Only the Lion
The Name Holds Both
Part 5 of 8
What the Greek Translation Erased
The Greek form Judas created a distinction that the Hebrew did not permit. In the Greek-speaking world that received the New Testament, Judas was a traitor and Judah was a patriarch, two separate names, two separate identities, separated by centuries and by the distance between a villain and a founding father.
In Hebrew, they are the same word. There is no distance. The man who arranged the arrest and the tribe that bore the Lion are named with identical sounds. The reader of the Hebrew text cannot encounter one without hearing the other. The tension is not available to be avoided. It is built into the language.
The translation into Judas made avoidance possible. Two thousand years of readers have been able to despise the betrayer and venerate the tribe and never once be required to sit with the fact that in the original language, they share a name and that sharing is not incidental but theologically loaded.
Judas erased the tension. Yehudah requires you to sit in it.
The Hebrew text does not let you choose sides between the betrayer and the tribe. They are one word.
Yeshua and the Tribe
Yeshua did not speak ambiguously about his relationship with the religious establishment of his day. He told those who controlled the temple that they were of their father the devil. He told them they had come to kill him. He said they did not know the Father. He cleansed the temple with a whip. He called Jerusalem the city that kills the prophets.
These are not gentle critiques. They are confrontations with a structure that had substituted its own authority for the presence of YHWH. And the confrontation came from within Yehudah, from the Lion of the tribe of Yehudah himself, directed at the institutional leadership of the same tribe.
The man who made the arrangement that brought Yeshua to the cross carried that tribe’s name. What this declares is not that the Jewish people as a people bear responsibility for the cross. What it declares is that the covenant, the promise, the royal line, contained within itself both the fulfillment and the resistance to the fulfillment. Both bore the name Yehudah. Both were YHWH is praised.
Only the Lion
And this is where the name opens rather than closes. Yehudah is also the tribe of the Lion. The one who was handed over was himself from that tribe. He did not come through another lineage to stand apart from Yehudah. He came through Yehudah. He was the fulfillment of everything the name had ever promised.
YHWH saves came through YHWH is praised. The name of the deliverer and the name of the tribe that bore him and the name of the man who handed him over, are all the same root. The cross was not the defeat of Yehudah. It was its completion.
That truth is available in Hebrew. It disappears entirely the moment Yehudah becomes Judas and the tribe becomes a distant historical reference with no linguistic connection to the man who stood before Pilate’s soldiers.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams