Our Father / אבינו - ’abhinu
André H. Roosma
10 June 2012
Jesus (Yashu‘ah) taught His
disciples – and via them us also – to address God as
‘our Father Who art in
heaven’.
Those two words our Father are just
one word in Hebrew: אבינו - ’abhinu [pronounced as: ’avinoo].
This is a remarkable word, for it contains all three of the most
original vowels from the Semitic languages (the a, i and u), and actually does not need
additional vowel signs to be pronounced well.
One could say that it belongs to basic language.
Even small children can pronounce it already early and - a little later -
can learn to write it relatively easy.
And I discovered another most remarkable thing about this special word.
In the oldest, pictographic, Biblical script1 it was written as:
     .
This can be read (right to left):
-
’abh (’alp-baitu) -
the first of the house, the founder of the family: Father.
-
i (yad) - He gives.
- n (nun) - seed; life, offspring, children.
- u
(wawu) - attachment, security.
So, implicitly this one first word of the Our Father prayer already contains the message that God gives life
and secure attachment to us, as His children. To me, this adds an extra
dimension to the prayer that Jesus taught us. For you too?
“ There can be no nature without spirit,
no world without Torah,
no
brotherhood without a Father,
no
humanity without attachment to God.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel2
Hallelu YaH !
Notes
| 1 |
More information on the old pictographic Bible script,
as referred to here, in the Hallelu-YaH Draft Research
Report: ‘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’  , a living document by
André H. Roosma, 1st English version: 18 April
2011 (1st Dutch original:
January 2011).
See also:
André H. Roosma, ‘The Original Aleph-Beth,
Hallelu-YaH brief web-article, 14 Jan. 2012. |
| 2 |
Source: Abraham Joshua Heschel, ‘The Meaning of This Hour’, lecture at a
conference of Quaker leaders in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, March 1938;
extended and published in 1943. Included posthumously (by Samuel H. Dresner -
Ed.) in: I Asked For Wonder – A Spiritual Anthology, Crossroad, 1983;
ISBN: 978 0824505424; p. 128; and as such cited in: ‘The
Bloods of Your Brother’, blog by Skip Moen, 22 May 2011. |
Previous article: ‘His Name is Jesus / Yashu‘ah’.
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