More and more people (including a recent president of the U.S.) are casting aspersions on the Bible, even blaming it for most of society’s ills. It’s one thing to recognize that people (from ecclasiastics to cult leaders) have twisted it to fit their agendas; that’s obvious. But that’s the bathwater, not the baby. Nowadays, though, many in the free world are as ready to burn the Bible as were the totalitarian leaders who feared it would let the masses see through their ruse. If it were just a collection of myths, as they say, it would be harmless enough to just ignore. But people who were once called “liberals” (because they took liberties with everything from human laws to the Bible) are now the least liberal of all, having no tolerance whatsoever for the book they think is responsible for racism, sexism, or “homophobia”.
Could those accusations stand up in court? Is there any substance to them? Or might they be “wishful thinking” on the part of those who know that if it proved true they would be responsible to obey it?
I realize there are some who reluctantly give up their faith because they feel it’s the honest thing to do, because someone has shown them “evidence” that it is not trustworthy. That is chiefly whom I am writing for, more than those who do not want to believe.
Of course we should not be so gullible as to believe anyone just because they tell you to, without something to vouch for their credibility. And admittedly, we can’t use the scientific method on every aspect of this question, because history only repeats itself in patterns, not in particulars. Nobody can repeat “the beginning” in the laboratory to see if it really occurred the way the Bible says it did. But if we find we can trust it in regard to the human history that can be verified, it would make sense to carry that trust over to the parts we can’t measure quite so precisely.
Though some parts are hard to make sense of from our viewpoint, when we know why a particular piece of literature was written, we can more easily interpret what would otherwise be ambiguous.
So why was the Bible written? The Torah directly tells us it was written to urge us to “walk in the ways which YHWH your Elohim has commanded you, so that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may extend your days on the land...” (Deuteronomy 5:33)
The New Testament adds another layer: “These are written that you may believe that Yeshua is the Messiah, the Son of the living Elohim, and that, believing, you may have life through his name.” (Yochanan 20:30-31)
What is the common theme? Life as opposed to death. The first 3 chapters of Genesis tell us why: the world has fallen from its prior, better condition where we would not even have had to die, barring a very unusual occurrence. But our ancestors ate something we were not supposed to eat, it apparently affected our DNA (with exponential effects in each generation), and now death is not just a remote possibility but universal. (DNA itself should be ample reason to believe in a Creator, but the Bible tells us about His character as well as the astounding things He can do and make.) The spiritual side is that since we disobeyed and cut ourselves off from our Source, contact with Him has been sparse. But He will not write it off as a loss. He intends to salvage whatever is still intact and eventually reconstitute that original goodness from its remaining vestiges. It is not an ideal world, but there are ways to navigate it that can still bring out its beauty and get us through to the other end of the tunnel relatively unscathed. The Bible is the story of that redemption, why it is needed, what made it possible, how it is being carried out, and most important for us, how to link up with it and ride along with its power rather than getting on the wrong side of the wave.
That is the only theme that it covers comprehensively. So while science (which really just means “knowledge of the facts”) is certainly included, it is only approached indirectly. I.e., only the facts pertinent to the stated purpose are emphasized. Other details are only there as supporting evidence.
But some scholars are suggesting that the Bible is just a patching together of numerous discourses written by people who were lobbying for different ways of fleshing out the vision.
Ghost Writers?
One well-known description of this is called the “JEPD Theory”, based on the idea that there were at least four different sources which later became the Torah: the Jehovist (which preferred the use of YHWH’s name), Elohist (preferring to use the title Elohim instead), Deuteronomist (who supposedly wrote in Moses’ name to gain credibility for his own views), and a priestly source (which added in all the parts about sacrifices and offerings, which ostensibly were not present in the part “pseudo-Moses” wrote). It is also called the Documentary Hypothesis.
The problem is that if we divide it this way, it does not take much imagination to expect claims that the sources contradict each other, and if that is the case, which was right and which was wrong?
But the Bible clearly states that Moshe (Moses) wrote it. Is there genuine warrant for doubt of his authorship? Or did someone want to discredit and undermine Scripture’s authority so they would not have to obey it? Did they go looking for problems in the text to find “dirt” on it, like biased journalists?
There are less-complicated explanations: If we look carefully at where in the story each aspect comes into play, many “sacrifices” appear to have been added by YHWH after the golden calf incident and other encounters with idolatry, to give Israel “busy work” to “keep them out of trouble”. The psalmists and prophets strongly suggest that these offerings were not His original intent (Ps. 40:6; Mic. 6:7, etc.)—at least not in the quantity that ended up being required. (Hence the “priestly” theory.) They do, however, provide explanations in advance of what YHWH was planning to do through Yeshua, so at least the basic concept was not just an afterthought, and they were not wasted.
Another question is how Moshe knew so much about events before his lifetime. This can be explained by “multiple authorship” of a different kind—a series of records passed down all the way from Adam: Every time it says, “These are the generations of…”, I think it is the signature of the one who collected that portion of the history and passed it on to the next—Adam, Noah, Shem, etc., all the way down to Isaac, Jacob, and Levi, who was only two generations before Moshe on his mother’s side. We also have a few spinoffs from the mainstream, like Esau and Ishmael, who added important facts to round out the record and explain who was who. Moshe collated them, then continued the story he knew firsthand.
Of course there are minor adjustments to these generalities. Our family’s friend Jodell Onstott addresses this masterfully in chapter 8 of her book, YHWH Exists. One of the biggest solutions to why there are different writing styles within the Torah is that the Book of the Wars of YHWH (referred to in Numbers 21:14-15) used to be a separate book, which is why Moshe mentioned it as such. Later, however, scribes merged some parts of it with the “Law of Moshe”, interspersed chronologically to maintain the historical flow, and thus narrative style shows up between segments with a more legal writing style. But that does not negate the many times the text says “Moshe wrote…” (Exodus 24:4; Num. 33:2; Deut. 31:9, 24-26)
Internal Evidence
When Moshe stopped writing, Y’hoshua (Joshua) took up the record and annotated some of it (including, for example, Moshe’s death, which common sense tells us Moshe himself would not have documented).
There are also tantalizing references to other books: “Isn’t it written in the book of Yasher?” (Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18) I.e., “If you want more information about this subject, look there. Here, it would just be a tangent, and isn’t this book long enough as it is?” And sure enough, when we look at Yasher (and similar extrabiblical but parallel books like Enoch, Baruch’s accounts, and Jubilees—of which there were more copies found among the Dead Sea Scrolls than any other document), the story is the same, but there is a lot more detail. Some of the phraseology is exactly the same as what is in the Torah, and I would not be surprised if Moshe and Joshua drew many of their historical accounts directly from those, but streamlined them for conciseness, using only the parts relevant to their purpose for writing (and possibly leaving out some parts whose accuracy may be debatable).
During the days of Raamses (13th century BCE), the prophetess Deborah also did what we might do with a 17th-century document that spoke of “New Amsterdam”: we would add, “that is, New York” in a marginal note. They explained obsolete or borrowed foreign phrases that appeared in the original version, which needed no explanation for the original readers who were familiar with them. Sometimes marginal notes accidentally got included as part of the text of the next copy, especially in the New Testament, causing some doctrinal hiccups. But that does not mean the rest of the document was not written at the earlier date. Many times these “glosses” were put there to confirm the veracity of the account with phrases like “which remains there to this day” (e.g., Joshua 7:26; 28:8-9, etc.). They would not have been written just after the fact, when it was still well-known and fresh in the readers’ minds, but was important for later generations. And someone did the same for Israel’s other historical records.
“Who Scripture’s late-date scribe or editor was is an important consideration for Scripture’s credibility, validity, and overall constancy”, notes Mrs. Onstott. “Yet again Scripture furnishes evidence to solve this dilemma.” 2 Kings 17:7-41 gives reasons for the deportation to Babylon. The writer was clearly a scholar fluent in the covenant, who could trace the connection back to the Torah, where Moshe warned that this is exactly what would take place if Israel continued to abandon their agreement with YHWH. “Ezra was a priest eligible for the high priesthood… Ezra was ordained to edit the nation’s surviving archives. He understood YHWH, His prophecies, and the need for adding clarifications to texts that would seem ambiguous to later generations. Ezra’s editing ensured that significant information remained accurate and truth was passed on to succeeding generations.” He is probably the one who organized and divided Scripture into the arrangements that we still use today.
There is especially strong archaeological evidence for Ezra’s credibility. Mrs. Onstott remarks, “The validity of letters sent directly to a Persian king as recorded in Ezra has been a source of heated academic debate. Not until similar letters were unearthed… near Elephantine, Egypt, was any credibility given to Ezra’s testimony. Acclaimed ancient Near Eastern historian, A.T. Olmstead, wrote: ‘…Here were the closest parallels in language and style to the Aramaic of Ezra. Prescripts from Persian kings were cited in Ezra; Old Testament critics had declared them inauthentic, but now there was ample proof that the critics themselves were in the wrong.’ Ezra’s book gained further credibility when excavations unearthed a reference to the regional governor Tatnai (Ezra 5:3)… One archaeological discovery also confirms the name Gashmu [‘Geshem’], a local governor who opposed Nehemiah’s efforts in Jerusalem… [Neh. 2:19, etc.] A Lycian cult charter [found] in 1973 added credibility to Ezra’s testimony by providing striking parallels with Cyrus’ decree for Temple restoration”, through similar wording, similar requests, and similar official responses that showed this was standard practice at that time. The critics’ views turned out to be the unrealistic ones.
Other textual critics theorized that there were two different writers of the book of Yeshayahu (Isaiah), since the first 39 chapters are so different from the latter 27. But Chuck Missler pointed out that Yeshua testified to “both” Isaiahs being one: In Yochanan 12:38 he quoted Yeshayahu from 53:1, then in the next verse stated that “Yeshayahu said again/further”, and he quoted from Isaiah 6:10. Thus he credits both this (from the “first” writer) and the other verse, from the “second Yeshayahu” to the same author. To anyone who accepts his testimony as authoritative, the two-Isaiah theory is therefore suspect.
According to Mrs. Onstott, Isaiah actually delegated his writing to his scribes: Isa. 8:1-4 says YHWH told him to write and he found faithful witnesses--Uriah and Zechariah—to record what he said (specifically the prophecies of chapters 7-35, then 36-39, their fulfillment). Ironically, the “late” portion (which textual critics think was written 7 centuries later than Isaiah’s time) is the only part of his book (except for the first 6 chapters) that we can assuredly credit to Isaiah’s own hand! His style changes because he was writing in different roles: in some sections he spoke as a prophet, in other parts as a court official. If a poet also wrote prose articles for a magazine, you would not claim he could not be the same author, would you?
At different times in history, “accuracy” seems to have been defined in slightly-different ways. Different scribal schools had different rules for spelling, which was not as universally codified or standardized as it is today. Different dialects, with their differences in accent, also spelled names differently (e.g., Yoram vs. Yehoram). But sometimes variant spellings or forms were deliberate, intended to defame or discredit someone who had not reigned righteously. (Yehoyachin, Jeconiah, and Coniah were the same man, and all three versions have the same meaning, but using several different names diminished his fame and thus his honor in the minds of all but the few who read carefully enough to recognize this.)
Onstott summarizes, “Scholars who accept the JEPD theory may be correct to see at least four writing phases in Israel’s history. We are not left in the dark to see how these phases occurred. Scripture tells us when these collaborations took place and it has preserved who administered these writing phases: Moses-Joshua, Deborah, Samuel and the priests under the Monarchy, and Ezra.”
She points out that the authors of the Chronicles are identified elsewhere in Scripture (2 Samuel 8:16-17 referring to 1 Chronicles 10-22, for example), and many times they were Levites. (1 Chron. 24:6) In another case, to preserve the historical flow, several biographies of David (such as “the book of Samuel the seer, the book of Nathan the prophet, and the book of Gad the seer”, per 1 Chron. 29:29) were combined to form a single narrative running chronologically through 1 and 2 Samuel. The same thing was done for Solomon, combining the records of Nathan, Iddo, and Ahiyah. (2 Chron. 9:29) Most of the psalms identify who the author was in a short prologue. Christians have typically separated these from the body of the psalm, whereas Jews include “a psalm of David”, for example, as part of the first verse and even include it when the psalm is set to music! But this shows just how important historical accuracy has been to those who have preserved the text for so many centuries.
Evidence from Outside
Yeshua said of some of those same Jewish people, “If they become silent, the very stones will cry out!” (Luke 19:40) And in the last century and a half, we are seeing that very thing occur.
In 1935 a series of letters from other cities was found at the tel of Lakhish in Israel, and some of them spoke of a “prophet who was discouraging Jerusalem”. This corroborates with what Jeremiah (Yirmeyahu) was doing—telling the king to submit to YHWH’s discipline and surrender to Babylon this time, as submission to YHWH’s chastening. Many idioms similar to those in Jeremiah 38:4-27 were found in the Lakhish letters, showing that the time frame was the same. Most of Jeremiah’s prophecies were actually written down by Baruch ben Neriyah, and a seal bearing this complete name was excavated in the City of David, the part of Jerusalem where the kings lived. A similar signet impression (called a “bulla”) was found verifying the existence of Sanballat, the Assyrian official who gave Nehemiah so much trouble. And those are only samples of many such “bullae”. Jeremiah himself did write a few sections, mentioned right in the text (39:13-18; chapter 45; 51:61-64) If we follow what the text actually states, we find that there are many places where the authorship is directly acknowledged.
The most game-changing actual inscription was found in the ruins of the city of Dan at the extreme northern end of Israel in the 1990s. It was the first extrabiblical reference to the “House of David” (the name by which the northern Kingdom of Israel called the southern Kingdom of Judah). Many skeptical theories about David never existing or having just had a tiny fiefdom came crashing down.
And this has become a regular occurrence because of the discipline of archaeology. Within the last ten years a text found at Khirbet Qeiyafa put to rest all skepticism that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century B.C.E., when Scripture says Kings David and Solomon lived. An old adage says, “With every turn of the archaeologist’s spade, another ‘higher critique’ is buried.” While of course more questions are raised from the physical data as well, numerous Biblical characters have been proven to be historical after all.
And as far as alleged tampering with the text, with the seismic discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we suddenly had original manuscripts 1,000 years older than anything else extant before that, and the differences in the texts from what we otherwise had were minuscule—just copying mistakes: an extra reduplication of the same word here, a missing letter there, but nothing that changed the meaning.
Timing is Everything
Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon’s claim that there was no evidence of Jericho’s destruction was swept away when the chronology was corrected; then ample evidence was found to have already been discovered, but not recognized because they were not expecting it at that time period in the strata.
The same revision of chronology solved the difficulty scholars were having in aligning the Egyptian historical record with the timeline of Joseph’s arrival there and the Exodus. But when 1 Kings 6:1’s claim that the exodus took place 480 years before Solomon’s temple was dedicated was finally taken seriously and the dates shifted earlier accordingly, things lined up perfectly. Immanuel Velikovsky (Ages in Chaos) was one of the first to notice this in the 1950s, and others carried it further and made it much easier to follow, like Timothy Mahoney in his recent Patterns of Evidence film series, who uses excellent visuals to explain this clearly.
