“
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
”
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David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
“
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
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David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
“
Love is written in our instincts, yet erased by our actions.
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Gayle D. Erwin (The YHWH Style: A Fresh Look at the Nature of God the Father)
“
Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
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That divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear (a) that YHWH is not a workaholic, (b) that YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and (c) that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work.
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
“
The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh.
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
“
Because the griots who compose these texts are part of a patriarchal system that frequently devalues women, we should not be surprised that their portrayals of YHWH allow the Divinity silently to consent to the women's abuse.
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Hugh R. Page Jr. (The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora)
“
The emancipatory gift of YHWH to Israel is contrasted with all the seductions of images. The memory of the exodus concerns the God of freedom who frees.
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
“
When Moses sought the nature of this God, asking ‘What is thy name?’, he received the majestically forbidding reply, ‘I AM THAT I AM,’ a God without a name, rendered in Hebrew as YHWH: Yahweh or, as Christians later misspelt it, Jehovah.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore (Jerusalem)
“
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
”
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David Foster Wallace
“
Long before the Aryan Judeo-Christian plagiarization of the Semite's Scripture took place, the ancient Egyptian concept of the Trinity was a calendrical system of theology. The Aryan Osirian Jew annexed the ancient Egyptian calendar through Osiris' Scepter, while the Aryan Atenian Christian did so through Horus' Scepter. Both Scepters, however, symbolize that very same calendrical anchor when the cow-god YHWH annually rested in ancient Egypt; an event which the Jew and the Christian projected weekly and commemorated on Scepterday and Sonday, consecutively. The Jew has temporally reduced the symbol of the Scepter to the Sabbath, whereas the Christian has spatially reduced it to the Sun; a temporospatial ancient Egyptian unholiness of plagiarizing Semitic Scripture and its seven-days week calendar. That Judeo-Christian Trinity -which the former is trying so hard to conceal while the latter shies not from proclaiming- consists of the three ancient Egyptian calendrical elements: Sky, Moon and Sun. These elements were Hathor, Osiris and Horus who later on became to be identified as YHWH, the departed King coming as the Holy Spirit and the Son.
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Mill of Egypt: The Complete Series Fused)
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The first commandments concern God, God’s aniconic character, and God’s name (Exod. 20:3–7). But when we consider the identity of this God, we are made immediately aware that the God who will brook no rival and who eventually will rest is a God who is embedded in a narrative; this God is not known or available apart from that narrative. The narrative matrix of YHWH, the God of Israel, is the exodus narrative. This is the God “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (v. 2).
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
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When the mouth cries, I want to see God, the heart has reached its finest moment. Once we have sought and seen God, all other things have a way of finding us.
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Gayle D. Erwin (The YHWH Style: A Fresh Look at the Nature of God the Father)
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prophetic preaching can take place only where the preacher is deeply embedded in the YHWH narrative.
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Walter Brueggemann (The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word)
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The Hebrew letters YHWH (English: “Jehovah”) when written vertically depict an upright person in four levels, image of the cosmos.
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Michael S. Schneider (A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science)
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God by His generic name, Elohim, not His personal name, YHWH. This shows us how he views God; it’s the difference between knowing God and knowing about God.
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Tara-Leigh Cobble (The Bible Recap: A One-Year Guide to Reading and Understanding the Entire Bible)
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YHWH summons us to a sabbath table.
Water and wine,
bread and salt,
light and love await us there.
Come, my companions,
sorrow is for another day,
for YHWH has spoken.
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Ann Johnson (Miryam of Judah: Witness in Truth and Tradition)
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Here we have it. YHWH is in charge and will establish his own rule over the rest of the world from his throne in Zion. But he will do this through his “anointed,” through the one he calls “my son.
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N.T. Wright (Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters)
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I still find my corrupt heart longing for tomorrow's bread. I can make a good argument to the Lord about how effective I can be if He would supply me with enough advance funds. It's a little frightening to pray for TODAY's bread. That means I must pray again for tomorrow and believe again for tomorrow. My greedy heart is willing to be corrupted by a little bit of riches so that I see my warehouse full of loaves. I can make a good argument about how God won’t have to be bothered with me every day if He would only advance me about ten years worth of bread.
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Gayle D. Erwin (The YHWH Style: A Fresh Look at the Nature of God the Father)
“
The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh. In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
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Like most ancient names, YHWH had a meaning. It seems to have meant ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be who I will be.’ This God, the name suggests, can’t be defined in terms of anything or anyone else. It isn’t the case that there is such a thing as ‘divinity’ and that he’s simply another example, even the supreme one, of this category. Nor is it the case that all things that exist, including God, share in something we might call ‘being’ or ‘existence,’ so that God would then be the supremely existing being. Rather, he is who he is. He is his own category, not part of a larger one.
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N.T. Wright (Simply Christian)
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Jehovah, the Christian name for God derived from the Hebrew Yahweh, (from the letters YHWH), is translated as "I AM." YOU ARE the essence of life—the Cosmic Consciousness that creates, lives in, and destroys all things. In Buddhism, your true nature is referred to as your “Buddha Nature.” Muslims refer to it as Allah, Native tribes have often called it the Great Spirit, Taoists refer to it as the Tao, and numerous other cultures throughout history have all created their own distinctive names for it. But the one eternal reality that these cultures point to remains the same—and this reality is YOU.
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Joseph P. Kauffman (The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom)
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First, concerning terms that refer to God in the Old Testament: God, the Maker of heaven and earth, introduced himself to the people of Israel with a special personal name, the consonants for which are YHWH (see Exodus 3:14–15). Scholars call this the “Tetragrammaton,” a Greek term referring to the four Hebrew letters YHWH. The exact pronunciation of YHWH is uncertain, because the Jewish people considered the personal name of God to be so holy that it should never be spoken aloud. Instead of reading the word YHWH, they would normally read the Hebrew word ’adonay (“Lord”), and the ancient translations into Greek, Syriac, and Aramaic also followed this practice.
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
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To me God’s voice and inspiration is stronger, of greater importance and authority than that of any fairy or any other spirit like creature from above or below earth. My Spirit Tales are stories based on truth and inspired by His writings.
Stories about YHWH and His great wonderful acts are definitely not fairytales but Spirit Tales.
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Sipporah Joseph (The Wheelwork: Don't You Know You're Not Alone! (Spirit Tales #1))
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The entire future of Israel depends, in each generation, on the capacity and resolve of YHWH to make a way out of no way. This reiterated miracle of new life in a context of hopelessness evokes in Israel a due sense of awe that issues in doxology. Well, it issues in laughter: “Now Sarah said, ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me’ ” (Gen. 21:6). In subsequent Christian tradition, that laugh has become an “Easter laugh,” a deep sweep of elation that looks death and despair in the face and mocks them. The ancestral narratives attest to the power of YHWH to create new historical possibilities where there is no ground for expectation. IV
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Walter Brueggemann (The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word)
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My conclusion from this brief survey of the evidence is that Jesus believed himself called to act as the new Temple. When people were in his presence, it was as if they were in the Temple. But if the Temple was itself the greatest of Israel’s incarnational symbols, the conclusion was inevitable (though the cryptic nature of Jesus’ actions meant that people only gradually realized what he had in mind): Jesus was claiming, at least implicitly, to be the place where and the means by which Israel’s God was at last personally present to and with his people. Jesus was taking the huge risk of acting as if he were the Shekinah in person, the presence of YHWH tabernacling with his people.
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N.T. Wright (The Challenge of Jesus)
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As a result, legitimate indignation is regularly siphoned away from speech with God to be acted out in other, perhaps more destructive ways. Such speech of rage addressed to YHWH is credible only when the worshiping community has confidence that the covenant God addressed is both willing and able to intervene in contexts of unbearable suffering.
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Walter Brueggemann (Worship in Ancient Israel: An Essential Guide (Essential Guide (Abingdon Press)))
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In decreeing the Decalogue, moreover, YHWH bypasses Moses to address the people as a whole, communicating his will to them in quasi-democratic openness, without the need for any royal or prophetic intermediary. That is not only without precedent in the history of religion; it is also unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible. God’s proclamation of the Decalogue accordingly lies at the heart of the theme of revelation.
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Jan Assmann (The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus)
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The letters of the name of God in Hebrew… are infrequently pronounced Yahweh. But in truth they are inutterable….
This word {YHWH} is the sound of breathing.
The holiest name in the world, the Name of Creator, is the sound of your own breathing. That these letters are unpronounceable is no accident. Just as it is no accident that they are also the root letters of the Hebrew verb ‘to be’… God’s name is name of Being itself.
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~Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
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On all counts, this narrative, with its move from wonder to wait, contradicts the narrative of self-invention, competitive productivity, and self-sufficiency. Israel’s life is a life that contradicts the way of the world: • Wonder instead of self-invention; • Emancipation instead of the rat race of production; • Nourishment instead of labor for that which does not satisfy; • Covenantal dialogue instead of tyrannical monopoly or autonomous anxiety; • A quid pro quo of accountability instead of either abdicating submissiveness or autonomous self-assertion; • Waiting instead of having or despair about not having. At every accent point in the narrative, the tradition of Israel asserts that the dominant narrative of the world is not adequate and so cannot be true. It cannot be adequate because it omits the defining resolve and capacity of YHWH, the lead character in the life of the world. 3.
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Walter Brueggemann (The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word)
“
First, concerning terms that refer to God in the Old Testament: God, the Maker of heaven and earth, introduced himself to the people of Israel with a special personal name, the consonants for which are YHWH (see Exodus 3:14–15). Scholars call this the “Tetragrammaton,” a Greek term referring to the four Hebrew letters YHWH. The exact pronunciation of YHWH is uncertain, because the Jewish people considered the personal name of God to be so holy that it should never be spoken aloud.
”
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
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Egyptians could not eat with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to the Egyptians. (Gen. 43:32) That treatment is not unlike the way in which Whites have characteristically treated Blacks in U.S. society. – In the exodus narrative it is remembered that Israel, in its departure from Egypt, was a “mixed multitude,” not a readily identified population (Exod. 12:38). – At Sinai, however, this gathering of disparate populations was formed and transformed by the will of YHWH into an identifiable, intentional community, called to a historical destiny:
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Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
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Leviticus, then, is a book about the theme of dwelling with God in the house of God, and how that reality is finally made possible. Israel’s deepest hope, to dwell in YHWH’s house upon his holy mountain, was not merely a liturgical question but a historical quest. A gravely confounding quest, to be sure, for who may ‘dwell with the devouring fire?’ (Isa. 33:14). And yet Israel’s destiny, nevertheless, is to become just such a wonder, akin to the burning bush, to be ‘burning with fire, but not consumed’, alight with the glory of the Presence of God (Exod. 3:2–3).
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L. Michael Morales (Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus (New Studies in Biblical Theology 37))
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The question of god lay at the heart of second-Temple Jewish life. Each affirmation, each act of worship, contained the question: not Who? (they knew the answer to that), nor yet Why? (again, they knew: because he was the creator, the covenant god), or particularly Where? (land and Temple remained the focus), but How? What? and, above all, When? How, they wanted to know, would YHWH deliver them? What did he want them to be doing in the meantime? And, When would it happen? The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth provided the early Christians with a new, unexpected and crystal clear answer to these three questions; and, by doing so, it raised the first three in a quite new way.
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N.T. Wright (The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #3))
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Light is the in-utterable name of God; the YHWH form. It is the emotional life of a bee and the distance to Icarus, the farthest visible star. It is the finding of compassion amidst tyranny, the networked communication between trees, and the whale song. Light is woven through the gauze of grief and is “the limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns” (John Lennon). It is what Catholic theologians called “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable, the thing we cannot conceive” (John Chrysostom) . “Tell me, if you have understanding. What is the way to the place where the light is distributed?” (Job 38:4) And unable to answer, in dumb obliviousness, instead, we point at the Sun
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Dr Aisling O'Donnell (THE MAP: Archetypes of the Major Arcana)
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Throughout the Scriptures, God gives us constant reminders of his vastness and majesty. He reveals and invites us into relationship, but he never allows us to forget how big he is. In the Old Testament, his name served that purpose. So did the fact that he appeared to people without form. But the Israelites couldn’t handle a God that awesome, and they set about, time and again, to reduce him to a more manageable size. This has always been the temptation of the people of God—to tame him. He increases mystery; we desire to remove it. He introduces paradox; we seek to solve it. We, like the Israelites before us, want a God who is understandable and predictable and safe. We want a God who makes sense and operates according to generally accepted accounting principles. But instead, we meet YHWH and his son, Ye’shua, who don’t play by our rules.3
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Mike Erre (The Jesus of Suburbia: Have We Tamed the Son of God to Fit Our Lifestyle?)
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25:10. a jubilee: you shall go back, each to his possession. In the law of the jubilee, YHWH commands that every fifty years all property is to return to the original owners. This appears to be an economic program designed to prevent the feudal system, common in the rest of the ancient Near East, from developing in Israel. That is, it functions to prevent the establishment of a class of wealthy landowners at the top of the economic scale and a mass of landless peasants at the bottom. Every Israelite is to be apportioned some land (described in the books of Numbers and Joshua), and the deity commands that in every fiftieth year the system returns to where it started. If an Israelite has lost his ancestral land as a result of debt or calamity, he regains ownership of it in the jubilee year. Land is unalienable. Individuals can suffer difficult times, but there is a divinely decreed limit to their loss, and the nation as a whole can never degenerate into a two-tiered system of the very rich and the very poor.
