There is a video being passed around on the internet that attempts to show linguistically that Jesus gave us the name of the Antichrist. Unfortunately, many are falling for this lie and accepting this video without question, never realizing that some hatemonger decided to mix Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in order to try to FORCE the Bible to agree with his personal opinion about President Obama....Please feel free to watch the above video before reading the refutation of Hebrew and Aramaic scholar, Andrew Gabriel Roth who proves that a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing!

It was just a matter of time before some liar crawled out of the woodwork to attempt to twist the Scriptures by mixing Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic in order to come up with this nonsense....Whether one likes Obama or not, the bottom line is, this particular video is a farce, and here's why:

1) His name is beyt-resh-kaph, NOT beyt-resh-qoph. BARAK means “to bless”, BARAQ (Aram barqa means “lightning”). BARAK is related to BARUCH and is actually a Hebrew name of respect. When we say a prayer it’s a BRAKHA. It is possible in modern Hebrew for both words to be spelled B-R-K. However the President has been less than forthcoming in explaining this too. He called BARAK “the African word for blessing” and it’s NOT. If anything, it’s either Hebrew or Arabic.

2) The Aramaic text specifically does not have the phrase “the heights” in Luke 10:18, and this, not modern Hebrew, is what Y’shua would have actually said. That is to say: khza leh (I did see him ) hawyit l’Satan d’napal (who was Satan falling) aykh (like) barqa (lightning) min (from) shmya (the heavens). The BAMA is not mentioned here, which is why they turn to Isaiah.

3) The BAMA word is correctly rendered. You know it as BIMA also, a place to ascendto or look down from.

4) There are so many roots with multiple meanings or different roots with the same spellings in Hebrew as to make this a meaningless exercise. You can’t play with Hebrew this way. For example, one could argue that his name means “BLESSING FROM ABOVE”. The Aramaic actually might support that. The construction is, as I said:

BARRQA MIN SHMYA

Now if shmaya is a substituted with BAMA, we get:

BARQA MIN BAMA = barak from the heights = blessing from the heights

Then, grammatically speaking, I could throw in the WAW like they did as a connector and toss out the MIN. It’s not pretty, but I could do it.

BARQA O BAMA

I could do this with almost any name and the rules are so flexible (ignoring spelling, etc) that I could get good and bad readings all over the place.

The rabbis of the Talmud show how ridiculous this can be. They have an account of hanging a man named Y’shua on a tree at Passover. Then they go after the disciples, five of them are named. Of these 5, only one matches the NT: Matthew.

What gets interesting though is that each of these 5 names can be argued to have a good meaning, so they ask: “Should someone with this NICE name of ___ be killed because it means ___?” The next rabbi says, “yes kill him because the name ALSO MEANS (insert something bad here).” So they go from a name that means “gift of YHWH” into another name that gives them reason to kill him.

Now assuming people find that horribly unfair to do to the disciples, I would imagine it’s also horribly unfair to do it to anyone else.

Even if Obama were the antichrist, this is far from the most effective way to prove it. But I am sure many folks will get duped by this junk proving that a little bit of knowledge is a very dangerous thing.

Or maybe we should all be scared of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who incidentally changed his name from a Russian accented BROG to BARAK deliberately to mean LIGHTNING because he was going into the army. But on the other hand, BARAK can also mean to SHINE, and so it goes. (And he actually tried to bring peace to Jerusalem....)