The word εφφαθα (ephphatha) is thought to be a transliteration of an Aramaic term that occurs in Mark 7:34 only, in the highly allegorical scene in which Jesus heals the deaf-mute man in the Decapolis region, just east of the Phoenician homeland, which was centered on the cities of Tyre and Sidon.

The author of this story does not actually state that our phrase is Aramaic, and it may very well be Swahili or proto-Slavic; we don't know. But, author Mark helpfully interprets our term, and declares it to be the synonym of the (second person singular) imperative of the Greek verb διανοιγω (dianoigo), meaning to totally lay wide open, or to open by going through. However, as we discuss at length in our article on the name Boanerges (which also only occurs in the gospel of Mark), Mark had reasons for splicing Aramaic phrases into his Greek narrative, and making the explanation part of the pun rather than simply a proper interpretation of the Aramaic phrase — which implies that only people who actually spoke Aramaic or Hebrew had access to the pun, whereas people who didn't, had no idea that wordplay was in the works.

Greek-speakers in Jesus' original audience would have noted that εφφαθα (ephphatha) is suspiciously similar to εφατο (ephato), the third person masculine singular middle imperfect of the verb φημι (phemi), to speak, meaning that εφατο (ephato) means "he/it is being said" or even "he/it is being quoted", which some creative listeners may have interpreted as a reference to the word-based model of the world, in which all things began their ontological journey as immaterial words, that were initially thought up by God and then uttered, after which they materialized (Deuteronomy 8:3, hence Matthew 4:4).

But in writing, the phrase εφατο (ephato) differs rather clearly from εφφαθα (ephphatha), whose double "ph" is distinctive of the Niphal stem in Hebrew. This Niphal stem commonly reflects a middle voice, which is the voice that deals with the actions of things that have no agency and whose actions are performed by some implied but off-stage actor: doors or windows that open, or body parts like eyes or ears that start to work , or people who get overcome by their emotions, "do" those things obviously not by themselves but by some unspecified or implied agent. In such cases, Hebrew will use the Niphal. The leading "e" of our term εφφαθα (ephphatha) in turn gives our phrase the unmistakable form of a first person singular Niphal inflection of some verb "phatha" (other persons and imperative forms start in the Niphal stem with "ne" or "te" or "ye" or "hi").

All this rather curiously emphasizes a preoccupation with grammar in all this: Mark's Greek interpretation involves a second person singular, his Greek transliteration resembles a third person singular, whereas any Semitic original would have been a first person.

As we have discussed at length in other articles, (see our articles on the names Jesus and Hebrew), much of the dynamic of the gospels derives from the competition between traditional Jews who endeavored to preserve Hebrew and progressive ones who wanted to switch to hip Greek. What the first knew and the latter were quickly forgetting was that Hebrew has certain qualities that Greek-speakers cannot begin to guess at. Hence not only the Word of God came to mankind in Hebrew (Genesis 15:1), but from Hebrew also came the alphabet (see our article on YHWH, and note that the alphabet is the father of the word), which quickly swept over the world and extended eternal life to all libraries whose priests embraced it (Psalm 16:10). Without the alphabet there would have been no Greek philosophy or theatre or democracy. There would have been no formal postal system, no Roman Empire, no modern Europe, no modern world.

People think that the gospels are true because they really happened. This is incorrect. The gospels are true not because they really happened but because they are law. The gospels, as the rest of the Bible, relate to the whole entire world of conscious experience the way the Periodic Table relates to all of chemistry and physics. Whatever we can experience consists of mental molecules, and those consist of mental atoms. It's those that the Bible lists.

The statement "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" is alike the statement "the first element of the period table is hydrogen". These things are not true because they really happened, and some eye witness quickly penned them down. Instead, these things are true because they form the foundational layer of all observable reality. Several Jewish sages have declared that the Torah contains the entire universe, and they were entirely correct.

The only "real" Jesus of Nazareth is the one whom we meet, face to face, on the pages of our Bibles. Any "historical" Jesus (whatever that means) has already long faded. His footsteps have long been erased and the molecules of his body exist now dispersed in every living thing on earth. The only "real" and "permanent" Jesus of Nazareth is the literary character of Jesus of Nazareth. His story is a mirror, and all we can see of Jesus in that mirror is the degree of Jesus we ourselves have become. If we are only vaguely alike him, then we see him only vaguely in the story. But when we have become like him, then we see him clearly (1 Corinthians 13:12).

