Category: moses
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Moses in Egypt?
The Bible’s Exodus narrative is quite specific about Moses’s history in Egypt: his adoption by the Queen; His rise to responsibility and power under Pharaoh; his crime, and his flight to Midian to escape justice. And from Moses’s introduction in this narrative, the Exodus author goes out of his way to inform us that Moses is from the tribe of Levi. We’ll look for Moses in the historical record, we’ll also try to understand the significance of his Levite identity. And, we’ll propose his place in the historical record of Egypt.
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Israel in Egypt?
Where is the evidence for Israel in Egypt and their Exodus from it? When we look for its memory in Egypt we don’t find it. When we look for it at Jericho we don’t find it. When we look for it in Egyptian or Mesopotamian records we don’t find it. You would think something as momentous as an entire nation emigrating from one land to another would get some mention in the historical (not just the Biblical) record. But we don’t see it, explicitly. Did it not happen (at least as recorded in the Bible)? Or, did it happen, but…
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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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Learning the Real Paul (and Unlearning What You’ve Been Taught)
Scholars and expositors have been mangling Paul’s message in his epistles (particularly Romans) for centuries. If we are to see Paul’s true message, we’re going to have to dig much more deeply into the text, and then unlearn nearly everything we thought we knew. No small undertaking. But in so doing, we will also see revealed the true Gospel message of not only the entire New Testament, but the Hebrew Bible as well, as one grand story. And once you’ve seen this story accurately, it is doctrine- and theology-upending to the point that you will never again read your Bible…
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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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The Priestly Slander of Moses
The Hebrew Bible presents conflicting political viewpoints between its authors. The priestly viewpoint seeks to distance itself (and its readers) from the mythic legacy of Moses as the redeemer of the nation of Israel and replace it with a system of abject reverence for, and obeisance to, the Aaronic priesthood. We’ll examine a few examples of how this conflict is played out in the text.
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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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The Origins of Judaism
When did “Judaism” begin to be widely practiced (i.e. widespread adherence to what we today recognize as the rules and calendar of the Pentateuch)? Irrespective of when the individual books of the Pentateuch were written, when did the majority of Judeans begin to live them out? The answer is quite shocking.
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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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Searching For (and Finding) the “Needle in the Biblical Haystack”: Following the Bible’s “Blue Thread”
Our premise in what follows is that there is a unified message permeating throughout the entire Bible: both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. That message represents God’s “signal” concerning how we are to treat Him (love and reverence), and each other (love, as we love ourselves). But His signal must penetrate through lots of modern distractions and Biblical texts that have little, if anything, to do with living in accordance with God’s will and with one another in love. Thus, they are “noise” obscuring His signal.
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Jesus and the Moses Scroll
Our purpose here is to compare and contrast the “Ten Words” (Decalogue) found in the “Moses Scroll” (MS) with both of the other canonical versions found in Exodus and Deuteronomy, but also with the teachings of Jesus. We’ll see if the nuances in the MS Ten Words (and their blessings and curses) can also be detected in Jesus’ teachings. And if they can, can we propose how such a linkage could exist when at the same time it is missing or much harder to find between our published versions of the Decalogue? Let’s see.
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Moses’ Real Words?
In the 1880’s an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem came into possession of an apparently ancient “scroll” consisting of fifteen strips of leather containing paleo-Hebrew texts. Within a period of five years of their “publication”, the fragments had been declared forgeries by “experts” in Europe, and shortly thereafter, the antiquities dealer, Moses Shapira, committed suicide in a Rotterdam hotel room in 1884. But what if they were authentic? That’s the question I want to pose and try to answer.
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Wrestling With the Origins of the Pentateuch
Modern Biblical scholarship has concluded that the majority of what we now have in the Biblical Pentateuch was substantially written in the seventh to fifth centuries BC. This creates a formidable problem for the traditionalist view (of both Jews and Christians) that holds that these foundational works were written by Moses, in Moses’ timeframe. But should it?
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The New Covenant…of Moses?
It may come as a surprise (as it did to me) that Moses, virtually before Israel was identifiably a nation, predicted the replacement of the Covenant he was given for them by a succeeding, New covenant in which God took things into His own hands.