A similar problem arose when scholars attempted to reconcile the chronologies of the kings of Israel and Judah. The answer turned out to be the common ancient near eastern practice of co-regency, where an aging king would install his son as king while he was still alive to take over the day-to-day duties he no longer had the strength to handle, so the dates overlapped. (Edwin Richard Thiele documented this in great detail.)
Factors We Don’t Usually Consider
What about the “fanciful” stories about impossible things like sundials going backward, the sun standing still, or a sea splitting into with walls of water standing motionless on both sides of a path that opens up through the water?
Once you realize that geologic and astronomical processes are not uniform after all, a bigger picture opens up—outside of the box. 2 Peter 3:4ff speaks of people in the “latter days” willingly ignoring the fact that the processes that we see in motion today have not always proceeded at the same pace.
Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision) thought the events of the Exodus could have been set off by a huge comet that passed near the earth, with immense gravitational force which could help make the Red Sea stand up like walls--in addition to the “fierce east wind” which, according to Exodus 15:8, actually froze them in place until Israel got through, then the pillar of fire behind the Israelites must have started thawing them as the Egyptians entered the path behind it. Few people notice that precise wording!
Standing on Velikovsky’s shoulders, Patten, Hatch, and Steinhauer came up with a similar theory (but with a repeating pattern) by which such catastrophes in the past can be explained. This does not minimize the miracle aspect of the events, in which YHWH was showing just what He could do within the natural laws he had created when extremely rare factors which men had never seen before were introduced into the equation—right at the exact moment they were needed. One of the clues that set off the investigation was the fact that Jonathan Swift knew details about the moons of Mars that scientists did not even rediscover until many decades after he wrote Gulliver’s Travels. Clearly there were some ancient writings about them from which he drew. Either they had better telescopes thousands of years ago, or Mars was closer to earth at some time in the past.
Based on events that must have spawned stories that were later taken only as myths, and the fact that after 701 BCE every nation was trying to figure out how to reconfigure their calendars to fit a year that was now several days longer, they found that Mars used to have a 720-day orbit and earth 360 (hence the number of degrees in a circle). Every 54 years the orbits would cross, and every 108 years the two planets would come especially close—close enough for their gravitational force to affect each other, setting off massive earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions, and at least once even lifting a mountain off the ground so Israel could walk underneath it as a giant wedding chuppah (Deut. 4:11). Armies would sometimes schedule sieges of cities otherwise too strong to breach, in hopes that the upheavals would knock their walls down. This might also explain what Deborah meant when she sang that the “stars in their courses fought from heaven” against Sisra’s army. (Judges 5:20).
The crustal tides this would cause could have greatly speeded up the formation of high mountain massifs in addition to the rapid upward thrust of continents that collided much faster than they normally do, because of the massive forces in play. Once it tilted the earth’s axis fast enough to tear a big gash in the crust as the equatorial bulge shifted all at once, forming the Rift Valley that runs a third of earth’s longitude and overthrowing Sodom and Gomorrah. Another time there was just a wobble with one spot on the earths surface holding still while the rest of the globe pivoted around that point, making it look, from one place in western Israel, like the sun was standing still for that whole length of time. The final approach of the two planets, at the time of Assyria’s siege of Jerusalem, was so close that the poles of the two planets repelled one another, pushing them both into their present orbits and making the shadow on Hezekiah’s sundial temporarily move in the opposite direction than it usually did.
The mechanics of what occurred at the flood of Noah can also explain why Genesis says people could live nearly 1,000 years before that. Patten and friends discovered that there is a heat sink 11 miles above the earth’s surface, and Genesis 7:11 speaks of the “windows of heaven being opened”. The creation account tells of a “firmament” (literally a low-density area) above which there were waters at that time. If so, that heat sink could have formed a layer of translucent ice above the atmosphere, acting as a true greenhouse, more so than the ozone layer as described today. It would have kept the whole earth at a humid 72 degrees Fahrenheit, keeping plants lush and screening out much more solar radiation than gets through today. There would have been no storms or wintry weather to contend with, keeping people much healthier so early deaths would usually have been only those perpetrated by other humans. Also, genetic defects and mutations had not yet advanced very far. After that ice shield shattered and melted, producing some of that 40 days of rain, all of these things changed, within a few centuries lifespans got down to nearly where they are today. The ice-shield shattering and the volcanic effects that would have produced much more of the precipitation could have been caused by such a planetary passby, and also initiated rapid plate tectonics over a highly-heated mantle that caused the continents to drift very quickly, colliding and pushing up mountains after the mega-tsunamis these caused (according to Ken Ham) sloshed back and forth over mountains much lower than we have today; early in the deluge they would not have to overtop mountains as high as the Himalayas.
If I understand prophecy correctly in light of Psalm 114’s descriptions of the magnitude of what was going on at the time of the Exodus, we may get to see some of these kinds of forces--at least a huge asteroid falling into the sea (Revelation 8:8) but also something big enough to displace mountains (Rev. 6:14)--reshape our world again in the next few years. Ezekiel’s description of the Temple in the Messianic Kingdom is going to require some major topographic changes to Jerusalem to fit. Other things we may see, to bring about “the restoration of all things”, may include a return of the polar tilt to what originally gave Israel a climate more like northern California than the southern-California-like climate of today and allowed the cedars of Lebanon to grow as big as redwoods and made the land “flow with milk and honey” much more than it does today. One of my avocations is mapmaking, and I want the job of helping revise the geographical record after that!
Ken Ham also cites the formation of a “grand canyon” (smaller than but similar in structure to the famous one) by a second eruption of Mt. St. Helens in the sediment laid down less than a year before by the first modern eruption in 1980 showed clearly that the classic Grand Canyon would not have required more than a few years to form—if that. NewScientistSpace also reported that Box Canyon in Idaho is thought to have also been formed rapidly by a “megaflood” because slow-moving water could not have transported its large boulders downstream. The evidence of multiple tree trunks spanning at least a dozen rock strata shows that those layers could not have taken longer to lay down than the amount of time it would take a tree to decompose. So the Scripture’s implication that the earth is not more than a few thousand years old is quite scientifically plausible. It fits perfectly with the long-held Jewish view, based on Psalm 90, that the history of man is to last 7,000 years, with the final millennium being the “Sabbath”—the Messianic kingdom where the world is finally at rest.
If you just can’t accept that, consider the perspective of Dr. Gerald Schroeder (also Jewish), who points out that time is expanding outward along with the universe, and what was six days when the impetus began (from YHWH’s perspective looking forward) stretched out to many more years (from our point of view looking backward). But this still seems based on a uniformitarian view. If the same processes had been going on for billions of years, there should be much more salt in the oceans. The minuscule depth of dust on the atmosphere-free moon’s surface and how comparatively little silt there is from river deltas around the world, among other things, argue that a few thousand years is the maximum that the processes at their current rate could have been uniform.
