It’s almost Halloween, so let me tell you about an important gast. “What’s that?” you ask. Well, it’s the Old English word for a ghost. Old English is the phase that our language went through before William the Conqueror. Traces of it remain in Modern English.
Old English words can be fun. If you happen across a devil or a werewolf this season, the word devil derives from defol. “Werewolf” comes from werewulf. Were meant “man,” hence the meaning “wolf-man.” “Man” itself comes from mann, used for any person. A male mann likely had a wif. She was, of course, a wif mann, a female person, or “woman.”
At Thanksgiving, we will probably enjoy turkey and various special dishes. Food in general used to be called mete. A hint of the Old English swete mete lingers in our modern sweetmeats. And a turkey is a game bird or “fowl.” That word comes from fugol, which then applied to all birds and also led to our verb “to fly.”
Well, that’s the extent of my Old English wordhord, the collection of words a poet back then would draw on.
The ghost I want to tell you about isn’t ghastly, and doesn’t terrify you suddenly (gastan), leaving you aghast. Before King William’s time, a gast was a spirit, soul, or breath. Spirits can be frightening, but not necessarily. On its journey from gast to ghost, the word acquired spookiness and donned the white sheets with black eyes that haunt front yards this time of year.
When the Bible was first translated into (Middle) English by men like John Wycliffe, a gast had become a goost. Naturally, Wycliffe used that word to translate the Latin, Spiritu Sancto, which is equivalent to the Greek, Pneumatos Hagios. And so, our fourteenth-century ancestors read or heard John the Baptist’s testimony about Jesus,
“Y knew hym not; but he that sente me to baptise in watir, seide to me, ‘On whom thou seest the Spirit comynge doun, and dwellynge on hym, this is he, that baptisith in the Hooli Goost.’” (John 1:33, Wycliffe Translation, 1382)
By the time later translations, like the King James Version, were made, “ghost” was good “king’s English.” The popularity of that version kept “Holy Ghost” in business for centuries. The story contains a powerful point. The Holy Spirit or Ghost that Jesus promised and came to baptize us in or with is the Spirit of God. He is the one who hovered over the face of the formless void before God created life and order (Gen. 1:2). In one of His final acts, Jesus breathed (enphusesen) His breath-like Spirit into His disciples just as God had breathed life into the first man and, later, resuscitated an army of dry bones (Gen. 2:7; Ezk. 37:9; John 20:22). At Pentecost, the howling, wind-like, flaming Spirit transformed those disciples into witnesses so bold they performed miracles and often paid with their lives (Acts 1:4–8; 2:1–4). The Lord promises the same transformative power to us. Nothing scary about that!