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Richard Elliott Friedman (Commentary on the Torah)
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The Christian narrative states that a maximally powerful, maximally good, all-knowing aseitic being consciously created everything, including man who short-circuited shortly after. This failure resulted in the immediate separation of all earthly things, including man, from the Creator: the Middle Eastern deity named, Yhwh. The objective of life, according to the Christian narrative, is to return to communion with Yhwh. Failure to do so in a finite space of time (a single lifetime of indeterminate duration and unequal resources) will result in Yhwh tossing the individual into an abyss he created for his finest and most beautiful creation, an angel named Lucifer (Ezekiel 28:12,13), who also short-circuited sometime earlier. This is considered by Christians to be the ultimate punishment: an eternal separation from the god, Yhwh.
This narrative is wholesale nonsense.
As a theology (and scaffolding for a tremendously flawed accompanying theodicy), it is an extravagant work of self-annihilating absurdity. As a maximally good, aseitic being, everything was once part of perfection. That’s what aseity means. There was no-thing that was not already perfect. To argue otherwise is to concede Yhwh was not, in fact, perfect. Creation, therefore, destroyed this eternal harmony, this purity, and by this fact alone, the act of Creation can only be called maximally evil. Creation separated things from the perfect goodness. Creation expelled goodness and cast it into a state of imperfection, and that is evil. In the second instance, as Lucifer—Yhwh’s most perfect creation—had already failed, which was itself inevitable, then that means Yhwh consciously flung man into an already corrupted Creation, and that, too, is evil.
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John Zande
“
Jesus, then, went to Jerusalem not just to preach, but to die. Schweitzer was right: Jesus believed that the messianic woes were about to burst upon Israel, and that he had to take them upon himself, solo. In the Temple and the upper room, Jesus deliberately enacted two symbols, which encapsulated his whole work and agenda. The first symbol said: the present system is corrupt and recalcitrant. It is ripe for judgment. But Jesus is the Messiah, the one through whom YHWH, the God of all the world, will save Israel and thereby the world. And the second symbol said: this is how the true exodus will come about. This is how evil will be defeated. This is how sins will be forgiven. Jesus knew—he must have known—that these actions, and the words which accompanied and explained them, were very likely to get him put on trial as a false prophet leading Israel astray, and as a would-be Messiah; and that such a trial, unless he convinced the court otherwise, would inevitably result in his being handed over to the Romans and executed as a (failed) revolutionary king. This did not, actually, take a great deal of “supernatural” insight, any more than it took much more than ordinary common sense to predict that, if Israel continued to attempt rebellion against Rome, Rome would eventually do to her as a nation what she was now going to do to this strange would-be Messiah. But at the heart of Jesus’ symbolic actions, and his retelling of Israel’s story, there was a great deal more than political pragmatism, revolutionary daring, or the desire for a martyr’s glory. There was a deeply theological analysis of Israel, the world, and his own role in relation to both. There was a deep sense of vocation and trust in Israel’s god, whom he believed of course to be God. There was the unshakable belief—Gethsemane seems nearly to have shaken it, but Jesus seems to have construed that, too, as part of the point, part of the battle—that if he went this route, if he fought this battle, the long night of Israel’s exile would be over at last, and the new day for Israel and the world really would dawn once and for all. He himself would be vindicated (of course; all martyrs believed that); and Israel’s destiny, to save the world, would thereby be accomplished. Not only would he create a breathing space for his followers and any who would join them, by drawing on to himself for a moment the wrath of Rome and letting them escape; if he was defeating the real enemy, he was doing so on behalf of the whole world. The servant-vocation, to be the light of the world, would come true in him, and thence in the followers who would regroup after his vindication. The death of the shepherd would result in YHWH becoming king of all the earth. The vindication of the “son of man” would see the once-for-all defeat of evil, the rescue of the true Israel, and the establishment of a worldwide kingdom. Jesus therefore took up his own cross. He had come to see it, too, in deeply symbolic terms: symbolic, now, not merely of Roman oppression, but of the way of love and peace which he had commended so vigorously, the way of defeat which he had announced as the way of victory. Unlike his actions in the Temple and the upper room, the cross was a symbol not of praxis but of passivity, not of action but of passion. It was to become the symbol of victory, but not of the victory of Caesar, nor of those who would oppose Caesar with Caesar’s methods. It was to become the symbol, because it would be the means, of the victory of God.14
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N.T. Wright (The Challenge of Jesus)
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YHWH rests thrice a month on the zodiac of Dendera as an internal gear driving the outer spur gear of the decans; which in turn allows for 12 rolls a year (12 roles/tribes).
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Mill of Egypt: The Complete Series Fused)
“
Exodus 3:13–15 God’s Name God’s statement “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex 3:14) is essentially in answer to the question, “What is your name?” God’s initial answer seems evasive. He is hinting at the real answer, though, since the Hebrew words for “I am” sound a bit like “Yahweh,” the name finally revealed in Ex 3:15 (“the LORD”). Two aspects of how divine names were utilized in ancient Egypt may relate to this revelation of God’s name. First, ancient Egyptians believed in a close relationship between the name of a deity and the deity itself—i.e., the name of a god could reveal part of the essential nature of that god. In Egyptian texts that refer to different but important names for the same deity, the names are often associated with particular actions or characteristics, and the words used tend to sound similar to the names with which they are associated. One can say there is wordplay between the action or characteristic and the name. For example, one text says, “You are complete [km] and great [wr] in your name of Bitter Lake [Km wr] . . . See you are great and round [šn] in (your name of) Ocean [Šn wr].” One can discern a similar wordplay at work in Ex 3:14. The action God refers to is that of being or existing. The wordplay consists in that the statement “I AM” comes from the Hebrew consonants h-y-h, while the name in Ex 3:15 contains the consonants y-h-w-h. Both words come from the same verbal root, and the linguistic connection would be immediately clear to an ancient listener or reader. It is not that God’s name is actually “I am” but that “Yahweh” reveals something about the essence of who God is—an essence that relates to the concept of being and to the idea of one who brings others into being. A second aspect of divine names in Egypt may be relevant. Deities sometimes had secret names, and special power was granted to those who knew them. Certain Egyptian magical texts (e.g., the Harris Magical Papyrus) give instructions on how to use the words of a god and thereby wield a degree of that god’s power.
