By Scott Nelson
Introduction
In the gospel of Luke, Yeshua made a statement to a group of women who were lamenting his impending crucifixion which made little sense to me for a long time. I now have no doubt that it was a prophecy concerning our day and the subject of abortion. Those who have any respect for the words of Yeshua will sense the gravity of the implications involved. Indeed, this should trouble everyone.
In the New King James translation, the passage reads:
“But Yeshua, turning to them, said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts which never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “fall on us!” and to the hills, “cover us!” For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?”
Luke 23:28-31
There are two common interpretations of this prophecy. I will deal with the problems of those interpretations before going on to what I believe Yeshua was saying here.
Dismantling old Interpretations
The first interpretation involves taking the prophecy at face value and is the simple conclusion most come to the first time they read this passage. It is clear that Yeshua was telling the women to weep for a greater evil than his crucifixion. Therefore, the reasoning goes, Yeshua was making a statement that refraining from having children is evil. But is it really? To be sure, children are one of the greatest blessings, but it can not be considered an overt act of evil to simply refrain from accepting a blessing. The problem with this interpretation is that if it is true, then it would seem that Yeshua is not making much of a significant statement about the injustice being done to him. Yeshua was clearly stating to these women that the evil that was coming was at least as significant, if not a greater evil, than the one being perpetrated on him!
Seeing the weakness of this interpretation, most scholars have rejected it in favor of another more common interpretation. Here is a classic example of that interpretation:
“Some women who were present began to weep for Jesus. Jesus warns that their tears should be reserved for their own fate. The judgment on Jerusalem will be so horrible that the unhappy state of barrenness will be preferred (cf. Luke 1:25). People will call to the mountains and hills to shield them from the impending judgment. Verse 31 probably is saying that if the judgment is severe on the innocent Jesus, then it will be incredibly harsh for guilty Jerusalem.”
Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, published by Baker Book House, page 837
These interpretations assume that Yeshua was prophesying of the horrible siege and eventual fall of Jerusalem almost forty years later in 70 AD. At least this picture accommodates the understanding that Yeshua was speaking of something really bad. And Yeshua had certainly prophesied of the destruction of Jerusalem in Luke 19:41-44, and chapter 21:20-24. So it is understandable that one might easily jump to the conclusion that Yeshua was speaking of the same event again. But there are several things in this quote from the commentary that immediately jump out and call this interpretation into serious question as well.
The first, and the worst, is the idea that Yeshua would have had to have been in a vindictive state of mind to turn to a group of weeping women and in effect say to them… “Save it for yourselves ladies… ’cause you’re going to need it! The score for this injustice will be settled on your heads.” Yeshua was never in a get-even frame of mind. Only three verses later, as he was being nailed to the cross, it is recorded that he said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” How could Yeshua in one minute pronounce a curse on a group of women who were clearly opposed to-and grieving over his impending crucifixion, and then only a few minutes later forgive the very men who were carrying it out? There is no consistency in this interpretation. Yeshua was never unsympathetic toward the women’s grief.
Also, the phrase “Daughters of Jerusalem”, is not necessarily indicative of who the prophecy is directed toward. Yeshua was simply addressing the women for who they were… residents of Jerusalem. The phrase should be recognized as a loving term-of-endearment, and not as an address to the recipients of a prophetic curse.
Furthermore, if Yeshua had been referring to Jerusalem’s siege and fall, it would be hard to picture the residents of Jerusalem crying to the mountains to bury them alive for deliverance from the Roman armies. I think we can safely assume that cries for deliverance during the siege were directed toward the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What’s more, there is no record of anyone crying to the mountains to fall on them during Jerusalem’s siege. Crying to the mountains, on the other hand, has all the earmarks of trying to hide from the direct judgment of God Himself. In the end-time prophecies of The Book of Revelation it clearly tells us when people will be speaking these very words:
And the kings of the earth, the great men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”
Rev. 6:15-17 NKJV
This prophecy has not been fulfilled, but many like myself believe its fulfillment is near. We are living at that time near the close of the age.
Notice the similarities between this reference in Revelation, to the cry unto the mountains and hills to “fall on us” in Luke 23. These two references are obviously of the same event. If they are, this would also indicate that Yeshua’s prophecy to the weeping women of Jerusalem is concerning our time and the judgment that will fall on man just before his return.
The phrase, “Then they will begin to say to the mountains…” is also somewhat obscure. How does one “begin” to say something? The Greek word translated “begin” means, “to be the first to do anything”. See Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, #757. Page 78, definition (1). What Yeshua was indicating is that those who are guilty of the sin of which he is speaking will be the first ones to experience the wrath of God when it is poured out on mankind. These are the ones who will begin, or take the lead, or lead off, as the first of those who will cry to the mountains to fall on them to hide them from the face of God. for deliverance. “They will begin the saying to the mountains…”
It is also crucial that we clearly understand all that Yeshua implied in the 31st verse. Yeshua was clearly drawing a connection between what man was doing to him at that time, to what man would do in the future. His statement was not about what God would do in the future in response to what man was doing then. The subject of the sentence is “they”. My amplified interjection in parentheses helps to show the obvious.
“For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done (by them) in the dry?”
Luke 23:31
Yeshua was clearly indicating that man’s behavior will become much worse. This is the unifying theme of Yeshua’s entire prophecy. When he said to the women at the beginning of his statement, “weep for yourselves and for your children”, he was telling them that they should weep for themselves as the child-bearing species of the human race. He was telling them to weep for their descendants, for it would be mankind’s descendants who would grow worse and worse until they came to the point of such barbaric nature, they would commit the evil that he describes. And the terms “green wood” and “dry”, are metaphors for life and death. More specifically, the love of life and its sanctity, and the future lack thereof.
