HEBREW WORD STUDY – HE KISSED HIM – VAYISHAQEHU וישקהו Vav Yod Shin Qop Hei Vav

Genesis 33:4: “And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.”

Matthew 5:18: “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”

There is something about this verse that shows up only in the Torah scrolls and a few Hebrew Bibles. The Torah scrolls were meticulously copied. If the scribe made just one simple error, even a stray dot the whole parchment was discarded and the poor scribe had to start all over again. If he made three mistakes, no matter how simple the whole of what he had written would be destroyed. So the Torah scrolls really give us about an accurate replication of the original document that is possible.

Oddly, what is found on the Torah scrolls is not really found in all our Hebrew Bibles. I do have one Hebrew Bible that shows this oddity. The word for kiss is vayishaqehu spelled Vav Yod Shin Qop Hei Vav. It comes from the root word shaqah which means to kiss or draw very near. Obviously from the context, it is agreed by all Bible Scholars that this should be rendered as Easu kissing his brother Jacob’s neck. What is strange is that there is a dot above every letter including the Vav which is just a conjunction. It is probably left out of all Christian documents because no one can explain the presence of these dots and what they mean. The Orthodox Jews as do the Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians believe the original documents of the Bible including the Old Testament are not only inspired of God but without error. These dots were in the inspired text and they were not the result of a scribe stuttering. There is a reason for these dots and it is one of the great mysteries of the Bible.

One school of thought is that the dots were put there to indicate that Esau was not really sincere in his forgiveness of his brother for stealing his birthright. I doubt this as Jacob bowed before his brother and Esau ran to his brother, hugged him and wept. Another school of thought is that the dots are meant to show you that this kiss should not be taken seriously and that Easu intended to bite nashak his brother’s neck but instantly decided not to as he was moved by compassion for his brother at the least minute. The simple fact is no one knows what those dots mean. Yet, they are in the inspired text for a reason.

Jesus Himself says that not one jot or title will be removed from the Torah until all be fulfilled. In Aramaic, the word for jot is Yod, like the letter Yod. It is the smallest letter. But Yod does not have to mean the letter Yod. In extra-Biblical literature it is also used for a dot.

In Aramaic Jesus may have said in Matthew 5:18 that one dot or one tittle shall not pass from the law until all be fulfilled. The sages teach that the battle between Jacob and Esau was a battle between the natural world, Easu who desired riches and Jacob who desired the spiritual. It is felt by many sages that the kiss of Easu to Jacob was a picture of the natural and supernatural, or the flesh and spirit coming together in harmony