Dem Dry Bones, Hear the word of the Lord

May 23, 2015
Dem Dry Bones, Hear the word of the Lord

Ezekiel the Prophet 

by Pedro Berruguete, c. 1500

What I know about Hebrew, you could put into a thimble – that it reads from right to left and that among its twenty-seven or twenty-eight letters, there are no vowels in the sense we think of them; and I could be wrong about that. But, I had heard that in the Old Testament passage for this Sunday, Ezekiel 37, the words for breath and wind and spirit are only one word, pronounced rue – as in RuPaul – ach – as in Bach, Johann Sebastian or Carl Philipp Emanuel: ru-ach. My Lutheran friend, Axel Sundstrøm, who had to learn both Greek and Hebrew in order to preach in English, confirmed as much.

      He also suggested that I preface the my (TRV) version of that familiar passage about the prophet’s vision of the valley full of dry bones with three other passages, preferably, he added, from more reputable translations. “You don’t need to comment,” he continued, just put them up there. Anyone that really wants to get it will get it.”

      You can jump straight to the “plodcast,” if you’d rather, but it would please Axel if you read these first. Couldn’t hurt. So, okay:      

           Genesis 1

     In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, until the spirit (ruach) of God went moving across the waters.

Genesis 2

     Thus the heavens and earth were finished . . . . On the seventh day God finished his work . . . and he rested . . . . [But]

     There was yet no plant of the field in the earth . . . for the Yahweh God had not yet caused it to rain; there was no man to till the ground . . . . Then the Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground and blew in to his nostrils the breath [ruach] of life, and the man became a living thing.

Jeremiah 8

     At that time, says Yahweh, the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of its princes, the bones of the priests, the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the people of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs; and they shall be spread before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which they have loved and worshiped, which they have whored after, and they shall be as dung on the surface of the ground.

     Death shall be preferred to life by all that remain in all the place I have put them, says Yahweh.

And here’s Ezekiel 37, the dry-bones part, in the TRV (Ted Riich Version):