ZONDERVAN
Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus
Copyright © 2012 by Lois Tverberg
This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook. Visit www.zondervan.com/ebooks.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tverberg, Lois.
Walking in the dust of Rabbi Jesus : how the Jewish words of Jesus can change
your life/ Lois Tverberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index [if applicable].
ISBN 978-0-310-28420-8 (hardcover)
1. Jesus Christ — Jewishness. 2. Jesus Christ — Words. I. Title.
BT590.J8T84 2011
232.9’06 — dc23 2011035954
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New
International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by
permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible.
Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.
Used by permission.
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Interior design: Beth Shagene
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Foreword by Ray Vander Laan 9
I Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words
with New Ears | 13
1 Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages 15
2 Shema: Living Out What You Hear 31
3 Loving God with Everything You’ve Got 42
4 Meeting Myself Next Door 55
II Living Out the Words
of Rabbi Jesus | 67
5 Gaining a Good Eye 69
6 The Mystery of the Name 81
7 How to Have a Kosher Mouth 92
8 Taking My Thumb Off the Scale 104
9 Praying with Chutzpah 117
10 Thinking with Both Hands 130
III Studying the Word
with Rabbi Jesus | 143
11 The Treasure of the Text 145
12 The Secrets That God Keeps 154
13 Our Longing Father 165
14 God’s Image Stamped in Dust 180
Afterword by Ann Spangler 192
Appendix: The Shema 195
Acknowledgments 197
Notes 199
Glossary 217
Recommended Resources 223
Scripture Index 227
General Index 230
9
Foreword
As an author, Bible teacher, and study tour leader, I have had the
privilege of walking the lands of the Bible with thousands of
Jesus’ followers who came to see where Abraham, Ruth, David, and
Jesus lived. I enjoyed watching group after group slowly come to realize
that the Bible’s stories are set in real times and real places. As they
learned more about the land, the people, and the culture of the Bible,
these believers saw that the context God chose for his redemptive
plan could help them apply the Word to their own lives. At the end
of their travels, I often heard people say, “I will never read the Bible
the same way again.”
Many returned home from Israel or Turkey or Greece with their
faith in Jesus deepened but hungry for more — much more. The pilgrim
excitement of “walking where Jesus walked” became a growing
thirst for a deeper understanding of God’s story — a thirst as palpable
as their need for bottled water in the hot, dry climate of Israel.
I know their experience well — that was my journey too. I began
to explore the Jewish world of Jesus with a desire to deepen my faith
in Jesus. I was familiar with the accounts of his life and believed them
to be true. I accepted his claims to be the Messiah and believed in
his redemptive death. But as I entered the world of Jewish thought,
I began to wonder about the faith of Jesus. I struggled to understand
what I should learn from the accounts of how he lived. Was it simply to
explain why he must die? Or was his life a pattern to be understood and
emulated? And what did it mean to imitate him in my walk with God?
As I explored the lands and cultures of the Bible, I realized that
I did indeed need to have not only faith in Jesus, but also to develop
the faith of Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus I needed to know why and
how he lived out his faith, so that I could follow him more closely.
This insight seems so obvious now that I cannot imagine that I
Foreword
10
had not considered it before. I grew up in a Chris tian community,
lived in a Chris tian home where the Bible was often read, attended
Chris tian schools through college, and received an advanced degree
at an outstanding seminary. I believed the Bible to be the inspired
Word of God and from my childhood was committed to Jesus as Savior
and Lord. Yet I had not even considered the implications of the
fact that Jesus lived among us as a Jewish man in a first-century Jewish
culture. Jesus was Jewish! What a radical thought!
From the beginning, God chose to speak and act within the context
of human culture, so it is no surprise that his Son would do the
same. Jesus lived like a Jew, talked like a Jew, and worshiped like a
Jew. His words, actions, and teaching methods were in keeping with
the customs, traditions, and practices of the Semitic culture into
which he was born. He wasn’t born in northwestern Iowa among
nineteenth-century Dutch immigrants. He was born in Judea, a land
that was a hotbed of political and religious turmoil, a country that
had been the crossroads of the ancient world for centuries. He grew
up among the Jews, a people chosen by God to bear his name to the
world. And he ministered under the mighty empire of Rome. While
God’s message was and is timeless, it was first revealed to a real people
in a real place and at a real time. Understanding this ancient world
is critical to interpreting and applying the biblical story to our own
lives.
In a sense, as we study the Bible, we must temporarily leave our
twenty-first-century culture and our Western attitudes and go back
to another time and place . . . to the land of Israel, the birthplace
and home of Jesus. We must enter an Eastern culture that was passionately
religious and that longed for God’s great redemption. The
Jews of Jesus’ time knew their story and fiercely debated how God
wanted them to live it out. The Hebrew Bible was their daily bread,
and discussion of it dominated their lives, as it would Jesus’ life. Paradoxically,
stepping back into that setting makes the Bible even more
relevant to our own culture and time.
That was my journey from faith in Jesus to learning to live out
the faith of Jesus. What I had been taught from the Bible was not
wrong. Few, if any, doctrines changed for me as I studied the Bible’s
Foreword
11
ancient Jewish context. And after thirty-six years of intensive cultural
study, I still believe God is our Creator, Jesus is our Savior, and the
Bible is his inspired Word. But there are more riches in the Word
than I had ever imagined. To view Scripture through the perspective
of an ancient Near Eastern culture is to gain additional insights, as
certainly as reading the Bible in the original languages deepens one’s
grasp of the text.
Somewhere on the journey of studying the context and culture of
the Bible, I met Lois Tverberg. Just like so many others I had known,
her first experience of the ancient world of the Bible produced an
ever-growing thirst for greater understanding of its story in context.
She was as intense and intentional in her search as any student I had
ever met, bringing her training and skill as a scientist to her pursuit
of deeper understanding of the biblical text. Her tenacity in learning
the ancient languages, in studying the land of Israel, in exploring Jewish
thought, and in investigating archaeological discoveries provide
her with a unique set of tools to explore the text in context. Soon I
was learning from her, as her insights gave me a new understanding
of the Bible and particularly the life of Jesus — the One we both knew
as Savior and Lord, for we share a faith in Jesus. Through her insights
Lois has deepened my understanding of the faith of Jesus and encouraged
me to “walk . . . as [ Jesus] walked” 1 John 2:6 NASB).
Lois’s earlier work (with Ann Spangler), Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi
Jesus, was an entry step into Jesus’ world. The Jewish context into
which Jesus came and the implications of that setting for understanding
him better are powerfully presented and have guided many
believers as they seek a greater understanding of the Teacher from
Nazareth. I believe the present work will have even greater impact
on those who desire to be disciples of Jesus. Readers will be deeply
challenged as they discover the implications of Jesus’ teaching for
their daily walk.