The Translation Problem
If Yeshua was not teaching that it is a great evil to refrain from having children, and he was not prophesying of the destruction of Jerusalem, then what was he prophesying?
There have probably been others like me who’ve quickly grabbed the nearest Strong’s Concordance to look up the Greek word for “barren”, thinking it might mean abortion because it’s the only interpretation that makes any sense. But when we do we find that the Greek word used is “stiros” which means “sterile”, or “incapable of conceiving”, and by extension “barren”, and with that, our theory is blown out of the water and we find ourselves back at square one scratching our heads!
But what many people don’t realize is that Yeshua didn’t speak to the people in Greek. For the most part, Yeshua spoke to the people in the Hebrew language. There is also evidence that he would occasionally speak in Aramaic, which is also a Shemitic language and very closely related to Hebrew. Whether the actual word Yeshua used was ever written down or not no one knows, but the point is, some unknown person is responsible for translating that word to Greek! The translation of the Gospels from the oldest Greek manuscripts to the English language has not been without its own difficulties in spite of the fact that they have been subjected to centuries of scholarly scrutiny. Therefore, it is asking an awful lot to assume that the much more difficult task of translating Shemitic words to Greek by some unknown person was always accomplished flawlessly. The actual Hebrew or Aramaic words that Yeshua spoke are perfect in truth. It’s the subsequent man-handling of those words that is subject to error. Again, we see it every day in the differing translations of the English Bible.
The translation process from any one language to another is not always a clear cut word-for-word exchange process. Many words have more than one meaning. It depends upon the translator’s ability to understand how a word is used and what is being said as to whether or not he will choose the best new word. A translator’s abilities can only be as good as his ability to understand what is being said in the first place. Therefore, translating the words of someone like Yeshua, who regularly spoke in abbreviated and often veiled-in-metaphor speech can be a translator’s worst nightmare. There were times when Yeshua said things that left people groping for their marbles as to the meaning of what he had said in spite of the fact that they understood the language perfectly!
Many words have multiple meanings. This is especially true for ancient Hebrew, but it is also true even in modern English. For example ‘barren’ in English may mean ‘without children’, or it may mean ‘lifeless’ like a desert. Imagine someone of a foreign language translating the English sentence; “The desert was barren”, into his native language as “The desert had no children”. It wouldn’t make any sense to the people of his native tongue. This is clearly what has happened to Yeshua’s original Hebrew word now rendered “barren” in its first generation translation Hebrew to Greek. Interestingly enough, there is, in fact, a Hebrew word that a Greek-speaking person could easily render “stiros” that happens to have another meaning. That Hebrew word is shaw-kole’, 7921 Strong’s, and it also means “to cause, or make abortion“! There is an Aramaic word, te-khal‘, which means exactly the same as the Hebrew word. It can be found in Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament, published by Baker Book House, under the same numerical code of #7921. See definition (2).
No Doubt, it is the word shaw-kole‘ or possibly te-khal‘ that Yeshua used when speaking to the women that day. But the original person who translated it to Greek didn’t understand the prophecy. How could he? The people who followed Yeshua could hardly conceive of the idea that anyone would want to terminate a pregnancy, let alone understand that man would someday possess the technology to carry it out by the millions with little pain or risk to the mother’s health. Consequently, not being able to comprehend this picture, the translator of Yeshua’s Aramaic word rendered it in the Greek as “sti’-ros“, which means not only “barren” and “childless”, but also sterile and incapable of conceiving. This has had the effect of cutting off future generations of translations from the picture of terminating a pregnancy after conception which Yeshua’s original word certainly included.
It should also be mentioned that the other interpretations given to this passage are far older than the modern day phenomenon of abortion. Scholars simply have not had much in the way of other possible interpretations to choose from.
Conclusion
Yeshua was prophesying of our day, shortly before the end of the age when God’s judgment would fall, when man’s behavior would sink to new unimaginable barbaric lows. He was contrasting his murder, the murder of one innocent man, to the vicious wholesale slaughter of millions of the most innocent of all human beings …children, yet to be born! This being the case, it follows that when Yeshua used the phrases “wombs that never bore”, and “the breasts that never nursed” he was speaking of the wombs and breasts of those who had had the abortions. Yeshua did not say, ‘…the wombs that never conceived...’ as one might expect him to have said if indeed his previous phrase had meant, ‘blessed are the sterile’. He said, “the wombs that never gave birth“. In light of the fact that we now know he was undoubtedly speaking of abortion, he was obviously speaking of wombs that had conceived but never bore, and breasts that were preparing to nurse but never did.
To sum it up, if Yeshua had taken the time to flesh out this picture and had spoken this prophecy in the English language, he might well have spoken these words:
‘Precious daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me over this great injustice. Yes, they are going to crucify an innocent man, but this is small compared to what men will do in the future. Weep instead for yourselves as the childbearing members of the human race, and weep for your descendants. For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, “Blessed are those who abort their pregnancy, and blessed are those wombs that conceived but never gave birth, and those breasts that were preparing …but never nursed the child for whom they were preparing.” In that unimaginably evil time, they will murder the innocent unborn by the millions, and for this atrocity, they will be the first of those who will cry to the mountains “Fall on us.” and to the hills “Cover us, and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.” as judgment falls on them for their unspeakable deeds. For if they are able to justify murdering me while there yet remains some love of life in the world, what will they be capable of …when that love is gone?’
My paraphrase
Now read again Yeshua’s words as recorded in Luke and see for yourself if this isn’t exactly what he said!
“But Yeshua, turning to them, said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts which never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “fall on us!” and to the hills, “cover us!” For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?”
Luke 23:28-31