In the story that Paul and the evangelists wrote, Jesus of Nazareth embodies the Hebrew language. And just like Jesus looked like any man, and man looks like any great ape, and apes look like any mammal, so the Hebrew language looks like any language to anyone who cannot begin to imagine that there are greater things and higher realities continuously around us, clearly visible to anyone who can think outside their own box but hopelessly obscured for people that can't or won't. Hebrew does things that no other language can, and to people who are born outside House David, the Hebrew language is unfathomably divine (Zechariah 12:8, Zephaniah 3:9), and learning it causes the brain to rewire so that the mind is fundamentally changed (Romans 12:2, Ezekiel 36:26), and begins to partake in God's divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

Part of the power of Hebrew is that it preserves etymological links that correspond to relational links between objects and events in the observable world, that in turn carve out neurological pathways in the brain upon which the mind is seated and from which it derives its intelligence. Humans are not simply more intelligent than other animals but differently. Human intelligence allows for the emergence of language, and hence law and hence science, whereas animal intelligence may be staggering but fundamentally unsuited for creating a social super-organism. And so, Hebrew makes distinctions where Greek sees twice the same, and Greek makes distinctions where Hebrew sees twice the same. The Hebrew word for son, for instance, namely בן (ben), looks like a noun derived from the verb to build, which is בנה (bana), so that the observation that sons may be living stones that are being built into a single unified temple (house or temple: בית, bayit, daughter: בת, bat), is a bit of a stretchy metaphor in Greek but a naturally emergent non-metaphorical obviousness in Hebrew (1 Peter 2:5). Likewise, but in the reverse, the word κυριον (kurion) is Greek for lord or mister. In the Septuagint, this one Greek word translates both the Hebrew noun אדן ('adon), any lord or mister, and the specific divine name YHWH, so that the Hebrew original "YHWH said onto אדני (adoni) ..." becomes the ridiculous "The kurion said to the kurion of me ..." (Matthew 22:44).

The European language basin is a great farm — as many secular writers have noted; see our discussion of George Orwell's Animal Farm in our article on εννεα (ennea), nine — and this is because Hebrew was always the Good Shepherd of the world's languages. Part of the good news of which the evangelists spoke is that while Hebrew would always be the world's Good Shepherd, and the salvation of the entire world would come only from the Jews (John 4:22), the Good Shepherd could always use a good shepherd dog. And that's precisely what Greek would become: in the Christian era, Greek's domesticated version (Koine) became the new Caleb to the new Joshua. For a closer look at this, see our articles on the name Hellas, the noun ποιμην (poimen), shepherd, and the noun κυων (kuon), meaning dog.

Hebrew, assisted by Greek, domesticated those European languages whose speakers were willing. Hebrew gave them houses and security from storms and wild animals. Our Western World is a domesticated world that has Hebrew at its collective heart (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek), so that everything that can be said in any language, was first said in Hebrew (John 21:25, Revelation 2:4). We don't exactly know what Paul demonstrated so powerfully about the Spirit, so as to lead so many Europeans to Christ (1 Corinthians 2:4), but it may very well have been the amazing traces of Hebrew in all European languages, in which it lies interred like Abel's blood, waiting to be resurrected. Hebrew is like a river that has become a delta that waters all the world and breathes life into all the languages, and unifies them and declares them mere dialects of the sacred original (Acts 2:6).

But that means that any translation of the Hebrew original inevitably causes injury to the original, and the farther the target language has drifted away from Hebrew, the less alive it is, and the more its most urgent purpose is to lead the desperately thirsty upstream from the infested mud trickle they are confined to, to the vast fountain of Living Water from which once the whole of human reality came bursting forth. But otherwise, any translation of the Hebrew original is little more than a barely living golem or bronze automaton, or even an entirely stagnant golden calf or silly gypsum idol to which the deluded bow and burn incense — spoken of in horror by the prophet Ezekiel, who saw "seventy" elders of Israel performing misdeeds, each in front of their own idol (Ezekiel 8:9-12). Ezekiel wrote in the Aramaic period but his visions cleverly explain the name of the later Greek translation, namely Septuagint, which is the Latin translation of the Greek word εβδομηκοντα (hebdomekonta), seventy.

The English language, in case you are wondering, is among the driest, deadest and most mechanical languages the world has ever produced, and is fit for machines but not for humans: see our article on the verb βασκαινω (baskoino), to bewitch. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the English language is collapsing (see our article on Mesopotamia for the details), which means that people who speak only English will surely go down with the ship (or with their "tower" if you will). Other languages will survive only by merit of the amount of Hebrew they have stored in them (see our fun-filled article on The Bible, Tolkien and Serbia, in which we semi-facetiously ask whether the Ark of the Covenant might be hidden in Serbia), and note that the stories that make up the Bible are still native to Hebrew, so that anyone who knows the stories but not the language is entirely alike a deaf-mute person.

And all that brings us to the core of our term εφφαθα (ephphatha), which would be something that looks like φαθα (phatha) when transliterated into Greek. Commentators usually offer the verb פתח (patah), to open, which would match our scene rather perfectly, as our Hebrew verb is most often associated with the opening of lips and ears (Isaiah 35:5) as well as doors (Job 41:14) and gates (Isaiah 60:11). The Qal form אפתח (aptah), "I will open", occurs frequently, as in Isaiah 41:18: "I will open rivers on the bare heights and springs in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land fountains of water." Noun פתח (petah) means opening or doorway or the "unlocking" of some mystery. A proposed second verb פתח (patah), meaning to engrave or carve, may actually be the same as the first, since the act of carving "opens" the surface of the thing in which one carves.

However, while there is indeed only one sort of "p" or "ph" in Hebrew, the letter ח (heth) is pronounced like a hard "ch" and rather tends to morph into a hard "k" in Greek (and even in Hebrew). In other words, פתח (patah) would sooner become πατακ (patak) than φαθα (phatha). And that turns the attentions of some other commentators to the verb פתה (pata), which ends on the letter ה (he), which may look somewhat similar to ח (heth) but is really as different as the English letter O differs from Q.

The similarity is accidental, and our verb פתה (pata) expresses a totally different process or dynamic principle than פתח (patah). In English we name things after the way things look but in Hebrew we name things after the way they act (in English, something that "is" like a lion looks like a lion, but in Hebrew something that "is" like a lion acts like a lion and may very well be a millimeter tall).

That said, our verb פתה (pata) describes the slow and gradual growth of things like sandbanks or mudflats. The Hebrew name for Greece, namely Javan, means Mud, and Javan was a grandson of Noah, through his son Japheth, whose name derives from our verb פתה (pata), to increase gradually. In Genesis 9:27, Noah expresses the wish that Japheth would move into the tents of Shem and that God would יפת ליפת (yapet le yapet), or "make wide Japheth" (twice the same word), which obviously refers to the process of slowly getting drier and bigger of the dry land, upon the receding of the flood waters. It's also the process that marks the third day of creation, and note that day four associates with the global release of the Great Light that is Hebrew (i.e. the Hebrew alphabet, the republic, the postal system, science; compare Genesis 1:16 to Isaiah 9:2-6), the lesser light that is Greek, and the great many stars that are the sons of Abraham (compare Genesis 15:5 to Daniel 12:3, Galatians 3:7, Philippians 2:15).

This verb's sole derivative, the noun פתי (peti) means simplicity, or a being "muddy of mind". Since dry land symbolizes rational knowledge (i.e. the Logos) and water the formless potentials of total ignorance, mental muddiness appears to refer to a sort of intellectual intuition. This noun occurs only in Proverbs 1:22, which reads: "How long, simple ones (פתים, petim), will you love simplicity (פתי, peti)?".

But that means that our term εφφαθα (ephphatha) most literally means "I am enlarging [something]" and hails back to what Noah understood, namely that Japeth would enlarge if and only if he stayed within the tents of Shem (Acts 19:20, Isaiah 60:22, 1 Kings 18:44). In the story of the deaf-mute man, Jesus is the Shemite Logos, the Good Shepherd, whereas the deaf-mute man is the Phoenician-Greek shepherd dog who is welcomed in the shepherd's home, where he learns to behave himself and be of service, even though he will never understand what being human entails, where the human world comes from (dogs have no way of knowing that houses and roads are not natural but built by humans), how the human world works and what the human world might be for. All the dog knows is that the Master wants the herds herded, and that there is a meal in it for the dog. Man's best friend.