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Please read the Introductory Notes to this commentary.
For a glossary of unfamiliar terms,
CLICK HERE. For assistance in
pronouncing Hebrew terms,
a pronunciation guide is located
HERE.
My short comments on the text are notated in “maroon pop-up text tipsMy comment is displayed like this.” which are accessed by “hovering” your mouse over the text or tapping your touch screen. [A few short comments look like this.] Longer comments are included in footnotes or links to other pages. Sometimes my paraphrase provides all the commentary needed to clarify the passage. I have added emphasis to some phrases simply to call them to your attention. Explanations of Greek and Hebrew words are from the NAS Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible with Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries Copyright © 1981, 1998 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved Lockman.org. In order to get the most from these pages, please follow all the hyperlinks, nearly all of which will open in a new tab or window.
Introductory Notes and Comments
Bible Books Index •
Global Notes •
Biblical Numerology
Torah •
Neviim •
Kituvim •
Apocrypha •
Apostolic Writings
Introduction to
My Paraphrase, Notes, and Comments
on the Whole Bible
Commentaries are great, but they are not a substitute for the Word. If you go to commentaries first, they may taint what God wants you to understand from His Word. You should read the Book and get to know the Divine Author. If you want to know what God is saying, read His Word, meditate upon it, and ask Him what He wants you to understand. As He is a very personal God, He may very well want you to understand something different than what He wants me (or some other commentator) to understand, just as He bestows different gifts to each of us. This commentary, like all commentaries, is a human project and subject to human error. After you have read the text of your own Bible, meditated upon it, asked God what He wants you personally to understand from the text, then by all means come back here and see some of the things he wanted me to understand.
The text used for my notes and
comments is my own paraphrase[1]
based primarily on
The
World Messianic Bible (which is in the Public Domain) with constant reference to the
original Hebrew and Greek texts, though I am in no way a language
scholar. I have paraphrased the text because
my intent is to provide you with my understanding of (my
comments on) the original writer’s idea and
to clarify difficult ideas into modern terms. Whenever I have
done so, I have tried to ensure that the original text actually allows my rendering
or paraphrase by comparing it with several other modern
translations.[2] It should not be considered in any way authoritative. I have
also retained the Hebrew names of Jewish individuals and places because I believe
an understanding of their ethnic identity is critical to a correct understanding of
the Scriptures. I have also tried to keep my notes and comments
conversational, as if you and I were seated together to discuss the
text. While this may offend some as being “unscholarly,” I believe
it will be more comfortable for the majority of readers. (See “Vocabulary Matters”)
I feel that I need to emphasize that my intent in this effort is not to present an accurate translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. For that I would refer you to other works, such as Robert Alter’s three-volume set The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, in which he goes to great lengths to accurately preserve the flow and pace of the original Hebrew. My intent is to present the reader with what I consider the best meaning of the text in conversational English.
Why Yet Another Paraphrase Version?
Something that has bothered me for a very long time about English translations of the Scriptures is that, as far as I know, the English Bible is the only body of “literature” that makes a concentrated effort to disguise the true ethnicity of the people involved by changing their names so they don’t sound quite so “Jewish.” When a book written in Spanish about a character named Juan Rodriguez is translated into English, the translator doesn’t translate the character’s name as John Rogers, because the author wants you to know he’s Hispanic. But when ambivalent (or sometimes openly antisemitic) English-speaking translators[3] render the Bible into English, all sorts of strange things happen.
- Avraham becomes Abraham
- Yitzchak becomes Isaac
- Ya'akov becomes Jacob, but only when it appears in the “Old Testament”
- Ya'akov (the exact same word) becomes James, but only when it appears in the “New Testament”[4]
- Moshe becomes Moses
- Yehoshua becomes Joshua ...
and so on.
This results in a total loss of who the characters are, how they live, and what they think. The entire history of the Israelites becomes not only Anglicized but also mythologized. All sorts of strange ideas and traditions creep into the text. This is especially so of the Apostolic Writingsthe so-called“New Testament”, resulting in terrible distortions of God’s message to mankind.
- Yosef becomes Joseph
- Miryam becomes Mary
- The Jewish Rabbi Yeshua HaMashiach becomes the “Gentile God” Jesus Christ
- Yeshua’s Torah-observant Jewish brothers Ya'akov and Y'hudah become the anti-Torah Gentile “Christians” James and Jude
- Rabbi Sha'ul, a devoutly Torah-observant Pharisee, who might even have been a member of the Sanhedrin, who never “planted a Church” in his life, and who never preached a single sermon out of the “New Testament,” becomes anti-Torah Paul who “planted Gentile Churches” throughout the ancient world
- The Torah-observant Jewish followers of Mashiach become anti-Torah Gentile “Christians”
But even worse than the total distortion of the ethnicity and true beliefs of the people involved, the entire message of the Apostolic Writings has become corrupted and all sorts of strange myths, unbiblical traditions, and anachronisms have become accepted as “Gospel truth.”
- The
Good News of the Kingdom of God here on earth becomes
a quest for
“heaven” somewhere “in the sweet bye and bye.”
- God’s divine loving instruction to humanity, the Torah, becomes an unbearably burdensome
and tyrannical “Law” imposed upon humanity by a capricious Deity
only to show mankind it is impossible for
them to obey Him.
- The Gentiles who have been adopted into Israel through faith
in the Jewish Messiah steal the birthright from the natural-born children
and relegate the natural-born children to a status of loathsome
outsiders.
- God revokes his Eternal Covenants with Israel and transfers them to the “Gentile Church.”
- God divorces His Bride Israel and marries “The Church.”
- The “Church” becomes exempt from God’s judgment for
rejecting Torah and blatantly violating His Covenants.
- The Messianic Jewish sect known as “The Way” becomes a Gentiles-only “Church.”
- God’s eternal covenant day with Israel, Shabbat, is replaced by the pagan Roman “Venerable Day of the Sun.”
- Observing God’s eternal Appointed Times becomes “Galatianism.”
- The pagan festivals of Ishtar and Saturnalia become the non-biblical holidays “Easter” and “Christmas.”
- The infant Messiah becomes born in a barn or stable in mid-winter instead of in a
sukkah during the
Autumn Feast of Sukkot.
- A group of Jewish philosopher/scientists from Babylon become “Three Kings.”
- The “test” for whether or not a Jew has truly accepted the Jewish Messiah is whether or not he/she is willing to renounce his/her Jewish heritage, live as a Gentile, and prove his/her contempt for God’s Torah by eating “unclean food” (a ham sandwich or deep-fried shrimp, for example).
Whether it has been done out of ignorance or done intentionally to follow the example of the de facto first Roman Pope, Constantine, to eradicate everything Jewish from the both the Church and the Holy Scriptures, the result has been to divide the Body of Messiah and to destroy the unity for which Messiah so fervently prayed (John 17:21) and for which the Apostles gave their lives (Ephesians 2:14; Colossians 3:9-11). It has also led directly, I believe, to over 1,500 years of persecution of the Jews by “the Church.” If the original “Jewishness” of the Scriptures, especially the Apostolic Writings, had been retained, the Jewish Messiah Yeshua would never have become the Gentile God “Jesus Christ” (a false prophet according to the Torah’s requirements for a prophet, categorically and rightfully rejected by Torah-believing Jews of all ages) and the Jewish Sect called “The Way” would still be a part of Judaism and would never have become “the Church.” How difficult it would have been for followers of the Jewish Messiah Yeshua to have persecuted Yeshua’s relatives in the name of the Jewish Messiah!
