This is our first PG-13 teaching so I must caution parents to either preview this or watch it with your kids. I give a warning at the beginning telling kids not to watch it without your permission. There is just no way to thoroughly discuss why Messiah’s genealogy was an honorable one without talking about the four women mentioned in it – and this week that means discussing Levirate marriage, sex, and cult prostitution. Tamar was a vindicated woman, but to the modern eye she appears a bit scandalous – it is important that our kids know how people in Messiah’s day would have looked at the women included.

This also ties in with Torah Portion Vayeshev.

The tithe system of ancient Israel can be really difficult to understand when you are just reading it out of the Bible – there are obviously multiple tithes being talked about, but what are they and who did they belong to? This week we are going to learn the different tithes and some Hebrew too!

Here is a very professional (ha ha) flowchart I had made up at great personal expense to help you with this week’s lesson
tithec4kkitavo

Here is an actually professional looking Spanish version of the chart made by my friend Edgar Gonzalez (now you can laugh at my lame version)

Also, a friend sent me a super cool youtube channel that teaches singing prayers in Hebrew – check it out!

You can’t even go shopping without seeing people being lied about in the tabloids – false accusations everywhere! God gave Israel some very specific laws in this week’s Torah portion about what is called a “malicious witness” – they had to pay the penalty for the crime they accused someone else of committing if they had lied! Sometimes that penalty was death, but at the very least it was 39 lashes!

That’s very different than here in the United States where you actually have to sue someone if they lie about you, and suing someone is way too expensive for most people! That means that people are almost never punished for their lies, no matter how badly it hurts someone else’s life.

I wanted you to check out this awesome poem written by Abbi Henkel after taking lesson #20 in Context for Kids: Honor and Shame in the Bible – she definitely nailed it!

“His name is like no other,

He is worthy of esteem,

Praise and exaltation are His words,

Though by some, he is taunted and despised.

His forgiveness and splendor surpasses all,

Those who reproach Him will turn in embarrassment.

Whether His honor grows or decreases

His love will always shine”

Hey! Sorry for taking such a long break but things got crazy around here! We started our twins’ sophomore year and my husband was blessed with a great new job in our favorite place in the USA (okay, okay I mean besides Disneyland and Disneyworld!). So we are overhauling the house and getting ready to move back to Idaho after twelve years of moving around the US. We are incredibly happy and excited. Our kiddos were born when we were in Idaho, so they are native sons returning to the land of potatoes and salmon.

I also, with the help of my editor Sarah Hawkes Valente and my formatter David Farley, have the next volume of Context for Kids at the publisher. This week it should be available just in time for the new school year. Volume one was suitable for kids as young as seven, but volume two is slated for ten and up – it is more complicated but still very doable. A lot of history in this one, as well as archaeology and I hope a lot of inspiration for your kids to be lifelong Bible scholars!

So this week’s Torah portion covers one of those awkward and sticky biblical situations – SLAVERY. We all immediately think of the horrors of Roots (and I strongly recommend that all kids see it once they are old enough) but Biblical slavery is entirely different. American slavery, as well as the slavery practiced in the world today, is Biblically indefensible – even though the Bible was used to defend it (let’s face it, the Bible is used out of context to justify a lot of evil in this world). Quakers and other Christians and Jews, used the Bible to fight slavery, in fact. So, I hope this lesson on Israelite debt-slavery helps the kids understand more about how God cares for His people.

Quick addition here – my teacher Joseph Good, an expert in the Temple in Jerusalem, taught me this fun prayer this morning that many Jews pray when they see a rainbow and I copied and pasted it from a site called chabad.org. I like it because it makes reference to the covenant, only wish I had learned this BEFORE sending my new book to the publisher, it would have been a great addition.

After the flood, G‑d promised Noah that He would never again bring a flood that would destroy the world. A rainbow is a reminder of this covenant that G‑d made with Noah, his descendants, and all living creatures. Therefore, upon seeing a rainbow in the sky, we recite the following blessing:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֶלוֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם זוֹכֵר הַבְּרִית וְנֶאֱמָן בִּבְרִיתוֹ וְקַיָם בְּמַאֲמָרוֹ

Baruch ata Ado-nai Elo-heinu melech ha’olam zocher ha’brit v’ne’eman bivrito v’kayam b’ma’amaro.

Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the universe, who remembers the covenant, and is faithful to His covenant, and keeps His promise.

Why could husbands and fathers nullify a wife’s or daughter’s oath? This week we are going to talk about the life of women in honor and shame cultures and how that applied to Bible days. We will also go through the Scripture looking at famous vows and oaths so we can understand the difference.

