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יוֹמָם (Yomam): Day and Night Devotion to God’s Word · Reformed Thinking

0:00
Welcome to Reform Thinking. I'm so glad you're joining us
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today. So imagine you were trying to
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translate a hostage negotiation. Oh boy, that sounds stressful.
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Yeah, it is. But imagine your dictionary
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tells you that the word for broad daylight is actually the
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identical word used for the pitch black of night, depending
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on you know, which century the speaker happens to be from.
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That sounds like an absolute nightmare for a translator.
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It really is, and that is the kind of linguistic nightmare
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translators face when they encounter ancient languages.
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We tend to assume a word like day is just a fixed mathematical
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reality. You look at a digital clock, the
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sun is up, so it is daytime. The categories are very neat and
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clean. Yeah, we like our neat
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categories. But when you look at ancient
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Hebrew measurements of time, that digital clock just shatters
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it. Really.
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Does it falls completely apart? So today we're taking a stack of
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highly specific technical source materials.
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We are talking about advanced Biblical Hebrew Lexicon entries
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and commentary notes, and we are going to extract the hidden
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architecture beneath the text. It's.
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Going to be a fascinating deep dive.
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Definitely our mission for this deep dive is to look at the
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anatomy of two specific ancient words, first Yomam meaning by
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day, and 2nd Yolan which translates to Javan or Greece.
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And through these two words, we are going to see how ancient
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language shaped the perception of time and geography and really
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human action itself. OK, let's unpack this, because
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looking at advanced Hebrew dictionary entries, I mean it
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sounds like a really dry academic exercise to most.
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People. Oh, absolutely.
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It sounds like something you'd only do in a graduate seminary
1:38
class, but doing so actually pulls back the curtain on how
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the ancient mind categorized reality.
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When we consult lexicons like the Theological Word Book of the
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Old Testament or Brown Driver Briggs, or the modern scholarly
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dictionaries in our sources, we are looking at the bare bones of
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human perception. So where do we even start with a
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word like yomam? Well, the sources hand us a
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mystery right away regarding this word, and it centers on
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something you would assume is a basic objective fact, which is
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counting. Counting.
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That is what initially caught my attention in the notes, and
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frankly, it baffles me. It's pretty strange.
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Right. Yeah, because we are dealing
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with a closed ancient text. The words are set in stone, or
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at least set an ink on parchment.
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Right, they aren't writing new books of the Hebrew Bible.
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Yeah, yet looking at the source material, there are glaring
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discretion sees in the basic data.
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One lexicon states that yo mom appears 150 times in the Hebrew
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Bible. Another entry states it appears
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50 times, then a third source gives us 53.
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It's a pretty wild spread. How can world class scholars, I
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mean people who dedicate their entire lives to this single
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language, disagree on a basic word count?
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It seems impossible. If I ask someone to count how
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many times the word day appears in a modern novel, they just hit
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control F and get a hard number. Why are these experts handing us
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3 wildly different tallies for the exact for the identical
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word? So that discrepancy gets to the
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very heart of how Semitic languages function.
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It depends entirely on what a lexicographer considers the best
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word. OK, so it's a definition
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problem. Yeah, exactly.
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Or rather precisely. It's about whether you count a
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variant, a text critical correction, or a grammatical
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shift over centuries as the same word.
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Biblical Hebrew is built on a root system, usually consisting
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of three consonants. The base root word for day is
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Yum. Which most people probably
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recognize from Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
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Yes, spot on. So our specific word yomam is
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composed of that base root Yom plus a suffix.
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I'm the scholarly debate centers on the origin and the function
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of that specific suffix. Well, the whole counting problem
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is because of those two little letters at the end.
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Basically, yes, Yeah. The sources note that a
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prominent linguist named Karl Brockelman in his major
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grammatical works, identifies that I'm ending as a quote
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survival of mitimation. OK, stop right there.
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What in the world is mimation? Right, it's a highly technical
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term. Mimation is a grammatical
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feature found in much older ancient Semitic languages like
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Akadian. So language is older than
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biblical Hebrew. Much older.
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In those ancient languages, words often ended in an M sound
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to indicate certain grammatical states.
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It's much like how Latin uses different endings for its nouns
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to show if it's the subject or the object.
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OK, that makes sense. But over centuries of linguistic
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evolution, those M endings just dropped off.
