jcstudies A Hebrew Speaking Lord (Part 4 of 4) Author: Dwight A. Pryor (of blessed memory) - from lecture two of the audio seminar Our Hebrew Lord (jcstudies/resourceDetail.cfm?productId=35&quicksearch=true&searchForm=our%20hebrew) ------------------------------------------------------------ I will be referring several times to a book called, ‘Everyman’s Talmud’—it is a kind of ‘Reader’s Digest’ selection of Jewish oral law and tradition. You need to understand this, because Jesus knew about these things – and it is important to understand him. There was in Jesus’ day what is called the oral law - in Hebrew the word for that is the Mishnah. According to the rabbis this was originally given to Moses at Sinai along with the written law. The Hebrew word for the written law is Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible - Pentateuch). According to rabbinic tradition God gave not only a written document to Moses, he also told Moses a whole lot which he then passed on to others; they passed it to others from generation to generation. As it was passed along orally it grew larger and larger and larger. The Mishnah as we know it today dates to 200-300 BCE until 200 CE – a span of 500 years. Jesus was right in the middle of this, and he knew it. After the oral law came to an end there was another 300-400 years of commentary upon the oral law which is known as Gemara. If you combine the Mishnah with the Gemara (as was done in Jewish tradition) you end up with the Talmud. The Talmud is just as important and inspired as the Bible to the Jews—it started from God to Moses, and has been passed down. The view is basically this: the written law is fixed, it is eternal, it is unchanging; but it requires constant adaptation to current circumstances, and that is what the oral law was for. It is to clarify and illuminate and adapt the written law to your current law. The English translation of the Talmud is 18 volumes; but ‘Everyman’s Talmud’ is one volume, although it is 400 pages—it is just selections and highlights from the Talmud. On p.271 you will find the explanation of what ‘a good eye’ is – by the way, this is the best translation of the Hebrew (if you have a good eye your body is full of light). This writer says (this is under the heading ‘the evil eye’ and it is talking about superstitions in Judaism): ‘obviously no superstitious notion is connected with the phrase ‘a good eye and an evil eye’ as they were used in rabbinic literature. Rather, they refer to magnanimity and its reverse’. And then a second quote on p.271: ‘a good eye, a humble mind and a lowly spirit are the tokens of the disciples of Abraham, our father’. Hebrew as is spoken in Israel today is very close to the Hebrew of Jesus’ day; they use the same figures of speech. The Hebrew language is filled with idioms (figures of speech). We have many idioms in English, e.g. when it rains hard we say: ‘it rains cats and dogs’ – meaning it rained really hard. You can’t take the literal meaning of those words. The Hebrew language is much more idiomatic than English, or even Greek. A ‘good eye’ is an idiom that is used in Hebrew today, and it simply means generosity. Does this makes sense in the Scripture? Let’s look at it in context. Matth 6:19-22. Vs.20 – ‘treasures in heaven’ is also a figure of speech. How do you send money to heaven? The meaning in Hebrew is: give to the needy — you store up treasure in heaven in the Hebrew way of thinking by giving to those who need. So Jesus is saying, ‘don’t store up your money here’. In those days people would hide their money in a hole or under a brick, and it would rust (many of the coins were bronze). Thus Jesus is saying, ‘don’t store your treasures there, store your treasures in heaven’. And then immediately following this verse he says in vs.24, ‘you cannot serve both God and Mammon’. What is mammon? It is an image of an idol, named wealth. Jesus is saying, ‘you have got to make a choice; you have to either serve God, or you have to serve wealth; you can’t serve two masters’. That doesn’t mean you have to be poor, but he is saying that you have got to decide which one is God, and which one are you serving—do you put your money in service of God or do you make money your god? Notice that in all of this Jesus is talking about money and giving (storing up treasures; choosing between God and wealth), and right in-between he suddenly makes a statement that now makes perfect sense. He says: ‘I tell you the truth, if you have a generous giving spirit you are full of light, but if you have a miserly stingy spirit—not only are you full of darkness, but how great is that darkness, you are deceived’. That is a message to any of us. If we think we are filled with God’s Spirit and yet our lives shows evidence of being stingy and miserly, we are in enormous deception — because that is not the Spirit of God, the Spirit of God is a magnanimous giving Spirit. Disciples of Jesus tend to be giving people; not necessarily just money – they give of their time, their energy, of their encouragement, they give their house for you to use—it is a spirit of generosity. That is what Jesus is speaking of. We could have figured this out if we realized Jesus that speaks Hebrew, and that he is always referring to the OT Scriptures. We could have looked in Prov 22:9 and seen this exact expression, and here it is properly translated – ‘a generous man will himself be blessed for he shares his food with the poor’ (NIV). ‘He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed’ (KJ - a more literal translation). What it literally says is: he that has a ‘good eye’ shall be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor (in other words, he stores up ‘treasures in heaven’). Isn’t it fascinating that in the OT the translators had no problem. Why? Because they know Hebrew. But in the NT the translators have lots of problems — they know Greek, but it never occurs to them that Jesus was speaking Hebrew. In ch. 28:22 you will see the opposite of a good eye: ‘a stingy man is eager to get rich and is unaware that poverty awaits him’ (NIV) — it literally says: he with an evil eye. So here you have the text and the context of ‘a good eye’ – a Hebrew idiom, a Hebrew expression that shows you exactly what Jesus was saying and meaning. So, we have established that we can know who Jesus is, and that it is very important to know who Jesus was. The question of the ages as to who Jesus was, are going to be answered in the sessions ahead. We already by faith believed that it is important because he is our Mediator
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 08:08:36 +0000
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