DeMar, Gary, YAHOO! Hermeneutics
"The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle' but Filo and Yang [founders of Yahoo!] insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos."
Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation. It takes skill to interpret any piece of literature. The Bible is no exception. But with the Bible comes extra care since it is God's word. To handle it lightly or to trivialize its message is an affront to God. Modern-day prophecy writers are the worst at maneuvering the Bible to fit their whimsical interpretive schemes. The following two examples are all the evidence I need to demonstrate this point.
The "World Wide Web" and the Mark of the Beast
It was only a matter of time before the Internet became an apocalyptic feature in modern-day prophetic speculation. Zola Levitt writes in his April 1999 ministry newsletter that after attending a prophecy conference that he "started looking into the Hebrew language and certain computer designations." Levitt is correct about the Hebrew language, and I would add, the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament cannot be understood without understanding the Old Testament, especially Revelation. But like any interpretive key, it can be misused. Levitt attempts to make a link between the World Wide Web and 666:
To begin with, the familiar symbol for the Internet, World Wide Web or "www", would be rendered in Hebrew as vav, vav, vav (the Hebrew alphabet does not have a "w" and Hebrew speaking people us the vav, or "v", in place of our "w"). The interesting part is that since Hebrew letters also have numerical values (Hebrew speakers do not prefer Arabic numerals), we have a number of the letter vav. Since it is the sixth letter of the alphabet, the expression "www", in Hebrew, is 666.
Like the majority of prophecy writers who claim to be experts on the subject, Levitt, who should know better, seemingly is unaware that the number for the mark of the beast is six hundred and sixty-six, not three sixes.
Dispensationalists are notorious for playing the interpretive game of "sounds like." The Hebrew word "Rosh" in Ezekiel 38-39 is said to be modern-day Russia since Rosh sounds like Russia. What should we make of the "wilderness of Sin" (Ex. 16:1; 17:1; Num. 33:11) since Sin sounds like sin?
Yahoo! Exegesis
Levitt doesn't stop with identifying the World Wide Web as the Beast of Revelation. Step two in sound-alike exegesis is to identify the popular search engine Yahoo! as the Antichrist. Levitt reasons:
Finally, the popular search engine, Yahoo, is an important Hebrew word repeated often in the Scriptures. The name Yahweh is shortened to Yah in names; and hu, in Hebrew, stands for the pronoun "he." Thus, "Yahoo" on the end of a name in Hebrew, such as Netanyahu, means "he...God" in English. In the case of Netanyahu, since netan means "gift," his entire name means "He is the gift of God." The prophets Isaiah (Yeshayahu) and Jeremiah (Yirmeyahu) also had yahu on the ends of their names. These were meant in complimentary terms, but in the case of the Antichrist, yahoo by itself expresses exactly his counterfeit: "he is God."
As in both cases (www) and (Yahu), Hebrew is being used as the bridge language. Unlike Latin and Greek, there are not many Hebrew words that make up the English language. Words which do make it into English are most often given their proper singular Hebrew definition, for example, kosher and kibbutz. These words mean what they mean in Hebrew because the design of the language is so different in structure from that of English. Hebrew words are not used as prefixes and suffixes as are Latin and Greek words (e.g., anti, ante, post, contra, bene, etc.).
The same can be said for a language like Chinese. Lo Mein is a Chinese dish served in most Chinese restaurants. You won't find a Chinese equivalent of High Mein. The Chinese word Lo does not mean what low means in English even though their sounds are identical. The same is true of Hebrew. There are probably numerous Hebrew words that sound a lot like English words, but there is no meaningful association. Even English has words that are pronounced alike but have different meanings (homophones):
to, too, two
reign, rain, rein
sea, see, si
Then there are words that are spelled the same way but have different meanings (homonyms):
bat (animal and wooden club)
ball (sphere and dance)
Yahoo! has at least two meanings in English: a western expression of excitement and Jonathan Swift's designation of a race of brutes in his satirical Gulliver's Travels (1726). You can decide which fits Zola Levitt's interpretive idiosyncracies.
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