While each chapter is supported with careful analysis of contemporary
scholarship, ancient sources, and recent archaeological discovery,
as you read you will feel as if you are on a journey back to the
world of Jesus. You will see the beauty of the silvery green olive trees
on the Galilean hills, feel the rocky path under your feet, and smell
Foreword
12
the dust as you follow the Rabbi. You will hear the sages discussing
the Torah as their disciples listen and will discover the greatest interpreter
of all . . . Jesus the Messiah. For he is not only God incarnate,
but also the Word incarnate. His life is in a real sense the Word — the
Bible — in living flesh. And you will be challenged to become ever
more passionate about being his disciple — having the faith of Jesus.
So come along with us and follow in the dust of Jesus — the Jewish
Rabbi — of Scripture.
Ray Vander Laan
PART I
Hearing
Our Rabbi’s Words
with New Ears
What would it be like to listen to Jesus’ earth- shattering
words through the ears of a first-century disciple? The
first thing you’d notice is how Jewish they are. His greatest
commandments begin with the Shema, the core statement
of Jewish faith. For over two millennia, each morning and
evening, Jews have committed themselves to loving their
one and only God with all of their heart, soul, and strength.
Learning more about Jesus’ language, his Scriptures, and his
people will deepen our understanding of his most important
words.
15
CHAPTER 1
Brushing Away the Dust
of the Ages
Just as rain water comes down in drops and forms rivers,
so with the Scriptures: one studies a bit today
and some more tomorrow, until in time the understanding
becomes like a flowing stream.
— Song of Songs Midrash Rabbah 2:8
In 1977, Pinin Barcilon won the assignment of a lifetime when she
was asked to lead the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper,
one of the most well-known images of all time. But the renowned
Italian art conservator could hardly imagine how nerve-wracking the
next twenty-three years would be.
The centuries hadn’t been kind to the mural that da Vinci completed
on a monastery wall in Milan, Italy, in 1498. Always the experimenter,
Leonardo had reformulated his paints in a way that proved to
be unstable, so that the paint began flaking off even before his death.
And even though his mural was immediately hailed as a masterpiece,
it was left unprotected from pollution and humidity. When Barcilon
began her restoration, five hundred years of dust, mold, and candle
soot had darkened the iconic work almost to the point of invisibility.
The real challenge for her team, however, was to undo the disastrous
attempts at restoration that had begun back in the 1700s. Heavy
coats of varnish, glue, and wax had been brushed on, each of them
hastening the darkening process. Worst of all, hack amateurs had
painted over da Vinci’s work time and again, rendering its images
distorted, brushing out details they didn’t understand, and filling in
gaps with their own interpretations.
After months of photographing every square centimeter of the
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
16
painting’s surface and analyzing it using state-of-the-art technology,
Barcilon’s team members finally began their work. Then, for over
twenty years they hunched over microscopes, painstakingly scraping
away five hundred years of grime and overpainting. On a good
day, one postage stamp’s worth of the image would emerge. In 1999,
when da Vinci’s brushstrokes were finally revealed, her team’s meticulous,
mind-numbing labor found its reward. Barcilon called it a “slow,
severe conquest, which, flake after flake, day after day, millimeter
after millimeter, fragment after fragment, gave back a reading of
the dimensions, of the expressive and chromatic intensity that we
thought was lost forever.”1
Gloomy shadows banished; a well-lit banquet hall emerged. Peter’s
beard and nose were free of the clumsy weight that later retouchings
had given them. Matthew sported blond hair, not black. Thomas
gained a left hand. Andrew’s expression was transformed — he was no
longer sullen, but astonished. And Jesus’ face glowed with new light
after the dingy repaintings had been removed.
The essence of the scene remained unchanged. Da Vinci had
depicted the fateful scene at the moment Jesus revealed one of his
disciples would soon betray him. But after centuries of murky obscurity,
restoration had brought to light the original beauty of the artist’s
masterful portrayal of the facial expressions and body language of
Christ and his disciples.2
Unearthing Jesus’ World
Just as modern technology enabled Barcilon to reveal da Vinci’s
original strokes, in recent decades scholars have gained new tools to
restore the picture of Jesus that the gospel writers first gave us. In just
the past fifty years, we have seen more advances in biblical archaeology
and in the discovery of ancient texts than in all the centuries
since the time of Jesus. As dingy accretions of history are cleared
away, vivid details of Jesus’ life and culture are emerging.
The same year that the Last Supper was newly unveiled, I took my
first study trip to Israel. One of the scarier highlights of our tour was
exploring the water tunnel that King Hezekiah built under Jerusalem
Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages
17
in 701 BC. Half terrified, our group peered into the dark, stone-hewn
shaft before us and stepped down into the icy, rushing waters of the
Gihon spring. After groping our way through the cramped blackness
by flashlight for a third of a mile, waist-high water sweeping us along,
we heaved a sigh of relief when we finally glimpsed the exit.
Adding to the thrill, we were emerging at the site of the famous
Pool of Siloam, where a blind man miraculously recovered his vision
after Jesus sent him there to wash John 9:7. The puddle-deep pool
was, admittedly, unimpressive — only a few feet wide and a few more
yards long. But this was the famous site, according to Chris tian tradition
that went back to the fourth century AD.
Or so we thought.
In 2004, five years after our visit, a sewage pipe broke underneath
a nearby Jerusalem street. Massive earth-moving equipment rumbled
in to make the repair. Pushing into the soil, a bulldozer blade collided
with a submerged object and came to a grinding halt. An ancient
plastered step emerged as the dirt was brushed away. Within minutes
prominent archaeologists had rushed over, the word “bulldozer”
hurrying them to the scene. Excavation revealed several more steps
down one side of an enormous rectangular pool. Within weeks this
monumental reservoir (about 160 feet wide by 200 feet long) was
identified as the real Pool of Siloam, the main source of fresh water
within Jerusalem’s walls. Coins embedded in the plaster confirmed
that it was in use during Jesus’ time.3
As they excavated the Pool of Siloam archaeologists also discovered
a wide, stepped first-century street that leads from the pool up
to the Temple. This was one of the main Jerusalem thoroughfares in
the first century, and it would have been the final steps of ascent for
pilgrims after days or weeks of journeying to celebrate the feasts. The
Pool of Siloam was one of the places where they could have stopped
to purify themselves before entering the Temple.
And reading John’s gospel again, we discover that the Pool of
Siloam played a part in another scene in Jesus’ ministry. Each night
of the joyous weeklong Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), the high priest
would parade down this street amid great fanfare and fill a golden
pitcher with living water from the Pool of Siloam for the water libation
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
18
on the Temple’s altar. On the last day of the feast, the high priest
would process around the altar seven times as the crowds chanted
fervent prayers for living water, rain for the next year’s crops. The
roar grew ever more thunderous until the priest finally approached
the altar. A hush would descend as he filled a silver bowl and then
ceremoniously poured the living water onto the sacrificial pyre. It was
then when Jesus stood up and shouted, “Let anyone who is thirsty
come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has
said, rivers of living water will flow from within them” John 7:37 – 38,
italics added).
