 repentance in the Hebrew. Now as a disclaimer I don't read, write or speak Hebrew so I am not authoritative on how the Hebrew should best be translated. I am only doing this video to deal with the nonsense that is perpetuated by many other Christians who also don't speak Hebrew and because even without speaking Hebrew it's easy to debunk some of the wild claims that are made regarding this subject. All claims made in this video are substantiated using either a concordance or second hand information but sources will be presented on screen where possible. When refuting the notion that repentance always means to turn from sin, I and also many of you have pointed to the many passages in the King James Bible where God repents. Now with one exception in the New Testament in Hebrew 721 which the Greek will need to have its own video next time. All the other verses about God repenting are all in the Old Testament. Now of course there's no shortage of verses in the Old Testament about turning from sins, we've already looked at them, some of them anyway previously in the series like Jonah 3 and Ezekiel 3 18 and 33. But I have heard some people say that the Hebrew uses a completely different word for God repenting than when man repents of sins. So in this video we're going to look at the Hebrew words which underpin repentance and turning from sins in the Old Testament. Before we begin it's important to understand that compared to English Hebrew words have much more variation depending on the context, the tense and the object of the word. If you look at Genesis 6 6 and 7 on the screen you will see that one says repented past tense and the other says repent earth which is present tense. You can see in each verse the encircled Hebrew word varies on much the same principle but Hebrew has far more variants than English does because of how the language works. So one of the verses we just saw in Genesis 6 7 where it says that the state of the earth repents the Lord that he has made them. Modern translations will often substitute the word repent with I am sorry or something like that which I'll have to do another video at another time about that. If you look up repented the past tense verb in the kingsbible.com concordance you will see many examples of verses where God repented most of them being translated from the same Hebrew word under entry 5 1 6 2 in the concordance. So if you look up this entry in the concordance this is the word knackam it's a verb and the most basic definition is to be sorry or to comfort oneself. Strong's exhaustive concordance defines it as sort of sigh or breathe strongly and it can also mean to be moved with pity or have compassion on others to suffer grief or repent of one's own doing or to ease oneself or to comfort oneself. There is also the noun form knockam which is Strong's reference 5 1 6 4 and there's only one verse that uses the noun and that's in Hosea 1340. This is the only Old Testament use of the word repentance in its noun form when translated to our English King James Bible. Modern Bibles may substitute this word with compassion or pity in this particular verse and this verse basically reads O Grave I will be your destruction repentance or compassion shall be hid from mine eyes and as I said here you can see modern Bibles user a different word. If you look up repent the imperative verb in the Kings Bible dot com concordance you will see that while most instances are translated from knackam there are a small selection of verses that are translated from a different Hebrew word under entry 7 7 2 5 and the entry for this word is Shubh which is a verb and the most basic definition is to turn back or to return. This definition is extended to include to answer or reply to a question or in a conversation or to turn which may be in another direction but usually it refers to turning back between two opposing directions. There are over a thousand verses using this word so it is very common. So for example Second Chronicles 714 is an example of a verse that uses this word and in this case it is about turning from sin but only because the context shows that it's about turning from sin and you'll notice that it actually uses the word turn rather than the word repent but it doesn't automatically imply turning from sin. It can mean to return anything so take for example Genesis 1460 and it's about Abraham bringing lots and his goods and people back nothing to do with turning from sin. In fact this first uses the word twice in two variants hence the word brought being used twice in our English Bible. Now because this word is used over 1000 times in the Bible I couldn't possibly list them all but pause the video here if you like just to see examples of different verses on the screen that use this word in a variety of contexts. In fact this word is so common that if you try to look up all instances on Bible hub it just cuts off after a certain point because there's far too many to list. And the noun of this word is Teshuva or Teshuva. It's often pronounced Teshuva but in the concordance it's listed as Teshuva and there are only eight occurrences of the noun form of this word in the entire Bible but it is highly likely that you have heard of this word before and this is because of the Jewish doctrine of Teshuva and Christians within Israel fetish also get sucked into this as well. Now I briefly talked about this in video 20 