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The 3rd Monotheistic Religion that is from Abraham

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[First posted December 9, 2014:

Bet you didn’t know:

“Jews and Christians are sometimes referred to in the Qur’an by Arabic translations of these names, but they are also referred to as “People of the Book.” This term originates in the Qur’an, and it comes from the recognition that Jews and Christians were recipients of scripture before the revelation of the Qur’an.”

This, you might have known:

“The Arabic term for one who surrenders or submits is muslim, and submission to God’s will is a core principle of Islam.”

Bet this one you don’t know:

“Abraham was not a Jew nor a Christian, but was a monotheist, a submitter [muslim], not an idolater.”

Or perhaps this?

“In theory, at least, there is a place for the covenanted chosenness of Judaism and Christianity within Islam.”

 

Where is this leading to?  

 

The topic of this post:  Chosenness and Covenant in the Qur’an, the 5th chapter of our MUST READ/MUST OWN Who are the REAL Chosen People? – by Reuven Firestone.  What is great about Reuven Firestone is — he simply says it like it is, with no judgment nor moralizing, and this kind of scholar is the kind to learn from (and emulate!) for the likes of us who came from religions/cultures that point the finger at one another and say “I’m right and you’re wrong.”  Let the reader, the audience, decide, right? But first, give everyone a hearing!  

 

Reformatted and highlighted for this post.—Admin1]

 
Image from www.vu39.com

Image from www.vu39.com

 

The Qur’an represents the divine message spoken by God through his angel Gabriel to Muhammad, who then recited the words he received to the people. In fact, the meaning of the word, Qur’an, is ”recitation”—divine revelation delivered through the recitations of God’s prophet Muhammad. The Qu’ran emerges into history in the seventh century CE in the west-Central Arabian region called the Hijaz.

 

Islam and the Religious Context of Arabia

 

The Roman Empire never controlled Arabia; neither did the Persian Empire or any other foreign power. Arabia remained outside the control of empire, but foreign cultures and religions nevertheless had a significant impact on community customs and the local way of life.

 

The establishment religions that opposed the emergence of the new religious movement of Islam were three:

  • Arabian polytheism,
  • Judaism,
  • and Christianity.

Jews and Christians had lived in Arabia for centuries and had attracted local Arabs to join their religions through conversion. Arabian Jews and Christians were thus highly acculturated to the local language and cultural practices and functioned, for all intents and purposes, as Arabs  practicing local versions of Judaism and Christianity.

 

Of the three establishment religious communities, the polytheists were the greatest obstacle to the emergence of Islam, and the Qur’an directs its resentment and anger mostly toward the indigenous religion of the Arabs and those who practiced it.

  • The most common term for idolatry in the Qur’an is the word shirk, which has the sense of “sharing, participating, associating.” That term carries something of the notion of polytheism known in the Israelite world as well, since polytheist are assumed to associate divinity in things other than God, and worship them in addition to the deity.
  • One who associates other powers with God is a mushrik.
  • Another term for those who did not follow Muhammad and accept the validity of the Qur’an is kafir, which has the sense of “denying,” as in denying the truth of God. This term has often been translated as “infidel,” though in modern Qur’an translation it is more often translated as “unbeliever.”

When the Qur’an refers to unbelievers, it may be referring to practitioners of traditional Arabian Polytheism (mushriks) or it may be referring to Jews and Christian.

 

The Qur’an notes that unbelievers tried actively to destroy the new movement.

 

 

”When you go forth in the land, its is no sin to cut back in your prayers if you fear that the unbelievers will attack you, for the unbelievers are clearly an enemy” (4:101).

 

This verse is followed with divine instruction about how to protect the community that had been previously attacked while engaging in prayer. This is followed by the words,

 

 

“The unbelievers want you to neglect your arms and your belongings so they may attack you once and for all… take precaution! (4:102).

 

According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad began receiving divine revelation in his hometown of Mecca, a major polytheistic religious center in his day.  Beginning about the age of forty, he began to receive revelations and continued to do so intermittently until his death nearly twenty-three years later. He performed no miracles, but his extraordinary charisma attracted many followers. His community was dedicated to a simple ethical way of life under the authority of the One Great God, the same God that had given prior revelation through the Israelite prophets and Jesus.

 

There is no evidence that there were Jewish or Christian communities living in Mecca in the seventh century. The reason is most likely that they did not feel comfortable living in a center of polytheistic religious practice, though individuals would regularly go there in order to trade. On the other hand, there was a large Christian community living in the region called Najran to the south, and a large Jewish community living in Yathrib to the north. Mecca’s status as religious center attracted tribes from throughout the region to make pilgrimage to it in order to worship the deities that were represented there by figures and pillars and images and temples. This was an important cultural and religious aspect of life in the region, and what we would call the “religious pilgrimage industry” was a mainstay of the Meccan economy. 

 

Trading fairs rose up around Mecca during the height of the pilgrimage season, and entire extended families and clans would move into Mecca and the surrounding area for a numbers of days. They would go to the markets to trade, and they would need materials for sacrifices and guides to instruct them through the many varied rituals.

 

When Muhammad began to attract followers to monotheism who then shunned the traditional religious practices in favor of simple prayer to the One Great God, he attracted the ire of the religious establishment. The threat was not merely one of competing religious ideology, but of competing business as well. The new religious movement soon grew large enough to represent a danger to the religious and the economic establishment of Mecca. He was vigorously opposed. The Qur’an contains passages that reproduce some of the accusations that were leveled against Muhammad by the polytheists of Mecca.

 

So they were surprised that a warner has come to them from their midst. Those unbelievers say, “This is a lying conjuror! Has he made the deities into one God? This is indeed a strange thing!” The chiefs among them go around saying, “Go, and remain faithful to your gods. This is certainly something concocted. We have not heard such a thing among people recently. It is only a fabrication.” (38:4-7)

 

God reassured Mohammed and supported him in his struggle. “And while the unbelievers plot against you to arrest you, kill you or drive you out, God plots too; and God is the better of the planners” (8:30). But Muhammad’s status in Mecca continued to deteriorate and eventually became so precarious that his life was in danger. He needed to find refuge from the relentless harassment of the Meccan establishment that opposed him.

 

An opportunity presented itself for him to move with his followers to the town of Yathrib, where Jews had a powerful presence. He agreed to make the move and in 622 CE he arrived in Yathrib, after which the town began to be called Medina, a shortened form of Madinat al-Nabi (City of the Prophet).

 

Competition and the “People of the Book” 

 

Muhammad naturally expected the Jews of Medina to recognize his prophethood. After all, the idolatrous Meccans may have been hopelessly steeped in their worship of false gods, but it was well known in Arabia that the Jews were an ancient people with a history of prophets and revelations that were not unlike the revelations that he had received.

 

Muhammad was sorely disappointed. From the perspective of the Jews, he was simply the leader of a threatening new religious movement. They accepted neither his prophetic teachings nor his prophetic status, just as their forebears in the Holy Land accepted neither the teachings nor the special status that Jesus claimed. Rather than an authentic prophet, Muhammad represented a threat to them and, unsurprisingly, they opposed him.

 

Jews and Christians are sometimes referred to in the Qur’an by Arabic translations of these names, but they are also referred to as “People of the Book.” This term originates in the Qur’an, and it comes from the recognition that Jews and Christians were recipients of scripture before the revelation of the Qur’an. The Qur’an makes it quite clear that Jews and Christians were not happy with the presence of a new form of monotheism in their midst.

 

“Many of the People of the Book would like to render you again unbelievers after your having believed, because of envy on their part after the truth has become clear to them. But forgive and be indulgent until God gives His commands, for God is the Power over everything” (2:109).

 

Because Muhammad lived in Medina where a large Jewish community had settled rather that in Najran or another area highly populated with Christians, most scholars believe that this and a number of similar verses are directed against Jews that he had encountered and who opposed him. This is also likely the reason why the Qur’an contains more criticism of Jews than Christians. Had Muhammad moved to a Christian area, the Christians would have opposed his claim to religious authority no less than the Jews. And in fact, in subsequent generations when Islam expanded beyond the Arabian peninsula, the Christian Byzantine Empire was the Muslims’ most dangerous enemy, both as competing empire and as representative of competing religion.

 

Abraham and authenticity

 

The Qur’an shares many symbols and ideas with the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and like them, it associates Abraham with its central symbols and religious values. Abraham is loyal, earnest, and witness to the absolute unity of God in the Qur’an, and he submits unceasingly to the divine will.

 

Like the New Testament, the Qur’an provides its own answer to the mystery of why God chose Abraham. According to the Qur’an, Abraham’s merit is found first in his ability to find God through reason. In polytheistic systems, celestial bodies such as the moon or stars and constellations were often worshiped. According to a passage in the Qur’an, as a young man, Abraham became attracted to the stars, which were soon eclipsed by the moon and then brightness of the sum. When Abraham observed the cycle of rising and setting, he realized that one great creator must have brought them all into existence, and it is to that God that Abraham must turn (3:75-79).

 

The Qur’anic Abraham is the dedicated monotheist. He resisted the oppression of his own people in order to demonstrate the unity of God. He physically demolished the idols of his father and his people, and when they responded by threatening to kill him for destroying the idols, he fled in search of God (37:83-99). One cannot help but see the parallel between Muhammad’s difficulties in Mecca and Abraham’s stalwart insistence on monotheism despite the religious oppression of his own people. They both bring down the idols of their own community and are forced to flee for their devotion and commitment.

 

Abraham is depicted in the Qur’an as establishing the foundations of Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca along with his son Ishmael. This is consistent with his building of altars and sacred sites in the Holy Land according to the Bible (Gen. 12:7-8), and the Qur’an tells us that he prayed that his descendents be loyal to God and follow the ritual and theological requirements that would epitomize the religion of Islam.

 

And when Abraham and Ishmael were raising up the foundations of the House [they prayed]:

 

“Our Lord, Accept [this] from us, for You are the Hearer, the Knower. Our Lord, Make us submitters [muslimayn] to You and our progeny a submissive people to You. Show us the ritual places and turn toward us, for You are the most relenting, the Merciful. Our Lord, send them a messenger from among them who will recite for them Your signs and teach them the Book and wisdom and make them pure and good. For You are the Mighty, the Wise.” Who could dislike the religion of Abraham other than those who fool themselves? We have chosen him in [this] world. And in the hereafter, he is among the righteous. When the Lord said to him: Surrender [aslim]! He answered: “I surrender to the Lord of the universe.” Abraham charged his sons, as did Jacob: “O my sons! God has chosen [the right] religion for you. [When you die,] die in submitters [to God]. (2:127-132) 

 
 

Abraham proclaimed that God had chosen true religion, and that religion is represented in the passage with Abraham’s devotion. The first thing that Abraham prayed for was that he and his descendants remain “submitters” to God. The Arabic term for one who surrenders or submits is muslim, and submission to God’s will is a core principle of Islam. But even beyond  the notion of submission as a key to Muslim identity is the symbolism of the actual word used to convey the notion. The difference in English transliteration between muslim as “submitter” and Muslim as a member of Islamic religion is conveyed by the use of lower or uppercase letters. In Arabic, there is no lower or upper forms, and therefore, no difference at all.  

 

Abraham, then, though he existed long before the emergence of Islam, represents the the quintessential Muslim because he submitted fully to God. He symbolizes and authenticates some of the most iconic features of Islam in this passage: worship at the Ka’ba (House) in Mecca and submission to the divine will.

As in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Abraham appears in the Qur’an as God’s “friend.” He thus represents for all three faith systems the pinnacle of relationship with God.

 

“Who is better in religion than one who surrenders to God [using the same word, muslim] while being righteous and following the tradition of Abraham the monotheist. God chose Abraham as friend” (4:125).