Details That Connect the Dots
My first exposure to this field of study was about fifteen years ago
when I signed up for a class at my church called “The Land, the Culture,
and the Book.” Having grown up in a devout Lutheran family,
I figured that learning some historical background would be good
for my Bible study. My grandparents had been missionaries in Madagascar,
and several uncles and cousins were pastors. My own world
was the sciences, so I was more used to facts and lectures. My graduate
degree was in biology, and I was teaching human physiology and
molecular biology at a nearby college.
I admit that I cringed a little before starting the class, bracing
myself for what I thought would be a weekly dose of dusty, dry archaeological
information. I didn’t know much about the presenter except
that he had taught high school for twenty-five years and had been
leading study trips to Israel for twenty-five years — mentally I calculated
his age at about eighty-seven. How appropriate to learn about
the Old Testament from an octogenarian, I thought.4 (Not catching
that the presenter, Ray Vander Laan, had being doing these things
concurrently, I was off by about forty years.)
But from the first session the class was like drinking from a fire
hose. Everywhere the Bible started greening up, sprouting with new
life. It was there that I first heard of the biblical idea of living water
and learned about its association with the Feast of Tabernacles and
Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages
19
with the outpouring of the Spirit during the messianic age (Ezekiel
47; Joel 2:23 – 29; Zechariah 14:8 – 18.
As I started to see how important history, geography, language,
and culture were for unlocking the biblical text, my curiosity led me
to study in the land of Israel, to learn from scholars there about firstcentury
Jewish culture, and to study Hebrew and Greek.5 A few years
later I left the world of teaching biology to write and teach about this
subject full-time.
You might think that you need to master whole textbooks before
this kind of study starts to enrich your Bible reading, but I’ve been
amazed at how the smallest details can help connect the dots. It’s like
when you’re stumped doing a crossword puzzle but then finally decipher
one word. Suddenly an adjoining word falls into place, which
yields clues to unlock yet more words, and then the rest of the grid
starts to fill in.
The simplest cultural details can unravel knotty mysteries, sometimes
with powerful theological implications. For instance, how much
would the firewood weigh for an average burnt offering? You might
think that minutiae like this isn’t worth studying, but this obscure
detail casts light on one of the Bible’s most difficult chapters.
After reading the account in Genesis 22 about God’s asking Abraham
to sacrifice Isaac, many people ask, “How old was Isaac?” Was he
a toddler, a teen, or an adult? Most paintings picture Isaac as a child
toting a bundle of sticks under his arm as he walks beside his elderly
father. This is because Genesis 22:6 says that Abraham carried the
knife while Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice.
But a sacrifice was offered by roasting an animal as a whole burnt
offering, which took several hours over a full fire.6 The large logs
needed for fuel would require the strength of a full-grown man to
carry them. There was no way the elderly Abraham could lift them
(remember, he was one hundred already when Isaac was born), so he
carried the knife while Isaac carried the wood. In fact, for most of the
journey, two donkeys bore the massive burden (verse 3).
Once you envision an adult Isaac bearing the heavy wood, the
story takes on an entirely different tone. Now we see that the story is
not just about Abraham’s unshakeable faith in God; it’s about Isaac’s
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
20
willing, heroic obedience to submit to his father’s will. And suddenly
the scene of Christ carrying his cross comes starkly into view.
Hearing Jesus through a Disciple’s Ears
What does it mean that Jesus lived as a Jewish rabbi who called and
trained disciples? And how does learning about his teachings in their
original context enable us to better live out our calling? Jesus’ first
followers responded to his words with actions that astound us. They
left home, family, and comfort behind to follow him, risking their
lives to change the world. As life-changing as his teachings were in
their original context, modern readers often struggle to see what provoked
such a radical response. More than twenty centuries separate
us. Could it be that the debris of time and cultural change have taken
the edge off Jesus’ earth-shattering words?
What if we could scrub off the dust and dirt of the ages to see the
original Jesus in the Gospels? What if we allowed the scenery around
him to come to life, so that we could visualize him once again in his
native context? Jesus’ words would not change,
but they would burst with new meaning when
understood in their original setting. We would
see Jesus with new clarity as we bring into
focus the fuzzy backdrop around him that is so
foreign to our modern world — a place of rabbis
and synagogues, nomads, farmers, kings, and
shepherds.
It’s hard not to wonder if the early Jerusalem church might have
had a few advantages in understanding Jesus that can help us as disciples
today. In the first chapters in Acts we read of their amazing
passion — their Spirit-filled prayers, their joyful gatherings, their loving
generosity, and their dynamic witness to their neighbors.
Until a few years ago, it never occurred to me that the first believers
of the infant Jerusalem church in Acts were all observant Jews,
men and women who continued to study the Torah and worship in
the Temple, even after they came to faith in Christ. In fact, for the
first half of Acts, the rapidly expanding church was almost entirely
The world stands
on three things:
on Torah, worship,
and loving deeds
of kindness.
— Mishnah, Avot 1:2
Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages
21
Jewish. It was only after God pushed Peter out of his comfort zone to
witness to the Gentile centurion Cornelius that the church considered
the possibility that the gospel was for Gentiles too Acts 10.
We Chris tians often neglect this as we retell the stories of the
early believers’ joyful fellowship. We assume that the remarkable
success of the Jerusalem church came from the fact that believers
were freshly filled with the Holy Spirit. But Paul’s Gentile church at
Corinth had experienced the same outpouring, yet it struggled with
immaturity, division, and sexual immorality. Why the difference? As
wonderful as it was that the Corinthians found Christ, most had
come out of a pagan reality, and their lives had not been saturated by
the Scriptures that Jesus read, our Old Testament. They lacked the
Torah’s training in moral laws that Christ built upon. They had a lot
of catching up to do.
Moreover, while the Gentiles worshiped Jesus as their Savior and
God, the Jewish believers also knew him as their rabbi. As Jesus’ disciples,
they knew their obligation was to memorize his words and live
according his halakhah, his interpretation of how God’s Word teaches
us to live.
Why Haven’t We Known?
Nowadays, it seems only natural to wonder about Jesus’ Jewish cultural
setting. Why haven’t we asked those questions in the past? A
stroll through the aisles of my local grocery store suggests one answer:
Sushi. Gyros. Kimchi. Tahini. Fifty years ago my mother had never
even heard of these ethnic specialties; it wasn’t until the late sixties
that she even tried making a new-fangled dish called “pizza.”
