Page 56 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

CHAPTER 2 CASES OF DESIGN IN THE HEBREW LANGUAGE
CHAPTER 2 CASES OF DESIGN IN THE HEBREW LANGUAGE 35 35

Figure 2.2. “To sin”, in Hebrew.

Rachamim (Mercy, Compassion)
Mercy refers to a certain mode of conduct one living creature may pursue in
relating to another. However, this is also one of the prominent thirteen attri-
butes that Jewish tradition ascribes to the conduct of God. The source for this

description of God’s conduct is in Exodus (34). When Moses is commanded by

God to go up Mount Sinai to receive the tablets with the Ten Commandments
the second time (after the first ones have been broken by Moses), the latter gets

the two tablets in his hands, and after God “descended in the cloud, and stood
with him there,” Moses proclaims, “The Lord, The Lord, mighty, merciful and
gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in love and truth” (Exod. 34:6). The next
sentence continues to describe qualities of God’s conduct. We realize that being
merciful is one such feature, and it is abundantly repeated throughout the Bible
(for example, Deut. 4:31, Joel 2:13, Jon. 4:2).
How would one qualify the most essential components that need to exist for a
living being to be merciful to another? We believe that it is safe to assert that there
are at least two such ingredients. First, whoever shows mercy feels only compassion
towards the subject of the mercy, so that only favorable acts and modes of conduct
will ensue. Second, the recipient of mercy is in a state of helplessness, or some
kind of hardship, that obviously calls for assistance. One cannot indeed think of a
better example of a human being in a position of need for mercy than an embryo