ARAMAIC  WORD STUDY – GENERATION –  SHARBTHA   שׁרבתא 

Matthew 24:34: “Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.”

I remember growing up in an Evangelical Church where Biblical prophecy was the order of the day.  Everyone was speculating on who the anti-Christ was.  President Kennedy would come back to life and be the anti-Christ; it was Henry Kissinger or the pope.  Not only that the computer was just becoming a real reality and the beast was surely some supercomputer.  666 was embedded in names, books, computer programs, I mean Evangelicals were convinced the rapture would occur before the end of the 1980’s and the stage was being set for the 7 year tribulation period.    Much of this hype was based upon Matthew 24:34 where it was taught that the clock began ticking with the restoration of Israel in 1948 and with a generation being about 30-40 years Jesus would have to return sometime between 1978 and 1988.

It is going on 25 years since that 40 year period ended and no one seems to be speculating on this verse much anymore.  Oh, I know there are a few holdouts playing around with what a generation is and when the clock really begins to tick, but for the most part many of the prophetic teachers who hinted at the idea that we would not see 1990 have tucked their tails behind them and crawled under yon rock from whence they came. 

So to celebrate this 25 year anniversary as another reason we should never set any dates for the Lord’s return, I would like to revisit this verse in the Aramaic. 

In the Greek, the word generation is genea from the root word genos where we obviously get our English word for generation.  It does mean a period of time or an age, but on rare occasions, it has been used to mean a nation.  A generation is about 30-40 years so obviously, this was not fulfilled at the time of Jesus nor from the time of the restoration of Israel.   Every English translation I have read renders this word as generation and it appears Jesus wrongly predicted His return if we stay with this rendering.   Unless, of course, you can concoct another point in time when the generation clock begins to tick which you teachers of prophecy are desperately trying to do.

Fortunately, there are other possible renderings.   The Aramaic word that is used in my Aramaic Bible for generation is sharbtha.  Sharbatha literally means a race, tribe, family, nation and on rare occasions, it can be used for generation.   In other words, the most common usage of genea in the Greek is generation where the most common usage of the Aramaic word sharbatha is a race of people which is the least common usage for the Greek word.

If we plug in the Aramaic rendering we find that Jesus taught that this race of people would not pass away before His return.  For over two thousand years people have tried to commit genocide with the Jewish people and had Hitler won the war he might have succeeded.  Yet, the promise of Jesus stood firm that this race that gave birth to Him would not pass away until His return.   All the attempts at genocide for over two thousand years have and will continue to fail. 

Now with regard to man’s attempts to circumvent verse 36 that no man knows the day nor hour of our Lord’s return, those attempts will always fail, as we well discovered on December 22, 2012, and found the world still turning on its axis even after all the 2012 prophecies of the world ending.  If you try to get around verse 36 by saying the passage says we cannot know the day or hour but says nothing about the week, month or period of time you are going to have to contend with something called idioms.   “Very day and every hour” is a Semitic idiomatic expression for a period of time.  That includes not only day, month, year, but generation as well.   We cannot even know the generation of His return.