Reader Questions Anwered

Why did they tie a rope to the high priest on the Day of Atonement?

Does Matthew 19:18 say "shall not murder" or "shall not kill"?

What does Paul mean by "and so all Israel will be saved"?

Reader Question: Why did they tie a rope to the high priest before he entered the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement? (08/14/22)

Short Answer: They didn't.

Long Answer: Apparently, the so-called purpose of the mythical rope was to pull the high priest out in case he was struck dead by God because of some sin that had not been atoned for. Mythical bells were attached to the high priest's garment, so that those outside could hear him moving around, and if the bells stopped, they would know he had died and it was time to pull him out.

The Bible does not know about any of this, however, and apparently neither did anyone else until the 13th century A.D., when it was introduced in the Zohar, a Jewish mystical work.

In fact, the high priest's ordinary working garments are exhaustively described in Exodus 28; there are bells on the hem, but no rope. They seem to have looked more or less like this modern reconstruction.

On the Day of Atonement, however, the high priest wore only simple linen garments, according to Leviticus 16:4 - no colors, no bells, no ephod, and, most importantly for our discussion here, no rope.

Well, then, what if the high priest died? There is no human provision for this, because God made sure it didn't happen. The purpose of the bells on the hem of the ordinary garments is given in Exodus 28:35: "And it shall be on Aaron when he ministers, and its sound shall be heard when he goes into the Holy Place before the LORD, and when he comes out, so that he does not die." Leviticus 16 talks about the Day of Atonement. Verse 2 says, the LORD said to Moses, "Tell Aaron your brother not to come at any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, before the mercy seat that is on the ark, so that he may not die." Verses 12-13 say, "he shall take a censer full of coals of fire from the altar before the LORD, and two handfuls of sweet incense beaten small, and he shall bring it inside the veil and put the incense on the fire before the LORD, that the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy seat that is over the testimony, so that he does not die."

In any case, the whole purpose of the Day of Atonement is that the high priest will "make atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make atonement for the tent of meeting and for the altar, and he shall make atonement for the priests and for all the people of the assembly." It seems a little counter-intuitive to me that God might strike the high priest dead inside the Holy of Holies, and thus make the whole area (not to mention that year's ceremony of atonement) unclean, and thus ruin everything for everybody.

So the secondary lesson for us is just what my grandpa used to say: "Don't believe everything you read. And nothing that you hear, and only half of what you see!" (The latter is a paraphrase of E. A. Poe, in "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether," providing what I read on the Internet is correct.)

The primary lesson is that if we had read Exodus and Leviticus carefully for ourselves, we would have been more skeptical of the rope story to begin with.

Weird Al and Bible Study (08/26/22)

Before you read any farther, please listen to Mission Statement, by Weird Al Yankovic. It's from the album Mandatory Fun, which may be my favorite. I've listened to it forty times - I just put a CD in the car and listen to it overandoverandover until I finally remember to pick up a different CD on my way out the door.

I've always been a little puzzled by the dramatic change in musical styles near the end of Mission Statement. A couple days ago, waiting in a parking lot for my grandson, I took out the jewel-box insert and studied the lyrics. Several hours later, I was thinking about it again, and suddenly it hit me: the music changes because it's a paradigm shift, get it? It says so, right there in the lyrics:

"Well, it's a paradigm shift, now!"

Now, you probably noticed this the first time you heard it, but I had to listen to the song forty times before I got it. This is why we have keep reading the Bible. Sometimes we get a new insight the first time, and every time, we read a passage. Sometimes we have to read it forty times and then go away and think about it before we say, "Oh, I get it!" And when we do say that, it will be a paradigm shift in the way we read the text.

Reader Question: How should we refer to God? (09/02/22)

Reader 1: I don't like referring to God as God because of its human, or even pagan, connotations. I've come to like Creator more. In Exodus, "God" calls himself I AM. How can we possibly know what to call our Creator? Perhaps Yahweh, while a decent guess, may be the best way to put a label on an entity which defies description and human understanding. What do you think?

Reader 2: Is the Creator of other religions, e.g., various Native American tribal religions, the same as God?

Short Answer: The Bible doesn't have any trouble with "God," so I don't either. "Creator" seems to me personally to take a rather narrow view of who God is. Other people have other views, and that's fine with me, to the extent that I'm even entitled to have an opinion about the views of other people. Calling on God is more important than what we call God.

Long Answer: Both of these fellow readers asked for my opinion, and that's what you're going to get, because this is one of those questions where there is no "correct" answer. In fact, the Bible uses many names for God.

These questions remind me of a guest preacher we had one Sunday who was Navajo. He said that as a boy, he would sit on a rock and shout at the sky, "Yeh shu?" "Where are you from?" (My consultant on the Navajo language says that this is in the sense of "What clan are you from? Who are your people?") Then he went to seminary and learned that all that time, he had been unknowingly calling on Yeshua, Jesus. (That may be how he ended up in seminary. Be careful what you pray for.)

My Opinion on Question 1: Three creeds prescribe orthodox Christian belief. They do not say how one is to address or refer to God.

The Apostles' Creed says, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." God, Father, Almighty, and maker are all characteristics, not names, and encompass more than just a creator.
The Nicene Creed says, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible," which adds the information that there's only one such being.
The Athanasian Creed doesn't comment on whether God is creator; it concentrates on the nature of the Trinity and says that God is triune, uncreated, unlimited, eternal, and almighty, among other characteristics.

Thus we get no help on this question from orthodoxy, but we also get no prohibitions.

The original Hebrew and Greek of the Old and New Testaments and the creeds are perfectly comfortable with calling God "God," so I'm okay with it. Both also use "Lord" many times, so I'm okay with that, also. Several other names are used less frequently, but they can all be used, too.

Two names for God seem to be actual names, or possibly two forms of the same ineffable name. The Bible treats them with great respect, so I do, too.

I can only find "I AM" used three times in the OT, all in Exodus 3:14:

Exodus 3:14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel: 'I AM has sent me to you.' "

Tiny Language Lesson: Neither Hebrew nor Greek requires a pronoun to be used with a verb. In the absence of some specified noun, the verb itself shows who or what is doing the action. "I go" in Hebrew or Greek can be just "[I] Go," and it can also be translated as "I am going." For the verb "to be," the opposite is often true. "I am whatever" is frequently just "I, whatever." In many cases, neither "I" nor "am" is present; there's no pronoun and some other verb entirely. This is where your King James Bible is invaluable. The italics show to some degree of accuracy that a word is not present in the Hebrew or Greek.

Therefore, any time outside Exodus 3:14 that you see "I am the LORD" or "I am God" or "I am whatever," the Hebrew has "I the LORD" or "I God" or "I whatever"; the "am" is unnecessary in Hebrew and therefore not used. "I AM" in Exodus 3:14 is emphatic, which is probably why most translations use capital letters. The Greek has ego eimi/I am in Exodus 3:14, and since the "I" and "am" are present, this is also emphatic. I didn't look at every single "I am" in the Greek, but spot checking suggests that relatively few of them have ego eimi in either Testament. They mostly have either ego or eimi, both of which are of necessity translated into English as an ordinary, non-emphatic "I am," or they have some other verb altogether, with neither "I" nor "am." The NT Jews get really offended when Jesus says he is "I AM." For example, in John 8:58-59, Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I AM," and the listeners try to stone him. In Mark 14:61-64, Jesus is asked if he the Christ, the son of God. He replies, "I AM," and is immediately accused of blasphemy.

Almost all the time when you see "LORD," the Hebrew has "YHWH," which appears to be a form of "I AM" and God's name. For example, Exodus 20:2 says, "I am YHWH your elohim/God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other elohim/gods before me." Vs. 7 says, "You shall not take the name of YHWH your elohim/God in vain, for YHWH will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain."

