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The so called writer of Fourth Gospel claimed that his Gospel was written to prove that Jesus was Messiah but he proved otherwise as a godly (divine) being who was preexisting before his human birth.
Think about it. There must be someone who was the first to be with God because there are not two Gods. The one who was first begotten could have been so before creation of the cosmos. Then God could create the cosmos through him and for him and make the only begotten the Lord of all. So what better person to save the cosmos and people which could have been planned before the cosmos given that free will would eventually lead to a world that would choose to sin.
So if it was all created through the Word, then all could be saved through the Word of God too.
How could a a world leader save all men and deal with sin? Your view appears to be a man will be born and resurrect the kingdom of david, and that is it.
No salvation from sin. Mankind still guilty before God for breaking the law. And still great problems in the world.
The only difference is Israel is a kingdom.
Not a big deal is it?
God is bigger than your limited mind that you impose on the messiah.
Faith enables you to see the big picture and it is very big. Bigger than what you can see with your carnal eyes.
Sadly Hebrew religion was meant only for a people and for a nation. 99% of Hebrew Bible talk about Israel nation and its people. The God of the Hebrew Bible confines his attention to his people Israel and least towards other nations. Here is a good talk on so called Jewish Universalism;
Universalism and Jewish Values
My talk this afternoon was inspired by an earlier Morgenthau Lecture, Amartya Sen’s “Human Rights and Asian Values”. Sen’s subject is perhaps best described as the universality of universalism itself, which has been called into question by Asian traditionalists who claim that universal doctrines like “human rights” are Western inventions and imperial impositions. Sen shows, in an admirably convincing way, that similar doctrines can be defended from within the world of Asian cultures. I want to make an argument of the same kind about the smaller world of the Jewish tradition — an argument that has, I think, both local and general interest.
Throughout the enlightenment years, which in the case of the Jews extended from the last decades of the 18th century to the end of the 19th, prodigious efforts were made to discover a Jewish universalism or, better, to define Judaism as a universal religion of ethical reason. These efforts were sometimes philosophical, sometimes polemical, sometimes merely apologetic; they were in any case convincing for one practical reason: the politics of ordinary Jews during those same years (and ever since) seemed to confirm them. Everywhere, Jews played a leading role in universalist political movements, liberal, socialist, and, later on, communist too. Wasn’t this politics, in some sense at least, an expression of, or a secular continuation of, their Judaism?
But these were emancipated Jews, and even when the writers and activists among them looked to Jewish sources for their universalism — the creation of men and women in God’s image, the liberation from Egyptian bondage, the prophetic critique of injustice, the vision of a general redemption — the actual creeds they espoused were more likely to derive from Kant or Marx than from the Bible or Talmud. Indeed, they could find what they needed in the Bible and Talmud to support a universalist politics and morality, but the discovery was too easy: they simply picked the nicest passages and ignored everything else. Their programmatic politics had little in common with the tradition as a whole or with the traditional life of the scattered Jewish communities of the exile.
Hence counter-enlightenment followed quickly upon enlightenment. Already in the 19th century there were Jewish writers who defended the traditional way of life and described enlightenment politics (and reformed religion) as a flight from Judaism, an effort to assimilate into the gentile world. Similar arguments are still being made today: “The Judaism of the last two centuries,” writes Michael Wyschogrod, perhaps the most interesting of American orthodox intellectuals, “is the Judaism of self-liquidation.” As Wyschogrod’s brilliant book, The Body of Faith, suggests, an anti-enlightenment traditionalism can still be defended 200 years after the death of Moses Mendelssohn — and defended with what, from the other side, has to be described as unexpected vigor.
This defense of tradition represents a Jewish version of the argument about “Asian values.” Orthodox Jews (not all of them, but many) uphold what they take to be the true understanding of divine election and halakhic [Jewish law] order against the ever-encroaching forces of Western culture. They are resolutely opposed to universalism, at least in its secular philosophical and political versions. They have little use for the idea of human rights or for the claims that are made in its name. Like Asian traditionalists, they reject feminist demands for equality and insist that their own familial life, with all its hierarchies, is superior to anything available in the West. In Israel’s disputes about foreign policy, they are unwilling to recognize a universal right of self-determination or to acknowledge the claims of Palestinians to land and sovereignty.
Though I am a product of enlightenment and emancipation, I don’t think that it is enough today to respond to the traditionalist revival by reiterating 19th century descriptions of Jewish universalism. Judaism is manifestly not a religion of ethical reason; no one looking at contemporary orthodoxy and ultra-orthodoxy can have any illusions about that. Like the other world religions, it includes powerful rationalist and ethical doctrines — and reform Jews especially have made the most of these; but it includes much else besides. At the most abstract level, monotheism, creation “in the image,” and messianic redemption can generate a powerful universalist commitment.
But the concrete life of the Jewish people for most of its history hasn’t been dominated by those abstractions, but rather by a God of history who not only created the universe but who also chose the Jews, and who will one day bring them a redeemer, the king messiah, son of David. Between the historical moment of election and the promised but always postponed moment of redemption, the life of religious Jews has been narrowly circumscribed, highly vulnerable, and intensely parochial. Especially so during the long years of exile, before emancipation and sovereignty: the scattered communities were everywhere subordinate and, most of the time, beleaguered and oppressed.
We can readily imagine this experience as the basis for a “liberationist” ethics and a liberal or leftist politics; it can also, however, produce an inwardly turned traditionalism, hostile toward the outside world, resentful of would-be intermediaries, and deeply suspicious of any kind of moral, political, or social inclusiveness. Among religious men and women, this latter outcome seems the more likely one. Wyschogrod, once again a useful example, describes “ethics” as the Judaism of assimilated Jews.
Nonetheless, there are interesting universalist or universalizing arguments that have been made within the Jewish tradition, in the classical texts and commentaries that reflect what I’ve called the concrete life of the Jews — which means, they are not philosophical or polemical or apologetic in character. I don’t want to deny the value of arguments that take these latter forms — and that figure in the work of major Jewish writers like Philo, Josephus, Judah Halevi, Isaac Cardoso, Hermann Cohen; but I am looking for something else: for the concrete, inescapable universalism of people who are not, so to speak, first-order universalists. And the place to look is in what might be called the intellectual marchlands, the border areas where practical encounters with “the others” ordinarily occur (and also where they are imagined, worried about, anticipated, and reflected on). In biblical history and prophecy there are repeated efforts to deal with, if not quite to understand, the gentile nations, and the same efforts are continued or renewed in rabbinic legal discussions.
These arguments are valuable and worth recovering precisely because the universalist positions they sometimes defend differ from the standard versions of philosophical universalism. They reflect the impact of a strongly particularist creed, and they represent, most of the time, a voice from below. Enlightenment universalism in its original French version was, after all, the universalism of an elite class in the leading country of the Western world; and though the Jewish maskilim (enlighteners) were from a different class and country, they did the best they could to adapt and naturalize the original version. Pre-emancipation Jewish universalism, by contrast, is the universalism of the weak. I want to reclaim it now, without pretending that it dominates the tradition; I claim only that it is a significant presence, which has been repressed by most contemporary “traditionalists.” Traditions should never be left to their conservative defenders.
