(especially reflexive, in homage to royalty or God)
:–bow (self) down, crouch, fall down (flat),
humbly beseech, do (make) obeisance, do reverence,
make to stoop, worship. depress,
bow down or to fall down flat or prostrate.
It is a picture of humility before the Lord
and it’s the word used in Ex. 34:14
For thou shalt worship no other god for the Lord whose name is Jealous is a jealous God.
and in
Genesis 24:52: heard their words, he worshiped the LORD,
bowing himself to the earth.
שָׁחָה
Transliteration: saha
Pronunciation: shaw-khaw’
to bow down
(Qal) to bow down
(Hiphil) to depress (fig)
(Hithpael) to bow down,
prostrate oneself before,
superior in homage,
before God in worship,
before false gods,
before angel.
It can infer:
paying homage either to God, to someone,
or to something else.
This action is that of giving of ourself and our devotion to; as well as depending upon the one to whom we bow.
It’s interesting that in most times of what we term the praise and worship portions of our services and meetings, we stand with arms raised and outstretched which is the opposite of the meaning we just read of shachah.
Worship is a very important word for believers and yet our understanding of what it truly is may have passed us by. We seem to be doing what seems to be ok and what tradition has taught us. In different church settings it means different things. In high church its recitation of liturgy (often in Latin); and in an order of service which is exactly the same every week. Some lift hands and sing hymns or choruses and all denominations have their own format of service.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with hymns and choruses, standing sitting, and raising hands; all are outward response of inner expressions of love and thankfulness towards our Heavenly Father.
However how many of us truly understand the intimate nature of worship as revealed in the Hebrew word shachah?
Which as we just read, means:
to bow down or to prostrate ourself before God.
In essence it has nothing to do with music or with uplifted hands; in fact it has really nothing to do with praise and thanksgiving as these are just physical actions of worship. It does however have everything to do with the inner person of the heart and of our deep attitude of love, submission and realization of the holiness of the One we are giving our worship to.
Some people tend to think that worship only takes place with music. To be honest, shouldn’t everything that takes place during a ‘church service’ be in a heart attitude of worship? We have come a long way because music was never really a part of the ‘church’ until about 200 years ago as it was considered sinful, as being the devil’s playground. Sadly, sometimes the ‘churches’ music program is more akin to entertainment than it is to worship, being mainly used to heighten emotions and feelings. This music can sometimes take the place of true humility in the total giving of self in reverent respect before our Holy Creator Father.
When music was finally accepted in the church it had to be the singing of Scripture and nothing else. Songs that had the words invented by man were believed to not be honoring to God. This is not meaning any negative thoughts or condemning worship music.
David was a musician and said:
“It is good to sing praises unto our God.”
There are numerous scriptures referring to musical instruments; however, we must be wise and carefully guard against bringing the things of the world into the church and labelling it worship or calling it holy.
In Psalms 147:1 the word shacah /worship is not in this verse, it only speaks of praising God. Many of our church services have praise and worship, because we realize that they are different.
The word used for praise inPsalms 147:1 is halal which is to make one shine, or to celebrate. When you celebrate, everyone is supposed to get happy.
The Ancient Hebrew Word Picture for Praise
Praise (הָלַל Halal) יְהוָֹה YHVH, All you nations! Extol Him, All you peoples! For great is His Loving devotion toward us, and the Faithfulness of יְהוָֹה *YHVH endures forever. HalleluYah!
To Praise is to Behold the Ultimate, Spiritual Authority of all Authorities; יְהוָֹה YHVH; He is, He Was, He Shall Be.
Applying it to this verse:
“It is good to sing praises unto our God.”
The word good is the Hebrew word tov
which means: to be in harmony.
The word
sing is zamar
which means:
to cut, or prune, or divide, as with rhythmical numbers.
This is not just singing, but includes dancing as well.
