Hebrew Famous Quotes

The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow's laboratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that "the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." [...] Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. "Say, what is this stuff?" "Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My doormates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses for Smegmo!

According to a legend preserved in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the tormented nymph Io, when released from Argus by Hermes, fled, in the form of a cow, to Egypt; and there, according to a later legend, recovering her human form, gave birth to a son identified as Serapis, and Io became known as the goddess Isis. The Umbrian master Pinturicchio (1454–1513) gives us a Renaissance version of her rescue, painted in 1493 on a wall of the so-called Borgia Chambers of the Vatican for the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (Fig. 147). Figure 147. Isis with Hermes Trismegistus and Moses (fresco, Renaissance, Vatican, 1493) Pinturicchio shows the rescued nymph, now as Isis, teaching, with Hermes Trismegistus at her right hand and Moses at her left. The statement implied there is that the two variant traditions are two ways of rendering a great, ageless tradition, both issuing from the mouth and the body of the Goddess. This is the biggest statement you can make of the Goddess, and here we have it in the Vatican—that the one teaching is shared by the Hebrew prophets and Greek sages, derived, moreover, not from Moses’s God,17 but from that goddess of whom we read in the words of her most famous initiate, Lucius Apuleius (born c. a.d. 125): I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.

We can pick up the minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome – who was by all accounts the supreme intellect of Christendom, who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing where and how St Jerome worked, a detail stands out: there are almost no books in his famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old.

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that came into being around 200 BCE, interpreted the revelation of God’s name according to Hellenistic philosophical thought and translated it as “I am the one who is” (Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν). This translation made history and shaped theological thought for many centuries. On the basis of this translation, one was convinced that what is the highest in thought—Being—and what is highest in faith—God, correlate to each other. In this conviction one saw confirmation that believing and thinking are not opposed to each other, but rather correspond to each other. This interpretation is already found in the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo († 40 CE). However, Tertullian soon asked: “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?”14 Most notably, Blaise Pascal, after having a mystical experience, highlighted the difference between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in his famous Memorial of 1654.15

Taking these Hebrew insights into consideration, an alternative possible translation of this famous verse might be as follows: “I will do good to those who do good to you, and the one who makes light of you I will utterly destroy.” The Blessing Meant for Jacob Many believers struggle with understanding the Biblical figure of Jacob when they consider his life, at least privately.

Page 36-38: Many, perhaps most, biblical verses prescribing religious acts and obligations are ‘understood’ by classical Judaism, and by present-day Orthodoxy, in a sense which is quite distinct from, or even contrary to, their literal meaning as understood by Christian or other readers of the Old Testament, who only see the plain text. … Apologetics of Judaism claim that the interpretation of the Bible, originated by the Pharisees and fixed in the Talmud, is always more liberal than the literal sense. But some of the examples below show that this is far from being the case. … In numerous cases general terms such as ‘thy fellow’, ‘stranger’, or even ‘man’ are taken to have an exclusivist chauvinistic meaning. The famous verse ‘thou shalt love thy fellow as thyself’ (Leviticus, 19:18) is understood by classical (and present-day Orthodox) Judaism as an injunction to love one’s fellow Jew, not any fellow human. Similarly, the verse ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’ (ibid., 16) is supposed to mean that one must not stand idly by when the life (‘blood’) of a fellow Jew is in danger; but, as will be seen in Chapter 5, a Jew is in general forbidden to save the life of a Gentile, because ‘he is not thy fellow’. The generous injunction to leave the gleanings of one’s field and vineyard ‘for the poor and the stranger’ (ibid., 9-10) is interpreted as referring exclusively to the Jewish poor and to converts to Judaism. … It is quite clear even from these examples that when Orthodox Jews today (or all Jews before about 1780) read the Bible, they are reading a very different book, with a totally different meaning, from the Bible as read by non-Jews or non-Orthodox Jews. … If such a communication gap exists in Israel, where people read Hebrew and can readily obtain correct information if they wish, one can imagine how deep is the misconception abroad, say among people educated in the Christian tradition. In fact, the more such a person reads the Bible, the less he or she knows about Orthodox Judaism.

