Hallelujah: Call “of” Praise or Call “to” Praise

After discussing, in my recent blog post, “Hallelujah is a Sentence,” that the biblical “term” Hallelujah has grammar and that we should both be aware of that grammar and use the phrase accordingly in our worship songs, I received two types of criticism. Let’s call them sniveling and thoughtful.

(This is the part of the blog where I attempt to stir up readership by making outlandish controversial remarks designed to increase “BUZZ.” Soooo…. start buzzing. Here’s a script you can use until you think of your own. “You won’t believe what this Christian writer, Andrew Sargent from drandrewsargent.com, said about some of the people who criticized his blog. It’s scandalous! You just have to read it… and then you have to read everything he’s written so you can find other outrageous things to be upset about… just keep clicking in and sharing them with everyone you know.”)

The sniveling complaints… which mostly came to me from back door channels went something like, “I don’t care if Hallelujah is a call to praise in Hebrew. I speak English and I’ll use it anyway I want. So there. Na-na-na Nana-na! And your Mother wears army boots!” Which is true. My mother was a WAC, which is how she met my father, who was a peace time draftee.

The thoughtful complaints, zeroed in on an element of the discussion that I left out. Blogs are short after all. They zeroed in on the fact that some things become “frozen formula” and cease to carry the exact meaning they once had. So a shout like “Hallelujah!” could have become not just a call to praise, but a shout of praise itself, devoid of the grammatical sense it originally carried.

This is akin to the habit on airlines for the pilots to say, “We’d like to thank you for flying with us today.” But have you ever noticed that they never do.

(Have you stopped laughing yet?) So the grammar of “We’d like to thank” is ignored and received as thanks itself.

Growing up in certain religious circles, I often heard the word “rebuke” used as a rebuke. We took the biblical statement, “The Lord rebuke you.” (Jude 1:9) as a rebuke.

Not— “What you did was wrong; you should be ashamed; only horrible people take double communion helpings because they missed breakfast!”

But—”I rebuke you, Grape Juice Breath!  Oh, and you’ve got a piece of cracker stuck between your teeth.”

The question, however, is not whether the shout, “Praise YAH!” became a call “of” praise and not just a call “to” praise, but whether there is any suggestion that its use among those who knew Hebrew and Aramaic came to defy its grammar (i.e. Is there any ancient justification for us to use it any way we want?) Put another way, is Hallelujah used as a call of praise without also being a call to praise? And THAT is a good question.

We know that the shout itself became important in public worship by the tendency in both the LXX and the book of Revelation to use it in transliteration rather than translation. This means that they use Greek letters to sound out the Hebrew phrase rather than using Greek words to represent the phrase’s meaning.[1] We might also note that the phrase Hallelu Yah is separated in the Hebrew manuscripts into two terms (Which is why you don’t find Hallelujah in most English translations of Psalms) but are joined as a single term in these other texts. In fact, 3 Maccabees 7:13 uses the phrase τό ἁλληλουϊά  “the hallelujah” as in “they departed with joy, shouting the hallelujah.

In over 100 instances where the root HLL is used in terms of praise for YHWH it only appears in the grammatical form Hallelu-Jah some 30x. HLL shifts its form regularly to match the grammatical demand of the moment. (e.g. 1 Chronicles 23:30—(וּלְהַלֵּ֖ל לַיהוָ֑ה In many Psalms, Hallelu-jah, as two terms opens and closes psalms but in no instance that I have found does the use of the phrase violate its grammar. It is either left hanging alone, a simple Hallelujah disconnected from the statements around it… thus, a shout of praise as a communal call to praise, as in Revelation 19:1-4, or it works its grammar as in its use in Revelation 19:6, “Hallelujah, for the Lord our God, the Almighty reigns.” In fact, I can’t find a single occurrence, in or out of scripture in which the grammar of the shout is violated.

If someone can find one, I’d love to see it. That’s all part of being in a learning community after all.

I must say, however, that words matter. If we use an important term from Scripture to mean something other than what Scripture means by it, that makes interpretation difficult for our congregation.” In this regard, my wife commented, “If we don’t have to concern ourselves with the meaning of words, then we can tell people, “You’re an idiot! We can tell everyone we know, “That guy’s an idiot.” Then tell them not to get upset, because, what I mean by idiot is, “A really nice guy.”