He Saves

Jacob waited for “your salvation (yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw).” Many centuries later an angel told Joseph to call Mary’s Son Yeshua, “for He will save His people from their sins.” As we saw in Book 4, that name is built of two pieces, the yod in front and Shua behind, and Shua stands as a word of its own, as Genesis 38:2 and the name Malchi-shua show. The first letter also does something in Hebrew grammar, and Matthew’s Greek carries it over.

Where a Hebrew Verb Puts Its Subject

An English verb usually needs a separate word to say who acts: he saves, you save, I save. A Hebrew verb can carry the subject inside itself. In the form of the verb that speaks of what is not yet finished, the person is marked by a letter at the front of the word.

Take the root yasha יָשַׁע yeh'-shah, “to save.” In these three forms only the first letter changes.

The rest of the word stays the same. One letter at the front decides who does the saving. When that letter is yod, the subject is “he.”

This is the form Hebrew uses for an action not yet complete, and it covers both what is still ahead and what is done again and again. So yoshia can be read “He will save” and also “He saves.” It speaks of the One who saves as the One whose work this is.

The same yod stands at the front of yevarekh, “bless,” the verb that follows the three names in Genesis 48:16, marking a subject that is “he,” one person, singular. That small letter is what shows that the three names Jacob called took one verb.

A Mighty One Who Saves

The prophet Zephaniah uses the very form yoshia in a verse about the LORD in the midst of His people.

Zephaniah 3:17 The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who saves (yasha); he will rejoice over you with joy, he will be silent in his love, he will exult over you with singing.

The YLV renders the words gibbor yoshia (גִּבּוֹר יוֹשִׁיעַ) as “a mighty one who saves (yasha).” Gibbor is a mighty man, a warrior. Yoshia is the verb with the yod in front: He saves. A warrior who saves, that is, one of whom it is said, He saves. The same verse goes on to say three more things He does, and every one of them has the same subject, He. The verse does not speak of salvation as a thing that lies about in the midst of the people. It speaks of a Person in their midst who saves.

The Front of the Name Says Who

Other Hebrew names ending in Shua work the same way. Gathered from the Hebrew text, they show the front part doing one job in every case: it says who.

Each of these names is not a single word but a short sentence, built of “who” and “what.” The back half is the same. The front half names a different subject each time.

The Hebrew text has the long name, Joshua, 218 times, and the short name, Yeshua, as a man’s name, 29 times. The two are the same behind and different in front. The front of Joshua is the name of God. The front of Yeshua is the yod.

This yod is also the first letter of the name the LORD, and the whole reads “The LORD is salvation.” Hebrew grammar shows a second thing the same letter does at the front of a word: it marks the one who acts, “he.” Explain Yeshua only as a shortened form of Joshua and stop there, and you miss that “He.” The doer stands inside the name. That is the point of this name.

Matthew Unfolds the Name

Matthew, writing in Greek, does not translate the name with the noun “salvation.” He unfolds it as a sentence.

Matthew 1:21 And she will bear a Son, and you shall call His name Yeshua, for He will save His people from their sins."

In Greek the verb is sosei, a future, “will save.” In front of it stands autos, the pronoun that puts weight on “He Himself.” Greek verbs already carry their subject, just as Hebrew verbs do, so autos is not needed to make the sentence work. When it is written anyway, it gives the subject emphasis, and that is why it is there: the “He” that the Hebrew yod sets at the front of the name is the “He” that Matthew sets at the front of his sentence. The name says, He saves. The angel says, He Himself will save.

This also shows how Matthew’s sentence and Jacob’s word fit together. Jacob waited for “your salvation (yeshuah),” a noun, salvation as something that belongs to the LORD and that he longed to see. In Matthew the same root comes back as the name of a person and as a sentence with a subject. What Jacob named as the object of his waiting, Matthew names as the work of the One who has come.

Not a Condition but a Person

Many people know Yeshua only as a word that means “salvation,” or only as a shortened form of Joshua. Both are true as far as they go. But the name is built of two pieces, and the first piece sets up “He.” The second carries more than the act of saving alone.

So Yeshua is not the name of a condition called salvation. It is the name of the One who saves. To call that name is to name the subject of the event, the One by whom salvation is done.

The form yoshia looks at saving as something not yet complete: He saves, He will save. Hebrew has a way to take that same form and make it tell what has already happened. It takes only one more letter, and Scripture uses it at the shore of the sea.