Maranatha meaning

Meaning

Bitterness Gave, [He/God] Gave Bitterness (i.e. God tested for adultery)

You Are A Meronothite! You Are One Of The Rebellion!

Came [Our] Mister

Etymology

From (1) the verb מרר (marar), to be bitter, and (2) the verb נתן (natan), to give.

From the ethnonym מרנתי (meronoti), Meronothite, or (1) מרן (meron), Meron, and (2) the second person singular masculine pronoun: אתא ('ata'), you.

From (1) מארא (ma'ra'), lord or mister, (2) נא (na'), our, and (3), אתה ('ata), to come.

Related names

• Via מרר (marar): Evil-merodach, Imrah, Jambres, Mamre, Mara, Marah, Marduk, Maria, Maroth, Martha, Mary, Meraiah, Meraioth, Merari, Merodach-baladan, Merom, Meronothite, Miriam, Mordecai, Moriah, Smyrna

• Via נתן (natan): Elnathan, Jonathan, Mattan, Mattanah, Mattaniah, Mattatha, Mattathias, Mattattah, Mattenai, Matthan, Matthat, Matthew, Matthias, Mattithiah, Nathan, Nathanael, Nathan-melech, Nethanel, Nethaniah, Nethinim, Tattenai

The term Maranatha occurs only once in the Bible, namely in 1 Corinthians 16:22, and despite the enthusiasm of many, the meaning and purpose of this term are by no means settled and secured. It's traditionally interpreted as "our Lord has come" or "our Lord come!" but there are problems with that (as we will discuss below) and our term may just as well mean "dictated but not read" or "make Judea great again!" or "at dawn we ride!" Our phrase does not appear to be Greek and feels rather Semitic (and probably is) but may very well be Hittite or Sanskrit or Bantu. Or Latin.

The familiar and not dissimilar Italian term marinata, meaning marinade, stems from the Latin mar, meaning sea (because to marinade used be mean to douse in αλς, hals, salt), but the Latin noun marita means wife, from marito, to marry (same word), from mas, man (hence our word "masculine"). It's unclear why marrying has to do with asking someone's hand — let's be real: marriage is not signified by hands joining; hence also Shakespeare's little pun: "let lips do what hands do..." (R&J 1.5) — but the Greek word μαρη (mare) is an ancient synonym of χειρ (cheir), hand. This word μαρη (mare), hand, shows up nowhere in extant texts and we only know about it because it's contained in compound words like ευμαρετς (eumaretes), good-handed or handy. It's unclear where μαρη (mare) comes from, but perhaps it's related to the Latin manus, meaning hand.

We have no idea what the Corinthians thought, or in which direction their minds wandered, when they saw the term Maranatha transliterated into Greek, or heard it pronounced by whoever was reading Paul's letter. We don't know why Paul incorporated it, or why he didn't simply say what he wanted to say in Greek, so that there would be no mystery. But perhaps that's precisely what this word is supposed to convey: an everlasting mystery, like Willy Wonka's Everlasting Gobstopper or Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.

Love, after all, believes all things, and anything worth exploring, never only has one meaning. Sometimes words go through multiple slots at once.

Depending on the manuscript one consults, our phrase is spelled μαραν ατα (maran ata) or μαρανα τα (marana ta) or μαρανατα (maranata), but because Paul wrote scripto continuo, without spaces, the original was μαρανατα (maranata), and we don't know where the blank(s) went or even if there were any (because Hebrew and Aramaic had spaces, but Greek didn't and neither did Sanskrit).

"If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed. Maranatha. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen" (1 Corinthians 16:22-24).

The most plausible explanation is that Maranata was some sort of incantation, lifted from some other-than-Greek language and hence probably somewhat corrupted, not unlike abracadabra, meaning "done as said" (from עבר, 'abar, to transpire, כ (ke), like, and דבר, dabar, to speak), or molon labe, meaning "come and take 'em" (from βλωσκω, blosko, to come, and λαμβανω, lambano, to take), or some generic rallying cry (like "deus vult!" or "pumpaj, pumpaj!" or "ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam!"), that was attached to some specific cause or group of protesters and meant more in the way of its popular use than in the literal meanings of its words.

The only other time our term Maranata appears in documents that survive from late antiquity is in the late first or early second century work called the Didache, which was also written in Koine Greek, and clearly shared its literary tradition with Paul (50-60's), the evangelists (70-80's) and John the Revelator (90's). We don't exactly know in which year the Didache was completed (40s-150s?) but it possibly incorporates textual material or common incantations that predate even Paul. In chapter 10 of the Didache we read:

"Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the God of David; if anyone is holy, let him come. If anyone is not, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen" (Didache 10).

This not only clearly reflects Paul's message to the people of Corinth, it's also reminiscent of Revelation 22:17: "The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come!'". This line from the Didache also incorporates two other famous Hebrew terms (hosanna and amen) and a famous Hebrew name (David), so yes, our term μαρανατα (maranata) is probably a transliteration of a Hebrew or Aramaic phrase that had come to mean more than the mere sum of its words. But if it is indeed a colloquialism, it's suspicious that it survives in no other document. And if it was a rallying cry, it can't have been much of a rally.

On second thought, the first secular mentions of Jesus of Nazareth don't appear until the 90's, so contemporary popularity is evidently not anything to go on. Our term may well have been a sort of tribal identifier, like Zealots or Boanerges or Sons of Light, the latter two we would not have known about if they hadn't been mentioned in the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Surely, Paul must have been confident that his audience in Corinth knew about our phrase, but we moderns have no idea where he based this confidence on, and we certainly don't share the understanding that Paul implied the Corinthians had. The term μαρανατα (maranata) may be a transliteration of quite a few Hebrew or Aramaic constructions, but nothing closely comparable survives in the vast entirety of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts that do.

Here at Abarim Publications we don't know either, of course, but as we will see below, the term Maranata might be shoehorned into an Aramaic phrase that would indeed mean The Master Came or Our Master Came, but this Aramaic phrase originated probably as late as the Middle Ages, while its resemblance with our term Maranatha is far from perfect, and its sentiments are that of central authority and not the typical republic style personal autonomy that was conveyed by the original gospel. Both Paul and the Didache emphasize the community in Christ, which the Revelator refers to as the Bride, whose wedding she invites her audience to attend. And everybody back then knew that although men and women had different roles in society, within marriage the two were one (Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5, Ephesians 5:31), and unification with God (or husbands) was only possible when the entire law was upheld, and fell apart when even one rule was broken (James 2:20).

Long before Jesus Christ became the Pantokrator of Imperial Rome, he had been a common laborer whose mission to fulfill the whole law in its entirety had been inaugurated by the awkward fact of his own birth, which had been from an unmarried young woman named Mary, whose financée Joseph had nothing to do with her conception and wanted to send her away in secret. Joseph was the first adult male who had to deal with the reality of Jesus (and see Zechariah 13:4). He was a righteous man, which is a man who lives according to the law, and the law left him with two options: he either swallowed his pride and sent Mary away quietly on the grounds of marital infidelity (Matthew 5:27-32), or he did not swallow or assume anything and took Mary to public court to very loudly proclaim and publicly examine the facts of the matter. Joseph favored the quiet option, but God was about to get loud.

Long before anyone could speak of glory and promised Paradises, the problem of Jesus' conception had to be squared. That draws the attention of us here at Abarim Publications toward the Test of Adultery as proscribed in great detail in the Torah. That test has several components and clearly also informs the story of Joseph and Mary at the beginning her pregnancy (Matthew 1:18-23).

Contrary to what is commonly proclaimed, the Test of Adultery as formalized in Numbers 5:11-31, did not react to whatever the woman might have been up to but rather reacted to the suspicion of the husband — which not only implies that male jealousy (קנאה, qin'a) was a much bigger problem in ancient Israel than female unfaithfulness, but also that female unfaithfulness was the man's job to prevent, so that any misguided male jealousy was an impurity that the man had to be cleansed from (compare Numbers 5:6 to 5:10 and 5:31; see our article on μοιχος, moichos, adulterer). Regardless of any evidence, witnesses or lack thereof, if the man had been overcome by a spirit of jealousy (hence the irony of Luke 1:35), he would bring his woman to the priest and also offer a jealousy offering of grain and frankincense. And then:

1. The priest filled an item of חרשׂ (heres), pottery, with מים (mayim), waters, קדשים (qedoshim), holy, or "holy waters" (a term not used elsewhere) and added some עפר ('apar), looseness [dirt or dust], from the tabernacle floor, so that these waters became מי המרים (me hammarim), waters of bitterness, from the verb מרר (marar), to be bitter (hence names like Mara, Miriam and Mary).
2. Then the priest unbound (פרע, para') the woman's head (ראש, rosh), and gave (נתן, natan) the fragrant jealousy offering on her open hands (כף, kap).
3. Then the priest (in no further specified manner) placed the woman under oath (שבע, shaba') and curse (אלה, 'ala II), and said: "[If indeed you've done such and such], then may YHWH give (נתן, natan) you to be an oath and a curse among your people, when YHWH gives (נתן, natan) your belly to swell and your genitalia (ירך, yarek) to disintegrate (נפל, napal, to "fall")."
4. To which the woman would respond with "Amen, Amen". This clearly corresponds to the "Amen" of both the Didache and Paul's note to Corinth.
5. The priest then somehow wrote these curses upon some sort of record (ספר, seper), but then immediately erased (מחה, maha) this record by means of the bitter water, so that the curse entered the water.
6. Then he took the fragrant jealousy offering from the woman's hand and burned it on the altar.
7. After all that, the woman was finally made to drink the water. If she had guilt, her belly would swell and her genitalia would disintegrate and she would be a curse among her people. But if not, and here it comes, she would be free and conceive seed — and both these latter two verbs are in the Niphal stem, which usually indicates a passive or reflexive mood, but here renders semi-autonomous agency (it's a statement like: her womb, eyes, gates [are] opened, or open [themselves]).

The Adultery Test was designed to cleanse Israel from male jealousy, and had only two outcomes: either the woman's body was ruined and she became a curse among the people, or she became pregnant, and in that case, the woman's pregnancy demonstrated her innocence. In physical reality, nobody would swell up or fall apart from drinking dusty water, but mentally, nobody in ancient Israel with even a snippet of guilt would have been able to keep a straight face during this ordeal.

The first of the two key verbs in this regard is מרר (marar), to be bitter:

The second of the two key verbs is נתן (natan), to give:

We modern students of the Torah need to remember that there was no doubt back then, and the world was a very different place because of that. It was a matter of common knowledge that God related to mankind the way any husband related to his own estate (wife, children, animals, objects). Our modern human world would not exist without the sanctity of property rights, and unfair as it may seem today, the invention of marriage was where property rights began (see our article on γαμος, gamos, marriage). Sexuality, subsequently, was governed by wholly different social conventions, was mostly associated with political alliances between houses, and certainly had not been stigmatized yet.

