Posted by Navah on Feb 22, 2025 in Bible Study
The whole subject of observing the laws of the Torah can become difficult to understand in detail, when we look only at what has been revealed to us in the Scriptural text. For instance, Torah says to cease labor on Shabbat and rest on the seventh day of the Creator but does not explicitly define what labor and rest are. Likewise with other commands. Mosheh in his last address to the nation asks us to love the Eternal with all we have and do His commands and statues, but...
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Posted by Navah on Feb 20, 2025 in The Exodus
The Bible is a book of questions, not of answers. Israel uniquely became a nation before it became a state. It had laws before it had a land. Thus, Israel can be counted as the only nation in the world that is an ethno-religious nation. Yet, we do not know her greatest leader’s Hebrew name. Exodus 2 tells us that a Levite married a woman from his tribe, and she conceived and bore a son. Later, Torah will tell us also that the man’s name was Amram, and the...
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Posted by Navah on Feb 16, 2025 in Hebrew Study
The Hebrew alphabet (aleph-bet) has 22 letters. Each of these 22 letters is correlated with a specific number, as there are no “numbers” in Hebrew as we know them today. Gematria is not a Hebrew word but Greek. Basically, gematria is the computation of individual letters of words, or entire phrases and sentences utilizing their numerical equivalence. For instance, the first letter has numerical value of 1, the second letter has 2, etc. The Biblical commentators believe that...
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Posted by Navah on Feb 9, 2025 in Bible Study
The historical events surrounding the festival of Chanukkah are described in two historical works called Maccabees I and Maccabees II. Both books tell the story of the liberation from the Greek rule of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes over the land of Judea and of the purification of the second Temple from the abominations the Greeks committed in the Temple. Vastly outnumbered, the Jews placed their trust in the Elohim of their fathers, and He gave them a miraculous...
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Posted by Navah on Jan 25, 2025 in Hebrew Study
The term “Jew” or “Jewish” is a Rabbinic misnomer that is supposedly developed from the name “Judah” or “Judea”. But “Jew” or “Jewish” is more than a mere Rabbinic misnomer designated to refer to the ancient Israelites as “Jews”. By substituting the term “Jews” for all Israelites, the Ten Tribes of the northern kingdom are thus erased from the commonwealth of Israel, and the...
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Posted by Navah on Jan 22, 2025 in Bible Study
There is a passage in Matthew 8 that always perplexes a sensitive reader who tends to read the Scripture carefully. Moreover, it is extremely confusing, when we look only at what has been revealed to us in the narration. We need to resort to the Torah to make better sense of this short episode in the Apostolic Writings. It is the object of this work, therefore, to explain what is not satisfactorily explained by the commentators and expose certain misconceptions that still...
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Posted by Navah on Jan 19, 2025 in The Exodus
The scroll of Genesis concludes with the death of the last patriarch, Ya’akov, and then by relates that Yoseph saw Ephrayim’s children to the third generation (Gen 50:23). But it does not tell anything about his brothers except that they were few in number when they descended to Egypt: only seventy souls including their father Ya’akov. Their fate however is revealed to the reader in the scroll of Exodus, which begins with listing their names again as in Chapter...
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Posted by Navah on Jan 11, 2025 in The Patriarchs' Saga
After Yoseph was sold in slavery and spent many years first as a slave and then in a prison accused unjustly, he rose to power in Egypt to become only second to Pharoah; he became the viceroy of Egypt. And Yoseph changed. Away from home and family, he was no longer the favored son of his father, who was reporting his brothers. In his encounter with his brothers, who came down to Egypt to buy grain on account of the famine in the land of Kana’an, he learned that his...
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Posted by Navah on Jan 5, 2025 in The Exiles, The Patriarchs' Saga
Yoseph administered Egypt during the seven years of famine, which are interrupted in order to describe how his family came to settle in Egypt. In the first year of the famine, there was no bread in the entire country, since the famine was very severe and all the grain that they had set aside as a reserve during the seven years of plenty had gone. And because the people languished due to the famine, Yoseph opened the granaries of Egypt. In Gen. 47:13-27, we learn that Yoseph...
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Posted by Navah on Jan 4, 2025 in The Patriarchs' Saga
Yoseph was sold in Egypt as a slave. But the Elohim of his father was with him and did not abandon him as his brothers did. Now raised to the highest rank in Egypt, only second to Pharaoh himself, Yoseph could set his thought on his family in the land of Kana’an. On account of the famine that was throughout the whole land, his brothers came down to Egypt to buy grain, for grain could be found only in Egypt. Yoseph was expecting them to come for the famine was very great....
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Posted by Navah on Dec 25, 2024 in The Messiah
Psalm 2 is written as a psalm without a heading in honor of a particular king. Its content and visionary language indicate that it is not describing a specific king but rather depicts a prophetic vision of the future redeemer, Melech haMashiach, King Messiah, as it is written: “This day I have brought you forth”. The psalmist penned his Psalm as a mirrored picture of what he saw and as an echo of what he heard. In the prophecy given through Natan the prophet...
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Posted by Navah on Dec 20, 2024 in The Patriarchs' Saga
No matter how we will read the narratives of Ya’akov and Yoseph, we still will not know the entire story. And the story reads well until we start reading it carefully. Then, several questions start presenting themselves to the careful reader. And the Yoseph story begins in Genesis 37, wherein we learn that his father, Ya’akov, moved to the land of Kana’an, the land of his father, as we read, These are the generations of Ya’akov. Yoseph, being...
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