Behold the God of Life and Blessings
He answered and said, Lo [Hey], I see four men loose,
walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.
Daniel 3:25 (Spoke 5, Cycle 2)
The name of the Fifth Letter is what it sounds like; an interjection demanding attention like "look!" or
"behold!" just as
we say "hey!" in English and many other languages. It is the simplest of words, requiring only a breath
with no articulation. It appears only four times in Scripture; once in Genesis, once in Ezekiel, and twice in
Daniel as above where it is rendered Lo. Much more common is the lengthened form hinney,
appearing over a thousand times in the Old Testament. God used it in the last Hey verse of the great Alphabetic Psalm 119:
- AV Psa 119:40 Behold (Hinney), I have longed after thy precepts: quicken me in thy righteousness.
This links to one of its primary roles in Hebrew grammar. When prefixed to a noun,
Hey signifies the definite article, the word the.
For example, "name" is "shem" (שם) and "the name"
is "ha-shem" (השם). It also is closely related to the verb
hayah (to be, to exist), which God used in four Alphabetic Verses:
- AV Prov 31:14 She is (hayah) like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
- AV Lam 1:5 Her adversaries are (hayah) the chief, her enemies prosper; for the LORD hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions:
- AV Lam 2:5The Lord was (hayah) as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel, he hath swallowed up all her palaces: he hath destroyed his strong holds.
- AV Lam 3:14 I was (hayah) a derision to all my people; and their song all the day.
The
Hey Prefix also signifies the grammatical conjugation called the hiphil imperative,
which indicates causation. God used it this way in most of the Alphabetic Verses, such as these three consecutive
verses from AV Psalm 119:
- AV Ps 119:35Make me to go in the path of thy commandments; for therein do I delight.
- AV Ps 119:36 Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to covetousness.
- AV Ps 119:37 Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken thou me in thy way.
The Psalmist pleads for God to cause him to go in the path of His commandments,
to cause his heart to incline to His testimonies, to cause his eyes
to turn from vanity. This is the meaning of the Hiphil imperative conjugation, indicated by the Hey Prefix.
These Keywords give great insight into the meaning of the divine name יהוה (YHVH),
the Tetragrammaton, in which Hey appears twice. It contains within itself the
three tenses of the verb hayah (to be) – past, present, and future – and so carries the sense of
both "He who is, was, and will be" and "He who causes things to be." God explicitly proclaimed the
eternal meaning of His Name when He described Himself as the Almighty God "who is, who was, and who is to come" (Rev 1:8).
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