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People stop using them. So finding one in biblical
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Hebrew is. It's akin to finding a dinosaur
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bone in your backyard. It is a leftover piece of a much
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older language structure. So Brockleman sees it as an
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evolutionary leftover, but I imagine not everyone agrees with
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that assessment given the varying word counts we talked
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about. You'd be correct.
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It's highly debated. If it is just a leftover piece
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of an older language, does it still hold grammatical weight?
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Or is it just a dead letter hanging on to the end of the
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word doing nothing? That is the big debate.
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Other grammarians, specifically Bauer and Lander, argue it is
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not just a dead fossil of mammation.
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They argue it is a fixed adverbial ending.
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Meaning it actually serves a purpose in the sentence.
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Yes, they point to similar structures in related languages,
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like the Aramaic word yamama and the Syriac word IMO, both of
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which mean daytime. Oh, interesting.
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They argue that M suffix makes the noun function specifically
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as an adverb, answering the question of when something
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happened. OK, so it turns day into during
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the day or by day? Right.
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So when scholars sit down to count the word, they have to
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make a theological and grammatical choice.
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Do you count every instance where the letters Yom AM appear?
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Which would give you the big number.
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Yes. Or do you only count the ones
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where it functions purely as an adverb modifying a verb?
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Do you exclude verses where the grammatical structure is
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ambiguous? So that is why one scholar
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counts 150 looking at the broad biological family tree of the
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word. Yeah, and another counts 50
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looking only at its specific functional job in a given
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sentence. Think about the English word
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daily. We all know what it means, but
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if you dissect it you have the base word day and the suffix
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Ole, right? That's a great comparison.
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That zai is actually a linguistic fossil from Old
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English. It was originally delic lic,
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which meant having the form or likeness of something.
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Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, so daily literally meant
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having the likeness of a day, but we never think about that
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history when we use the word today.
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No, we just say it. The history is stacked inside
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that single word, hidden from the modern speaker.
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These Hebrew lexicons are doing that same dissection, just on a
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scale of millennia. That's a perfect way to put it
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for our listeners. It's digging through the layers
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of history stacked inside single words.
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So understanding how Yomam is built structurally naturally
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leads to the question of when it applies chronologically.
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Because day is a very elastic concept in the ancient world.
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Highly elastic based on the sources.
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If I tell you we were meeting during the day, that implies
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noon or mid afternoon broad daylight.
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Yeah, I'd assume we're getting lunch.
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Right, but the Lexicon points out that in Job chapter 24,
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verse 18, yomam is translated specifically as at dawn.
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That's a very different time of day.
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Our dawn and broad daylight mutually exclusive in ancient
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time keeping. It seems contradictory to use
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the same word for the very first crack of light and the blazing
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afternoon sun. Well, to understand that you
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have to discard our modern time keeping devices entirely.
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The boundaries of ancient time were defined by observable
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physical phenomena and human participation.
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So not by abstract numbers on a dial.
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Not at all. When Job 24.18 uses yomam to
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mean dawn, it is describing the initiation of the day.
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Dawn is the active shattering of the night.
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The. Active shattering.
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I like that phrase. It is the specific moment the
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physical world becomes visible and usable.
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Again, contrast that with the sources reference to Ezekiel
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chapter 12, verse 3. What happens there?
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In that passage, the prophet Ezekiel is commanded by God to
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pack his bags and dig through a wall quote in broad daylight,
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and the Hebrew word used is yumum.
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Dig through a wall in broad daylight.
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Yeah, and the text explicitly contrast this action with the
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evening. The reason he must do it in
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broad daylight is that it is meant to be a public, visible
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spectacle. Because the rebellious people
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need to see him enacting this prophecy of exile.
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Exactly. This reveals A crucial
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distinction in the semantic range of the word.
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The sources differentiate between in Daylight Time, which
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is the physical period between sunrise and sunset.
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Like we see in Leviticus 8.35. Right.
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And what they categorize as day awake.
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Day awake, yeah. Jeremiah 8.23 talks about a
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person weeping yomam, meaning during the waking hours when
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humans are not sleeping. The hours reserved for labor,
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activity and consciousness. Yes, the ancients measured time
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by human labor and visibility, not by clocks.
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The connection to human consciousness and labor makes
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the emotional weight of these texts so much heavier.
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It really changes how you read it.
