Exodus 15, Psalm 118, and Hosanna

In the last chapter we saw that the letter heh, which standard lexicons usually call a feminine ending, also closes the shortest form of God’s own name, Yah, and the divine name Eloah. Earlier, in Chapter 9, we heard Isaiah say that God Himself is his yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw, his salvation. This chapter brings those two lines together, because the Hebrew Bible itself joins them, in a way you can count.

In the whole Old Testament there are exactly three verses in which the name Yah (H3050) and the word yeshuah (H3444) stand together. They come from three different books, the Torah, a prophet and the Psalms, and yet all three carry, in effect, one sentence.

The Song by the Sea

The first is the song Moses and Israel sang after they crossed the Sea of Reeds and saw the waters close over the army that had chased them.

Exodus 15:2 My strength and song is Yah, and he has become my salvation (yeshuah); this is my God (El), and I will glorify him, the God of my father, and I will exalt him.

The second is Isaiah’s short song, which we read in Chapter 9: “for Yah the LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation (yeshuah)” (Isaiah 12:2).

The third is in the Psalms.

Psalm 118:14 My strength and song is Yah, and he has become for me salvation (yeshuah).

Set the three side by side and the shared words are plain. Ozzi means “my strength.” Ve-zimrat means “and song.” Then comes Yah (יָהּ), the name of God, ending in a heh that is sounded. And then the line closes with the word for what that God became for the singer: yeshuah, salvation, which also ends in heh.

So in every one of these verses the same letter appears twice. It stands once at the end of God’s name, and once at the end of the word that names what God became for the one who is singing. And the sentence does not set the two at a distance from each other. It does not say that Yah sent salvation, or that Yah made a way of salvation. It says, “he has become my salvation (yeshuah).” Yah Himself became the singer’s yeshuah.

That is the point the study draws from these three verses, and it is simply what the words say. This study reads that shared last letter as no accident: in the confession of the one who sings, the name and the salvation are one.

A Psalm That Climbs

Of the three verses, the one in Psalm 118 calls for a closer look, because it does not stand alone in its psalm. The root of yeshuah, the verb yasha ישע yeh'-shah, “to save,” runs through Psalm 118 four times, in verses 14, 15, 21 and 25, and the psalm moves from one step to the next until it arrives at a person.

You have already read verse 14. Seven verses later the singer comes back to the same word, and this time he speaks to God directly.

Psalm 118:21 I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me, and you have become for me salvation (yeshuah).

Here the singer says “you have become for me salvation (yeshuah).” What verse 14 said about Yah, verse 21 says to Him.

Then come the two verses that most readers of the New Testament know without realizing it.

Psalm 118:25-26 I beseech you, O LORD, save now (yasha)! I beseech you, O LORD, make prosper now! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD; we bless you from the house of the LORD.

The cry “save now” in verse 25 is two Hebrew words, hoshiah na הוֹשִׁיעָה נָּא yaw-shah'. The first word is built on the same root, yasha, the root of yeshuah. It is a command in the causative stem of the verb, and it too ends in a heh: the lengthening heh of a command, like qumah, “arise!”, in the table of Chapter 40, which OSHB tags as paragogic. The second word, na, is a small word of pleading, something like “please” or “now, I beg you.” Spoken together, hoshiah na is the very cry that came into Greek as “Hosanna.”

And right after that cry, in verse 26, the psalm names someone: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.”

So the psalm climbs in four steps:

It begins at Yah. It passes through yeshuah. It cries out hoshiah na. And it ends with “he who comes.”

The Crowd on the Road

Now go to the road down from the Mount of Olives, on the day Yeshua rode into Jerusalem. Matthew records what the crowds were shouting.

Matthew 21:9 The crowds going ahead of Him and those who followed were shouting: "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!"

“Hosanna” and “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord” are verses 25 and 26 of Psalm 118, the last two steps of the climb. The crowd did not shout them into the air, as one might sing a hymn. They shouted them at a man on the road, the One they were walking beside. The cry that had once asked the LORD to save was now directed to a person who had come.

Notice also the name of the person to whom they cried. As we saw in Chapter 6, the name Yeshua joins the yod that points to the LORD with shua, salvation. The psalm moves from Yah to yeshuah, from yeshuah to hoshiah na, and from hoshiah na to “he who comes,” and on that day in Jerusalem the One who came bore a name made of the same root.

One Letter, One Confession

It is worth slowing down to see what this chapter does and does not claim. It does not rest on a hidden code, or on counting letters for their own sake. It rests on three verses that any reader can open, in which the Hebrew sets God’s name and the word for salvation side by side and says that the one has become the other. It rests on a psalm whose words climb from that same confession to a cry for salvation and then to the One who comes in the LORD’s name. And it rests on Matthew’s plain report that this cry was spoken to Yeshua.

The letter heh is the thread that ties the first link of that chain to the second. Yah ends in heh. Yeshuah ends in heh. Hoshiah, the cry to save, ends in heh as well. Whatever a grammar may call that letter in one place or another, in these verses it stands at the end of God’s name and at the end of the word for what God became for His people.

There is, however, another side to the matter. The same standard analysis that calls yeshuah feminine had to set aside three verses in which the word carries an extra heh at the end, and one of those three verses was spoken by Jonah from inside the fish. Those three verses, and the evidence that points the other way, are the subject of the next chapter.