My account of this peculiarly Jewish universalism will focus, appropriately for this occasion, on international politics. Once the Jews are a stateless people, of course, international politics doesn’t take conventional forms, but I think that I can make it recognizable. I will begin before statelessness, with two biblical examples. In thinking about these two, it is important to remember that the Israelite kingdoms of the biblical age were themselves small and weak, and that the local imperialisms — Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian — were violent and brutal and, in historical succession, triumphant. So there is a significant sense in which the Bible is already the textual record of a subordinate people, even though modern Zionists looked to it as a prooftext for Jewish political independence and warrior heroism. After the biblical examples, I will turn to two rabbinic arguments that are not discussed, as far as I know, in secular or Zionist literature.
Example 1: Moral Teachings of the Prophet Amos
“The Covenant of Brotherhood”Consider first the following lines from the prophet Amos:
Thus said the Lord:
For three transgressions of Damascus,
For four, I will not revoke it [the decree of punishment]
Because they threshed Gilead
With threshing boards of iron….Thus said the Lord:
For three transgressions of Gaza
For four, I will not revoke it:
Because they exiled an entire population….Thus said the Lord,
For three transgressions of Tyre,
For four, I will not revoke it:
Because they handed over
An entire population to Edom
Ignoring the covenant of brotherhood….Thus said the Lord:
For three transgressions of Edom,
For four, I will not revoke it:
Because he pursued his brother with the sword
And repressed all pity….Thus said the Lord:
For three transgressions of the Ammonites,
For four, I will not revoke it:
Because they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead
In order to enlarge their own territory….Thus said the Lord:
For three transgressions of Moab,
For four, I will not revoke it:
Because he burned the bones Of the king of Edom to lime….(Amos 1:3-2:1)In his Ancient Judaism, Max Weber describes the “transgressions” listed here as violations “of a form of international religious law which was presupposed as valid among the Palestine peoples.” “Religious law” sounds right, given the commitment to divine punishment with which each indictment begins. But whose religious law is this? The acts described are not mentioned in any of the Israelite codes; they are not the subject of any divine commands elsewhere in the Bible.
I suspect that this is in fact conventional law or, perhaps better, a kind of moral custom, obviously violated in practice, but nonetheless the product of informal, perhaps sometimes of formal, agreement. The prophet promises divine enforcement; he doesn’t speak of divine revelation, and the only covenant he mentions is between two of the “Palestinian” kingdoms, not between Israel (or any of the other nations) and God. Nor is anything said about the idolatrous practices of the nations listed in the passages I have quoted; they are not condemned for their idolatry; no specifically religious demands are made upon them; they appear here as equal members of a society of states.
Note the substance of the transgressions: what is indicted here is extreme cruelty, reaching, probably, to massacre; mass deportation and enslavement; the violation of treaties; and the desecration of the dead — all taking place in time of war. In the verses that come immediately after the ones I’ve quoted, Amos turns to Israel and Judah with equal fierceness, but in those cases he is concerned with idolatry and domestic injustice (“they trample the heads of the poor…”), not with foreign affairs, and he explicitly invokes divine law and covenantal responsibility.
These last are familiar texts; they show the prophet at home, in his role as social critic, and along with similar passages in other prophetic books, they have undoubtedly played a part in shaping the liberal/left universalism of emancipated Jews. But the earlier passages are at least equally interesting, even though Amos shows no concern for social justice within the neighboring nations. He is concerned only with what we call war crimes; the Amos text is a very early example of the effort to set limits on the conduct of war.
It is revealing, I think, that the effort is made within the small international society of what Weber calls “the Palestine peoples” — that is, the two Israelite kingdoms and their immediate neighbors. The limits that are set, though apparently ineffective, are reciprocal: most of the crimes that Amos describes were committed against Israel or Judah, but he also takes notice, as Weber says, of “the injustice of a third people against another,” Moab against Edom. The promised divine punishments (omitted from the quotation above) don’t quite fit the customary code. Some of them seem to be directed only against what we would call military targets: “I will set fire to the wall of Rabbah,/And…shall devour its fortresses.” But God also says: “I will wipe out the inhabitants of Ashdod,” which suggests that he too has “repressed all pity.” The conventions apparently don’t apply to him.
Nonetheless, when prophets like Nahum condemn the cruelty of the Assyrians, they are relying on understandings about legitimate warfare exactly like those that underlie the Amos text. The understandings, then, are taken to have universal extension; they apply to everyone’s behavior. But they were first worked out among the small peoples; there is no evidence that the Assyrians accepted them, though even they understood the obligations of a treaty and, despite their reputation for cruelty, may have believed themselves to be fighting within some set of rules.
For my purposes here, I simply want to point to the Israelite acceptance of conventional law alongside divine, revealed law and to the prophetic invocation of the moral/legal conventions in arguments about military conduct in the international arena. Statehood makes this sort of thing possible, and perhaps necessary, even when the state structures are fairly rudimentary. In the long years of statelessness, the laws of war were mostly ignored by Jewish writers (they are obviously relevant again today). Weber is surely right in reading the Amos text as the reflection of an actually existing “international law.” But its actuality goes deeper: the text also reflects an existing international morality, underlying the law (as morality commonly does), which must have been worked out in the course of a long series of cross-border encounters, for the protection of the protagonists. God is, again, only the agent of enforcement; the prophet doesn’t claim any more creative role for him. The condemnation of cruelty, exile, betrayal, and murder is, so Amos seems to assume, natural to humankind–even if it is also natural for human beings to be cruel, murderous, and so on.
One might also deduce from the international law of the small peoples a condemnation of empire — as Isaac Cardoso does in his Las Excelencias de los Hebreos. According to Cardoso, the smallness of God’s promised land is meant “to show that great realms are great plunders, and that the domination of foreign territories is more the result of violence and force than of justice and equity…” But this is a seventeenth century argument. Despite the critique of Assyria, I don’t think that the prophetic texts reach as far. Amos’s indictments tell us more about the equal standing of the small peoples than about the necessary illegitimacy of the great ones.
Example 2: Messianic Vision in Micah and Isaiah
“And they shall beat their swords into plowshares”My second example is a famous text that appears in the books of Micah and Isaiah, with only very minor word changes. A majority of contemporary biblical scholars (though these majorities are highly volatile) regards the source as unknown, probably from a third hand; this is a “floating” prophecy. The date is contested, and pretty much irrelevant to my purposes here, but I shall assume that it comes from the time of Micah and Isaiah, roughly, the last several decades of the 8th century BCE.
In the days to come,
The Mount of the Lord’s House
Shall stand firm above the mountains
And tower above the hills;
And all the nations
Shall gaze on it with joy.
And the many peoples shall go and say:
“Come,
Let us go up to the Mount of the Lord,
To the House of the God of Jacob,
That He may instruct us in His ways,
And that we may walk in His paths.”
For instruction shall come forth from Zion,
The word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
Thus He will judge among the nations
And arbitrate for the many peoples,
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks:
Nation shall not take up
Sword against nation;
They shall never again know war. (Isaiah 2:2-7)This is clearly a messianic vision, though there is no king messiah mentioned in the text. Partly for that reason, the last five lines have played an especially important role in the literature and culture of the universalist left. But the prophecy as a whole points toward a distinctive form of universalism, which hasn’t been imitated or adapted, or even discussed, in modern times. The prophet’s universe is not composed, like the world of contemporary philosophers, of individual men and women who have somehow escaped their parochial identities and transcended their differences; they have only stopped fighting about identity and difference. Nations and peoples still exist and, what is more telling, they still find themselves in conflict; they are different, and they differ. They come to Jerusalem for divine judgement and arbitration.