Until only a few decades ago, a startlingly short list of bland foods
comprised my family’s entire culinary world. Creamed beef on toast.
Macaroni and Spam. Ground beef over rice. In my white-bread world,
I simply never thought to ask.
On my kitchen table is a little clay sculpture of Jesus healing a
blind man, with a sticker on the bottom that says it was handcrafted
in Peru. But you hardly need the label to guess where it came from
when you see the dark braids, the ponchos, the Peruvian faces. Of
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
22
course its creator imagined Jesus within his or her own reality, just
as white Americans have cast Jesus as a blue-eyed Caucasian. As the
gospel has gone out around the world, people have, by default, pictured
Jesus through their own cultural lenses.
You might be surprised that Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper does
the same thing. This masterpiece has influenced the Chris tian imagination
of Jesus’ fateful last evening more than any other, yet it is
culturally wrong in every detail. In the background are windows looking
out on a sunny mid-afternoon scene, whereas the Passover meal
always took place at night. And of course the faces of Jesus and the
disciples are pale-faced Europeans, not Semitic. Most telling is what
is on the table. Lacking are the essential elements of the Passover
celebration, including the lamb and unleavened bread. In their place
is a puffy loaf of bread, when leavening is strictly forbidden during
the week of Passover, and a shockingly unkosher plate of grilled eels
garnished with orange slices!8
Of course da Vinci’s goal was to portray the disciples’ reactions
at that critical moment, and he does so with brilliant technique and
emotive depth. But by not including the elements of Passover, a feast
that celebrated God’s redemption and brimmed over with messianic
expectations, we miss the fact that Jesus was powerfully proclaiming
himself as the fulfillment of God’s ancient promises. Jesus uses the
symbols of Passover to point toward his coming atonement to redeem
those who believed in him and to inaugurate a “new covenant” for
the forgiveness of sin.9
Certainly much of the reason that we Chris tians have missed
these details is simply out of ignorance. But it also comes out of how
we’ve read our Bibles. As I was growing up, what I usually heard about
Jesus’ Jewish context was how much he opposed it and was bringing
it to an end. Unfortunately, that attitude is not just a relic of the
past. Just a few months ago I happened to tune my car radio to hear
a popular pastor put it this way:
When Jesus came, everything changed, everything
changed. . . . He didn’t just want to clean up the people’s attitudes
as they gave their sacrifices, He obliterated the sacrificial system
Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages
23
because He brought an end to Judaism with all its ceremonies,
all its rituals, all its sacrifices, all of its external trappings, the
Temple, the Holy of Holies, all of it.10
If this were what Jesus taught, his first passionate followers in
Acts certainly didn’t catch his drift. Peter and the other early Christians
continued to participate daily in Temple worship Acts 3:1;
21:23 – 26). Jesus did, of course, speak against corruption within the
priesthood and prophesy the Temple’s destruction forty years later.
Other Jewish groups, like the Essenes, also denounced its corruption
and sought to purify their worship. But while the Essenes abandoned
the Temple,11 Jesus’ disciples never did, implying that Jesus did not
preach against the Temple’s ceremonies. And even though the Jerusalem
church ruled that Gentiles did not need to observe Jewish law,
Jewish believers in Jesus continued to carefully observe the Torah
and were even known for their avid observance (see Acts 21:20, 25.12
When I used to read the passages in the New Testament about
“the Jews” as those who opposed the church and rejected Jesus, I
didn’t realize that the people writing those words were also Jews.
Often they used the phrase “the Jews” to refer to the Jewish leadership
who opposed them. Acts tells us that thousands of Jews actually did
believe in Christ Acts 2:41; 5:14; 6:7; 21:20). So the issue to Paul in
Romans 9 – 11 was not that none of the Jews had believed in Christ,
but that not all of them did. (Have all of us Gentiles, for that matter,
embraced him?)
Scholar Luke Timothy Johnson notes that many first-century
documents show a cultural habit of referring to one’s opponents with
harsh epithets such as “hypocrites,” “blind,” or “demon-possessed.” By
our standards, every debate sounds overcharged and full of slander.
When you hear John the Baptist calling his listeners a “brood of
vipers” Matthew 3:7, and Paul wishing that his opponents would
emasculate themselves Galatians 5:12, their comments should be
heard in this light. Within its wider cultural setting, the New Testament’s
rebukes don’t sound quite so harsh.13
The Jews were strongly divided over Jesus in the New Testament,
and this within-the-family debate became heated. But it wasn’t until
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
24
centuries later when the church became overwhelmingly Gentile that
the New Testament was understood as being hostile toward Jews as a
whole. This has strongly contributed to anti-Semitism over the ages,
and for many Chris tians has led to a disinterest in the Jewish setting
of the Bible and our faith.
I was hardly aware of this attitude myself until a stunning encounter
I had before my first study trip in Israel. I was chatting with a
neighbor down the block and mentioned my upcoming travels. Since
he was active in his church, I thought he might be interested. But
he grimaced and blurted out, “Why on earth would you want to go
there? Those Jews never did nothing good, except give us Jesus.”14
Wouldn’t that be enough?
New Tools to Know
Never before have we been more profoundly aware of the diverse
mosaic of peoples that blanket our planet. With such heightened
sensitivity, it seems only natural to ask about Jesus’ Jewish setting.
But ironically, as our world has become more sensitive to embracing
ethnic differences, some have done exactly the opposite with Jesus.
In 1999 the National Catholic Reporter magazine sponsored a “ Jesus
2000” competition, searching for a new “image” of Jesus for the next
millennium. The prize-winning painting, called “The Jesus of the
People,” portrayed Jesus as dark-skinned, thick-lipped, and feminine.15
It’s understandable that this Jesus is not white. But what about the
fact that he’s also not in any way Jewish?
This was the approach that the Last Supper caretakers took in
former centuries. Each time da Vinci’s scene grew dingy, the faces
were “brightened” by repainting right over the top of them, touching
them up in whatever way the current painter saw fit. In a similar way,
the Christ we often encounter has been “repainted” to blend into
everyone else’s culture rather than his own. Each artist adds another
layer to suit their tastes.
It’s hard not to wonder if this is why each new book of the “ Jesus
reimagined” genre wildly disagrees with the previous one. In one Jesus
is a wandering guru, in the next a subversive rebel, in the next a busi-
Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages
25
ness CEO, in the next a dreamy mystic.16 Instead of photoshopping
Jesus into yet another improbable reality, a helpful corrective would
be to restore Jesus to his original setting. And now we are gaining
more and more tools to do so, with the discovery of ancient texts and
archaeological remains of his day.
What would it look like to peel back the layers of time and to see
the real Jesus? Obviously, it would be a mistake to project on him
Jewish realities of later centuries. If we picture him with a bagel in
one hand and a dreidel in the other, we’d be guilty of distorting his
reality too, because both things are from later centuries and practices.
