Walking in The Dust of Rabbi Jesus: How The Jewish Words of Jesus Can Change Your Life by Lois Tverberg
Walking in The Dust of Rabbi Jesus: How The Jewish Words of Jesus Can Change Your Life by Lois Tverberg
Walking in The Dust of Rabbi Jesus: How The Jewish Words of Jesus Can Change Your Life by Lois Tverberg
In this illuminating sequel to Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, Tverberg has again done the serious student of Scripture a favor. At once
edifying and challenging, Tverberg skillfully enables her readers to
understand and apply more of the master Teachers expressions in
their original Jewish setting. Let the feast begin.
Marvin R. Wilson, PhD, professor of biblical and
theological studies, Gordon College
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In Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, Lois Tverberg joins the disciplined mind of a research scientist (which she is!) with the passion
of a true follower of Jesus (which she is!) to give us all an invaluable
window into the life and witness of Jesus. When I write or preach on
anything that Lois has thought or written about, I always consult her.
Her work is a treasure, and Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus is a mustread for all who love Jesus and long for his appearing!
Rev. Dr. Timothy Brown, president,
Western Theological Seminary
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Walk ing
in the
Dust of Ra bbi
JE S U S
L
OIS T VERBERG
Foreword by Ray Vander Laan
Afterword by Ann Spangler
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ZONDERVAN
Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus
Copyright 2012 by Lois Tverberg
This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook. Visit www.zondervan.com/ebooks.
This title is also availablein a Zondervan audioedition. Visit www.zondervan.fm.
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tverberg, Lois.
Walking in the dust of Rabbi Jesus : how the Jewish words of Jesus can change
your life/ Lois Tverberg.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index [if applicable].
ISBN 978-0-310-28420-8 (hardcover)
1. Jesus ChristJewishness. 2. Jesus ChristWords. I. Title.
BT590.J8T842011
232.9'06 dc23
2011035954
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New
International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by
permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible.
Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are
offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement
by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for
the life of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy,
recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Published in association with the literary agency of Ann Spangler and Company, 1420
Pontiac Road SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506.
Cover photography: iStockphoto
Interior illustration: iStockphoto
Interior design: Beth Shagene
Printed in the United States of America
11121314151617/DCI/22212019181716151413121110987654321
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Contents
15
31
42
55
69
81
92
104
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145
154
165
180
192
195
Acknowledgments
197
Notes
199
Glossary
217
Recommended Resources
223
Scripture Index
227
General Index
230
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Foreword
s an author, Bible teacher, and study tour leader, I have had the
privilege of walking the lands of the Bible with thousands of
Jesus followers who came to see where Abraham, Ruth, David, and
Jesus lived. I enjoyed watching group after group slowly come to realize that the Bibles stories are set in real times and real places. As they
learned more about the land, the people, and the culture of the Bible,
these believers saw that the context God chose for his redemptive
plan could help them apply the Word to their own lives. At the end
of their travels, I often heard people say, I will never read the Bible
the same way again.
Many returned home from Israel or Turkey or Greece with their
faith in Jesus deepened but hungry for moremuch more. The pilgrim excitement of walking where Jesus walked became a growing
thirst for a deeper understanding of Gods storya thirst as palpable
as their need for bottled water in the hot, dry climate of Israel.
I know their experience wellthat was my journey too. I began
to explore the Jewish world of Jesus with a desire to deepen my faith
in Jesus. I was familiar with the accounts of his life and believed them
to be true. I accepted his claims to be the Messiah and believed in
his redemptive death. But as I entered the world of Jewish thought,
I began to wonder about the faith of Jesus. I struggled to understand
what I should learn from the accounts of how he lived. Was it simply to
explain why he must die? Or was his life a pattern to be understood and
emulated? And what did it mean to imitate him in my walk with God?
As I explored the lands and cultures of the Bible, I realized that
I did indeed need to have not only faith in Jesus, but also to develop
the faith of Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus I needed to know why and
how he lived out his faith, so that I could follow him more closely.
