Thunder and Lightning

I was awakened early this morning to some pretty noisy storms--thunder and lightning with strong winds. The weather report I heard this morning on the radio made reference to tornadic weather, in November!!!

Sorry, Kim, but this is neither a post about the weather, nor about grammar (no sentence diagrams coming). Unfortunately it is about Biblical Hebrew . . . and about politics.

President-elect Barak Obama was strongly criticized for the radical associations of his earlier life. Was he born in Hawaii? Or was he born in Kenya? What connections does he really have with Raila Odinga, who shares power in Kenya, but allegedly has designs to benefits Muslims (at the expense of Christians). All of this caused some to question how President Obama will deal with the Israel-Arab tensions.

To help him along those lines, Obama has named an Illinois Congressman, Rahm Emanuel, to be his Chief-of-Staff. Emanuel is Jewish, and his father was born in Israel. That should help ease the fears of some who fear that Obama might sell Israel into the hands of Iran.

It is fairly well known that the name Barak in languages having some relation to Arabic means "blessing." Notwithstanding what Obama himself said in his comedy routine at the Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner, that Barak in Swahili means "that one", the name Barak in Hebrew means lightning.

The Hebrew word ra'am, similar to Rahm, means thunder.

So, what we will have in the White House next January will be . . . thunder and lightning! To see those two Hebrew words together in one verse, one must look to Psalm 77:18. Below, you can see the text, with annotations from the ESV Reverse Interlinear, and lexical entries from the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament.