The Bible Through Their Eyes: Part Two

The second section of "The Bible Through Their Eyes" program -- "Learning How Words Work" -- has been revised and uploaded to the website.

"A goal that every reader of the Bible should have is to determine what the words they are reading meant to the original author and the audience to whom he or she was writing. This is not a simple task. As a matter of fact it may be impossible in some cases. There are, however, guidelines that one may use to ensure the highest possibility of accuracy.

This is what we call learning how words work

Learning how words work allows us to see beyond the cultural blinders that we have worn all of our lives. We have been acquiring words, along with the bundles of association provided by our culture, all of our lives. So have many others, otherwise, without this process, communication with one another would be impossible. It is those shared bundles of associations that combine to create our languages."

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Hammurabi, Sixth King of Babylon

Famous for the Code of Hammurabi, a symbol of the Mesopotamian civilization, Hammurabi was a Babylonian king and the sixth ruler of the Amorite dynasty. He is revered today as one of the great rulers and lawgivers of ancient times. Hammurabi (also spelled Hammurapi) was a member of the Amorite tribe, a Semitic group of people who lived in Mesopotamia, an area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Very little information exists about his early life and immediate family. His father was named Sinmuballit, his sister was Iltani and his firstborn son was Samsuiluna. The origin of Hammurabi’s name isn’t distinctly Babylonian and remains a bit of a mystery, the Catholic Encyclopedia explains. Some scribes have translated it as “Kimta-rapaashtum,” meaning “great family” in the South Arabian dialect. Many scholars agree that Hammurabi’s dynasty was of Arabic or Aramean origin, originating in the “land of Amurru.”
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Woman Arrested for Carrying Torah Near Western Wall

JERUSALEM (RNS) An Israeli feminist was arrested Monday (July 12) when she carried a Torah scroll at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. Jerusalem police detained Anat Hoffman, co-founder of the Women of the Wall, for five hours, fined her $1,300 and ordered her to stay away from the Western Wall for 30 days, according to the statement released by Hoffman's group. . . The incident occurred on the same day the Israeli parliament took steps to approve a contentious law that would codify the Orthodox establishment's control over all matters related to conversions to Judaism.
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How Will 9,000,000,000 People Live Together?

The world's population has risen from two billion in 1930 to 6.8 billion now, with nine billion projected by 2050. Think about those numbers for a moment. More people will be added to the present population in the next 40 years than the entire world population in 1930. What will be required to supply 9,000,000,000 people with water, food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, entertainment, etc.? Where will they work and who will pay them? How will they relate to one another? What they believe will clearly play a role in the way they relate. If they believe that the protection, preservation and enhancement of the quality of life is their top priority in 40 years the world could be a more peaceful and safer place. But, if they believe that their mutually exclusive belief systems should be imposed on the rest of the population, the quality of life that we have experienced could steadily degenerate over next 40 years. Clearly the current trend of for the concentration of wealth in fewer & fewer hands has some dangerous implications. As the general unrest of billions of people increases their beliefs will be a major factor in determining what they do. In 40 years my oldest grandson will be younger than I am now, and my youngest granddaughter will be 43 years old. How old will you children and grandchildren be? What can we do to make their world better and safer?

Jerusalem's Most Ancient Letter Revealed

Archaeologists working in Jerusalem have uncovered the most ancient written document ever found in the city – a fragment of a letter thought to date back to the 14th century BCE. The letter was engraved in clay using the Akkadian text, used at the time as a "bridge language" between kingdoms and others. Researchers said the fragment shows that Jerusalem was an important city in the late Bronze age, even before it became the capital of the Jewish state and the city in which the Holy Temple was built.
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Ancient Egyptian City Located in Nile Delta by Radar

An ancient Egyptian city believed to be Avaris, the capital of the Hyksos people who ruled 3,500 years ago, has been located by radar, Egypt's culture ministry says. A team of Austrian archaeologists used radar imaging to find the underground outlines of the city in the Nile Delta, a now densely populated area. The Hyksos were foreign occupiers from Asia who ruled Egypt for a century.
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Egyptian Kingdoms Dated

A three-year study of hundreds of artefacts looks set to settle several long-standing debates about Egypt's ancient dynasties. The study, which appears in today's issue of Science1, is the first to use high-precision measurements of radioactive carbon isotopes to produce a detailed timeline for the reigns of Egyptian pharaohs from about 2650 BC to 1100 BC. "It is a very, very important finding," says Hendrik Bruins, an archaeologist and geoscientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, who was not associated with the work. "For the first time, radiocarbon dating more or less corroborates the essence of the Egyptian historical chronology."
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What Does God Require?

