Abba #87

Abba is Aramaic, not Hebrew — the everyday language spoken in first-century Judea and Galilee, closely related to Hebrew but distinct from it. It is the emphatic form of the ordinary word for “father,” used the way a child would address a parent directly: familiar and affectionate rather than formal. A wrinkle worth noting for anyone comparing Strong’s numbers: because abba is a transliterated Aramaic word that appears written out in the Greek text of the New Testament, its Strong’s entry (G5) sits in the Greek dictionary, not a Hebrew or Aramaic one — the word itself is Aramaic, but the concordance number reflects the language of the document it was transliterated into.

Biblical Usage

The word appears exactly three times in the New Testament, every time immediately followed by its Greek translation, “Father.” In Gethsemane, praying in anguish before his arrest, Jesus says, “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:36). Paul uses the same word twice to describe how believers relate to God: “ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15), and “God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6).

Theological Significance

That Mark preserves Jesus’s actual Aramaic word rather than translating it outright suggests the term was remembered as distinctive — a mode of address to God that stood out even to the Greek-speaking church repeating it decades later. Paul’s reuse of the same word for ordinary believers, not just for Jesus, is central to his argument that Christians are given, through the Spirit, the same kind of intimate filial relationship to God that Jesus himself had — adoption into the family rather than mere obedience to a master.