Category Archives: Study Helps

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)

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.