There was no shame in sex, only in lawlessness, i.e. sex that was not governed by a legal covenant that stipulated how the consequences of the interaction were to be dealt with, who "owned" the child and who was going to pay for and benefit from all of it. Everybody knows that at the heart of Israel, there was the Ark of the Covenant, but while most people think that the Ark was the container of a specific covenant (namely the Ten Commandments), it was rather the symbol of the principle of covenant: the idea that interactions between humans could be regulated by permanent but imaginary agreements rather than continued shows of supremacy or aggression. At the heart of Israel was the Store Of Covenants, which declared that the whole of Israelite society was governed by any and all covenants, whose written records were secured in a central vault and were managed by a specially trained administrative class.

When Jacob asked Laban for his daughter Rachel, he added clarifyingly: "... so that I may come into her" (Genesis 29:21). Then, after an entire wedding night, behold, it was Leah!

How Jacob managed to mate with the wrong sister, the story doesn't tell, but it appears to have been well within imaginable reality that sometimes people coupled accidentally with the wrong partners. Nobody is blessed with an innate understanding of either one's own adolescent fury or else the general truth about the origin of babies. Whatever medical knowledge existed, very little of it was available for women, and very young adults may not always have been sufficiently instructed about the extent or potential of sexual aggression. And since it was the husband's part of the covenant to keep the women satisfied, provided for and safe from all sorts of assault, an unexplained pregnancy was therefore exclusively the fault of the father of the house, who was thus the actual covenant-breaker. This also helps explain Joseph's reaction to Mary's pregnancy: the story tells that Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit and it really serves no critical purpose to dispute that (explanations must stay true to facts of the story, or else we've moved ourselves into a different story; also see our article on παρθενος, parthenos, virgin). But, regardless of the cause of Mary's pregnancy, Joseph was a righteous man (i.e. entirely concerned with the Law) and his fiancée's inexplicable pregnancy automatically inculpated him for having failed to keep Mary unpregnant. Long before he had a chance to begin to build his own house, Joseph had proven to be a bad father, entirely unworthy of one and bound for servitude and bondage. The most humane thing to do in such a situation was to send the woman back to her parental home (Ruth 1:8).

Social security the way we know it did not exist, and physical labor for men and sexual labor for women were not rarely the commodities of last resort for either. Women would trade sex for security, and greatly preferred security derived from a communally upheld covenant over the fleeting attentions of any passer-by. But covenanted husbands often went off to war or business or had fatal accidents, leaving their brides confused and vulnerable, especially when these brides had been imported away from their own families and into the clan of the husband — the story of Ruth comes to mind (Ruth 3:4), as do the stories of Tamar and Bathsheba. Human life has always been precious to Israel, and any pregnancy would be protected with much more consideration than was extended to the ruffled feathers of some irresponsible man. The penalty for foul play was always death (Leviticus 20:10), but if the woman's conscience was clean, then Levirate Law took precedent (Deuteronomy 25:5; compare Deuteronomy 25:9 to Matthew 3:11).

Since the relationship of God with mankind is frequently depicted as a marriage or at least a betrothal, adultery is a synonym for idolatry (hence Ezekiel 16:1-59, Jeremiah 3:1-25). God is a jealous God (Exodus 20:5, 34:14, Ezekiel 39:25, Zechariah 8:2), and although his invisible attributes, eternal power and divine nature can be clearly observed and understood through what has been made (Romans 1:20), most people still find ways to cheat on God by devoting themselves to factions, tribes, religions, superstitions, fear and their own glorified dominance.

See for more detail our article on θεος (theos), but in short: the whole of physical reality Big-Banged out of a singularity that was never compromised. It still binds everything together, determines preservation laws, directs anything that evolves, and governs the whole shebang of physical interactions anywhere in the universe. Likewise "meaning", which relates to consciousness the way matter relates to energy. All meaning, even meaning that sits below the level of words and other modes of formalization, derives from interactions, that all add up. All consciousness gravitates upon a singularity from which everything that means something derives its meaning. And (for complicated reasons) that singularity-of-meaning has primality over the physical singularity, so that the former "creates" the latter.

This is the reason why the worship of YHWH has nothing to do with creeds, dogma or even religion (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11), and everything with cooperation and dialogue (Isaiah 1:18, 1 Thessalonians 5:21). The worship of YHWH is expressed in any freely operating economy, where objects and activities are determined from their value and usefulness to other objects and activities. This includes the material and biological realities of nature, and someday soon also the reality of human language, politics and commerce. And at the heart of that, sits the Hebrew language (i.e. Biblical Hebrew, not modern Hebrew), which has qualities that no other language has and which has always been the vehicle by which the Word of YHWH attained human form and approached us (Genesis 15:1).

Of course there are other languages, just like there are other men in the village, but worshippers of YHWH attach themselves to Hebrew and seek unity above all else. This is because God's unity is extended into his followers, who "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), and are called "Sons of God" (Matthew 5:9, Luke 20:36, John 1:12, Romans 8:14-19, Galatians 3:26, Philippians 2:15, 1 John 3:1-2), but certainly never so as to produce a Godhead that is not perfectly and seamlessly One (Isaiah 45:7, John 17:20-26, Ephesians 4:1-6).

