nuggets060610

In a way that seems strangely parallel to today, some were living there, but most of the Jewish people had never returned either from the Assyrian expulsion (centuries before Solomon's Temple was destroyed) or from the Babylonian expulsion in the time of Daniel and Ezekiel. They were scattered throughout the world then, just as we are today.

The book of Nehemiah4 describes the actual numbers of Jewish people who returned to Israel after they were allowed to return by their captors. They account for less than 10 percent of the Jewish captives from the Babylonian exile alone. Indeed, because of the events chronicled in the book of Esther5, many Jews did not feel the need to return to a desolate land to rebuild a difficult life among ruins when, for the first time since the exile began, they were being given a new freedom to practice their beliefs safely in a protective and nurturing environment. Most of Judah did not rush home… and almost none of the northern kingdom of Israel had returned to their birthright. This is the climate into which a 20 year old general named Alexander ascended the throne of his late father, Philip II.

Greek Influence Sweeps Over the World

When Alexander the Great conquered most of the entire ancient world, it become one large Macedonian/Greek kingdom. The Greek influence was so widely felt that it affected the language and culture of the Jews living everywhere on earth. Alexander forced his religious system and culture upon everyone on earth… almost. For a strange and fascinating reason (which we will not explore in this writing), he allowed the Jews to continue their "peculiar" ways in peace and gave them complete freedom to move throughout the world safely, so the whole world became the Jewish learner's classroom. G-d had supernaturally protected the Jews' right to remain Jewish in a non-Jewish, Greek world… but sadly much of the Jewish world became enamored with the Greek world and rather than being a "light to the nations", was heavily influenced by it. Assimilation (then known as "Hellenization") became the greatest crisis facing the Jew then, just as it is today.

The largest Jewish population in the world at that time was in Alexandria, Egypt - so named for the conqueror. Greek became the universal language of the day, in much the same way that English is now the worldwide accepted "bridge" language. Had air traffic controllers existed in Alexander's day, they would have been landing planes all over the world using Greek to do so, just like English is used today in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, etc.

So many Jewish people no longer were speaking or teaching their children Hebrew, that a need developed to translate the Jewish Bible into the language that most Jews spoke: Greek. Seventy rabbis began a translation which would bring the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), the prophets and the Psalms to their quickly assimilating brethren all over the Greek speaking world. This translation was known as the Septuagint. Remember, all of these things took place a couple of centuries before the time of Jesus, and long before Rome was a world power.

In many ways, the existence of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) would later be a great help for translators of the New Testament and there are many examples in the New Testament where the writer quotes the Greek Septuagint translation of a prophecy rather than the Hebrew. It all points to how prevalent the Greek way of thinking had become to people in Jesus' day.

The “Land of the East”: Babylon

The second largest Jewish population in the ancient world still lived in what the Bible refers to as Babylon and Persia (today's Iraq and Iran). The greatest schools of Jewish learning were from these areas. The Babylonian Talmud (Mishnah - commentary on the Bible and Gemara - case studies of the Mishnah) was penned by Jewish scholars during the two centuries following the second (Herod's) Temple's and Jerusalem's destruction by the Roman armies, long after Jesus' departure and shortly after Paul's death.

This helps to explain the reference to "wise men from the east"6, used in the Gospels to denote those who came to seek out the promised king of Israel and why there would be Jewish "magi" (the aramaic [Babylonian] term for men of wisdom and understanding was "mag"). Daniel the prophet, who lived in Babylon, was made the ruler over all of the magi of Babylon.7

Continued on page 2

Endnotes:
1 Matthew 14:24
2 Mark 4:41
3 John 6:21
4 Nehemiah 7:66
5 Esther 8:15-17, 10:3
6 Matthew 2:1
7 Daniel 2:48

"Water-Walk: The Motion Picture"

One of the things I love to do when I read the Bible is to sort of play the events out on the movie screen of my mind and to imagine how they looked as if I was actually there… feeling the moment, smelling the smells, hearing the sounds, seeing the events as a participant, rather than one who is reading about them many generations after the fact.

When I read about Jesus walking on water in the middle of the night toward a group of terrified disciples, I want to know what they saw from a first person perspective. Believe me, it creates some dramatic footage for my mental movie. However, it raises some logistical questions as well. We know from the Gospels1 that the "contrary wind" had been blowing all night. This wind out of the east creates real problems on the Sea of Galilee. I know, because I've been out on that same sea in a boat when the winds suddenly shifted and the waves became a rollicking roller-coaster. It's been times like that when I've wondered how Jesus would have looked on the surface of those waves. Would He be bouncing up and down with the enormous swells? Would the waves have created a smooth path only around His footsteps? Would He have walked up one wave and down another? Would the foam and spray have soaked Him?
No, I'm not being silly. Many people with whom I have spoken have confessed to me that they wondered the same thing. It has created challenges for artists who depict Jesus walking on water. Each of the paintings and sketches show either a wimpy version of a storm so that walking would not have been difficult for even a toddler - if said toddler had the ability to walk on water, or else the storm rages elsewhere in the painting, just not at the feet of Jesus. Artists typically recreate their own opinions about how it looked but they make it so that Jesus was removed from any real storminess.

Another thing that always bothered me when I read this story is that aside from calming down his frightened disciples, what was the purpose of this miracle? What did it teach other than to say to his terrified students that He had supernatural mastery over the natural realm? Couldn't He have demonstrated it another way? Indeed, we know that his disciples clearly got the message from the time when He was sleeping in the boat and they thought that they were going to drown, only to have Him wake up and rebuke the wind and the waves. At that time, they said, "Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?"2 Message loud and clear.
Again, why walk on top of the water? Why did Peter ask the unthinkable… to get out of the boat into a stormy sea? Why did Jesus let him take that "leap of faith"? Why did he sink? Why does John's gospel3 tell us that once Jesus and Peter got into the boat, that they were immediately, supernaturally at their destination? Wouldn't it have been a greater miracle if Jesus had just zapped them to their destination as soon as the storm hit? He could have been waiting for them on the opposite shore with a smile on his face as if to say, "I'll bet you're wondering how I got here before you did."

If we are going to answer any or all of the above questions, we need to know some things… literally, we need to know everything that the disciples knew in their day - which we do not know in ours. Indeed one of the purposes of JewishEyes.org is to impart to the modern student (removed from the historical events of the Bible) as much as possible about the time, culture, customs and traditions, the belief systems and practices of the ancient people who were alive when the events were unfolding.

Believe it or not, three languages and thousands of years removed from the events described in the Bible robs a person of the ability to truly understand what was going on at that time. Our task, joyfully accepted, is to recreate an understanding of what people understood at that time.

An Expectation and Some History

The people of Jesus' day were longing for the Messiah to appear, in order to end the exile from our land and bring about the redemption. "What exile?", you ask. The gospels clearly show that some Jews were living in the land of Israel and they were not living in "exile". True, but did you know that the vast majority of the Jewish people were not anywhere near the land of Israel during the time of Jesus and Paul?