We don't know how to pronounce YHWH, because the vowels are not given in the text, and the Jews have not spoken the name of God for at least 2500 years. As far as I know, the earliest extant copies of the Hebrew Bible use the vowels for adonai/master/lord/sir with YHWH, as a reminder of what they should say instead. For most of this time, Jews have apparently said adonai whenever they came to the written form YHWH (~6500 times in the OT), and that's what I learned to do in Hebrew class; however, many modern Jews say ha shem/the name, and that seems to be what (retired professor of Old Testament) Dr. Nancy Bowen does. So I am opposed to "Yahweh," for two reasons. First, it almost certainly isn't correct or even a real word, since it's made up from consonants from YHWH and vowels from adonai. If those vowels gave the actual name, they wouldn't have used them! And second, I'm not going to purposefully violate more than 2,000 years of Jewish tradition just for the sake of having something easy to say.

First-century Jews still wouldn't say God's name, often substituting either "the heavens," "the Blessed," or the passive voice, "Rain is caused to fall." Many modern Jews use "G-d" or "L - d" so they seem to agree with first-century Jews and Reader 1 in preferring not to use "God" or "Lord." There's no similar restriction, however, in the Hebrew Old Testament on el or elohim, both of which mean God, or in the Greek Old Testament or the New Testament on theos, which also means God. The Greek kurios also means master/lord/sir and seems to replace YHWH just about everywhere it occurs in the Greek OT. Kurios is used in the NT to refer to Jesus and to God. Both adonai and kurios are also used to address or refer to ordinary human beings, just as we would say, "Sir, you dropped your hat."

The fact that other people say "God" or "Lord" as either a curse or a sign of exasperation or surprise doesn't affect my opinion or usage. I very rarely use either of these in any way other than to talk about God, even knowing that neither is actually God's name, which I don't know how to say and would prefer not to take any chances with in any case.

My Opinion on Question 2: Carl Sagan said, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I believe that God created everything from scratch; however, I don't want to limit God to the job of "creator." That is one aspect of Deism, namely, the idea that God created everything and then left it to its own devices.

Judaism and Christianity say that God created everything from nothing and continues to take an interest and an active part in creation. As the UMC Hymnal says in the Statement of Faith of The United Church of Canada, God "has created and is creating." I don't know enough about any religion other than (biblical) Judaism and Christianity to say whether in calling God "Creator" they are saying that God is creator and nothing else, or whether that's just a part of the Deity's job description. "God" is a also job description for our Deity, as we saw above, but I suspect that most Christians think of it as a name. In any case, there's often no bright line between a title, a job description, and a name. (Consider the difference, if any, between "Go tell your grandma," a title; "I'm his grandma," a job description; and "Grandma!" a name.) Therefore I think it's pretty hard to say what anybody means by either "God" or "Creator" without a lengthy conversation!

Summary: So, I think this is what I think:

If people are using "Creator" in place of "God" as a useful shorthand for "the unique Deity, whose actual name we don't know but is the creator of everything, who actively participates in history and loves us all as individuals, and who has a bunch of other important characteristics," then I have no problem with that at all.
However, if people are using "Creator" as a shorthand for "the person who made all this, period," then I do have a problem with it theologically; however, I don't argue about theology.
I object to "Yahweh" on the grounds that it isn't a real word and it pretends to be the name of God, which is actually unknown and was traditionally not spoken aloud even back when it was known.
I don't know enough about other religions or denominations, or the church Fellow Reader 2 is asking about in particular, to know what they mean, so I can't really judge whether their "Creator" is the same as our God or not. It probably depends on who is using it.
If we love God and love our neighbor, then we may each address and refer to God in a way that makes us comfortable, and so may our neighbor.

Reader Question: Does Matthew 19:18 say "You shall not murder" or "Thou shalt not kill?

