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

by Lois Tverberg

Jesus was leading the group on a mental hike through the Scriptures: Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalms, Hosea, and Malachi.

Traditionally, boys have studied the Hebrew Bible in school until about age ten, and then a commentary on the Torah called the Mishnah (200 AD) in the early preteen years. Then comes Talmud study, which stretches into adulthood. The Talmud is an encyclopedic expansion of the discussions in the Mishnah, more than twenty volumes written between 400–500 AD.

. The mind-stopping display of scriptural erudition obvious in nearly any Rabbinic exegetical discourse on scripture reminds us that the sages knew their scripture with a physical intimacy reminiscent of the Hebrew double entendre regarding the word “knowledge” (da’at).

The Torah and Prophets were read aloud and preached on in the synagogue for hours each Sabbath.

This is called a davar torah (dah-VAHR to-RAH), a word of teaching.

Christian scholars have scratched their heads over Paul’s reasoning in his argument against teachers who forbid certain foods in 1 Timothy 4: For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer. (vv. 4–5 NASB)

the “word of God and prayer”? Could he have been thinking of the tradition of sharing a davar torah at mealtime that invokes God’s

presence and sanctifies the gathering, as other Jew...

Literacy was not required to be very knowledgeable in the Scriptures. Notice that both the synagogue and supper table were equal-opportunity forums for learners—both boys and girls would have had ample opportunity to hear the Scriptures read and discussed.

practice, however, was to always study in a group, so that the memory skill that was important for participants to have was the ability to mentally locate a text in a wider context, not recite an entire book by rote.

What Martin Luther King Jr. did, Jesus and Paul did—and on an even more sophisticated level. It was not uncommon for rabbis to “hint” to the Bible with only a word or two and expect listeners to recall a whole passage. Sometimes the reference could be quite important for getting their point.10 Here’s one passage where Jesus uses this technique: He entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.” (Luke 19:45–46)

If you know his references, you’ll see that Jesus’ rebuke of the money changers was packed with far more punch. He was contrasting two famous prophecies about the temple. The first came from Isaiah’s glorious vision of universal worship in chapter 56:

The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants . . . these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. (Isa. 56:6–7, emphasis added)

The second prophecy Jesus referenced, however, came from Jeremiah’s judgment of the temple of his day because of its corruption: Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are delivered!”—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the LORD. Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it because of the evil of my people Israel. (Jer. 7:9–12, emphasis added)

The Jeremiah passage describes the temple’s worst possible abuse, where people committed wicked acts openly and then fled to the temple believing that God would protect it from destruction. God had let the tabernacle at Shiloh be destroyed, Jeremiah warned, and he’d do the same again.

Once you hear the contrast between these two prophecies, Jesus’ words in Mark 11 overflow with rebuke. Jesus was assaulting the money-changing tables...

Mark 11 expands into a prophecy about the destruction of the temple because of priestly corruption. Seen in this light, it fits with Jesus’ other words of condemnation during Passion Week.

We find another example of this technique in Jesus’ answer to the query about which of the commandments is the greatest: The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “You shall love

your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:29–31)

Jesus was quoting from two passages from the Torah, Deuteronomy 6:4–5 and Leviticus 19:18. Both of these lines share a distinctive word, v’ahavta (ve-ah-HAV-tah, “and you shall love”), so Jewish teachers would meditate on how the two lines might reflect on each other: You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart. (Deut. 6:5) You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Lev. 19:18) The second is like the first, Jesus declared. Indeed, it could ev...

Much of the reason we’ve found Jesus’ words so hard to grasp is because we are so unfamiliar with the Scriptures he loved—the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.

Just as the Alzheimer’s patient must ask the name of her own children, the church watches her ancestors walk through the door with a similar response. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are unknown and unnamed. The end result: The church does not know who she is, because she does not know who she was.13

In Acts 13:15 we read that Paul was invited to address the congregation after the public reading of the Law (Torah) and the Prophets (Neviim).

Neviim (which include both prophetic writings and historical books) are also read that fit the theme of the Torah reading. The Torah portion is called the parashah (par-a-SHAH, pl. parashot; par-a-SHOTE), and the reading from the Neviim is called the haftarah (haf-ta-RAH, pl. haftarot; haf-ta-ROTE), which means “completion.”

If you grew up in a liturgical tradition like I did, you’ll recognize the habit of reading the Bible aloud, passage by passage, week by week. Christians inherited this practice from the ancient synagogue.

This rhythmic pattern is so engrained in Jewish life that even secular Israeli calendars mark off the weeks of the year by the names of the parashah that will be read that week. Can you imagine participating in a Bible study so universal that you can glance at a free calendar you got at the bank to see what you’ll be studying this week?

In Orthodox synagogues, the same Scripture texts have been recited each week of the year for over fifteen centuries.

Simchat Torah (sim-KHAHT to-RAH)—“The Joy of the Torah.”

You’ve heard of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946, but you may never have heard of another momentous discovery of Hebrew texts that occurred fifty years earlier in Cairo, Egypt. In 1896, over three hundred thousand Jewish documents dating back over a thousand years were found in a synagogue genizah (geh-NEE-zah), a storeroom for worn-out holy texts. Among these texts were multiple synagogue lectionary lists. To the amazement of the discoverers, these were not the annual readings they knew so well but were from a more ancient synagogue tradition that had persisted in Israel, northern Africa, and Egypt until at least 1100 AD.3

Babylon. Jesus and Paul would have encountered different villages at slightly different places in the text as they traveled and preached.

Genesis 11, they’d read his promise in Zephaniah 3:9: For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the LORD and serve him with one accord.

Exodus 34:27–35, they’d read Jeremiah 31:32–39, about God making a new covenant with his people: This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jer. 31:33) When they read Leviticus 12–13, about purification after childbirth, they’d read Isaiah 9:6: For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.