The vision is not imperialist (though there are imperial visions in other prophetic texts): Israel neither encompasses the other nations nor rules over them. A recent commentator on the parallel passage in Micah nicely describes what happens when Zion “towers above the hills”:
The result is not a religious empire or a world subject in humiliation to a triumphant Israel. The nations bring their crises to YHWH, their disputes are dealt with, and they depart. They are not dominated and incorporated in a power structure, but helped and led to a new policy that makes for life. The vision is not of some final stage in the struggle for power, but of its end. . . .
I want particularly to call attention to the commentator’s perception that this is a messianic age in which there are still “crises.” Crisis is a natural consequence of the continued existence of national and ethnic pluralism. In the overwhelming majority of religious milleniums and secular utopias, pluralism is rejected precisely in order to avoid its natural consequence. In this “floating” prophecy, which was sufficiently popular to be adopted by two prophetic schools, political pluralism is made possible, and peaceful, by religious monotheism. But the common faith of the nations or, at least, their common willingness to seek the judgement of Israel’s God, doesn’t bring them into harmony, let alone into union. That “God’s name is one,” as the prophet Zechariah says it will be in the days to come (14:9), doesn’t mean that humanity is one.This is a vision that comes out of the same world as the Amos indictments, a world of small nations, whose members are, so to speak, accustomed to one another. They fight and they negotiate; they share a common law, which they are often tempted to violate. Their vision of peace not only includes the others but accepts their otherness. The prophets of an imperial power would be likely, I think, to give an entirely different account of the days to come. Presumably they would be critics of imperialism, but what they would yearn for is an empire without domination, a world state of equal citizens, not a jumble of heterogeneous and contentious nations.
Imperial intellectuals are commonly captured by the idea of a “pax Romana” even when they have no illusions about the character of “Roman” power. They imagine the pax without the power. The Israelite prophet solves the power problem by invoking a “pax deii,” but he then returns to the familiar jumble of nations. It’s that return that gives his vision its attractive modesty. If “swords into plowshares” is utopian, the plural “nations” and “many peoples” is realistic.
Example 3: Rabbinic Maxim on Jews in Exile
Dina d’malkhuta dina [The law of the kingdom is law.]The third argument that I want to examine develops around the legal maxim with which the rabbis accommodated themselves, and the nation generally, to the political conditions of the exile. Now statehood and sovereignty have been lost; the Jews are scattered, ruled by alien kings. They no longer play a part in international society. But they still need what we can think of as a foreign policy: they have to deal with the alien kings. This can’t be a single foreign policy, conducted from a central ministry. It is highly localized, the work of many intermediary figures (like the “intercessors” of the medieval period). Nonetheless, it has remarkably similar features across the diaspora.
Everywhere it starts from the legal position first adopted in Babylonia: “The law of the kingdom is law.” Dina d’malkhuta dina. The function of this maxim is not only to accept gentile rule, but to incorporate it into the halakhic system. Now Jews who obey the law of the country in which they find themselves are also, first of all, obeying a Jewish law that tells them to obey the law of the country in which they find themselves. The law of the country is domestic in character; the halakhic maxim is something like international law for the diaspora — and its extensions and qualifications, as we shall see, take on universal meaning. Dina d’malkhuta dina is recognizably linked to the international law of the small peoples of the biblical age: it is another example of the universalism of the weak.
The maxim doesn’t stand by itself; it can’t be unqualified, else it would leave no room at all for any Jewish law except this one self-immolating principle. In practice, its effects are limited to civil law; it involves an acceptance of the king’s right to tax and of his regulation of the property system. Religious law, by contrast, is not subordinated to the law of the kingdom, and since religious law includes personal status (marriage, divorce, conversion, and so on), there continues to be much work for the rabbinic courts.
But this important exception to the (gentile) king’s authority, insisted upon for the sake of religion, was not developed into a general demand for a separation of religious and civil jurisdictions — and certainly not into a claim for religious freedom. Here a universalist moment is missed: the standard argument isn’t that people generally should be allowed to follow their understandings of God’s law, but only that Jews must obey the divine commandments that were delivered to them at Sinai. The Jews in effect separated the synagogue from the (gentile) state, but they did not argue that separation was a good thing; it was just one more perverse but necessary feature of exilic life. Even so, they might have recognized that it was necessary also for other “exiles,” that is, for minorities generally; but I know of no writers who made that argument.
Still, the maxim about dina d’malkhuta was qualified in other ways that are more readily universalized. For the rabbis did not mean to expose Jews to arbitrary or unfair laws. From very early on, cases of confiscatory taxation or tyrannical decree or discriminatory legislation were not taken to be “covered” by the maxim. It might be necessary to pay the taxes or obey the decrees, but it wasn’t necessary to call them legitimate. And the standard way of refusing to do that was to say, this isn’t “law.” The strategy was to essentialize law and thereby to universalize it. What isn’t law isn’t legitimate — in principle, it isn’t legitimate for anybody.
The strategy can be extended: if the king confiscates the property of one of his subjects or gives arbitrary power to a tax farmer, setting no limits to what he can extort, that isn’t “taxation,” it’s robbery. Imagine, says Maimonides, that the king “takes the courtyard or field of one of the citizens [as the biblical King Ahab tried to do], contrary to the laws he has promulgated: he is deemed a robber…” (Most Jewish burghers dealing with most gentile kings in the years before emancipation thought, probably rightly, that they were being robbed.)
But the most important demand of the Jews in exile was for equal treatment: law must be general and non-discriminatory in its application. The “general rule,” according to Maimonides, is that “any law promulgated by the king [must] apply to everyone and not to one person alone…” This isn’t quite the same thing as a demand for full equality before the law; it doesn’t reach, for example to class differences. Ideally, however, it does reach to national differences, as the Bible seems to require: “There shall be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you” (Exodus 12:49). There are other biblical commands, however, that require discrimination, and this verse from Exodus was probably honored most often in the breach.
Still, it was what Jews hoped for in the lands of the exile. Their extreme vulnerability sometimes forced them to concede that special laws might be enacted for “strangers” like themselves — and then they asked only that all Jews be treated equally. It is worth noting that this concession was forced by the harsh conditions of Jewish life in Christendom; rabbinic authorities in Muslim lands claimed a more general equality (which is not to say that the claim was accepted). Of course, the rule that law must be non-discriminatory was a formal principle of both Christian and Muslim jursiprudence, even when “strangers” were in fact discriminated against. But it was the strangers themselves for whom the principle had practical value; it was worth insisting on whenever they were able. “This is not a fair law,” says a thirteenth century rabbinic responsum, criticizing an act of royal discrimination, “and is not law…” Here again is the universalism of the weak.
As in my other examples, it is a very modest universalism. It doesn’t require that the law be substantively just, only that it not be radically unjust. And, at least in its Jewish version, it doesn’t propose resistance or revolution in the face of illegitimate law. In general, I think, the members of pariah religious and ethnic groups can’t be revolutionaries; emancipation is the precondition of revolutionary politics. And resistance, in the “internationalist” terms that I have adopted here, would have to take the form of a war — a just war, perhaps, but not a possible course of action for the scattered and vulnerable Jewish communities.
