Tag: Hebrew Bible
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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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Unpacking the New Covenant Gospel
Many Western Christians [i] and secular individuals have misunderstood the core message of the Bible’s Good News for centuries. This analysis aims to clarify the true Gospel, obscured since the Reformation, by examining relevant New Testament and Hebrew Bible passages to determine whether they support or challenge what I’m referring to as the “New Covenant Gospel”, first proposed by Dr. Jason A Staples. This interpretation diverges from the traditional Gospel message fundamentally.
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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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How Old is the Hebrew Bible?
How old are the books of the Hebrew Bible, and why should we care? Since the Bible is likely the most influential book ever written, we deserve to know the truth of its composition and history.
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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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Does Paul’s Potter/Clay Metaphor Say What Christians Think It Says?
In Romans 9:18-23, Paul gives us a very sparse but dense (contextually) metaphor describing God as a potter working on “vessels” that in one case turn out “for blessing” and in others, turn out “for destruction”. Is Paul saying what traditionally has been believed he is saying? Let’s see.
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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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What, Or Who, Are the Bible’s Heavenly Beings?
One of the more obscure concepts in the Bible for me has been the idea of Heavenly beings. I say it is obscure because when they are mentioned in texts they remain quite enigmatic, and opinions among biblical scholars and theologians concerning the nature of these beings vary all over the map. In diving into this subject we have to keep in mind that the question is: “What was in the mind of the biblical authors when they referred to a ‘divine council’, or ‘sons of God’, or ‘hosts of heaven’”, NOT what the reality is (something I contend we…
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Fishers of Men
There is an intriguing connection, as pointed out by my friend and Hebrew Bible teacher, Ross K. Nichols, between some of the Hebrew Bible’s prophecies, describing a regathering set off by phrases placing that regathering in the “latter”/”last”/”days to come”, and Jesus’ statement that He would make His Disciples (the fishermen Simon (Peter) and his brother Andrew while they were in the process of fishing) “fishers of men” (Mt. 4:19). Question: Was Jesus simply using the obvious metaphor that those Disciples were vocationally already fishermen to connect the mission He was inviting them to take up? Or is there some…
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The “Fulfillment” of Scripture
Luke 4:[17] And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, [18] “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, [19] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” [20] And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes…
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Listen, Learn, Keep, Do
What were God’s instructions to His children? Moses thought they were crystal clear. They were the basis of God’s covenant with Israel. Where do we find these covenant teachings today? In significant part, they have been abandoned. Let’s take a look at what, according to Moses, the basic precepts of being “God’s people” involved[i], and why it was that Israel, as surrogates for all humanity, failed miserably at it.
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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 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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Where Did YHWH “Come From”?
Most of us are familiar with the Biblical story of YHWH introducing himself to Moses, as Moses was shepherding a flock, as a vision/theophany in a burning bush adjacent to Mt. Sinai/Horeb (Ex 3:1-2, 15). (For the uninitiated, your English Bible’s use of the word “LORD” [all caps] is its symbol for God’s name, YHWH.) There is a long tradition of Israel’s recognition of their God first occurring in the deserts south of Israel, in Midian through this episode. Midian was an area of today’s NW Arabia, home also to a people known as the Kenites. We’ll look at that…
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Some Narrative Patterns in the Hebrew Bible
One of the dominant features of the Hebrew Bible is its use of purely literary or literal-historical patterns – whether of actions, of the circumstances of characters, or similarities in narrative construction. Interestingly, some of the Bible’s patterns may just be literary devices for their own sake. This article identifies dozens of such forms. But the narrative patterns we’re interested in are those that serve through their repetition/reprise to underscore the importance of the pattern to the story of God and His people. Here we’ll dig into some examples of those that fall into this latter category. What we hope…
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The Lesson of Ecclesiastes
Those somewhat familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes know that its headline message is encapsulated in its second verse, Ec 1:2: [2] Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. The book’s Hebrew title is Qoheleth whose meaning roughly is “an expounder of wisdom”, the narrator of the book.
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Make Man In Our Image
What does “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26) mean about us? And, what does it mean that God gives man “dominion” over the living things in His Creation? And, what on earth does this have to do with prohibiting them from worshipping idols? Let’s find out.
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Who Wrote the Hebrew Bible?
Is it possible to figure out how the Hebrew Bible was written, by whom, and when? Those who study the text for a living would say “yes”. Among them is Richard Elliot Friedman, in his 1987 book “Who Wrote the Bible?” (updated in 2019). In it, Friedman makes an absolutely fascinating and substantially believable case for the origins and authorship of the Hebrew Bible. In this note, we’ll try to outline his major findings and summarize some of the textual data and analytical reasoning he uses to come to his conclusions. And, as we have done previously, we will ask…
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A Reassessment of the Source(s) and Authenticity of the Hebrew Bible
All scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). There is a festering dissonance today between the traditional view of the Bible by people of faith (both Jew and Christian), and the data uncovered within its text by those scholars known as Text- or Source-critics – people who study only the text to learn its dating, and authorship/sources. But, (and this will be my key point) I have concluded that the text-critical data concerning when or by…
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Interpreting the New Covenant
There is substantial controversy surrounding the proper interpretation of the announcement of a New Covenant between God and Israel and Judah (Je 31:31-34, Ezk 36:24-28). Both the Jewish and Christian interpreters spin its interpretation to suit their theological views, leaving no consensus. Let’s see if by working through the texts we can discover the truth.
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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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Did God Want a Temple, Sacrifices, or a Monarchy?
People casually familiar with the Hebrew Bible and its narrative of the history of Israel generally accept that the cultural symbols and practices that developed in that history were prescribed – even commanded – by their God Yahweh (YHWH). A little study, however, reveals a much more ambiguous situation.
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In the “Bronze Age”, Where Did the Bronze Come From?
Undoubtedly, this little monograph will be met with yawns of disinterest from most. I started thinking about the question of how the wandering Hebrews could come up with enough bronze to fashion the altar God commanded them to make while researching another Exodus topic. Since an entire epoch of some 2.100 years was named for the metal, which happened to encompass the beginnings of civilization and the first monotheistic religion, I decided to at least ask the question.
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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.