Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

by Lois Tverberg

I’m into artisanal Bible study. A lot of us do Bible study microwave-style. We gulp down a prepackaged, presweetened devotion with a few slurps of coffee before heading off to work. Is it at all surprising when it’s bland and unmemorable, like a vending-machine sandwich?

Jesus’ words fit far better into Judaism than a Gentile context. What are the implications? Seeing him in his context sheds brilliant new light on his ministry and deepens our understanding of his words. A Bible in a Gilded Cage

The more I pondered the scene on the Emmaus road, the more remarkable it seemed. Luke 24:27 says that “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” The very texts that I found most intractable, the laws of Moses and the prophetic books, were the ones he was preaching from. Indeed, his favorite books to quote from were Deuteronomy and Isaiah, and he quoted from them a lot.

Admittedly the Bible is a foreign land to us.

Pentecost, God’s Spirit poured out on the disciples and turned them into translators.

The Bible is an Eastern book. We see it through the colored glasses of Western culture. Much is lost. We miss the subtleties of humor and many of the underlying assumptions. We do not understand the ingrained attitudes that illuminate a story or illustration. . . . What lies between the lines, what is felt and not spoken, is of deepest significance.

God wanted Moses to be fully present, in body, mind, and spirit.

The Scriptures are meant for us to read but they were not written to our modern world. God spoke so that the ancient world would understand, as they looked at life through different lenses.

Even if we meet someone who speaks English, we still might misunderstand each other because of cultural differences. If this is true between us even now, how much more should we expect it as we read our Bibles?

We piously assume that since it’s biblical, it’s the way things ought to be. Don’t forget, though, that God was speaking into a world that had its own harsh realities. Polygamy, concubines, infant sacrifice, and tribal warfare were unfortunate practices of the ancient Near East.

calling its audience to live by a higher standard. For instance, in the biblical world, when a couple married, the wife left her childhood home to join her husband’s larger household.

Can you imagine how stressful that was? Just as she was establishing a new marriage relationship, she’d also need to adjust to the odd habits and quirky personality of the rest of his family. Laundry? Cooking? They’d have their own way of doing everything. Luckily, her new mother-in-law would be hovering right nearby, ready with advice for each little detail. With this in mind, consider this famous pronouncement in Genesis about marriage: That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Gen. 2:24 NIV)

She sees it as a subtle comment on marriage in light of the social reality of its time. Of course the woman would leave her home and family for her new husband. But the man needed to shift his loyalties to his new wife too. Richter reads Genesis 2:24 as saying, Young man, although you have all the benefits and comforts in this system, from this day onward you shall live your life as if you too have left. She is now bone of your bones and flesh of your flesh. Your most significant kinship alliance, as of today, is her.5

Advanced age was seen as a sign of God’s blessing and a source of honor and dignity. Proverbs 16:31 says, “Gray hair is a crown of splendor; it is attained in the way of righteousness” (NIV), and Job observes, “Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?” (Job 12:12 NIV). Even today, it’s an insult in the Middle East to estimate a person’s age as too young. Hasidic Jews line the cribs of their newborns with pictures of long-bearded rabbis, who are the “rock stars” of their world.

In the biblical world, youth was seen as a disadvantage. When Jeremiah was first called to be a prophet, he said no because he felt he was too young and therefore no one would listen to him (Jer. 1:6).

Timothy by saying, “Let no one despise you for your youth” (1 Tim. 4:12). We, on the other hand, idolize young people like Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Beiber. We can hardly imagine living in a world where growin...

Believe it or not, the Bible had the same attitude as they do in Uganda about weight gain—that it’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Daniel’s diet plan actually made him fat. You might miss this if you read the NIV, which says Daniel and his friends were “better nourished” than the young men who ate the royal fare (Dan. 1:15). The Hebrew word that is used here is actually bari, which means “fat.” The more literal ESV explains that Daniel and his friends had become “fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king’s food” (emphasis added). They hadn’t lost weight but rather gained it on Daniel’s diet plan! They had expected a diet of only vegetables to leave them thin and weak, but God honored their faithfulness to Jewish dietary law and avoidance of meat sacrificed to idols so that they put on weight instead.

But it’s important not to extract lessons from the Bible that it never intended to teach. To search the Bible for secrets for slimming down

Our world: Thin is beautiful Biblical world: Fat is blessing, wealth Our world: Youth is attractive Biblical world: Age is wisdom Our world: Does God exist? Biblical world: Whose god is greatest? Our world: Me—personal goals Biblical world: We—family legacy Our world: Sunshine—happiness Biblical world: Rain—utter joy Our world: Logic and reason Biblical world: Parable and prophecy

Surprisingly, he believed that much of the world has less difficulty understanding the Bible than modern Americans. He writes: In a sense, the Bible is the most translatable religious book that has ever been written, for it comes from a particular time and place (the western end of the Fertile Crescent) through which passed more cultural patterns and out from which radiated more distinctive features and values than any other place in the history of the world. If one were to make a comparison of the culture traits of the Bible with those of all the existing cultures of today . . . one would find that in certain respects the Bible is surprisingly closer to many of them than to the technological culture of the western world. It is this “western” culture that is the aberrant one in the world. And it is precisely in the western world, and in the growing number of persons in other parts of the world, that the Scriptures have seemingly the least ready acceptance.6

What an interesting thought—that much of the world finds the Bible less difficult to read than we do.