David says:
to celebrate, honor God, or make Him shine, with rhythms that are in harmony with God both in singing and dancing.
to sing praises
זַמְּרָ֣ה (zam·mə·rāh) Strong’s 2167: Play, to make music, celebrate in song and music
HalleluYah!How good it is to sing praises (זָמַר zamar) to our God, for Praise (תְּהִלָּה Tehillah) is pleasant and lovely …Exalt (שָׁבַח Shabach) יְהוָֹה YHVH, O Jerusalem; Praise(הָלַל Halal) your God, (Elohim) O Tzion! …He has done this for no other nation; they do not know His Judgments. HalleluYah!Psalm 147:1, 12
Worship as we have noted in Hebrew is
shachah which the lexicon says is:
to fall prostrate.
“Then Ezra Blessed יְהוָֹה YHVH the Great God. And all the people answered, “Amen, Amen!” while lifting up their hands; then they Bowed Low (קָדַד qadad) and Worshipped (שָׁחָה Shachach) to יְהוָֹה YHVH with their Faces to the Ground.“ Nehemiah 8:6
Bow down is Kara’
and
kneel is Barack.
Most worship services do the opposite, stand and wave your hands. Are the three Hebrew words the Psalmist uses giving us the characteristics of worship and not a physical manifestation?
Shachah is a Phoenician word for being surrounded by water, like swimming, by allowing the presence of God to surround us.
Swimming in the presence of God.
Kara’ is a word used for:
bending ones’ head to sip water.
When we sip water our attention is momentarily directed away from everything but the cup of water that our head is bowed to.
Barack rendered here as kneel really is the word for bless or to make someone happy.
Thus worship is surrounding yourself, or swimming in the presence of God focusing your attention totally on Him to make Him happy or bring pleasure to Him.
Kara’ for bowing is spelled
Kap/Kaf which is a vessel, like your heart, waiting to be filled with the next letter Resh which represents His Holy Spirit, Who will reveal the final letter Ayin to us, which is: insight into the heart of God and what brings Him pleasure.
The combination of the letters in shachah expresses:
the most intimate aspect of our relationship with our Heavenly Father.
The word shahcah is spelled with the letters:
shin chet hei
The Masorite text spells it with a shin as pronounced sh.
In the original text there were no vowel points to define the pronunciation so, the shin w could have been an s not a sh sound. If the word was spelled as sachah the word would mean:
to swim or to have an overflow.
Regardless, the sine and shin both represent:
wholeness, completeness and nearness to God.
The next letter is chet and usually means:
an intimate joining of man to God.
Reading the first letter as a sine rather than shin we can see how worship is a picture of swimming. When we swim we are surrounded by water, we can therefore also worship, sachah, while we are alone and reading scripture or while studying His Word with other believers, while we are singing, playing an instrument, or just sitting quietly before the Father.
This is because any time we give Him our full and undivided attention, He can surround us with His presence and love; just as water surrounds us when we are swimming or even taking a long soak in a bath of water.
If we place the 2 letters together shin and chet
they express worship –
i.e. the swimming/nearness to God and
intimate joining of man to God.
Then add the final letter of the word shachah which is a letter hei. The letter hei speaks of:
the breath of God, His Spirit of Holiness,
of His presence and of His feminine nature;
This points to the understanding that: worship is any act which joins man with God, into a completeness, surrounded by the presence of His Spirit of Holiness. It can also infer that worship and holiness go hand in hand, it’s a place of sanctity of heart as we give of ourselves completely to Him; a true, sincere heart-touching-heart moment.
When we give our heart it makes us vulnerable and we give away the power for someone to break our heart. He gives His heart to us and so the responsibility then falls on us, to not abuse or be careless with heart God has entrusted to us in this relationship. Exodus 34:14, tells us that He is a jealous God and we must not give our heart to another once we have given it and committed ourselves to Him.
What does a pruning hook have to do with worship ???
Psalms 118:14: “The Lord is my strength and song and is become my salvation.”
Some readers may remember the chorus..
