A reader writes:
Do you know of a place I can go to get an authoritative definition of the Aramaic word Kepha (Or however you would transliterate Simon Peter’s Aramaic name meaning rock). I am in an online dialogue with some folks who say that Kepha in Aramaic means hollow rock and therefore would not be a suitable foundation for a Church. Therefore, Jesus could not have said, "You are Kepha and upon this Kepha I build my Church."
This website seems to agree with the "hollow rock" definition.
http://www.htmlbible.com/sacrednamebiblecom/kjvstrongs/FRMSTRHEB37.htm
Okay, two problems:
- The page you reference is an online version of Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary. Now the thing about Strong’s is, it’s not a scholarly dictionary. It gives brief glosses on words and is based, frankly, on outdated scholarship and has a lot of flaws. I really wish people would stop trying to appealing to it in apologetic controversies, because it’s simply too unreliable to try to get precise nuances out of. Unfortunately, it’s old enough (outdated scholarship, remember?) that it’s a public domain text and so it’s all over the Internet and people cite it constantly.
- You’ll note that the word in question (#3710) does not have "(Aramaic)" at the front of the definition (compare it, for example, to #3706). That tells you that the dictionary is attempting to offer a definition for the Hebrew word keph. Now the thing is: You can’t rely on a definition of a Hebrew word to tell you what an Aramaic word means. Hebrew and Aramaic may be cognate language, like English and German are, but you can’t use words in one language as a sure guide to the meaning of similar-sounding words in the other. The German word bitte sounds like the English word bitter (especially in a non-rhotic English accent that drops the final /r/), but they mean very different things. (Bitte means "please," not "acrid tasting.") In the same way, you can’t appeal to the definition of a Hebrew word as a reliable method of determining the meaning of an Aramaic term. So even assuming Strong’s is right on the meaning of the Hebrew keph, that can’t be used to settle arguments about the meaning of the Aramaic kepha.
The reader continues:
I have seen a translation of the bible into Aramaic where they used Kepha for Simon’s new name AND for the rock that Jesus builds His Church, but I was hoping to find some sort of Aramaic Dictionary that I can easily obtain that has a definition closer to "big rock".
I can help you here, but I have a caution: I’d drop the "big rock"/"small rock" thing. While this distinction existed in at least one dialect of classical Greek several centuries before the time of Christ, the distinction was gone by the first century. It is also exceedingly hard to recover something like size distinctions at this remote date in history since we can’t survey a swath of native speakers to ask them to clarify their usage. From what we can tell now, petros, petra, and kepha all just meant "rock" in the first century, and it isn’t productive to try to argue size differences one way or the other.
That being said, the most exhaustive Aramaic-English dictionary that is commonly in use today is A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Syriac is a major Aramaic dialect) by R. Payne Smith, which was edited down from a longer work (Thesaurus Syriacus) by his daughter, J. Payne Smith.
So. . . . Here’s the definition for kepha in Smith:
Now, you may not be familiar with the Aramaic script that the dictionary uses, but you should be able to see that the basic meanings of the term are "a stone, rock."
It is also used elliptically (i.e., as shorthand) for "a stone vessel, column, idol, a precious stone." This means, for example, that speakers might be referring to a stone cup (a kind of vessel) and say, "Hand me that stone."
From there the entry starts to give examples of the term used in phrases ("he was stoned") and compound constructions ("a millstone").
As you can see, though, in no case is a definition anywhere close to "hollow rock" given, either for the term itself or for anything else the entry covers.
The idea that kepha means "hollow rock" is simply bogus.
