Category: Jewish Temple
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Making Scrolls into The Bible
Most laypeople hold the traditionalist view that the Pentateuch – the Torah – was written by Moses sometime after Israel’s Mt. Sinai event. Further, they accept implicitly that Isaiah wrote Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jeremiah, and so forth. Key to these assumptions is that the authors were recording real-time events in Israel’s history, with no ulterior motives. This is not the general assumption subscribed to by biblical scholars, and has not been for hundreds of years. Their stock-in-trade is the study of biblical and extra-biblical texts to try to understand what material influenced the writing, where it might have been written, and…
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How Judaism Was Subverted
Modern Judaism dates to the middle-ages. Before that came the Rabbinic Period, beginning in the first century. Before that was the period described as the “Late Second Temple” Period which included the Persian, Seleucid, Hasmonean and Roman occupation periods. Before that were the Babylonian exile and post-exilic periods, and before that the Assyrian obliteration of the northern tribes of the House of Israel. And before that? We simply don’t know. Because of sparse archaeological data, scholars dispute the historicity of David and Solomon, the conquest of Canaan, the Exodus, Moses’s upbringing in Pharaoh’s court, and the patriarchal sagas stretching back…
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The Strange Case of the Mishna
The Jewish Mishna is an enigma. Not its texts, per se. They are quite “practical” and plain as instructions on how to live the Jewish life. What is profoundly mysterious is the mentality of its authors in developing it between the 2nd half of the first century and the end of the second. You will likely notice that this time period includes the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 AD, a sixty-year inter-war period of unrest, followed by the last Jewish-Roman war from 132-136 AD.
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The Bible’s Crucial Lesson
Our purpose here is to expose what the Bible teaches is God’s desire and intentions of, and for us, and as a result, how the rest of one’s traditional religious beliefs and practices are supplanted. Having understood God’s heart for us, we will see which aspects of the Bible reveal it, and which don’t. Those that don’t, we need to recognize are there for different, and by definition, secondary, reasons. The Bible’s story of God’s plan and message isn’t “new”. It is simply non-traditional, and so largely ignored.
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The Development of Israel’s Idea of Righteousness
“Righteousness” to Israel came to mean being acceptable to God. Most know that the Ten Commandments given by God to Israel at Sinai served as the foundation for Israel’s idea of righteousness. The evolution of Israel’s received understanding of their position vis-à-vis the status of “righteous” before God was dependent on their progressive revelation by God of His will for therm. And, they had to fight through many false declarations intent on obscuring the truth to benefit men. While the Decalogue remained the bedrock of Israel’s moral imperative, their view did not remain static but developed through their history. Our…
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Whatever Happened to Yom Kippur?
I spend virtually zero time reading the Talmud. However, I recently stumbled onto a video presentation that describes some radically strange stuff there having to do with the Yom Kippur ceremony, especially after 30 AD. Especially for Christians, this is a must-know piece of Jewish legend.
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Jesus’ Fulfillments
In this piece, we’ll drill down into the claims of believers that Jesus, as the Christ – the Messiah, was the fulfillment not only of the Hebrew Bible’s Messianic prophecies, but further that He was the fulfillment of its “Law” and “the Prophets”, and, perhaps most controversially, of Israel itself, as well as inaugurating the New Covenant prophecies it proclaims.
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Why Priests and Sacrifices?
I have written several pieces explaining the fact that God, as He is recorded in the Hebrew Bible, did not want His people to perform sacrifices to Him. Yet the vast majority of the Pentateuch is all about sacrifices and offerings. Why?
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Searching for the Bible’s Sources
Many laymen dispute that the Pentateuch was written by several distinct authors. Biblical scholars don’t. But they disagree on who those authors were and what they wrote. If we stipulate that the authors of the Documentary Hypothesis wrote the Pentateuch, what can we discover about their backgrounds and worldviews? Let’s see.
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Why Jesus?
God promised Israel a savior, a Messiah of the line of David. Having rejected God and suffered for centuries they expectantly looked forward to their ultimate vindication and redemption that he would bring.
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What Did the “Law of Moses” Mean To…?
This post presents a three-part series looking at what the term “Law of Moses” (and similar) meant to different people at different times in the Bible; 1) The Israelites, at various points in their history, 2) Jesus (in His many interactions with others involving His understanding of its meaning), and 3) Paul, who infamously dismissed “works of the law” as valid for justification of his Jewish brethren.
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God’s Issues With the Temple Cult
A casual reading of the Pentateuch leaves one with the impression that, for some unexplained reason, God created a line of priests to mediate between him and hs rescued Hebrews and laid out in meticulous detail an intricate and fully developed sacrificial system, tabernacle, and culture. A more careful reading, however, at the very least calls into question the God-ordained pedigree of these details and practices. Scholars, theologians, Rabbis and regular Bible readers have noted these issues for centuries[i],[ii]. And we know that we have biblical textual scholars telling us that most of the Pentateuch was authored between the 8th…
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Uncleanness, Sin, and Holiness in the Hebrew Bible
Most modern Christians (and essentially all unbelievers) misunderstand the key patterns used by the Hebrew Bible to convey the concepts related to Holiness. They tend to see a moral binary pattern that can be summarized as: “Holiness is the absence of Sin”. But that’s not the pattern that the ancient authors of the Torah were guided by. Certainly, there is a relationship between sin and holiness. But it’s just not the one we moderns think of. Let’s see what it is.
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Not One Stone Left Upon Another
Do you know why God had to see to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple? I didn’t.
