Warning, this is a PG-13 teaching and parental guidance is strongly advised.

Well, I noticed that I skipped this Torah Portion last year and so while going through it on Monday, I realized that this would be the perfect chance to teach about the Sotah test in Numbers 5 – the ritual God gave to women in order to prove that they were not guilty of adultery if their husbands got jealous.

This was taught to me by my Temple teacher Joseph Good and you can find his much larger teaching “The Heavens Rejoiced: A Sukkot Story” available to be watched on www.jerusalemtemplestudy.com for subscribers or for sale at Hatikva.org. It is the amazing teaching of the birth of Messiah from his conception during the Feast of Hannukah to his birth on Sukkot – proven not only Biblically but also through extra-biblical Jewish writings.

This week we are going to divert from our trip through Matthew Chapter 1 to address a common concern – namely, can we learn from people with whom we do not see eye to eye? We are going to talk about the difference between listening to a scholar who is an expert in a certain field vs considering them a spiritual advisor. It is very important to understand the difference because the only reason we know anything about Yeshua/Jesus outside of what is written in the Bible is through reading the Jewish writings – without them, we would know nothing about the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians or the political situation of the first century.

Modern books and ancient books are incredibly different – for example, a book about a modern person would tell you what day a person was born and might skip any other details about that day, but in Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) day, people would generally say nothing about the day of the year at all but would focus on what made that person’s birth important and impressive. As a result, we know very few ancient birthdays before the time of Messiah – especially among the Jews, who focused on a person’s life, and not their birth! Around 200 CE, people got super concerned with when Yeshua was born, but before that, they really didn’t seem to care much. This week we are going to talk about the stuff that the two Biblical authors, Matthew and Luke, did want to talk about, and why it was important. We will also discuss the very interesting reasons why people at the end of the second century came up with the date of December 25th, and how it relates to Rabbi Eliezer and Jewish beliefs about the redemption of the world.

This is a really interesting article if you are interested in studying the December 25th date in more detail

And my friend Sarah has another great book out for families that is also a lot of fun for kids – teaching them about having great character and developing the fruit of the Spirit.

I spent the last three weeks pouring through the Kehati Mishnah Commentaries on Ketubot, Kiddushin, and Gittin in order to study for this lesson in first-century betrothal, marriage, and divorce. Some of the laws were pretty messed up and others were actually kinda funny – fortunately for women, most modern denominations of Judaism don’t adhere to these rulings anymore. We are going to have some fun though, and laugh at some of the stuff I learned – like divorcing your husband because he handles dog poop in his profession.

I also had to make an apology for last week’s video where I mentioned being excited to see the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie – had I seen it first, I would NOT have mentioned it. I was horrified by it as it was full of sexual innuendos. I hope no one went and saw it just because they saw me excited about it. If you want a good Kurt Russel film to show your family, every single other one of his Disney movies would be a much better choice.

Because we have this verse in Matthew 1 that says 21 “She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”” and it doesn’t make any sense in the English, I decided to go ahead and tackle the wacky world of transliterations and translations. What do you do when languages have different alphabets and different sounds? Most things can be translated, but names are tricky – especially when sounds in one language don’t exist in others! English language translators today have it pretty easy – they can listen to someone speaking Hebrew and mimic *almost* every sound in Hebrew and Greek, but not all of them – I am sure you have heard the almost hacking sound that people make with their throat while speaking any of the Semitic languages and there is no English equivalent. So we are going to take the journey from Yeshua to Jesus, step by step through the last 2000 years, following the “paper trail” from the Septuagint translation of Joshua to the Tyndale Bible. We’re also going to debunk the “Hey Zeus” memes out there by pointing out that Zeus is the modern name for the god, not the ancient one.