Hebrew Voices #175 – Thanksgiving to Yehovah for He is Good

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #175 – Thanksgiving to Yehovah for He is Good

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Today, I’m going to speak about the feast of Thanksgiving, or in Hebrew, Chag Ha’Hodayah. And let me be honest with you, in this episode of the Raw Stream of Torah Consciousness, this is really just an excuse to speak about being thankful.

Now, let me stop before I talk about Thanksgiving and say, okay, there are some people out there who say that Thanksgiving is this Pagan holiday. I just don’t see it. I did the research; I couldn't find it. And it’s one of those things that if you really want to find Paganism, you can find it everywhere, but to me that’s like, “Is that really what it’s about?” And I don’t think it is. I think it’s pretty clear. Now, if you’re a Native American or a First Nations person, you might not really appreciate Thanksgiving, I’ll be honest with you.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing Pagan in it. I think it’s a great little holiday. I love the whole Snoopy thing, I do. So, now I’ve got to share about the word pun, that’s what I started talking about. Once I gave my caveat of recognizing the negative side of it, let’s go to the positive.

So, in Hebrew, Thanksgiving is called Chag Ha’Hodayah, “the feast of hodayah". And hodayah is the Hebrew word for “thanking.” We’re going to talk a lot about that word, “thanking”. And here’s the really strange thing, which is a coincidence but it’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence, and the strange thing is that the Hebrew word for “turkey” is hodu. Hodu, hodayah, that sounds like a Hebrew word pun like Adam and adamah. And you’re almost tempted to say, “We eat hodu on Thanksgiving to remember the hodayah,” giving thanks to God, but it’s a complete and total coincidence. And I think it's a really important lesson about word puns, that word puns can be a coincidence. And it’s only when you take cumulatively the evidence of hundreds, maybe thousands of them, that you can say, “Okay, we have something we can learn from here.” But if it’s one single word pun, it could be a coincidence.

Now, where does the word hodu come from? Hodu is just the Hebrew pronunciation of “India”. You have the word Hindi, which is the language of India, and their religion is called Hindu, which really just means “Indian”, and in Hebrew it’s Hodu. Hindu, Hodu, Hindi, is the language. So, Hodu is just the Hebrew word for India, and it’s actually mentioned twice in Tanakh, in the Scroll of Esther. It’s specifically in a phrase that Achashverosh, the King of Persia, ruled, “mi’Hodu v’ad Kush,” “from India to Ethiopia,” or literally Kush, which is in Northwestern Ethiopia today, the Kingdom of Kush, or Northern Sudan as well.

So, Hodu appears twice in the Tanakh referring to India, and today it is the national… It’s not the national bird of Israel, but they eat more turkey in Israel than any other country in the world per capita. But there’s no connection between hodu and hodayah, “turkey”, and that’s just how it is.

I want to talk about another word pun if we’re going to do word puns. And that's a true word pun that really appears in the Tanakh, and this is the word pun of the name, Yehudah. Yehudah is what we know in English as Judah, and Yehudah actually has two word puns related to it. One, when Judah is born and his mother decides what name to give him, his mother Leah, and that’s in Genesis 29:35. The other one appears in Genesis 49:8 when his father blesses him just before Jacob dies. And it's very common in the Tanakh, name explanations based on a word pun related to a name. And why am I telling you this? Because the Feast of Hodayah, the feast of Thanksgiving, you could really call this the Feast of Judah.