The King James Version, English Standard Version, and many other translations have "You shall not murder" in Matthew 19:18. I, of course, learned, "Thou shalt not kill," in Sunday School as a kid. Based on the original Hebrew (and I assume, confirmed in the Greek), what should be the translation? (09/09/22)

Short Answer and Introduction from Regina: I had also read that it should be "murder" in both the OT and NT, but my Hebrew is bad. So I asked retired professor of Old Testament Dr. Nancy Bowen, who graciously sent a pretty comprehensive answer about the Hebrew, only slightly modified below.

The short answer is yes, the Hebrew word in the Ten Commandments means "murder." Probably.

This question is more complicated than it seems, however. First, translating from one language to another is always a little up in the air, and with dead languages like Hebrew and biblical Greek, you can't discuss the definitions with native speakers. While the King James Version seems to render the Hebrew reasonably consistently, I wouldn't bet actual money on any given case. When you move to another translation, all bets are off.

Second, frequently the meanings of several words overlap in each language, and they don't usually overlap in the same way in any pair of languages. English has several words for bringing about the intentional death of a human being, e.g., kill, murder, slay, assassinate, or execute, even without getting into slang, warfare, or degrees of homicide. So does Hebrew. Do any of them match up? That's why I asked Dr. Bowen, "Aren't there several Hebrew words for 'devivify'?"

(Isn't that a great word?? I learned it just the other day in connection with the new invasive lantern fly. Most of the agricultural agents just say kill, squash, etc., but one has devivify.)

Dr. Bowen's Answer: You are correct that Hebrew has many words for "devivify," which is a great word! Devivifying people is clearly permitted in A. war and B. capital punishment. One of the words is nakah, which in the KJV was translated as "smite/smote." So when smiting is going on, it's usually nakah. It seems to always refer to lethal violence. It occurs 401 times, so it's a pretty common word. You could also include words such as the words for "fight/go to war" and "totally destroy."

The causative form of the verb "to die" (yamut ) means "to cause to be dead," and this is used in most capital punishment cases.

Exodus 21:12 "Whoever strikes a person mortally (nakah ) will be put to death (mot yumat ). " The same construction is in Exodus 21:13, "Whoever strikes father or mother shall be put to death." [Note from Regina: mot means death.]

The word used in the Ten Commandments is ratsach. It occurs only 40 times, half of them in Numbers and Deuteronomy. Interestingly, there is a cluster of verses in Numbers 35:16-19 that say, "If a person strikes (nakah ) another person with an object that could cause death, and death ensues, it is a murderer (rotseach), the murderer shall be put to death (mot yumat). Three verbs for devivifying in one verse!

Numbers 35 deals with the issue of cities of refuge "where you shall permit a slayer (rotseach) to flee" (Numbers 35;6, 9-34). Numbers 35:16-28 discuss intentional versus unintentional murder. It may be that part of the commandment was to prevent cycles of revenge killings between families. Are we supposed to think of distinctions between first, second, and third-degree homicide? Unfortunately, the most the text distinguishes between is intentional and unintentional murder. Numbers 35 makes clear that justice for murder becomes a matter of the state, not of the family. A brief legal section in Exodus 21:12-14 discusses intentional versus unintentional devivifying, but the "murder" verb isn't used there.

There's also harag, which means "to slay or kill." It occurs 158 times. It's what Cain did to Abel.

As with most things, where there is a cluster of words on a related topic, clear distinctions aren't always possible.

Regina on the Greek: I looked at the Greek for some of Dr. Bowen's examples. (She claims that her Greek isn't very good.) The Greek word in the commandment in Exodus is phoneuo, which is the same as in Matthew 19:18.

However, phoneuo or its noun form is also used in Matthew 5:21, 23:31, 23:35; Mark 10:19; Luke 18:20; Romans 13:9; and James 2:11, 4:2, and 5:6, and in the KJV, none of these have murder, they have kill or slay. So I looked up phoneuo in the Greek OT, where it is used 43 times. I thought, "Aha! Probably these are about the same as Dr. Bowen's 40 occurrences of ratseach," and that turned out to be true in Numbers 35. Unfortunately, just when we think we've got a match, phoneuo is used in place of nakah during Joshua's conquests. When you get to the cities of refuge for the ratseach in Joshua 21, it goes back to the noun form of phoneuo. In Kings, Chronicles, Nehemiah, Psalms, and Proverbs you get a few occurrences of phoneuo for nakah and harag.

In conclusion, it doesn't pay to be too dogmatic about X in Hebrew meaning Y in Greek or Z in English. My Greek teacher always used to say, "Context! Context! Context!" And that's what you have to rely on.

Reader Question: What does the Apostle Paul mean in Romans 11:26 when he states, "and so all Israel will be saved"?

Paul is adamant that God has not cast off his ancient Covenant people. Even now a remnant from among the Jews is being saved just as among the Gentiles. I get all this. What I want to know specifically is:

Does "all Israel" mean from among the actual Jews, the ancient Covenant people, the physical descendants of Abraham, or
Does "all Israel" mean the total number of the elect from Jew and Gentile? (09/16/22)

Short Answer. There seems to be considerable agreement among scholars - I looked at nine sources, and they all said the same thing, which may be unprecedented in this Bible study - that "all Israel" means the Jews as a body, although not necessarily every individual therein. Note, however, that "Israel" includes only the descendants of Jacob, not all of the descendants of Abraham.

Long Answer. Both our fellow reader and I expected this question to be a difficult on both exegetical and theological grounds, but this turned out not to be the case. Probably there are scholars who have some other view than the one presented here; however, I consulted more sources than I usually do, and I didn't find them. I have quoted the ones I found and given you the references at the end. (I did the extra work just to be sure, because I was so surprised at the consistency of both translation and commentary.)

Greek. In the first place, the Greek is completely unambiguous, not to mention much simpler than Paul's normal style. Here's what it says literally and in this exact order:

And thus all Israel will be saved just as it-has-been-written "will-come out-of Zion the deliverer/rescuer and he-will-turn-away ungodliness from Jacob."

The quotation is from the Greek Old Testament, Isaiah 59:20, with the slight modification of "for Zion's sake" to "from Zion" from Psalm 14:7 or 53:6, according to F. F. Bruce.

This says "all Israel" (i.e., the literal or figurative descendants of Jacob, i.e., the Jews in contrast to the Gentiles of Paul's overall discussion) will be saved. It's worth noting, although not worth putting a whole lot of weight on, that "will be saved" is 3rd person singular, again suggesting that Paul is talking about the body of Jews, not individuals within the Jews.

F. F. Bruce comments specifically on the meaning of "Israel" in his comment on vs. 26

"And so all Israel will be saved. It is impossible to entertain an exegesis which understands 'Israel' here in a different sense from 'Israel' in verse 25 ('a hardening has come upon part of Israel'). The connecting words 'and so' (cf. 5:12) say more than 'and then': they imply that 'in this way' - by the operation of the divine purpose that the gospel should be received by the Gentile first, and then also by the Jew - the salvation of 'all Israel' will come about. 'All Israel' is a recurring expression in Jewish literature, where it need not mean 'every Jew without a single exception', but 'Israel as a whole'. Thus 'all Israel has a portion in the age to come', says the Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin (10.1), and proceeds immediately to name certain Israelites who have no portion therein."

Sanhedrin (10.1) states that, for example, those who say that there is no resurrection of the dead from the Torah and there is no Torah from heaven, those who treat Torah scholars and the Torah with contempt, and those who pronounce the name of God (see supplement dated 9/2/22) have no part in the world to come. Sanhedrin (10.2) names three kings and four commoners who have no share in the world to come, which is especially interesting considering that there were many idolatrous and disobedient kings. The rest of Sanhedrin (10) specifies some smallish groups (such as the generation of the flood and the inhabitants of Sodom) that have no share in the world to come.

It appears that the default position is literally that "all Israel" will be saved, and only specific individuals and groups will not be.