But Jesus did eat matzah (unleavened bread) and celebrate Hanukkah,
traditions that go back to before his time.17
How much can we know about the world of Jesus anyhow? A
wealth of literature actually exists that preserves Jewish thought from
the centuries before and after Christ. Best known are the Mishnah
and the Talmud, two compendiums of discussion on the laws of the
Torah, which contain teachings preserved orally from about 200
BC until AD 200 (Mishnah) or AD 400 – 500 (Talmud, in two editions).
18 Orthodox Jews still study these writings today. Of course
Chris tians don’t read these texts as authoritative, but they reveal an
ancient river of thought that flowed through Jesus’ world, which can
fill in gaps in our understanding. Other first-century documents like
the writings of Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls shed light on Jesus’
world too.
You might be surprised to learn that some of Judaism’s most
influential thinkers, including Hillel and Shammai (30 BC to AD
10), lived in the decades right around Jesus’ time. Hillel’s grandson,
Gamaliel, was Paul’s teacher, who came to the defense of the early
church in Acts 5:33 – 39. The words of these and other early rabbis
allow us to reconstruct the conversations going on around Jesus. They
used the same kind of logic to answer questions, interpret Scriptures,
and weave parables, which yields fascinating clues to Jesus’ words.
Of course, scholars disagree about the exact details of Jesus’ reality,
and Judaism is known for its wide diversity of opinion. My thoughts
will hardly provide the last and best word. But as a Chris tian, I grew
up without knowing the most basic details of Jesus’ Jewish world,
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
26
aspects of his reality that have persisted in Judaism from the first century
until today. What I’ve chosen to share in this book are a few core
concepts that Chris tians have hardly known about, yet shed light
on Jesus’ teachings. Often this Hebraic perspective unlocks biblical
wisdom that our culture has forgotten over time.
Ken Bailey has spent decades traveling in the Middle East to study
Arab peoples, showing how traditional societies there preserve the
Bible’s cultural perspective in ways that Western societies have not.
He comments, “For us as Westerners the cultural distance ‘over’ to
the Middle East is greater than the distance ‘back’ to the first century.
The cultural gulf between the West and the East is deeper and wider
than the gulf between the first century (in the Middle East) and the
contemporary conservative Middle Eastern village.”19
Chris tians may also be surprised at how Jewish traditions have
preserved biblical attitudes. To catch the emotional power of Jesus’
claim to be the source of “living water” in John 7, you can go to the
parched Middle East and ask an Arab about how precious rain is to
him. Or, go to the synagogue in your own hometown, where you’ll
hear passionate prayers for “living water” each day during the weeklong
feast of Sukkot. (In one Jewish prayer book, these go on for over
fifty pages.) Some liturgies preserve cultural memories that go back
thousands of years.20
Why is God allowing us to discover these insights now? Perhaps
it’s because we need them now more than ever. Indeed, for much of
the world, the culture of the Bible makes more sense than it does to
us. Eugene Nida, a pioneer in Bible translation, has commented:
In a sense, the Bible is the most translatable religious book
that has ever been written. . . . If one were to make a comparison
of the culture traits of the Bible with those of all the existing
cultures of today, one would find that in certain respects the
Bible is surprisingly closer to many of them than to the technological
culture of the Western world. It is this “Western” culture
that is the aberrant one in the world. And it is precisely in the
Western world . . . that the Scriptures have seemingly the least
acceptance.21
Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages
27
Throughout history people have lived in extended families, practiced
subsistence farming, and lived under the shadow of slavery and
war. And around the world, many traditional cultures focus their children’s
training on sacred stories and order their lives around religious
practices. With our individualism, secularism, materialism, and biblical
illiteracy, we in the Western world are the ones who have moved
farthest away from Jesus’ world. Could it be that we’re the ones who
have the most to learn?
Not Just a Rabbi
One thing I don’t want you to misunderstand. You might think that
by calling Jesus “rabbi” I’m implying that he was just an innovative
teacher trying to promote a new idea, like Edison with a light bulb
or Bill Gates with a new operating system. We’re so used to thinking
this way that we assume that Jesus’ goal was to compete in the realm
of thought. We mistakenly hear Jesus’ message about the “kingdom
of God” as if he’s trying to sell an exciting new plan for establishing
world peace. But to Jesus’ Jewish audience, to proclaim the kingdom
of God was to make a shocking announcement that God’s promised
Messiah had arrived, because the task of the Messiah was to establish
God’s kingdom on earth. Jesus was making an earth-shattering claim
that he was the Christ, and that God’s redemption of the world would
come through him.22
The reason I point this out is because it allows us to release Jesus
from the age-old competitive game of “ Jesus vs. Judaism,” where his
ideas can only be right if everyone else’s are wrong, and vice versa.
If, as a Chris tian, you start out by assuming that Jesus is the Messiah
and the Son of God, he simply doesn’t need to compete. He speaks
with divine authority whether he disagrees with the Jewish thought
of his day or affirms it. We can grow as his disciples when we hear his
words in their Jewish context and learn how to better live them out.
Bearing this in mind, it is still appropriate to speak of Jesus as
“rabbi,” because part of his mission was to teach his redeemed people
how God wanted them to live.23 He did so by using the methods
that other early Jewish sages used for teaching and raising disciples.
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
28
Throughout the Gospels Jesus was called “teacher” and “rabbi” by
those around him, and members of the early church universally called
themselves “disciples.” They were mathetai (Greek for “students”), followers
of the “Way” that Jesus had taught them for living.
Walking in His Dust
The way Jesus taught his first disciples was not unique but part of a
wider tradition in Judaism that began a few centuries before his time.
Jesus didn’t hand his disciples a textbook or give them a course syllabus.
He asked each one of them to follow him — literally, to “walk
after” him. He invited them to trek the byways at his side, living life
beside him to learn from him as they journeyed. His disciples would
engage in life’s activities along with him, observing his responses and
imitating how he lived by God’s Word.
Out of this unusual teaching method arose a well-known saying:
you should learn from a rabbi by “covering yourself in his dust.” You
should follow so closely behind him as he
traveled from town to town teaching that
billows of sandy granules would cling to your
clothes.24 As you walked after your rabbi,
your heart would change. This will be our
task in this book, to stroll through Jesus’
ancient world at his side, listening to his
words with the ears of a disciple.
But in Hebrew, the word for halakh,
“walk,” encompasses so much more. Your
“walk” in life refers to your overall lifestyle,
how you conduct yourself morally. A rabbi’s
interpretation of the Torah was called halakhah,
how to “walk” by God’s Word. When
Jesus called his disciples to “walk after” him,
he meant the word in both ways. First they
would follow in his literal footsteps; later they would follow in his
teachings, taking his message out to the world.
