What God YaHUaH says about Himself
– the Message of Exodus 34: 6-7
André H. Roosma
20 January 2012
Exodus 34: 6-7 gives an account of a meeting between God YaHUaH 1 (the God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and Moses. There, God YaHUaH makes a very important statement about Himself.
He makes Himself known in Who He is, we could say.
The Bible says (I provide an interlinear variant with
the Hebrew source text here, using a kind of majority translation, apart
from the usage of the great Name):
ויּעבר
יהוה
על־פּניו
ויּקרא
יהוה
And YaHUaH passed
by before him and YaHUaH
proclaimed,
יהוה
אל רחוּם
וחנּוּן ארך
אפּים
“YaHUaH,
God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering,
ורב־חסד
ואמת
and abundant in goodness and truth,
נצר חסד
לאלפים
keeping mercy for thousands,
נשׂא
עון ופשׁע
וחטּאה
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
ונקּה לא
ינקּה
and Who will by no means clear [the guilty],
פּקד עון
אבות
על־בּנים
visiting the iniquity of fathers on the
sons,
ועל־בּני
בנים
על־שׁלּשׁים
ועל־רבּעים
and on the sons of sons, to the third and to the
fourth generation.”
God YaHUaH mentions a number of
things about Himself here:
- He calls out His glorious and Personal Name יהוה /
   - YaHUaH. This wonderful Name
stands for His Identity. His lovely Name signifies Who He is.
And some of the things signified by that grand Name are:
1 2
- He is the Eternal One, exalted above all;
- He is the One Who gives us life and joy in connection with Him
and with each other, and in wonder and worship towards Him;
- He is the Present One; Who desires to be with us;
- He is merciful; the Hebrew word used רחוּם /
   - rachum refers to the womb and the tender and
cherishing feelings that a good mother (ideally)
has there towards her (unborn) baby;
- He is gracious - חנּוּן /
 -
channun; this refers to the broader limits, which you often allow
towards your own children, because you can endure more from them than from
any other child; God also has more room for us, as being His own children;
- He is longsuffering / slow to anger - ארך אפּים
/
   -
’erek ’appaim; this refers to the nostrils of God Himself;
when someone (or e.g. a bull) becomes very angry,
he starts to snuffle (compare: ‘seething with
rage’) and this statement here says that with God it lasts a
long time before He gets that angry (longer than with
whomever else);
- He is abundant in goodness - חסד /
  - chesed; originally this refers to
removing the ugly ‘skirt’ (of entangled,
prickly, dried old fronds around the trunk) from the palm tree; God
removes our hard shell of sin and He does not shield us away from Himself
by a shield of anger and/or judgment, but allows us to come close and enjoy
Him, in a similar way as someone climbing a date palm can enjoy its delicious
fruits once this ‘skirt’ has been removed.3
- He is abundant in truth / faithfulness - אמת /
- ’emet; pictographically this is the sign of the first
abundance or the first water – probably referring to the enormous
abundance of God that was there in paradise (and which
we will taste again when Jesus makes all things new) or to the
abundance that is there in the womb, where the body of the mother transfers
all nutritients to the child, in a time of shortage even at the expense
of her own body. Now, that is an image of how true and faithful God is to
us!
- He has mercy for thousands. His grace and mercy are not just for a
happy few, no, His grace is for countless multitudes of people!
In other words: in seven (fullness!)
statements, using various images, God goes to great lengths to communicate
to us that He is a God of enormous grace and mercy, Who loves us dearly,
and Who wants to cherish us. That is the key message of these
verses; the core of how God YaHUaH
makes Himself known to Moses.
At the end, as a kind of additional extra He says something that is hard
to understand from our common translations. In the course of Church
history unfortunately this often led to a heavy burden on the hearts of
many believers. If I say that many know these verses as the
‘generations curse’, while actually it is a message of hope
in line with the above, you will understand why I have a strong desire
to explain what these verses say from the source text.
Most translations say that God says that He will visit the sins of fathers (parents) on the
sons and grandsons (children and grandchildren),
even to the fourth generation. That word visit - פּקד - paqad is the key here. The dictionary explains this verb as: ‘attend to
(something), visit (+ and
-), oversee, exercise (e.g. a profession),
instate (as in a function)’.
In the old pictographic script it is written as:  – ‘opening / to open - for the light -
to enter’; so: to lay open, such that God’s light can enter in.
Or, alternatively: ‘to blow - rising sun - to move’. Regarding
this latter interpretation: The combination
– ‘rising sun - door/ entrance/ to enter/ move’ often
represents ‘fire’ (warmth/light moving
up). So in total the word paqad originally said: ‘blow -
fire’.4
Now, a mythical dragon might have literally ‘blown fire’ to
destruct and kill, but I see a much different perspective here.