when we looked at whether we should use a dictionary to define repentance. So basically if you search the internet you can find tons of resources of Jews telling you in articles and videos what Teshuva means and a bit like when Christians try to define repentance. You'll get all kinds of confusing and self contradictory answers but it's encompassed by the idea of turning from your sins. And I've even heard Christians try to use Jewish beliefs about Teshuva to justify the Christian definition of repentance as something that we have to do to be saved. But what's so ridiculous about all of this is that first of all as we just saw the verb form is so abundant in the Bible it's used all kinds of ways most of them completely mundane and nothing to do with sin. The noun form only appears eight times in the Old Testament and as I mentioned in video 20 none of them have anything to do with turning from sin. So the first use of this word is in first Samuel 7 and it's referring to Samuel judging Israel and changing locations as he judged and he returned to Ramah where his home is. It uses the word Teshuva nothing to do with turning from sin. The next instance is second Samuel 11 verse 1. Teshuva is again used but it is referring to the change of the calendar year after the year was expired. This has nothing to do with turning from sin it is referring to the new year. The next two instances are in first Kings chapter 20 in verses 22 and 26 and again just as in second Samuel it's the return of the year before a battle takes place. Nothing to do with sin translated from Teshuva. The next two instances are in the book of Chronicles one being in the first book chapter 20 verse 1 the other being in the second book chapter 36 verse 10. Same idea again it's the change of the calendar year before war. Nothing to do with turning from sin it's translated from Teshuva. And then the final two instances are found in Job. Interestingly the use of this word is very different. So in Job 21 verse 34 Teshuva refers to Job's friend's answer when they replied to him. Nothing to do with turning from sin it's about their replies but this is what's interesting. Job says that in their answers their remains falsehood. So their Teshuva is not turning from sin their Teshuva arguably is sin. They are sinning by doing their act of Teshuva as it were which is their answer to Job's pain and suffering. And so finally we have Job 34 36 and I've included the previous and next verse on the screen for a bit of context. Elihu is accusing Job of answering for wicked men. So again Teshuva refers to his answer not his repentance. But Elihu was accusing Job's act of Teshuva his answer of being sinful. So that was all the examples of Teshuva in the Bible. So this Jewish idea of Teshuva that Christians get sucked into is complete nonsense. The Bible never uses Teshuva in this way and the word Shub refers to all kinds of things many of which have nothing to do with sin. Instead of treating the word as an ordinary word like any other word in the Bible it's become a doctrine like the Trinity where one word describes a huge collection of complicated beliefs rather than being used as an ordinary part of the sentence. So you can see where Christians are getting it from because it's the same thing with the Jews. This is what a lot of religious people like. They just parrot and repeat things. Don't care whether it's correct or not. And they just make stuff up. And everything's got to be so emotional and sensational and it's got to be all whiny and ecstatic like Francis Chan. But we see from the Bible it's ridiculous. It's complete nonsense. Going back to the issue of God repenting in the Bible. I have heard it said that when God repented this is a different Hebrew word than when man is commanded to repent of sins. So the premise of this argument is that God repenting is a different kind of repentance that is not comparable to man's repentance of sins. And for this reason many modern Bibles will instead substitute God's repentance with a different word such as relenting or sorrow etc. And we already saw an example of this earlier. Well this is one of those almost but not quite true claims. So I've mentioned that there are two verbs which are translated as repent in our King James Bible. The most common one is nachem but some verses occasionally use shubh. So what will happen is if God nachems or doesn't nachem this is translated as God repenting whereas if God shubed or doesn't shubh this is translated as God turning or returning. Our English King James Bible does not hide the fact that there are different words at play here because it is already apparent in our English translation. Jonah 3 9 is a shining example of this. It says who can tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce anger that we perish not. And turn is translated from shubh and repent is translated from nachem. So God did both of these things. He repented and he turned. What Jonah 3 9 is doing here is essentially repeating things using different words for emphasis because that's quite a common theme in the Hebrew Old Testament particularly. So that's God's repentance or turning. What about man's repentance and turning? In Jeremiah 8 6 it says that no man repented him of his wickedness and we can see that this is definitely about man repenting of sin and it uses the word repented because it comes from the Hebrew word