Of Amen, Prayer and Certainty!

Well, as a rabbit hole goes, I think it’s a good (and short) one!

I was sitting at a café, sipping a lovely latte, when I wondered: where does the word “amen” come from?

After all, it is used all around the world and it carries a rather strong significance, but do we know what it was intended to mean, versus what it means nowadays.

For such a powerful word in all three of the Abrahamic religions, it doesn’t have much background information; or rather, it seems to have a short and very consistent history.

It appears to be as old as written history (I mean, there is no writing before written history, so logic would have it we can’t trace the actual origin beyond that… yes, I love stating the obvious!) and can be found in the earliest Jewish texts. Interestingly enough, the word amen is one of the very few examples of a word that has endured in a consistent form and meaning for thousands of years while becoming embedded in hundreds of languages.

Amen is said to be derived from the Hebrew word āmēn, which means “certainty,” “truth,” and “verily”. The word is found in the Torah, the Old Testament and the New Testament and was imported into Greek from the Judaism at the time of the early Church. From Greek, amen entered other European languages.

One funny note, in English, the word has two primary pronunciations: “ah-men” or “ey-men”. In Anglophone North American usage, the ah-men pronunciation is used in performances of classical music and in churches with more formalized liturgy. The ay-men pronunciation is a product of the Great Vowel Shift (i.e., it dates from the 15th century) that is associated with Irish Protestantism and with conservative evangelical denominations generally.

In Islam, the word amen is used with the same meaning as in Judaism and Christianity; when concluding a prayer, especially after a supplication (du'a) or reciting the first surah Al Fatiha of the Qur'an, as in prayer (salat), and as an assent to the prayers of others.

Today, the word amen is used to mean something of a confirmation, roughly “so be it" or "let it be so”. It is also frequently used to indicate that one strongly agreed with something (“amen to that” or “can I get an amen?”).

Either the word has a humble origin that has grown in strength over the past few millennia, or it always had a powerful meaning that has remained hidden from history, I cannot say!

For a word with such a strong meaning, that can transcend cultures, languages and continents, driving people to pious prayers and deep connection with the divine, the origin and history of the word, while factually acceptable, leaves me somewhat dissatisfied!

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