I ask: what fire needed blowing and what for? There are basically only
two applications: one is that of a smith or refiner of precious metal
whose fire needs extra air to reach enough heat, and the other, much closer
to every day life, is that by softly blowing some extra fresh air at the
fire in an oil lamp, you could increase the amount of light it gave.
I combine this with the observation from development psychology and
sociology, saying that both positive and negative patterns of behavior of
parents are sort of automatically transferred onto their children.
What I then see in this statement by God is, that He makes a lamp to
shine a little brighter for children who had parents (or grandparents) who sinned, such that these children can see
these sinful patterns and distance themselves from them after all (compare how e.g. Gideon cut down the sacred poles of his
father, such that there came an opening for the salvation of God).
God pays some extra attention to these things.
The association with the refiner’s fire being blown for sufficient
heat may add that God’s goal is to purify the children from those
‘ancestral sins’.
And the observation that God keeps on trying to do so to the fourth
generation, I see then, in line with the rest of this text, as His grand,
longsuffering grace in dealing with His people.5
I also combine this with the three words in between, which many
translations – with some imagination or fantasy – made into a
full sentence on its own (‘and Who will by no
means clear [the guilty],’). In fact these three words are
better translated simply as: ‘clearing, He does not [totally] clear,
but...’ (or: ‘declaring innocent, He does not declare [totally]
innocent, but...’), while coupling it with and emphasizing what
follows. God does not excuse or clear the sins the parents passed on.
He does not say: “Oh, it’s nothing!” He knows how
devastating the consequences can be in the lives of their children!
He knows that something needs to be done about it, to stop the evil cycle
from contaminating generation after generation.
And therefore, He provides some extra light on it, and pays some extra
attention. He desires to purify us, and to stop the cycles of evil.
On this basis I suggest for the last three lines this adapted
translation:
ונקּה לא
ינקּה
Declaring [them] innocent, He does not declare innocent
פּקד עון
אבות
על־בּנים
but sheds some extra light on (or: pays some extra attention to) [the ongoing contaminating effect of] the iniquity of the fathers
among the children
ועל־בּני
בנים
על־שׁלּשׁים
ועל־רבּעים
and grandchildren, even into the third and fourth
generation.
[because He likes to cleanse them of
that iniquity]”
In pastoral care this is most significant.
Due to the unclear translation, at first this passage was for many a sort of
vague threat – like a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads
– that some day they might be punished for sins of their forefathers
they weren’t even aware of.
Now it actually appears to be a passage offering a great hope:
God wants to give us extra light to come loose from the effects the sins
of our forefathers may have had on us, and from the old negative behavior
patterns that may have been transferred from parents to children already for
generations.
Wow, what a God!
Hallelu YaH !
Notes
| 1 |
The glorious Name of God I presented here - as well as
I could - from the oldest Hebrew original, instead of replacing this grand
Personal Name of The Most High by a common word, such as ‘Lord’.
For more background information on this see:
André H. Roosma,
‘The magnificent and most
lovely Name of the God Who was there, Who is there, and Who will be there’  , extensive Accede! / Hallelu-YaH! study, July 2009. |
| 2 |
The word explanations given here are based in part on
an extensive study of the oldest pictographic Bible script. See: André
H. Roosma, ‘The Written
Language of Abraham, Moses and David – A study of the pictographic
roots and basic notions in the underlying fabric of the earliest Biblical
script’ , Hallelu-YaH Draft Research
Report, 1st English version: 18 April 2011 (1st Dutch original: January
2011). |
| 3 |
An alternative interpretation of the symbols is: to
enter the palm-trees encircled domain of a wealthy man; with the implied
meaning here that God shares His wealth freely with us.
See also a variety of
blog posts by Skip Moen about the Hebrew notion of chesed. |
| 4 |
An alternative explanation of פּקד - paqad
is possible. –
‘opening - rising sun - door/entrance’.
So: ‘an opening as of a door that opens, letting the sunlight in’.
Or: ‘opening - light - to enter’ –
so: ‘an opening to let light in’.
This links well with what Julius Fürst gives as the first entries for
פּקד in his dictionary
(A Hebrew & Chaldee Lexicon, Leipzig/ London/ Edinburgh, 1885):
to open, to split asunder, to cut into, to examine, to review.
He refers to קדד -
qadad, which stands for: to divide, to cut, to peel off, to break or
to bend.
