Beth HaDerech; Messianic Jewish Congregation, Toronto, Canada

The Jewish Messiah – Zaphnath pa’aneach

Many words in the Hebrew language have a complex and twisted history. Sometimes one of the paths along which the word marched is blocked, but then another opens along which it continues its existence. This is probably the case with "Zaphnath pa'aneach", a name which appears only once in the Bible: "And Pharaoh called Joseph by the name Zaphnath-pa'aneach" (Bereishit 41:45). The challenge of explaining this name has captivated commentators from as far back as ancient times and right up to modern times. The earliest biblical commentators already point out the difficulty in interpreting this name. A careful reading of the Ibn Ezra will show us that he cleverly pointed put the fork in the road where the various versions of this word divided. On one hand, the Ibn Ezra raises the hypothesis that this may be an Egyptian word, whose meaning is not known (and note the concentration of Egyptian words in the chapter: Pharaoh, Avreich, Poti-phera). Today we know that we can bring support for this hypothesis from other ancient sources. The Septuagint - a Greek translation of the Bible written in the first centuries BC - contains this exact name, transliterated into Greek, without any translation. Later one of the church fathers, Hieronymus (died circa 420) states that "Zaphnath-pa'aneach" is Egyptian and means "savior of the world". Hieronymus' interpretation is probably based on an Alexandrian interpretive...