 

Given Abraham’s pivotal role as quintessential monotheist, it is not surprising that he figures deeply in Qur’anic polemic against not only polytheism, but also the establishment monotheism of the day. When in another passage Abraham prays that his descendants receive the same blessings as him, God answers, “My covenant does not include wrongdoers” (2:124). This is a critique of Jewish claims to chosenness based on their kinship with Abraham, a critique that we also observed in the New Testament. The most striking example of Abraham’s role in the polemics of all three expressions of monotheism, however, is in Qur’an 3:65-67:

 

O People of Scripture! Why do you argue about Abraham, when the Torah and the Gospel were not revealed until after him? Have you no sense? Do you not argue about things of which you have knowledge? Why, then, argue about things of which you have no knowledge! God knows, but you know not! Abraham was not a Jew nor a Christian, but was a monotheist, a submitter [muslim], not an idolater.

 

In this one short passage, the Qur’an makes an end–run around Jewish and Christian claims in order to claim Abraham for Islam. According to the logic expressed here, Abraham could not have been a Jew or a Christian because the very definition for these two religious categories is based on the receipt of scriptural revelation.  

 

Jews are Jews because they follow the Torah, and Christians are Christians because they follow Jesus, whose mission is detailed in the Gospel.

 

The definition of muslim, however, is simply “one who submits [to God],” and its meaning is not dependent on any scripture. Abraham was, by definition, a (small m) muslim because he submitted to the divine will. Since he lived before the revelations that would define Judaism and Christianity, he could not truly be claimed for either.

 

Whether a non-Muslim would agree with this argument or consider it merely an issue of semantics, the point here is that Abraham becomes a symbol of the natural competition between newly emerging religious and establishment religions. He appears in the important role of legitimizing each religious system because he so powerfully represents the relationship between God and humanity. And as we have observed, he appears in all three scriptures in roles that endorse some very specific and particular traits of each religion.

 

When the three are compared, however, we cannot help but find that he authenticates religions that have different, even conflicting views on some of the most basic issues. Abraham, therefore, is not exactly the same person in the three scriptures.

    • In the Hebrew Bible he represents ultimate obedience to the divine call despite his occasional doubt (as in Gen.17:17-18).
    • In the New Testament he symbolizes absolute faith in God even before he was called, and thus serves as a role model for the necessary faith in Christ.
    • And in the Qur’an Abraham authenticates the sanctity of Islamic religious practice and epitomizes the need for humanity to submit humbly to the will of God.
 

His role as God’s chosen, God’s love or intimate friend, makes him the variable symbol of right religion for each religious tradition. His character and personality thus become central and basic to each as a means of authentication and legitimization.

 

Qur’anic expressions of the chosenness of Islam are not dependent only on the figure of Abraham. Plenty of other expressions may be found to demonstrate God’s choice as well.

 

  • For example, in a discussion on permitted foods that finds some parallels with the dietary laws found in the Hebrew Bible is the statement,

“This day I have perfected your religion for you, completed My favor upon you and have chosen for you Islam as your religion” (5:3).

 
  • And in reproof directed against the People of the Book who were harassing the new community of believers, God assures Muhammad’s followers,

“You are the best community that has been brought forth for humanity, commanding the reputable and forbidding the disreputable  and believing in God. If the People of the Book had believed it would have been better for them. Some of them are believers, but most are degenerate” (3:110).

 

In this passage, the elite status that is conveyed upon the new community of believers is dependent on engaging in proper behaviors.

 

In the following passage it is the combination of proper behavior and proper faith that merits the inheritance of the special status previously reserved for others.

 

“God has promised those of you who believe and do good works that He will make them heirs of the land, just as He made those before them to be heirs, and He will surely establish for them their religion that He has approved for them, exchanging security for them in a place of fear. They shall worship me and not associate anything with Me. Those who disbelieve after that are the reprobate” (24:55).

 

The message here is consistent with the repeated Qur’anic critique of the earlier covenants. Membership within a covenanted community is never static in the Qur’an. You must validate your membership through belief and action, a criterion that allows for Muslims to inherit the status of Jews and Christians, who are accused of neglecting or abandoning the requirements that were earlier placed upon them.

 

Supersession or Correction?

 

These passages illustrate how concerned the Qur’an is with the covenantal claims of Jews and Christians. But it does not claim to supersede them as the New Testament claims to supersede the “old” covenant of the Hebrew Bible. The Qur’an certainly excludes most Jews and Christians from the very covenants they claim to represent and uphold by citing their lack of commitment to them (2:124, 4:54-55, 5:12-14), but it does not claim to replace them. Rather, it claims to “correct” them and to provide a means of bringing errant monotheists (not to mention polytheists!) back to the proper path to God.

 

Abraham, for example, epitomized the true monotheist who submitted himself fully to God’s will. According to the Qur’an, most Jews and Christians have lost sight of the true essence of the Abrahamic commitment.

 

Despite  the passages that claim to represent Islam as God’s  chosen religion and its followers as God’s chosen community, the  Qur’an is not actually as preoccupied  with the chosenness issue as the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are.  Recall that the competition for chosen status between Jews and Christians was a “zero-sum” situation based on the unique nature of monotheism in a world that was overwhelmingly polytheistic. It was inconceivable in that environment to think that there could be more than one divinely chosen community. Jews and Christians at the time argued over which one was the chosen one.

 

By the seventh century, however, much had changed in the Near East. The Roman Empire had become the Christians’ Byzantine Empire, and Jews and Christians had become increasingly dispersed throughout the region. These two developments encouraged a huge influx of erstwhile polytheist into one or another of these two monotheistic systems.

 

Moreover, Christianity had produced many different expressions and denominations, and Judaism also existed in a variety of forms between the Holy Land, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Historical demographers believe that the overwhelming majority of peoples in the Near East at this time were monotheist of one form or another, while a significant minority was represented by Zoroastrianism.

 

 Zoroastrianism is an ancient religious system that emerged independently of either Judaism or Christianity, and it is not monotheistic. Nevertheless, it was the state religion of the Persian Empire and was extremely sophisticated and impressive, represented by great literatures and theologies, administered by a highly educated priesthood, and organized around beautiful temples and monumental structures.  All three great religious systems represented high religious civilization to the old, indigenous polytheisms. In fact, only a few pockets of traditional polytheism remained in the Near East at this time. The largest seems to have been in Arabia.

 

In other words, it was no longer so unique in the Near East of the late seventh century to believe in the one Great God. Even Arabia had a well-known population of monotheists, and when Arabs traded beyond the borders of Arabia, most of the people they came  into contact with were monotheist as well. Islam was thus born in a world that was radically different from either the world of emerging biblical monotheism or the world of emerging Christianity.

 

As Islam emerged into its own religious world, its devotees could not claim exclusive truth as monotheists in a world of polytheism, as did ancient Israel. Neither could they claim sole possession of the ultimate relationship with the one Great God in a simple bilateral competition with the Jews, as did Christianity. The Muslim community encountered a multi-monotheist playing field in which the goal had to be, simply, to demonstrate superiority in its claim for share of the market.

 

The religious fellowship of Islam, the umma in Qur’anic parlance as articulated in Qur’an 3:110, is “the best community that has been brought forth for humanity,” but only as long as its members would “command the reputable and forbid the disreputable, and believe in God.”

 

Exactly what was meant by these requirements was not articulated unambiguously in the Qur’an. That is to say, would successfully fulfilling these three obligations be possible only within an Islamic framework? Or could Jews and Christians acceptably command the reputable and forbid the disreputable within their own religious system?

 

Some Qur’anic passages such as 2:62, say that  they may:

 

“Those who believe, and who are Jews, and Christians  and Sabaeans—whoever  believes in God and the Last Day  and who work righteousness—they have their reward with their Lord, they  shall not fear nor should they grieve.”

 

The identical message is given again in 5:69 although debatable, 22:17 might even include Zoroastrians among those approved by God.

 

Other verses, such as 9:29, talked a different position, which according to many interpreters is considered to have abrogated the more welcoming verses mentioned above.

 

”Fight those given scripture who do not believe in God or in the Last Day and do not make forbidden what God and His messenger have made forbidden, and do not practice the religion of truth, until they pay tribute willingly, in a humbled state.”

 

This verse may be interpreted as condemning only those People of the Book who are not true to their own scriptural traditions, or it may be interpreted to mean that all those who have been given prior scripture have become unbelievers and rebels against the very divine revelation that they received. However, one may interpret this verse, it places monotheist represented by the religions of the book in a secondary positions to Muslims. It is an elitist position, but it is not supersecessionist. Even in exclusivist readings of the Qur’an, chosenness is shared among all monotheists.

 

In theory, at least, there is a place for the covenanted chosenness of Judaism and Christianity within Islam.

MUST READ

What about the 3rd world monotheistic religion, Islam?

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[First posted November 8, 2012, another interesting discussion from Paul Johnson in A History of the Jews.  As the title of the post suggests, this is about the development of Islam in a nutshell. This book is downloadable as ebook from amazon.com, and part of our MUST READ category. Reformatting and highlight ours—Admin1.]

 

 

Image from www.dreamstime.com

Image from www.dreamstime.com

Like Christianity, Islam was originally a heterodox movement within Judaism, which diverged to the point where it became a separate religion, and then rapidly developed its own dynamic and characteristics. The Jewish presence in Arabia is very ancient. In the south, in what is now Yemen, Jewish trading interests date back to the first century BC, but in the north or Hijaz, it goes back very much further. One Arab historical legend says that Jewish settlement in Medina occurred under King David, and another puts it back to Moses. Babylonian inscriptions discovered in 1956 suggest that Jewish religious communities were introduced in the Hijaz, in the 6th century BC, and they may have been there even before. [Source: Charles ‘C. Torrey, The Jewish Foundation of Islam). But the first definite confirmation, in the form of Jewish names in tomb inscriptions and graffiti, does not go back further than the 1st century BC. At all events, during the early Christian era, Judaism spread in north Arabia and some tribes became wholly Jewish. There is evidence that Jewish poets flourished in the region of Medina in the 4th century AD, and it is even possible that a Jewish-ruled state existed there at this time. According to Arab sources, about 20 tribes in and around Medina were Jewish.

 

These settled oasis tribes were traders as much as pastoralists, and Islam was from the start a semi-urban trader’s religion rather than a desert one. But the desert was important, because Jews living on its fringes, or moving to it escape the corruptions of city life, such as the Nazirites, had always practiced a more rigorous form of Judaism and, in particular, had been uncompromising in their monotheism. That was what attracted Mohammed.

 

The influence of Christianity, which would have been strictly monotheistic in his eyes, was very slight, at any rate at this early stage. What he seems to have wished to do was to destroy the polytheistic paganism of the oasis culture by giving the Arabs Jewish ethical monotheism in a language they could understand and in terms adapted to their ways.

 

  • He accepted the Jewish God and their prophets, the idea of fixed law embodied in scripture—the Koran being an Arabic substitute for the Bible—and the addition of an Oral Law applied in religious courts.
  • Like the Jews, the Moslems were originally reluctant to commit Oral Law to writing.
  • Like the Jews, they eventually did so.
  • Like the Jews, they developed the practice of responsum, and the earliest responsa seem to have consciously adopted a Judaic formula.
  • Like the Jews, the Moslems accepted strict and elaborate codes covering diet, ritual purity and cleanliness.

 

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Image rom smic-geography.weebly.com250 × 315Search by image

Mohammed’s development of a separate religion began when he realized that the Jews of Medina were not prepared to accept his arbitrarily contrived Arab version of Judaism. Had Mohammed possessed the skill and patience to work out an Arab halakhah, the result might have been different. But it is unlikely. One of the strongest characteristics of Judaism is the willingness of Jewish communities to exist in distant areas without the need for acculturalization. At all events, Mohammed rebuffed, and he thereafter gave a deliberate new thrust to Islamic monotheism.

 

  • He altered the nature of the Sabbath and changed it to Friday.
  • He changed the orientation of prayers from Jerusalem to Mecca.
  • He redated the principal feast.
  • Most important of all, he declared that most of the Jewish dietary laws were simply a punishment for their past misdeeds, and so abolished them, though he retained the prohibitions on pork, blood and carcasses, and some of the slaughtering rules.

