08 January 2025
Jesus is the Hebrew Messiah. The Bible is a Hebrew document and Christianity is a Hebrew religion. God built the Hebrew nation and culture as the sole fit means of revealing Himself to His Creation. If you are not striving to embrace the Hebrew outlook on reality, then you are not following Jesus.
Granted, it's a struggle. I look back on my life and almost despair at how long it took me to work out the necessity of understanding the Hebrew perspective on Scripture. But then, I realize just how very far I had to go, and in those days, I was blindly stumbling through the wilderness trying to find the path. Only recently have we seen a growing body of scholarship urging us to discover the ancient Hebrew mind.
We've already noted our delight with the work of Jeff Benner in teaching Hebrew language and thought. He has a YouTube channel and at least one solid website. This is not a blanket endorsement, though. For example, we take issue with his failure to use the painfully obvious glottal stops so common across all Semitic languages. Still, his work in ferreting out the underlying conceptions of Hebrew language is invaluable.
One particular issue he points out is the sheer practicality of the Hebrew approach to reality. Climb up to a high point somewhere and take a picture of the landscape. Somewhere out there in the image will be a horizon. Whether it's a rising ridge or simply that visual effect in which the earth curves away out of view, you cannot see beyond a certain point. If you could ask an ancient Hebrew what was beyond that horizon, he would say, "Nothing".
His answer is not meant to be factual, but states a moral principle that, if you cannot see it or touch it, then you cannot know it. It's not quite the same as, "Out of sight, out of mind." That's a binary statement. Rather, with Hebrew thinking, it's that whatever is out there isn't your problem right now.
For example, the Hebrew culture imported the Persian concept of "millennium". There is no actual Hebrew word for it. The Hebrews aggressively hijacked pagan concepts in order to capture them for Jehovah. Whatever claims pagans made for their deities were (often sarcastically) associated with Jehovah as propaganda against idolatry. The literal meaning of "a thousand years" would be missing the point. Hebrew minds didn't engage in mathematical precision very often. Rather, they used the concept of "millennium" to denote something too long for any useful measurement. You don't need to worry about how long that is. For them, anything beyond their horizon is not their problem. Yes, God knows in detail everything out there, and we will let Him worry about it. He didn't put it in our laps, so it's a waste of His provision to struggle with what is beyond our reach.
This is shocking to western minds. In the West, a primary virtue is curiosity for its own sake. It's one thing to examine something in front of you, but it's another thing entirely to go looking for data that you cannot use in serving the Lord. For the Hebrews, this was a purely fleshly instinct that arose from the Fall. It may be ubiquitous and require mention in a law code, but it is distinctly dangerous. Don't buy into the western pagan morals about the superiority of intellectual awareness, and the dismissive attitude toward those who don't worship curiosity. For the Hebrew, it doesn't matter until it matters. It's idolatry to pile up knowledge simply for the sake of knowing.
The worst thing you can do in Hebrew thinking is to cut yourself adrift from all the richness of what God has provided in terms of wisdom and experience. Your nation's traditions aren't a jail, but a treasury of revelation. Sure, revisit those events and their meaning, but don't simply leave it all behind, as if it confines you. The Covenant boundaries are not a prison; they keep you from falling into Satan's hand. Serving God is not slavery; it's a high privilege restricted to only a few.
In our forum chat the other day we were discussing how the difficulty in learning Hebrew is not the heavy load of memorization. There are roughly 800 root words in Hebrew, and a few thousand usage terms derived from those roots. The root meaning of the entire language of ancient Hebrew is wrapped up in the letters themselves. It's not that the Hebrew people were so adept at memorizing vast quantities of narrative, but that the complexity of their language was not in the words themselves, but the contextual meaning.
Contrast that with English. Just reading Shakespeare, for example, requires a vocabulary of 35,000 words. The number of traditional dictionary terms is roughly 500,000, but a modern rewrite would require more like a million. One historian said that the English language did not borrow from others, but chased every foreign language down dark alleys to mug them and dig through their pockets for every word they might possess. All of this because of an obsession with precision that paradoxically few ever seem to exercise in speech or writing. Instead, we keep reinterpreting what we learn from others and every story gets garbled because rote memorization is not only hard to do, but pointless because of how the meanings of words drift over time.
In English it's a virtue to characterize and reinterpret everything, and we do it quite poorly for the most part. That's what happens when language is used like ore carts carrying data. With Hebrews, the root thrust of the language itself serves as an indicator of God's will. To be literate in Hebrew is to be fully aware of the etymology of the words and the very letters themselves. Modern Hebrew bears only the most superficial resemblance to the ancient. Benner notes that the modern Hebrew script actively obscures the pictographic meaning of the original Hebrew writing.
We have indeed a very long way to go in rediscovering God's Word.
This document is public domain; spread the message.