Closely related was the word derekh, meaning “road,” “path,” or
I did not go to
the rabbi to learn
interpretations of the
Torah from him but
to note his way of
tying his shoelaces
and taking off his
shoes. . . . In his
actions, in his speech,
in his bearing, and
his faithfulness to the
Lord, man must make
the Torah manifest.
— Aryeh Leib Sarahs
Brushing Away the Dust of the Ages
29
“way.” The imagery was not of four-laned freeways that are paved for
permanence, but the track left behind by people’s footprints. Some
paths led to good places, and some to dangerous, evil places. Your
“way” was a spiritual metaphor for how you lived. This is still true
today, as Jesus lovingly walks before us in the way we ought to live.
And then he bids us to put our feet in his own footprints to follow
after him, to become part of his “Way,” as his early followers once did.
In Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, my coauthor Ann Spangler
and I began by looking at another first-century idiom, that to “sit
at the feet” of a rabbi meant to study with him. We pondered what
Jesus’ words might have sounded like if we had gathered in Martha’s
house and sat alongside Mary at Jesus’ feet, enjoying an after-dinner
discussion with his disciples. Ann and I examined basic aspects of
Jesus’ Jewish reality like the yearly feasts, the daily prayers, and the
way rabbis trained disciples. Through them we discovered many new
insights on Jesus’ life and mission.
In this book, I will be looking more closely at Jesus’ words and
teachings in their Jewish context. We’ll push beyond externals to
explore the world of Jewish thought. We’ll contemplate some of the
cultural ideas and biblical images that gave meaning and depth to
Jesus’ words. And, we’ll discover some of the wisdom that Jewish culture
has preserved over the ages that reveals ways we can become
more like Rabbi Jesus.
We’ll look at some key Hebrew words that Jesus knew from his
Scriptures and discover how their deeper meanings cast light on our
faith. We will listen with new ears to Jesus’ interpretation of how
to live out the Shema — the daily pledge to love God with all your
heart that formed the very center of Jewish commitment from ancient
times until today. As we do, we’ll hear our Savior’s calling in ways
that will transform our lives today.
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
30
Wisdom for the Walk
1. Reflect on your own cultural and spiritual heritage. How may it
have distorted your view of Jesus and his teachings? In what ways
do you feel it portrays Jesus accurately?
2. Why have we lost an understanding of the Hebrew culture and
context of Jesus? How might those things still affect our thinking
today?
3. Read John 7, keeping in mind that Jesus’ followers as well as his
opponents were all Jews, and often the words “the Jews” refers
to Jewish leaders who opposed him. How does that cast light on
your reading?
4. The chapter points out the contrast between the maturity of the
Jewish believers in Acts and the Gentile believers of Corinth,
who were plagued with sins and scandals. Consider your own life
and the life of your church. Do you exhibit signs of maturity, or
do you have a long way to go, like the Corinthians? How can you
and your church pursue spiritual maturity?
5. How does understanding Jesus’ culture help us to better interpret
and live out his words?
31
CHAPTER 2
Shema:
Living Out What You Hear
The word Shema itself means “listen,”
and the recital of the Shema is a supreme act of faith-as-listening:
to the voice that brought the universe into being,
created us in love and guides us through our lives.
— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks1
In 1945, Rabbi Eliezer Silver headed up the search for thousands of
displaced Jewish children across Europe. They had been hidden
from the clutches of the Nazis on farms and in convents and monasteries,
and now he sought to return them to their families if at all
possible.
The rabbi had a promising lead with a report that a monastery
in southern France had taken in Jewish children. But the priest in
charge was of little help, declaring that to his knowledge, all of their
children were Chris tians. And Rabbi Silver could produce no records.
Schwartz . . . Kaufmann . . . Schneider. These family names were
obviously German, but they could be either Jewish or Gentile. He
scanned their small faces — many had lived there since they were toddlers.
How could he know if any of them were from Jewish families?
He asked if he could visit the wards. In front of the children he
began singing in Hebrew, “Shema Israel, Adonai elohenu, Adonai
echad.” (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”) A
handful of faces lit up, and tiny voices from around the room joined
in. They recognized these ancient words from their bedtime prayers
and from their earliest memories of their mothers and fathers reciting
them each morning and evening during their own prayers.2
These six words begin the Shema (pronounced “shmah”), three sec-
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
32
tions of Scripture repeated twice daily to remind each Jewish person of
his or her commitment to God Deuteronomy 6:4 – 9; 11:13 – 21; Numbers
15:37 – 41; see pages 195 – 96 for the text). For thousands of years,
observant Jewish parents have taught their children the words of the
Shema as soon as they could speak. Jesus likely learned it on Joseph’s
knee when he was a youngster too. These same lines have been central
to Jewish prayer life since centuries before Jesus was born.3
Before I started learning about Jesus’ Jewish context, I, like most
Chris tians, had never even heard of the Shema. But it was so central
to Jesus’ own faith that when a lawyer asked him what he believed
was the greatest commandment, his answer began by quoting from
the Shema:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating.
Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked
him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O
Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind
and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor
as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Mark 12:28 – 31
Like many Chris tians, if you asked me to summarize this famous
story, I’d rattle off Jesus’ words about loving God and neighbor. But I’d
skip over this mysterious preamble about God being “one,” the very
words that those Jewish children knew by heart. The line I had never
heard of was the cornerstone of their faith.
Why did Jesus quote this line about the Lord being one? Because
it is the opening line of the Shema. Immediately following it is the
great command: “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and
with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Every morning and evening for thousands of years, the Jewish people
have promised to love God wholeheartedly when they’ve said the
Shema.
Believe it or not, Jesus’ next command, “love your neighbor as
yourself,” comes straight from Leviticus 19:18. I used to think that the
Shema: Living Out What You Hear
33
scribe’s question was a legalistic quiz and that Jesus’ talk of love rather
than law would have shocked and scandalized his audience. Imagine
my surprise to discover that every word of Jesus’ answer came straight
out of the Torah — from Leviticus and Deuteronomy — the Old Testament
two books I had read the least.
The lawyer’s query was not foolish either. Rather, it was an invitation
to participate in a fascinating debate among the rabbinic teachers
of his day. Most likely his words were: Mah klal gadol ba’torah?
What is the great essence of God’s Law? What overriding principle
encapsulates all of God’s instruction? (Torah, which we translate
“law,” actually means “teaching.” Technically, the term “Torah” only
refers to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, what Chris tians call
the Pentateuch. But often the word is used to refer to the Scriptures as
a whole.) The goal of answering this classic question was not to summarize
the Bible in one’s own words, but to choose one key verse that
distilled all the rest, focusing its light down to a single brilliant point.
