The Three-Hundred-Twelfth (The Horizon)

There are certain words in our English Bibles that we read straight past.  Not because they're unimportant, but because we're absolutely certain we already know what they mean.  We've heard them a thousand times, we've sung them in songs, we've built entire beliefs on them, and it never once crosses our mind to stop and check.

When you read that a statute is "for ever," or that a possession is "everlasting," or that something will last "for ever and ever," what happens in your head?  For most of us a picture forms immediately, and that picture is unending time with no stopping point.  Once that picture forms, we start reasoning from it.  We decide what YHWH must have meant, what He must still expect, what must have been done away with, and what must be permanent, all based on a picture that an English translator put in our heads.

This week, we're going to look at the Hebrew word underneath all those English phrases.  I'll warn you up front that by the end of this you may find you have to go back and re-read some passages you thought you had settled a long time ago!  This isn't going to be a case of one obscure verse getting stretched to make a point either.  There are hundreds of occurrences, and they're going to tell us the same thing over and over.

The Hebrew word is olam (Strong's H5769), and it shows up in the Old Testament well over four hundred times.  Depending on how you count it, the tagged Hebrew text has it 438 times across 413 verses, and Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) lists its entry as 439.  That's a lot of occurrences, and it tells us that scripture itself gives us more than enough context to show how we should be thinking about this word when we see it in scripture.

Before we get into the actual verses, let’s see how the word was translated.  The King James translators rendered olam as "ever" 272 times and "everlasting" 63 times.  But those same translators also rendered it "old" 22 times, "ancient" 5 times, and, brace yourself, "never" 13 times!  Now, "never" is usually olam sitting next to a negative, so it's not quite as strange as it first sounds.   Keep the "old" and "ancient" ones in your mind though, because those aren't negatives, and they're going to matter a great deal here shortly.

Let's start with the clearest case in all of scripture.  In the Law YHWH gave at Sinai, there's one about a Hebrew servant who serves six years and goes free in the seventh.  But if he says he loves his master and his wife and his children and doesn't want to go free, his master brings him to the door, pierces his ear with an awl, and "he shall serve him for ever" (Exodus 21:5-6).  The Hebrew there is le'olam, and when it was translated into Greek in the Septuagint they rendered it eis ton aiōna, which is the exact phrase the apostles use over and over in what we call the New Testament.

So here is the question: Does that servant serve his master through unending eternity?  Is he still serving him right now, and will he be serving him a billion years from now?  Obviously not, because he serves him until he dies.  The same law is repeated in Deuteronomy with the same word (Deuteronomy 15:17), and most modern translations have quietly given up trying to make "for ever" work here and just render it "for life."

One verse in, and already the picture in our heads is in trouble!  Maybe you're thinking that's just an idiom, a figure of speech, a single odd usage that got frozen into the Law.  That's a fair thought, so let's keep going and see whether it holds up.

Jonah, sitting inside a fish, prays and says that the earth with her bars closed upon him le'olam (Jonah 2:6).  How long was Jonah in there?  Three days and three nights (Jonah 1:17).  Hannah tells her husband that once Samuel is weaned, she'll bring him before YHWH so that he may abide there ad-olam (1 Samuel 1:22), and six verses later she explains exactly what she meant: "as long as he lives" (1 Samuel 1:28).  Scripture defines its own term right there in the same conversation.

Zechariah asks about the fathers and the prophets, "do they live le'olam?" (Zechariah 1:5).  In context, this question only works if the answer is no.  Then there's my favorite, because Isaiah doesn't leave any room to argue at all.  He prophesies that the forts and towers will be dens ad-olam, a joy of wild donkeys, a pasture of flocks (Isaiah 32:14).  And what's the very next word out of his mouth?

"Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high" (Isaiah 32:15).  For ever…until.  In the same breath, by the same prophet, in the same sentence, opposites are connected.  Whatever olam meant to Isaiah, it was something that could have an "until" attached to the end of it.

Now, let's come back to those 22 times the King James renders olam as "old."  The mighty men in Noah's day were men "of old" (Genesis 6:4).  Moses tells Israel to remember the days "of old" (Deuteronomy 32:7).  Solomon says not to move the "ancient" landmark your fathers set (Proverbs 22:28).  The same word, olam, is pointing backwards.

Think about what that does to our mental picture.  If olam simply meant unending eternity, then the men of Genesis 6 came from eternity past, which is nonsense because the verse itself says they were born.  The word runs in both directions, forward and backward, and it can't mean eternity in both directions and still be talking about a landmark somebody's grandfather planted in a field.  Something else is going on with this word, and we're starting to figure it out.

Before we get there, we need to deal with the New Testament, because someone always says that the Greek is more precise.  In the Septuagint, olam is rendered overwhelmingly by aiōn (Strong's G165) and its adjective aiōnios (Strong's G166).  That's the standard equivalence, and BDB lists it right in its own entry.  So whatever olam is doing, aiōn inherited it, and the Greek turns out to be no help at all to the eternity picture.

Yeshua's disciples ask Him about "the end of the aiōn" (Matthew 24:3).  He uses the same phrase Himself, more than once (Matthew 13:39-40, 13:49, 28:20).  If aiōn means eternity, then "the end of eternity" is a phrase our Savior used on purpose, repeatedly, and nobody in the room thought twice about it.  He also speaks of "this aiōn" and "the aiōn to come" (Mark 10:30), and Paul speaks of "the aiōns to come," plural (Ephesians 2:7).  Eternity does not come in a plural!

Paul goes further than that.  Twice he writes about grace given, and life promised, pro chronōn aiōniōn, before aiōnios times (2 Timothy 1:9, Titus 1:2).  Once he writes about a mystery kept silent chronois aiōniois, in aiōnios times, but now made manifest (Romans 16:25-26).  Read those slowly, because there is no "before" eternity, eternity does not have "times," and a secret kept for eternity could never be told.  And in that little letter about a runaway slave, Paul tells Philemon that maybe Onesimus departed for a season so that he might have him back aiōnion (Philemon 1:15), which puts us right back where we started in Exodus 21.

Now, we have Hebrew manuscripts of some of these books, and this is where it gets really interesting, because we can test whether the Hebrew reads more like the Old Testament than the Greek does.  In the Hebrew Matthew, the disciples don't ask about the end of an abstract idea like forever, they ask about the end of the world.  Yeshua says whoever speaks against the Set-Apart (Holy) Spirit will not have atonement in this world or in the coming world (Matthew 12:32).  That's ha'olam ha-zeh and ha'olam ha-ba, this present age and the age that follows.  It's exactly the two-aiōn structure of the Greek, sitting in Hebrew, using olam.

And then there's the fig tree.  In the Greek, Yeshua tells it that no fruit will grow on it eis ton aiōna, "for ever" (Matthew 21:19).  The Hebrew manuscript points the phrase the other direction and reads something closer to "from olam you have not given me fruit," which the translators footnote as simply "you never gave me."  The direction differs but the word does not, and either way olam language is being applied to a fig tree that withered on the spot.

The Hebrew Revelation is even more interesting though.  Where the Greek reads eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn, "unto the ages of the ages," the Hebrew manuscript reads "from everlasting and unto everlasting."  That is not a loose paraphrase, that is min-olam ve'ad-olam, the standard Hebrew formula, and the manuscript's own notes point you straight back to where it comes from in Jeremiah, Chronicles, Nehemiah and the Psalms.  It shows up at the Yeshua's declaration that He is alive (Revelation 1:18), at the seventh trumpet (Revelation 11:15), over the smoke of the punishment (Revelation 14:11), and in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10).

So the Hebrew of Revelation is speaking the Old Testament's own idiom rather than a Greek construction.  That should make us feel more secure about what we’re figuring out.  Except then you go look up one of the verses those notes send you to and the whole thing turns over on you.

YHWH, through Jeremiah, standing at the gate of the temple, says this to Judah: If you truly amend your ways, if you truly do justice, if you don't oppress the stranger and the fatherless and the widow, if you don't shed innocent blood, if you don't walk after other gods, "then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers lemin-olam ve'ad-olam” (Jeremiah 7:5-7).  From olam and unto olam, the strongest form of the phrase in the language, and the very same construction the Hebrew Revelation uses for "for ever and ever."  And they ended up being carried off to Babylon.

That's not a translation problem and it's not a manuscript problem.  That is YHWH Himself using the biggest "for ever" the Hebrew language has for something that had conditions attached and that came to an end.  So we can stop asking whether the translators got it wrong somewhere.  They didn't.  They did the best they could.  The word is just doing something we simply haven't understood.

So what is this word actually doing?  Look at where it comes from.  Strong's derives olam from alam (Strong’s H5956), a verb meaning to hide or conceal, and defines it as properly concealed, the vanishing point.  

Stand on a straight road and look down it.  At some point the road disappears, and it isn't because the road ends there, it's because your eyes end there.  That point where you can no longer see is the olam, and it's the horizon.  That's why the word runs backward and forward, because there's a horizon behind you and a horizon out in front of you!

