Language

I'm fascinated by language. When I was in Turkey, I loved seeing how their language reflected the culture. Turkish is very straight-forward. No, it's not easy, but it's pretty logical...you just have to learn their logic. They don't have irregular verbs. The written language matches the spoken language: each letter represents the sound you make with it. No consonant blends, nothing.

One of the fun things was to find words in Turkish that are also words in English. Like "ben." Ben means "me" or "I." I met an American named Ben...I figured he had a lot of fun learning to say "Ben ben," or "it's Ben" when he called someone one the phone.

When I was in 8th grade, I was in Bible Quizzing with a group of kids in my church. We studied the book of Acts. I don't remember much anymore (that was a loooooong time ago) but one thing that always stuck out to me was "Saul, who was also called Paul." Whenever God changed someone's name, like Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, the Bible always mentioned the change in meaning. Not so here. As a matter of fact, later on in the book, chapters after the "change" from Saul to Paul, when he is giving a sermon in Aramaic, he calls himself Saul.

I did some digging online (I know, not the most reliable, but it's also a good place to find unusual opinions) and apparently the word "Saul" meant something bad, or at least negative, in whatever language he started speaking in when he did his traveling (Greek, I think). It was a fine name in Hebrew, but not so when he was sharing with these people who didn't know Hebrew. So he adopted a name that sounded close to his own, but didn't have the negative connotations that Saul did. It wasn't that God changed his name. That likely would have happened at conversion, not a few chapters later!

It really doesn't matter...this isn't a sermon or anything like that. To me, though, it's much more interesting than if his name had been changed because of his conversion. He tried hard to be "all things to all people," and even used his name to reflect that. I understand; if my name had meant something terrible in Turkish, you'd better believe I would have come up with something else for them to call me there!