• I am that I am As Moses asked for his name, God's response to Moses was ‘Ham-Sah’ or ‘I am that I am’ according to the famous lines of the Hebrew Torah. ‘I am that I am’ reaffirms God's eternal existence which is all, where all that is the God of nature. Breathe in whilst meditating whilst saying ‘ham’. With that, you understand your identity and all you are-your perceptions, your thoughts, and your memories. Breathing out and trying to say ‘sa’ to identify with all that you are, with all that's there. Through their senses, feelings and experiences, the lives of those before you. • Aham-Prema The mantra is said to be ‘Aah-ham-pree-mah’. In ‘I am Divine Love’ it translates. Chanting this mantra, you surround yourself with divine love–all that is and can be unconditional love to you. These are the traits; acceptance, innocence, respect, admiration, love, thanks, forgiveness, empathy, feeling, unity. Aham Prema' is a simple mantra which should be repeated 108 times in a chant. This puts together, in harmony, spirit, body and soul. That will allow you to leave behind your history. It will clear your mind and give you focus from distraction. Aham Prema' will give you energy and fresh start. •

Even the emergence of Edom as a political entity, during the first millennium BCE, has been related to the sudden increase in mining and smelting activities in this area. Thus, it would be extremely surprising if metallurgy had not impacted the Edomite way of life and religion. Based on the central importance of Levantine copper smelting from the earliest times, the patron of the Canaanite smelters would certainly have been famous. And yet, strikingly, this deity has not been yet identified among the 240 Canaanite deities mentioned in the Ugaritic texts. In parallel, it is interesting to notice that the Ugaritic texts also 'forgot' to mention Yahweh. All these indications invite the testing of the hypothesis that Yahweh was formerly the Canaanite god of metallurgy. (p. 390) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404

In Hebrews 12:2, 'the race set before us' is not a sprint but a marathon. We are promised popularity, ease, and fun if we will pursue the lifestyles presented to us by the world. We are promised easy credit, 250 channels, unlimited minutes, all you can eat, no-fault divorce, free wireless, confidential abortions, and safe sex. Those are the 'joys set before us' by the world, and most people trust these promises to deliver joy apart from God. But notice what is happening. The pursuit of the excellence of Jesus Christ is replaced by the pursuit of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is replaced with the ratings of what or who is most popular, and self-control is traded for self-indulgence. Consequently, there is no foundation for endurance. Even God's people quit jobs and marriages at the same rate as the world. More tragically, many of God's people quit trusting God. They have been stripped of Christian character.

The New Testament varies widely as well, with the Gospel writers understanding Jesus’ death as a Passover sacrifice and the author of Hebrews considering it a Yom Kippur sacrifice. Mixing those two is a bit like putting a Christmas tree up on Easter, which is basically what Paul does in his various letters.

promises of YHWH. Hebrews 13:6 came to his mind, that famous quote from Psalm 118: “YHWH is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?

Some New Testament writers, such as the author of Hebrews, used Platonic concepts to illustrate parallels and correspondences between the spiritual and physical worlds (Heb. 1: 1–4; 9: 1–14). The book’s famous definition of Christian faith is primarily a confession of Platonic belief in the reality of the invisible realm (Heb. 11: 1–2).

My fear is that, perhaps without even realizing it, we’ve fallen into the very dangerous habit of neglecting God’s commands in favor of our logic. For example, if I invite the most famous Christian artist to do a concert at my church, I’m sure to get a crowd of people, maybe even some open-minded unbelievers. I can give a gospel presentation in the middle and an altar call at the end, and through a couple hours of work, I’m almost guaranteed to have some kind of positive response. On the other hand, if I commit to becoming like family with a few other believers, I could spend years pouring time and energy into building those relationships, and I have no idea how that is going to affect any unbelievers. I would have to put all my hope in a promise. When I look at those two options, there’s no question which one makes more sense in the flesh. Many people stop right there and make their decision. But I would ask you to consider: • Does marching around a city seven times and blowing trumpets sound like the most effective way to conquer a city? • Does a little shepherd boy with a slingshot sound like the best candidate to defeat a giant warrior? This list could be expanded at length, but you get the point. God often asks people to pursue strategies that don’t make the most logical sense. If they did make sense to us, we wouldn’t need faith. And without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6) God’s ways are not our ways. He has not asked us to strategize; He has asked us to obey. It seems simple, so why haven’t we obeyed? I can’t speak for you, but I know what usually keeps me from staying committed to His plan: disbelief.