All these changes made it quite impossible to bring about a merging of Jewish and Islamic communities, however much they might agree on ethical or dogmatic fundamentals; but, in addition, Islam soon developed a dogmatic dynamism of its own, and theological debate — leading to violent sectarianism — soon began to play a central role in Islam, as in Christianity.

 

Above all, Islam quickly created a theory and practice of forcible conversion, as the Jews had done in the time of Joshua, David and the Hasmoneans, but which rabbinic Judaism had implicitly and conclusively renounced. It spread with astonishing speed, to engulf the Near East, the whole of the southern Mediterranean, Spain and vast areas of Asia. By the early 8th century, the Jewish communities which still retained precarious footholds in the Greek and Latin worlds, found themselves cocooned in a vast Islamic theocracy, which they had in a sense spawned and renounced, and which now held the key to their very survival. But, by now, they had developed their own life-support system, the Talmud, and its unique formula for self-government —the Cathedocracy.

SINAI 6000

IN HIS NAME: What’s in a name? – 1

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[First posted May 17, 2012; part of a whole series IN HIS NAME:  

—Admin1]
——————————

 

 

“Who would you be if you didn’t know your name?” is the first line of a song my son wrote.  I had to think about that . . . Really, what’s in a name?  Identity, character, personal history, reputation, achievement, connectivity, context, legacy, stigma, to name a few.

 

How important is it to get a name right? To function in this world, absolutely necessary! It figures in employment, drivers license, company/school ID, citizenship, social security, bank transactions, property rights, routine matters, death certificates, relational issues such as paternity, inheritance, royalty blue blood claims to the throne.

 

Reputation —whether honor or shame—is likewise carried in the name, whether persons lived well or badly.  And fortunately as well as unfortunately, such good or ill repute spill over to progenitors; hence proverbs such as ‘the apple does not fall far from the apple tree’.  Drop a name and it either opens or closes doors of opportunity.

 

We are named at birth, and unless it is changed in marriage and for legal reasons, that name spells out our very existence. It ends up etched on a gravestone, but mention the name of a deceased and that alone evokes specific images and thoughts associated with that name.

 

Talk show hosts occasionally play an interesting name game with their guests who are asked to give in an instant, a word that best characterizes the person named, at least in that guest’s viewpoint.  Think about what one word would characterize you? Or does that word depend on the perceiver? Do people see the real you or do you have a public face different from private?  Are you an open book or a closed one? Does your essence fit the name you bear, if it was not your choice?

 

In this day and age of unbelievable scams perpetrated on personal information relating to a name, it is all the more urgent to take precautionary measures protecting one’s name, identity, and personal information. Just as ruinous is gossip or false accusation as well as scandal broadsheets that proliferate which blow out of proportion the slightest rumor whether baseless or not, which are so easily taken for truth, simply because they are spread around even by disreputable media.

 

You would think identity theft is a new phenomenon but no, it is as old as the need to impersonate someone for any reason at all. In the field of literature, forgeries proliferated all through the centuries.  Unfortunately we do live in a world of deceptions and forgeries and it is becoming more difficult to ferret out the truth, though science has developed enough technology to unmask counterfeits.

 

Bart D. Ehrman, Christian scholar turned atheist, wrote a fascinating book about this with a simple title: FORGED:

 

“When I give public lectures on forgery, I am often asked, “Who would do such a thing?”  The answer is, “Lots of people!”  And for lots of different reasons.  The most common reason today, of course, is to make money . . . . The forgery trade continues to thrive; forgeries in the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, an many, many others continue to flood the market, as recent literature on modern forgery so aptly attests.  These forgeries are almost always produced in order to be sold as authentic.  There was a good deal of that kind of activity in the ancient world as well (and far fewer forgery experts who could detect a forgery if they saw one), although it was not a major factor within early Christianity.  This was for a simple reason:  Christian books were not, by and large, for sale.”

 

From this book, you learn a few new words to add to your vocabulary, such as:

 

  • “Orthonymous” (literally, “rightly named”), writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it.  Seven of Paul’s 13 epistles are orthonymous, so he claims.
  • “Homonymous” (literally, “same named”) is writing that is written by someone who happens to have the same name as someone else.

 

In the days of antiquity, specially when the Christian scriptures were being put together, many people were named John, James, Jude, and Mary.  In the case of Mary, you have to be mindful when that name is mentioned in the gospels because there are actually five Mary’s.

 

  • “Anonymous” we know about, literally it means “having no name.”  These are authors who choose not to identify themselves.  Ehrman claims that technically speaking, anonymity is true of 1/3 of the New Testament books, that none of the four gospels actually tell us the name of its author and only later did Christians assign names. He adds that the “anonymous” author of the book of Hebrews would like readers to think it was authored by Paul even if it wasn’t.
  • “Pseudonymous” (literally, “falsely named”) refers to any book that appears under the name of someone other than the author.

 

Ehrman says there are two kinds of pseudonymous writings:  one is that the author simply takes a pen name and he gives the example of Samuel Clemens—who chose the name ‘Mark Twain’ of Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn fame.  Think of George Elliott who was actually a woman writing under a man’s name during a time women might not have been published.

 

In this website, in case you haven’t noticed, contributors have opted to use 3 initials appended to “@S6K” to consistently project that the author is a Sinaite and is identifiable in person only to this small community.  We decided this because we are dealing with unknown visitors on the internet and have resorted to maintaining some privacy, specially since the ‘crusade’ we’ve specifically embraced is, to put it mildly, hardly a popular one.

 

The second type of pseudonymous writing, explains Ehrman, involves a book that is circulated under the name of someone else, usually some kind of authority figure who is presumed to be well known to the reading audience.  For this type, he uses the technical term “pseudepigraphy” (literally, “written under a false name”). To elaborate, pseudepigraphical writing is one that is claimed to be written by a famous, well-known, or authoritative person who did not in fact write it.

 

To complicate matters further, there are two kinds of this—one where the readers presume who the author is and ascribe the writing to that person and that is called “mistaken ascription.”  The other pseudonymous pseudepigraphical writing is one where the author himself chooses to fool his readers and ascribes his writing to another famous person.

 

If this is all getting to be very confusing, it is vital to try to understand because all this is dealing with a book that is probably the most printed and reprinted, the most translated and retranslated, the top-selling book worldwide, but  relegated to private bookshelves and casually read, perhaps not as well understood, but thankfully scrutinized by biblical scholars non-stop over centuries.  The reason for this is only one:  it claims to be authored by God Himself.  Skeptics, atheists and agnostics would challenge that authorship claim, but few believers do.

 

 

Who authored the Bible?  If it is “God, “what is His Name?  If ‘pseudephigraphers’ wrote “in God’s Name”, then who could they have been?  In this day and age of information technology and updated research in antiquity and archeology, books are coming out of the woodworks exposing the actual or presumed authors of the books of the Bible, both in the “New” Testament as well as the “Old”.  We will be featuring more such books soon!

 

 

 

NSB@S6K

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Exodus/Shemoth

What if you were a Hebrew slave in Egypt?

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[First posted in April 2012, reposted April 2014. 

This year, 2016 from April 22 to 30, Jewry commemorate two feasts that recount the history of their liberation from Egyptian bondage:  Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread.  Translation: EF/Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses.—Admin1.]

 

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Image from americanisraelite.com

Image from americanisraelite.com

The starting point of any journey is significant in the sense that the traveller has to determine what he should pack for the trip.  In the biblical account of the Exodus, the Israelites were given specific instructions on how to prepare for their freedom trek out of the land of their bondage, Egypt, into uncertain territory through the wilderness of Sinai toward the Land of promise.

 

Put yourself in a Hebrew slave’s place and think the thoughts he might have pondered:

  • For such a journey, what does a slave bring?  
  • What worldly possessions might a slave have to even pack?
  • What about food provisions to physically survive in an inhospitable environment; would we have enough to last the unspecified time it would take?
  • There are so many UNKNOWNS!

Think and consider:  

  • Why leave familiar surroundings in Egypt, insufferable though life is in what has become “home” for our people for 400 years?
  • At least we have access to daily bread between non-stop-no-rest back-breaking-brick-making labor; better the devil we know!
  • What to do, what to do . . . .not to worry, we’re assured after all, that the travel orders come from . . . Whom?  
  • What did Moses say His Name was? is? will be?  
  • Have Israelites heard that Name before?

Didn’t word get around that the Pharaoh didn’t recognize that God and answered:

 

 Exodus/Shemoth 5:2 

 Pharaoh said:

 “Who is YHVH,

that I should hearken to his voice to send Israel free? 

 I do not know YHVH,

 moreover, Israel I will not send free!”

 

Pharaoh does not know this god, never heard his name before.

 

  • Do we know the name of our God?
  • Were we ever told by our parents, were they told by theirs, through generations since the first generation of Yaakobites/Israelites came to live in Egypt some 400 years ago?
  • Do we even remember the name of the God of our patriarch Jacob?
  • Weren’t we often told the story about our forefather’s night experience, wrestling with that mysterious figure?
  • Before parting, didn’t he have an opportunity to ask for a name and did he get a straight answer?
  • What was the name, can we remember  . . .?

Genesis/Bereshith 32:28-30  

28 He said to him:

What is your name?

And he said: Yaakov. 

29 Then he said:

Not as Yaakov/Heel-sneak shall your name be henceforth uttered,

but rather as Yisrael/God-fighter,

for you have fought with God and men

and have prevailed. 

30 Then Yaakov asked and said:

Pray tell me your name!

But he said: Now why do you ask after 

my name?

And he gave him farewell-blessing there.

31  Yaakov called the name of the place: Peniel/Face of God,

for I have seen God

face to face,

and my life has been saved.

 

So if our patriarch Jacob didn’t get a straight answer,

  • how can generations of Israelites know our God’s name,
  • except as “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” and “El Shaddai“
  • which are not names at all?
  • Is not a name important for identity?
  • There are so many gods in Egypt, so many gods among the nations, how do we distinguish the true god who claims to be our god . . . if we don’t know his name?

 

Exodus/Shemoth 3:13-16

13 Moshe said to God: 

Here, I will come to the Children of Israel

and I will say to them: 
Image from www.satansrapture.com

Image from www.satansrapture.com

The God of your fathers has sent me to you, 

and they will say to me: What is his name?-

what shall I say to them?

14 God said to Moshe: 

EHYEH ASHER EHYEH/I will be-there howsoever I will be-there

. And he said: 

Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel:

EHYEH/I-WILL-BE-THERE sends me to you.

15 And God said further to Moshe: 

Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel: 

YHVH,

the God of your fathers, 

the God of Avraham, the God of Yitzhak, and the God of Yaakov, sends me to you.

That is my name for the ages,

that is my title (from) generation to generation.

16 Go, 

gather the elders of Israel

and say to them: 

YHVH, the God of your fathers, has been seen by me, the God of Avraham, of Yitzhak, and of Yaakov, saying:

I have taken account, yes, account of you and of what is being 

done to you in Egypt,

 

 

Exodus/Shemoth 6:2-3

2 God spoke to Moshe, 

he said to him: 

 am YHVH.

3 I was seen by Avraham, by Yitzhak, and by Yaakov 

as God Shaddai, 

but (by) my name YHVH I was not known to them.

 

YHWH . . . that’s a name we’ve never heard before!

  • How do we know he’s the one?
  • Are we  supposed to swallow everything that comes from the mouth of that messenger, what’s his name, Moses?
  • Sounds like Thut-moses, Ra-moses, or Ramses, aren’t those Egyptian names?  
  • Is he Egyptian?  
  • Wasn’t he connected somewhat to the Pharaoh’s family?
  • Didn’t he disappear 40 years ago?
  • What’s he doing coming back here?
  • Can we trust someone who was never one of us, never living with us, never slaving away with us from the very beginning?

But, as we’ve already witnessed,  9 plagues have stricken the Egyptians right and left, while we and our homes have been spared!  That should make us think!  How many more proofs do we need to believe the power of this God whose name is YHWH and His sincerity in going to all this trouble to liberate us? Why us?

 

This YHWH has chosen us

even if we have not chosen him!  

 

  • Who are we to say NO to FREE GRACE?
  • This is our chance to get out of this miserable life!
  • What have we done to deserve living like this for generations, with no rest from our labors?  
  • And with the Pharaoh making it even more impossible for us to make bricks!
  •  Sometimes we wish this Moses would back off, he’s caused us more misery and heavier burdens!
  • But perhaps that’s part of the power play; this Moses seems to have quite a few tricks up his sleeve but he’s only a man, so the plagues upon the Egyptians must be coming from the God whose name Moses proclaims!

And now we ourselves are being put to a test!

  •  Whereas previously we were simply witnesses to the miracles of this YHWH, now we are told to participate in the plague against the firstborn.
  • Couldn’t we just huddle quietly inside our home the way we did during previous plagues?  
  • Must we now take part by following the final instructions?  
  • And how strange these instructions are!

Would we dare slaughter one of Egypt’s gods—a lamb—right here in Egypt?

 

Exodus 8:21-23 

21 Pharaoh had Moshe and Aharon called 

and said: 

Go, slaughter (offerings) to your god in the land!

22 Moshe said:

 It would not be wise to do thus: 

for Egypt’s abomination is what we slaughter for our God; 

if we were to slaughter Egypt’s abomination before their eyes, 

would they not stone us?

23 Let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness,

and we shall slaughter (offerings) to YHVH our God, as he has said to us.

 

Image from pjsprayerline.blogspot.com

As if that’s not hard enough,

  • we have to roast this lamb; just think of the aroma of roasting meat wafting all over Egypt, they’ll know what we’re doing when they smell it!
  • Then we’re supposed to eat it and not leave anything.
  • As if that’s not enough for faint-hearted slaves like us, worse, we are commanded to further flaunt our disrespect for their god by splattering the lamb’s blood on the lintel and doorposts of our houses.
  • Isn’t that the height of insult, that blood evidence will surely identify us and the Egyptians will slaughter us if they recover from the most recent plague!

What to do, what to do . . . do we have a choice?

 

  • For the first time in our hopeless life of slavery, we have been given an opportunity to make a decision for ourselves!
  • The alternative to slavery, to a lifetime of bondage, is being served to us on a silver platter by the God of our patriarchs.
  • All we are asked to do is to take that leap of faith!
  • Obey all instructions to the letter, and let our rediscovered Self-Revealing God do the rest!
  • He has already shown what He has done to Egypt’s other gods, do we need one more proof of His power?

Exodus 12:12-13 

12 I will proceed through the land of Egypt on this night and strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, from man to beast,

 and on all the gods of Egypt I will render judgment,

I, YHVH.

13 Now the blood will be a sign for you upon the houses where you are: 

when I see the blood, I will pass over you, 

the blow will not become a bringer-of-ruin to you, when I strike down the land of Egypt.

 
 

Who was it who said ‘You shall know the truth the truth will set you free?‘ (Oops, that’s in the New Testament, supposedly said by Jesus, picked up by Dr. Martin Luther King for his freedom march. Still, that statement is so true!)

 

Sinaites have come to know the Truth about the One True God and this Truth has indeed set us free! Free from what?

 

Let’s start with the obvious:  IGNORANCE!

And the second obvious:  MANMADE “TRUTHS”!

 

The God we have sought all our lives is the God who commissioned Israel to declare Him to the gentiles like ourselves; we have come to believe in the original good news:  

 

YHWH reigns today and as foretold by the prophet Zechariah 14:9:

 

JPS/And the LORD shall be King over all the earth;

in that day shall the LORD be One, and His name one.

 

You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

He liberates all who are in bondage to ignorance and falsehood but there is a condition to such freedom:  one must decide, just like the Hebrew slave, to believe in this God and and what He has promised to all who seek Him, take Him at His Word, and let Him have the last word:

Do not add to what I command you

and do not subtract from it,

but keep the commands of the LORD your God

that I give you.

(Deuteronomy 4:2)

But if from there you seek the LORD your God,

you will find him if you seek him

with all your heart and with all your soul.  

(Deuteronomy 4:29)

12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

14 I will be found by you,”

(Jeremiah 29:12-14)

 

Hear, O Jew, O Gentile:

 

 “I will be found by you!”

 

 

 

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WORSHIP AIDS

Homage

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Prayer photo

Sculpture at entrance of a memorial park, Northern Luzon Expressway, RP – taken from moving vehicle at dawn.

O YHWH, Master of the universe,

Creator and Giver of life:

You birth us into existence

within earthly soils and historic times,

individually designed

but equally gifted

with freedom to rightly choose.

 

May we persevere within communities

that nurture us

in good times and bad

to mature into responsible people

for destinies You purpose for us to fulfill.

 

O Self-revealing God of Sacred Scriptures,

By Your providence

We need no longer be ignorant

of Your ways,

nor of Your vision for humanity.

 

Your unchanging declaration

echo through the ages,

calling upon people of all nations

to live lives full of

lovingkindness,

mercy

and grace,

lives that relentlessly pursue

righteousness

and justice,

since that which is genuinely beneficial to all

is that which ultimately finds favor in Your eyes.

 

It is when we see these

in our neighbor

and in ourselves

and in this world,

that we see

You.

 

We awaken our hearts to gratefulness, O Father,

for mercies have flowed upon us day by day:

in health and dis-ease,

in labor and in rest,

in the daily renewing beauty of earth and sky.

 

May the challenges for truth and justice

stir us from our ease

and quicken our endeavors.

 

In the contemplation of Your eternity,

may we be filled with hope,

for

that which is right and true

can never perish.

 

Bless therefore our strivings

to be more and more in accord

with Your pure will,

that grace may rain upon us

through the promised blessings

of obedience.

 

Blessed are YOU,
O LORD, our God,
King of the universe
Who created joy and gladness,
celebration,
joyful festivity and merriment,
love and brotherhood,
peace and companionship.

 

May all these pervade
the UC culture
as we bring home
the essence of giving
that our Founder
bequeathed to academe.

 

Amen.

 

[Written for the occasion of the Centenary Commemorative Ceremony honoring the Founder of the University of the Cordilleras,  April 19, 1913-2013; collaborative work of daughters NSB/LSS@S6K].

DAILY POSTS

Yo searchers! Need help? – April 2015

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Image from emekatalks.com

Image from emekatalks.com

[For a list of ALL articles, please click SITEMAP, upper right box above the active Sinai images.]

 

04/17/16 –  “yhwh will bless you”  – The blessings from the God of Israel, YHWH, the universal God of all peoples and nations, are promised in many verses of the Torah but are conditional—specifically in relation to obedience. And just as obedience results in blessing (often automatically),  the opposite of blessing are the automatic consequences for disobedience which are curses.

 

Devarim/Deuteronomy 30:15-20

 

15  See, I set before you today

life and good, and death and ill:  

16  in that I command you today 

to love YHWH your God,

to walk in his ways

and to keep his commandments, his laws and his regulations,

that you may stay-alive and become-many

and YHWH your God may bless you

in the land that you are entering to possess.  

17  Now if your heart should face-about, and you do not hearken, and you thrust-ourself-away and prostate yourselves to other gods, and serve them,  

18  I announce to you today

that perish, you will perish,

you will not prolong days on the soil that you are crossing the Jordan to enter, to possess.  

19  I call-as-witness against you today the heavens and the earth:  life and death I place before you, blessing and curse; now choose life, in order that you may stay-alive, you and your seed,

20  by loving YHWH your God,

by hearkening to his voice and by cleaving to him,

for he is your life and the length of your days,

to be settled on the soil

that YHWH swore to your fathers, to Avraham, to Yitzhak and to Yaakov,

to give them!

 

 

 

04/14/16 -“sermon on the mount and the new sinai” –  Thank you, searcher, for this entry . . . except that the original post was not referring to a “new” Sinai but the original Sinai where, according to the Hebrew Scriptures (specifically the Torah in the TNK),
  • the Creator Who formed the nation of Israel
  • from the patriarchs
    • Abraham,
    • Isaac and
    • Jacob (whose 12 sons ‘generated’ the 12 tribes),

—revealed—

  • Himself,
    • His Name YHWH,
    • and His Truth,
    • His Way (the Torah)
    • and the Life (Torah living).

And, excuse us, folks, with all due respect to what the supposed “sequel” to the Hebrew Scriptures claim,  that Self-Revealing God on Sinai would not be the Christian Savior-Messiah Jesus Christ.

 

So this post discusses the difference between the God of Israel and the Second Person of the Christian Trinitarian Godhead.
Here’s the post:

 

The Sermon on Sinai vs. The Sermon on the Mount
04/06/16  – “animal sacrifice in christianity” – 
The Christian scriptures (New Testament) teach that there is no more need for animal sacrifices which supposedly prefigured in the OT,  the Final Sacrifice of God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ in the NT.  And if hypothetically speaking,  Christians would perform animal sacrifices, one would have to wonder “for what purpose?”  Even the Jews to whom the animal sacrifices were commanded in the Torah no longer perform these rituals.  Why?  Because the place of such sacrifices is no longer existing, which was the Temple in Jerusalem.  
Now, if the question were: what were the animal sacrifices for in the TNK/Hebrew Scriptures/”Old” Testament?  
Here’s a post: 

Revisit: TORAH 101: What were the animal sacrifices all about? – Jewish Perspective

 

 

 

04/02 – ‘the real ernest van den haag’ – 

 

[April the 4th month of the year used to be the 2nd, according to the early Roman calendar.  It got bumped off when January was assigned as the 1st month.  Figure that out since the link does not explain further:

http://www.famousbirthdays.com/facts/facts-about-april.html

April is from the Latin aprilis which means ‘to open’.  Spring which is the season associated with the month  is the time when animals come out of hibernation, when birds migrate northward, when bees and butterflies begin to do what comes naturally—gather nectar.  Depending on which part of the world, it’s either planting time or harvest time.  Outdoor activities begin.

 

Whoever determined birthstones and birth flowers assigned diamond and sweet pea or daisy to April; ditto with zodiac signs shared by Aries (March 21-April 19) and Taurus (April 20-May 20).  Many people seriously go by these signs that supposedly define character:  strength keywords:  independent, generous, optimistic, enthusiastic, courageous; weakness keywords:  moody, short-tempered,  self-involved, impulsive, impatient.   In a nutshell:  

 

Aries is the first of the zodiac signs. Aries is the sign of the self, people born under this sign strongly project their personalities onto others and can be very self-oriented. Aries tend to venture out into the world and leave impressions on others that they are exciting, vibrant and talkative. Aries tend to live adventurous lives and like to be the center of attention, but rightly so since they are natural, confident leaders. Aries are enthusiastic about their goals and enjoy the thrill of the hunt, “wanting is always better then getting” is a good way to sum it up. Aries are very impulsive and usually do not think before they act – or speak. Too often Aries will say whatever pops into their head and usually end up regretting it later!   [http://zodiac-signs-astrology.com/zodiac-signs/aries.htm] — Believe or not, that well defines my father and my son!

 

April is awareness month for Child Nutrition, Humor, and Mathematics, none of which relate but what the heck.  On particular days fall April Fools [1st], Arbor Day [5], Earth Day [22].  

 

This post is primarily to help seekers who enter ‘search terms’  find specific articles that might address their quest. This year, we have had fewer search terms to respond to; we hope April will be a busier month!  For starters, here’s food for thought for April fools’ day:  
“Arguing with a fool only proves that there are two!”
—Admin1]

 

CHRISTIANITY

Paul 6: Founder of Gentile Christianity

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Image from amazon.com

Image from amazon.com

[First posted 2012.  Continuing “What did Paul Achieve,” Chapter 5 of Charles Freeman’s A New History of Early Christianity; condensed and slightly edited. Please get a copy of the book for your library. —Admin1].