You are the words and the music, you are the song that I sing. You are the melody, you are the harmony, praising you makes my heart sing. You are the mighty God, you are the Lord of Lords, you are the King of all Kings; now I return to you, the song that You gave to me, You are the song that I sing.
He is our song of victory and there are just some songs that stir our hearts in a special way however old they are! He is our song what a picture!
Here again we discover a hidden gem in the language..
there are many words for song in Hebrew but the word used for song inPs 118:14 is zamar.
There is a fascinating history to this word, because
zamar means: a pruning hook.
Its seems the meaning of this word gradually evolved to mean a song because the pruning hook is shaped like a scythe.
A curved blade was mounted on a pole and used to cut away the dead wood and branches of a tree. Pruning tools for the garden and agriculture have changed little over the generations they still have a curved blade attached to a pole.
This pruning hook became a weapon called a maul Persian soldiers used to unseat enemy soldiers from their horses. Knights in the middle ages used a similar weapon called a maul for the same purpose. If a person unseated a knight from his horse it was said that you had mauled him. Hence our modern use of the same word when someone or something is mauled often by being attacked and meaning being wounded in the process e.g. mauled by a bear or lion.
How is this connected to a song?
These days not many farmers use a scythe to cut their harvest however back when this was the manner used, a farmer who was skilled in using a pruning hook, would swing it back and forth in a very smooth continuous action, and it would make a rhythmic whistling, noise.
There is an audio track at the links below for the sound described above:
A scythe is an agricultural hand tool for mowing grass or harvesting crops. It is historically used to cut down or reap edible grains, before the process of threshing.
The scythe is more than a simple curved blade. It is a tool perfect for maintaining land, body and mind. When you mow, you exercise almost every muscle of your body The action distributes muscle activity from the legs through the torso and finally into the arms and shoulders to guide the blade along the intended path
As the object of pruning is to
cut away the bad and leave the good,
this word was used to express:
a song of triumph, victory and salvation from one’s foes.
The lord is my strength and SONG and is become my salvation a SONG of victory
a song of victory. זמר
It is a song declaring that:
the Lord has mauled us and has removed all the bad things from our lives and left only that which is good and brings us to victory!
So to our initial question…
what does a pruning hook have to do with worship?
If true worship comes from within – from the heart, it will
purify our motives.
Psalms 86:11
Teach me thy way Unite my heart — יחד לבבי yached lebabi, join all the purposes, resolutions, and affections of my heart together, to fear and to glorify thy name.
Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, Hebrews 12:14
When we enter into worship
and draw closer and closer to the
heart of our Heavenly Father, He purifies us…
He prunes away all those
personal agendas and selfish motives.
Worship begins internally
it can’t be forced..
we can live in a state of worship,
which by definition is:
the constant action of voluntarily observance
of a person, place, or thing.
Worship is not something instantaneous, it’s more of a process and according to scripture, it involves the whole body.. bowing the knee and falling prostrate before Him in complete surrender.
The Hebrew writings of the sages teach that it is like a king going to war and for the battle, he dresses just like every other soldier. The object of war in those days was similar to the board game of chess and the object was to strategically capture the other army’s king and this ended the battle. The king was surrounded by his best warriors protecting him and the enemy had to break through the protective barrier in order to reach and capture the king. So too, our sins, afflictions and cares of this world surround us and come between us and our Heavenly Father; and we must take the time to identify and repent of the things that are causing that barrier and then the break through comes and we can reach out to Him. When we begin to worship we usually do not ‘feel anything’ and yet something is happening and the more we worship and praise our Father, the more we begin to break through that barrier separating us from God.
Maybe we should begin our times of praise and worship by preparing ourselves to worship
beginning with an inward action
rather than an outward one?
A time of preparation meaning: a time of personal reflection, confession and repentance of our sins and shortcomings and then calling upon our Heavenly Father to make us pure… so we can enter into His presence in true worship/shachah.
The word zamar is spelled: Zayin, Mem, Resh.
The letter Zayin looks like a sword and means: a sword or weapon.
