The phrase Shema Yisrael comes from the first two Hebrew words of the verse Deuteronomy 6:4 (Hebrew שְׁמַ֖ע יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל), transliterated as šemǎʿʹ yiś·rā·ʾēlʹ. The words mean "Hear Israel", and this passage is frequently referred to as the Shema. Strong’s Concordance assigns the number 8085 to the Hebrew word šemǎʿʹ and translates it as "hear". "Hear" is...
The words diglot and polyglot are linguistic terms that come from Greek words meaning "two-tongued" and "many-tongued", respectively; they can also mean "language" rather than "tongued". When used as adjectives, they refer to people who speak more than one language. In this article, I'll be using them as nouns and refer to manuscripts and books which have more than one language. Most of the time, I'll use polyglot to refer to two or more...
In my last two articles I've researched What is the Synoptic Problem? and Which Gospel was Written First?. It is frequently accepted by modern scholars that Mark was written first, and the Gospels of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source.
There is material common to both Matthew and Luke which is not in Mark, so where did they get that material? It is generally believed Luke was written third, so either Luke copied the...
(This post was supposed to go out last Saturday, but I realized yesterday it hadn't.)
The order of the Gospels in the New Testament is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, however, scholars typically believe they were written in a different order. How did they come to this conclusion?
In my article What is the Synoptic Problem?, I showed there is so much in common between the Synoptic Gospels that the later...
This is part two of a series, Where did Moses get His Information?. In part one, I briefly discussed how Moses could have written Exodus 1 (ESV) since it took place before he was born. I also mentioned Deuteronomy 34 (ESV), which was written after he died. The likely answers are pretty simple, so it was a short article.
Now I want to discuss how Moses received the information he wrote in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible....
The first five books of the Bible are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and are traditionally attributed to Moses (see the articles Did Moses Write the Torah? Part 1, Part 2). Most of the events in the last four books happened during Moses' life, and he was, in fact, the key person during those events.
Exodus chapter 2 records Moses's birth, so obviously he wasn't an eyewitness to the events in...
Last week I posted the article Did Moses Write the Torah? Part 1, and I showed other Biblical authors clearly attributed the first five books of the Bible to Moses, in both the Old and New Testaments. In this article I want to make the case that the books we have in our Bibles may not be exactly what Moses wrote, but they are accurate representations of what Moses, and God, were communicating to the Israelites, and to us.
Editors may...
Modern skeptics have
doubts that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These books are core teachings for three of
the worlds major religions: Judaism (Hebrew Torah),
Christianity (Greek Pentateuch) and
Islam (Arabic Tawrat). These three religions all have
traditions of the same author, despite their significant theological
differences. Could Moses have written the first five...
Here's some
information I found about Sefer Torah scrolls. There's quite a bit of
conflicting information, so its kind of hard to summarize.
Web sites pretty
consistently indicate there are 304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah. Try a Google
search for How
many letters are in a Sefer Torah?, and you'll find a huge number of pages
which show there are 304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah. Since the Torah has been
checked so...
The research I did
for the article What is a Sefer Torah? shows there are
304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah. A common question asked on the websites I
looked at is: What is the middle of a Sefer Torah? The word Sofer
is the Hebrew word for counter (not scribe, writer, author, copier, etc.), and Soferim count the letters in a Sefer Torah to
ensure it was copied accurately. Since the letters have been counted so many
times over a few...