Context. All of Romans talks about the Jews on the one hand and the Gentiles on the other; to assume that Paul is somehow mixing the two groups here, or dividing the Jews into elect and non-elect, makes no sense to me, and apparently it makes no sense to the scholars I consulted. John Wesley says in his comment on vs. 11:1, "Now there is 'a remnant' who believe, Rom 11:5; and hereafter 'all Israel will be saved,' Rom 11:26." He divides Israel only into those who are saved now and those who will be saved later, saying specifically about vs. 11:26, "And so all Israel shall be saved - Being convinced by the coming of the gentiles."

John Knox agrees that in both 11:26 and its context, "all Israel" means just that: "What is thus (i.e., in vss. 23-24) strongly suggested is now explicitly asserted: all Israel will be saved. ... The assurance of Israel's eventual salvation is now justified and supported by two quotations from Isaiah (Isaiah 59:20-21...)."

T. W. Manson says that vss. "25-32 state the conclusion of the whole matter... 26. The fact that Paul expects 'all Israel' to be saved may suggest that he hopes for as much for the Gentiles. ... 29. But on the long view God's purpose must and will prevail, and he stands by his promises to the Patriarchs."

The Elect. Many translations follow the King James Version and use "elect" or "election" in 11:5, 7, and 28. I'm not crazy about this, because "the elect" carries modern theological baggage that doesn't seem to me to be present in the original languages. The Greek means "to choose" as a verb or "the one(s) chosen" as a noun. The verb is used 21 times in the NT, typically in the sense of "select from several options." The noun is used only seven times, typically in the sense of "those who have been selected," and only in the letters. Neither appears in the Greek OT.

In the KJV Old Testament, "elect" occurs only four times, and as in the Greek NT, the original Hebrew word is from the root bachar/choose. "Chosen" occurs nine times, all from the same root. "Choose" occurs 26 times, all from the same root! I am astonished! You know from previous word studies, e.g., the one we had just last week on "murder," that there's almost always a mix-and-match situation, with three Hebrew, four Greek, and five English words all used to translate each other. I don't ever recall doing a word study before that had the kind of consistency we're seeing today.

James Denney says,

"Paul is thinking of the historical people, as the contrast with Gentiles shows, but he is not thinking of them one by one. Israel a Christian nation, Israel as a nation a part of the Messianic kingdom, is the content of his thought. To make [all Israel] refer to a 'spiritual' Israel, or to the elect, is to miss the mark: it foretells a 'conversion of the Jews so universal that the separation into an "elect remnant " and "the rest who were hardened " shall disappear' (Gifford). ... all [Paul] is concerned with [in the quotation from OT] is the fact that in prophetic scripture language is used which implies that Israel as a people is to inherit the Messianic salvation."

Dr. Denney refers to 1 Kings 12:1 and 2 Chronicles 12:1 as examples of "all Israel" that clearly do not include every individual Jew.

The footnotes to The New English Bible support this in saying, "Gentiles... in full strength and the whole of Israel: corporately but not necessarily every individual."

Even John Calvin's commentary on vs. 11:26 doesn't seem to divide the Jews into elect and non-elect, although he apparently does take "all Israel" to include the Gentiles, unlike the other scholars consulted.

"Many understand this of the Jewish people, as though Paul had said, that religion would again be restored among them as before: but I extend the word Israel to all the people of God,... This interpretation seems to me the most suitable, because Paul intended here to set forth the completion of the kingdom of Christ, which is by no means to be confined to the Jews, but is to include the whole world. The same manner of speaking we find in Galatians 6:16. The Israel of God is what he calls the Church, gathered alike from Jews and Gentiles; and he sets the people, thus collected from their dispersion, in opposition to the carnal children of Abraham, who had departed from his faith."

Edwin C. Blackman does divide Israel into the elect and (presumably) non-elect, but he says that "All Israel must include not only the "elect" within Israel, but also the "rest," i.e., the hitherto unresponsive (cf. vs. 7).

Conclusion: The scholarly consensus seems to be that God intends to save the entirety of the descendants of Israel by virtue of their descent from Jacob; however, individuals may reject salvation or lose it in some other way.

Scholarly Sources Consulted: