I never knew until recently that the Greek word most often translated as hallowed only occurs twice in the New Testament.
Update: As Peter Kirk pointed out to me, this isn’t true. While the specific verb form may be used twice in Matthew 6:9 and Luke 11:2, it occurs many more times in the New Testament. Please see the ISBE portion of the PDF file. (And read it more carefully than I did the first time around.)
Matthew 6:9
Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Luke 11:2
When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
I put together a PDF file of some definitions that I printed out for a Bible study using out of copyright sources and thought I’d make it available here.
Here is a quote from the book we’re studying:
By requesting that God honor his name, Jesus teaches us to ask God to make all creation recognize and revere his holiness. Of course, included in creation is the one praying. So in the same breath that we request God to make his name holy everywhere else, we also ask God to make our own heart honor him.
By praying, ‘hallowed be your name,’ we make God’s holiness our highest priority and ask him to promote his glory in, around, and through us. Thus the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer asks that all creation reverence God and that God exercise his will in ways that will advance his name in all the earth. The petition for God to hallow his name asks God to fulfill his righteous purposes for his glory.
–Bryan Chapell, Praying Backwards
I didn’t know this either, and I discovered why: it is not true! Well, it may be true of this particular form of the verb, that it occurs in only these two places. … I spent a long time researching this verb and writing a comment about it, but the comment was both truncated and rejected. Why?
Hi,
Yow. I’m so sorry that happened. I have no idea why. I’m using a pretty standard Wordpress install. I didn’t get your comment through my e-mail either.
I had a comment on another blog put in Wordpress’ spam filter once because it contained too many links.
I’d like to know what you said if you have the time. You could email me and I’d post it. If you’d rather not spend the time again that’s OK.
I got my info from ISBE:
In the New Testament “hallow” occurs only in the “Lord’s Prayer,” there rendering αγιαζω,
hagiazo , the Septuagint word for kadhashh : Mat 6:9; Luk 11:2, “Hallowed be thy name.” Hagiazo is
quite frequent in the New Testament, and is always (American Standard Revised Version)
rendered “sanctify,” except here, and in Rev 22:11, “He that is holy, let him be made holy still.”
I should have read that more carefully.
Jeff
Thanks, Jeff. I think the ISBE makes the main point I was trying to make, about the many other occurrences of the same verb translated (open quote)sanctify(close quote) etc.
It seems your comment box has problems quote marks of any kind.
Testing “quotes”. Not sure what’s going on there either.
Quotes still do not work.
I see you have changed the encoding of this blog from UTF-8 to Western (without properly indicating this in your HTML), which has messed up the Greek in your post quoting ISBE which looked OK before. You really should stick to UTF-8 for a blog, especially if you are going to quote in non-Roman scripts. I guess you were trying to fix the quote problem, but that is not the problem.
I wonder if the problem is actually with your captcha plugin, which may be messing up the comment text. If the captcha is disabled when you yourself comment, that would explain why you can put quotes in comments but others cannot. I use Peter(quote)s Custom for captcha, which does not have this problem.
I think you’re onto something. I’ve switched back to UTF-8 and disabled the captcha. If you see this and would like to test it please do. Thanks.
Jeff
Well, let’s see if “quotes” work OK in this.
Looks like you have fixed the problem by disabling captcha. I suggest you enable Akismet to catch most spam comments, if you haven’t already, and then you shouldn’t get too much spam.
I have Askimet enabled but I still get a few annoying spam messages a day. I really liked that particular captcha and it eliminated the spam so I’m going to look at the code to see if I can see anything or possibly try another one.
Thanks for fixing it.
Jeff