Jesus was being asked to give his opinion on an intriguing discussion
that sought to get at the very heart of God’s will.4
When we hear the lawyer’s question in light of its Jewish context,
we can see how profound it was. And Jesus’ answer is all the more
penetrating when we meditate on it in its original setting too. Let’s
begin to uncover some of the richness of God’s greatest command by
examining this first line of the Shema, which has been so central in
Jewish thought for many centuries. In later chapters, we’ll examine
the rest of Jesus’ words.
Shema — Hear and Obey
The Hebrew words that Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy overflow
with great wisdom. Looking more closely, this is how the first line of
the Shema is translated:
Shema (Hear)
Israel,
Adonai (the Lord)
elohenu (our God)
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
34
Adonai (the Lord)
echad! (one/alone)
The first word, shema, we usually translate “hear.” But the word
shema has a much wider, deeper meaning than “to perceive sound.” It
encompasses a whole spectrum of ideas that includes listening, taking
heed, and responding with action to what one has heard.
I discovered the wideness of the word shema in my first Hebrew
class. One classmate had a smattering of Hebrew knowledge gleaned
from other places, and he let us all know it. He’d come late, leave
early, and goof around during class. The teacher would pose a question
to someone else, and he’d blurt out the answer before they could
respond. Annoyed, one classmate pointedly inquired, “How do you
tell someone to obey?”
“Shema,” responded my instructor.
Later that afternoon, curiosity prodded me to search for verses
that contained “obey” in my computer Bible program. In almost every
case, the Hebrew behind “obey” was shema!
For instance, in English we read Deuteronomy 11:13 as, “So if you
faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today. . . .” Literally,
though, this verse reads, “And it will be if hearing, you will hear. . . .”
And after Moses recited the covenant to the people of Israel, they
responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey”
Exodus 24:7. But the Hebrew here actually reads, “All that God
had said we will do and we will hear.” The two verbs here are really
synonymous — to hear is to do, to be obedient.
This became even clearer one sticky summer evening when I was
visiting an old college friend. As we chatted together in her front
yard, we could hear squealing and laughter coming from behind her
house. Her kids were drenching each other in a water fight, a duel
between the garden hose and a big squirt gun. As the sun sank below
the horizon, it was getting past their bedtimes, so we paused our conversation
so that she could call them inside. “It’s getting late — time
to go in,” she announced. But the giggling and chasing didn’t even
slow down. She repeated her command, louder and louder. No effect.
Shema: Living Out What You Hear
35
“My kids seem to have a hearing problem, Lois,” she sighed,
wearily.
Since I knew that she had studied some Hebrew, I commented,
“You know, actually, what I think your kids have is a shema-ing problem.”
Her words were vibrating their eardrums, but not actually moving
their bodies toward the door to her house. She could have been
talking in Klingon for all their response. She knew as well as I did
that the natural outcome of listening should be response.
Grasping the wider meaning of shema yields insights to other biblical
mysteries. In the psalms, David pleads, “O Lord, please hear my
prayer.” But he wasn’t accusing God of being deaf or disinterested.
Rather, he was calling on God to take action, not just listen to his
words. When the angel appeared to Zechariah to announce that his
wife Elizabeth was pregnant with John, he declared that their prayer
had been heard — that God was answering the barren couple’s prayerful
longings to have a child Luke 1:13.
How does this help us unlock the words of the Shema? In this
line, it is saying in effect, “Hearken, take heed, Israel — the Lord is
your God.” Often God uses shema to call the Israelites to obey him,
to trust him, and to follow in his ways. You can hear God saying this
very thing in Psalm 81. Listen to it in light of the wider meaning of
the word shema:
Hear me, my people, and I will warn you —
if you would only listen to me, Israel! . . .
But my people would not listen to me;
Israel would not submit to me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts
to follow their own devices.
If my people would only listen to me,
if Israel would only follow my ways,
how quickly would I subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes! . . .
You would be fed with the finest of wheat;
with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.
Psalm 81:8, 11 – 14, 16, italics added)
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
36
Having Ears to Hear
Understanding the word shema also helps us see why Jesus often concluded
his teaching with the words, “Whoever has ears to hear, let
them hear” (e.g., Mark 4:9. What he really meant was, “You have
heard my teaching, now take it to heart and obey it!” He wants us to
be doers of his words, not hearers only James 1:22.
You see this especially in Jesus’ parable of the sower, which concludes
with his saying about having “ears to hear.” He tells about a
farmer who sows seed all over his land. But much of the ground is
poor, so the seed bounces off the hardened pathway, withers in the
rocks, and is choked by weeds Mark 4:3 – 20. Only what lands in
the good soil really grows.
In Jesus’ parable, our hearts are the soil, and we “hear” by receiving
his words with faith and obedience. His words are a call to examine
ourselves as to which type of listener we are. Are our hearts hard
to God’s Word? Or are we shallow, distracted by wealth or daily living?
5 It’s easy to insult Jesus’ original audience by assuming that they
were especially unwilling to respond. But are we so different than
them? Who of us isn’t choked by weeds in our lives? How many of us
truly follow wherever Christ leads?
As tough as this parable is to hear, it makes a potent promise.
God is like a farmer who sows a field, knowing that much of the land
is poor. But the seed he is sowing is supercharged. When Christ’s
kingdom takes hold of the few who will shema,6 hear and obey, what
an amazing impact it will have — a huge, hundredfold yield, the very
limits of ancient productivity. Through an obedient disciple God can
do truly miraculous things to expand his kingdom, far beyond human
imagination.
Wise Hebrew Words
The reason that shema has such a breadth of meaning is because
Hebrew is a “word-poor” language. Biblical Hebrew includes only
about 8,000 words, far fewer than the 400,000 or more we have in
English.7 Paradoxically, the richness of Hebrew comes from its pov-
Shema: Living Out What You Hear
37
erty. Because this ancient language has so few words, each one is
like an overstuffed suitcase, bulging with extra meanings that it must
carry in order for the language to fully describe reality. Unpacking
each word is a delightful exercise in seeing how the ancient authors
organized ideas, sometimes grouping concepts together in very different
ways than we do.
Many verbs in Hebrew that we think of as only mental activities
often encompass their expected physical result. For instance, to
“remember” can mean “to act on someone’s behalf.” In Genesis 8:1
it says that “God remembered Noah . . . and he sent a wind over the
earth, and the waters receded.” But God didn’t
just wake up one morning and suddenly recall
that an ark was out bobbing around somewhere.
He “remembered” Noah by coming to his rescue.
And to “know” another person is to have
a relationship with them, to care about them,
even to be intimate with them. When Adam
“knew” Eve, she conceived Cain Genesis 4:1.
