King Jesus The Messiah... Or Not Quite

Today we witness a sad Hebrew tattoo indeed. Not only is our victim apparently a Smurf, but his tat is seriously misspelled too.


This guy wanted "King Jesus the Messiah", and he even managed to get his grammar right. The sentence makes perfect sense... if you manage to decipher it, that is.

Unfortunately, Hebrew letters got our guy confused real bad. I see a Yod turned into apostrophe, a Vav turned into Resh, a Lamed turned into number seven with apostrophe on top (how can that even happen??). Also, all spaces are missing.

It's really quite unreadable if you haven't been clued in first. A very bad, sad, blue Hebrew tattoo.

This is what the guy was going for, "King Jesus the Messiah" in correct Hebrew:


If you want to take it a step further, though, the sentence "Jesus the King Messiah" is a more popular form in Hebrew:

5 comments:

  1. ישוע מלך המשיח means Jesus King of the Messaiah without a comma in there

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  2. It's really a bad sentence to translate to Hebrew.
    It should be really "המלך ישוע, המשיח" but it sounds bad.
    "מלך ישוע המשיח" doesn't really mean anything.
    and "ישוע מלך המשיח" means: Jesus, the king of messiah.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I get why it sounds to you guys like "Jesus, the king of messiah", but it is a valid way to write that.

    During my Chabad days (don't ask), that was the way the Rabbi who was considered the messiah, was addressed. So I think using the same for Jesus is appropriate.

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  4. I read it as "Melekh she-ra'ah mashiach"(ra'a with "ain") - A king that shepherded(or grazed) a messiah. :-)

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  5. מלך ישוע המשיח is not grammatical, and, as it was noted before me, it means only "Jesus, king of the Messiah".

    What you heard in Chabad was מלך המשיח, which is an idiosyncratic form that truly means "the king messiah". However, you can never squeeze a name between the two words.

    The only similar form I can think of, as a native speaker, is מלכת אסתר, which means "The queen Esther". However, this form is considered 'child talk' (used mostly for referring to Purim costumes), and no grown-ups would use it between themselves.

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