also a related word with the same root. The root word has a meaning of attacking, and the two branch words hold a meaning of troop. 

We also see a prophet in David's time named Gad as well first introduced in 1 Samuel 13:7.

However, these aren't the people this statement is referring to. It is the mention in Isaiah 65:11.

"that forget my holy mountain, that prepare a table for that troop(גד)". This is a variation of the initial גד we have been exploring. When we look at the nikkud, the vowel pointings in the Hebrew, we can see this גד is pronounced "gad". 

Well, that isn't the same as the English "god", now is it? However, let's look at the English word.

As mentioned before, English stems from Old English, which is a Germanic language. Many words can be traced back to Old English and then to Old High German. And wouldn't you know, god is one of those words!

In the 1911 A concise etymology of the English language by Walter W. Skeat, we find the following (I've expanded the abbreviations and left out some of the other content to get to the point here.):

God (English)    Anglo-Saxon god + Dutch god, Icelandic go∂, Danish gud, Swedish gud, German gott. from a root meaning to worship as in to sacrifice to, or one to whom sacrifice is offered.

To get a second witness, if we look at the 1891 A Middle English dictionary containing words used by English writers from the twelfth to the fifteenth century by Francis Henry Stratmann it gives the Old English god, Old Frisian god, Old Norse go∂r and Old High German guot. Showing that even in Old English, god was still something that was in the other Germanic languages of the time. 

Even in the German Etymology website, https://woerterbuchnetz.de, for GOTT it gives other Germanic languages words, all being similar and then states the word can be seen as a characteristic of the Germanic languages. Showing this word is originated in the Germanic languages.

So, if it originated in the Germanic languages, it can't be the same as the Hebrew גד. Even, in the Old versions of English and German, it still held the definition of a deity type being, whereas in Hebrew, the definition is related to attacking.

This also shows that god is not an exonym. Exonyms are common in English. They are words that do not follow the local language usage of the original word. Most commonly, these are used for place names. Such as Florence in Italy is actually Firenze.

It should be noted that non-proper nouns are not exonyms. While the term god, is not a proper noun, in English it is used as a proper noun, which is where I am guessing this theory comes from. The question would be, if this is the case, what original term for god is supposedly being used here? What is its origin? I just showed it isn't Hebrew, and the god we use in English comes from older Germanic languages. Does the evidence for whatever this other term is outweigh the etymology of the Germanic god?

Lastly, let's look at Jesus.

Much like with "God", I've seen several people state we shouldn't be using Jesus. Some of the statements I've seen are:

"Jesus means 'Hail, Zeus'"

"Jesus can't be the Messiah's name, because sus is Hebrew for horse"

"666 in Revelation 13:18 is pronounced 'Cheesus' (i.e. Jesus)"

Before we unpack each of these, let's look at where Jesus comes from. 

If we go back to the 1911 Etymology book, we see that Jesus is Iesvs in Latin, Ἰησοῦς in Greek, and Yeshua in Hebrew (giving the reference of Nehemiah 8:17 which has ישוע listed there). 

According to etymonline.com, which takes into account several etymology book sources, Jesus comes from the Late Latin, from the Greek, which was trying to render the proper name ישוע into Greek. 

There is a meme floating around that explains the process: Yeshua, the "a" was dropped because there was no Greek character for the letter ע. The "sh" was dropped because there is no Greek character for ש, this changed to the closest sound "SO". The י was equivalent to the Greek "i". The "S" was added to the end as a Nominative Case Ending indicating a name. The "O" was dropped in English transliteration. When the J was introduced into English, it replaced instances of the letter "i" in later King James versions.

To see it in a line: ישוע -> Ἰησοῦς -> IESVS -> Jesus. 

What I find interesting is why would the original translators make this decision to do this? Jesus' Hebrew name, Yeshua, is the shortened form of the Hebrew name for Joshua. We even have an instance in Hebrews 4:8 where Joshua is called Jesus in earlier translations because of this same line of changing ישוע to Jesus. Knowing this, why not just use the Hebrew name instead of coming up with something new? Interestingly, this didn't just happen in the Greek. We also do this with several people in the Hebrew Old Testament such as Moses, which is actually Moshe (Moshay). 

So, we can see that from a standpoint of the origin of the name, it wasn't some conspiracy to do something evil. It was a decision made by translators over the years to try and convey what they thought was best at the time.

Let's look at the list now.

"Jesus means 'Hail, Zeus'" This one doesn't make any sense as Zeus in Greek is ο Δίας, or transliterated o Dias. If we compare Jesus' name in Greek Ἰησοῦς to this Greek Zeus name, we can see there is only the last character shared on both words. The Greek word for hail is χαλάζι. Nothing shared there either. This theory doesn't hold water, and I feel is based on how the English sounds rather than looking into the Greek.

"Jesus can't be the Messiah's name, because sus is Hebrew for horse" This one doesn't make any sense because as we just covered, Jesus isn't Hebrew. It is a transliteration of a transliteration of a transliteration. סוס (sus) in Hebrew does in fact mean horse, but this goes back to my point earlier in the גד section: just because a word in English sounds like something in Hebrew, it doesn't mean they are related.

"666 in Revelation 13:18 is pronounced 'Cheesus' (i.e. Jesus)" I got my first exposure to this one through a video someone sent me and asked my opinion on. I don't believe they liked what I said about it because I never heard from them again. I saw it again a few years later on TikTok and it seemed to take flight over there. Several people jumping on that this is actually true and several other people pointing out that it isn't. In Revelation 13:18, there are three letters given for 666: χξς. 

The common transliteration of these letters is chi xi sigma, which as an English speaker if you aren't familiar with these letters probably said "chai or chi" with the "ch" like church, zi or ksi, and sigma. With that and cramming them together you get something like Cheesus.

However, χ doesn't make the "ch" sound as in church. It is closer to the ח in Hebrew, which makes a gutteral sound we don't have in English. The word loch is close to it, but most people just say that like lock. 

The other issue here is there are no vowels in the 3 letters given. Greek needs vowels. We see other words that are transliterated in Revelation, and they have vowels. In Revelation 19:1 we see Halleluyah, a transliteration of the Hebrew word. In the Greek, it has vowels and consonants, making it sound in Greek similar to what it is in Hebrew.

So, it couldn't be a word John wants us to pronounce. Another witness to this, and the most important witness, John tells us 3 times before he gives the 3 letters, that this is a number. Like he knew somewhere down the line, someone was going to try and make this out to be something more than it actually was.

In closing, etymology is important. Using it, we can see that there is nothing inherently wrong with the words God or Jesus. We can also see that Sabbath is what we call Saturday. 

Without etymology, some crazy theories can be presented. Unfortunately, a lot of people won't go as deep as I did here. Some "teacher" somewhere said one of these things, and they must be true. 

I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make it drink. This is my evidence for my stance on these words. If you have counter evidence against these points, please provide. I would love to research them. However, "because this person said so" isn't evidence. Or some 3 hour long video with 75% of it having nothing to do with the topic at hand. (I've had people provide both for me on other subjects.)