Things You Just Couldn’t Fake
The periodic table of atomic elements has 92 elements that occur naturally. (Numbers higher than this are humanly synthesized.) 6 of them are inert—that is, stable; they do not bond with other elements. That leaves 86 that are not inert. My fellow Torah scholar David Ison discovered (and found a second witness, corroborated by Harav Yitzchak Ginsburgh, who published his findings at www.inner.org) that in the account of creation, from Genesis 1:1-2:1, there are 86 unique Hebrew words used (i.e., some are repeated throughout in various grammatical forms, but the additional uses do not count as new words). In the following two verses, where Elohim’s rest on the seventh day is discussed, 6 additional unique words occur (corresponding with the 6 elements that are “at rest”)! This is like YHWH’s signature, because “by the word of YHWH the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6) and “the worlds were framed by the word of Elohim, so that the visible things were not made of things that can be seen.” (Hebrews 11:3)
Along similar lines, Winkie Pratney cites the discoveries of Harvard mathematician Ivan Panin:
“Aware of the numerical values of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, Panin experimented one day by replacing the letters with their corresponding numbers in Scripture… Suddenly, his trained mind saw a mathematical pattern! As he studied more intensely. his excitement grew. A few short hours of work had him utterly amazed. The verses he had studied bore unmistakable evidence of an elaborate mathematical pattern, far beyond random chance, or human ability to construct… Panin found that patterns of prime numbers, such as 11, 13, 17 and 23, but especially 7, were found in great clusters. He would add up the sum of all numerical values for different words, sentences, paragraphs, passages, and whole books, and he found the same patterns in each of these forms! He found that the number of words in a vocabulary divides by 7. The number of proper names, both male and female divides by 7… Words that occurred more than once divide by 7, and also words that appeared only once! The number of nouns is divisible by 7; also the words that are not. Even the number of words beginning with each letter of the alphabet!... Just the very first sentence in the Bible. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1:1). That’s the way it comes out in 7 [Hebrew] words [that] have exactly 28 (4×7) letters. There are 3 nouns (God, heavens, and earth). Taking the letters of these, substituting their number equivalents and adding them up, you get a combined total of 777 ( 111×7)! There is one Hebrew verb, ‘created’. Its total numerical value is 203 (29×7). The first three words contain the subject, with exactly 14 (2×7) letters, likewise the other four are the object, with exactly 14 letters. The Hebrew words for the two objects (heaven and earth) each have 7 letters [when the connected conjunctions and object markers are counted]. The value for the first, middle, and last letters in the sentence is 133 (19×7). The numeric value of the first and last letters of all the words is 1393 (199×7); the value of the first and last letters of the first and last words of the verse is 497 (71×7). The value of the first and last letters of each of the words between is 896 (128×7)… in this verse alone there are 30 different features of 7. I have listed only 11 of them! The chance of this happening accidentally is 1 in 33 trillion.”
Pratney summarizes, “These are not just words; it’s an incredible mathematical pattern. It dances with its own poetry in mathematics. A computer would go into raptures over this! It’s like a building where every piece joins perfectly into each other. And… you can’t pull even one word out, without damaging the whole pattern. So the Bible carries within itself, a self-checking. self-verifying protection factor…This cannot be found in any other religious ‘holy’ book in the world.” (Since the advent of computers, countless more such sequencing patterns have indeed been identified—though, in all fairness, Jewish scholars in the Middle Ages found many of them without the help of machines!)
Two Biblical Religions or One?
Panin found similar examples in the New Testament, notably the genealogy in Matthew. That begs the question: Is the New Testament as reliable as the Hebrew Scriptures?
“All Scripture is breathed by Elohim and is useful for instruction, conviction, correction, and training in righteousness, so that a person belonging to Elohim may be complete, fully equipped for every [kind of] beneficial work.” (2 Tim. 3:16-17) But when that was written, the only Scripture was the Hebrew Bible.
So it’s only fair to ask that question, and it’s one I struggled with as I learned how far off its base the New Testament had shifted. But when the coordinates of where it was supposed to sit are relocated and realigned, I have found that not only does it fit, but for those who lack the background to decipher all the hints in the original inscriptions that do indeed tell the whole story, or the wherewithal to find our way back from the ends of the earth in the dark, the lighthouse it forms, rising above the jungles that have grown up around the touchstone, is simply indispensable.
Some of the New Testament—at least the books of Matthew (from which Panin took his “core sample”) and Hebrews—are known to have been originally written in Hebrew, likely because of their intended recipients. Other books and letters included in it were written largely to audiences that did not speak Hebrew, so some were written in Greek, the first language of many recipients, or at least the commonly-understood lingua franca. Others were first written in Aramaic, another regional trade language based in Babylon, and then later translated into Greek. We may not be able to do as much with them as Panin did with Hebrew, and some might consider them less holy, and the point is well taken. But the main point in the choice of language was to be understood by the readers because it was meant to go straight to their hearts. YHWH, in His mercy, met us where we were so He could woo us back to where we belong.
Calling it “new” is also somewhat misleading. Yes, it ends with the promise that YHWH will “make all things new”. (Rev. 21:5) But that is speaking of an era yet to come, when the covenants that address humanity in its sinful condition will no longer be necessary—though “the word of YHWH endures forever” (1 Peter 1:25, based on Psalm 119:89), so undoubtedly the wording of His agreement will take on a meaning applicable to that time. (The Hebrew letters, which do not actually contain vowels until added for clarification, might even be in the same order but divided differently or with different vowels.)
But “renewed covenant” is a much better understanding of the term b’rith khadashah. (Jeremiah 31:31) The renewal spoken of in Jeremiah may not even be referring to the renewal that Yeshua said he ratified the night before he died. (Luke 22:20) Covenants can be renewed whenever there is a change of conditions for one party or the other and terms need to be updated to fit the new situation, but everything else remains in effect as before. The first renewal was the book of Deuteronomy--right before Moshe died and a new generation of Israel was about to cross into the Land and some rules (like those relating to the manna) would no longer be necessary.
Yeshua renewed the covenant to adjust for conditions of exile in which the Northern Kingdom remained and into which he knew Judah would soon be returning to. Many aspects of the Torah cannot be kept under such circumstances, though their underlying principles can certainly be applied, and thus the New Testament is couched in more generic terms, applicable anywhere, which, nonetheless, teach the exact same thing that the more specific examples given in the Torah taught for those in the Land and with an intact sanctuary and functioning priesthood.
The Renewed Covenant is also an answer to the issues that arose out of the first: “He [Yeshua] is the mediator of the Renewed Covenant, so that by means of death for the ransom of transgressions [committed] under the original covenant, those who are called might receive the eternal inheritance as promised.” (Heb. 9:15) The sins of the Northern Kingdom especially (but let’s not kid ourselves—of Judah also) had already reached the point of being a debt that we could never pay back by ordinary Torah means. That is why this renewal was necessary.
“In the place where it was said to [the descendants of Israel] ‘You are not My people’, they will be told, ‘You are the sons of the living Elohim!’” (Hosea 1:10) The Renewed Covenant is a direct answer to this: “Behold what kind of love the Father has bestowed on us: that we should be called the sons of Elohim…” (1 John 3:1)
“Once [you] were not a people, but now you are the people of Elohim. Once [you] had not obtained mercy, but now [you] have obtained mercy.” (1 Peter 2:10)
Once we factor in the promises made to the lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom, the renewal of the covenant proves to be of one piece with the original. They are not two different covenants, but a continuation of the same one, with provisions for some changed circumstances. But this is the one we are under now, and it fits our situation, allowing us some grace where we are not in a position to carry out some commands, but Yeshua made it clear that none of them is cancelled. (Mat. 5:18) When all the tribes are back together and restored to the Land, as Deuteronomy 30 and most (if not all) of the prophets promise will occur one day (probably soon), another renewal (probably that of Jeremiah 31) will be put into effect, and it appears that it will revert to looking a lot more like the first version.
So aside from those few places where the marginal or scribal notes accidentally got included in the text, the Renewed Covenant itself, when read with the Torah and the prophets as parameters, is reliable. It has been interpreted in many ways that contradict what came before, but the text itself does not do that.
