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

by Lois Tverberg

Other events in Solomon’s life shed light on events that occur during the Gospels. Consider what happened when the Queen of Sheba paid him a visit:

(1 Kings 10:1–3, 10)

Do you

see the similarity between this story and the visit of the wise men in Matthew 2, when they brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh? In both accounts, visitors from distant lands came with expensive ...

Sheba was at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula, where Yemen is today, about...

known for possessing fabul...

camels have been used for transporting luxury goods along the spice trade routes of the Mediterranean because they are the only animals that can survive the dangerously dry Arabian desert. With these details in mind, consider these prophecies about the messianic King: May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth! May desert tribes bow down before him, and his enemies lick the dust! May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts! May all kings fall down before him, all nations serve him! Long may he live; may gold of Sheba be given to him! (Ps. 72:8–11, 15)

Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. . . . The wealth on the seas will be brought to you, to you the riches of the nations will come. Herds of camels will cover your land, young camels of Midian and Ephah. And all from Sheba will come, bearing gold and incense and proclaiming the praise of the LORD. (Isa. 60:3, 5–6 NIV)

“we three kings” and picture Jesus’ visitors coming on camels, even though Matthew 2 doesn’t mention either detail? Over the ages, Christian readers saw that Matthew’s account echoed Psalm 72:10, which pictures kings from Tarshish, Sheba, and Seba paying tribute to the future messiah.

Why, then, do we find “wise men” instead of kings in the New Testament? Likely because they were acting as ambassadors (1 Kings 4:34).

kings often employed royal counselors who had been schooled in magical arts like divination and astrology.

When these counselors in distant lands determined that a powerful ruler had arisen in Israel, they were sent as royal emissaries to pay tribute on behalf of their leaders.

ancient kingship is that I had been misunderstanding the word gospel

But, in fact, the Greek word for gospel, euanggelion (literally, “good news”), in the New Testament also comes from terminology that was used in regards to kings and their dominions. When a new king was crowned, the euanggelion was the announcement that the monarch had taken the throne, that a new kingdom had taken power.

How happy you are as the hearer is not the point. The news is good for the king and his kingdom.

Strictly speaking, the gospel, the euanggelion, is simply that God had appointed Jesus as his chosen King.

“euanggelion of Christ” and spoke of himself as his “ambassador” ...

Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. (Luke 24:46–47)

Originally, the “goodness” of the euanggelion was in the fact that it announced God’s anointed King had come and had even been raised from the dead. Yet it is indeed connected to the fact that we can be forgiven of our sins. But how? According to Jesus, the answer is staring us right in the face in his Scriptures, our Old Testament. Does that surprise you? Certainly we find this written all over the New Testament, but where do we find this answer in the Old Testament? What clues can we find to help us read the Bible the way he did? In the last section of the book, we’ll look specifically at this question.

Excavating the imagery of ancient kingship helped me solve several mysteries in Jesus’ life, yet it created even more.

euanggelion was about Jesus as King, she responded, “Well, that isn’t very good news! I don’t want a king!”

Some of us find the whole idea of kings and kin...

biblical metaphors like God establishing his “kingdom” on earth and the Messiah as God’s anointed “King” simply do not resonate. To the contrary, this imagery may actually offend us.

Some of us are so pained by a bombastic, tyrannical title like “king” that we automatically assume the humble sage from Galilee would reject it outright.

Yet we see him riding on a donkey into Jerusalem to the cheers of the crowds, and at Emmaus we find him discu...

If the “king” idea doesn’t bother you, other ideas associated with kings might. Like the fact that kings in ancient times were also expected to act as judges.

essential function of a king was as the supreme judge in the land. Before Israel had kings, its leaders were called “judges,” and kings took on this role too.

Solomon built his throne room, the text describes it this way: “He made the Hall of the Throne where he was to pronounce judgment, eve...

