Andy Zach's Blog: The Unlikely life of Andy Zach - Posts Tagged "bible"

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Lois Tverberg writes a clear, understandable book explaining the Jewish roots to many of Jesus' teaching. She explains Jewish culture and way of thinking with concrete Biblical and practical examples. Then she applies the technique to Jesus' teachings, both the familiar and the less familiar.

This book will help any Christian or any person seeking to understand Jesus in the context of his culture of first-century Judea. Along the way, you will gain a deeper, richer appreciation for the Hebraic way of thinking and understanding scripture longitudinally. This is where scriptures with similar words and phrases are compared with each other. The scriptures from one book illuminate the scriptures in another, adding depth and meaning.

This is how Jesus taught His disciples. By reading this book, you will gain the same insights.



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The World English Bible (WEB): Isaiah by Anonymous

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Isaiah contains some of the greatest poetry in the Bible and the greatest quotes. You already know some of them: "The lion will lie down with the lamb", "your peace will flow like a river", "though your sins be as scarlet, yet they shall be white as snow."

Isaiah has been called "the gospel of the Old Testament" for it contains so many prophecies about Jesus Christ. "he shall be born of a virgin"; and this remarkable passage in Isaiah 53:
He has no good looks or majesty.
When we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He was despised,
and rejected by men;
a man of suffering,
and acquainted with disease.
He was despised as one from whom men hide their face;
and we didn’t respect him.

4 Surely he has borne our sickness,
and carried our suffering;
yet we considered him plagued,
struck by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities.
The punishment that brought our peace was on him;
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray.
Everyone has turned to his own way;
and Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed,
yet when he was afflicted he didn’t open his mouth.
As a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and as a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he didn’t open his mouth.
8 He was taken away by oppression and judgment;
and as for his generation,
who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living
and stricken for the disobedience of my people?
9 They made his grave with the wicked,
and with a rich man in his death;
although he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Isaiah was written about 720 years before Jesus' birth during the last days of the Kingdom of Israel. They were repeatedly warned of conquest and captivity by Assyria, but they didn't listen. This is the loss of the ten tribes of Israel other than Judah, Benjamin, and Levi to the south. They went north in captivity with Assyria and never returned. When Babylon conquered Assyria about a hundred years later, presumably Israel fled with them to the north, to area that is now Turkey and Ukraine.

Should you read Isaiah? Yes, if you want to read the source material for Handel's Messiah and many popular Christmas carols. Yes, if you're interested in history and what it's like for one nation to conquer another in the 8th century BC. Yes, if you want to know the fount of many of our expressions and metaphors.



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