But even more important than the technicalities is the content. The astounding redemption it describes is hinted at everywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, but it was kept somewhat vague so it could be accomplished before the enemy could figure out and subvert the whole plan. With Yeshua, it finally came to concrete completion that could be grasped and responded to with understanding and a clear intent. Something we need so desperately cannot be made too complicated, for we all have one handicap or another. YHWH’s love overcame the obstacles so that even the simplest can respond. And YHWH even turned our exile into a blessing, because in the process of finding us, people from every nation—wherever we were scattered—got to hear about the availability of this redemption too.
So why would we reject something so beautiful? Where else can we read the words of a man who never lost the connection with the Creator that everyone else lost? As his own contemporaries said, “To whom else could we go? You have the words of eternal life!” (Yochanan/John 6:68) Is there really anything else that can solve the world’s problems not just on the surface but from the root?
Your Attitude Counts, Too
Why would someone not want such a love story to be true, especially when so many have experienced radically-changed lives through this message? All I can surmise is that many just don’t want to have to answer for their actions, so they try to claim there is no one to be responsible to. But they are still heeding the initial doubt that the serpent cast on YHWH’s goodness and benevolent intent. How did he do it? By twisting His words—taking them out of context or further than they were intended.
Torah teacher Tom Bradford states, “Some doctrinal error is just that: error, … just poor understanding of the Holy Scriptures…[But] much false doctrine is probably intentional or … from willful ignorance in that it serves a man-defined purpose. Today there are many false teachers and preachers of false doctrines who claim to be doing God's work but in fact are primarily seeking an opportunity to acquire personal wealth and power.” This “lying pen of the scribes” (Jeremiah 8:8) probably led to some of the excessive teachings with which Yeshua contended in his day and which continued nonetheless.
Bradford continues: “History proves that most errors that prophecy teachers and students have made, whether in ancient or modern times, is by not taking the words of prophecies literally enough… because in their era and in their culture they could not take seriously how the literal nature of what was being foretold could possibly occur. This inability to accept what is written as the literal truth leads to allegorizing and spiritualizing critical Scripture passages, and thus the intended meaning becomes obscured and is replaced with incorrect, man-made doctrines that can endure for centuries.” This accounts for the many myths that grew up around Scripture not read carefully enough. Again, they are “bathwater” by which we should not judge the “baby”.
Physicist Arthur Custance wrote, “In expressing human emotion this may or may not be so important in the ordinary course of events, but where revealed truth in the abstract is involved, it seems… virtually impossible for ideas or factual data to be conveyed without the aid of verbal inspiration. Man often chooses words poorly and consequently misleads his hearers. It does not seem to me that God would ever do this. But only rarely can ideas be conveyed by mere images, save in mathematical terms. It is words that are crucial as a rule. To claim that meaning is inspired, but not the wording, often seems to me to be an evasion…Literalism… is probably the only way in which to unravel the apparent contradictions that seem clearly to exist between certain key statements.” (Journey Out of Time, ch. 11) I.e., look at the details of what the text actually says, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction to what you assume it is saying based on things you have heard about it.
That brings us back to those accusations made at the beginning: Racists and anti-racists both claim that the Bible says YHWH cursed Ham (the ancestor of the Africans). But Ham was also the ancestor of the Chinese (through Sinim), the Egyptians (Mitzrayim), and some of the original Mesopotamians. Does anyone (other than their own government) try to enslave the Chinese based on their ancestry? Ham had another son named Canaan, who was the one who was actually cursed (Gen. 9:25) and this is the background for why Israel had to conquer his descendants. It was not a random, unjustified, or selfish conquest. Read carefully before making blanket statements!
Does the Bible make people sexists—“male Chauvinist pigs”, misogynists who just want to hold onto their patriarchal power structures? Again, the actual hierarchy of which this is a caricature did not come about in a vacuum or just because men are often strong enough to force submission. It was one of the results of Hawwah (Eve)’s choice to believe the serpent rather than obeying YHWH. He told her, “Your husband shall be what you desire, but he will have authority over you.“ (Genesis 3:16) That word for “authority” is used in Scripture in both positive and negative ways—sometimes of other nations dominating us, but more often of YHWH Himself bringing order and keeping things under control so they do not get out of hand. The term is used of what the sun does to the day (Gen. 1:16), how we are to keep sin from ruling over us (Gen. 4:7) but rather that we rule our own spirit (Prov. 16:32) so as to not go wild with rage. It is even used of the kind of rule we were meant to have over the rest of creation (Psalm 8:6), before our getting out of line put the rest of creation out of balance (Gen. 3:18; Romans 8:20-22).
I don’t think it was a punishment so much as a safeguard that was now needed because of the new vulnerable position she had put herself in. There was now someone who could overrule choices (good or bad) that might be made in the emotion of the moment without consideration of the consequences. (Numbers 30:3-8) “The buck” has to stop somewhere, so YHWH put the husband in charge for those occasions when argument is no longer fruitful and a final decision is required. But this “privilege” of authority is a heavy responsibility. Whatever it means in other contexts, its character in regard to marriage is clarified in the Renewed Covenant, which portrays Messiah’s self-sacrificing love as the model for how husbands are to treat their wives. (Ephesians 5:25-30)
Back in Genesis 2, before the pattern was marred and the emergency mode was put in effect, the initial design said that YHWH made for Adam “a helper suited to him” (2:18). What it actually means in Hebrew is “correlated to him as a counterpart, or opposite". Avi ben Mordechai explains that the sense in which the wife is "opposed to" her husband: as a paper held in the air is too flimsy to write anything on, but when there is something to prop it against, it becomes useful rather than existing abstractly as in a vacuum. The opposing pressure keeps him in the upright position. If she were just like him, they would both fall into the same traps. He needs her different angle to keep him balanced. She will think of things he never could. He is not obligated to follow her every choice, but where her views are wise, why wouldn’t he take them into strong consideration? The Hebrew word for “bride” (kalah) also means “one who completes”. The “helpful opposition” (which does include some critique) is about upholding one another, not belittling each other’s differences. So no, it’s far from sexist. Women had more rights in Israel than anywhere else in the ancient world. Without that step in the right direction, who would even be asking the questions about rights and ethics today?
As for “homophobia” (which actually means “fear of sameness”, but I think they really mean “fear of homosexuals”), fear is never what Scripture mandates, but it does state that “lying with a man as one would lie with a woman” is “repulsive” to the Creator. (Leviticus 18:22) It may be because it is an unfruitful lifestyle, or because of the self-devouring autoimmune diseases it can spread (from something a man’s body is not designed to receive), or because it seems an indirect form of self-worship. Its cousin, cross-dressing, is described the same way. (Deut. 22:5.) And I won’t even go into that whole “sex vs. gender” thing; that is absolute confusion, not to mention an easy foot in the door for pedophiles and voyeurs. Out of compassion, we must recognize that many choose such behaviors out of desperation after countless rejections by the opposite sex or traumatic experiences that leave them tangled in perplexity. The guilt is not in the feelings one has; YHWH certainly understands the dilemma the poisonous fruit has left us all in. It is the actions we choose, over which we do have control, which render one “repulsive” in His eyes—or not.
Of course, eating pork or shellfish is described in the same terms of something disgusting to YHWH. (Leviticus 11:10-42; Isaiah 66:17) So don’t feel singled out…
Many who claim to have open minds about so many such social issues close them to this one viewpoint and this alone! That is nothing but prejudice, and an unfair starting point whereby you could cheat yourself out of something infinitely valuable. But, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The object of opening one’s mind, as with opening one’s mouth, is to close it again on something solid.” There comes a time when you have to commit yourself to what the preponderance of evidence seems to point to.