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The lexicon directs us to Jeremiah chapter 15, verse 9,
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which contains the phrase While it was yet day, the sun went
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down. And the Hebrew phrase there uses
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yomam. Yes.
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So when you consider the daytime is defined by human action,
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visibility, and the capacity to work, then the sun going down
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while it is yet day is a massive catastrophe.
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It's terrifying. It represents a life cut short,
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a sudden, unnatural end to the working hours.
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The daylight hours were precious.
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They were the only time a person could secure their survival in
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an agrarian society. You.
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Cannot harvest wheat or mend a roof in the pitch black.
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Right. Light equaled life and
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productivity, so if the daytime is defined by human action and
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visibility, pairing it with the night must signal something
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total. Something that escapes the
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normal boundaries of human limitation, Yeah.
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And the sources show a heavy reliance on pairing yomam with
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Layla, which is the Hebrew word for night.
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That pairing is extremely common, and it carries massive
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theological weight regarding the nature of God and human
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endurance. How so?
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When the text pairs Yomam and Layla, we are looking at a
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linguistic device known as Amerism.
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Amerism. For those listening, a mirrorism
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is a figure of speech where two opposite extremes are used to
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encompass the entirety of a thing.
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Right, including everything in between those extremes.
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The sources provide several striking examples of this.
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In Exodus 13.21 we see the pillar of cloud leading the
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Israelites, Yomam by day paired with the pillar of fire by
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night. This demonstrates God's
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relentless protective presence that does not adhere to human
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schedules. He doesn't clock out.
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And in Psalm 1.2, the righteous person meditates on the law,
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Yomo Lila, day and night. We also see the reverse phrasing
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night and day in Deuteronomy 28.66 and Isaiah 34.0.
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By linking the time of human labor with the time of human
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rest, the text creates a concept of unbroken, constant time.
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Continuous time that completely transcends normal physical
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limits. In our modern idiom, you know,
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saying I work day and night is just a figure of speech.
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It's like saying I searched Diane Lowe.
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Yeah, you didn't literally check the top of a mountain and the
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bottom of a valley. You just mean you looked
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everywhere? It is hyperbole, but looking at
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the sources, this ancient marism seems much more literal and
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physically demanding. Especially regarding the
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sacrificial system. Yes, in Leviticus 8.35 the
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priests are commanded to sit at the entrance of the tent of
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meeting day and night for seven days.
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That is not a poetic way of saying be diligent.
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No, that represents an exhausting, unbroken physical
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reality of their mediating duties.
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The psychological impact of that unbroken time must have been
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immense. Oh, without a doubt.
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You mentioned Jeremiah 8.23 earlier where the prophet talks
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about weeping day and night over the destruction of his people.
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Yeah, the weeping. When you add the night to the
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weeping of the day, you remove the normal human relief of
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sleep. You erase the biological
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boundary that gives the mind a chance to reset.
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That erasure of boundaries is a terrifying prospect in the
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ancient worldview. Nighttime was designed for
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cessation. It was designed for doors to be
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locked, for labor to cease, and for vulnerability to be
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mitigated by hiding in the dark. So to weep day and night means
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the grief has breached the natural defenses of the created
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order. Yes.
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The sorrow does not respect the setting of the sun.
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It is an all consuming state. This brings U another really
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fascinating element from the source material regarding
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boundaries. The grammatical boundaries, yes.
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While Yomam acts as a oetic measurement of time, the
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lexicons show it acting very strangely on a grammatical
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level. It essentially shape shifts into
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different forms that break its own established grammatical
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rules. It does.
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As we said earlier, the word functions mostly as an adverb
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modifying a verb, like saying he walked by day.
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But the dictionaries note that it sometimes acts as a
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substantive. A noun.
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It even receives prepositions. The sources point to Nehemiah
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Chapter 9 verse 19, where it appears as Bioma.
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And the prefix B in Hebrew is a preposition meaning in or with.
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That seems like a massive redundancy to me.
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How do you mean? Well, if the word yomam already
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has that adverbial fossil ending that makes it mean by day or in
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the daytime, then attaching the bee preposition to the front to
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make it biomim is literally saying in by day.
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Or in in the daytime, yeah. Why would a biblical author
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write that? It feels analogous to someone
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writing pin number or APM machine today.
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You are repeating the function that is already built into the
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word itself. Right.
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Did the authors of these later texts just lose track of how
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their own language worked? Well, it is actually a perfect
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demonstration of linguistic progression and drift.
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Linguistic drift, yeah. Nehemiah is a much later text
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compared to the early books of the Pentateuch.
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Over the centuries that fossilized adverbial ending, the
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M suffix lost its strict adverbial force in the of the
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later writers and speakers. So they forgot what the ending
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meant. Sort of.
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They no longer intuitively felt the by or the inn that was
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historically baked into the suffix.
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To them, the word had drifted into being a standard noun for
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daytime. So to make it function the way
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they needed it to in a sentence, they just attached the standard
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preposition B to clarify it. Exactly.
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Turning it unambiguously into in the daytime.
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This shows us that Biblical Hebrew was a living language
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that shifted over generations. That makes a lot of sense.
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We see another striking example of this grammatical shape
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shifting in Ezekiel 30.1 seat. Where Yomam is put into the
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genitive construct. Right, the source material
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translates that specific phrase in Ezekiel 30.16 as zare yoma.
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Which means foes of daytime or daily enemies.
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Let's look at the mechanics of that, because it's fascinating.
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The construct state in Hebrew essentially fuses 2 nouns
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together to show possession or relationship.
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It creates an X of Y relationship.
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So you take the word for foes and fuse it with the word for D
15:03
time, creating an incredibly chilling image.
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It really is, instead of an attack coming under the cover of
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darkness, which is the standard expectation for ancient warfare,
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ambushes and banditry. These are enemies so brazen, so
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confident in their supremacy, that they attack in the light.
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They do not need to hide their malice.
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They are the foes of the broad daylight.
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The linguistic shift creates A vivid picture of human depravity
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and an unstoppable military force.
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It's terrifying poetry. It is, but while Foes of Daytime
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creates a clear picture, the ancient text sometimes hand
15:36
scholars a phrase that seems to make no sense at all.
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This leads us to what is probably the most controversial
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part of the source material. According to one of the
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lexicons, translating the current Masoretic Hebrew text to
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Psalm 13, verse 3, literally as by day, yields a quote lame
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sense. That is a strong phrase for a
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lexicon to use I. Chuckled when I read it.
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The scholarly shade of calling a biblical reading lame.
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A world class dictionary explicitly states that a literal
16:05
reading of the received text yields a lame sense.
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It pulls back the curtain on the meticulous science of textual
16:11
criticism. So they aren't just insulting
16:13
the text. No, the scholars are identifying
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A structural anomaly in the poetry.
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In Psalm 13.3 the literal Hebrew reads something like, How long
16:22
shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart by
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day. And the commentators listed in
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our sources, specifically Mitchell Dayhood and Peter
16:29
Craigy, look at that line and spot a severe, severe problem.
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A problem with the poetic parallel structure.
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Ancient Hebrew poetry does not rhyme sounds.
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It rhymes ideas. It balances semantic weight.
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So if the psalmist is expressing absolute, overwhelming grief,
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limiting that grief only to the daylight hours feels incomplete.
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Exactly. It breaks the expected cadence
16:50
of the lament. Therefore, the lexicon suggests
16:53
either adding the word willala meaning and night to complete
16:57
the merism. Or reading the Hebrew word as
16:59
Yom Yom, which means daily. But wait, are commentators like
17:04
Da Hood and Craigie just allowed to fix a text because they think
17:07
it sounds awkward? That is a very common objection.
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Changing the ancient text just because a modern scholar thinks
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the poetry sounds lame seems incredibly arrogant.
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How do they justify that? It's a valid.
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Question if I read a poem that intentionally breaks the rhythm
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to create a jarring effect, and 1000 years later a scholar fixes
17:25
it to make it smooth, they've actually destroyed my original
17:28
intent, right? We believe these texts carry
17:31
immense theological authority, so altering the words based on a
17:35
perceived awkwardness feels like a dangerous game.
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Are these scholars just guessing based on their modern aesthetic
17:40
preferences? It is a totally valid concern,
17:43
and it is why the discipline is governed by strict objective
17:46
metrics rather than aesthetic preferences.
17:48
They are absolutely not guessing.
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So what are they doing? They act as historical
17:53
detectives. They piece together fragments
17:55
from multiple ancient cultures to reconstruct the most probable
17:59
original reading. OK, so they have actual data.