The Logos could only have been born from Unity, and because he was born, his birth demonstrated the innocence of the people that had born him. And that is the meaning of Maranata.

Here at Abarim Publications we suspect that the term Maranatha was matched with an Aramaic term meaning "Our Lord Has Come" only in the Middle Ages, but that it originated, and in the first century was still much rather associated, with the Hebrew phrase מרה נתן (mara natan), meaning Bitterness He Gave, or a variation like מרה נתון (mara naton), Was Given Bitterness. Our term Maranata is overwhelmingly reported to mean "our Lord has come", but that is only somewhat correct as long as we consider it a very rough paraphrase or even a conclusion from what it translates as. It expresses the observation that although all families and tribes of the world were given bitterness, only the people of Israel hadn't swollen and fallen apart but rather conceived, given birth, and raised the Logos into maturity as one of their own.

Let's zoom in on our term Maranata, and try to establish how it may have appeared to people who are not familiar with the Gospel of Jesus Christ or any of the basic principles that make the Bible tick:

The most immediate association with the -ata part of our term is the second person singular masculine pronoun (אתה, 'ata'), which occurs all over the Hebrew and Aramaic canon and in several lasting evergreens. The term baruch ata, for instance means "Blessed are you ... " and is applied to men and God. Various versions of prayers that start with "Baruch ata Adonai..." (i.e. 'Blessed are You, O Lord...') are prayed multiple times per day by millions of people all over the world.

But this would imply that "Maran ata" means "You [men] are Maran" (whatever that is), perhaps in a sense that is comparable to "Je suis Charlie" or "Ich bin ein Berliner" or "Die pet past ons allemaal" or "We Are Satoshi" or "I'm every woman" or "They were all under the cloud" (1 Corinthians 10:1). Note that contrary to persistent rumor, the characters in the Bible are literary characters and not historical characters, and that the Bible is not true because "it really happened" but because the stories of the Bible tell of law that is true always, regardless of time and space. Above we note that the Ark of the Covenant is not simply the Box Of A Specific Covenant, but rather the Central Storage Of All Covenant. Likewise, Adam is not a man but the man: all man (and see this discussed at greater length in our article on the name Adam). Likewise Christ is not a but the. Likewise Maran is not a but the.

But there is also a feminine version of this pronoun, namely (את, 'at), and despite the common parsing, none of the words used in 1 Corinthians 16:22 are decidedly masculine or feminine (τις, tis, meaning "some" is indefinite, and αναθεμα, anathema, is neuter, and, of course, so are all the verbs).

Clearly more favored by most commentators is the verb אתה ('ata), which means to come. This verb is a relatively rare poetic equivalent of the much more common verb בוא (bo'), to come, which occurs almost 2,600 times in the Hebrew Bible, against 20 times of our verb אתה ('ata), half of which in the Book of Isaiah. Our rare verb describes bringing water to the thirsty (Isaiah 21:14), the coming of the morning (Isaiah 21:12), the getting together of humanity (Isaiah 41:5), the coming of the future in general (Isaiah 41:23), or a specific person and his policies (Isaiah 41:25), or wild beasts on the prowl (Isaiah 56:9). Scary things may come (Job 3:25), or years (Job 16:22), or the brood of fools (Job 30:14), or the golden splendor around God (Job 37:22). It may describe the coming of God (Deuteronomy 33:2) or a coming to God (Jeremiah 3:22), but neither of these latter two employs a theonym and both attach a pronoun to our verb.

If the -ata part of our term "Maran ata" is indeed a transliteration of the verb אתה ('ata), then it is a so-called perfect form, which mostly describes a completed action (Maran came, or has come, or has completed the action of starting to come and hence is now underway: Maran is coming!). But the perfect form does not really talk about something that will happen or start to happen at some point in the future (to which we must add that the Hebrew language isn't tethered to the temporal axis the way English is, and its tenses speak more about repeating actions regularly, and onwardly, than about when events happened uniquely in the past, present or future).

Why our term "Maran ata" would employ a rare and probably antiquated verb rather than its much more common equivalent isn't clear, but "Maran ata" would mean Maran neareth / hath neared / approacheth / hath approached. And this while "Maran bo" would have sounded equally robust and far less obscure: Maran Comes! or Maran Has Come!

A major part of the conflict that brought about the Nazarene movement had to do with certain qualities that only Hebrew has, and which cannot be duplicated in any other language. Not everybody knew that, and many people had begun to read the Scriptures in Greek, and in their ignorance were confusing God's revelation with Greek mythology. Among the many possible interpretations of the story of Jesus is the story of the Hebrew language, which was the very substance within which the Word of God came to mankind, and attained human form, whose conversation was made to die in the Roman Empire but came back to life when the evangelists had emphasized the importance of reading the Scriptures in Hebrew. Why would Paul, when knowledge of Hebrew had dwindled to the point where dialogue in Hebrew could barely be heard anywhere, write a letter to a group of Greeks and insert in it a term that incorporated a verb that was unusual even for an expert in Hebrew?

The Romans persecuted the Jews for precisely the same reasons the Nazis would — the details are not relevant to our present story but the bottom line is that the Hebrews believed that societal perfection was contingent on every individual's attained freedom (which is an acquired skill: ελευθερια, eleutheria, freedom-by-law), whereas the Romans believed that societal perfection would come about if only everybody would simply do as they were told. In the 1930's, British supporters of Hitler would go about greeting each other with the ominous slogan "perish Judah". Why they wouldn't simply say, "Death to the Jews!" isn't clear, but the verb "to perish" is relatively unusual, and even today not everybody realizes that the word Jew simply means "of Judah", and that suggests that they were going for something that sounded venerable and erudite.

