Day 12: What did it mean?
The archaic definitions of the word “hope” remind me that definitions shift and change over time. Hope used to mean more of trust or reliance or confidence. And I think Biblical times definitely qualify as archaic. Maybe hope seemed a little more sturdy back in the day.
And thinking on these things from an “it’s in the Bible” kind of way also necessarily entails a degree of separation via translation because I speak neither Hebrew nor Greek. According to Google, there are two Hebrew words used in the Old Testament that are primarily translated as hope.
One of those OT words is yakhal. Yakhal appears approximately 50 times in the Old Testament and translates most closely as “to wait for.” That’s kind of one of my main Advent questions: can you wait without waiting for something? Is there a difference between waiting and waiting for? I hope I remember to come back to that later.
The other Hebrew word we translate as “hope” is qavah. It’s used about 70 times in the Old Testament, and it translates as “to wait.”
I like qavah better than yakhal for a variety of reasons, the first one being that it’s a “q” without a “u,” and that doesn’t happen very often in English. The second reason is that it’s based on the Hebrew word for “cord,” which is qav. Qavah has to do with the pulling of a cord, the tension that builds and builds and builds until the cord snaps. That seems a little more realistic to me.
Things have tension. Things snap. Things that held can stretch until they simply don’t hold anymore. I can a little bit get behind qavah because it recognizes the tension that accompanies the waiting and seems to allow some space for the fact that sometimes things fall apart. It might ultimately still be for the better, but it’s not lollipops and rainbows.
In New Testament Greek, the word we translate as “hope” is elpis. It translates as “expectation, trust, and confidence.” That’s an interesting development. Confidence seems like the opposite of hope. If you’re confident in something, are you still hopeful? I’m pretty confident that Santa will be the last thing in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I look forward to seeing Santa at the end, but I don’t hope I’ll see him because I know I’ll see him. If that’s New Testament hope, that’s a whole different thing.
That seems like quite an evolution to me:
OT hope = wait or wait for
NT hope = confident expectation
Today hope = desire with possibility and expectation
Words. They’re slippery little buggers, aren’t they?