18:02
Yes, when scholars like Dahood or Craigie suggest an
18:05
emendation, they rely on external data.
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For instance, the sources mentioned looking at ancient
18:11
translations, specifically the Greek Septuagint.
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The translation made a couple of centuries before Christ.
18:17
Exactly. If the Greek translators working
18:19
back then translated that verse using a phrase that explicitly
18:22
implies day and night, it strongly suggests their Hebrew
18:25
manuscript contained those words.
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They saw words that we don't currently have in our Hebrew
18:30
copies. Precisely.
18:32
Furthermore, the lexicon one explicitly mentions Ugaritic.
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Let's breakdown Ugaritic because I think a lot of people are
18:37
unfamiliar with how massive that discovery was for biblical
18:40
studies. Oh, it revolutionized the field
18:42
entirely. Ugaritic is an ancient Semitic
18:45
language discovered in the late 1920s in Ross Shamra, which is
18:49
in modern day Syria. And why does that matter for the
18:51
Hebrew Bible? Because the texts they found
18:54
share a massive amount of poetic vocabulary with Biblical Hebrew,
18:58
by studying eugeretic poetry, scholars deduced the strict
19:01
rules of ancient Canaanite and Israelite parallel structures.
19:04
So they found the rule book. Exactly.
19:07
They discovered standard A word and B word pairs.
19:10
If line A says silver, line B will predictably say gold.
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And if line A says day, line B will predictably say night.
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Yes. So when Moshe Greenberg analyzes
19:22
Ezekiel 12.3 or Jack Lundbaum looks at the textual issues in
19:26
Jeremiah 33 point 20 regarding the covenant of the day and the
19:30
night. They apply these hard won rules
19:32
of ancient syntax. Right, they are trying to deduce
19:35
whether a tired scribe accidentally dropped a word
19:38
centuries ago. The mechanics of how a word gets
19:41
dropped are fascinating to think about.
19:43
You have a scribe working by candlelight, copying a text by
19:46
hand. It's.
19:46
Grueling. Work.
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His eyes move from the manuscript he is reading to the
19:49
parchment he's writing on. He reads a line that ends in a
19:52
specific word, writes it down when he looks back at the
19:54
master. Copy His eye accidentally
19:56
catches the exact same word 2 lines down.
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Right, causing him to skip everything in between.
20:01
That is a mechanical error. A haplography recognizing that
20:05
is not liberal tampering with the text.
20:08
No, it is forensic accounting for ancient poetry.
20:11
You look at the ledgers of related ancient languages like
20:14
Ugaritic or Greek to find the missing linguistic currency.
20:17
That's a great analogy. Decoding these Hebrew anomalies
20:20
often requires looking at those Greek translations, which
20:23
perfectly bridges us to the final lexical entry in our
20:26
stack. Right, moving from Yuma to Yuan.
20:29
Yes, the source material points out that the Septuagint, the
20:32
ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible we just talked
20:34
about, translates Yomam as Hamara 32 times.
20:38
Hamara being the Greek word for day.
20:40
Right, but then the lexicon entry pivots from discussing the
20:43
concept of daytime to analyzing an entirely different word,
20:47
Yawan or Java and. The Septuagint translates Yowan
20:50
as Helen, Iowan or Hellas, which means Greece.
20:54
OK, so here's my question. How do we make the leap from a
20:58
highly specific Hebrew adverb about time, yomam, to a noun
21:02
about ancient Greek geography, yawan?
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The connection lies in the cultural collision represented
21:07
by the Septuagint translation process itself.
21:10
It's the connective tissue. How so?
21:12
When Jewish scholars in Alexandria sat down to translate
21:15
Hebrew words like yomam into Greek words like homera, they
21:20
were physically and intellectually interacting with
21:22
the very culture represented by the word yomwan.
21:25
So they were doing this translation work surrounded by
21:28
Greek culture. Yes, and the name Javan
21:30
originates in Genesis chapter 10, verse 2.
21:33
In the table of nations, it's listed as one of the sons of
21:36
Japheth. Right In the ancient Near
21:39
Eastern mental map, the descendants of Javan represented
21:42
the far off coastlands, the maritime peoples of the
21:45
Mediterranean. Which eventually coalesced into
21:47
the Ionian Greeks. Precisely, and tracing the
21:50
evolution of Yowan throughout the biblical text mirrors the
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shifting geopolitical landscape of the ancient world.