Sometimes I have gotten a little help from a first-century Palestinian rabbi who expanded the famous Shema prayer to include a second biblical instruction. When asked by a biblical scholar to name the most important command of Scripture, Jesus, like any good Jew, responded with an embellishment of the Shema, the colloquial title for the prayer, which is taken from its first word, the Hebrew word for "heart": "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." Then he added that a second command is "like it": "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

• I am that I am As Moses asked for his name, God's response to Moses was ‘Ham-Sah’ or ‘I am that I am’ according to the famous lines of the Hebrew Torah. ‘I am that I am’ reaffirms God's eternal existence which is all, where all that is the God of nature. Breathe in whilst meditating whilst saying ‘ham’. With that, you understand your identity and all you are-your perceptions, your thoughts, and your memories. Breathing out and trying to say ‘sa’ to identify with all that you are, with all that's there. Through their senses, feelings and experiences, the lives of those before you. • Aham-Prema The mantra is said to be ‘Aah-ham-pree-mah’. In ‘I am Divine Love’ it translates. Chanting this mantra, you surround yourself with divine love–all that is and can be unconditional love to you. These are the traits; acceptance, innocence, respect, admiration, love, thanks, forgiveness, empathy, feeling, unity. Aham Prema' is a simple mantra which should be repeated 108 times in a chant. This puts together, in harmony, spirit, body and soul. That will allow you to leave behind your history. It will clear your mind and give you focus from distraction. Aham Prema' will give you energy and fresh start. • Ho’oponopono It is an old Hawaiian word, declared ‘ho-oh-pono-pono’. The meaning is: ‘I love you; I'm sorry; excuse me, please; thank you’. People who find themselves overcome with feelings of anger, guilt, which have problems caused by complicated interpersonal relationships who find themselves unable to express their feelings about their loved ones are chosen to do so. People who feel wrong and find it hard to obtain forgiveness for themselves. It opens your heart to say ‘I love you’. Saying ‘I'm sorry’ makes you calm. Saying ‘Please forgive me’ accepts your imperfections and expresses your thanks for saying' thank you.' The chant will cure your karmic effect and give you a chance to start fresh.

The famous ritual of Jesus washing the feet of his male disciples (John 13 : 1–11). After taking his clothes off (yes, he strips) and tying a towel around his waist, Jesus does something that only slaves and women did in his culture, something that “real men” never did: he washes other peoples’ feet. More provocatively still, it is this unmanly or womanly act, he teaches, that signals both his own divinity and the way he wants his own disciples to live. As Jennings has it, “Jesus’s ‘divine’ identity thus is expressed in his disregard for the most intimately enforced institutions of worldly society: gender role expectations.” Not everyone, of course, is pleased with such a queer act: “Jesus stripping naked and washing the feet of his friends,” Jennings reminds us, is “something that Peter at least regards as quite unseemly.” Dale Martin makes a very similar point: although “Jesus allows a woman to wash his feet (and we biblical scholars— who know our Hebrew—recognize the hint [foot penis]), when it is his turn, he takes his clothes off, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes the feet of his male disciples, again taking time out for a special seduction of Peter.” Modern readers, then, may be blind to the gendered and sexual meanings of such acts, but the original participants certainly were not, nor are our contemporary gnostic scholars.

Thus, as the Communication is a long sequence of Fortified remounting stations, so is the Line a long sequence of Taverns and Ordinaries, and absences of the same. One day, the Meridian having been closely enough establish’d, and with an hour or two of free time available to them, one heads north, one south, and ’tis Dixon’s luck to discover The Rabbi of Prague, headquarters of a Kabbalistick Faith, in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of Paris, whose private Salute they now greet Dixon with, the Fingers spread two and two, and the Thumb held away from them likewise, said to represent the Hebrew letter Shin and to signify, “Live long and prosper.” The area just beyond the next Ridge is believ’d to harbor a giant Golem, or Jewish Automaton, taller than the most ancient of the Trees. As explain’d to Dixon, ’twas created by an Indian tribe widely suppos’d to be one of the famous Lost Tribes of Israel, who had somehow given up control of the Creature, sending it headlong into the Forest, where it would learn of its own gift of Mobile Invisibility.