A flippant critic might have responded with a resounding: "perish ya mamma!", which without the original "perish Judah" would surely have deprived any later observers of relevant footing. Whether our term "maran ata" is likewise a reaction to some missing original isn't known, but our point remains that the meaning of this phrase may wholly elude that of its constitutory elements.

If the -ata part of our term is de second person singular masculine pronoun (אתא, 'ata'), then the maran- part may very well derive from the name Maroth, which is the name of a town so insignificant that only the prophet Micah mentions it (Micah 1:12). This name Maroth (מרות) is the plural of the name Marah (מרה), meaning Bitterness. However, here at Abarim Publications we suspect that Maroth was not the name of a geographic location, where perhaps a few families lived, but rather a subset of the human condition, where millions made their home. In that sense, Maroth is rather alike Nazareth, which was also either a town of such insignificance that no other writer mentions it or else an important subset of the human condition, namely the Diaspora, where many millions are forced to reside, and whilst pining to go home (Philippians 3:20), come up with skills and technologies that benefit the whole of mankind but which were designed to be telescopes to view across the waters to the light on the far shore.

The assumed Hebrew and Aramaic transliteration of our term Maranatha (מרנאתא, maranata) is tellingly similar to the ethnonym מרנתי (meronoti), Meronothite, which describes someone from a place called Meronoth or Meronah, or even Meron or Maran, but no such place is mentioned in the Bible, while there are two Meronothites mentioned: a Jehdeiah the Meronothite, who had charge of the donkeys during the monarchy of David (1 Chronicles 27:30), and Jadon the Meronothite, who was among the men who made repairs to Jerusalem after the return from exile (Nehemiah 3:7). Note that the word for wall, namely חומה (homa), relates closely to חם (ham), one's husband's father, and חמות (hamot), one's husband's mother. These three nouns derive from the verb חמה (hamah), to surround and/or protect.

As we point out in our article on the name Meronothite: the name Meron (מרון) is identical to the Aramaic noun מרון (meron), which means rebellion. The first chapter of the tractate Rosh Hashanah makes mention of בני מרון (bene meron), which literally means "sons of the rebellion" but in fact simply means "rebels". This phrase refers to all creatures, as all are judged on Rosh Hashanah, in accordance with Psalm 33:14-15: "He looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth; He who fashions the hearts of them all; He who understands all their works."

Just north of the Sea of Galilee, there sit the modern towns of Meiron and Meron, which house the tombs of some very famous and very early rabbis, including the amazing Hillel, who died early in the 1st century, when Jesus would have been a young boy. These towns called Meiron and Meron are rumored to be the same as the Merom mentioned in Joshua 11:5 and 11:7, where the Canaanite coalition drew up to meet Israel in an all-or-nothing final battle. The Canaanites lost this battle and Joshua's victory over these kings concluded the campaign and secured the land for Israel. This rather obviously reminds of Jesus' victory at the final battle at Armageddon (Revelation 20:9).

In his Jewish Wars, Josephus mentions a town called Μηρω (Mero) or Μηρωθ (Meroth) among the Galilean towns he had fortified (JW.2.20). This may be the same as the Maroth mentioned by Micah, and both may not be actual geographic locations but rather manifestations of social conditions. It's beyond dispute that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, but was that Bethlehem of stones and cement or Bethlehem of human minds (the "house" of bread/war; and see our article on αρτος, artos, bread). And did Jesus have a birthday, or rather a birth-decade, namely the decade between the death of Herod the Great (4 BC) and the ascension of Quirinius as governor of Syria (in 6 AD)? And was Jesus conceived in some hamlet up north, or rather in the global diaspora? On the wings of the postal service (the noun αγγελος, aggelos, means postman), so that he was not simply a way but the way, comprising the entire road system, the seat of the very first manifestation of the original Internet.

Intuition is a most marvelous thing, and some of the greatest feats of human ingenuity were performed by it. It seems that some of us hear a voice that others don't. As if from a universal grapevine, Stephen Hawking "conceived" of Hawking Radiation, Alan Guth "conceived" of the inflationary universe, Paul McCartney "conceived" of Yesterday. The story of Harry Potter goes well beyond mere fantasy and ties into ancient Hekhalot and Merkabah mysticism (respectively as the invisible Hogwarts and Mr. Weasley's flying light-blue Ford Anglia, which in turn shares its symbolic root with the Blue Fairy of Pinocchio). The All Souls trilogy, likewise, taps into patterns that are ancient and formidable — for instance that the Book of Life is a palimpsest, and though missing, only hiding in the great human library until some fatherless orphan (Melchizedek, Frodo, Harry, Diane Bishop, Esmeralda of Paris, hence also the green light on Daisy's dock, even Ike "Vikar" Jerome who has a portrait of his spiritual parents tattooed on his head) conjures it up by sheer force of need (hence also the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts, and Melville's "necessity for the whale's rising").

