Lifting Holy Hands

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TWO YEARS AGO MY Hebrew language school shared a post in honor of the American holiday of Thanksgiving, discussing the meaning of the Hebrew word, לֵהוֹדוֹת (leh-hoh-doht). My own post on this topic explored the seemingly throw away line, However, it also means to confess or to admit something. It seems like in the bible, these two verbs were strongly related and sometimes even interchangeable. For a Christian, the discovery that the same Hebrew word can mean “to thank” and “to confess” is, at least, surprising: both the western and eastern Churches teach the inviolable connection between the Holy Mysteries or Sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist – this last coming from the Greek word meaning “to give thanks”. So, there is, in the Hebrew that would have been spoken and prayed by Jesus and his followers, some way in which the act of confessing one’s sins was intimately related to the act of praising and thanking God in the HOliest of Holy things, the Mass or Holy Communion. All Hebrew verbs are constructed from roots (called a shoresh) the root letters for לֵהוֹדוֹת are ידה yadah meaning to throw and come from the word meaning “hand”. Thanksgiving, praise, and confession all require our hands.

Translating the Holy Text out of the original languages into more more vernaculat tongues require making choices. This is always been an issue from the time that the Torah was first translated out of the Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek. In the Greek Text of the Bible that Jesus would have known, the verb לֵהוֹדוֹת can be rendered in one of two ways: ἐξαγορεύω exagoreuo, meaning to make known, confess; and ἐξομολογέω examologeo meaning, confess, agree. The former moves on, through the usage/evolution of laguage to mean things like to declare one’s sins. The latter evolves to mean to praise or give thanks (because agreeing with…).

Thus we can see that early in the translation process (which influenced the Vulgate and later English) the one Hebrew word was parsed out into two different words to accentuate two different meanings. Something was, thereby, lost.

Please note that neither of these words is the Greek εὐχαριστέω eucharisteo from whence the English Eucharist. In the LXX this word only occurs in the books originally writen in Greek, ie what modern scholars call the Deuterocanonical Books. These works are not accepted as canonical by Protestants or modern Judaism. They were accepted by some Jewish communities in the 2nd Temple period, although the word “canonical” would be an anachronism. It is beyond the scope of this article, but should the use of eucharisteo being limited to the later books be read as a theological issue or a linguistic one? That’s for another time.

Fr Schmemann, of blessed memory, taught, “Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.” Amen. So it is with us. Our act of Thanksgiving is at once a confession and an act of praise. We raise our hands in prayer both in good times and in bad, in thanksgiving and to beg for mercy. More we extend our hands to God to offer help to our neighbor: what we do to the least we do to God. And so it is that to the image of God, present in our neighbors, we can offer a plate of food, a hammer for housing, new clothes. All acts of mercy become actions of praise and confession, of thanksgiving and glory.

We cast ourselves on the Lord, cast our cares upon him, cast our burdens on him, cast our sins before him, and – at the end of days – will cast our crowns before him. To him be glory, now and forever, and to the ages of ages. Amen.