My primary objective for this effort is to provide brief explanatory comments on the entire Biblical text as well. I believe that Dr. David Stern has done an excellent job of preserving the “Jewishness” of the people and the message of the original text in his translation of the Complete Jewish Bible, and that is the version that I personally use as the “jumping-off point” for most of my own Bible study and devotional reading. However, I cannot afford the copyright use fees the publisher charges to use the CJB as the text for a commentary, so I had to find an alternative.
The World Messianic Bible, formerly known as the Hebrew Names Version, is in the Public Domain, but I do not believe the translators have gone far enough in retaining the real “Jewishness” of the Sacred Text. So using the WMB as a starting point, I have attempted to render the text a bit more faithfully to what I believe was the “ethnic flavor” of the original, and to that paraphrase I am in the process of adding my notes and comments. My hope is that you, the reader, will be able to experience the Scriptures as if you were one of the intended recipients of the original text.
The division of the Tanakh and Apostolic Writings into chapters and verses was originally done by medieval Christians, and only later adopted by Jews; however, very early on (probably before the Second Temple Period) the Jews “divided” the Torah into weekly portions, or parashot, and referred to each section by the first or key word or words of the section, much as we now refer to sections by chapter and verse. I have included the Parashot identification in my version of the Torah.
I anticipate this effort will probably take the rest of my life to complete, as I have already well exceeded my allotted “threescore years and ten,” but I will work as quickly as priorities allow and keep this section of my website as current as I possibly can.
My prayer is that you will find this rendering of God’s Word useful and, hopefully, insightful.
Shalom b'Mashiach!
Dates Used
Dates used in the commentary on the Tanakh are taken from The Chronological Bible by Edward Reese and Frank R. Klassen and The Narrated Bible In Chronological Order by F. LaGard Smith. Except where otherwise indicated, dates are Klassen’s. (K) indicates Klassen’s dates; (R) indicates Reese’s dates; (S) indicates Smith’s dates; * indates my extrapolation from the above dates.
Dates used in the commentary on the Gospels and Acts are from The Chronological Gospels ©1969 by Michael John Rood.
____________
1. When studying the Scriptures to find out what God said, how He said it, and what you should do about it — rather than reading for meditation, enjoyment, or history — I would urge you to be very careful about the use of any but an “essentially literal” translation (such as the New American Standard Bible, the Christian Standard Version, and the English Standard Version) that seeks as far as possible to capture the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer. As such, the emphasis of these translations is on “word-for-word” correspondence, at the same time taking into account differences of grammar, syntax, and idiom between current literary English and the original languages. Thus they seek to be transparent to the original text, letting the reader see as directly as possible the structure and meaning of the original.
In contrast to the “essentially literal” philosophy, some Bible versions have followed a “thought-for-thought” rather than “word-for-word" translation philosophy, emphasizing “dynamic equivalence” rather than the “essentially literal” meaning of the original. A “thought-for-thought” translation (or paraphrase like mine) is of necessity more inclined to reflect the interpretive opinions of the translator and the influences of contemporary culture. [RETURN]
2. I suggest you check out the valuable study tools on the BibleHub website. [RETURN]
3. Note that the vast majority of English Bible translators are gentile Christians who have little, if any, sensitivity toward the Hebrew character of the Sacted Text. This is not (in most cases) due to any overt animosity, but rather simply to a lack of proper understanding in that their academic training has been deeply rooted in Replacement Theology. [RETURN]
4. In an apparent effort to flatter the king who commissioned the 1611 English translation of the Bible, the “translators” arbitrarily changed the name of Messiah’s half-brother from Ya'akov to “James” (which they rendered as “Jacob” in the “Old Testament”), apparently so the monarch could see his name in the Scriptures. The question needs to be asked, can we trust the accuracy of a translation in which the “translators” (who were not at all proficient in the Hebrew language) were specifically instructed to consider the traditions of the apostate Church of England of greater priority than accuracy of translations, and who place political favor above textual accuracy? And it begs the question, why haven’t more recent translators corrected this situation? [RETURN]
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