Something similar might be going on in the story first told by Joseph Smith: of the angel Moroni, whose name was never explained but is obviously Aramaic for My Master, who handed young Joseph the gold tablets from which he translated the Book of Mormon. Critics point out that there's a lot wrong with that story, but they do that with every story, so that does not set the story of Moroni apart. And especially in our enlightened age, critics tend to overlook that it's not mythology's business to be true of false but rather to provide roosts for very real concerns and "phenomenally conscious mental states" that fly around society without factual materials to settle on. This is simply how mythology works: it's an important working principle of the human mind, the same that forged our very language (compare Genesis 8:6-12 to Luke 10:1-18). The Structuralist Theory of Mythology explains that myths are elements of language, super-words or words as big as narratives: molecule-words which are stories that have no author but grow like stalagmites in the caves of human discourse. Stories about aliens, bigfoots or lake monsters are not about aliens, bigfoots or lake monsters but about the cohesion of social strata within which these stories naturally emerge, wax and circulate.

Another word of considerable interest is the noun μορον (moron), the proverbially dim or deep red-glowing mulberry (hence also Huckelberry Finn, another orphan), which came to symbolize not only intellectual primitivity and immaturity, but much rather the beginning of a much greater enlightenment: hence the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the original Romeo and Juliet. The μορον (moron), mulberry, is related to the συκον (sukon), fig, which in Hebrew is בכורה (bikkura), from the verb בכר (bakar), to rise early. The Hebrew word for morning is the comparable בקר (boqer), whereas the word for cattle is the closely related בקר (baqar) — which explains how the story of the Golden Calf (i.e. very early sunrise) also serves as a critique of mere rationalism, which in Jesus' time was associated with Plato; hence the broad (πλατυς, platus) road to destruction, which is the same as the "broad" plain from which the opposing coalition attacks the saints and the Beloved City (Revelation 20:9). A synonym of בקר (baqar), cattle, is אלף ('elep), cattle, from the verb אלף ('alep), to socially synchronize (i.e. to learn by imitation and repetition rather than instruction and obedience). Rationality is always a much better idea than superstition of following some smooth-talking leader, but one of the cardinal elements of the gospel is that, although the Logos is divine, when the Logos is incarnated within any human individual, that incarnated Logos must die, so that both the Logos and its host human can resurrect in a societal or communal reality of only meaning (i.e. heaven) and no physicality (i.e. earth).

What it is, exactly, that transcends the incarnated Logos, may not be clear to a lot of people, but since Russel's paradox, Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Turing's halting problem, our celebrated modern enlightenment has begun to be formally aware of its own limitations. Aristotle could not imagine rationality to have a boundary, or the Logos to be mortal, let alone that there would be a whole other continuum, a consistent, rule-based reality in which information is usefully preserved and exchanged between parties, beyond the edge of reason, where the Logos resurrects in a splendor that no individual could ever have foreseen (Proverbs 6:6).

Rational people pledge to believe only their own eyes, and so not infrequently come to be tethered to the fabrications of their unfaithful imaginations (1 Corinthians 8:1). While beyond that selfish abyss there rises a heaven where folks only believe what choirs sing, and tune themselves to that melody. The first principle of science is to not believe what one's own eyes see, but wait for the confirmation of one's peers and disregard everything else (see our article on charis, the social felicity the leads to salvation).

The immediate problem that comes along with this, is that when a thing has no name, it becomes difficult to discuss. That means that whatever is said about it, inevitably comes in the guise of something else. That's why the people of God study metaphor, because it's not mathematics but poetry that is the language of the universe (Psalm 78:2, Matthew 13:35).

It takes some practice but it's like learning how to see colors where others see only shades of grey. And when you do, it becomes ever easier to ignore the endless armies of buffoons, who talk about things they don't understand and see solid grey where others see rainbows (Genesis 9:13, 1 Thessalonians 4:17).

That said, when Jesus entered Jerusalem, he did so whilst riding on a donkey's foal — and recall whom we mentioned earlier, Jehdeiah the Meronothite, who was in charge of donkeys during David's reign. The word for foal is οναριον (onarion), which is a diminutive of ονος (onos), meaning donkey, but much rather looks like a diminutive of οναρ (onar), meaning dream. Jesus legal father Joseph was named after Joseph of Israel, who was celebrated as an explainer of dreams. True to form, the entire narrative arc between the Angel of the Lord telling Joseph how Mary got pregnant, and their final settlement in Galilee, is carried by a whopping five dream sequences (Matthew 1:20, 2:12, 2:13, 2:19, 2:22), meaning that Matthew's nativity sequence is essentially a sequence of dreams: very real and useful information that comes to the mind from the subconscious, but only when the subconscious has been trained by the conscious. The rational mind can learn by simply absorbing information but the subconscious is an animal that can only be trained by years and years of repeated exposure (for more on how to train your dragon, see our article on δρακων, drakon).

Paul says it like this:

"... to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:19).

"... the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:7).

"I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead" (Philippians 3:8-11).

Despite all the above considerations, it's generally agreed that the maran- part of our term Maranatha has to do with the verb מרר (marar), to be bitter or have a strong taste. This is explained by the observation that bitterness is generally a thing to avoid, which in turn implies that whatever sentiment or feeling or experience people veer away from is metaphorically "bitter". That in turn means that a teacher who teaches their students with proverbial pricks and goads is a person who dispenses bitterness, and note that the sapiens part of the term Homo sapience derives from the Latin sapio, sapere, meaning to taste.

