Prophetic Prospective Daily Devotional

For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent.

As we read our selection of God's prophetic word in Zephaniah, we must realize that the Lord will one day, a day that seems not too far into the future, will one day pour out his indignation upon the nations of the world that have brought harm to the Jewish people, verse 8.

God through the prophet Zephaniah tells the Jews not to be proud. In fact, He tells them they will be no "more haughty" because of His "holy mountain". The "holy mountain of God" is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This is to be the location of the Lord's presence among His people forever, Psalm 132:13-14.

It is in the midst of the warnings and promises that the Lord tells His people that He will return to them a "pure language", verse 9. This passage needs some explanation. The language of the Jewish people for the first 2,000 years of their existence was the Hebrew language.

With the destruction of the Temple, the devastation of the city of Jerusalem, and the dispersion of the Jews into the four corners of the earth in 70A.D, the Jews basically left off from speaking the Hebrew language.

Any linguist will confirm that Hebrew was a dead language for almost 2000 years. It was not used for daily conversation, for commerce, or for anything else except a rare reading of the Hebrew text in a place of Jewish worship.

In the late 1800's, a Jewish man named Eliezar Ben-Yahuda moved to Israel with his new bride and they started to learn Hebrew, develop new Hebrew words, develop a method of teaching Hebrew, and even put together a Hebrew dictionary with the new words in it.

The miracle of the restoration of the Hebrew language to the Jewish people of today is evidence that we are living in the days referred to by Zephaniah. Not only was the prophecy of the resurrection of the Hebrew language fulfilled, but all the other prophecies Zephaniah wrote down for us today will be fulfilled as well - and most likely in the near future.