Have you really found a better explanation for the evils of the world, or a better, more accessible solution?
The Personal Side
Where the rubber really meets the road is the evidence of YHWH’s ongoing activity in our own lives today. One might argue with your subjective experience, but one would have to deliberately close one’s eyes to fail to see His hand in, only 3 years after the Holocaust, the restoration of Israel as a nation and Jerusalem as its focal point as He promised, and much more recently, the awakening of the Northern Kingdom to our true identity and our return to the covenant, as all of the prophets foretold. Learn the details and keep watching; fulfilled prophecy is one of the strongest evidences for the Bible’s veracity.
But lives changed from aimless--or worse, recklessly hostile--to benevolent, kind, and fruitful does constitute objective change, and there are thousands if not millions of testimonials to how the rebirth of spirit offered freely by YHWH (through simple trust in what He made available through Yeshua) has changed lives, often instantly, with constant additional improvement as well. “Too good to be true” applies to human advertising, but since the perfection of both goodness and truth are found in the same Creator, such an epithet should never be applied to what He offers.
The Bible ends with this offer, astounding in our world in which even access to the most basic necessities are monetized: “Anyone who is thirsty, let him come. Whoever wishes to, let him take of the water of life freely.” (Revelation 22:17, echoing Isaiah 55:1) Doesn’t that penetrate deep into your innermost core?
Belief in the afterlife that the Bible describes means that those who die without receiving justice for wrongs done in their lifetimes are not without hope. In the resurrection, they will receive the rewards they deserve and the “bad actors” will receive justice. So we can proceed through life with patience and confidence, not frustration and anger, and “live around” the indignities we experience.
This message satisfies the most profound needs of not just our intellect, but our hearts.
Think about it deeply. If the Creator wanted to be known by those He created, wouldn’t He communicate to us, and have us pass on the communication in a sustainable form? If He wants us to act in a certain way, wouldn’t He give us instructions? If He wants us to change our behavior, wouldn’t He give us positive correctives? If he wants us to know His power—or His love—wouldn’t He demonstrate it in an unforgettable way, and entrust that knowledge to reliable witnesses?
And if the message were in danger of being “jammed” by interference from someone who hated the sender and did not want His love to be known, wouldn’t we find such “smear campaigns” to the reliability of the message as we see all the way back in the Garden of Eden? (“Did Elohim really say that? Did He really mean it THAT way? Don’t you think He has ulterior motives, like I d— I mean, like anybody sometimes would…?”)
Clearly there is opposition to this message getting through, as our opening comments exemplified. Chuck Missler pointed out that when you are trying to get a message through hostile territory, you don’t “put all your eggs in one basket”. You don’t give all the information about an impending military maneuver to just one infiltrator, in case it should be intercepted. Likewise, you don’t put everything about one topic in the same place in Scripture and nowhere else, in case it were to be lost, because then you would have no data about that aspect of truth. So YHWH spread all the messages out throughout numerous writings, so that each would have pieces of every puzzle and enough to get the recipients through their immediate situation—but also something to add to the fragments sent in a different direction, when once they do get back together and can all be compared and compiled. That is exactly how Scripture was written.
Consider where we would be without the Bible. Without the understanding it brings of the fast tracks to knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and thereby peace and prosperity, we’d be left to our own devices, which are little more than hit-and-miss trial and error. They may get us somewhere, but they are weak and unreliable most of the time. Without the hope it brings, we would have to succumb to despair as so many philosophers who tried to circumvent the Bible have done. Without its comfort, our pain would be infinitely sharper. Without the brakes it gives us to stem the horrendous pull of self-destructive habits, we’d be up the proverbial creek.
But we don’t have to be. There is a solid foundation. There is evidence that our Creator can be known, and that He is not hostile but friendly to any but those who want to deliberately mess things up for others. There is hope of not-just-incremental improvement, but a qualitatively better tomorrow. And most of all, there are redemption and restoration available. These are all found in this priceless volume.
What can we say but, “Thanks be to YHWH for His indescribable gift!”? (2 Corinthians 9:15)
Does the New Testament
Contradict Hebrew Scripture?
The prophets set the tone for the litmus test of what writings Israel may consider valid. Mal’akhi begins his famous prophecy about the coming “Day of YHWH” that will be preceded by Eliyahu’s reappearance by saying, “Remember the Torah of Moshe!” (4:4) And Yeshayahu (Isaiah) warns, “To the Torah and to the Testimony! If they do not speak in agreement with this word, it is because there is no light in them.” (Isaiah 8:20)
Many people think that there are lots of discrepancies between the TaNaKh and the New Testament. But are there really? Let’s more carefully examine the passages that are most often marshalled to prove this.
Does the New Testament Contradict the Kosher Laws?
Are the dietary laws abrogated in the New Testament? Probably the verse that has led many people to think this is, “‘Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.’ (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)” (Mark 7:18-19, NIV)
But it doesn’t really say that. That translation used eisegesis (reading into it more than it actually says), based on a presupposition that came from later doctrines that, as we shall see, have no firm foundation in Scripture. For starters, the words “Jesus declared” are not even in the original language. What it really says is, “…it does not enter his heart but into the abdomen, and then goes out into the latrine, thus purging all foods.”
He wasn’t even talking about kinds of foods in this context, but eating with unwashed hands—which does not conflict with Torah, only with a rabbinic tradition; he was saying it really doesn’t matter if we get a little dirt on our food, because the body will get rid of it on its own.
Not that there’s anything wrong with hygiene! Washing your hands before you eat is a good thing, but it should not be claimed that it was YHWH’s command no matter what our situation—such as picking fruit in an orchard where there is no water source. The only people who are actually mandated to wash their hands are the priests and their levitical assistants. That was his point; the discussion had nothing to do with what they were eating.
Ah, but what about Peter’s vision on the Yaffa rooftop, when YHWH told him to “kill and eat” all kinds of unclean beasts, creeping things, and birds (Acts 10:12-13)? A big clue is that Peter himself could not figure out what it meant, because he knew it could not seriously be taken literally, for he knew YHWH would not order him to do something contrary to His own commands. So he refused, and the voice from heaven told him, “What YHWH has cleansed, do not treat as profane.” But he was still puzzled after the vision came to him three times—until three Gentile men came to the door, and YHWH told him to go with them without hesitation. When he recounted the story, he explained, “YHWH has shown me that I should not call any man profane or unclean.” So it was never about food at all; that was just an allegory to show where YHWH actually was making a change—but of a different sort.
Does the New Testament Do Away with the Sabbath?
Did Yeshua break the Shabbat and say we could too? First of all, his disciples were the ones accused of “harvesting” on Shabbat. It wasn’t even him! But is picking a snack’s worth of grain from the corners of the fields “harvesting”? It may be construed as “gleaning”, but they were not taking what they picked any further away from the field than the distance it takes to chew up a handful of grain. It’s more like picking a single peach from a tree—closer to what life in the Garden of Eden was like, and therefore quite well-correlated with the ethos of the Shabbat. Work? Hardly. It required no sweat of the brow, and so Yeshua says the critics were condemning the guiltless. (Mat. 12:7)
Now what about healing on Shabbat? That was the other frequent criticism. (Luke 6, 13, 14) But consider that the Shabbat is the 7th day, the picture of the 7th Millennium, the Kingdom, the “time of the restitution of all things.” (Acts 3:21) That’s when the whole world will be healed, so healing on the Shabbat was a very appropriate prophecy and foretaste/microcosm of what the “Age to Come” will be like. So, far from breaking the Shabbat, that was fulfilling it in a huge way. He himself said he was the “master of the Sabbath” (Mat. 12:8), and thus would not want to break it but rather to display it in its best possible light. He even told us to pray that the flight for our lives would not be on a Shabbat (Mat. 24:20) Why would he say that if he thought it didn’t matter what we did on the Shabbat?