What the rabbis propose instead is evasion: since this isn’t a tax, you are justified in looking for any possible way of not paying it. Since this isn’t a law, you are justified in disobeying it and also in lying about your disobedience. There is no call for civil, that is public, disobedience in the Jewish texts; that kind of behavior depends upon a significant degree of trust in the overall justice of the political system, and the Jews had no such trust, and no reason to have it, in pre-emancipation times. What they did have was a minimalist sense of what justice might mean in a system that included small peoples like themselves. The minimum requirements were all negative in character: taxes should not be arbitrary or unlimited; the king should not rule by decree (but only by public enactment or longstanding custom); the laws should not discriminate among the individuals and/or nations subject to the king’s authority.
Example 4: Noahide Code
“There is nothing permitted to Jews that is prohibited to gentiles.”My last example is the Noahide Code, which represents the Jewish tradition’s closest approximation to a standard universalism. The actual meaning and purpose of the Code is the subject of much debate both in the classical texts and among contemporary scholars. I won’t provide an account of the debate here, though aspects of it will be reflected in my own analysis. I am radically dependent in this section on two wonderfully erudite and subtle books by David Novak that analyze the Code as a kind of natural law.
These are the laws that, according to the Talmud, were given to Adam and again to the sons of Noah — that is, to humankind generally. The number varies in different versions, but the standard number is seven, and six of these laws are, again, negative in character: the Noahides are forbidden to practice idolatry and blasphemy; they are forbidden to commit murder, robbery, and a set of sexual acts that includes incest, adultery, and homosexual intercourse; and they are forbidden to eat the flesh of a living animal (this last is read by Maimonides as a ban on cruelty). The seventh law is positive: they are required to establish a judicial system (presumably to enforce the first six laws).
These seven are derived exegetically from verses in the book of Genesis that, with the exception of the bans on murder and the flesh of a living animal, do not bear the interpretations they are given. The Noahide Code is a speculative venture of the rabbis; it describes at once the obligations of all humanity before the Sinai revelation and the obligations of non-Jews after — the Jews having been given a much larger set of laws, which includes the original seven. The seven, however, are so generally stated that they invite elaboration, and in some versions they pretty much cover the same ground as Jewish law except for its ritual provisions: holidays, the dietary code, sacrifices, purity, and so on.
It is easy to see how the Code could come to represent a Jewish version of natural law. It incorporates the standard moral rules, which have in (some) other traditions also been thought to include or require a commitment to monotheism. And a number of Jewish writers have explicitly argued that it is possible to arrive at the seven laws through reason alone or, more specifically, through reflection on the human need for society. But in the original rabbinic teaching, the laws of the Noahides are commandments, not rational deductions and hence not, in the usual sense, “natural” to humankind; they are the first example of revealed law; the Torah delivered at Sinai is only the second. This is how gentiles are recognized by religious Jews as moral beings: they live, like the Jews, “under the commandments.” There is quite a bit of leeway for interpreting the commandments, but all human beings start by being commanded. The traditional Jewish view is that we do not create the moral universe; we only inhabit it. What’s important here is that we all inhabit it.
But it is also the traditional view that we inhabit it by choice. Human beings are free to refuse the commandments and walk out of the moral universe. It is wrong to do that, but not impossible. And the standard Jewish claim about the idolatrous nations is that they have done exactly that. It is virtually analytic to the Jewish understanding of idolatry that idolators recognize no moral restraint. If they violate the primary Noahide commandment, then they violate all the others. Simple empiricism would lead observers of real-idolators-in-the-world to question this analysis, and such questions do surface in rabbinic literature.
But the double standard with which early Jewish law treats Jews and gentiles makes sense only if the idolatrous others are taken to be radically lawless. (They have no sense of property, for example, hence the law about the return of lost articles [Deuteronomy 23] doesn’t apply to them…and so on.) One purpose of the Noahide Code, then, is to mark out the people to whom the double standard doesn’t apply and with whom moral co-existence is possible.
It could do much more than this: the Code also provided the basis for a full acceptance of the “other” as a religious equal. Thus Menachem Meiri, a 14th century halakhist and talmudic commentator living in Provence, writes that “Every Noahide whom we see, who accepts upon himself the seven commandments, is one of the saints of the nations of the world, and is in the category of the religious, and has a portion in the world-to-come.”
In some sense, this is the standard view of the Noahides, though the meaning of its various parts (above all the phrase “accepts upon himself”) is disputed, and Meiri’s strong statement owes a great deal to the relatively benign character of Jewish-Christian interaction in 14th century Provence. But the central focus of the legal literature is not on individual Noahides, but rather on the gentile nations. The Code is, again, a kind of international law; the agents to whom it is chiefly addressed are organized groups of men and women, imagined as accepting the Code or not, living with or without legal constraint.
At the same time, many of the rabbis, in both the talmudic and medieval periods, regard the Code as if it was designed for resident aliens in the Land of Israel, the subjects of a Jewish king. Since there was no continuous tradition of gentile acknowledgement and observance of the Code from the days of Noah forward, and since the Noahide Code was included in the Sinai revelation (in effect, revealed again), these rabbis take the Code to be, effectively, Jewish law for the gentiles. This is “our” universal law for “them”–much like the earliest form of the jus gentium, which was simply a form of Roman law for non-Romans.
Hence the Noahide Code is meaningful only when Jews exercise political power: they take responsibility for the seventh commandment and set up a judicial system to enforce the other six commandments on their non-Jewish subjects. In this form, “natural law” is very much an imperial creation, and here, as in other empires, it marks out a way of tolerating foreign nations. Or, at least, it defines a limited toleration: resident aliens must give up idolatry; they need not convert to Judaism.
If the Noahide Code is an imperial creation, then, so it is often said, it must have been created in an empire. This belief has led some scholars to date the Code from Hasmonean times, when Jewish rule extended over a number of non-Jewish nations. But some of these, like the Idumeans, were forcibly converted — which suggests that adherence to the Code was not yet available, or not yet acceptable, as an alternative to conversion.
Probably, the Code is a later creation, the product of an imperial imagination rather than an actual empire. The rabbis imagined a messianic age when a Jewish king would rule, not over the world, but over the land of Israel, and they imagined the land with its existing heterogeneous population. Given their unhappiness with the Hasmoneans and with the policy of forced conversion, they then had to work out a more minimalist set of rules for gentile residents. These are conceived to be rules that all human beings must obey, but mostly don’t; so the rules are enforced by the Jews wherever they are able to enforce them (but this is, again, a purely imaginary “ability”).
Maimonides, the greatest of the medieval Jewish philosophers, seems to have held this view of the Noahide Code. Isaac Cardoso argued from it, on the principle of reciprocity, that Christians should give to Jews the same status as Noahides would have or, as he thinks, once actually had in a Jewish kingdom — “resident sojourners, who…were able to live among [the Israelites], although they did not follow their Law.”
But there is an alternative understanding, according to which the Code is simply the law of the Noahides, and the Jews have no special responsibility for its enforcement. This alternative is less the product of philosophical or theological reflection than of experience. Exilic Jewry had no powers of enforcement, and yet in all the countries of the exile the Code was more or less effectively enforced by the Noahides — that is, the gentiles — themselves. So here is a set of laws/commandments, revealed to humankind in the days of Adam and Noah, knowable by reason, and visibly established in the world.
Taking the Noahide Code to be the actual law of the gentile nations is a way of recognizing what Novak calls the “normativity” of the others. Not only do non-Jews live “under the commandments,” but they also live — some of them, some of the time — according to the commandments. Anyone who wants to deny non-Jews this status must also deny or minimize the meaning of the Code. Thus Wyschogrod: “But the law is addressed only to Israel. It is not a universal law, obedience to which is expected of all peoples. Apart from the Noahide commandments, the Torah is addressed only to Israel…” Wyschogrod says nothing more about the Noahides. But focusing on their “normativity,” as Novak invites us to do, has important and interesting consequences.
First of all, the Noahide Code provides a new grounding for dina d’malkhuta dina, which appears now as something more than an exilic accomodation to gentile power; it is also a recognition of the substantive validity of gentile law. “The law of the kingdom” is based on revelation and/or confirmed by reason, exactly as Jewish law is — or, better, revelation and reason provide critical standards for non-Jews as well as for Jews. Second, the Code, and the gentile law that it validates, provide a comparative standard for Jewish law: “they” are more strict here, “we” are more strict there; “they” do things this way, “we” do things that way.
I don’t want to suggest that comparative law was ever a central feature of Jewish scholarship. Until very recently, at least, it wasn’t. Indeed, curiosity about the “others” is barely visible in the classical Jewish texts. There was no Jewish Herodotus in ancient times, and while writers like Philo and Josephus labored to explain Judaism to the gentiles, they made no effort, nor did anyone else, to explain Hellenistic culture to the Jews. With rare exceptions, that pattern persisted into medieval and early modern times. But the complex engagement of exilic Jewry with gentile law forced Jewish writers to think, sometimes, about legal practices in a comparative way. And Noahide law provided a framework within which to do this.
If there was legitimate law and law enforcement among the gentile nations, there were also, visibly, different versions of legitimate law among the different gentile nations. The idea of Noahide law made for pluralism: the Code could be realized in different ways. Jews believed, of course, that the Torah was the ideal legal system, but it wasn’t the only one. Whether founded on revelation or reason, the law of the gentiles was “essentially independent.” At the same time, it was possible to recognize a minimalist version of the Code, which it was incumbent on all nations to enact and enforce. And here “we” could learn from “their” enactments. “The recognition and affirmation of the presence of dinim (laws, legality) among the gentiles,” writes Novak, “provided a theoretical model for determining the necessary minimal moral standards to which Jewish law must adhere.”
I am unsure about the idea of a theoretical model, but the “recognition and affirmation” certainly had a practical effect, which is reflected in another legal maxim: “There is nothing permitted to Jews that is prohibited to gentiles” (B. Sanhedrin 59a). It would have been a scandal and a discredit to God, so the rabbis thought, if Jewish law on any subject was more permissive than gentile law. A discredit in whose eyes? Obviously, in the eyes of the gentiles, whose “normativity” is thus given extraordinary force. Of course, the reverse form of the maxim is not accepted: “There is nothing prohibited to Jews that is permitted to gentiles.” The strictness of gentile law is controlling, not its leniency. In traditional Judaism, strictness is more valued — and yet, sometimes, the gentile nations are more strict! The ability to acknowledge this fact is the unexpected outcome of the revelation to the sons of Noah.
Conclusion
I have tried to describe a number of approaches to universalism from within traditional Judaism. Think of these as moving toward, perhaps eventually constituting, what might be called a “low-flying” universalism; that is, one worked out in close contact with the political landscape. Its crucial moral perception is the existence of other nations as moral and legal agents. This acknowledgement of the others derives from Jewish particularism; it is, so to speak, the turning outward of a particularist perspective. Sometimes the turn can reach to what I have described elsewhere as a “reiterative universalism”–as in the following passage from the prophet Amos:To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians
–declares the Lord.
True, I brought Israel up
From the land of Egypt,
But also the Philistines from Caphtor
And the Arameans from Kir. (Amos 9:7)This suggests that there isn’t one deliverance (and one election) but a reiterated series, each engaging a different nation. The nations are fully equal in God’s eyes, and so they should be in each others’. Amos’s argument was never accepted (in fact, it is rarely mentioned) in later Jewish texts, but note that his universalism is also worked out close to the ground–on which real Philistines and real Arameans walked. In this sense, it fits nicely with my four examples, in all of which the ongoing co-existence of Israel and the nations is assumed.
Co-existence is necessarily rule-governed. That, at least, is the Jewish assumption; there is no love of anarchy among traditional Jews; antinomianism appears sometimes in mystical thought, but not here in the marchlands, where one actually has to deal with the other nations. Here there are rules for the conduct of war; divine arbitration; legal limits on taxation and on state action generally; rules of adjudication; and, finally, a basic moral code. All these apply across actually existing national and religious boundaries. Some of their content is included in Halakhah, formally incorporated into Jewish law. But all of them are first imagined and developed outside, and they are best understood as constituting a Jewish universalism — which takes the characteristic form of a common law for the nations.
In fact, we should think of it as a common law in the making, as common law commonly is. Amos’s rules for war are not a code, but only a series of examples; the argument invites more work, and the work is well worth doing. The wars of modern Israel have led some contemporary rabbis to struggle with halakhic precedents about military conduct, but these are meager (because there were no Jewish armies whose conduct required regulation, and they are scarred by exilic resentments.
Amos’s customary law reflects, as I have already argued, a state-like posture and a morally helpful commitment to ongoing relations with other states. Similarly, the limits on dina d’malkhuta dina have to be figured out anew in each “kingdom” — and why not in Israel too, where the principle of non-discrimination could play a useful critical role? And, again, the Noahide Code is far too vague to serve as an actual set of laws; it has to be expanded and interpreted — and has been the subject of a wide range of expansions and interpretations.
None of these examples are definitive, but the arguments themselves have served as a useful background for everyday encounters with the “others.” There is no reason why these arguments cannot go on today, taking into account the place of Jews in the modern world and of Israel in the society of nations. In any case, they have gone on long enough so that it makes no sense to claim that universalism depends on Greek philosophy or on Christianity (or on some combination of the two), or that it is a secular liberal invention, or that it must be philosophically grounded in Kantian ethics, or that it is uniquely Western (or, for that matter, that it is the product of Jewish assimilation). There are many different universalisms, many different idioms in which similar universal values can be and have been expressed.
Among the Jews, one can find both high-flying (philosophical) and low-flying (political/legal) versions of universalist argument. I have focused on the second partly because it is less well understood, but also because it is more realistic and perhaps more useful on the ground. But does this second version reach as far as many Jews today want to go? Does it reach to an account of human rights? Does it allow for feminist claims to equality? There is no reason why Amos’s ban on the exile and enslavement of “an entire population” cannot be expressed in the language of rights (as the condemnation of “ethnic cleansing” is expressed today), and no reason why the Noahide Code’s ban on murder and robbery can’t be taken to rest on rights to life and property. What is today called “rights talk” could easily be introduced into the common law of the Jews.
Feminism is harder, given the overwhelmingly patriarchal character of rabbinic Judaism. But the comparative perspective opened up by the Noahide Code offers interesting possibilities. For if gentile men are now prohibited from ruling tyrannically over their wives and daughters, how can this be permitted to Jewish men? It would be a scandal and a discredit to God.
I don’t say this to mock the tradition. In fact, I am being true to it. Polygamy was finally ruled out as a Jewish practice, sometime around the year 1000, with arguments of exactly this kind. When Rabbi Gershom and his colleagues forbade marriage to more than one woman, they acted, writes Robert Gordis, because “they found it intolerable for Jews to maintain an attitude toward marriage…that set women on a lower social and ethical plane than did their monogamous Christian neighbors.” That is a good argument, and it is no sign of progress that contemporary orthodox writers would probably find it incomprehensible or repugnant — a call for assimilation. This way of recognizing the possible moral value of what the “others” think and do is a key feature of low-flying universalism, and low-flying universalism arises within the tradition. You live with other people, and you have to look and see what they are doing.
There are still judgements to be made, of course, and these will reflect Jewish experience and values. But Jewish experience isn’t the whole story; Jewish values aren’t the only ones. The arguments that I have canvassed here are invitations to further argument, which will rightly be shaped, in the future as in the past, by the ongoing, permanent engagement with other nations and religions. Anyone who claims that this engagement is an imposition of Western culture isn’t being faithful to the Jewish (or, I suspect, to any other) traditional way of life.
Think about it. There must be someone who was the first to be with God because there are not two Gods. The one who was first begotten could have been so before creation of the cosmos. Then God could create the cosmos through him and for him and make the only begotten the Lord of all. So what better person to save the cosmos and people which could have been planned before the cosmos given that free will would eventually lead to a world that would choose to sin.
So if it was all created through the Word, then all could be saved through the Word of God too.
This is where Christianity struck up by mystifying the Hebrew Messiah who was never meant as a god or divine being to involve in God’s creation and to become a Saviour figure. His role was entirely different from that of Christianity.
Gadam
CERTAINLY NOT
OT AND NT are ONE
Then said the LORD unto me, Thou hast well seen: for I will hasten my word to perform it. (Jeremiah1:12)
The Messiah an Eschatological Figure
MESSIAH ‘ (Greek, Messias) represents the Aramaic mtšîhâ\Hebrew ham-māšîah, ‘the Anointed One’ . The word expresses an idea characteristic of later Judaism and early Christianity. In the time of Jesus the Jews were awaiting a Messiah; and it was part of the message of Jesus, and later the central point in the teaching of His disciples, that He was this Messiah, ‘He that cometh’. ‘Jesus Messiah’, or in Greek ‘Jesus Christ’, were His name and His title in the speech of the community, until the term ‘Christ’ also came to be regarded as a personal name . In order, therefore, to understand the consciousness and the message of Jesus it is necessary to have as a background some idea of the Messianic conceptions of His time.
In later Judaism the term ‘Messiah’ denotes an eschatological figure. He belongs to ‘the last time’; his advent lies in the future. To use the word ‘Messiah’ is to imply eschatology, the last things. It is, therefore, a misuse of the words ‘Messiah’ and ‘Messianic’ to apply them, for instance, to those ideas which were associated in Israel or in the ancient east with kings who were actually reigning, even if, as we shall see, these ideas were expressed in exalted and mythical terms. The word ‘Messiah’ by itself, as a title and
a name, originated in later Judaism as the designation of an eschatological figure; and it is therefore only to such a figure that it may be applied.In Christian eschatology, too, the Messiah (Christ) became the central figure in the expectation of the last time. The expected day of judgement became ‘the day of our Lord Jesus Christ’. That is why theologians have sometimes used the expressions ‘ Messianic prophecies ‘ or ‘ Messianic expectations ‘ as synonymous
with ‘eschatological expectations’. But the use of the term is incorrect. The Messiah is not the central and dominating figure in the future hope of later Judaism, and even less so in that of the Old Testament. The fact is that the Messiah as a concrete eschatological figure, the king of the final age, the founder of the glorious kingdom, is far less prominent in the Old Testament than in the New.The title ‘Messiah’, ‘the Anointed One’ , as a title or technical term for the king of the final age, does not even occur in the Old Testament. Nevertheless it was above all to the Old Testament that the early Church turned for evidence in support of its belief that Jesus was the Messiah. In the thought and theology of the early Church (if it is legitimate to speak of a theology at that period) the Old Testament was the ground and source of the conception of the Messiah. A survey of Messianic conceptions in later Judaism, in
the teaching of Jesus, and in the early Church must therefore of necessity begin with the Old Testament.The Messiah Originally a Political Figure
The expression ham-māšîah is really a shortened form of mešîah YHWH, ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’, i.e., the reigning king of Israel. In the ancient east both persons and things were anointed by having sweet-smelling oil poured or smeared over them. For instance, the cultic stone (massēbâh) was anointed; and thereby worship was offered to the deity who inhabited it or was represented by it. The first anointing of the stone was regarded as the power-conferring act in virtue of which it was set apart as a holy stone; to anoint a stone meant simply to make it a holy stone.
When a temple was consecrated, the building, its several parts, and the holy vessels were anointed. There are accounts of the same practice in Babylonia. Anointing was also used in cultic purification from sickness and defilement. Thus the act had a sacral significance. The original idea was, no doubt, that the oil possessed an abnormal, ‘holy ‘ power, or ‘mana’ , to use the familiar term from the phenomenology of religion. In the act of anointing, this power and holiness were transmitted to the person anointed, or the holiness and supernatural power with which he was already endowed were renewed and strengthened.
Practical experience of the power and usefulness of oil, both as a food and as a medicine, readily explains this belief in its sacral, mana-like character. Among all the persons and objects which may be anointed there is one who is ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’ in a special sense, one who is ‘the Anointed’, namely the king. In the Old Testament the primary and proper sense of the expression ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’ is the king, the earthly king who at any given time is reigning over Yahweh’s people. Th e expression implies his close relationship to Yahweh, the sacral character of his office and his person (as priest-king), and the abnormal endowment of holy power which is his because he has been anointed king. The essential characteristic of a king is that he has been anointed. The Israelite speaks not of crowning a man, but of anointing him in the sense of making him king (himlîk).
The custom of anointing the king in order to install him in his sacred office was taken over by the Israelites from the inhabitants of Canaan. It is presupposed in the Amarna Letters (the correspondence from the vassal princes in Canaan to their overlord, the king of Egypt, dating from the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BCE); and there is also some evidence that it was practised in Egypt and Assyria. The references to anointing in connexion with Melchizedek, king of Jerusalem, and with Phoenician kings, show that it was primarily as a priest-king that a king was anointed, that is, as a sacral king who represented his people before the deity, and thus also took a leading and active part in the cult. Anointing made him a ‘holy ‘ person, similar to the priest in character and function. In practically every passage in the Old Testament where the expressions ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’, or ‘the Anointed One’ , occur, the reference is to the reigning king of David’s line, the king in Jerusalem, designated, installed, and anointed by Yahweh through His cultic representative the priest.
For a prophet to perform the anointing seems to have been irregular and exceptional; and, in the main, only usurpers were so anointed. Samuel is regarded as a priestly seer, not as a nābV (prophet). Yahweh’s Anointed is, of course, king of Yahweh’s people Israel, or of Judah , which is also called Israel in religious usage. It is quite exceptional for a prophet like Deutero-Isaiah, in the exuberant enthusiasm of his faith, to call a heathen king like Cyrus ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’, because Yahweh has made him king in order to fulfil His plan for Israel. This use does not help to define the meaning of the term. In the post-exilic age the High-priests became in many respects the heirs of the kings. As early as the period of the monarchy there
is evidence that the authentic professional priesthood tried to exclude the king from the exercise of cultic functions. This was a stage in the struggle of the Levitical or Leviticized priesthood to monopolize the cult. Both in the legend about King Uzziah’s leprosy and in Ps 110 we have echoes of rivalry of this kind between the king and the priesthood. In the post-exilic age it was established that the cult was the exclusive privilege of the priesthood; and the High-priest claimed kingly status through his anointing
and the wearing of the diadem. In time it became customary to anoint all priests when they were installed in their office.Thus the original sacral significance of the custom survived and prevailed, when the political monarchy had disappeared, and the High-priest’s claim to political power remained little more than theory. ‘ The Anointed One ‘, or the indefinite form of the term, ‘ an anointed one’, could also be applied in the later period to the High-priest or to any priest. Usually, however, we find the explicit designation, ‘the anointed priest’, i.e., the High-priest. It appears that on occasion prophets also were anointed when they were consecrated and admitted to the prophetic guild. It is to this custom that the prophet alludes in Isa. 61:1 : ‘ Yahweh has anointed me.’ Consequently we find one incidental example in late linguistic usage, and in the idiom of religious poetry, of Yahweh’s calling the patriarchs ‘Mine anointed ones’: in the later Old Testament period and subsequently, all the great religious figures of the past, ‘the patriarchs’, were regarded as prophets. At one time many scholars maintained that the term ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’ could denote the Israelite people. This view was based on erroneous exegesis, and in part on erroneous assumptions about the date of the sources, particularly of the Psalms. The expression ‘the Anointed One ‘ does not occur in the Old Testament as a technical term for the Messiah. On the other hand, ‘the Anointed One’ , or ‘His’ , or ‘My Anointed One ‘ does occur as the ceremonial religious title of the reigning king in Israel, king ‘ by the grace of God’ . To the content of this title we shall return below. It is, however, obvious that there must be a historical connexion between the two titles; and there can be no doubt which is the older. As title and name for the eschatological king, Messiah does not occur in the Old Testament, but appears first in the literature of later Judaism; and as we have already seen, the word ‘ Messiah ‘ is an abbreviation of the fuller expression, ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’. This shows that the eschatological Messiah
derived his name from the sacral title of the ancient kings of Israel. This historical association of ideas is further corroborated by the fact that the Messiah was not only an eschatological figure, but always had a measure of political significance. The Messiah is he who shall restore Israel as a people, free her from her enemies, rule over her as king, and bring other nations under her political and religious sway. This conception of the future king as a this worldly political figure is clearly and explicitly present in most if
not all of the passages in the Old Testament which refer to him. According to the express testimony of the evangelists it was against this political conception of the Messiah, present in the minds and thoughts of the disciples and of the multitude, that Jesus had to contend. Just as the word ‘ Messiah ‘ has an eschatological character wherever it has become a clearly defined term, so too it has a political sense from the beginning.Both the term and its content reveal a clear connexion between the idea of the Messiah and the Old Testament conceptions of ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’, the earthly king of Yahweh’s people. What is the character of this connexion; and what is the difference between the two ideas? In other words, in what way did the
concept of ‘Yahweh’s Anointed’ develop, so that the earthly, political king became the eschatological figure? Is this an instance of development in religious thought (the word ‘development’ does not, of course, here imply a purely immanent evolutionary process) ; or is it possible that in the course of time, and as a result of certain factors in the history of religion, the term ‘ the Anointed One ‘ was transferred to an eschatological figure, and that this figure existed independently of, or side by side with, the thought
of the earthly and political ‘Anointed One’ ?In either case an examination of the political concept of ‘the Anointed One ‘ must precede any investigation and exposition of the idea of the Messiah in the Old Testament and in later Judaism.
This means that at the outset we must take account of the ancient Israelite conceptions of the king and of kingship. But Israel took over the monarchy and many of the ideas associated with it from the older civilized nations which were her neighbours. If, then, Israelite conceptions of kingship are to be rightly understood, it is essential to relate them to the general oriental background. But we must also try to ascertain to what wider religious context the idea of the Messiah belongs. If that idea is eschatological, then it must be seen against the background of the general eschatological conceptions of the Old Testament and later Judaism; and its relation to them must be more precisely defined. Is the connexion
of the Messiah with eschatology original or not? Does history show that he is an essential and indispensable element in these concepts?….(taken from the book “He that Cometh” by Sigmund Mowinckel)This is where Christianity struck up by mystifying the Hebrew Messiah who was never meant as a god or divine being to involve in God’s creation and to become a Saviour figure. His role was entirely different from that of Christianity.
Just because God’s plan is in progress and new revelation is released, that doesn’t make it false.
Your definition of truth seems to be that it is 100% in the Old Testament and thus your own sins are not dealt with there.
You have no hope.
What is your hope?
Just because God’s plan is in progress and new revelation is released, that doesn’t make it false.
Your definition of truth seems to be that it is 100% in the Old Testament and thus your own sins are not dealt with there.
You have no hope.
Hi Proclaimer, the Salvation for the Israel is already provided in the Hebrew Bible and for the non-Israel if they seek the God of Israel. The so called Vicarious Atonement for sin, the invention of Christianity is not found in the Hebrew Bible. Please read Torah and Hebrew Bible you find solution for every thing nothing less and nothing more.
Do you think that sins of Abraham, David, Daniel and other men of God not forgiven based on Torah. It a myth of Christianity and the NT writers stating that without the death of Jesus the supposed Messiah there is no forgiveness of sins.
Read carefully the following;
The most mediated verse in the Bible during Pandemic; 2 Chr 7:13-14
13 When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, 14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
Sorry there is no mention of so called Atonement of Jesus here….
Please open your eyes and ears to the Torah you will be enlightened.
Hi Adam,
I said this:
You admit that even the Jews understand the scriptures differently amongst themselves. Therefore, how can you use the reason that the Hebrew scriptures do not say _______________ (fill in the blank) therefore it is wrong, if the Jews do not even agree on what the Hebrew scriptures say?
Then you deny that you admitted that. However, your next sentence that YOU wrote tells me how the different sects of the Jews interpret things differently.
These are your words which seem like you are speaking out of two sides of your mouth:
Adam says: I have only replied your post to me on the sects of Jewish people. But I have not admitted on their interpretations. As I have mentioned earlier the Jews for Jesus are the Trinitarian Christian Jews who interpret the Hebrew Bible to suit their ideas on Jesus as Messiah. So I can not expect any thing from this group as I know much about Trinitarian Christianity. So I am quoting the interpretations of the rival group, the Jews for Judaism or the Out reach Judaism which I find reasonable when compared to those of Christian Jews.
Hi Adam,
You wrote this verse recently as the remedy that YHVH gave for sin:
2 Chron 7:14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
Have you been seeking His face? If so, what does the face of YHVH look like?
Hi Gadam
You
…..
Read carefully the following;
The most mediated verse in the Bible during Pandemic; 2 Chr 7:13-14
13 When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, 14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
Sorry there is no mention of so called Atonement of Jesus here….Please open your eyes and ears to the Torah you will be enlightened.
Me
read please
“Why isn’t God destroying our wicked world now? The answer is found in the Israelite sanctuary service:
(a) Each day two lambs were offered on the burnt offering altar, one in the morning and one in the evening, for the benefit of each of those who lived within the boundaries of Israel. Foreigners and good guys were also included. They were not based on repentance and confession. No question was asked. the lambs were offered as a continuous burnt offering (Exodus 29: 38-42). To be a human being was all that was needed to come under the protection of God’s abundant grace.
(b) This is the Gospel in “shadow”, the “moon” of Revelation 12: 1. The meaning becomes clearer when the “sun” of the New Testament rises: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world with itself “(2 Corinthians 5:19). “By the ineffable gift of his Son, God has surrounded the whole world with an atmosphere of grace just as real as the air that circulates around our globe” (The Best Way, p. 66). The daily service of the two lambs was a ministry for the benefit of the whole world. When Jesus came to ask John to be baptized, he refused. Jesus had to give him a Bible study there, in the water, to make him understand that He was the Lamb symbolized by the daily sacrifice. “And John resisted him no more” (Matthew 3:15).
(c) The next day John introduced Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Not “probably” or “maybe” or “he would like”. Nor “the Lamb who takes away the sin of some”. Why this universal sacrifice of atonement? “He himself is an atoning victim for our sins, not only for our own, but also for those of the whole world” (1 John 2: 2).
(d) The incense offered on the altar of incense, which burned continuously or daily, was also a type or representation of the universal ministry of intercession. Only the unbroken blood of Christ can keep this wicked world from destruction (Revelation 8: 3-5). When he stops presenting his blood, the time of distress will come.
Thank God for “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”! There can’t be better news. Good news for you and for me if we respond to his ministry in the Most Holy Place “as long as we can say today”.
R.J.W.
Then you deny that you admitted that. However, your next sentence that YOU wrote tells me how the different sects of the Jews interpret things differently.
These are your words which seem like you are speaking out of two sides of your mouth:
Adam says: I have only replied your post to me on the sects of Jewish people. But I have not admitted on their interpretations. As I have mentioned earlier the Jews for Jesus are the Trinitarian Christian Jews who interpret the Hebrew Bible to suit their ideas on Jesus as Messiah. So I can not expect any thing from this group as I know much about Trinitarian Christianity. So I am quoting the interpretations of the rival group, the Jews for Judaism or the Out reach Judaism which I find reasonable when compared to those of Christian Jews.
Sorry if my reply caused you offended. In fact I wanted to convey that I am not for Christian Trinitarian ‘Jews for Jesus’ and I am interpreting the Tanak based on the non-Christian Jewish groups like ‘Jews for Judaism’ or ‘Outreach Judaism’
Hope that will clear your doubts on me.
Hi Adam,
You wrote this verse recently as the remedy that YHVH gave for sin:
2 Chron 7:14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
Have you been seeking His face? If so, what does the face of YHVH look like?The remedy for sin as you mentioned is taken from Hebrew Bible only not my creation.
Seeking the face of God is a way of talking about approaching God and not literal face of God IMO and rest as you interpret.
The soul that sins will die. You will die. We all will die. Is that it. The God of the cosmos will let us all eternally die. Never to have life again.
We have a glorious hope because we accepted the messiah. What is your hope gadam?
2 Chron 7:14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
This is not personal but is about the collective. If you could be forgiven for all sin, then why the need for the shedding of blood to cover sin in the OT?
The soul that sins will still die. The price of sin is death. And so it is we die. All the while, God can still forgive a nation. But death remains in the end for each person.
If prayer is all it takes to avoid death, then why does anyone need the messiah? Why is their even the notion of a messiah in the OT.
Hi Adam,
Regarding this passage:
2 Chron 7:14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
You said:
The remedy for sin as you mentioned is taken from Hebrew Bible only not my creation.
Seeking the face of God is a way of talking about approaching God and not literal face of God IMO and rest as you interpret.
Thanks for your reply. From what you wrote, it looks like a formula to follow for forgiveness of sin and healing the land. Kindly tell me how all that is measured. For example, how do you measure if someone has humbled themself, prayed enough, sought YHVH’s face, and turned from their wicked ways, and been called by His name?
The soul that sins will die. You will die. We all will die. Is that it. The God of the cosmos will let us all eternally die. Never to have life again.
We have a glorious hope because we accepted the messiah. What is your hope gadam?
Your Messiah is a mythical figure not the original Messiah talked in the Hebrew Bible. So what type of hope is this which mystified the very concepts of Messiah? Why hang on Messiah at all if you don’t want a Hebrew Messiah?
Coming to “Soul that sins die” please avoid taking the texts out of their original context which was done by the NT writers left and right. Please read carefully the passage of Ezekiel 18:
14 But if this man has a son who sees all the sins that his father has done, considers, and does not do likewise, 15 who does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife, 16 does not wrong anyone, exacts no pledge, commits no robbery, but gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, 17 withholds his hand from iniquity, takes no advance or accrued interest, observes my ordinances, and follows my statutes; he shall not die for his father’s iniquity; he shall surely live. 18 As for his father, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother, and did what is not good among his people, he dies for his iniquity.
19 Yet you say, “Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?” When the son has done what is lawful and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live. 20 The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own.
21 But if the wicked turn away from all their sins that they have committed and keep all my statutes and do what is lawful and right, they shall surely live; they shall not die. 22 None of the transgressions that they have committed shall be remembered against them; for the righteousness that they have done they shall live. 23 Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live? 24 But when the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity and do the same abominable things that the wicked do, shall they live? None of the righteous deeds that they have done shall be remembered; for the treachery of which they are guilty and the sin they have committed, they shall die.
25 Yet you say, “The way of the Lord is unfair.” Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair? 26 When the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity, they shall die for it; for the iniquity that they have committed they shall die. 27 Again, when the wicked turn away from the wickedness they have committed and do what is lawful and right, they shall save their life. 28 Because they considered and turned away from all the transgressions that they had committed, they shall surely live; they shall not die. 29 Yet the house of Israel says, “The way of the Lord is unfair.” O house of Israel, are my ways unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?
30 Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, all of you according to your ways, says the Lord God. Repent and turn from all your transgressions; otherwise iniquity will be your ruin.[c] 31 Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? 32 For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.
I hope your very doubts are clear now on the query? The so called Vicarious Atonement of Jesus is a great mythology of the Paul and other NT writers.
Please think over my friend and don’t close your eyes and ears to God’s Torah and Hebrew Bible.
Jesus was born a Hebrew
Your Messiah is a mythical figure not the original Messiah talked in the Hebrew Bible. So what type of hope is this which mystified the very concepts of Messiah? Why hang on Messiah at all if you don’t want a Hebrew Messiah?
Jesus was a Hebrew.
He was a man.
He did what messiahs do. He saved.
The only thing you really disagree with is the scope.
But look at the cosmos. It shows you God’s nature.
His eternity.
He goes way beyond what you think is possible.
Instead of creating a man there and then and making him king of Israel, he did so much more.
He sent this only begotten son into the world so that the world might be saved through him.
First to the Jew, then the Gentile.
You have no faith in God if you do not believe he is sovereign and or is restricted to what man thinks is possible.
And naturally the OT does not explain everything nor pose these restrictions that you are imposing.
It promises a messiah. Yes.
The messiah came.
You are at least 2000 years behind the plan.
First the law then grace.
You have rejected grace.
But you have free will so you are allowed to reject it.
At this stage it seems you are your own worse enemy.
The messiah to be born in Bethlehem
Matthew 2:6
“‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’”Micah 5:2
But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.And his coming forth shall be from ancient days
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