nachem. The same word that is used to describe God repenting or relenting etc. And that it goes on to say everyone turned to his course and this is translated from the Hebrew word shubh just as God also turned in the Bible. In Judges 21 it talks about the children of Israel repenting for their the tribe of Benjamin and repented is translated from nachem but in this case it's not about sin but it is about man's nachem, man's repentance. Just a few verses later they went and returned on to their inheritance and returned is translated from shubh and is not directly about sin here even though the Benjamites had sin leading up to this. So we see a very clear pattern here. Both nachem, repent and shubh turn have these things in common sometimes God repented or didn't, sometimes he turned or didn't, not from sins obviously. Sometimes man repented or didn't, sometimes man turned or didn't, sometimes this was repenting of sin, sometimes repenting of a non-sin issue, sometimes this was turning from sin, sometimes turning from a non-sin issue. So the idea of God's repenting being a different kind of repentance than man's repentance just because of different words is completely false it's not true. Obviously God did not ever repent of sin and there are verses that command man to turn from sin but that's not implied by the word repent as a word on its own if there's no sin mentioned around the context of repentance. Only the context can tell you what the turning or the repenting was so unless you can point to the doing of the sin as the context then repentance is not about turning from sin in those verses. So you can't just take verses about repentance and add sin in the context because it doesn't belong in those verses. But before we finish there's two more points that we need to address here. We have seen examples of nachem being translated as repent or repented. We have seen examples of shubh being translated as turn or return. In an earlier slide we did see on the English concordance though that a couple of verses at least or a handful that say repent were actually translated from shubh not nachem and if we search for the word turn in the English concordance we will see that there are other Hebrew words that this is translated from. So why is that? So let's deal with the first one first. So verbs can be both transitive and intransitive. So a transitive verb has an object. So for example please bring coffee is a transitive verb because coffee is the object of bring whereas if you say you better run it's intransitive because run is a standalone verb it doesn't have an object to say where you're running to. So in the Hebrew there is the odd verse here and there that uses the same Hebrew word twice for emphasis but in a slightly different variant because one is intransitive and then one is transitive. So the King James translators would translate the intransitive verb as repent instead of turn to make it sound more sensible in English. A couple of examples of these come from Ezekiel. So we previously looked at Ezekiel chapter 18 in the series let's just revisit it for a moment. So in Ezekiel 1830 it says repent and turn yourselves from all your transgression and both repent and turn are translated from different variations of the word shubh. The transitive verb was translated into repent otherwise it would say turn and turn which would sound silly in English. So regarding the second point then well just as turn or return is very generic word in English there are different words you could substitute it with depending on the context. Now the word repent here being a case in point. Hebrew likewise has other verbs that can communicate the same idea. For example now I do apologize about my pronunciation but the word panah which is strong 6437. This is another generic word meaning turn and in fact this is probably the closest Hebrew equivalent to the word turn whereas shubh is more like return. Panah can also refer to the appearance or face of turning. For example he looked this way in Exodus 212 or when the morning appeared in Exodus 14 27. The word so which is strong's reference 5493 which means to turn aside or to depart or to be removed. Deuteronomy 1 7 translates this as turn you as another way of saying depart. And then Nathan which is strong's 5 4 1 4 this means to give or to grant or permit and Deuteronomy 14 25 translates this as turn it which is the wine and the oil tithe offering into money. There are other examples that we could look at but I'm sure you get the point by now. The key message that we can learn from all of this is that repent is a verb not a complicated doctrine. It is simply a way of communicating in language that one is turning from one thing to another. That may be sin but it doesn't have to be especially if the doing of sin is not the context of the verb. Therefore you cannot reasonably infer turn from sin from the verb repent unless sin is clearly the context of that verse. Do not be deceived by somebody who uses your lack of understanding of the Hebrew to spread misinformation. Repentance does not need a 10 paragraph article of fanciful words and obsessing about the Jews to explain the implications of the transformative work of the believer into Christ consciousness and blah blah blah. It's just a verb. This is no nonsense Christianity reminding you that nowhere in the Bible does it say repent of your sins to be saved.