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Think about how names of foreign places in our own modern
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language evolve based on history.
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Oh sure, a name can start as a completely neutral map label,
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just a distant country you had to memorize for a geography
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test. Right.
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It means nothing to you personally.
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But depending on historical events, a sudden war, a massive
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economic alliance, a cultural export, that neutral label can
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rapidly morph into a loaded heavy term.
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It takes on a whole new life. The exact same progression
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happened with Jovan in these ancient texts.
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The sources map out this progression really clearly.
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If we look at Ezekiel chapter 27 verse 13, Joy Van is mentioned
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alongside Tubal and Meshech. OK.
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And what are they doing there? In this context they are merely,
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excuse me, they are simply trading partners with the
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wealthy maritime city of Tyre. They are exchanging human slaves
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and articles of bronze for Tyres merchandise.
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So it is a purely economic relationship at that.
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Point. Yes, the word is functionally
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neutral, just a place on a map you do business.
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With, but that changes. Dramatically, as the centuries
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pass and empires clash, the usage of the word darkens.
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By the time we reach Zechariah 9.3, the Sons of Joyban are
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positioned as direct military adversaries to the Sons of Zion.
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God speaks of rousing the sons of Zion against the sons of
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Greece. And when we look at the sources
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citation of Daniel 10.20 and Daniel 11.2, Javan has become a
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formidable eschatological adversary.
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The text speaks of the Prince of Greece arriving.
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Right. This is a reference to the
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sweeping conquests of Alexander the Great and the subsequent
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oppression under the Seleucid kings like Antiochus Epiphanes.
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So the word morphed from a distant genealogy in Genesis.
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To a trading partner. In Ezekiel.
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To an overwhelming cultural and military threat in Daniel, the
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scholars translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek and Alexandria
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were intimately aware of this tension.
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They had to be. They were living as a conquered
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people in a world dominated by the descendants of Java.
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So what does this all mean for us?
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As we look back at this stack of Lexicon entries, we have covered
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a lot of ground. We really have.
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We started by pulling apart a single tiny suffix, that ancient
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zum sound at the end of Yomam. And from that one linguistic
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fossil, we uncovered the mechanics of how grammarians
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trace the biological family tree of a single word.
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We saw how now the ancient mind defined D time not by the
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objective position of a planet, but by the subjective capacity
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for human labor. The ACT is shattering of the
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dark. Yes, we analyzed the theological
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dread of the foes of daytime, those enemies whose depravity is
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so bold they attack in the light.
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And we watched scholars perform forensic detective work using
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Eucharitic poetry and the Septuagint to restore the
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cadence of a heartbroken Psalm. Finally, we tracked how a
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distant sun in the genealogy be morphed into the apocalyptic
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Prince of Greece, altering the map of the ancient world.
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There is a staggering amount of data compressed into just two.
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Words. The main take away from all
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these sources is an appreciation for the vast machinery operating
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beneath the surface of any translation you read.
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Every single translated word you read in a modern text rests on a
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mountain of scholarly debate, ancient cross referencing,
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grammatical shifts and cultural collisions.
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The translators have to weigh the difference between a
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fossilized adverb and a later noun.
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Between a poetic comoroism signifying endless grief and a
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literal command for priestly duty.
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Or between a neutral trading partner and an imperial threat.
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None of these decisions are arbitrary.
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No, they are the result of centuries of meticulous,
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rigorous study aimed at understanding accurately how the
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ancient authors perceived their reality.
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And ensuring that reality is communicated faithfully to us
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today. Absolutely.
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Before we wrap up, I want to leave you with a final thought
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to Mull over based on everything we discussed today regarding
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time. It's an interesting concept to
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think about. If the ancient writers use the
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word for day to also mean human waking life and the capacity for
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physical labor, what does that say about how we have
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artificially separated our concept of time from our concept
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of human energy today? Oh.
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That's a really sharp question. We treat ours as empty
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containers we are forced to fill with productivity, regardless of
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whether our bodies, our minds, are capable of filling them.
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At that moment, the clock dictates our action.
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But for the ancients, the capacity for action define the
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time itself. Exactly.
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Are we living in a rigid mechanical time while the
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ancients live in a distinctly human time?
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Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the ancient text.
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Keep reading, keep questioning, and we will see you next time.