Our verb מרר (marar) not simply denotes anything literally tasting bitter but also metaphorically experienced bitterly — and when bitterness is experienced in reasonable dosages, it motivates learning, growth, correction, even the repentance that leads to life (2 Corinthians 7:10). Myrrh was a proverbially bitter herb, but also the smell of the consummation of marriage. This event is commonly slightly painful for the woman, but then (husband-willing) quickly exceedingly joyous, and (God-willing) resulting in house full of children, which in Biblical times was not only tied to feelings of love but rather also to social security and ever more helping hands.

Another famously bitter herb is wormwood. John the Revelator saw an entire star called Wormwood crash to earth and turn a third of the world's waters bitter. We discuss this vision in greater detail in our article on the Greek word for wormwood, namely αψινθος (apsinthos), but suffice it to say that this event does not involve a reasonable dosage but rather a globally experienced trauma from which hopefully everybody learns their lesson.

By the Aramaic period, a small cluster of identical words מר (mar) were in use, and since one of these is commonly considered contributary to our term Maranatha, here they are (in our own order):

• From the verb מרר (marar), to be bitter or strongly tasting: מר (mar 1) describes anything bitter, from herbs such as myrrh to cares and worries to a teacher's pressurizing his student.
• From the verb מור (mor), to exchange or trade, which is identical and probably denominative of מור (mor), the proverbially costly myrrh: מר (mar 2) means exchange or trade.
• Either from the verb מרא (mara'), to be fat or well-fed (which may have something to do with the previous) or an identical verb מרא (mara'), to be strong (which clearly relates to מרר, marar): מר (mar 3) means superior, master, mister, lord or teacher. An alternate version of this noun, namely מרא (mara') appears four times in Daniel, twice in reference to God (2:47 and 5:23) and twice to king Nebuchadnezzar (4:19, 4:24). Note also the accidental similarity with the noun מראה (mar'a), vision, from the verb ראה (ra'a), meaning to see.
• The noun מר (mar 4) means rake or hoe, and it's not overly clear how it ended up in Aramaic. The link between goad and a teacher is obviously Biblical and the jump to rake or hoe doesn't seem too demanding (and neither is the jump to combing hair and the noun κοσμος, kosmos, world-order). But our noun מר (mar 4) may also stem from ארה ('ara), to gather, hence ארי ('ary), lion, which in turn brings it into proximity of the European root "hek-", sharp or pointed, hence words like ακρον (akron), extremity (and see our articles on the name Tigris and the noun λεον, leon, lion, for a look at the link between pointy things and formal governments).

The familiar second-temple period Hebrew word for master or teacher is Rabbi (ραββι, rabbi), from רבב (rabab), to be much or great. The "i" suffix of our word Rabbi may be indicative of an adjective (great or great one) or a first person possessive pronoun: "my Rav" or "my superior". The plural first person pronoun is the same nu as appears in the name Immanuel, meaning God With Us, and the phrase "our teacher" would be רבינו (rabeinu). This latter term, perhaps in combination with the familiar noun אדן ('adon), lord, hence the term אדני (adonai), my lord, may have helped form the honorary term רבן (raban), chief teacher, and hence the term of endearment ραββονι (rabboni), which occurs in Mark 10:51 and John 20:16 in reference to Jesus.

All this in turn helps to explain the emergence of another honorary term, namely מרן (maran), evidently from any of our words מר (mar), and this honorary term מרן (maran) is commonly cited as core subsidiary of our term Maran-ata. Unlike the Hebrew definite article, the prefix ה (ha), Aramaic has a postfixed definite article, namely א (a), so that מרא (mara') and hence מרנא (marana') means "the mister". And the first person plural personal pronoun, which in Hebrew is the suffixed נו (nu), in Aramaic is נא (na'), so that מרנא (marana') may also be interpreted as "our mister". There are a few concerns with this, however.

Although the story of Daniel plays in the 6th century BC, it was recorded in its present form in the 2nd century BCE. The word מר (mar) for lord or great one, and the slightly less common מרא (mara'), meaning the same, referred to a governmental superior, which is precisely the opposite of what the title Christ conveyed in the gospel. The title Christ or Messiah means anointed, and was indeed the title of Israel's king. But it was also the title of a prophet or priest, because an "anointed" is simply someone who has no earthly superior, and also is not a superior to anybody else (Philippians 2:3). The title Christ belongs to anyone who is sovereign and autonomous, and describes any member of a decentralized society of which all members are equally autonomous — not equal, because diversity is the key to unity, but autonomous in that nobody gets to tell anybody else what they should do or think or believe or hope for.

People of God partake in the anointing and are autonomous in their learning, their skill and their self-government: "The anointing which you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you, but as His anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you abide in Him" (1 John 2:27). In Christ there is neither master nor slave and all are one (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11), and the whole Body is a Kingdom of Priests (Exodus 19:6). The Kingdom of God comes about when Christ "has abolished all rule and all authority and power" (1 Corinthians 15:24).

The words מר (mar), lord, and מרי (mari), my lord, did not begin to be commonly used — either as terms of politeness among regular people or as synonym for Rabbi — until the early Middle Ages, and here at Abarim Publications we further suspect that the word with which Daniel addressed Nebuchadnezzar stemmed from מרא (mara'), to be fat or well-fed — which in turn somewhat corresponds to the Hebrew verb כבד (kabed), to be heavy or "weighty" — but the Rabbinical titles Mar and Maran rather stemmed from מרר (marar), to be bitter or corrective, and only joined their homophone brethren that stressed the weightiness of these gentlemen (Matthew 23:4-12) when in the popular mind, Christ the laboring everyman evolved into Christ the Pantokrator. This latter development had already begun to come about within the diseased and bondage-hungry mind of the people of Jesus' time, but was a thing that Jesus himself passionately fled away from (John 6:15, see Galatians 5:1).