 

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When he was on one of his visits to Corinth, Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans.  (It is recorded as having been written at Cenchreae, the port of Corinth.)  It is the only one he sent to a community of which he had no direct experience and, free of the tensions that characterised his letters to communities whom he knew, it allowed for a more systematic exposition of his theology.  Perhaps he was trying to bring some coherence to his thoughts before he returned to Jerusalem with his collection and had to justify his views to the Jewish Christian community there.  Not surprisingly in view of the bruises he had suffered at the hands of his opponents and recalcitrant followers, this letter is preoccupied with the weight of human sin.  Everyone is subject to its stifling effect, even Jews who have observed the Law.  God’s proof of his own love for us is shown no longer through the Law but in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. ‘God did not withold his own Son but gave him over for us’ (Romans 8:32).  Baptism is in the death of Christ and the possibilities of eternal life lie with his resurrection.  The Law is now transcended and history has moved into a new phase in which all — including the Gentiles, of course — who show faith may be ‘justified’. 

No issue in Paul’s theology has proved more intractable than understanding what Paul meant by ‘righteousness’ and ‘justification through faith.’ What did it actually mean  to ‘set right’ as the Greek word Paul used implied?  Had the death of Christ, and the freeing of the human race from sin, made those with faith ‘justified’ in the sense of being released into spiritual freedom?  Did one actually have to do anything, good works, for instance, to stay in  a state of ‘justification’ or was it a once and for all gift through the grace of God?

 

At Romans 6:15-19, Paul brings slavery to the core of the argument.  Those who have been slaves to sin can now be redeemed by God through Christ and become slaves of righteousness instead.  The word “redeem” in Greek is the same term used when a slave’s freedom was bought — and it is used in the Old Testament to describe the process by which God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  The intensity with which Paul makes his argument is perhaps one instance where he writes from the heart.  The personal experience of his family’s freedom from slavery is expressed in his theology.  When, at Romans 8:15, Paul writes, ‘The Spirit [of God] you have received is not a spirit of slavery leading you back into a life of fear, but a Spirit that makes us sons, enabling us to cry “Abba! Father!” ‘; a personal sense of liberation is patent.

 

The Letter to the Romans was later to be taken up by Augustine and become one of the most influential documents in western history.  Luther went so far as to suggest that ‘this epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament, and truly the purest gospel’, an astonishingly narrow approach to the totality of the scriptures.  However, its impact at the time it was written is completely unknown. 

 

After a stay of perhaps 3 months in Corinth, Paul returned to Asia Minor.  He avoided Ephesus and headed instead for another major port of the region, Miletus, and it was here that he received a delegation from the Ephesian Christians.  By now he was in a mood of deep foreboding. There is no evidence that he had ever convinced the Jews of his mission and he must have known that he would hardly have been welcome in Jerusalem where he probably had a collection to deliver.  He did not expect to return alive from the city and he was pessimistic about the future of his missions. ‘I know that when I am gone, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock.’ His depression proved infectious.  The Ephesians were in tears when they escorted him to his boat.

 

Paul had already talked to the Thessalonians of the retaliation being inflicted on Jews.  This may well have referred to the increasing tension in Judaea.  When Paul arrived in Jerusalem (c. 58) the city was unsettled.  The clumsy tactics of Fellix, the procurator, had exacerbated unrest.  There had been massacres and these had fuelled the growing sense of Jewish nationalism which was to erupt in the disastrous rebellion of 66.  The Jewish Christian community, still under the leadership of James, felt acutely vulnerable and they insisted that Paul went through the ritual of purification to allay the suspicion that his mission to the Gentiles involved a rejection of his Jewish identity.

 

This may have satisfied James and his followers but Paul was too well known for him to be left in peace.  Even before the 7 days of purification were over Jews from Asia had attacked him in the synagogue.  A rumor that he had offended by bringing a Gentile into the Temple spread round Jerusalem and caused such turmoil that the centurion in charge of the city garrison intervened to rescue Paul.  Further unrest followed when Paul spoke to the crowds.  He was eventually brought before the Sanhedrin but here again there was confusion when he preached the resurrection of the dead.  The Pharisees in the council supported him, the Sadducees opposed him.  Sensibly the centurion, who now knew Paul was a Roman citizen, arranged for him to be taken down to Caesarea to be judged by Felix.

 

Luke provides a series of speeches in which Paul justifies his beliefs before Felix, Felix’s successor, Festus, and Agrippa, a descendant of Herod whom the Romans had installed in a small kingdom to the north of Judaea.  Paul became passionate and overheated but he said nothing that justified a charge against him. Festus, however, was forced to acquiesce to Paul’s demand that he should be able to appeal direct to the emperor in Rome. In what is one of the best descriptions of a voyage in the ancient world, Luke describes the tortuous journey across the Mediterranean that followed.  Paul was imprisoned in Rome and may have suffered martyrdom there although some traditions (a hint in the First Letter of Clement, for instance) suggest that he was released and able to travel as far west as Spain before returning to Rome to his death, possibly in the persecutions of Nero.  Luke’s abrupt conclusion to Acts leaves the question open.

 

In custody in Rome, Paul seems to have found some kind of emotional peace.  It may have been the support of Christians in the city that calmed him.  Perhaps his imprisonment for his beliefs gave him the respect among them that he craved.  He may simply have felt relieved to be away from the tensions of the Greek east which had done so much to distress him.  It was probably now that he wrote the letter to the Philippians, the most irenic of his writings.

 

The community in the Roman colony of Philippi does not seem to have been disturbed by conflict with traditional Jews.  Paul feels confident about its prospects.  He assures them that Christ can be preached in many ways, a much more mature attitude than he had expressed in earlier letters.  ‘You must work out your own [sic] salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you, inspiring both the will and deed, for his own chosen purpose’ ([Letter to the] Philippians 2:12-13). Christ is now the example of good living.  For those who believe in Christ circumcision is spiritual, not a physical mutilation.  He talks too of his own spiritual journey that is not yet complete.  Again, as with the First Letter to the Corinthians, one can warm to Paul in a way which is difficult with his more intemperate letters.  The second part of the letter is somewhat darker in tone:  Paul warns of ‘the dogs’ who insist on circumcision, for instance, but one is relieved that he ended his life with a sense of achievement.

 

Paul’s immediate legacy is difficult to assess.  It is not known how many of his communities survived and whether any of them had access to a coherent statement of his theology.  Did anyone, except possibly a few Roman Christians, read the Letter to the Romans, for instance? Only those able to read Greek would have been able to read them in any case.  (Astonishingly, no Latin speaker is known to have read them in the original until the 15th century.)  all the major centres of the early church — Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome — were established independently of him.  In the 4th century when churches developed histories of their foundation by an apostle or evangelist (Rome and Antioch by Peter, Alexandria by Mark), none claimed Paul as their founder. Yet some memory of Paul’s missions persisted.  When Clement, bishop of Rome, wrote to the Corinthians in the 90s, it was to a community that was still squabbling.  Clement urged them to reread the letter (only one is mentioned) sent to them by Paul.  Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, writing in about 117 to the Philippians reminds them that he himself did not have the wisdom of Paul, the man who had taught them the word of truth and had written them letters (sic) which strengthened their faith.

 

The Acts of the Apostles must have consolidated Paul’s memory.  It is not known how and where copies circulated but it has been argued that it acted as the catalyst for the collection of Paul’s letters.  By this time, others were writing in his name.  The letters tot he Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, a second letter to the Thessalonians and letters to Timothy and Titus, which are part of the New Testament, were all attributed to Paul, a sign that his status was recognized by some followers.  Yet his legacy remained an ambiguous one.  What is remarkable is the number of early Christian writers, the gospel writers and the early church fathers, who do not appear to have been influenced by Paul’s writings at all.  They were clearly contentious.  In the 2nd Letter of Peter, written in about 140, the author notes that there are obscure passages in Paul ‘which the ignorant and unstable misinterpret to their own ruin’ (2 Peter 3:16).  When, very much at the same time, Marcion, the first great enthusiast for Paul, attempted to create a canon of texts, an early New Testament as it were, of a single gospel and Paul’s letters, the attempt failed.  The declaration that Marcion was a heretic did nothing to boost Paul’s position nor did Marcions links to the gnostics whose teachings the church condemned.  It was not until the late 4th century, as a result of the adulation of John Chrysostom in the Greek-speaking world and Augustine in the Latin, that Paul became fully integrated into the Christian tradition.  Even so, he has inspired radically different Christian responses.  Is he the conservative champion of an austere moral absolutism or the man who urged the breakdown of all conventional hierarchies?  Did he ever resolve the conflict between the revolutionary nature of his message and his personal abhorrence of social disorder?  How far, in practice, did his teachings create a Gentile Christianity which would never have evolved without them?

Paul shifted the focus from Jesus’ teachings, of which he said virtually nothing, to the drama of his crucifixion and resurrection.  He demanded an emotional commitment to Christ that required a rejection of worldly interests, the temptations of the flesh and even ‘the wisdom of the wise.’ In the contexts of his belief that the Second Coming was at hand this was understandable.  But the Second Coming did not come and Paul became something completely different.  His letters, which had been received piecemeal by their recipients, were brought together as if they were to define Christian living for all time.  The results were always healthy.  The rejection of ‘the wisdom of the wise’ easily led to an assault on reasoned thought.  His concerns over sexuality fed into paranoia about the lures of women and the ‘evils of homosexuality.  The stress on sin might be developed into a denigration of human nature.  Paul’s own ambivalence toward his Jewish background fuelled anti-Semitism.

 

Paul cannot be blamed, of course, for the ways in which his letters were separated from their original context and used by Christians for other purposes.  Tortured as they often are, they stand on their own as fine literature and impressive examples of ancient rhetoric.  At its most passionate, their eloquence is remarkable.  So one can never wish Paul had never happened.  The greatest regret must be that his letters are such isolated survivals.  Christianity would have been dramatically different if we had, for instance, fuller records of Jewish Christianity.  There might never have been the antagonisms between Jew and Christian that were already in place by the second century.  We would have benefiited immensely from the survival of some of Apollos’ speeches (although the Letter to the Hebrews may reflect some of his ideas.)  Apollos may have preached only to an intellectual elite, in the tradition of Plato, but a more reasoned theology would have provided a useful contrast to the impassioned and highly emotional rhetoric of Paul.

 

Paul will always remain controversial and enigmatic.  He was heroic in his endeavors but hardly attractive as a personality.  Puritans seldom are. In a comparatively rare moment of insight (2 Corinthians 12:20), he recognized the bitterness and confusion he could bring to those he visited.  Even the loyal Timothy seems to have been rejected for failing to live up to his mentor’s expectations.  The arrival of his letters must have been dreaded.  No one could be quite sure what he would demand next or what idiosyncratic interpretations he might make of scripture or the message of Christ.  They were, after all, personal to him and not part of an established tradition.  For those who were attuned to the apostles who had actually known Jesus, his authority must have been suspect and his apparent vision of Christ hardly comparable to their eyewitness testimony.  Yet, there have always been Christians –Augustine and Luther are good examples –who remain intrigued by Paul even to the extent of appearing to give his letters precedence over the gospels.  They are the theologians who have given Paul the prominent place in Christian tradition which he occupies today.  

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Why ask 4 questions on Passover? Why not?

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Image from amazon.com

Image from amazon.com

[First posted in 2013.  If you’ve checked out the links we have listed on this website, most of them are Jewish:

  • some with anti-missionary agenda, meaning they counter the claims of Christian missionaries whose target converts are Jews who are ignorant of their own faith-heritage;
  • some Jewish websites reflect Jewish viewpoint or opinion on current events;
  • some are ‘teaching’ websites
  • and at least two are non-Christian but Torah-centered [Noahide, Synagogue without Walls].  

We like Jewish rabbis who are able to make Torah relevant not only to Jews today but to gentiles as well.  We are featuring here an excellent article by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, actually one of our favorite Jewish writers.