The men of old in Genesis 6 are past the horizon of memory.  The servant's "for ever" is past the horizon of his life.  Jonah's "for ever" is past the horizon of a man drowning in the dark who cannot see a way out.  And Judah's land grant was past the horizon of anything they could imagine losing, right up until the day they lost it.

Once you see that, go read the verse where Solomon uses this word about the human heart.  He says YHWH has set ha'olam in their heart, "so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11).  Read that again.  He put the horizon in us.  He gave us the sense that there is more out past where we can see, and in the very same sentence He tells us we cannot find out the end of it.  The word means the thing you cannot see the end of, and that's the whole word.

Here's the part that actually matters though.  Olam is not a measurement, it's a horizon, and a horizon is measured by wherever you happen to be standing.  This means olam takes its length from whatever it's attached to.  A servant's olam is exactly as long as a servant, a tabernacle's olam is exactly as long as a tabernacle exists, and Judah's dwelling in the land lasted precisely as long as the conditions YHWH attached to it.

Now, follow that same rule the other way.  YHWH is called El Olam, the God of the horizon (Genesis 21:33).  Moses prays that from olam unto olam He is El (Psalm 90:2), which is to say that from the horizon behind to the horizon ahead He is already standing there on both sides of the edge of what we can see.  He tells us the grass withers and the flower fades but the word of YHWH shall stand le'olam (Isaiah 40:8), that every one of His righteous judgments is le'olam (Psalm 119:160), and that He is YHWH and He changes not (Malachi 3:6).  When YHWH ties an olam to a building, the olam lasts as long as the building, and when He ties an olam to Himself, it lasts as long as He does!

We want to be careful here, because it would be easy to run too far with this.  BDB does list unending future and eternity among this word's definition, and the plural form is used as an intensive that genuinely does reach for everlastingness.  Scripture also has other words for duration, ad (Strong’s H5703) and netsach (Strong’s H5331), and they very often get stacked with olam, like when David says he'll bless YHWH’s name le'olam va'ed (Psalm 145:1-2).  Think about why a writer would ever need to do that, because you don't reinforce a word that already means unending all by itself.

So no, we’re not saying that scripture suggests nothing lasts.  Our resurrection is sure, His word stands, and YHWH does not change.  What we’re seeing is that the English phrase "for ever" is not evidence for any of that on its own.  The evidence is always in what the olam is attached to.

So what does this all mean?  The first thing is simple humility as we read scripture.  If you have ever settled a doctrine because a verse said "for ever," (I know I have!) go back and look at what that "for ever" is actually attached to.  See if it’s truly a forever and if you need to adjust your doctrine accordingly.

The second thing is a warning, and it cuts in both directions.  Some people already know what this word means and use it as a weapon.  If "everlasting statute" doesn't really mean everlasting, then maybe I don't have to worry about that Law now that the temple is gone.  But look at what you're actually doing there, because you'd be arguing that His commandments are attached to a building and a season rather than attached to Him when He has told us plainly that His word stands le'olam and that He does not change. Using this word to shrink His instruction, His Torah, is using it exactly backward.

Other people go the opposite direction and hear only comfort in it, but Jeremiah 7 is standing right there.  Judah heard "from olam and unto olam" about that land and stopped listening to the "if" that came before it.  They took a promise attached to their obedience and treated it as a promise attached to their address.  That is a mistake every one of us is more than capable of making.

The third thing is the good part.  There is a horizon out in front of every one of us and by definition we cannot see past it.  Not one of us knows what next month holds, let alone what the resurrection will actually be like.  That's not a flaw in us, because He put that horizon in our hearts on purpose and He told us plainly that we would not be able to find out the end of it.

But the One who stands on both sides of that horizon has already told us what He attached His covenant to!  It isn't a tabernacle, it isn't a temple, and it isn't a nation's borders or a servant's lifespan.  He attached it to Himself, and He is El Olam. We can't see the end of the road, but we can absolutely see the One waiting on it!

We hope you have a great week! Shabbat shalom and YHWH bless you!

-Rob and Sara Gene

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The Gospel

We are born sinful as a result of Adam and Eve's sin (Genesis 2:17, 3:6, 1 John 1:8)

The consequence of sin, which is unavoidable through our own works, is death (Romans 6:23)

Yeshua, the Son of YHWH, lived sinless and was put to death (Hebrews 4:15)

His death, therefore, cleanses us of sin that would have required our death

(2 Corinthians 5:21)

He rose on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:4)

Because of His resurrection, we are confident in our future resurrection and eternal life

(1 Corinthians 15:17-18, John 3:16)