The Hebrew teachers used to say that:
the Zayin cuts away all that is really unimportant to us and leaves only that which is important.
If we follow that thought then this
song is a song of
what is most important to us.
David says his song is God,
it is God that is the most important thing in his life and the Zayin cuts away or prunes away all that is unimportant so that he can see what is important which is God.
He understands that his love for God will grow and as we know from scripture, it’s the fruit of the spirit that will grow and like a fruit tree that has been pruned of the worthless branches that steal the nourishment away from the growing fruit,
zamar,
that song of pruning
will prune away all that is worthless,
that which robs the fruit of the spirit of its nourishment.
The more we
sing the song of the pruning
the stronger our love for God and the more developed the fruits of the spirit will be.
So what is this song?
A song that sings of that which is of the most importance to us?
This song is sung with the next letter in the word which is the letter Mem.
The Mem represents water
and also the revealed knowledge of God.
When we swim in the sea or a lake, the water completely surrounds us. When we sing this song, it is a
song that surrounds us with the revealed knowledge of God.
Like water it will surround us with His presence and then we are truly in worship the meaning is: to be swimming in His presence. It’s not the usual battle or victory song; it’s a song that speaks of Our Heavenly Father and His love and when we sing this song we become surrounded by His presence as He reveals Himself to us. We begin to shachah – to worship or swim in His presence.
The last letter in this word for song is the letter Resh. The letter Resh is the convicting power of His Holy Spirit, and speaks of the One who reveals to us those things in our lives that need to be cut away or pruned so that we can see what is important. The Resh speaks to us of repentance, the turning away from our sins or those thing that keep us from seeing what it really important to us which is our Heavenly Father.
When we prepare ourselves for worship we sing this song or this zamar and when we are, it surrounds us with His knowledge. When He is all we see, we throw off all that keeps us from Him through repentance and the Zayin cuts it out of us, prunes us and leaves only our love for God.
As all Hebrew letters are also numbers, the numerical value of the word zamar, the song of pruning reveals a little more.
The letter Zayin has a value of 7, the Mem of 40 and the Resh is 200. Add up the total value of the word zamar is 247. There is another word in the Hebrew language that has the same value of 247 and it is the Hebrew word mazaqaq. The sages teach that if 2 Hebrew words have the same numerical value, the Spirit of God may show you a relationship between these two words that will be of significant spiritual value.
Mazaqaq means: to refine.
When we enter praise and worship by singing and/or listening to a zamar or song of pruning, first our Heavenly Father begins a refining process in us; cutting away all those things that separate us from Him and as we come closer into His presence, we are left only with Him.
And suddenly looking round about,
they saw no one any more,
save Jesus only
with themselves.
Mark 9:8
This is what a pruning hook has to do with
worship/shachah
so let’s be willing to have
all the pruning necessary
then we can humbly
SHACHAH/worship Him
in spirit and truth.
Shalom shalom mishpachah/family
and cheverim/friends!
You are loved and appreciated and prayed for daily.
… and…
it’s all about Life and Relationship, NOT Religion.
You are greatly loved and precious in His sight.
NOT SURE?
YOU CAN BE..
SAY THE FOLLOWING FROM YOUR HEART RIGHT NOW…
Heavenly Father I come to you in the Name of Jesus/Yeshua asking for forgiveness of my sins for which I am truly sorry. I repent of them all and turn away from my past.
I believe with my heart and confess with my mouth that Jesus/Yeshua is your Son and that He died on the cross at calvary to pay the price for my sin, so that I might be forgiven and have eternal life in the kingdom of Heaven. Father I believe that Jesus/Yeshua rose from the dead and I ask you to come into my life right now and be my personal Savior and Lord and I will worship you all the days of my life. Because your word is truth I say that I am now forgiven and born again and by faith I am washed clean with the blood of Jesus/Yeshua. Thank you that you have accepted me into your family in Jesus’/Yeshua’s name. Amen.
Another word is noted in Strongs #5647 
As the object of pruning is to 
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