I was chatting with another Ugandan friend about the line in Deuteronomy when God tells his people to “Talk about [my commandments] when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (6:7 NIV). I wondered why it says, “when you walk along the road.” Because, my friend explained, much of people’s time was likely spent walking, traveling on foot for every journey. Where she grew up, she’d walk for hours or days at a time. Jesus’ five-day journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem seemed not unreasonable to her. (This, of course, is yet another reason why the Bible contains no weight-loss plans.)

Western and Educated We formulate ideas as our Greek cultural ancestors did, not as the biblical Hebrews of Jesus’ world and heritage did.

Industrialized The rhythms of our lives have been utterly transformed by modernity.

We derive our basic identity from our work outside of the home, not from the growth and strength of our family.

Rich

survival. The daily worries of people throughout history simply don’t concern us.

where he’d be praised for having the forethought to “pay himself first” and create the biblical equivalent of a Roth IRA. In much of the world, it would be shocking that the farmer didn’t share his windfall with his community.

Democratic We are used to government being “by the people, for the people,” and we place a strong emphasis on individualism and independence.

much of the world doesn’t see personal autonomy as an important value. Rather, they view people principally as members of groups—families, tribes, and nations—that make strong claims on the people’s loyalty. What defines you are your relationships, and what orders your life are your...

Phillip Jenkins, historian and author of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, comments: For many Americans and Europeans, not only are the societies in the Bible—in both testaments—distant in terms of time and place, but their everyday assumptions are all but incomprehensible. Yet exactly the issues that make the Bible a distant historical record for many Americans and Europeans keep it a living text in the churches of the global South. . . . And this identification extends to the Old Testament no less than the New.

I used to wonder why God would let the Bible become difficult for humanity to understand. It really hasn’t, at least in the global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America), where the church has been expanding rapidly, according to Jenkins. North America and Europe are the places where the biblical message is most unacceptable, where we least resonate with the narrative of Scripture. We’re the ones who have a hard time getting the point. What might the rest of the world know that we need to understand?

Jesus’ question at Emmaus rang in my ears: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” He seemed incredulous that the disciples he had met that day had been so thickheaded about his mission.

What exactly is a Christ, anyhow?

Studying this one word in its culture was what began to unlock the rest of the Bible to me. Excavating the original promises about the coming Christ was just the beginning of my amazing journey into the Scriptures that continues

Christ comes from christos, a Greek word meaning “anointed.”

mashiach, or Messiah, in Hebrew. So, to be the Christ, or Messiah, is to be “the anointed of God.” But what does that mean?

To be anointed, literally, is to have sacred oil poured on one’s head, usually to appoint...

The ancient Egyptians anointed their high officials, and the Hittites appointed their kings with the “holy oil of kingship” at their coronation. In Israel, high priests were anointed, as well as kings like Saul, David, and Solomon. Several times in the Scrip...

we first start hearing the phrase “anointed one” (mashiach) regularly, and from then on it was most often used to refer to a king.

The act of anointing with sacred oil emphasized that it was God himself who had ordained a person and given him authority to lead his people and act as his representative. That’s why David wouldn’t lay a hand on Saul. Saul had been appointed by God as king, and no human being was worthy to unseat him. Priests were anointed too—and prophets, rarely. So the most prominent idea within the title “Christ” is actually that of a king. In simple terms, we could say that “Jesus Christ” means, “Jesus, God’s chosen King.”

“anointed King.”

But the more I studied ancient ideas about royalty, the more I found them popping up in the Gospels. They are clearest at the beginning and the end of his life. At Jesus’ birth, when the wise men visited Herod, they asked, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?” (Matt. 2:2).

Later, at the end of Jesus’ life, during his trial, the main question that he was asked was “Are you the King of the Jews?” which he answered affirmatively:

(Luke 23:2–3 NASB)

it’s because you’re unaware, as I was, of all the cultural imagery associated with kingship in the ancient world. You also need to know some significant events in the history of Israel.

David earnestly desired to build a temple, a “house” for God, but God responded that his son Solomon would be the one to build his temple.

Later on, the prophet Zechariah foresees the arrival of the Messiah the same way: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zech. 9:9)

John’s Gospel tells us that the night before Jesus’ triumphal entry in Jerusalem, in Bethany, he was even anointed by Mary. The parallels were inescapable. We need to know Israel’s history to see how Jesus was bringing it to fulfillment.