 

The celebration of Passover recounts the original story of the last and final ‘plague’ that broke the stone-will of Pharaoh, the killing of first-born sons of those who will not follow the instructions given that night. We stand corrected, but it is Sinaites’ belief that anyone, Israelite, non-Israelite, even among the Egyptian populace, who heard about the instructions and obeyed it to the last detail, would have been spared by the Angel of Death —“when I see the blood, I will pass over you”, Shemoth 13:12, please read the relevant chapters. 

 

Obedience to YHWH’s declared instructions is what Torah life is all about, as the Israelites will find out the hard way later. Obedience, period. No ifs and buts.  But it does help to understand the ‘Whys’, faith need not be “blind” and unanswered questions relegated to “mystery”.  

YHWH is a God of REASON and LOGIC, at least on the areas He requires human understanding of His Ways; a thinking reasoning believer is better than a clueless one who doesn’t even know why he believes what he has been told to believe.  And so, questions are encouraged not only on Passover, a questioning faith leads to biblical answers, if the original Word of YHWH is our source of truth.

 

Here, Rabbi Benjamin Blech gives a twist to the usual 4 questions asked on Passover; you will gain wonderful insights from this article.  We have included as well, one reader’s reaction, since we learn from it as well. This is one of the regular ‘sends’ from Aish.com —Admin1.]

 

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Sparking discussion on some of Passover’s most important themes.

 Rabbi Benjamin Blech – Published: March 17, 2013

Jews love questions. So it’s no surprise that the Seder, commemorating the birth of our people, is structured in a question/answer format. Participants are meant to ask and to spark lively discussion and exploration.
In this spirit, let me add to the Seder’s four questions an additional four that pick up on some of the most important themes to contemplate at the Passover table.

1. A question on the main theme of the Seder

Why do we call it the Seder?

“Seder” means order. And Jewish commentators explain that the most important idea of the holiday is that history is not happenstance but rather that it follows a divinely decreed order. When God took us out of Egypt we discovered that God didn’t exhaust His connection with the world by creating it; He continues to maintain an ongoing and caring relationship with those who love Him.

 

God took us out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage, so that we could forevermore know that He is involved with our lives.

 

Whatever happens to us isn’t coincidence; it’s God’s will. The events of our lives follow a script written by God. The existential meaningless of life viewed from an atheist’s perspective is replaced by the faith of a believer who knows that there is a Seder, a heavenly decreed order, to the seemingly strange but ultimately profound stories of our lives.

 

A close friend of mine who became religious later in life and who lives in Los Angeles shared with me this story. As a way of publicly acknowledging his love of Torah, he chose for his car’s license plate the word halachah. A while back he found himself followed by a driver frantically honking him and motioning him to pull over to the side of the road. Although somewhat frightened, he complied.

 

The man rushed over to his window to tell him he had to share his amazing experience. His life had recently presented him with some severe setbacks. Despondent, he decided he could no longer believe in God or hope for Divine assistance. He was ready to make a break with his past and his commitment to Judaism. He thought to himself, I’ll give God one more chance. If He really exists and wants me to maintain my faith, then let him send me a sign. “And then suddenly driving in front of me,” he confided, “was the license plate with the word halachah – the Hebrew word for Jewish law. I have to thank you for indirectly being the medium for God’s message, and allowing me to hear his response.”

 

Was that just coincidence? How wise is the insight that “coincidence is merely God’s way of choosing to remain anonymous.” There are moments when serendipity is too strange to be anything other than the voice of God reinforcing the concept of Seder, order, in our lives.

 

Question #1: Were there times in your life when it became clear that God intervened – and it was divinely decreed Seder rather than coincidence?

2. A question on the theme of family

If the Seder is so important, a student once asked me, how come it’s observed in the home and not in the synagogue?

 

The answer was obvious. Precisely because it is so important the Torah made its focus the family rather than the house of God.

 

The story of the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt lacks one detail. Why did it happen? Was there any sin of the Jews to account for the tragedy? The rabbis weren’t hesitant to give the answer. When the Jews came down to Egypt, they came “every man and his household” (Exodus 1:1). They understood the centrality of the home as the forger of morality and commonly held values. The text then tells us, “and the land became filled with them [the Israelites]” (Exodus, 1:7). The Midrash elaborates: They now filled the land, the circuses and the theaters, and no longer saw their homes as crucial to their spiritual being.

 

For deliverance to finally come, God demanded that they “take a lamb for family, a lamb for a household” and re-create what they had lost. The Last Supper of Egypt was a family meal, not a communitywide celebration.

 

At the very beginning of our history it was made clear that appreciating the importance of the home would be the key to our survival. Indeed the very first letter of the Torah, the Rabbis point out, is beit- the Hebrew letter that means “house,” because the Torah itself requires first and foremost commitment to the family.

 

Question #2: How can we recreate the centrality of family in Jewish life?

3. A question on the theme of children

The Seder revolves almost entirely around the children. The reason is obvious. Passover is the holiday when the Jewish nation was born and it is the time when it must continue to be reborn throughout the generations.

 

The children are our future. They represent continuity and survival. It is to them we pass over our heritage every Passover.

 

And that is no easy task. Not all of our children are willing to follow our guidance. Indeed, there are four kinds of sons. There is the wise son and the wicked son, the simple son and the one who does not even know or want to ask.

 

How do we reach them all? How do we make them appreciate the values that give our lives meaning?

 

There is a profound message in the way the Haggadah describes them. We contrast the wise son and the wicked. Yet this seems to be an illogical pairing. Wise implies intelligence and learning. Its opposite is ignorant. Similarly, the opposite of wicked is righteous; the emphasis is on character rather than cleverness. We should either speak of the wise son versus the foolish, or the pious son versus the wicked.

 

The commentators find a profound idea in this seemingly injudicious juxtaposition. The opposite of the wise son is the wicked son because we believe that the ultimate cause of wickedness is An insufficient exposure to wisdom. The wicked son is wicked because we didn’t teach him enough to make him understand the joy of leading a life dedicated to Torah.

 

We have lost many of our finest youth to assimilation and to a rejection of their heritage.

 

Our successes are glorious. We delighted to read the heartening article by David Brooks in the New York Times a short time ago titled “The Orthodox Surge” in which he took note of the remarkable resurgence of Jews committed to Torah and Jewish values. Spirituality has become not only acceptable but admired by many.

Yet the “wicked sons” – perhaps primarily because they were not given the opportunities to become wise – form a significant number of the Jewish community.

It’s important to note that they were not cast-off or excluded from the Passover table. We are never allowed to forget them or ignore their presence. We need all of our children as part of our nation. And it is they who represent the greatest challenge to our religious commitment.

 

Question #3: How can we reach – and teach – those of our children we have failed to inspire?

4. A question on the theme of slaughtering the Paschal Lamb

The requirement for Jews being saved in the Passover story was to slaughter a lamb and to smear its blood on the doorpost so God would “pass over” that home and spare its inhabitants.

 

What was the meaning of this seemingly bizarre ritual? The lamb was the national god of Egypt. It was the object of their worship. And for the Jews to deserve deliverance they had to prove they didn’t share the false idols of the Egyptians.

Idolatry didn’t end with ancient paganism. Francis Bacon popularized the concept of “idols of the marketplace”. They are the false gods people in every generation and culture mistakenly worship.

 

Contemporary society offers us countless examples. Americans worship at the altar of monetary success and fame. Movie stars who flaunt immorality are shamelessly deified. Business tycoons are the modern heroes of our age solely by virtue of their billions. For all too many, the only god is Mammon and the only goal in life is to accumulate more wealth than others because “he who dies with the most toys wins.”

 

It takes profound courage to go against the popular definition of success. It takes great spiritual strength to deny the superficial allure of a hedonistic lifestyle. It takes incredible valor to choose a life of value over the vanities of the trendy and fashionable tastemakers of our culture.

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But that’s exactly what the Jews of Egypt had to do in order to be worthy of the miracle of the first Passover that allowed us to become God’s chosen people. They had to slaughter the lamb of Egyptian idolatry. Our challenge is to replicate their heroism in its contemporary format.

 

Question #4: What are the most powerful idols of our day that challenge us to refute them in our quest for lives worthy of God’s deliverance and blessings?

 

May our discussions at the Seder table bring us greater insight into resolving these four major challenges to our faith – and help us to hasten the time of final redemption.

Visitor Comments: 1

(1) JLG, March 17, 2013 4:28 PM

Fantastic Article!

This article makes you think!

Question 3 Re How do we inspire those we failed to inspire. AISH has done a wonderful job of that, making Torah relevant. I think that we do walk around with an assumption that in order for people to connect and grow, we actively have to DO things. Sometimes its removing spiritual blockages and making sure that we simply DON’T do things in order to have people connect. For instance, when you invite someone over for Shabbos, there aren’t all the distractions of the world – music, cell phones ringing, buzzing, honking, fancy stores, etc. People can literally just think, and you hope (as was my story), that people will connect and investigate further.

The last question is an interesting one – Hollywood Stars and other modern day Deities come and go. But, at the end of the day modern day society’s worship of these false idols will only terminate when our values change. If our values are centred around beauty, then yes, we will see what pleases us (i.e. good looking stars and a focus on aesthetics). If we change our values and honour people who are wise, people who have courage, people who treat others in a dignified manner, than those idols will vanish. Why? Because the people who hold those values would be thoroughly abhorred at anybody trying to “worship them” and would shun the publicity and the autographs and the paparazzi, etc etc.

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SINAI and ZION 4 – SINAI and the Covenant Formulary

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Image from www.christianbooks.co.za

Image from www.christianbooks.co.za

[Posted March 26, 2015 & Jun, 2015; worth revisiting.  

What happened on Sinai?  A lot.  Not the least of which the Creator speaks to representative humanity —the mixed multitude —and cuts a covenant with the people He formed from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  The wonder of this God is He condescends and goes down to the level and limitations of human understanding within the times and culture of individuals and people-groups He deals with.  In this case, He uses existing man-made convenantal traditions.  That is the focus of this chapter from our current resource MUST READ which should always lead to MUST HAVE: Sinai and Zion by Jon D. Levenson.  

 

Reformatting and highlights added.–Admin1.]

 

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The traditions we have been discussing are of the infancy of Mount Sinai as a symbol in Jewish tradition. They present an image of a religion close to animism. YHWH is, in part, the genie of a scrubby tree, a desert deity who, in a quite literal way, dwells on a mountain, from which he ventures to wage war.

 

It may be dangerous to dismiss these primitive hierophanies too quickly, for there lies within them the germ of ideas which will prove of world-historical, in fact revolutionary import. It may be the case primitive men are in deeper contact with some truths than are their more advanced brethren.

 

It is essential, nonetheless, not to fall into the blunder known as the “genetic fallacy,” the idea that origins explain developments. Just as one would hardly grasp the greatness of Abraham Lincoln by discussing what he was at the age of six months, so would it be a mistake to take these earliest traditions of Sinai as definitive for what the mountain signified throughout biblical tradition.

 

For most of that tradition, Mount Sinai is remembered for something other than the manifestation of an arborescent wilderness deity. Rather, Sinai commemorates something that is alleged to have occurred on the plain of human history, but of an awesome and transcendant nature. In short, it is not Sinai in its prehistorical or somnolence which should claim the better part of our attention, but the Sinaitic event, what the traditions allege, in their varying ways, to have happened there.

 

The following text expresses that event in a particularly concise form:

 

3  YHWH called to him from the mountain, saying,
Thus shall you say to the House of Jacob, And declare to the Israelites:
4  “You have seen for yourselves what I did to Egypt, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to me.
5  Now, then, if you will obey me faithfully and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples—for all the world is mine.
6  You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the Israelites.”
7  Moses came and summoned the elders of the people and put before them all the words which YHWH had commanded him.
8  And all the people answered as one and said, “All that YHWH has spoken we will do!” Moses took the words of the people back to YHWH. (Exod 19:3b-8)

 

 

These verses serve as a kind of introduction to the entire revelation on Sinai. In them, YHWH and Israel conclude a bilateral relationship:  he will grant them a special status, one shared by none of his other people, if only they will obey him. This they agree to do, sending their assent up the mountain to God by way of the mediator of this new relationship, Moses.

