J-M's History Corner

Shabbat shalom, everyone!  At least, it’s the Shabbat (Sabbath) here in Australia.  Today, in addition to being the regular Shabbat, it is also (in Oz) the Feast of Trumpets, known in Hebrew as Yom Teruah.  This feast is described in the Book of Leviticus and, as I pointed out in Does the Torah Still Apply? is still meant to be kept.  Here are Leviticus ‘ instructions on this: And YEHOVAH spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the Israelites, saying, ‘In the 7th month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of shofars, a set-apart assembly.  You shall do no work of any kind, but you shall offer an offering made by fire to YEHOVAH.  ( Leviticus 23:23-25) [Note: most translations read “no servile work”, but if you look up the Hebrew word for “servile work”, Strong’s H#5656 “avodah”, it actually means “work of any kind”.] So, Yom Teruah is what is called a High Sabbath (or, if you’re a Messianic like...

  Hello!  Here is the belated 5th chapter of my Restored English Translation (RET) of the Book of Beresheet (Genesis).  Once again, this post contains the Hebrew names .  A glossary of those names will be provided at the end.  I will continue to use the Aleph Tavs , although I am no longer certain about them.  It appears that they may well be purely grammar after all.  A friend of mine wrote in an email: “On another note, the word את is explained in a Hebrew textbook thus: ‘A direct, definite object of a verb is preceded by the particle את.               David takes a book.               . דוד לוקח ספר             David takes the book .   .   דוד לוקח את הספר             Whom do you love .   ...

  The canon of Scripture is a settled issue, isn’t it? You’ve got your 66 books total, 39 in the Old Testament (24 by the Jewish counting) and 27 in the New Testament. However, when you do the research, things are not so simple. There are many “other” books claiming to be Scripture, a number of them accepted by various denominations and/or included in various Bibles over the years. Are they Scripture? Or just heretical additions? In  The Canon of Scripture, Part 1: The Apocrypha I established that the books known as the Apocrypha are inspired Scripture.  However, there is a much wider collection of works not included in our Bibles called the “Pseudepigraphia”, which means “false writings”.  Today, I will deal with two books of the Pseudepigraphia in particular: Book of Enoch Book of Jubilees ENOCH Of the books not in our canon, the Book of Enoch (also known as 1 Enoch or Ethiopic Enoch) is by far the most well-known outside of t...