Hot answers tagged tanakh
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Occam's answer:
The toleration of polygamy in the OT is not to say that it was an ideal, and we see that the laws dealing with it are mostly proscriptive. The ideal is more likely represented by the monogamous story of Adam and Eve. But for various reasons, the position of women in the ancient world was such that polygamy was an unavoidable fact of life ...
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In general the Tanakh is the same as the Christian Old Testament. The differences are:
Some Christians use a few extra books, which are called deuterocanonical (or apocrypha, by those who reject them). These books are found in the earliest Greek translation of the Tanakh, but were later rejected by the rabbis.
The books of the Tanakh are usually printed ...
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Here is a chart which gives a comparison of the books and order:
(source website)
The other important thing to remember is that the Jewish Tanach exists primarily in Hebrew and is augmented by commentary from within the Jewish tradition. Any translation, especially one whose translation was influenced by other theologies will deviate in terms of content.
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In Judaism the final decision of which writings (Ketuvim, the third part of the Tanakh) were canonical did not happen until at least the end of the 1st century CE. This was after Christianity and Judaism had largely split, and so the two groups made different decisions about which writings were accepted as canonical.
In particular, nascent Rabbinic Judaism ...
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The Greek translation of Jewish scripture (the Septuagint) occurred between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The canon of the Tanakh was finalized hundreds of years later. The Christian canon was debated from the 4th to the 16th centuries. We have a tendency of thinking of the Bible as written in stone, so to speak, but the canon has been the object of ...
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They also show us that the canon was settled long before Jamnia. In the scrolls, we have at least partial copies of every book in the Old Testament except Esther. We also have many scrolls that are not canonical, however, even that teaches us something. Their literature can be broken down into three types. (The percentages are from my seminary notes with ...
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I think I may be posting an answer not quite in-line with what you were hoping for but I am not sure if anyone has published the various differences between the manuscripts that could answer your question properly. I apologize about that.
However, I think it might be worth mentioning that the main benefit of the Dead Sea Scrolls is not small clarifications ...
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Rahab's house was part of the wall, at least high enough to require a rope to let the spies down to the ground:
15Then she let them down by a rope through the window, for her house was built into the city wall, so that she lived in the wall.
The spies particularly ask that the cord be tied in the window they escaped through, in other words visible from ...
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Well, the simplest answer is that the cord that happened to be sitting around her living space was, indeed, red. This is not a wealthy person who has a closet full of cords in different colors lying about.
The ancient world did not have aniline dyes; they could not produce a complete rainbow of possible colors. There was blue from shellfish -- very special ...
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Jews and Christians both consider the tanakh to be important scripture (usually seen as of divine origin, though individual denominations/movements may vary). They differ in how they derive meaning from that text, however. In this answer I'm going to describe some approaches used by each group, but it's important to note that there isn't much that's ...
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[Note: per Jon Ericson's advice and an edit to the question on which this was an original answer, this answer has been moved, with minor edits, from here, due to edits made to that question to keep it from being a duplicate of this one.]
Thesis
Calling on the name of Yahweh means that the Sethites began to engage in the public, communal worship of God.
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And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men (ḥālal) to call upon the name of the LORD.—Genesis 4:26 (KJV)
In the above the phrase "then began men" is translated from one word ḥālal. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon:
ḥālal:
pollute, defile, profane
Theological Wordbook of ...
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In the tanakh Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov are the three patriarchs of the Jewish people, beginning with a covenant with Avraham (Gen 12, 15, 17) and culminating in God revealing himself and giving his torah (Ex 20) to the family of Israel (i.e. Yaakov, after God's messenger renamed him (Gen 32)). God speaks directly to these three patriarchs.
God ...
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We often think that the punishment for adultery in the Bible was stoning but according to the Mishnah (Sanh. xi. 1) it was strangulation. John Owen says, strangulation was used for: adulterers, strikers of parents, man-stealers, old men exemplarily rebellious against the law, false prophets, and those who predicted the future under the names of idols (John ...
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The Hebrew word here is כרת (karet). The precise meaning is uncertain, but it seems to be a punishment at the hands of heaven, not one that a human court hands down. Depending on whom you ask, this might be an early death (at the age of 50, according to one talmudic opinion), extinction of the soul (spiritual, not physical, punishment), or a punishment in ...
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You just about have your answer right in the question. The short answer is that moving eastward seems to relate to exile, while moving westward is a return to the garden and the presence of God.
The long answer:
The garden is planted in the east of Eden
The garden is the primeval meeting place between God and man. It is the first sanctuary, where man is ...
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Didn't see a reference to this great passage anywhere, so I thought I'd tack it on for any future readers.
"Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He [Jesus] explained to them [the disciples] the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures," (NASB, Luke 24:27).
Spoken after Jesus's resurrection, but before his ascension, this ...
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In ancient mythology we see a natural meaning of the color red that would surprise nobody. Historically red often represented violence from blood, or life in blood (i.e. punishment for sin in the life of another). For example, Sekhmet was a warrior goddess in ancient Egypt:
She was envisioned as a fierce lioness, and in art, was depicted as such, or as ...
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There are many ways to determine the quantity of occurrences of a particular phrase in the Bible. The way I often do it is:
Go to www.blueletterbible.org.
You will see a box under "Bible Dictionary/ Search."
Within quotes, type in the word or phrase you would like to search for. For example: "God of Israel." This will yield results for that exact phrase.
...
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There are some flawed assumptions in the question.
As Kazark said in his answer, an animal sacrifice, by itself, does not atone for a sin where you wronged another person. Per Lev. 6 (among other places), you must also make restitution. You probably also need to regret what you did (certainly true by the time of Maimonides in the 13th century; I think ...
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The question is a good one, but some of the underlying suppositions need to be challenged in order to answer it.
The Sacrifice of an Animal Cannot Atone For One Man
In Leviticus 6, the animal's life is not enough to atone for the man's life. In some of the in-between verses which the question does not directly reference (4 and 5), the man must make ...
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Before Moses, there is possibly no other name more appropriate for God other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The reason is that God called Abraham out to populate a land given to a people that would serve him and then repeated the promise to Isaac and Jacob. The promise was to select a 'certain race', and how this particular line along that race ...
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Hezekiah's Sin
Did Hezekiah sin in this matter? Quite simply, yes. God would not come and pronounce judgment on him in response if he had not sinned. But what was his sin? What ought he to have done instead? The OP wrongly insinuates that his sin was to receive the Babylonians; rather it was the manner in which he received them.
Joel Beeke and James La ...
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If you believe that the text is divine, then this isn't a question about the text. It's a question about why G!d chooses this asymmetrical policy. And, as such, that question belongs, I believe, on a doctrinal site.
If you look at the text as a text, then you are looking at the social and cultural context of the time in which it was written. In that society ...
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Polygyny was acceptable because women were considered to be possessions. That is why Sarah called Avraham adon (Gen. 18:13 cp. 1 Pet. 3:6), or "sir"/ "lord"/ "master." The husband is essentially considered to be his wife's "master," and she, his servant.
This is why women did not have the right to divorce their husband. The only way they could re-marry was ...
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Heb 11.13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises,
but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and
embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on
the earth. 14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they
seek a country.
We err if we presume that the NT authors gave us ...
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Oh, how complicated (and therefore subject to misinterpretation!) many want to make it.
The meaning is simple: righteousness produces life!
This is true in the physical sense to some extent and even more so in the spiritual application. The chapter is full of metaphors involving "righteousness." This has absolutely nothing to do with the Genesis ...
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Sensus Plenior is one hermeneutic approach that argues for a literal day.
Every scripture has four meanings relating to the voices of prophet, priest, king and judge.
A literal reading is the voice of the king. The narratives are examples were the visible layer is in that voice. In these, the spiritual layer contains the other voices.
Revelation on the ...
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