This insight seems so obvious now that I cannot imagine that I
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Foreword
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Foreword
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Foreword
the dust as you follow the Rabbi. You will hear the sages discussing
the Torah as their disciples listen and will discover the greatest interpreter of all ... Jesus the Messiah. For he is not only God incarnate,
but also the Word incarnate. His life is in a real sense the Wordthe
Biblein living flesh. And you will be challenged to become ever
more passionate about being his disciplehaving the faith of Jesus.
So come along with us and follow in the dust of Jesusthe Jewish
Rabbiof Scripture.
Ray Vander Laan
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Part I
Hearing
Our Rabbis Words
with New Ears
W
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Chapter 1
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in 701 BC. Half terrified, our group peered into the dark, stone-hewn
shaft before us and stepped down into the icy, rushing waters of the
Gihon spring. After groping our way through the cramped blackness
by flashlight for a third of a mile, waist-high water sweeping us along,
we heaved a sigh of relief when we finally glimpsed the exit.
Adding to the thrill, we were emerging at the site of the famous
Pool of Siloam, where a blind man miraculously recovered his vision
after Jesus sent him there to wash (John 9:7). The puddle-deep pool
was, admittedly, unimpressiveonly a few feet wide and a few more
yards long. But this was the famous site, according to Christian tradition that went back to the fourth century AD.
Or so we thought.
In 2004, five years after our visit, a sewage pipe broke underneath
a nearby Jerusalem street. Massive earth-moving equipment rumbled
in to make the repair. Pushing into the soil, a bulldozer blade collided
with a submerged object and came to a grinding halt. An ancient
plastered step emerged as the dirt was brushed away. Within minutes prominent archaeologists had rushed over, the word bulldozer
hurrying them to the scene. Excavation revealed several more steps
down one side of an enormous rectangular pool. Within weeks this
monumental reservoir (about 160 feet wide by 200 feet long) was
identified as the real Pool of Siloam, the main source of fresh water
within Jerusalems walls. Coins embedded in the plaster confirmed
that it was in use during J esus time.3
As they excavated the Pool of Siloam archaeologists also discovered a wide, stepped first-century street that leads from the pool up
to the Temple. This was one of the main Jerusalem thoroughfares in
the first century, and it would have been the final steps of ascent for
pilgrims after days or weeks of journeying to celebrate the feasts. The
Pool of Siloam was one of the places where they could have stopped
to purify themselves before entering the Temple.
And reading Johns gospel again, we discover that the Pool of
Siloam played a part in another scene in Jesus ministry. Each night
of the joyous weeklong Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), the high priest
would parade down this street amid great fanfare and fill a golden
pitcher with living water from the Pool of Siloam for the water libation
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on the Temples altar. On the last day of the feast, the high priest
would process around the altar seven times as the crowds chanted
fervent prayers for living water, rain for the next years crops. The
roar grew ever more thunderous until the priest finally approached
the altar. A hush would descend as he filled a silver bowl and then
ceremoniously poured the living water onto the sacrificial pyre. It was
then when Jesus stood up and shouted, Let anyone who is thirsty
come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has
said, rivers of living water will flow from within them (John 7:3738,
italics added).
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with the outpouring of the Spirit during the messianic age (Ezekiel
47; Joel 2:2329; Zechariah 14:818).
As I started to see how important history, geography, language,
and culture were for unlocking the biblical text, my curiosity led me
to study in the land of Israel, to learn from scholars there about firstcentury Jewish culture, and to study Hebrew and Greek.5 A few years
later I left the world of teaching biology to write and teach about this
subject full-time.
You might think that you need to master whole textbooks before
this kind of study starts to enrich your Bible reading, but Ive been
amazed at how the smallest details can help connect the dots. Its like
when youre stumped doing a crossword puzzle but then finally decipher one word. Suddenly an adjoining word falls into place, which
yields clues to unlock yet more words, and then the rest of the grid
starts to fill in.