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Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
“
It would have been unusual in the ancient Near East for a deity quickly and easily to reveal his name (e.g., Ge 32:29); this may be part of the reason for the delayed answer here in Ex 3. Nevertheless, Yahweh’s name is not meant to be kept secret, and it is vitally important for Moses to have this knowledge. He is to speak Yahweh’s words (6:29), wield his power (7:17) and function like Yahweh to both his brother Aaron (4:16) and to Pharaoh (7:1). To this day, no one knows for sure how to pronounce the name of God—at least not as the ancient Israelites would have pronounced it. There are four consonants in the name—sometimes called the Tetragrammaton (“four-letter word”): y-h-w-h. The vowels are the tricky part. Hebrew is generally written without vowels. In the second half of the first millennium AD, some Jewish scribes began adding small marks to Biblical manuscripts in order to indicate how the vowel sounds of each word should be pronounced. They treated the name of God, however, differently from other words. It had long been customary in Jewish tradition not to pronounce the name Yahweh. Instead of saying “Yahweh,” people would often say “Adonay,” which means “my Lord” (and has led to “the LORD” as the traditional rendering of Yahweh in the English Bible). In order to remind readers to say “Adonay” instead of “Yahweh,” the scribes added the marks for the vowel sounds of Adonay to the consonants for Yahweh in their manuscripts. Pronouncing the consonants of yhwh with the vowels of adonay produces the well-known “Jehovah,” which is certainly not the right pronunciation.
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Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
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As there were no collusion between Trump's team and Russia, there has never been a collusion between YHWH (i.e. the cow-god of ancient Egypt) and Abraham.
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
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the text itself tells us that the calf was not originally meant as an alternative to, or reification of, God but was designed as a visual aid to worship. After all, Aaron attempts to point out the limitations of the calf by proclaiming a day of festival specifically in the name of YHWH.11 The point was that it was only meant to be an object that provided a focal point for reflecting upon the genuine experience of God in their midst. Yet the people were quick to view this object as a visual manifestation of the God who delivered them from Egypt. As such the image became an idol to the people and eclipsed the genuine experience of God.
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Peter Rollins (How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church)
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The Jew presence on Elephantine coincided with Khnum's cult, for that the Jew maintained his own temple there (i.e. the House of YHWH) which functioned alongside that of Khnum's. Khnum was the creator of children, which he made on a potter's wheel from clay. Therefore, we expect to find some evidence of Ihy's creation story in Egypt - taking into consideration his important role as a rejuvenated god in the New Kingdom and that is exactly what we see in Dendera's Temple complex where Khnum moulds Ihy.
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Mill of Egypt: The Complete Series Fused)
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This theological construct contains the following tenets: 1) YHWH chose Jerusalem specifically as the city for his immediate presence on earth; 2) YHWH appointed David and his descendants to rule from Jerusalem forever; 3) the temple in Jerusalem functions as the center of the cult of YHWH; 4) the Davidic king performs an intermediary role between YHWH and the people; and 5) the continuation of the Davidic dynasty and the protection of Jerusalem are both dependent upon the continued faithfulness of the king and his people to YHWH (Miller and Hayes, 1986, 203). In addition to this “oracle of Nathan,” this theology is evident in Solomon’s prayer (1 Kgs. 8:46-53) and most poignantly in a number of the psalms (Ps. 2; 18; 20; 21; 45; 46; 48; 72; 76; 84; 87; 101; 110; 121; 122). Jerusalem becomes the cosmic center of the universe, where YHWH sits upon his throne reigning as king over creation.
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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The Deuteronomistic Historian credits all of Solomon’s extra-Yahwistic worship activities to the influence of his foreign wives, but this was likely a theological coping mechanism. Solomon was likely comfortable worshipping Chemosh and Molech alongside YHWH and his Asherah throughout his reign without thinking twice about it (1 Kgs. 11:7-8). Such syncretistic practices were probably common in Greater Israel during the 10th century. Chapter
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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According to Scripture, Solomon was in Gibeon making his usual sacrifices (1 Kgs. 3:4). While he was there, YHWH appeared to him in a dream and asked what he wanted (1 Kgs. 3:5). Solomon responded, “Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil.” (1 Kgs. 3:9). This request pleased the Lord so much that he not only granted Solomon’s request for “understanding” and “discernment” but also added, “I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor all your life;
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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In fact, the temple and the palace were so close that their respective inner courts shared a wall, and in one of Ezekiel’s prophetic oracles, YHWH chastises the people of Israel for this issue of proximity: “The house of Israel shall no more defile my holy name, neither they nor their kings…When they placed their threshold by my threshold and their doorposts beside my doorposts, with only a wall between me and them…” (Ezek. 43:7-8). Again,
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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To understand, however, how the received form of the Bible frames and presents them, we do well to refer to the way I introduced them in chapter 1: the laws are, first and foremost, treaty stipulations. They are the conditions and mandates set down by the sovereign king YHWH for His treaty with the vassal Israel.12 As such, they are prescriptive in nature, and are meant to be binding on the members of the covenantal community. It is on the basis of the fulfillment of these stipulations that Israel the vassal will be judged by the heavenly sovereign king, just as earthly sovereigns judged their vassals on the basis of their compliance with the treaty stipulations. It may well be, additionally, that Scripture intends that judges make quasi-statutory, analogical, or referential uses of some of these laws.13 At the same time, it is clear that judges, perforce, must have also engaged a comprehensive oral law, or set of unwritten norms and social customs. The
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Joshua A. Berman (Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought)
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But then there is Bathsheba’s statement in 1 Kings 1:17: “She said to him [David], ‘My lord, you swore to your servant by YHWH your God, saying: Your son Solomon shall succeed me as king, and he shall sit on my throne.’” This adds a less savory perspective to the story. Randall Bailey has argued that this statement, made by Bathsheba before David has made any official gestures indicating his choice of Solomon as his successor, indicates that this dynastic choice was a precondition Bathsheba set before she would marry David.
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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The second oracle (2 Sam. 7:8-16) takes a different tact. Rather than appealing to the past as justification for denying David’s request, it looks to the future. In this oracle, YHWH explains to David that he will not build a house for YHWH, rather YHWH will build a house for him. This juxtaposition makes use of a play on words in Hebrew, where the Hebrew word for house (bayit) can convey both a “temple” and a “dynasty.” Because David is the recipient of an everlasting dynasty, he will not be the one to build the temple for YHWH. Many scholars consider this second “oracle of Nathan” to be the origin of messianic thought in Israel (Jones, 1990, 59-60).
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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The infidel Arabs inherited their religion from the Jews with the cow-god 'YHWH'/(LMBWL=King-of-Flood) as 'YHWH-EL' (or simply, HuWEL).
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Calendar of Ancient Egypt: The Temporal Mechanics of the Giza Plateau)
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YHWH is The Mistress of Dendera: Hathor/Sothis.
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Calendar of Ancient Egypt: The Temporal Mechanics of the Giza Plateau)
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One of the most interesting aspects of Waterman’s theory is his explanation of the contents of the debîr. According to the Bible, this housed the cherubîm and the Ark of the Covenant, and there is no reason to think that these items were secondarily placed in the debîr. Waterman argues that the cherubîm could not have represented the presence of YHWH anymore than the cherubîm guarding the Garden of Eden would have done so.