Some commentators (most notably Gustaf Dalman in Die Worte Jesu, 1898) have suggested that in Palestine, where Aramaic was the lingua franca, Jesus would or may have been addressed with מרי (mari), my lord (in the mundane sense of mein Herr or monsieur), and even noted that some enthusiasts accidentally confused κυριε (kurie), my lord, with χειριε (cheirie), my hand. Very early commentaries on the Hebrew Bible attached this word מרי (mari) to accounts involving several ancient kings (specifically Saul and Jehoshaphat), but these commentaries paraphrased rather than quoted, and only in the era of the Geonim (late sixth century) do we see compounds like Mar Rab, or mister Rabbi, and subsequently Marana Rabbana (our master and Rabbi).

In theory, it may be possible that in the first century, the term Maranatha presaged a convention that would only be normal half a dozen centuries later, and was formed from something like מרנ אתא (maran 'ata'), meaning "came mister" or מראנו אתא (mar'anu 'ata'), "came our mister". But alternatives remain more likely.

Other enthusiasts have aligned our mystery term Maranatha with the expletive שמתא (shammata), which is one of a few very serious Hebrew curses, but one whose original meaning has entirely been eclipsed by the meaning it acquired from its use. This curse שמתא (shammata) designated objects or persons that were entirely cut off from the assembly, banned, thrown out and utterly abandoned. And by the time people began to wonder about the etymology of words, nobody remembered where this term had come from. Christians who were looking to explain Maranatha declared that this curse was actually שם אתא (shem ata), where שם (shem) means "name" and is commonly used as a stand-in for the forbidden Name יהוה (yhwh). The "Name" of God is his authority and although God himself doesn't move (being omnipresent), his authority does quite frequently (Exodus 33:19, Leviticus 19:12, Numbers 6:27, Matthew 21:9) and then judges. So that would explain our curse to mean "The authority of God has come" in the sense of "God's justice has been established". But there are a few problems with this.

Firstly, the proper substitution for יהוה (yhwh) is השם (hashem), the Name. Without the definite article, our curse means something like "told you so!" or "call 'em as they come". Then, of course, the order of the words is the wrong way around: in Hebrew and Aramaic, the verb comes first and then the subject. So our curse would mean "came name" rather than "name came". Then, there's no evidence at all that our curse שמתא (shammata) was in use in Paul's time. The original and Biblical word for curse or cursed item was חרם (cherem), which most literally speaks of the process of dividing whatever into two, and then letting one half go out of focus (this happens all over the Bible, from the waters above the firmament to the adulterous woman, the northern tribes of Israel to the mocking murderer who was crucified on one side of Christ), whereas the other half becomes fruitful and multiplies (the waters below the firmament which yielded dry land, the faithful woman who conceived, the southern tribes who became the Jews, the crucified murderer on the other side of Christ).

But most crucially, Hebrew sages differ from modern scholars in that they don't care so much about the specific and unique technical origin of a word or term (or human being, for that matter: see our article on Biblical purity), and acknowledge any meaning that can possible be attached to it and for which it might be used in all reasonability (meaning that other people still understand what you're on about). When the Masoretes began to add diacritical notes to the Biblical texts, whose purpose was to preserve the oral tradition that had existed for centuries, our curse was revealed to be spelled with a double "m" (which merge into one "m" in spelling but not pronunciation). When meditating on what meanings might be made to stick to our curse, the sages rattled off a long list, mostly involving the verbs מות (mut), to die or kill, and שמם (shamem), to be desolate, devastated or abandoned. But none of them hinted at a possibility that our curse might involve השם (haShem) and the verb אתה ('ata), to come.

In summary, and in the spirit of the Hebrew sages, our mystery term Maranatha means all of the above. But it began to mean "Came Mister" only centuries after Paul, when the promise of equality in Christ and the republican sovereignty of every anointed person began to be forgotten, and Paradise became overgrown by the weeds of paganism and kings arose once again and claimed superiority over their brethren in the name of some super-king they demanded their populations to believe in.

The gospel of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with any of that. Rather contrarily, in the 5th century BC, the European communities ousted or killed their kings and began the great democratic experiment: the very long and hard process of trying to figure out how freedom relates to rule, and how to convince people that calm discourse among strangers is ultimately much more profitable than taking up arms against one's opponent, and that the covenant of law is sacrosanct and outweighs even life itself. A society without a king is a virgin without a husband, noted the prophet Isaiah, and expressed his great optimism by stating that the Virgin would be with Child (see this further discussed in our article on Athens).

Paul and the evangelists wrote in a time in which any sort of opposition to the Empire was an act of high treason, and that included any glorification of the Republic. But as anybody with even the slightest knowledge of the classics knew, the Son of the Virgin was the senatorial discourse of the only republic in mankind's history that's remained stable for millennia: the Hebrew Republic:

"...and the government will rest upon His shoulders, and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6).

Rome's belly swelled to grotesque proportions and her genitals withered until no inspiration was experienced anywhere in her putrid corridors. But the Son of the Righteous Virgin rose from his tomb and began to govern his eternal kingdom beneath the concrete over Rome, until its first cracks, when life bursts through and the earth may breathe again.

Maranatha.