Edit: Oops. Made a correction. A sentence previously reads: "...to this impressive list of Jewish people of those days..." is changed to "...to this impressive list of people of those days..." because I realized some names are of pre-Jewish nation - and then - believers are not necessarily Jewish. Yay.
In the Bible, there is a book called "Hebrews." No one knows who wrote it, but the early church fathers who canonized the Bible decided it should still be there anyway; and I'm glad for that decision. Some scholars believe it is written by a woman, which is so interesting and encouraging because - well - the society that wrote the other books was (and is) kind of chauvinistic.
But I digress. Here's the story:
My good friend got a tattoo recently, a Hebrew script of the words: "By faith" around his upper arm. My friend got it from Hebrews chapter 11 where it repeatedly said, "By faith, so and so did this and that.... by faith, when so and so heard, she..." It is a stunning passage that celebrates these people and their actions which were based on faith, the condition of "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."
He told me that before he got the tattoo, he wanted to check with someone who can read Hebrew to ensure that the script he had picked out (in Hebrew) in fact means and says "by faith" - because after all, translations often are not direct.
So he consulted a friend of a friend who confirmed that the script actually says "by faith." This friend of a friend added that the phrase in Hebrew is something that the Jews would say in the morning when they wake up (or something like that). And in that context, they would actually mean to say: "By God's faithfulness."
God's!
This rocks my world - and my friend's too - because this whole while, we thought the passage was drawing us to this impressive list of people of those days. And while we are (and ought to be) amazed and encouraged by their example, it struck me that it is also (and perhaps primarily so) by God's faithfulness that they were able to do those things.
A shift of focus, which was what I needed.
2 comments:
באמונה
Hmm...not sure I really see that Hebrew culture was a terribly bad place for women in ancient days, to be quite honest. You had women judges, prophetesses, and even entire books of the Bible that tell stories about women of faith (Esther, queen, and Ruth, a gentile who married an older Israelite man and birthed the line of kings). Jesus also points out that things like divorce as it was being practiced in his day (favoring the man) was frivolous and illegitimate. There were laws and provisions for widows, for women inheritance if there was no male heir...this was all ridiculously beneficent for that time period. Then fast forward to the O.T. where Jesus chooses women to be some of the first people to witness His resurrection - this was very counter-cultural.
So while I suppose that the culture did pervert some of the laws and became more misogynist than the Law wanted them to be, I don't think those instances were what He intended - and even so, by and large they had it way, way better than women had (or have) it in other Middle-Eastern cultures.
-calthaer
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