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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The reason Jesus celebrates the Last Supper with the twelve disciples is that together they represent the bride of God -- the people of Israel. This is a prophetic sign whose symbolism would have been recognized by any Jew familiar with the prophecies of God's future wedding. Just as YHWH wed himself to the twelve tribes of Israel at Mount Sinai through the blood of the old covenant, so now Jesus unites himself to the twelve disciples through the blood of the new covenant, which is sealed in his blood.
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Brant Pitre (Jesus the Bridegroom: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told)
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Once the doors of the temple were open, the priest’s day would begin, and the first task of the day was to feed YHWH breakfast in a three-part daily morning ritual (de Vaux, 1997, 449-50). There was a whole burnt offering (translated as a “holocaust offering” in older translations) that the priest performed, most likely on the bronze altar in the hêkal. The priest would cut the throat of a one-year old lamb without any blemishes and pour its blood around the altar. The priest would then skin the lamb and cut it into four parts, which the priest then placed into the fire on top of the altar. While one priest was doing this, another priest pulled bread, made with a particular recipe, from the oven and placed it on the table in the hêkal along with a jug of wine (de Vaux, 1997, 415-16). A third priest took a shovel, scooped some charcoal out of the golden altar, sprinkled perfume onto the glowing embers and returned the scented coals to the altar (de Vaux, 1997, 423). The priests then said their morning prayers, and one example of such a morning prayer appears in Psalm 5 (de Vaux, 1997, 458). After
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Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
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relationship between God and Old Testament Israel. In fact, as Jeremiah and other prophets pointed out, the catastrophe of 587 BC was not a denial of that covenant relationship, but the proof of it. It demonstrated that God meant what he said, that YHWH was as faithful to his threats as to his promises. At its inception the covenant had included sanctions – the notorious curses that would come on the people for persistent disloyalty to their covenant Lord (Lev. 26; Deut. 28).16 In 587 BC, they came.
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Christopher J.H. Wright (The Message of Lamentations (The Bible Speaks Today Series))
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The impression given by the Bible is of a cyclical swing between the cult of many gods and the cult of a single exclusive YHWH. But there may have been a prolonged period in which YHWH was worshipped as top God rather than the only God. Even the first of the commandments says ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’, presupposing that there were others – a matter of seniority rather than exclusiveness. It is only with ‘Second Isaiah’ as late as the fifth century BCE, that the first explicit statement of ‘Yahweh Alone’ is made categorical.
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Simon Schama (The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD)
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God blessed the relationship between male and female—not only in marriage but in every male/female collaboration. The Creator underscores the strategic importance of strong relationships between men and women when he says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make an ezer kenegdo for him.” Ezer is a Hebrew noun that in the Bible always appears in a military context and is recognized as a military term.6 Considering the challenges the first man and woman faced and that a deadly Enemy was plotting an attack, it shouldn’t surprise us that YHWH would use a military word to describe the female.7 Kenegdo is another important Hebrew word that indicates the woman is the man’s full partner. She is not his inferior or his superior. She is his match.8
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Carolyn Custis James (Finding God in the Margins: The Book of Ruth (Transformative Word))
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To Yahweh"
“YHWH is definitely a verb form. We can take comfort in the certain
knowledge that God is a verb, not a noun or an adjective.”
– The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill
God is the spray on your lip from the freshly-poured ginger ale.
No, God is the arrival on your lip of the spray. The arcing. The spree.
God is definitely not that weird sexuality of wild bird rehabilitators.
God is, instead, waves blown back hard from the shore. At night.
Perhaps he is the rumbling scaring done by the haunted freight train,
the shrill ghouls in the back cars climbing over each other to escape.
God is weequashing: The spearing of eels or fish from a canoe by torchlight.
God is the inventing of words like weequashing.
She is not the fire darkening down.
She is the goldfinch singing the whisper song.
And the birthing of a second child, to feel your body blooming.
To feel head, then shoulders, thighs then cord tumbling. To live. To life!
To give the initial downbeat to the tympanis. To cure mice by placing them in a cello.
To do whatever the scarecrow did with his brains. And to make that acrid or burned quality
of the smell of space. To crow, to fly, to gild and gnaw. To mean.
Shape, shear, smear and shine. Play and improvise. To last.
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Tina Kelley
“
Yahweh did not reveal an alternative cosmic geography to Israel in the Old Testament. But there can be no discussion of creation or many other important issues without presupposing some sort of cosmic geography. With no alternative presented, and no refutation of the traditional ancient Near Eastern elements, it is no surprise that much of Israel’s cosmic geography is at home in the ancient world rather than in the modern world. Nevertheless, as I. Cornelius indicates, theological distinctions did arise in the way that deity was seen as operating within the familiar system. The Hebrew Bible uses central concepts and ideas typical of the cosmology of ancient Near Eastern times. . . . However, the biblical writers seem to have given their own interpretation to many of these concepts. Heaven and primeval ocean are no longer divine powers, but only the creation of YHWH. YHWH is the one who upholds the pillars of the earth; he alone created the heaven and stars and can decide who goes to the underworld and leaves it. The biggest difference lies in the fact that according to ancient Hebrew thought, YHWH established the earth through wisdom.[1]
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John H. Walton (Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible)
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The tabernacle, and then the Temple in Jerusalem, are designed as a microcosmos, a little creation, a small working-model of creation as a whole which functions as a signpost to YHWH’s intention to renew the whole world. The New Testament declares in a hundred different ways that this is precisely what’s happened in and through Jesus:
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N.T. Wright (Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics (Collected Essays of N. T. Wright Book 1))
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Unto YHWH we salute
Unto YHWH we march
Unto YHWH we bow
O mighty God
Of all nations, tribes and creeds
How much we thank Thee
O how much we love Thee
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
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Our Father Hallowed be YHWH
YHWH mighty God. Our Redeemer. Our Deliverer. Our Solace. Our Comforter. We glorify You. You indeed are the most supreme. Ruler of all things visible and invisible. O mighty Father, YHWH, our God who is...who will...and forever will be because Thou changeth not. We magnify You. You O mighty God delivered Yeshua from under the grave and Caucasions from under the cave. Hear O God our cry and our plea. Deliver us from all evil and lead us not into temptation we beseech Thee O YHWH. Show us Your mercy in the name of Yeshua. We give Thee thanks. Amen.
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
“
Where there is life, mortal or eternal, there is praise, unto YHWH, who has kindly bestowed upon us, from the beginning, all things. Thanks be to God. Unto our great and splendid God YHWH, Halleluyah. Our God who ordained the order of the Universe. Glory to YHWH.
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
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In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.
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David Foster Wallace
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Here are the three main strands of second-temple hope. YHWH becomes king, Israel will return from exile, evil will be defeated, and YHWH himself will return to Zion.
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Marcus J. Borg (The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (Plus))
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Without YHWH Money Is Worthless
Can anyone give you all that you need?