Indeed, in Hebrew, the word for “judgment,” mishpat (meesh-PAHT), also means “justice.” By judging wrongdoers, a king was establishing justice in the land. Listen to the messianic imagery of Psalm 72: Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son! May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice! (vv. 1–2)

few more lines of Psalm 72 and consider for a moment why widows like Venus might appreciate them: May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the children of the needy, and crush the oppressor! . . . For he delivers the needy when he calls, the poor and him who has no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their life, and precious is their blood in his sight. (vv. 4, 12–14)

Psalm 72 is a prayer for the messianic King that frames his role as one who brings bullies to judgment.

One psalm from about a century before Christ puts it this way: Hear then, you kings, take this to heart; learn your lesson, lords of the wide world; lend your ears, you rulers of the multitude. . . . Though you are viceroys of his kingly power, you have not been

upright judges; you do not stand up for the law or guide your steps by the will of God. Swiftly and terribly will he descend upon you, for judgment falls relentlessly upon those in high places. The small man may find pity and forgiveness, but the powerful will be called powerfully to account.4

I wonder if it would make a difference to our president and the rest of the world’s leaders if they knew that someday they’d stand before Chr...

The first thing God did when he poured out his Spirit at Pentecost was make his disciples into translators. Translating language is only part of it—we need to translate culture too.

Reading The kings of the united monarchy of Israel were Saul, David, Solomon, and Rehoboam. Read 1 Samuel 8:1–20, about when the Israelites first wanted a king after having priests in leadership. What were they warned? Read 2 Chronicles 10:1–16. What happened during the reign of Rehoboam? Read Deuteronomy 17:14–20. What aspects of these laws describe Jesus and his kingdom? How did Solomon, the first “son of David,” do at observing these laws? See 1 Kings 11:1–8.

Whenever you see the word “Christ” in the New Testament, try stubstituting “God’s chosen King” and reading the text in that light.

Whenever your Bible sounds offensive to you, step back and ask if there could be something going on in the culture you don’t know about. Try your best to “be there.”

Sometimes our cultural difficulties with the Bible are those of modernity. Even a few decades ago a king was ...

There are also several chapters about Jesus’ Jewish teachings on the kingdom of God in Brad Young’s Jesus the Jewish Theologian

Why are there so many Bibles? Why can’t we just have one final, best translation and call it a day?

but a major reason why we haven’t settled on a single Bible translation actually comes from an aspect of language that most of us don’t think about. When you speak, you “paint,” in a sense. You choose from a list of words in your language that have the hues and overtones you’re looking for and you blend them into sentences to express what you mean. Each language is a palette with a finite amount of colors. When you try to paint a scene in a different language, the same words carry different shades of meaning, so the result is never exactly the same.

Hebrew, however, reflects a very different Afro-Asiatic heritage. It is tinged by the desert browns and burnt umbers of a Semitic, earthy tribe who trekked through parched wastelands, ate manna, herded sheep, and slung stones at their enemies.

Hebrew also contains a smaller set of “pigments” than English—about eight thousand words, in comparison to one hundred thousand or more in our language.1 Martin Luther noticed this from his work in Bible translation. He commented: The Hebrew tongue, above other languages, is very plain, but withal it is majestic and glorious: it contains much in few and simple words, and therein surpasses all other languages.2

but it simply isn’t possible to perfectly reproduce a painting with a different palette and different brushes. This is why there will never be one solitary, “best” translation of the Bible that replaces all others.3

Hebrew is God’s heart language—the mother tongue of the Scriptures Jesus read. Hebrew is an extremely rich, poetic language that looks at the world in very different ways than English.

Hebrew is helpful for reading not just the Old Testament but the New Testament too. Although the New Testament was written in Greek, it was composed almost entirely by Jews growing up in a Semitic-thinking culture. Often Hebrew’s deep, rich pigments diffuse through, showing evidence of the writer’s original “accent.”

walk, which in biblical Hebrew is halakh (ha-LAKH) and is widely used as a metaphor to describe one’s moral lifestyle, as in Psalm 1:1, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked” (NASB). In Greek this is normally not the case. The word for walk is peripateo, and it simply means “to stroll around” or “travel on foot.”

Jesus was asked why his disciples did not “walk” according to the tradition o...

when they used the same word for “work” as for “worship” and the same word for “listen” and “obey.”