The simplest cultural details can unravel knotty mysteries, sometimes with powerful theological implications. For instance, how much
would the firewood weigh for an average burnt offering? You might
think that minutiae like this isnt worth studying, but this obscure
detail casts light on one of the Bibles most difficult chapters.
After reading the account in Genesis 22 about Gods asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, many people ask, How old was Isaac? Was he
a toddler, a teen, or an adult? Most paintings picture Isaac as a child
toting a bundle of sticks under his arm as he walks beside his elderly
father. This is because Genesis 22:6 says that Abraham carried the
knife while Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice.
But a sacrifice was offered by roasting an animal as a whole burnt
offering, which took several hours over a full fire.6 The large logs
needed for fuel would require the strength of a full-grown man to
carry them. There was no way the elderly Abraham could lift them
(remember, he was one hundred already when Isaac was born), so he
carried the knife while Isaac carried the wood. In fact, for most of the
journey, two donkeys bore the massive burden (verse 3).
Once you envision an adult Isaac bearing the heavy wood, the
story takes on an entirely different tone. Now we see that the story is
not just about Abrahams unshakeable faith in God; its about Isaacs
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Jewish. It was only after God pushed Peter out of his comfort zone to
witness to the Gentile centurion Cornelius that the church considered the possibility that the gospel was for Gentiles too (Acts 10).
We Christians often neglect this as we retell the stories of the
early believers joyful fellowship. We assume that the remarkable
success of the Jerusalem church came from the fact that believers
were freshly filled with the Holy Spirit. But Pauls Gentile church at
Corinth had experienced the same outpouring, yet it struggled with
immaturity, division, and sexual immorality. Why the difference? As
wonderful as it was that the Corinthians found Christ, most had
come out of a pagan reality, and their lives had not been saturated by
the Scriptures that Jesus read, our Old Testament. They lacked the
Torahs training in moral laws that Christ built upon. They had a lot
of catching up to do.
Moreover, while the Gentiles worshiped Jesus as their Savior and
God, the Jewish believers also knew him as their rabbi. As Jesus disciples, they knew their obligation was to memorize his words and live
according his halakhah, his interpretation of how Gods Word teaches
us to live.
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course its creator imagined Jesus within his or her own reality, just
as white Americans have cast J esus as a blue-eyed Caucasian. As the
gospel has gone out around the world, people have, by default, pictured Jesus through their own cultural lenses.
You might be surprised that Leonardo da Vincis Last Supper does
the same thing. This masterpiece has influenced the Christian imagination of Jesus fateful last evening more than any other, yet it is
culturally wrong in every detail. In the background are windows looking out on a sunny mid-afternoon scene, whereas the Passover meal
always took place at night. And of course the faces of Jesus and the
disciples are pale-faced Europeans, not Semitic. Most telling is what
is on the table. Lacking are the essential elements of the Passover
celebration, including the lamb and unleavened bread. In their place
is a puffy loaf of bread, when leavening is strictly forbidden during
the week of Passover, and a shockingly unkosher plate of grilled eels
garnished with orange slices!8
Of course da Vincis goal was to portray the disciples reactions
at that critical moment, and he does so with brilliant technique and
emotive depth. But by not including the elements of Passover, a feast
that celebrated Gods redemption and brimmed over with messianic
expectations, we miss the fact that J esus was powerfully proclaiming
himself as the fulfillment of Gods ancient promises. Jesus uses the
symbols of Passover to point toward his coming atonement to redeem
those who believed in him and to inaugurate a new covenant for
the forgiveness of sin.9
Certainly much of the reason that we Christians have missed
these details is simply out of ignorance. But it also comes out of how
weve read our Bibles. As I was growing up, what I usually heard about
Jesus Jewish context was how much he opposed it and was bringing
it to an end. Unfortunately, that attitude is not just a relic of the
past. Just a few months ago I happened to tune my car radio to hear
a popular pastor put it this way:
When
Jesus came, everything changed, everything
changed.... He didnt just want to clean up the p eoples attitudes
as they gave their sacrifices, He obliterated the sacrificial system
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aspects of his reality that have persisted in Judaism from the first century until today. What Ive chosen to share in this book are a few core
concepts that Christians have hardly known about, yet shed light
on Jesus teachings. Often this Hebraic perspective unlocks biblical
wisdom that our culture has forgotten over time.