Has anyone ever given you all that you need?
No? But money can?
Can money buy the air you need if YHWH had not created it?
Can money buy the water you need if YHWH had not created it?
Can money buy the food you need if YHWH had not created seeds and cause them to grow?
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
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Forever Absent is Carnality. Holy Righteous Love is YHWH
Yeshua Son of YHWH
Yeshua Son of Mary
Yeshua the Alpha
Yeshua the Omega
Yeshua the Beginning
Yeshua the End
YHWH God our Father
YHWH God of Heaven
YHWH God of Earth
YHWH God Who was
And Who is before the Alpha
YHWH God Who is after the Omega
YHWH God Who is
And was before the Beginning
YHWH God Who is after the End
YHWH Endless God of Unlimited
YHWH God of Abundance bountiful in Love
You O YHWH fills the expanse of the Universe
You Most High God YHWH IS Holy Righteous Love
We give Thee thanks
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
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Halleluyah to our MASTER BLESSER YHWH
Thank You YHWH for daily bread
You cause wheat to grow
To make the dough
That made our daily bread
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
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The Pledge of Affirmation
I am blessed
I am favored by YHWH
YHWH is my Shepherd
YHWH leads me in the path of righteousness
I am YHWH's sheep
I graze in YHWH's pasture
YHWH is my God
YHWH keeps me
YHWH will never leave me
For better or for worse
In good health or in bad
In life or in death
YHWH and I will not part
I am sheltered by YHWH
I am fed by YHWH
I am surrounded by YHWH
YHWH is my Guide
YHWH is good
YHWH is kind
YHWH is full of mercy
YHWH is my shield
YHWH is my protection
YHWH reigns today
YHWH reigns forever
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
“
Pilgrimism
This race is called Life
This race has no end
Hold on to YHWH
As you pilgrim through
He will see you through
Today Tomorrow
And Forever
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
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The Holy Bible, the written word of God is the physical ''Vade-Mecum'' that initiates us into an understanding of the mind of God, by exposing us to the ways, and character of God, YHWH
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Dr Ikoghene S Aashikpelokhai
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The exodus is the moment of establishing YHWH’s alternative governance in the world, a governance that will displace the exploitative regime of Pharaoh and all exploitative regimes that follow after.
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Walter Brueggemann (Delivered out of Empire: Pivotal Moments in the Book of Exodus, Part One (Pivotal Moments in the Old Testament))
“
I am blessed
I am favored
I have no food
I have no money
I have YHWH
He gives me honey
To glaze a virtual turkey
And a virtual bunny
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
“
I am absolutely nothing without YHWH
With God I am what I am because I AM dwells in me
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
“
Recognizing a supreme divinity did not . . . translate immediately into conceiving one universal God. Israelites first took YHWH/El as their own while sometimes continuing to worship other people's deities as well. God could be described as heading an assembly of divine beings, but the Lord also sentences its members to death for "showing favor to the wicked" (Ps. 82:2). The prophets frequently express both themes: God is both virtuous and unique. This characterization of a single God who upholds moral standards ("ethical monotheism") surfaced strongly in light of the theological and military problems that Assyria posed. Did that empire's devastating triumph discredit God for having betrayed or failed Israel? "No," answered the prophets. God rules the nations, disposes their affairs justly, and deploys foreign powers as agents to rebuke Israel's iniquities. By the sixth century, this conclusion had become axiomatic. Consoling the exiles, the anonymous "Second Isaiah" reverenced "The Creator.... who alone is God" and who will reduce Babylon for having shown Israel "no mercy" (Is. 45:18, 47:5, 6).
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Charles L Cohen (The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
YHWH God be praised
YHWH God is great
No matter what
YHWH God is great
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
“
YHWH loves you...Not...what you do
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Maisie Aletha Smikle
“
Those who dedicated these sacrifices to Yhwh-Melek, in so doing emphasized his sovereignty and expressed a hope that he would intervene as savior in a situation of crisis. In the Persian era, human sacrifice became taboo, and the editors tried to dissociate it from the cult of Yhwh. As part of the same project, the Masoretes later changed Melek to Molek.
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Thomas Römer (The Invention of God)
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the biblical laments give their voice entirely to the community. They do not wait for Yhwh to speak; rather, they expect him to listen.
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Jacob L. Wright (Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins)
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It may be impossible to “sing YHWH’s song” in this foreign land, but this particular psalmist turns this impossibility itself into yet another of “YHWH’s songs,” thus making a psalm out of the fact that one can’t sing psalms here. If that reminds us of Israel’s greatest prophet sensing himself utterly abandoned by God and yet still able to ask God why he has abandoned him, that is probably part of the point.)
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N.T. Wright (The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential)
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Jesus. Paul’s fundamental †gospel proclamation is “Jesus Christ [is] Lord” (4:5). Both titles—Christ and Lord—are important. For Paul, Jesus’ lordship is intimately linked with the resurrection (4:14; see Phil 2:11), for it is the resurrection that reveals Jesus as Lord. Paul’s reference to Jesus as Kyrios (“Lord”) is striking when one realizes that the †Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Old Testament—uses Kyrios to translate the sacred name for God, †YHWH (a name so sacred it is not to be pronounced).
