I’ll carry on with more about my trip round China shortly.   My blog follows a sort of ‘Reader’s Digest’ pattern of stories that start and stop mainly on themes of my faith in Christ, travel in places of the bible and other countries that interest me.

This week I was really blessed to get this set of 4 volume Hebrew dictionaries, these used to belong to a library, I know that the Hebrew language actually gets ‘updated’ with new words for modern things, these books are from 2000.   So I don’t know how out of date they have to be to be retired!

I’m not a biblical scholar.  I have no Jewish background in my family as far as I know.  I’m a Christian who did some volunteering in Jerusalem, and I learned some Hebrew out there.   Not very much, not enough to be much useful.   I can’t remember many words, but I can read and pronounce things (badly) probably about 75% accuracy.    This is sufficient for me to understand some of this book.

This evening I quickly skimmed through looking a few words that interest me, the first being Yeshua or ( יֵשׁוּעַ ) which is the Hebrew word for Jesus, which comes from the root word for salvation in Hebrew.

But wait, theres something else that’s caught my eye, why does the page title show ישוע הבן which is translated to Yeshua Ha Ben / Jesus the son….

The same four Hebrew letters can be found inside these other words referring to ‘salvation’

Ok, this last phrase interests me.   I’m assuming this book is unlikely to be written by someone who knows Jesus/Yeshua, but I’m thinking this phrase “ceremony of redemption of the first son” is used in conventional Judaism.    This isn’t Gamatria or any clever random looking for words in words, its subtle clues of Jesus being the Messiah of Israel.

I’m pretty sure I’ll write a follow up to this with more words that interest me from this.

Update – I spoke to a couple of Messianic Jewish friends in UK – these words are used for money offered to Rabbis when doing a Bris (circumcision) of a new baby boy.    Sadly not seen in the context of the Jewish Messiah Jesus/Yeshua – yet… 🙂