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The War on Words: How the Nations Distort Our Holiest Language

by Ram ben Ze'ev


The War on Words: How the Nations Distort Our Holiest Language
The War on Words: How the Nations Distort Our Holiest Language

Language is not neutral. For ישראל, it is the vessel through which קדושה enters the world. When the nations take our sacred words, reshape them, and hand them back to us with their meaning hollowed out, something essential is lost. Holiness becomes obscured, and the identity of our people is quietly eroded.


Few examples reveal this more starkly than the distortion of שבת (Shabbat, rest) into the Christian term “Sabbath.” The Hebrew root שבת means to cease, to stop, to withdraw from creative labour. It is the crown of creation, sanctified by G-D in בראשית and given as a covenantal commandment to בני ישראל alone. Christianity did not inherit this meaning.



Instead, it borrowed the Greek sabbaton, a transliteration that preserved sound but severed sanctity. Once detached from its root, the word became pliable, allowing Christians to shift their observance to the first day of the week — Sunday — and still call it “Sabbath.” A foreign doctrine wrapped itself in a stolen Hebrew word.


The same pattern repeats across Scripture. תהלים (Tehillim, praises) becomes “Psalms,” a Greek musical term referring to a plucked instrument. מזמור (Mizmor, melody offered in service to G-D) becomes “psalm,” reframing worship as performance. Each time a Jew chooses the foreign term, another layer of holiness is peeled away. These linguistic distortions are not harmless synonyms; they are displacements. They redirect the soul’s focus from G-D to cultures that removed Him from the words they borrowed.


But the distortion does not stop with language. It extends into the structure of time itself.


For generations, printed calendars throughout the Western world — including those used by Jews — correctly displayed Sunday on the far left as day one, and שבת on the far right as day seven.



Even within Christian societies, the visual layout still echoed creation’s rhythm. Then, in the late twentieth century, under the guise of an “international standard,” the nations quietly redefined the structure of the week. Monday became the first day. Saturday was pushed out of its rightful place. And Sunday — the so-called 'Christian day of rest' — was moved to the far right, visually replacing Shabbat as the culmination of time.


This was not accidental. Committees debated it, governments endorsed it, software encoded it, and publishers adopted it. The result was a global calendar that now places the Christian reinterpretation at the position of honour and demotes the true seventh day to the sixth.


The distortion has become so pervasive that even calendars marketed as “Hebrew” are affected. One right-to-left calendar — written entirely in Hebrew — still displays Saturday and Sunday together on the right as the “weekend,” copying the Christian-secular week structure and simply mirroring it. Instead of restoring the biblical week, it unintentionally reaffirms the foreign model. The seventh day is not shown as the culmination of creation; it is reduced to a pre-weekend workday. The calendar is Hebrew only in script, not in holiness.



This is the exact pattern the nations have used for centuries: redefine our words, redefine our days, redefine the structure of meaning, and then export those distortions back into Jewish life. Only observant Jews, anchored in halakhah, retained clarity — because our understanding of sacred time is rooted in תורה, not in international standards or secular convention.


We must recognise that these shifts do not happen in a vacuum. They are part of a long historical effort to replace the worldview of Israel with the worldview of the nations. When we adopt their terms, we absorb their meanings. When we adopt their calendars, we absorb their errors. And when we do not push back, what begins as practicality becomes spiritual displacement.


We must remember this warning:


“We are not to praise even the good that we find in the idolatry or we will come to also praise the bad.”— רם בן זאב


To guard our covenant, we must guard our words.


To guard our identity, we must guard our time.


To remain faithful to the truth of תורה, we must refuse the distortions — linguistic, cultural, or calendrical — that seek to replace our sacred inheritance with foreign shadows.



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