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Thomas D. Stegman (Second Corinthians (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture): (A Catholic Bible Commentary on the New Testament by Trusted Catholic Biblical Scholars - CCSS))
“
L’esperienza di Dio che Mosè vive ai piedi del monte Oreb, davanti a un roveto che ardeva nel fuoco senza consumarsi, e dal quale udì provenire la voce del Signore che gli parlava, ci rimanda al simbolismo classico delle manifestazioni di Dio, il fuoco, rappresentazione della vicinanza e della trascendenza divina. Fiamma che non può essere afferrata e trattenuta, eppure che ci attraversa col suo calore e col suo splendore. Il suo carattere «inestinguibile» evoca l’eternità perfetta e l’immutabilità suprema di Dio. Questa epifania di Yhwh avviene nella cornice di un luogo santo, in cui Mosè è entrato inconsapevolmente. Ce lo rivela il gesto, di ammissione e di purificazione, che è invitato a fare: togliere i calzari, come segno di umiliazione e di spogliazione delle impurità rituali. La connessione tra la scena dell’Oreb e Maria di Nazaret è, ovviamente, allegorica, metaforica, libera e creativa. Il roveto arde in mille pagine mariane, della tradizione e dei Padri della Chiesa, come segno della verginità di Maria, della sua maternità divina. Ecco come Gregorio di Nissa, grande padre della Cappadocia (Turchia), vissuto nel IV secolo, in un’omelia natalizia sviluppa questo tema: «Ciò che era prefigurato nella fiamma e nel roveto, fu apertamente manifestato nel mistero della Vergine. Come sul monte il roveto ardeva ma non si consumava, così la Vergine partorì la luce ma non si corruppe. Né ti sembri sconveniente la similitudine del roveto, che prefigura il corpo della vergine, la quale ha partorito Dio». Durante una omelia del 428-429, Proclo, futuro patriarca di Costantinopoli, parla della
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Gianfranco Ravasi (Un mese con Maria (Italian Edition))
“
Nell’uso del roveto dell’Oreb si intuisce la dimensione simbolica mariana connessa al titolo Theotókos: Dio si rivela in pienezza in Maria, come nel roveto era Dio a svelarsi a Mosè. Efrem Siro, morto nel 373, fa balenare la verginità di Maria come sede della manifestazione di Dio. Il grembo di Maria è come il roveto nel quale discende il fuoco teofanico e nel quale Yhwh si rende presente e sperimentabile a Mosè. Nella stessa linea si muove anche Severo, patriarca di Antiochia, morto nel 538. In un’omelia, la 67, egli afferma: «Quando volgo lo sguardo alla Vergine Madre di Dio e tento di abbozzare un semplice pensiero su di lei, fin dall’inizio mi sembra di udire una voce che viene da Dio e che mi grida all’orecchio: “Non accostarti! Togliti i sandali dai piedi, perché il luogo dove tu stai è terra santa!”… Avvicinarsi a lei è come avvicinarsi a una terra santa e raggiungere il cielo». Certo, come dirà Ambrogio, «Maria non è il Dio del tempio ma il tempio di Dio». Perciò noi dobbiamo, come Mosè, avvicinarci a lei a piedi scalzi perché nel suo grembo è Dio che si rivela e lo fa nel modo più vicino e trasparente, rivestendo la carne dell’uomo.
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Gianfranco Ravasi (Un mese con Maria (Italian Edition))
“
Siamo attorno al XII secolo a.C. Gli Ebrei, liberati dell’oppressione egiziana, stanno occupando la terra promessa, abitata dagli indigeni cananei. Ma al centro dell’attuale Galilea, essi si scontrano con la violenta reazione del regno di Hazor, una potente città-stato, il cui re, Iabin, poteva schierare un’eccezionale armata da guerra. Israele, invece, è un popolo agricolo, militarmente impreparato, retto da Samgar, un «giudice» (cioè un politico) inetto e titubante, e da Barak, un generale incerto, e si sta avviando fatalmente ad essere divorato dall’avanzata cananea. È a questo punto che Dio, come in altre situazioni della salvezza, compie una scelta apparentemente stravagante. Sarà una donna, una creatura disprezzata in Oriente (e non solo…) a donare a Israele la libertà; a rivelare “profeticamente” la vicinanza di Dio a un popolo oppresso. Colui che appare è «Yhwh del Sinai, Dio d’Israele», cioè il Signore della libertà, colui che strappa lo schiavo dall’oppressione, colui che anche adesso sta per entrare in azione per aiutare un popolo umiliato e schiacciato. Debora è «giudice», termine che nel linguaggio biblico abbraccia tutta l’attività politica, e «profetessa»: pur essendo donna fragile, con la
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Gianfranco Ravasi (Un mese con Maria (Italian Edition))
“
Gli Ebrei si erano lasciati tentare dall’idolatria, e la figura di questo giudice, Gedeone, assume tratti religiosi: egli demolisce l’altare pagano e diventa il salvatore di Israele dalle mire egemoniche dei Madianiti, una tribù ostile meridionale, pur essendo membro della «famiglia più oscura di Manasse» (6,15). Gedeone sarà un liberatore, e la sua vittoria evidenzierà la sua esperienza di “piccolo” e di ultimo sostenuto solo dalla forza di Yhwh. Ma in questo brano entra in scena un’altra delle tante correlazioni allegoriche che la tradizione cristiana ha liberamente – e spesso fantasiosamente – intessuto tra il Nuovo e l’Antico Testamento. Tutto ruota attorno alla cosiddetta “prova del vello”. Sull’aia Gedeone espone un vello di pecora: nella simbologia mariana esso diventa un’immagine del grembo di Maria. La rugiada notturna – che è molto abbondante –, in un panorama assolato com’è quello palestinese, è un emblema di benedizione (cf Genesi 27,28), è simbolo dell’amore divino (cf Osea 14,6). Abbiamo citato l’omelia di Proclo in onore della Theotókos quando abbiamo parlato del roveto ardente. Ecco come prosegue: «…roveto vivente che non fu bruciato dal fuoco del parto
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Gianfranco Ravasi (Un mese con Maria (Italian Edition))
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The destruction of Jerusalem serves as the apex of suffering for God’s people. The last stronghold for a formerly great nation fell, inaugurating the exilic period for God’s people. When this tragedy occurs, the people of God tumble to the depth of despair. In Jeremiah 29, we are given a glimpse of two possible responses to the national tragedy of exile. On the one hand, God’s people were tempted to withdraw from the world. On the other, they were tempted to return to their idolatrous ways. Lamentations 1:1-3 reminds us of the tragic set of circumstances that confronts God’s people. They have fallen from the heights. A vibrant city filled with people now lies deserted. A noble queen has now become a slave (v. 1). How will the people of God respond to this tragedy? Although the proper response to the historical reality of this text is the lament offered in Lamentations, Jeremiah 29 presents two unacceptable options available to God’s people sent away into exile. Jeremiah responds to the situation described in Lamentations 1:1-3 by sending a letter “from Jerusalem to the surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets and all the other people Nebuchadnezzar had carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon” (Jer 29:1). Jeremiah 29:4-7 reveals YHWH’s command for the exiles when they are tempted to withdraw from the world: This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.
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Soong-Chan Rah (Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times)
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The call in Psalms to seek the peace and prosperity of Jerusalem is turned on its head with the command in Jeremiah 29:7 to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile,” that is, Babylon. The familiar formula and the anticipated call to seek the peace of Jerusalem would have been a sign of hope that the exiles could turn their attention back to the Promised Land. Instead, they are commanded (very unexpectedly) to seek the shalom of Babylon. YHWH implores his people to continue to live life, even in the midst of shattered dreams and expectations. They are to conduct life in all its fullness, including building homes, planting gardens, getting married and increasing in number. Even in the midst of a foreign land, they are not to hide from the world, but instead seek ways to engage and even contribute. Life continues even as a community struggles with its place and identity. Escape from the reality of a fallen world is not an option. Jeremiah confronts the desire by a defeated people to give up and run away. The reality of Lamentations 1:1-3 should not result in the impulse to escape, but instead should result in engagement. The exiles were disheartened by how far they had fallen as evidenced by Lamentations 1:1-3. God’s people were tempted to flee and disengage from the world around them in response to their reality, but Jeremiah 29:4-7 challenges God’s people to not take that option. Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles does not allow for that option. The people of God are to seek the peace of Babylon and not to disengage with the ready-made excuse that Babylon is a wicked city. They are not to give in to the temptation to withdraw from the world when things are not going as they had planned.