Ken Bailey has spent decades traveling in the Middle East to study
Arab p eoples, showing how traditional societies there preserve the
Bibles cultural perspective in ways that Western societies have not.
He comments, For us as Westerners the cultural distance over to
the Middle East is greater than the distance back to the first century.
The cultural gulf between the West and the East is deeper and wider
than the gulf between the first century (in the Middle East) and the
contemporary conservative Middle Eastern village.19
Christians may also be surprised at how Jewish traditions have
preserved biblical attitudes. To catch the emotional power of Jesus
claim to be the source of living water in John 7, you can go to the
parched Middle East and ask an Arab about how precious rain is to
him. Or, go to the synagogue in your own hometown, where youll
hear passionate prayers for living water each day during the weeklong feast of Sukkot. (In one Jewish prayer book, these go on for over
fifty pages.) Some liturgies preserve cultural memories that go back
thousands of years.20
Why is God allowing us to discover these insights now? Perhaps
its because we need them now more than ever. Indeed, for much of
the world, the culture of the Bible makes more sense than it does to
us. Eugene Nida, a pioneer in Bible translation, has commented:
In a sense, the Bible is the most translatable religious book
that has ever been written.... If one were to make a comparison
of the culture traits of the Bible with those of all the existing
cultures of today, one would find that in certain respects the
Bible is surprisingly closer to many of them than to the technological culture of the Western world. It is this Western culture
that is the aberrant one in the world. And it is precisely in the
Western world ... that the Scriptures have seemingly the least
acceptance.21
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Throughout history people have lived in extended families, practiced subsistence farming, and lived under the shadow of slavery and
war. And around the world, many traditional cultures focus their childrens training on sacred stories and order their lives around religious
practices. With our individualism, secularism, materialism, and biblical illiteracy, we in the Western world are the ones who have moved
farthest away from Jesus world. Could it be that were the ones who
have the most to learn?
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way. The imagery was not of four-laned freeways that are paved for
permanence, but the track left behind by peoples footprints. Some
paths led to good places, and some to dangerous, evil places. Your
way was a spiritual metaphor for how you lived. This is still true
today, as Jesus lovingly walks before us in the way we ought to live.
And then he bids us to put our feet in his own footprints to follow
after him, to become part of his Way, as his early followers once did.
In Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, my coauthor Ann Spangler
and I began by looking at another first-century idiom, that to sit
at the feet of a rabbi meant to study with him. We pondered what
Jesus words might have sounded like if we had gathered in Marthas
house and sat alongside Mary at Jesus feet, enjoying an after-dinner
discussion with his disciples. Ann and I examined basic aspects of
Jesus Jewish reality like the yearly feasts, the daily prayers, and the
way rabbis trained disciples. Through them we discovered many new
insights on Jesus life and mission.
In this book, I will be looking more closely at Jesus words and
teachings in their Jewish context. Well push beyond externals to
explore the world of Jewish thought. Well contemplate some of the
cultural ideas and biblical images that gave meaning and depth to
Jesus words. And, well discover some of the wisdom that Jewish culture has preserved over the ages that reveals ways we can become
more like Rabbi J esus.
Well look at some key Hebrew words that Jesus knew from his
Scriptures and discover how their deeper meanings cast light on our
faith. We will listen with new ears to Jesus interpretation of how
to live out the Shemathe daily pledge to love God with all your
heart that formed the very center of Jewish commitment from ancient
times until today. As we do, well hear our Saviors calling in ways
that will transform our lives today.
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