 

The text above is significant for two reasons.

 

First, recent scholarship tends increasingly to recognize in this passage old traditions, in spite of telltale signs of literary reworking.  Which of the old epic sources, J or E, is responsible for the larger part of these verses is not relevant here, but it is essential to note that some scholarship that has come out in the last several years is quite skeptical about the possibility that Exod 19:3b-8 is the product of a Deuteronomic source. Instead, the passage more likely reflects a relatively early phase in the religion of Israel.

 

My second reason for beginning here is that this text actually names the sort of relationship inaugurated on Mount Sinai. It is a covenant. If we can shed light on this term, we may be able to understand the basis of this special status conferred upon Israel and of the obligations that are inextricable from her identity.
Image from www.cityofgracechurch.org

Image from www.cityofgracechurch.org

About three decades ago scholars, especially George Mendenhall in the United States and Klaus Baltzer in Germany, began to compare biblical literature with certain treaties whose structure had been known for about two decades. These treaties derived from the Hittite Empire, which occupied essentially what is now the eastern part of Turkey and whose language was of the Indo-European family, like Greek and unlike Hebrew, which is form the Semitic family.  In the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1200 B.C.E.), the Hittite emperors were attempting to control the critical land-mass to their south, Syria, by entering into treaties with the kings of the lesser states of that region. The purpose of these treaties was to secure the allegiance of the smaller states to make sure that they stood faithful in alliance with the Hittites and did not pursue an independent foreign policy.

 

 

Treaties, in the ancient world, were of principally two types, parity and suzerainty.

  • Parity treaties were between equals;
  • suzerainty treaties were between unequals, the great king whom we shall call the suzerain and the petty monarch, whom we term the vassal.

 

From now on, we shall be concerned with suzerainty treaties only.

 

The sequence of steps characteristic of these treaties has come to be known as the covenant formulary.

 

To be sure, the extant documents, even those from the Hittites of the Late Bronze Age which have proved so important to biblical studies, show a wide variety of forms.  All that seems to have been essential to a treaty in the ancient Near East was a set of stipulations binding the vassal, and an oath sworn by at least the vassal and guaranteed and sanctioned by the gods. Nevertheless, despite this fluidity of forms, many of the treaties show a sequence of six steps, although not always in the same order.

 

 

I.  In the first step, the preamble or titulary, the suzerain identifies himself.
II.  The second step is the historical prologue or antecedent history. Whatever one calls it, it is a statement of the past relationship of the parties. Sometimes the suzerain stresses his benefactions towards the vassal. In one such treaty, the Hittite emperor Mursilis points out that he put his vassal, Duppi-Tessub on his throne, in spite of the latter’s illness, and forced an oath of loyalty upon his brothers (any new king fears his brothers) and upon his subjects, the land of Amurru. The covenant obligates the people of Amurru to recognize the kingship of Duppi-Tessub. In other words, the suzerain ensures the vassal’s royal status. The implication is that, left to his own devices, Duppi-Tessub would not have retained the throne. In fact, this seems to have been one of the central purposes of the historical prologue—to encourage a feeling of gratitude in the vassal so as to establish firmly the claim of the suzerain, and it is only right that he should respond to him out of a sense of obligation.

 

III.  The historical prologue thus leads smoothly to the third step, the stipulations, the terms of the treaty.
The purpose of the stipulations is to secure the fidelity of the vassal, to insure that the centerpiece of his foreign policy is faithfulness to his liege lord. The stipulations are in the nature of direct address; they are in the second person. It is important to understand the difference between this kind of phrasing and that typical of a modern treaty or contract. The ancient Near Eastern covenant was not an impersonal code, but an instrument of diplomacy founded upon the personal relationship of the heads of state.
The essence of the covenant lies in the fact that the latter pledge to be faithful to one another. It is important to remember that even within one state, government was conceived as personal, as it emphatically is not in modern states.

 

Modern man wants a government of laws, not of men, one in which all legal relationships are described in abstract terms without reference to personalities—thus phrased in the third person only.

 

By contrast, in the ancient Near East, the king was thought to look after his subjects solicitously. In a ubiquitous metaphor, he was their shepherd and they were his flock. They loved him and feared him. In parity treaties, the two kings are “brothers”; in some suzerainty treaties, the greater king is the “father” of the lesser king, not in a biological sense, of course, but in a powerful metaphorical way. Thus, we find that the vassals are sometimes commanded even to love their suzerain. In one Assyrian (i.e., Northeast Mesopotamian) treaty drawn up by King Esarhaddon (860-669 B.C.E.) to insure that his vassals will be loyal to his son Assurbanipal, we read: “You will love as yourselves Assurbanipal.” And in another document, the vassals declare under oath: “…the king of Assyria, our Lord, we will love.”

 

The purpose of the covenant would be defeated if the vassal were allowed to enter into such a relationship with another suzerain as well, for that would undermine the great king’s control over the area ruled by his partner. Therefore, although a suzerain may have many vassals, a given vassal must recognize only one suzerain. “Do not turn your eyes to anyone else,” warns Mursilis. “Henceforth however,” another suzerain admonishes, “recognize no other lord.” This demand for exclusive loyalty is central to the stipulations. From it the others follow naturally. Without it, they make no sense.

 

 

IV.  The fourth step in the covenant formulary is the deposition of the text. Any legal document should be deposited in some place agreed upon at the signing. In a society in which gods served as guarantors of the treaty, it was often deemed appropriate to put a public document in their temples, where they would be continually reminded of its provisions, lest a perfidious ally go unpunished. The formality of deposition need not occupy our attention.

 

 

Furthermore, some treaties required that the text be periodically read to the vassal in a kind of liturgical reaffirmation of the pact:

 

Furthermore, this tablet which I have set [forth] for you Ala[ksandus], shall be re[cit]ed to you three times each year, and you Alaksandus shall know it.
Here, recitation has as its goal knowledge of the terms of the covenant. One must know the treaty in order to fulfill it.
V.  The fifth item is the list of witnesses. These are the gods before whom the sacred oath is sworn. To violate the treaty, solemnly entered into, is to risk the wrath of these deities. The list is often quite lengthy, since the treaties tend to invoke the pantheon of each of the two parties. In addition, certain natural phenomena, such as mountains, rivers, heaven and earth, stand in witness. In a culture in which words were believed to have effects and in which one therefore did not utter the names of the deities lightly, the list of divine or cosmic witnesses served as a potent inducement to observance of the stipulations.

 

VI.  The sixth and last element in the covenant formulary is called curses and blessings. Violation of the stipulations, perfidy and betrayal, will surely result in a cursed life. Conversely, compliance with the stipulations, loyalty and faithfulness to the suzerain, result in a state of beatitude. The curses include such things as annihilation, epidemic, sterility, drought, famine, dethronement, and exile. It is clear that the covenant contains within it a moral mechanism based on the principle of retribution, reward for the faithful, punishment for the faithless. The moral principle was thought to be implemented not so much by the workings of the human political order, as by a transcendent element, the trustworthiness of the gods to respond to an oath sworn in their holy names.

 

If we turn back to the passage in Exodus 19 that we have taken as indicative of the broad outlines of the Sinaitic traditions, we hear echoes of this covenant formulary. To be sure, Exod 19:3b-8 is not per se the text of a covenant. It is a proclamation to the people announced through a prophet,  Moses, the prophet functioning as a mediator in the establishment of a covenant relationship. Such a mediating role does not appear in the classic Hittite covenants. Once one makes allowances for the context in which this vignette functions, however, it is difficult to deny the reflexes of the covenant formulary to be heard therein. V 4, for example, is a miniature historical prologue. V 5 voices the stipulation in the form of a conditional blessing. We should not be surprised or led to doubt the covenantal nature of the passage simply because the stipulative aspect of this latter sentence is cast in the most general terms, obedience to YHWH and observance of the covenant, for, in fact, the whole passage is embedded in a context which serves as an introduction to the actual stipulations of the Sinaitic covenant. It would have made no sense to present them in detail here.

 

 

There is a covenantal aspect to the next verse, which, although very important, has escaped the notice of other commentators:

 

You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (v 6)
Here, as a reward for loyalty in covenant, YHWH confers upon Israel the status of royalty. Their special position in a world entirely God’s is the position of priestly kings. The analogy with the treaty of Mursilis and Duppi-Tessub is quite close. Just as the Hittite emperor insured the kingship of his vassal by taking “your brothers (and) sisters and the Amurru land in oath for you,” so does YHWH guarantee that his loyal vassal Israel will be the “kingdom of priests” among all the nations of the world, a special people consecrated in covenant to him. “The whole world” is to Israel as the Amurru land (including the royal siblings) is to Duppi-Tessub. In each case, the suzerain establishes the vassal as the royal figure in a larger community which is itself under the great king’s suzerainty. The commandments, which are the stipulations of covenant, delineate a service which is also a form of lordship, an aristocracy of humility.

 

 

Finally, in v 8, the people solemnly undertake to fulfill the terms of the covenant:

 

And all the people answered as one and said,
“All that YHWH has spoken we will do!”
The covenant is now in force.

 

 

In sum, we detect in Exod 19:3b-8 reflexes of the formulary first worked out for the Hittite suzerainty treaty of the Late Bronze Age.   Behind v 4 lies the historical prologue. V 5b reflects the stipulations, which are syntactically linked to the blessings (vv 5b-6a).  Not every one of the six steps appears here; only three are clear.  But even in the Hittite texts, we cannot expect to find each item attested.  Hence, Dennis McCarthy’s warning about our passage is sound:

 

 

“The covenant formulary is not a frozen form…To control a literary form is precisely to use it effectively and freely like this.”
Exod 19:3b-8 is powerful evidence for the relatively early conception of the Sinaitic experience as the institution of a covenant between two kings, YHWH and the people Israel.

 

 

If in Exod 19:3b-8 there lurks a covenant ceremony beneath a text that is now a prophetic proclamation, in the last chapter of the book of Joshua (Josh 24:1-28) the covenant ceremony comes to the fore, and it seems that we can detect each of the six steps of the formulary, to one degree or another. This passage is not the text of a covenant, but it is the description of the negotiations which lead up to one and of the ceremony in which the covenant is concluded.

 

 

What about the formulary?

 

 

The first step, the preamble or titulary, is perhaps reflected in v 2: “Thus said YHWH the God of Israel.” I say “perhaps” because Joshua here, like Moses in Exodus 19, functions as a prophet, and “Thus said YHWH” (the messenger formula) is the most common way for a prophet to introduce his oracle. The most famous echo of the preamble, however, is the verse that Jews count as the first of the Ten Commandments, although it is technically no commandment at all:

 

 

I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Exod 20:2)
The First Commandment is emphatically not a messenger formula, but the self-presentation of the suzerain followed by his recitation of his essential benefaction to the vassal.

 

 

Joshua 24, the historical prologue occupies the greater part of the divine address.  It begins with the generation before Abraham and summarizes the three immediately succeeding eras in Israel’s sacred history—the patriarchal period, the Exodus from Egypt, and the conquest of the land (vv2-13).

 

 

The dominant theme of this recitation of history is the unceasing grace of YHWH toward Israel.  He has given them more than they deserve.  Time and again he has rescued them; time and again he has frustrated their enemies.  Thus, at this moment at the end of the book of Joshua, as the great epic of deliverance and conquest draws to a close, Israel profits from victories that her own sword and her own bow have not won, lives in cities she did not build, and eats of vineyards and orchards she never planted.

 

 

The message is clear: God had benefited Israel beyond her deserts. Like the ailing Duppi-Tessub, whom Mursilis nevertheless put on the throne, Israel benefits from goodwill she has not earned. In this covenant, the suzerain, at least, has demonstrated that he is possessed of the fidelity and reliability such a pact required of its partners.

