Hebrew Bible

Nations cannot endure His fury.

Pasuk yod alef, verse eleven, is unusual among most of the books of Tanakh, for it's written in Aramaic.

It is for this reason that the commentators date this prophecy to the later years of Yirmiyahu, under the reign of Tzidkiyahu, which is before the destruction of Yerushalayim and the Mikdash, but after the Babylonians had already taken a portion of the population, the king Yehoyakhin, the aristocracy, and the skilled craftsmen to Bavel in captivity.

Rashi and Radak, based on the Targum, explain that the pasuk is written in Aramaic because it's the part of the text of a letter sent by Yirmiyahu to the Babylonian captives.

[pasuk yud zayin] Seventeen.

אִסְפִּי מֵאֶרֶץ קִנְאַתֵּךְ יֹשֶׁבֶת בַּמָּצוֹר.

"Gather up your, your qin'ah, you who are sitting under siege." And the word qin'ateich is unique in Tanakh.

There's-- It has no parallel.

Jews predate the concept of religion.

You know, when Hebrew was being revived as a spoken language, Hebrew linguists had to root through the Hebrew Bible to find a word to mean religion because Hebrew didn't have one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was called The Eicha Problem, Eicha being the Book of Lamentations.

Where I have a critique of this idea, this is like a theological idea in Judaism, which is that anti-Semitism is the Jews' fault.

This is a deep ideological idea within, it's in the Tanakh, it's in the Hebrew Bible, right? And that's why I talk about the book of Lamentations, right? When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem.

The reason the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem is because the people have sinned.

Welcome back to our Tanakh Study Center series on Sefer Yimriyel in conjunction with the OU and the Nachiyomi Project.

In today's shiur, we study Yimriyel, Parak Yud, Chapter 10.

Let's begin by reading the first several psukim, and that will give us an idea of what direction Yimriyel is going in in this parak.

We're not talking about a sort of superhuman, Greco-Roman style.

There have been plenty of conceptions of God in history that have been quite physical, but that the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures actually doesn't have a body in that same way.

Help us to look back at the Genesis 1 claim that all humans are made in the image of God through the lens of the claim that Paul makes in his letter to the Colossians that Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

That's a great question.

People say he looks just like his father.

We're used to that idea of a child resembling a parent.

But it seems sort of weird if we're only looking at the Hebrew Scriptures because, again, the God revealed in Hebrew Scriptures is sometimes described.

It's not that anthropomorphic kind of body language is never used of the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, because it is, but that it's also pretty clear that this is not just a super human-sized humanoid being that we're talking about, who made the heavens and the earth.

and by the mother, the father.

And we know the 24 places in Tanakh that the corner are called Levi.

After all, they are in the Levi tribe, right? We know, you know, Aaron Akon came from the tribe of Levi, just like his brother Moshe.

So, and actually they're called Levim, we find 24 Zechem, and here's one of them, it always brings down this one, HaKonam HaLevim B'nai Tzadok, he says the Kona Levim B'nai Tzadok, so we know that B'nai Tzadok was a Kohen, Tzadok was a Kohen, and the Kohenim, his sons were Kohenim, Kona Levim B'nai Tzadok, and they're called Levim also, so therefore they're all included.

Next slide.

So the Tanakh, what is the Tanakh? Well, just an abbreviation of three words, okay? So the Torah, every single Christian, especially if you guys are doing apologetics or debates, you better know what these words mean.

The Torah, the law, the instruction.

It's the five books, the Pentateuch, right? The Pentateuch, the five books of Moses.

You read the

whole Tanakh, right? Like, it's not just the Torah.

Like, from my understanding, my understanding, Simchat Torah, you're just reading the five books of Moses and then starting back over at Genesis 1 after Simchat Torah is over.

Well, it depends.

Paul is directly quoting the Greek Septuagint translation of Job 13.

The Septuagint being the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that the early church used, right?

Exactly, specifically Job 13.16. Now, think about the story of Job.

He has lost his children, his wealth, his health.

But he doesn't tell you that or even explain that.

Old Testament Hebrew religion, which is proto-Orthodox Christianity, is not the same thing as rabbinic.

post Talmudic Judaism.

Including our shared patrimony and the scriptural heritage from which both our traditions draw.