An Image of Disorder Consider the consequences of disorder, and you will be strengthened in choosing order in your life. The Torah gives us a direct teaching in this regard in the famous story of the Tower of Babel.16 The Hebrew word for sin, averah—like its English counterpart transgression—means “straying across a boundary.” The tower builders’ efforts to reach out to touch heaven were sinful because they transgressed the limits and constraints that are laid into the deep structure of the universe. Stretching for heaven, they failed to honor the distinction between the human and the divine. Since they flaunted order, their punishment was to suffer disorder, as represented by their inability to communicate with one another. Failure to honor the need for order brings on chaos. This cautionary tale applies to our lives, too. How much time, energy, emotion, and life is diverted into the channels that spring from disorder? Where are the Haggadot for the Seder? Where is my tallis? Who forgot to set the clock? Why didn’t you take the soup out of the freezer? Why would I buy milk if it wasn’t on the list? It’s in here somewhere. I almost got there. How many relationships are challenged or even destroyed by lack of attention to order? Without order, you are bound to be wasting something—whether time, resources, things themselves that get lost, relationships, and so on. Not wasting is a Jewish ethical principle.17 Any management consultant will tell you that you have to get organized if you want to be effective, but our concern goes far beyond that. Our concern is how living in chaos throws up impediments to being attentive to the divine will. And isn’t a life at the other end of the spectrum, which would be obsessively rigid, every bit as much an obstacle to spiritual living? Picture chaos, with stuff flying and piles of junk and cluttered thinking and a clanging ruckus: who could possibly hear the fragile voice of truth whispering in the midst of the tornado? And in contrast, but equally disabling, where order has been taken to the point of extreme inflexibility, even if you heard the divine will, would there be anything you could do to meld your own personal will to the will of God, so unbending would your ways have become?

So were the days of ‘unknown Americans, of the nouveaux riches, and of the Hebrew persuasion’, observed the Tatler, snobbishly.3 Under the open-minded Edward, the perimeters of Society had been rolled back to accommodate his insatiable appetite for amusement. Now the arrivistes found themselves on the wrong side of the impenetrable ‘wall of steel’ surrounding the sovereign and his famously reserved consort. From hence, preference was to be given to representatives of the ‘old families’ of the British aristocracy, who prized lineage, dignity and discretion over wealth, wit and glamour. The shift was not lost on Max Beerbohm, who drew a group of Jewish financiers – among them Alfred and Leopold de Rothschild, Arthur Sassoon and Sir Ernest Cassel – creeping nervously along a corridor at Buckingham Palace. The caption read, ‘Are we as welcome as ever?’ Unwritten but tacitly acknowledged, the answer was ‘No’.

A strong vein of ancient religion runs throughout – but these texts do not abase themselves before the divine. Far from it. Instead, ancient deities are treated in their pages with a brusque practicality, and mixed and added and blended to this spell or that one, in much the same way as the spices are. There are spells that call upon Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Zeus, Hermes, Helios and the god of the Hebrews; there are spells that blend Babylonian religion with Egyptian mysticism; or Greek religion with Jewish; there are even, as their modern translator puts it, ‘a few sprinkles of Christianity.’18 One spell promises that it will allow its practitioner to summon ‘Apollonius of Tyana’s old serving woman.’19 Another (an ‘excellent rite for driving out daimons’) hails not only the God of Abraham, but also ‘Jesus Chrestos’.20 Another instructs its user to take the oil of unripe olives and the fruit pulp of the lotus and then to announce, ‘I conjure you by the God of the Hebrews/Jesus’.21 The most popular god is the Jewish God – for, as their translator, Betz, points out, ‘Jewish magic was famous in antiquity.