An unforgettable moment that almost every Informed Believer, with a Christian biblical heritage, never forgets is the moment he or she became aware of the differences between the Jewish Yeshua and the Roman Jesus. It is a shocking experience, to say the least. The Jewish Yeshua was the person that lived in the first century CE and some of his teachings are recorded in the Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark & Luke. The Roman Jesus is a theological creation of Gentile Christians, who were heavily influenced by Roman Emperors and the pre-Christian pagan beliefs of generations of Gentile church leaders. Who the Roman Jesus was and what he required of his followers fluctuated from time to time; depending on who was in charge of the church. In the famous 4th century CE conflict between two Alexandrian church leaders, Arius and Athanasius, the Roman Church first ruled that Athanasius was correct, reversed its position in favor or Arius for a while, and then reversed it again back to Athanasius. The status of their followers changed from orthodox believers to lost heretics without any changes in their individual beliefs. Changing the “official standard” for determining who is saved or damned has been repeated many times throughout the history of Christianity. However, the constant factor found almost universally among the different standards of salvation is that they all require adherence to the “correct beliefs,” which is determined by a religious institution.
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Presbyterians Push to Demonize Israel

You probably don’t remember but before June 1967 there was peace in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. There were no fedayeen, no terror attacks, no PLO. Only after it was “colonized in the 20th century” by Jewish immigrants from Europe who took “the land of Palestine from a majority of its inhabitants at gunpoint” did things go sour. First came the Nakba, the catastrophe that was the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, followed 19 years later by the “illegal” occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. That’s the view the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) will be asked to endorse next month when it meets in Minneapolis to consider a report by its Middle East study committee. . . . This document ignores Arab refusal to recognize the Jewish state, the attempts to destroy it at birth and the threats to drive it into the sea. It was the Jews’ own fault for being there in the first place. The report reaches back to biblical times to delegitimize Jewish claims to the land. Jacob, aka Israel, stole the birthright from his brother Esau and refused later entreaties to combine their interests and dwell in the land together. . . . National Jewish organizations, which the report accuses of “complicity in the excesses of Israeli policy,” have understandably denounced the document. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has said it is “distinctly onesided, traffics in troubling theology, misrepresents Jewish history.”
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Searching for the Better Text

How errors crept into the Bible and what can be done to correct them. Isaiah’s vision of universal peace is one of the best-known passages in the Hebrew Bible: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). But does this beloved image of the Peaceable Kingdom contain a mistranslation? For years many scholars suspected that it did. Given the parallelism of the phrases, one would expect a verb instead of “the fatling.” With the discovery of the Isaiah Scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls, those scholars were given persuasive new support. The Isaiah Scroll contains a slight change in the Hebrew letters at this point in the text, yielding “will feed”: “the calf and the young lion will feed together.” This is just one of numerous variations from the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In some cases the traditional text is clearly superior, but in others the version in the scrolls is better. Thanks to the scrolls, more and more textual problems in the Hebrew Bible are being resolved. The notes in newer Bible translations list variant readings from the scrolls, and in some cases, the translations incorporate these readings in the text as the preferred reading. No one has ever seriously suggested that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain anything like an eleventh commandment; but the scrolls do help clarify numerous difficult phrases in the Hebrew Bible, and for textual scholars that is more than enough. Before we list other examples of how the Dead Sea Scrolls influenced — or altered —Bible translations, we need to understand how ambiguities crept into the text of the Hebrew Bible in the first place. And we must also familiarize ourselves with the ancient versions of the Hebrew Bible on which modern translations rely (for good reason scholars call these ancient versions “witnesses” to the biblical text).
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Saving a Life Trumps Dogma

The principle of saving a life is paramount in Jewish law – so why are ultra-orthodox Jews still opposed to organ donation? Supporters of a new initiative encouraging organ donation in the Jewish community face an uphill task convincing certain groups that the practice is compatible with religious law. Even though the ultimate mitzvah (commandment) in Judaism is saving another's life, there is still resistance when it comes to donating organs for just such a cause. According to the misinterpretations of many ultra-orthodox leaders, a person must be buried intact so as to be in full working order when the Messiah comes to revive the dead. Due to the sanctity of every
individual's body – which is viewed as simply a receptacle for the God-given neshama (soul) – it is forbidden to desecrate a body, whether living or dead, either with superficially, as with tattoos, or by more extreme actions such as cremation. The issue of organ donation has divided the Jewish community for generations. Despite an apparent softening in the approach of many ultra-orthodox rabbis to the subject, there are still vast swaths of the Jewish public who are vehemently opposed to it – to the point that many Haredim carry anti-organ-donor cards expressly forbidding the
removal of their organs under any circumstances. Of course, those same people have no problem receiving organs from other donors, displaying the kind of hypocrisy that earns the Haredi community such opprobrium from their Jewish peers both in Israel and
abroad. Their all-take, no-give approach over organ transplants is reminiscent of their refusal to serve in the IDF, despite their expectation that others put their lives on the line to defend Israel's citizens and protect their freedom.
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