 

 

Awareness of divine grace sets the stage for the stipulations. These are expressed in the form of three imperatives:

 

  • “hold YHWH in awe,”
  • “serve him with undivided loyalty and in truthfulness,” and
  • “banish the [alien] gods” (v 14).

 

This expression of the stipulations is quite minimal, as covenants go; Joshua 24 required merely that Israel acclaim YHWH as her suzerain. But these minimal stipulations are all that is required, as the text must presuppose some corpus of Sinaitic law already revealed in the lifetime of Moses. It should be noted that the people swear they will not abandon YHWH (v 16); this is a persuasive indication that they have already entered into a relationship of fealty with him. These are not newcomers to YHWHism, at least in the text as we presently have it.  Instead of mediating a new covenant, Joshua is reinstituting the old one, reclaiming a wayward people for the essential relationship to God. Hence, his main concern is to insure that YHWH is her suzerain, YHWH alone. “Banish the gods” is the equivalent of Mursilis’ demand, “Do not turn your eyes to anyone else!…”  But whereas Mursilis goes on to lay down detailed terms in which this exclusive fidelity must find expression, Joshua relies upon the stipulations of his predecessor’s time. By banishing YHWH’s rivals, Israel rededicates herself to him.

 

 

 

The deposition of the covenant text takes place in v 26, when Joshua records the terms of the covenant in a scroll which he appears to deposit by a boulder at the foot of the sacred tree growing in the (now YHWHistic) Temple at Shechem. Both the tree and the rock will serve as landmarks for the location of the treaty-text inside the Temple. There is no provision here for the periodic reading of the text, but we do find exactly such a requirement in connection with the covenant Moses drew up on the plains of Moab, for there Moses charges Israel to hear a Torah read every seventh year during the festival of Booths (Deut 31:10-13).

 

The fifth step of the covenant formulary, the witnesses, presents a problem. In the extra-biblical treaties, the witnesses were mostly the gods of the two contacting states. But the suzerain in Israel being divine himself, to have him and them swear by another god would defeat the purpose of the covenant, for Israel would thus recognize another potential suzerain of the same status as YHWH. Instead of divine witnesses, therefore, Joshua first utilizes Israel as a witness against herself (v 22)—perhaps not very convincing legal procedure, but there is no good alternative. As if sensing that Israel would not prove most trustworthy in the role of witness against herself, the account then offers another adaptation of the old treaty formulary. In v 27, the large rock assumes the role of the gods as witness to the covenant, “for it has heard all the words YHWH has spoken to us.”

 

 

The only hint in Joshua 24 of curses and blessings, the last item in the covenant formulary, occurs in v 20.  YHWH has brought Israel success up to now, but if she abandons him and serves another suzerain, he will in turn reverse himself and annihilate Israel. The blessings are simply the continuation, after the conclusion of a covenant, of the life of grace stressed in the historical prologue. Two passages in the Pentateuch, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, develop this theme of blessing and curse in great and , at times, horrific detail. It is hardly surprising that these curses are read every year in the synagogue in an undertone.

 

 

We have seen that in Joshua 24, it can be argued that each of the six steps of the covenant formulary is present to one degree or another. The historical prologue, the stipulations, the deposition of the text, and the witnesses are well represented. The curses and blessings appear in a very skeletal form, and the preamble may or may not be there at all. The correlation between these elements and the covenant formulary evident in the Hittite and other Near Eastern suzerainty treaties cannot be coincidental.

 

 

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Image from www.pinterest.com

Israel has become the vassal of YHWH;

YHWH has become the suzerain of Israel.

 

 

There can be no profound understanding of the traditions of Sinai without recognition of the source or analogue for the kind of relationship which YHWH was thought to have inaugurated there, a relationship of covenant in which he became their sole God, and they, his special possession, the dominium Dei. To be sure, it is difficult to be definitive as to the date when this conception took hold. As I noted in the Introduction, without fundamentalist presuppositions we cannot assume that a passage is synchronous with the events it purports to record.

 

 

The historical Joshua—is such there was—may have had nothing to do with a covenant ceremony of the sort that closes the book that has been given his name. One must, instead, date the passage by its literary features and its religious ideas. It is interesting in this connection that one of the greatest scholars of covenant, Dennis McCarthy, dated this material quite early, earlier, in fact, than much of the Pentateuch.

 

 

The book of Joshua is usually regarded as the product of reworking (redaction) at the hands of editors highly influenced by Deuteronomy. The core of Deuteronomy, in turn, is usually dated to the late seventh century B.C.E., since parts of it seem to be closely related to, perhaps identical with, the book of the Torah found in the Temple during the reign of King Josiah (2 Kings 22-23). If  Joshua 24 is the product of a Deuteronomistic school, it is relatively late in the history of the religion of biblical Israel, and the old argument that covenant in Israel is late, an argument recently revived, gains in plausibility. McCarthy, however, notes the presence of some distinctly un-Deuteronomic elements in the chapter. For example, the “choice between gods as equal alternatives…is unthinkable” in Deuteronomic tradition, as is the nonjudgmental attitude toward a sacred tree and a Temple outside of the central shrine (v 26), elements of old tradition against which the reforming book of Deuteronomy polemicized uncompromisingly (e.g., Deut 12:2).

 

 

All this suggests that the Deuteronomistic historian has redacted, but not authored the account of the covenant ceremony at Shechem. In any event, the likelihood remains that the Sinaitic experience was conceived as covenantal relatively early in Israel and that the format of covenant served as the controlling metaphor for Israel’s relationship to God through most of biblical history.  This covenantalization of Israelite religion was so thoroughgoing that we are almost reduced to hypothesis in our effort to reconstruct the prior stages.

 

The literary legacy of ancient Israel is incomprehensible apart from covenant theology.
A Sinaite's Sabbath Liturgy

A Sinaite’s Musical Liturgy – 2nd Sabbath of April

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KINDLE THE SABBATH LIGHTS

 

 

 

[Original Tune: “Praise the Name of Jesus”/Revised Lyrics—-a capella] 

 

Image from vineofdavid.org

Image from vineofdavid.org

Light one Sabbath candle

as His blazing sun sets,

darkness fills all the spaces, 

not in minds where His True Light dwells,

Let His Tree of Life be your Light.

 

Image from vineofdavid.org

Light two Sabbath candles, 

Brighten up the darkness,

One is good, two is better,

More minds in harmony reflect more ‘Light’

Let His Tree of Life be our Light.

 

 

 

“There’s a blessing in saying the NAME”

Image from www.satansrapture.com

Image from www.satansrapture.com

 

[Original Tune: “Are You washed in the blood of the Lamb?”/Revised Lyrics]

 

[Sing the 1st melody 2X before going to CHORUS.]

 

1.  Have you been to Sinai where the One True God

gave His Name, His ineffable Name,

Which His chosen people dare not say out loud,

out of reverence and awe for His Name.

 

2.  So they called Him ‘Adonai’ and ‘Elohim’,

and devised other titles for Him,

And in time it happened that not one could say

how the Name is pronounced to this day.

CHORUS:  Yod Heh Vav Heh, Yod Heh Vav Heh,

Yah forgive, we don’t know how to say—

Yah-weh, Ya-hu-weh,Ye-ho-vah, Ya-hu-wah,

There’s a blessing in saying His Name.

 

3.  So He’s known by many other titles like—-

El Shaddai, Eluheinu, HaShem,

He’s Creator, Master of the universe,

He’s the Rock, He’s Provider, He’s God.

 

4.  How can anyone who’s never heard His Name

ever call on a God they don’t know?

Are they faulted for not knowing to this day,

when they can’t read His Name in THE BOOK?

CHORUS: Ya-hu-wah, Ya-hu-wah,

is it so wrong to call on His Name,

All the world will never know the One True God,

if we don’t say ‘Yahuwah’s His Name!’

 

RABBI-READINGDevarim/Deuteronomy 4:1-

 

1  And now O Israel, hearken to the laws and the regulations that I am teaching you to observe,

in order that you may live

and enter and take-possession of the land that YHWH, the God of your fathers, is giving to you.  

2  You are not to add to the word that I am commanding you,

and you are not to subtract from it,

in keeping the commandments of YHWH your God that I am commanding you.  

3 Your eyes (it is) that have seen what YHWH did at Baal Pe’or:  

indeed, every man that walked after Baal Pe’or-

YHWH your God destroyed him from among you!  

4  But you, the ones clinging to YHWH your God,

are alive, all of you today!  

5   See,  

I am teaching you laws and regulations

as YHWH my God has commanded me to do thus,

amid the land that you are entering to possess.  

6  You are to keep (them), you are to observe (them),

for that (will be) wisdom-for-you and understanding-for-you in the eyes of the peoples,

who, when they hear all these laws, will say:  

Only a wise and understanding people is this great nation!  

7  For who (else) is (such) a great nation

that has gods near to it as YHWH our God

in all our calling on him?  

8  And who (else) is (such) a great nation

that has laws and regulations so equitable

as all this instruction

that I put before you today?  

9  Only: take you care, take exceeding care for your self,

lest you forget the things that your eyes saw,

lest you turn-aside in your heart

all the days of your life;

make-them-known to your children, and to your children’s children:  

10  The day that you stood before the presence of YHWH your God at Horev,

when YHWH said to me:  

Assemble the people to me,

that I may have them hear my words

that they may learn to hold me in awe

all the days that they are alive on the soil,

—and their children, they are to teach!

 

Image from www.pinterest.com

Image from www.pinterest.com

 

[Original Tune:  “We Gather Together”/Revised Lyrics]

1.  We gather together to seek the Lord’s blessing,

with joy in our hearts, 

we delight in Your Day,

We welcome Your Sabbath, we seek Your loving Presence,

We bless Your Holy Name, Yahuwah our Lord.

 

2.  We break bread together, we bless one another,

We drink to our health and this joy that we share,

We pray for all others, for all the Sabbath-keepers,

Who faithfully observe this blest day of rest.

 

3.  For joy we derive from our loved ones, our family,

For daughters, for sons, and for grandchildren dear,

For blessings no end that Your gracious Hand has given us,

We bless you back, O Lord Yahuwah,  our God!

 

4.

 

 

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Image from www.pinterest.com

Image from www.adathatikvah.org

Image from www.adathatikvah.org

HAVDALAH

 

[Original Tune: “Onward Christian Soldiers”/Revised Lyrics]

1.  Onward true believers in the One True God,

With God’s Truth before us, leave the false behind,

Once we followed other gods, once we swallowed lies,

That’s all past tense, that’s behind us, disconnect old ties . . .Onward, onward, let’s move forward

from we were before,

With God’s Truth before us, listen not to lore.

 

2.  Learn the ‘Old’, unlearn the ‘New’,

That’s the thing to do—

Start from the beginning, Genesis anew,

Learn from Him, Creator God, lay aside your fears,

Learn to reason, get some wisdom, open up your ears!

Onward, let’s move further forward

from we were before,

With ‘Old’ Truth before us, there’s more truth in store.

 

3.  Exodus, Leviticus, read them with fresh eyes,

Don’t bring with you baggage from your former ties,

Numbers, Deuteronomy, these complete the five,

If that’s all that you can process, that is good for life,

Onward, let your search move onward,

leave the past behind,

There’s so much to cover, so much more to find.

 

4.  Let us follow Joshua’s lead, conquer turfs for God,

Weaken the resistance of the misinformed,

Don’t miss opportunities, say a word or two,

Sow the seeds but better if they see His Life in you,

Onward tread on bad soil, dry soil,

sow God’s Word of Truth,

Somewhere there is good soil ready for ‘Old’ Truth!

 A——–men!

Image from mydearpreciousfriends.blogspot.com

Image from mydearpreciousfriends.blogspot.com

Shabbat

shalom

to Israel,

and to

Gentiles

of the Nations,

 

and to

Sinaites,

and Sabbath-Keepers,

all worshippers

of YHWH,

the One True God,

wherever and

whoever you are!

 

 

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