I have been plugging my friend Sarah’s new book “A Marriage, a Mystery and Me” available on amazon.com, but here’s her commercial, which made me cry – see if you can spot my husband and I (hint – we’ve been married for 25 years). What really made me cry was looking at myself in a size 5 dress. hahaha

What do Rosh HaShannah, Noah, the Aramaic Targums, Messiah rising from the dead, Moses, and Exodus 12:2, Ex 23:16, and the Creation of the World all have in common? Tune in and find out! One of the things I love about teaching context is introducing the kids to some of the extra-biblical writings because we can sometimes find surprising historical tidbits. Now, not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and not all of the Targum material is inspired, but when the material answers questions to things that look like inconsistencies in the Bible we definitely need to give them a closer look.

The Targums were Aramaic interpretations – in other words, they are what Jews believed the Bible was saying around the time of Yeshua and much of that information found it’s way into the Gospels and Epistles – especially when it comes to the Targumic writings about the coming Messiah! The Targumic writers clearly saw two Messiahs – a suffering servant and the conquering king. What they didn’t know was this – “would it be two separate Messiahs or one Messiah who comes twice?” Of course, we know the answer to that now!

This week’s extra resource is called The Bible Project – I really enjoy the animation:

I just noticed that my meme for this portion looks like a demented Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.. hmmm. So anyway, totally weird Torah portion because it doesn’t feature anyone we know! Just this strange prophet Balaam who isn’t even necessarily an Israelite but lives in Northern Ammon. This week we are going to look at actual documents from Mari that contain references to Balaam himself, even making mention of his father’s name, which we also know from Scripture.

This week’s featured link is to my friend Sarah Hawke’s Valente’s latest book called, “Marriage, a Mystery, and Me.” If you are like most parents, discussing sex with kids is like pulling teeth and so you might want to consider allowing Sarah to help you out with that. I’m afraid I just flat out answered my kids when they asked, but then I am a scientist and hard to embarrass.

http://www.whatislovely.com/marriagemysteryme/

Korah had a great job, he and his immediate cousins had the privilege of carrying the ark of the covenant, the table of shewbread, the menorah and the golden altar when Israel travelled! They were the most honored out of all the clans of the Levites – but Korah was jealous of Moses and Aaron and so he gathered up 250 other leaders and challenged the right of Moses and Aaron to lead the people!

Can you even believe it? Didn’t he see Moses go up onto the Mountain with God? Didn’t he see the plagues in Egypt and in the Wilderness? Didn’t he see all of the miracles? The rock split open at Horeb? The Manna and Quails? Everything that Moses and Aaron said would happen, happened!

Korah was guilty of a specific sin called encroachment, which is coveting, theft and rebellion against God all rolled up into a big mess of sin.

If your kids want to laugh at the ancient video game system I referred to this week, here’s a video – and yes, I played about half these games. I was disappointed that Pitfall wasn’t there as I played that a LOT. 

This week we are going to do something completely different – I will be teaching the kids about ancient manuscripts and how we compare them in order to figure out what the Bible is saying. In this case, I am going to stick very close to the Bible with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the Masoretic text, and the works of Josephus – with some actual documentary (not meaning a movie but ancient documents!) archaeology thrown in from the Babylonian Etemenanki Ziggurat and the excavation of burial sites from Ancient Israel.

An important reason to know about things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint is because anti-missionaries (people who want to destroy our faith in Yeshua (Jesus) ) will point out that NT quotes of OT verses aren’t accurate with the Masoretic – and they are right, but they are accurate with the more ancient Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint, so we will talk about that too. I am not going to let the anti-missionaries get our kids without a fight!

If you want to get an idea of the height disparity between David and Goliath according to the oldest Biblical documents, check out this awesome video of Spud Webb and his teammates!

As our “extra” resource this week, we are going with something fun. I am hoping that you will show your kids the source of all those fake giant photos on the internet – they were actually taken from a photoshop contest site called worth1000.com – which has now been absorbed by another blogsite but the pics are all still here. Check out all of their archaeological anomalies entries, they are very funny (note:I have never found anything inappropriate on this site, but as always, we need to be careful)

http://blog.designcrowd.com/article/880/giant-skeletons-seem-too-real-to-be-a-hoax

Here is the general archaeological anomailes page!

I wanted to present this information to the kids this week because there are people who take these photos, which were supposed to be for fun, and use them in order to lie to people. When believers reshare them, we look like fools – whether or not the original poster was just desperate to prove a point or was actively wanting to see how gullible we are.

If you ever want to know the source of a picture, from google chrome you can right click on it, and there should be an option to search google for the image. It works great when dealing with those pesky internet memes!

Oh my goodness, all the complaining this week. Poor Moses was ready to die but he still had to put up with these people for another 39 years.

So this week we are going to look at the importance of gratitude and why we should be very careful about criticizing a free gift. We will also be answering that age-old question about Moses’ “Ethiopian” wife and how the seventy elders were vested with  the same spirit that was on Moses. Oh – and why was Miriam the only person who got afflicted with leprosy? And why, after like ten tries, won’t youtube allow me to change the thumbnail on my video? Inquiring minds want to know!

This week I want you to check out another resource called Torah Puppets, they even have a character called the “Grateful Dude.”