Biblical Heritage Center Blog

I published the following information in the TOV Center’s Educational Email today. I wanted to share it with you because we will come across situations like those described below many times as we Explore Biblical Heritages. If you read the histories of tribes, kingdoms, empires and nations you will find some common factors led most of them to ultimately fail. A narrow group of elite people gained control of political and economic institutions of a society and restructured them. ● They structured political institutions to remove restraints on their use of power. ● They structured economic institutions to extract resources from the rest of society. The synergistic relationship between extractive economic and political institutions introduces a strong feedback loop: “ Political institutions enable the elites controlling political power to choose economic institutions with few constraints or opposing forces. They also enable the elites to structure future political in...

This is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. Sandwiched between two giants in the Bible -- Joseph and Moses – is the story of Shiphrah ( beautiful ) and Puah ( groaning ). Puah ’s name is related to an account of woman giving birth. They are “ the Hebrew midwives ” in this story. Exodus opens with a reference the “ children of Israel ” and Joseph, but in Exodus 1:13, under a king that had not known Joseph, the children of Israel are enslaved and forced to labor in the service of the new king . At that point, the Bible refers to them as the “ Hebrews ” – meaning aliens and foreigners . Shiphrah and Puah are only referred to as Hebrews, so that means that are to serve the king. Something that makes their story even more remarkable is that the king of Egypt was revered as a semi-divine being by Egyptians . And the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives , of whom the name of the one was Shiphrah ( beautiful ) , and the name of the second Puah ( groaning ) . (v....

This is one of the worst mistranslations in the Bible of the teaching of Yeshua, the Jewish Jesus (Matthew 5:17-18): Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled . I was taught that this meant “ Jesus fulfilled all of the law, did away with it and we are under grace .” Christians were under grace, while Jews were under the law . The belief systems of over a billion Christians are constructed on that mistranslation. Interestingly, Yeshua’s words reminded his Jewish audience of something Adam did in the Garden of Eden. You will know what I mean when you understand the correct meanings of his words. ● The Torah or the Prophets were two sections of Jewish Scriptures at the time of Yeshua – and still are today . ● Destroy means “to add words to or remove words from the...

The history of human societies is a story about power struggles – one uses power to get what it wants from someone else who wants to keep what it has. In societies, power is exercised in two ways – persuasion by authority or through the use of force . The Bible, from the first book to the last, is full of stories about power. Today, I will focus on the Second Temple as a center of power. In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the Temple was to be operated under the laws of the Torah by priests who were Levites . However, the highest office of authority in the nation for most of the Second Temple Period was the High Priest (a descendant of Aaron the brother of Moses). The building of the Second Temple began with a decree of Cyrus the Great King Persia. Interestingly, the first Torah scroll -- like the one we have today -- was taken by Ezra, a Jewish priest and scribe to Jerusalem from Babylon – along with a scroll of laws of the Persian King Artaxerxes I . Ezra wa...

Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages. So long as knowledge was limited to the seven liberal arts of the Early Middle Ages, there could be no universities, for there was nothing to teach beyond the bare elements of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer notions of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, which did duty for an academic curriculum. But between 1100 and 1200 there came a great influx of new knowledge into western Europe, partly through Italy and Sicily, but chiefly through the Arab scholars of Spain — the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and the Greek physicians, the new arithmetic, and those texts of the Roman law which had lain hidden through the Dark Ages . Philosophy and Religion were supposed to stay in their own domains, however by the end of the twelfth century, the New Logic was pretty well assimilated. Then came Aristotle’s Metaphysics and natural philosophy, with their Arabic commentators – and th...

I use the phrase “ Yeshua, the Jewish Jesus ” to distinguish between the person that lived in the first century who was named “Yeshua ” and the person they read about in the New Testament called “Jesus” and “ Jesus Christ ” and “ beliefs about Jesus ” that were created centuries after the Romans executed him. I think there are a lot of people, Christian and Jewish , that have a “ Pre-K understanding ,” like I used to have, about what “ Christian and Jewish ” mean. I was an ordained minister and I viewed 2,500 years of history as the histories of two religions – Judaism and Christianity . Back then I viewed “ Jesus as the founder of Christianity ” and “ the Jews as the people that opposed Jesus .” In other words, my whole reality was built around “ my beliefs about Jesus .” In order to know what “ The Jewish Jesus ” means we have to view Yeshua in the context of the world in which he lived and know what “Christianity” was like in the second and third centuries CE . T...