Biblical Heritage Center Blog

We all think, act, and communicate in ways that are primarily predetermined by our culture. We didn't choose our culture any more than we chose our parents.  We are born and immediately immersed in whatever culture we happened to live in. If you had been born in another culture – you would be a very different person than you are today . Read the complete article at -- http://bhcbiblestudies.blogspot.com/2014/05/using-culture-key-to-unlock-meanings-of.html

We have received some great comments about Rabbi Leynor’s article “Finding the True Meaning of the Word `Love.” For those who do not know Rabbi Leynor the following bio will introduce you Jeffrey and his remarkable story. Rabbi Jeffrey Leynor Jeffrey Leynor was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in South Orange. His father was a doctor, his mother was a social worker and his father’s father was an orthodox rabbi. He attended  a synagogue associated with the Conservative Movement in Judaism. As a child, Jeffrey went to  the Shabbat services with his father and sit next to him, safe and secure under his huge tallit (prayer shawl). He listened and watched, as the service unfolded, and learned the tunes, prayers  and the practices on Shabbat and the holidays. After high school, Jeffrey attended Hiram College in Ohio as a premed major, but while home for the summer, he joined some high school buddies, Jimmy Brown and Richard Bunkiewicz in  the Stanky Br...

Atheists lost their case against the “In God We Trust” motto on the nation’s currency Wednesday (May 28). It’s a battle they have lost several times before, as court after court has affirmed that printing and engraving the country’s motto on its money does not violate the U.S. Constitution. . . The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York noted that the courts have long looked at the motto not so much as the entanglement of government in religion, but as a more general statement of optimism and a “reference to the country’s religious heritage.” Read the complete article at -- http://www.religionnews.com/2014/05/28/atheists-lose-latest-legal-fight-god-trust/

This is a great article and personal testimony by Rabbi Jeffrey Leynor. “In the late 1990’s, I brought my two young children in for play therapy to help them process my divorce. That day, I met a woman who would literally save my life and transform me forever. She was thirteen years my junior, the most beautiful, smartest, most competent and grown up woman I had ever met.  I was stressed out, angry, hurt and approaching 500 pounds, but oddly enough, that first day there were sparks.” Read the complete article at -- http://biblicalheritage.org/DTB/0514BDTB_Love.pdf

What language did Jesus speak? Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century a mistaken notion – Jesus only knew and spoke Aramaic -- took hold that has by-and-large continued to dominate both scholarly and popular opinion. Yet, the results of a century of archaeological evidence have challenged this assumption and brought a sea change of understanding regarding the linguistic environment of first-century Judaea. The inscriptional and literary evidence reflects a reality not unlike what we find with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of the 700 non-biblical texts from the Qumran library, 120 are in Aramaic and 28 in Greek, while 550 scrolls were written in Hebrew. Read the complete article at -- http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/05/judean-lingo/

(JTA) — According to Jewish tradition, the Torah is so sacred that even a single error made on a single letter renders the entire scroll unusable. And yet the Hebrew Bible — including the Torah, its first five books — is riddled with corruptions and alterations that have accrued and been passed down over the millennia. Now an international team of scholars is working to fix all that. For the past 14 years, the team behind “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” has been laboring on a project to sift through the text and reverse the accumulated imperfections and changes, returning the books of the Hebrew Bible to something like their original versions. The first volume is due out later this year. “It is a little chutzpadik,” acknowledged Ronald Hendel, HBCE’s general editor and a professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s also a messy, painstaking and controversial endeavor that has been criticized by some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Th...

We have been working on a project called the Bible’s Wisdom of the Beginning for several years and are just about ready to release it. For the past few days I have been working on a translation/commentary/midrash of Isaiah 1:12-26. The finished version will be included in the project above. However, I decided to share what I have done so far (in its unfinished form) because I feel that it should be considered as we enter into another season of elections. I am sure you are aware of the flood of political propaganda that is being produced at an increasing rate. The principles and values of the Bible’s Wisdom of the Beginning (you will have to wait for their publication in the near future) are clearly seen in the writings of the Prophets. They leave no doubt that religious rituals and blind allegiance to authority are not what God requires. They also make it clear that religious institutions and their rituals cannot free people from the consequences of what they do to other people....