Our text then denotes that God lays bare the iniquities of
parents for the next generations. Practically, this comes down to the same as
that He gives the next gereations more light on it, as stated above.
| added for completeness:
11 June 2012 |
The explanation in the main text aligns slightly better with that of the
dictionary by Gesenius, Brown, Driver & Briggs, considered one of the
most reliable sources, of which the shortened version gives
for פּקד:
1. to attend to, muster, number, reckon, visit, punish,
appoint, look after, care for
a. (Qal - what it is here)
1. to pay attention to, observe
2. to attend to
3. to seek, look about for
4. to seek in vain, need, miss, lack
5. to visit
6. to visit upon, punish
7. to pass in review, muster, number
8. to appoint, assign, lay upon as a charge, deposit
b. ....
See e.g. also Psalm 17: 3 (Young translates here: inspected; it deals with God having inspected the
heart of the Psalmist at night and found nothing evil; at night one indeed
needs some light to search/inspect). |
| 5 |
I find it most tragic to observe that the image of God
that some translators and theologians implicitly seem to have is more that of
a fire spitting dragon than that of someone who fires up the light to provide
more clarity, or of someone who refines precious metal artwork. |
See also: The Lord, a God Merciful and Gracious (both text and audio), a sermon
that John Piper preached on this passage on 7 October, 1984, as part of the
series: Hallowed be Thy Name: Eight Sermons on the Names of God.
André (author)
The explanation of the clause: ונקּה לא
ינקּה was modified.
A brief discussion on this explanation is in place here. The infinitive
absolute of the negated form (לא)
of the verb נקּה can
be interpreted in three ways (as the different translations of this and
parallel constructs as Jer.30:11; 25:29 and 46:28 demonstrate): either as an
enforcement of the negated verb - ‘And He does certainly not
(or: in no way) declare innocent’; or as a softening of it - ‘And
He does not declare entirely innocent’, while stressing the
sequel (the paqad).
In this context I see as fitting what the
margin notes of the Dutch States’ Translation add with Jer.30:11 (my
translation into English, stress added): “‘will not declare
totally innocent.’ Hebrew, ‘declaring innocent I will not
declare innocent’; that is here, ‘leave not totally
unpunished’”. As a third option (related to the second) I prefer
to leave it at the literal version of the text: ‘declaring innocent I
will not declare innocent’ - where the first refers to the previous
statements of mercy and the last part refers to the iniquity of the fathers
(as visible) among the children.
This fits with my pastoral experience.
Many children suffer under the iniquity of their parents. That can be in the
form of a man never able to accomplish anything good because his parents
always said he was up to no good (the force of such a curse must be broken),
a man not able to control his anger because his parents couldn’t teach
him beyond their own (in)ability, or a woman or man struggling with intimacy
because of a history of sexual abuse, or any ‘iniquity’ that was
passed on. The parents may be forgiven - ‘declared innocent’ -
but the children still need some support to get out of the mess. And for
that, the iniquity cannot be ignored.
John
This is an amazing teaching on this passage.
Thanks be to God!
André (author)
Thanks John! Yes, I thank God for the great
insight He gives into His Word!
André (author)
Concerning the early meaning of the Hebrew
paqad, we can also look at the equivalent Akkadian word
paqádu of the same origin. According to The Assyrian
Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
(Oriental Institute, Chicago IL, USA, 1956-2006; ISBN 0
918986 05 2; part 12 (2005), p.115-129) this has meanings like:
‘to care for / to provide a person with food’, ‘entrust
something to someone’, ‘to exert oneself conscientiously’.
This fully supports the interpretation that God ‘pays attention
to’ (the injustice of the fathers as it has influenced the lives of
the children). (And definitely not the interpretation of punishment,
as some translators want to have it.) Striking!
Hi Andre!
Confirmation! This is exactly what
Father revealed to me that this passage about the iniquity being visited is
not negative, but out of great mercy. Plus it aligns then, directly to the
passages that speak about the children not blaming their parents but taking
responsibility for their own sin (teeth blunted - bitter grapes). In other
areas, this same passage also includes at the end “to those who hate
me”. I believe that for those who hate him (the children that is), and
do not repent (though Yahuweh visits the inquiry of the fathers), the
children and children’s children will not always continue. As a matter
of fact, I think it was Yehu who had 4 generations of kids who did not turn
away from the sins of Jeroboam, and the whole house of Yehu ended. Yes He
visits the iniquity out of mercy for those who hate Him, yet if the children
do not change, the entire family line risks being completely wiped off the
face of the earth.. unlike those who love Him, they will continue on forever..
André (author)
Thanks for the confirmation, Derek!
Yes, the text as I now translate it at the end of the article is in line with
the teaching of the entire Bible! The grace and goodness (Hebrew: chesed) of YaHUaH is the central message of the Bible, including this passage
where He speaks for Himself! Hallelu YaH!
|