Hebrew verbs stress action and effect rather
than just mental activity. This isn’t unique
to Hebrew. Lorrie Anderson, a New Testament
translator in Peru, searched for months
to find a word for “believe” in the Candoshi
language. No direct equivalent existed for that
all- important term in Bible translation. What she finally discovered
was that “hear” in that language also can mean “believe” and also
“obey.” Anderson writes:
The question, “Don’t you hear His Word?” in Candoshi
means “Don’t you believe-obey His Word?” In their way of thinking,
if you “hear” you believe what you hear, and if you believe,
you obey. These are not separate ideas as in English.
She and other Bible translators share the same observation. They often
struggle to find words for mental activities we see as all- important, but
simply don’t exist in indigenous languages where thought is tied to its
expected outcome.8
The Hebrew
tongue, above
other languages,
is very plain, but
withal it is majestic
and glorious:
it contains much
in few and simple
words, and therein
surpasses all other
languages.
— Martin Luther
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
38
Part of why this seems strange to us is because of our Western
perspective. Many of our Greek cultural ancestors, including Plato,
considered the mental world all-important and physical reality worthless.
As a result, our culture tends to exalt our intellect as critical and
discount our actions. Some of us Chris tians even see actions as “dead
works” that are irrelevant, even opposed to faith.
You often see this unhappy disconnect online, when Chris tians
respond to what they consider theological error with rude, ugly
insults, feeling innocent of wrongdoing as long as they are outing a
“heretic.” Knowing the right thing is paramount; obeying Christ’s command
to “love your neighbor” is irrelevant. But Jesus said that we’ll be
held accountable on judgment day for every careless word we speak
Matthew 12:36. Just imagine what he’ll read off from his heavenly
computer monitor as he scrolls through our online comments.
The logic of Hebrew (and other languages) realizes that an action
should result from what is in our minds. If you “remember” someone,
you will act on their behalf. If you “hear” someone, you will obey
their words. If you “know” someone, you will have a close relationship
with them. Hebrew realizes that the longest twelve inches that your
faith has to move is from your head to your heart. And once your
faith makes that move, it naturally comes out through your hands
and feet.
Echad — The One and Only
The other key word in the first line of the Shema is echad (ech-
HAHD). Its most common meaning is simply “one,” but it can also
encompass related ideas, like being single, alone, unique, or unified.
The multiple shades of meaning of echad and the difficult wording
of the rest of the line have made the Shema a topic of debate for
millennia.
Part of the problem is that Deuteronomy 6:4 doesn’t even have
verbs. It literally reads: “YHWH . . . our God . . . YHWH . . . one.”9
The verse can be read either as saying “The Lord is our God, the
Lord alone,” or “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Of these two
readings, the more common reading is the second, that “the Lord is
Shema: Living Out What You Hear
39
one” in the sense that God is unique. There is only one God, the God
of Israel. So this line is usually understood as a statement of belief in
monotheism.
The word echad has been a sticking point between Jews and
Chris tians. Often Jews point to the fact that it means “one” as a reason
that they cannot believe in the Trinity or in the deity of Christ.
And Chris tians respond that echad can refer to a compound unity,
as when God created morning and evening, and together they made
yom echad (“one day”) (cf. Genesis 1:5. Or when Adam and Eve,
through marriage, became basar echad (“one flesh”) Genesis 2:24.
This whole debate hinges on interpreting the Shema as a creed;
that is, “the Lord is one” is a statement about what kind of being
God is. But, interestingly, one of the most widely-read Jewish Bible
translations now renders Deuteronomy 6:4 as “The Lord is our God,
the Lord alone” rather than “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”10
It does so because in recent decades, scholars have come to believe
that the original, ancient sense of echad in this verse was more likely
to be “alone” than “one.” In Zechariah 14:9, for instance, echad has
this sense: “The Lord will be king over all the earth; on that day the
Lord will be echad and his name echad” (pers. trans.). This is a vision
of the messianic age, when all of humanity will cease to worship idols
and revere only God and call on his name alone.
Jewish scholar Jeffrey Tigay asserts that even though the Scriptures
clearly preach monotheism, the Shema itself is not a statement
of belief. It’s an oath of loyalty. He calls the first line of the Shema “a
description of the proper relationship between YHVH and Israel: He
alone is Israel’s God. This is not a declaration of monotheism, meaning
that there is only one God. . . . Though other peoples worship
various beings and things they consider divine, Israel is to recognize
YHVH alone.”11
Why is this important? Because it changes the sense of what the
Shema communicates. Rather than merely being a command to a
particular belief about God, it is actually a call for a person’s absolute
allegiance to God. God alone is the one we should worship; him only
shall we serve. As often as the Shema is called a creed or a prayer, it
Hearing Our Rabbi’s Words with New Ears
40
is better understood as an oath of allegiance, a twice-daily recommitment
to the covenant with the God of Israel.
As Western Chris tians we are used to reciting creeds and statements
of belief in order to define our faith. We expect to find one
here too. So we easily could misunderstand that Jesus was saying that
it is extremely critical that we believe in God’s “oneness.” But when
properly understood, this line shows that the greatest commandment
is actually a call to commit ourselves to the one true God.
Reading the line this way solves another mystery about what Jesus
was saying. If he was asked what the greatest commandment was, why
does he begin by quoting a line about God being “one”? Because if
you read this line as about committing oneself to God as one’s Lord,
it flows directly into the next line in the Shema, explaining why we
should love God with every fiber of our being. If the Lord alone is our
God, and we worship no other gods, we can love him with all of our
heart and soul and strength. The two sentences together become one
commandment, the greatest in fact — to love the Lord your God.12
Once again, in the light of their Hebrew context, we find that
Jesus’ words call us beyond what is going on in our brains. We are not
just to “hear” but to take heed, to respond, to obey. And we are not
just called to believe in the oneness of God, but to place him at the
center of our lives.
To do that, we are to love God with all of our heart and soul and
strength and mind. Each of these words, in their Hebrew context, can
expand our understanding of our calling and the very essence of the
Scriptures, as Jesus understood it. We’ll consider that next.
Shema: Living Out What You Hear
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Wisdom for the Walk
1. Read the three passages of the Shema on pages 195 – 96 at the
end of this book. Why do you think these passages were chosen
for repetition every morning and evening? What questions do
they raise in your mind?
2. Read 2 Chron icles 6:19 – 27, which is Solomon’s prayer at the
dedication of the first temple. How does knowing the wider
Hebraic meaning of “hear,” shema, enrich your understanding?
3. In what ways may you have heard (intellectually understood
something) but not obeyed (acted on your knowledge)? Why does
this happen? What can you do about it?
4. The Shema is often interpreted as a statement of monotheism,
that God is one. But it can also be translated as “the Lord alone
is our God.” How does this translation change or deepen your
understanding of God and how to relate to him?
5. Paul also quotes the Shema in 1 Co rin thi ans 8:4. How does he
use it in his teaching?