The Torah …The Great Isaiah Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the oldest known complete…copy of the Book of Isaiah. "For the law will go forth from Zion and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem." (Isaiah 2:3) The Torah is the WORD OF GOD that was given to Israel and the world through […]
613 commandments The tradition that 613 commandments (Hebrew: ├Ä┬¼├Ä┬┐├Ä├û”├Ä├å ├Ä├ù├Ä┬¬├Ä├▓├Ä├▓├Ä┬¼├ö├ç├ä: taryagmitzvot, “613 Mitzvot“) is the number of mitzvot in the Torah, first occurred in the 3rd century CE, when Rabbi Simlai mentioned it in a sermon that is recorded in Talmud Makkot 23b.[1] These principles of Biblical law are sometimes called connections or commandments (mitzvot) […]
What Is the Most Natural Way to Read the Bible?…I shudder to think how close I came to giving up on the Bible. Like many people, I tried for years to read Scripture in ways that were doomed to fail. My way of reading made the Bible hard to understand, and it made me think […]
What Are Some Good Disciplines for Reading Scripture? I still cherish my boyhood memories of going fishing with my grandfather. It seems like it was yesterday. One day while I was sorting through the wide variety of tackle I had collected, fidgeting with lures and sinkers and bobbers and the rest in my fancy tackle […]
How Can We Hear God's Voice in Scripture?…Some years back, I did a survey of our church's congregation with the simple question: "If you could ask God one thing, what would it be?" I was not surprised that the most frequent response had to do with the problem of evil in the world, but I […]
How Can We Refine Our Understanding of Biblical Theology? Theology is not limited to the work of professors and clergy. Any serious Christian who has invested time in reading and studying Scripture is doing the work of theology, because theology (from the Greek words theos, meaning "God," and logia, meaning "utterance, speech, reasoning") is simply […]
What Help Can We Get So We Understand the BibleBetter? Do you understand what you are reading?" That was the question Philip the apostle asked a man from Ethiopia who was riding in a chariot on a desert road leading from Jerusalem toward the Mediterranean Sea (Acts 8). The man was the finance minister of […]