But weren’t his followers already meeting on the first day of the week by the time Paul visited Troas? What it actually says, “On the first of the weeks (plural), when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached to them, being ready to depart the next day, and he kept speaking until midnight.” (Acts 20:7-8)
The “first of the weeks” is a particular day of the year--the Firstfruits of the barley harvest, which starts the seven weeks that lead up to Shavuoth (Pentecost). Now, to meet the requirement that it constitute seven complete Shabbats with the 50th day the morrow after the last Shabbat, the first day of the counting (see Lev. 23:15) would have to be the first day of the week also, but there is another clue in the text: “There were many lights in the upper chamber where they were gathered.” Why would it mention lights when they did not play any other part in the story? Well, what part of the first day of the week features lighting lights? Havdallah--the ceremony that marks the separation of the Sabbath from the next week! As soon as the Sabbath is over (at sundown), it is the first day of the week—what we would call “Saturday night”, but Hebraically it is part of “Sunday”. It is the first time we can legally light candles again after the Sabbath begins, and multiple candles are twisted together to make the special havdallah candle. If they had gathered for the Sabbath, they just stayed together into the evening; it is not likely they would stay all that night and another whole day and then stay on until the next midnight!
But isn’t the resurrection enough of a justification for celebrating Sunday? Celebrating anything valid is one thing, and that is certainly cause for celebration. But regardless of when his resurrection was discovered (for the actual raising of Yeshua may have been accomplished while it was still the Sabbath), that is still entirely different from replacing something YHWH had commanded.
It was not Yeshua, Peter, Paul (or Mary!), but Constantine (who worshipped the “unvanquished sun” and wanted to distance himself from “those Jews”) who mandated that “Christian” Romans (and everyone else in his empire) needed to take Sunday off from work.
The only Sundays the Torah tells us to celebrate every year are the Firstfruits of the Barley Harvest mentioned above (the day after the Sabbath following either Passover or the whole feast of Unleavened Bread, per Lev. 23:11--which may indeed be that very resurrection day) and Shavuoth, which always falls on the day after the seventh complete Sabbath counted from that first day of the “omer”. (Lev. 23:15-16)
Doesn’t the New Testament Teach People to Worship a Man?
There are some texts that say some people “worshipped” Yeshua. Remember that was translated in the days of King James English, when “your worth-ship” was another way of addressing a judge or a king, to whom one would bow down in homage, and was not limited to worship in the modern, narrow sense that we think of as only fitting for deity. There are quite a lot of righteous people in the Tanakh who “prostrate themselves” before other men in appropriate situations and they are not counted as breaking the commandment to have no other Elohim besides YHWH. Why is the same term not translated “worship” there? Is an artificial distinction being made? Yeshua let people bow to him in some situations, but he was very clear that he would worship and serve only YHWH. (Mat. 4:10) He didn’t even want anyone to call him “good”, saying that that term was reserved for YHWH alone. (Mat. 19:17) It seems he anticipated where some would take these ideas, and wanted to nip them in the bud.
As with most of these issues, the problem is with the interpretations and translations, not the original text. Men extrapolated, but the New Testament does not actually say he is equal to YHWH, only fully united with Him in both purpose and character—though, precisely because he did not, like Adam, seek to be “like Elohim” but leaned far in the opposite direction and succeeded where the first Adam did not, YHWH did give him a position higher than any other human being—and says it is indeed proper and actually honoring to YHWH to bow to Yeshua because of this. (Philippians 2:5-11) So do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Does the New Testament Say the Torah was Cancelled?
In his famous “Sermon on the Mount”, Yeshua says over and over, “You have heard… But I tell you…” (Mat 5:21-22, 27-28, 33-34, 38-39, 43-44) At first it sounds like he is saying that whatever came before was wrong or inadequate, and he had a better way or more authority even than the Torah.
But he prefaces these sayings with, “Don’t suppose I have come to subvert the Torah or the prophets; I have not come to annul them, but to give them their fullest meaning.” (5:17) He clearly anticipated that some would deduce that from what he was about to say. But what he proceeded to show was that the sins forbidden by the Torah, though still wrong, are actually rooted in a deeper problem—internal, not external. Adultery is rooted in lust, murder in hate, etc. It’s not a contradiction, just a probing deeper and getting to the real issue, our spiritual proclivities of which outward sins are only symptoms. This is a perfect setup to understand why we need a renewed covenant. We’ll come back to this topic shortly.
But immediately, Yeshua warns us of heavy consequences if we try to say that even the smallest letter or stroke of the Torah is not valid before all of history has come to pass. (5:18-19) We are clearly not there yet.
So would his disciples teach anything different? We have to take anything they said as needing to fit the context of these parameters.
Peter warns us against turning away from YHWH’s commandments. (2 Peter 2:21) John emphasizes obedience to YHWH’s commandments as the only way to prove we know YHWH (1 Jn. 2:3-4) and that if we do not do so, it is doubtful that our prayers will be answered or that we will know His presence (1 Jn. 3:22-24). And James is even stricter about it (Yaaqov 1:22; 4:11)!
Paul too, though it may surprise some. Late in his life he testified under oath that he had done nothing against the Torah, the Jews, or the Temple. (Acts 25:8) Long after what many people call his “conversion”, he still considered himself a Pharisee (Acts 23:6). So there is no inherent contradiction in the mind of the man who wrote half of the New Testament between it and strict Judaism.
But didn’t he say that believers in Messiah are “no longer under Torah, but under grace”? (Rom. 6:14-15) Didn’t he say those who are circumcised have fallen from grace? (Gal. 2:2-4) He even says that “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters, but rather keeping the commandments of YHWH” (1 Cor. 7:19)—as if circumcision was not one of those commands!! (Ex. 12:48; Lev. 12:3)
Here and in Galatians, remember that “circumcision” was shorthand for the whole process of what today we would call “converting to Judaism”. It was the first step, and what Paul asks, setting the tone for all he says about the matter, is, “Is He [YHWH] the Elohim of Jews only, and not of the Gentiles too?” (Rom. 3:29) Dr. Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg, an Israeli believer in Yeshua, notes that Paul was recognizing that the apocalyptic promise of Israel being a light to all nations and Gentiles coming to belong to YHWH (e.g., Zech. 2:15) had already been set in motion by Yeshua’s triumph over death, so Gentiles did not have to become Jews before they could be YHWH’s people. Paul did circumcise at least one new believer who was of Jewish descent (Acts 16:3), so he had nothing against the actual practice itself, only against the idea that it was a prerequisite to having a relationship with YHWH rather than an expression of it.
In a major tikkun (reparation) for what the Jewish king Rehav’am had done to the other tribes of Israel (1 Kings 12), the Jewish leaders of Yeshua’s community did not place heavy requirements on “those returning to YHWH from among the Gentiles” (Acts 15:19-20)--a description of the lost tribes that had belonged to Him once but left the covenant. All they mandated was four changes in practice that would allow them to share the same dinner table with Jewish followers of Yeshua. Tied to this ruling, they reminded the other Jews that the Torah is taught in the synagogues every Sabbath (15:21), insinuating that the newcomers could learn more each week and take on other commanded practices (possibly including even circumcising their children on the eighth day, as we have done) as they heard and understood them, but they were not expected to be fully Torah-observant before they learned the principles behind the individual instructions, so they can carry them across into their own contexts too.
So the New Testament is valid if we approach it with the assumption that any interpretation has to agree with the Torah, Prophets, and Writings, rather than taking the words in other possible directions. It doesn’t conflict with Torah if we take it at face value when viewed through a Hebraic rather than Western lens. Its actual words can be trusted; it is doctrines based on the idea that what came before it must pass away that have caused people to think they see contradictions.
But Why Would We Even Need a New Covenant?
But the question all of this begs is, “Isn’t the Torah enough? If we are showing that the New Testament is in full agreement with the Torah, why do we even talk about it as a new thing? Why not just view it as another good commentary on the same covenant we had since Mt. Sinai?”
The same Hebrew term, Hadash, can mean either brand new or renewed; which it means in each case is clarified by context. Like the moon, which is said to be Hadash each month, something Hadash need not be something never seen before, but rather seen again after having gone unseen for a time—or being in effect again after being unused, in the case of a covenant.
Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) prophesied that there would be such a renewal of covenant (Jer. 31:31), and he said it would somehow not be like the one YHWH made before, “which covenant they broke”. (31:32) If His earlier covenant is broken and we still want to have a covenant, it somehow has to be renewed.
So, yes, we do need it. Paul says, in his discussion of this very topic, is that “the Torah is indeed holy, and the commandment, holy and just and right.” (Rom. 7:12) He is in full agreement with it. (7:16, 22) But then he points out the problem: “The Torah is spiritual; however, I am [still] carnal [fleshly], having been sold into [slavery to] sin.” (7:14) As Jason Staples notes, it’s not the standard that is the problem, but our inclination to not live up to it. David Stern explains that the Torah—the “old” covenant—“lacked the power to make the old nature cooperate".
And Yirmeyahu says it will somehow be different. How? Yirmeyahu goes on to say, “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, declares YHWH, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts…” (31:33)
This resolves Paul’s problem in Romans 7 of the inclination to disobey being stronger than our ability to obey.* He explains,
“Whatever the Torah says, it is speaking to those living within the framework of the Torah, so that every mouth may be silenced, and all the world may come to be [equally] under Elohim's judgment, ‘because before Your face no one who is alive can be righteous’ [Psalm 143:2] on the grounds of undertaking to accomplish [adherence to the] Torah, since through this same Torah comes a precise, accurate knowledge of sin. However, another kind of righteousness has now been actualized--from YHWH yet outside [the] Torah (though the Torah and the Prophets did indeed bear witness to it)--this being the righteousness from Elohim Himself which is [available] to anyone on account of the faithfulness of Yeshua the Messiah [reaching] to all and [extending] over all who place their confidence in Him, because there is no distinction [made], since all have sinned, and [thus] fall short of earning praise from Elohim, [yet are] being, [though] undeservedly, put in right standing due to His [empowering] favor through the ransom that [comes] through Messiah Yeshua…” (Romans 3:19-24)
Thus another factor in this covenant is that there is a new mediator—one who Moshe said (the Torah bearing witness, as Romans 3 said) would be like him (Deut. 18:15-18), and this is one way they are alike: Yeshua “is the mediator of the renewed covenant, so that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, those who are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” (Heb. 9:15)
So let’s go back to Paul’s verse about being not under Torah but under grace. (Rom. 6:14) I like to clarify the translation like this: “…because sin shall no longer lord it over you, since you are no longer subject to Torah, but to YHWH's empowering favor.” “No longer subject to Torah” in context means “not under its authority to condemn you”; rather, we now become active partners with the Torah, as its equals in a sense, cooperating with it toward the same goal.
A big feature of the renewed covenant that was missing in the first is YHWH’s empowering favor, which includes both amnesty for sin and the ability generously given to be able to accomplish what Torah aimed at--the positive effects of holiness, without unnecessary fear of being condemned for going about it wrongly or missing some detail. We now partake of its blessings instead because we understand its motive and share its motivation:
“Since the Torah was powerless, in that it was weak due to [our] natural condition, YHWH (by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and [specifically] to deal with sin) condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the Torah may be fulfilled in us (those who are not ordering our lives according to flesh but according to spirit.” (Rom. 8:3-4)
Jason Staples explains the contrast by saying that YHWH “has circumcised the hearts of the people, giving them the capacity to obey that they previously lacked… [YHWH]’s mercy does not involve changing the standard of judgment to accommodate the people, but instead changing the people to accommodate to the standard of judgment. That is, rather than unjustly judging the unjust to be just, [YHWH] will transform the unjust into ‘doers of Torah’ who can then be justly judged ‘just before [Elohim]. Rather than eliminating Torah, [YHWH] will transform people, and these justified people will obey [Him], having been given the fidelity [faithfulness] needed to obey Torah… After establishing…the plight of all humanity, Paul proceeds to present his Gospel as the fulfillment of exactly those prophetic promises of ethical transformation, pointing to those who have been empowered to fulfill the Torah’s requirements.”
So there is a contrast, but far from a contradiction. As the epistle to the Hebrews says, the Old Covenant was not bad, but the New Covenant is "better". It’s on firmer footing, as Yirmeyahu promised it would be. I, for one, am grateful that YHWH has renewed it in this way—a way more adaptable to our exile as well as to circumstances the Torah does not directly address, but still in the same spirit, accomplishing the same love of YHWH and love of neighbor as ourselves to which the Torah points us. Moshe could not take us all the way to the Promised Land; only Y’hoshua could (an amazing and literal analogy with the latter Y’hoshua , for that is Yeshua’s fuller name)!
That doesn’t mean we disrespect Moshe in any way, for his part was indispensable and the only foundation on which any New Covenant could ever be based. As Paul says, “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination [or goal, aim, target, purpose] of the ages has come.” (1 Cor. 10:11) “everything written in the past was written for our instruction, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope.” (Romans 15:4)
“All Scripture…is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness”. (1 Tim. 2:15) The only Scripture in existence when that was written was the Hebrew. So the Renewed Covenant endorses everything in the first and carries its purpose forward; it just adds the part it could not accomplish by giving us new hearts which not only want to but can obey every requirement of Torah, but indirectly, through doing things it never mentioned, but in the same spirit, and sometimes bypassing the particular examples the Torah gave of what loving YHWH and neighbor means since we are in a different context, but still obligated to carry out the same purpose of YHWH in the world, both inside and outside of the Land of Israel. Same covenant, version 2.0, a second instance (upgraded to be transcultural and internalized, with a better power source as well).
Torah’s details—including the Sabbath and feast days—“are a shadow of things to come; but the body [that cast the shadow] is [that] of Messiah.” (Col. 2:16-17)
Note it does not say, as some translations add, that they “were a shadow of things that were to come”; there is still more to be fulfilled; their job is not yet done. We still need them. And a shadow gives an accurate outline of what cast it; it is not in any sense a lie unless we take the shadow as being the real thing. The shadow may not always be present under certain conditions, so what we should trust in is something even more real. He (and, in another sense, his body, of which we are a part) is the substantive entity that the shadow was giving us a picture of. So that’s what we should pay even more attention to—not to the exclusion of the other, but in tandem with it.
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*Jason Staples resolves the apparent discrepancy with Deut. 30:11, which says, “this commandment which I am laying upon you today is not beyond your power to do” by noting that the context is the future time after we would experience the exile and other negative consequences of disobeying the Torah, then, while still “among the nations” (30:1), and turn back (30:2) and YHWH circumcises our heart (30:6)—in perfect correlation with the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31. When He does that, obedience to the Torah is no longer too difficult for us, for His Spirit within us will answer to and resonate with the outward commandment, and “the just requirement of the Torah will be fulfilled in us who walk…according to the Spirit.” (Rom. 8:4)