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Soong-Chan Rah (Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times)
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It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God’s own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile and the Euphrates as this earth of ours can offer. If God—the Real God, the One God—was to speak to human beings and if there was any possibility of their hearing him, it could happen only in a place stripped of all cultural reference points, where even nature (which was so imbued with contrary, god-inhabited forces) seemed absent. Only amid inhuman rock and dust could this fallible collection of human beings imagine becoming human in a new way. Only under a sun without pity, on a mountain devoid of life, could the living God break through the cultural filters that normally protect us from him. “YHWH, YHWH,” he thunders at Moshe, the man alone on the Mountain: “God, showing-mercy, showing-favor, long-suffering in anger, abundant in loyalty and faithfulness, keeping loyalty to the thousandth (generation), bearing iniquity, rebellion and sin, yet not clearing, clearing (the guilty), calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons and upon sons’ sons, to the third and fourth (generation)!
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Thomas Cahill (The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (Hinges of History Book 2))
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The Scripture presents seven compound titles of God, each describing God in terms of our needs: YHWH-jireh, the Lord will provide (Genesis 22); YHWH-rapha, the Lord that healeth (Exodus 15); YHWH-shalom, the Lord our Peace ( Judges 6); YHWH-tsidkenu, the Lord our Righteousness ( Jeremiah 23); YHWH-shammah, the Lord ever-present (Ezekiel 48); YHWH-nissi, the Lord our Banner (Exodus 17); and YHWH-raah, the Lord our Shepherd (Psalm 23). These describe God’s seven-fold completeness for each of us.
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Chuck Missler (Learn the Bible in 24 Hours: An Overview of the Whole Bible)
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The re-establishment of YHWH’s temple in Jerusalem was a testimony to God’s glory and holiness
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Andrew E. Hill (Haggai, Zechariah & Malachi (Tyndale Old Testament Commentary Series))
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Es evidente el sentido profundamente materialista de estas profecías, que no hacen más que confirmar el estilo del dios que las inspiraba, YHWH, el dios de la materia. Y analizando también estos extractos, podemos entender por qué es que el Mesías era tan anhelado por el pueblo israelita: Porque esa venida, estaría rodeada de una serie de eventos favorables para el pueblo, especialmente, la riqueza material.
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David Canga Corozo (LA CONSPIRACIÓN DEL ÁNGEL GABRIEL (Spanish Edition))
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Durant les XIème et VIIème siècles, Yhwh prend définitivement la tête du panthéon, reprenant les fonctions d'autres dieux, comme celui du dieu solaire, qui est aussi le dieu juge. Il existe en effet de nombreux psaumes qui transfèrent des caractéristiques et des fonctions du dieu solaire sur Yhwh.
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Thomas Römer (The Invention of God)
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Why is My Mishkan still under My Heel Stone?
Auger coring 1.2m (4ft) below it too Hard?
Your Book does not Mention it, Why?
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YHWH Allah
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Question d’une influence directe du mazdéisme sur le judaïsme naissant est plus difficile à résoudre. On constate, par exemple, dans de nombreux psaumes de l’époque perse ainsi que dans d’autres textes, que Yhwh est présenté comme trônant au milieu de l’assemblée céleste et dépassant tous les autres dieux, qui sont de fait dégradés en « anges » ou en « saints
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Thomas Römer (The Invention of God)
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Thus, N. T. Wright says, “I think it highly unlikely that these verses are a sad commentary on the temporary nature of exorcisms. ... Rather, as Matthew’s closing sentence [v. 45], and Luke's context, seems to indicate, this is a kind of parable about Israel. Here is the link between the exorcisms and the overall mission of Jesus ... the exorcisms themselves were signs that this god wished to deliver Israel herself from the real enemy who is now pitted against her: satan.” Wright then proposes that the ‘house’ in the parable is the Temple and speculates on the nature of the ‘exorcism’: “If specific movements are in mind, we might perhaps think of the Maccabaean revolt, when ‘the house’ was ‘swept and put in order’; or perhaps the Pharisaic movement as a whole, attempting to cleanse the body and soul of Judaism by its zeal for a purity which in some ways reflected that of the Temple; or possibly Herod’s massive rebuilding programme, which produced a ‘house’ that was magnificent but in which (according to Jesus, and probably many of his contemporaries) YHWH [God] had no inclination to make his dwelling. ... Nothing short of a new inhabitation of ‘the house’ would do.” This new habitation of God was eventually understood to be in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful. As St. Paul wrote, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16).
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Michael J. Ruszala (The Life and Times of Jesus: The Messiah Behind Enemy Lines (Part II))
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That One is Being itself, the constant in the endlessly changing evolutionary parade."
"Nuclear physicists and cosmologists have become the new Kabbalists of our age, speculating in ever more refined ways on the first few seconds of existence much as our mystical sages meditated on the highest triad of the ten divine emanations."
"How would such a reframed tale read? It would be a narrative of the great reaching out by the inner One that inhabits each of us and binds us all together, a constant stretching forth of Y-H-W-H ("Being") in the endless adventure of becoming HWYH (Hebrew for ''being'' or "existence"), or of the One garbing itself in the multicolored garment of diversity and multiplicity."
"I do not view humans - surely not as we are now - as the end purpose of evolution. We, like all other species, are a step along the way. If existence survives on this planet, Mind will one day be manifest to a degree far beyond our present ability to comprehend or predict. On that day, says Scripture, "Earth will be filled with knowledge of Y-H-W-H as water fills the sea" (Isaiah 11:9) - just that wholly and naturally.
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Arthur Green (Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series))
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En résumé, en Israël, Yhwh devint définitivement la divinité la plus importante avec le putsch de Jéhu. Yhwh a d’abord été vénéré dans le Nord surtout comme un « baal », c’est-à-dire un dieu de l’orage ressemblant à certains égards au dieu Baal d’Ougarit. Il n’a pas été le seul dieu vénéré en Israël ; peut-être a-t-il d’abord été subordonné à El (notamment dans le cas du sanctuaire de Béthel). Sous les Omrides, deux baalim se faisaient concurrence : le baal phénicien (peut-être Milqart) et le baal Yhwh. Par la suite, Yhwh intégra apparemment les traits d’El ainsi que des traits solaires : il devint un baal shamem, un « Seigneur du ciel ». Jusqu’à la chute de Samarie en 722 avant notre ère, le culte de Yhwh n’était pas exclusif, comme le montre le prisme de Nimroud, dans lequel Sargon II relate la prise de la capitale du royaume du Nord : « Je comptai pour prisonniers 27 280 personnes ainsi que leurs chars et les dieux en qui ils se confiaient. »
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Thomas Römer (The Invention of God)