Category Archives: Bible Study

LORD vs. Lord

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Ancient Hebrew is a very descriptive language but the problem is translating it to English, sometimes our words cross meanings with it and we have one word for two meanings. An example is our word Lord; Hebrew has two completely different words for what we call Lord – Adonai, and Yahweh. The NIV translation will use the word Lord but with two different cases to represent the two Hebrew words – LORD and Lord. The preface in the NIV Bible has a great explanation of why the translators did this.

From the Zondervan NIV Exhaustive Concordance, we get the meaning of Adonai as the one true God who has majesty and authority and Yahweh as the one true God that makes personnel and covenant relationships, the name also gives the picture of a God who exists or causes existence.  Psalms 68:17-20 uses both of the words so replace the word Lord with a form of its meaning and see how it changes the idea of the passage.

The James Moffatt Translation uses the word Eternal instead of Yahweh (Lord) and I always felt that it was very powerful in the way it changes the passage.  So try replacing the word Eternal when you see the word Lord especially if you read the NIV translation.

(see The Lord my/your God)

The Day

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My eschatology got a “sticky note” added to it when I read Ezekiel 39:8. Ezekiel (see Three Books) was just told to prophesy against Gog and Magog and to speak about their coming destruction and the LORD says that this is the “DAY” that He has spoken of. Magog is first mentioned in Genesis 10 as being the son of Japheth one of Noah’s three sons. Some people think that this may be Russia and its allies.
Matthew Henry’s Commentary refers back to verses with Moses and David as the prophets who did some of the “speaking.” But since Ezekiel is writing this after the “fall of Jerusalem” I had to go back and look. Isaiah and the prophets of his era started writing about “the day” and you had the idea that it was to be the fall of Jerusalem and when God would settle accounts with His people and get things back in order. You also know that it must hold a “type and shadow” for the future and it does. It just hit me though just how much of a “shadow” all the previous mentions of “the day” had been because of the way it is phrased here in Ezekiel. So we still have “the day” coming and it is going to be a dark day when it shows up.
But here is a bright spot that really shows the true nature of our God; look in Isaiah 61: 2 where it talks about “the day of vengeance of our God.” Many people focus on the day and miss the fact that there is a “year of the Lord’s favor.”

Patriarch Timeline

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I put this together to reference with several future studies, I hope it will be useful.

The biggest mistake that may exist is when Esau and Jacob were born; I gave about a five year gap, it may have been longer (probably was) . These are approximate lines; I used Excel and let every box be 5 years.  If it was longer than five years that would put Isaac dying before Jacob went to Egypt. That is a pretty good guess since we do not hear about Jacob traveling back once he is in Egypt.

The other information piece that I did not put in is when Abraham married Keturah; that is partly because we don’t know exactly.  You may get the idea that it was after Sarah died but it easily could have been before and she was around to help take care of the household as Sarah health and abilities were failing.  If they were married before Sarah’s death some of her children would have shared the camp with Esau and Jacob.

Please see my new attempt at Isaac and Jacob’s life. It may still not be 100% accurate but it is better.

Three Books, Three Views.

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Part of this year’s Bible study has brought me to read Ezekiel and Obadiah at the same time. This has been good because it made me think how those two men and Jeremiah (Daniel was at this time also but he will be another day) were all hearing God and writing at the same time and how they fit into the time line in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles.  Ezekiel was in Babylon, as part of the first wave of deportees, using time stamps to place his writings with Jeremiah’s and what was happening in Jerusalem at that time. Ezekiel 24 through 31 is the same time period of the second and final attack on Jerusalem. In chapter 32 Ezekiel starts writing about the “twelfth year”; so this was after the fall of Jerusalem and corresponds to Jeremiah 39 through 45. Now Obadiah comes in to this mix because his twenty-one verses are all about the destruction of Edom (Esau, Isaac’s first son and Jacob’s fraternal twin) because of how they mistreated Israel in their time of need.  So if you read Obadiah, Ezekiel 35 and Jeremiah 49:7 – 22 it shows a unified picture of God’s thoughts toward Edom. Resources: The Holman Illustrated Study Bible

Rock or chip off of the Block?

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Simon, son of John, we know him better as Peter (Cephas) and he is a favorite character in the Bible and one that shows “God-growth” from the beginning to the end of his story.  A meaning of Simon comes from the word for “hearing” and John means “Jehovah-favored” and this may all come from a word that means, “dove” and it is a possible form of Jonah (some Bible translations will use Jonah instead of John).  (Those “Jonah” people and fish, boats and water, sounds like another Bible study to me.) Cephas or Peter means a “piece of rock” or small pebble.

Matthew 16:18 is a verse that I think needs to be looked at a little different. Why would Jesus say that Peter, a “small piece of rock”, would have the church built on him when he used a term for a “large rock” in the same passage?  Lets try it this way; Jesus points at Peter and says he is a “part of the rock” and then gestures towards himself and says but on the “big rock (Jesus)” will the Church be built.

Resources: The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, my brother Luther