Ari Lamm
@AriLamm
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Host of Good Faith Effort, a podcast on the Bible and society @gfaitheffort. CEO, BZ Media. "Why Read The Bible In Hebrew?"
Joined October 2013
Why Read The Bible In Hebrew?. Well, remember when God gets angry at Sarah for laughing when she hears that God will grant her a child?. What exactly did Sarah do wrong?!. A thread (for non-Hebrew readers too!) 🧵 1
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I am a huge fan of Frederick Douglass. But you are allowed to say something nice about Increase Mather's contribution to the American jeremiad tradition without clarifying that Frederick Douglass did it better.
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Doing a ton of reading on English/early American history (for a super top secret Hebrew Bible podcast project nbd!) and slowly realizing that if you're looking for scholarship since like 2010 on New England written *without* contempt/condescension you're basically out of luck.
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The point of all this monotheism stuff is thus not to get you to deny the powers you see all around you. It’s not to make you disdainful of God’s Creation. It is, on the contrary, to encourage our awe of Creation…thereby turning our reverence to Creation’s Author.
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The word for “law” there is “torah”, from “y-r-h” meaning “to instruct”. As in “They teach Jacob your ordinances” (Deut 33:10). The word for “teach” has that same root. The mighty sun, in other words, is just another manifestation of God’s Instruction in establishing Creation.
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But what Scripture reminds us, is that those things are created by God, belong to Him, and serve His purpose. Psalm 19 is instructive here too. You know what it compares the celestial powers to?. “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (19:7).
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A lesser book than the Bible would have told you those things don’t exist, or aren’t so great. But the Bible does the opposite. It actually gives us even more mellifluous and powerful language to admire them. Go ahead and read Psalm 19’s depiction of the sun!.
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Now, that universe is beautiful and bountiful…but also overwhelming, sometimes even frightening. That’s true of both its natural and supernatural elements. No wonder humans took the most powerful of those elements, put faces and names to them, and began to worship them!.
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Why?. Because, says Scripture, they’re not real. They’re sock puppets. What’s real is the universe God created.
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But when the Bible uses them, it’s just to describe natural phenomena. So like the Canaanite god of the underworld is “Mot”. But in the Bible that word (“mavet”) just means “death”. A natural occurrence. Same for “Shamash”, the sun god. In the Bible “shemesh” just means “sun”.
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One thing you realize reading through Scripture is you’ll never see any of these apparent rivals to God actually personified, or with a POV. Ever. And it’s not like the Bible *couldn’t* have done this. It uses all the names of personified pagan gods: Shamash, Mot, Yam, etc.
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Spencer is such a joy to read—elegant, witty, erudite. An essential follow. Here he tackles a question I get asked a lot. What does the Bible mean when it talks about “other gods”?. Spencer’s thread is awesome. I’ve added my own thread below, which I believe supports his point!.
You know what, this is actually a decent question. I’ll bite. Hebrew has a number of words that we typically translate as “God.” One is elohim, and it basically means any higher power or absolute authority. Similar to English when we say “LeBron is a GOD of the court.” 🧵.
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Also true for the Old Testament. And the amount of gaslighting you get for noticing is even worse.
I have come to the conclusion that most of the critical approaches to New Testament authorship/dating are such hot garbage that they are embarrassments to the process of peer review. AMA.
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Yes, as everyone knows the pre-Christian Norse, Celts, Gauls and Saxons were famously all the same with a unified culture. That’s actually why they never fought with each other.
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There are so many different ways you can go from there! There are entire political orientations with wildly opposing views on policy and morality that can branch off from that. But like. "oh no big deal just another Tuesday"?!. I'd recommend cracking open Scripture again.
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I definitely don't think the Bible requires a particular opinion on specific geopolitical issues. But if as a reader of Scripture you look at the people of Israel's literal return to the Promised Land and ascribe zero significance to it? Just another fact? Your soul is rotted.
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The spiritual returns to reading the Bible in Hebrew are massive. A wonderful insight by @SpencerKlavan.
A Hebrew word I love is "gibbor" (גִּבּוֹר). It means "warrior, strong man, or champion." It comes from root meaning "strong." But that same root also gives us "gever" (גֶּבֶר), which is basically Hebrew's word for the average Joe. So, like, Psalm 128 describes how a man who.
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I am shooketh.
I can’t wait to be a primary source.
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Throwing my kippah in the ring…. Guys, books about the Bible by people who love it are awesome!.
🚨Giveaway🚨. I’m giving away a copy of my @tandtclark book on Amos. RT and follow to enter. Tag a friend for an extra entry. Winner announced 6/23.
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The brilliant @JamesBejon on How NOT To Read The Bible. We are so beyond back.
It started with a conversation with the mandatory-follow Ari Lamm (@AriLamm),. then it became a thread,. and now it’s a blog post. What next?.
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