Bible Geek Word Nerd -- Samson - ASAH -- Just Do It

 

Just Do It

March 19, 2023

Yesterday, we explained our distractibility by telling you we are pausing our Jeremiah walk to detour into the life of Samson in the Book of Judges.  Familiar territory, the story of SAMSON.  Everyone but the Veggie Tales has told his story.  This mini-series will not re-explain Samson’s life story.  Rather, we will tell it as it is in the Text, hopefully shedding new light on the well-trodden path, while turning up treasures lying there the whole time…in

plain sight, as it were.

 

We are beginning at the beginning, in Chapter 13.  In the Book of Judges, every Judge’s story begins the same way: “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord…”  And so so begins Samson’s tale.

 

Yesterday, we talked about the Hebrew words for “again” (YASAPH) and “eyes” (AYIN).  Today, we will pick up with “did” and “evil”.

 

The word behind “did” is the Hebrew verb ASAH (עָשָׂה), which means “to do, to make”.  It is used over 2600 times in the Hebrew text, making it not only one of the most frequently used verbs, but also one of the most frequently used words (though it is a piker next to AMAR (to say), which used over 5300 times).  To choose an easy example, ASAH is used seven times on the first page of the Bible to describe the making of the Heavens and the Earth.

 

“So God MADE the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so.”

Genesis 1:7

 

Like all Hebrew words, however, ASAH is not content to simply translate as “do” or “make”.  English translators like to make it do other remarkable actions.  Here it is in Genesis 1:11:

 

“Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that BEAR fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.’ And it was so.”  I suppose the trees MAKE the fruit, but that sounds odd to our modern ears.   So, “bear fruit” it is.

 

In Exodus 10:25, the NIV reads: “But Moses said, ‘You must allow us to have sacrifices and burnt offerings TO PRESENT to the Lord our God.”  ASAH is behind “to present”.    The close-to-literal reading would be, “But said Moshe also, ‘You must give us sacrifices and burnt offerings that we MAY DO to the LORD our G-d.”  Have we mentioned how challenging translation is?

 

ASAH’s frequent use underscores the importance ACTION – of DOING – in Hebraic thinking.  Throughout the Text, the children of Israel are encouraged to DO G-d’s commands, to DO righteousness, to DO justice.  

 

“For I have chosen him (Abraham), so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by DOING what is RIGHT (TSEDAQAH) and JUST (MISHPAT), so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him”

Genesis 18:19

 

“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you?  TO ACT justly (MISHPAT) and to love mercy and to walk humbly^[a] with your God.”

 

ASAH is essential to understanding the action orientation of the Hebrew Bible.  G-d does
not simply want you to think a certain way or believe the right things.  G-d wants you to DO it.  But not just do anything.  Do right.

 

Of course, in Judges, G-d people often are DOING it.  But the “it” is often EVIL, which we will take up in our next post.

Bible Geek Word Nerd - Detour to Samsonville

 

Slouching Toward Somewhere
(with apologies to Robert Bork)

March 18, 2023

(a six-minute read...better buckle up)

 

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51

 

We had planned to walk through Jeremiah for as long as it took. 52 chapters. 1364 verses. 33,000 words. We’ve made it to the beginning of Chapter 3 after a week (and we even skipped chapter 1). As we said, this is going to be a while. Pull up a chair. Have a coffee. And be ready for detours…like today’s. The Whitman poem refers to our contradictory ways: we are staying with Jeremiah, until we are NOT staying with Jeremiah. Which brings us to today: Judges. Along with Jeremiah, we are also reading Judges. Chapter 13 has caught our easily-caught attention. 

 

Chapter 13 tells the story of Samson’s (SHIMSHON) birth. It is a familiar enough story if you’ve been to Sunday School. Bob and Larry have not yet told it, but it has been told many times in many ways by many artists, from Handel to Saint-Saëns to Cecil B DeMille. There are even tee shirts. Horrible, cheesy, awful tee shirts. We all know Samson’s story quite well. But in reading it today, I was riveted to the Text in a new way. Let’s take a detour.

 

Chapter 13 begins as do so many stories in the Book of Judges: “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD…”

 

There are a few things to pick up on in this opening line of the Text. First, you will note that this is not the first – nor the last – time Israel will do evil in the LORD’s eyes. Second, you should remark that a familiar word is prominent in this and all verses which begin stories of Judges: AYIN (עַיִן). We will not re-tread a discussion on AYIN. Read yesterday’s post. Instead, we’d like to draw your attention to three words in this verse that have significant connotations for how you read the Text: again, did, and evil.

 

Let’s begin with “again”. In Hebrew, there are many ways the authors use to describe the phenomenon of “once more”. For instance, OD (עוֹד) is used 486 times to express the idea. The verb SHUB (שׁוּב) means “to turn back or return” and appears over 1000 times in the Hebrew Bible. It can mean “again”. We will discuss SHUB when we return to Jeremiah (see what we did there?). SHANAH (שָׁנָה) means “to repeat, to do again”. It uses the same three Hebrew consonants as the word for “a year”; the only difference is the vowels. But the word used here is none of those. Rather, it is YASAPH (יָסַף).

 

YASAPH is a verb that occurs 211 times in the Hebrew Bible. It primarily means “to add”. Does it sound familiar? It should. In Genesis 30:24, it is used twice, once as a verb and once as a noun (quoting from the ESV because it preserves the Hebraic way of saying this).

 

“And she called his name JOSEPH (יוֹסֵף), saying, ‘May the LORD ADD (יָסַף) to me another son!’”

 

The upper case words above – JOSEPH and ADD – are from the same root word: YASAPH. And each uses the same three Hebrew consonants, which you can plainly see.

 

A quick sidebar on the letter “J” might be helpful here. (If you already know the story, feel free to skip ahead. This might lead to TL|DR.)

 

Translating from one language to another must always consider each language's rules and limitations. We can see it in modern language translations, for example, where the simple English imperative “run away” has many options in Spanish, French, or German. Which option should you choose?

 

Then there are added challenges with the Hebrew Bible. To begin with, we have the problem of scale. As previously mentioned, our modern English vocabulary contains over 1,000,000 words (and is growing by the day), while Biblical Hebrew only has about 8600 words. And they are fixed in number. Language is constantly evolving, with new words being added, and even existing words changing their meaning over time. We can experience this firsthand simply by observing the plethora of English translations available to read.

 

Moreover, significant cultural and historical hurdles must be surmounted to effectively translate the ancient Biblical Text into modern English. How do you convey an ancient worldview in modern terms in ways that are accurate, to say nothing of being meaningful or useful?

 

Add to this the fact that Biblical Hebrew is written without vowels. The vowel sounds are conveyed by a sort of standardized code of dots and dashes – called NIKUDIM – that was added in the Middle Ages. So the standard three characters of SH-L-M (or in Hebrew characters, שּׁﬥﬦ) can be rendered into many words. SHALAM (שָׁלַם) is a verb meaning “to be complete”. SHELAM (שְׁלָם) is a noun that means “welfare or prosperity” SHELEM (שֶׁלֶם) is also a noun, but it means a peace offering or sacrifice. SHALEM (שָׁלֵם) is an adjective that means “complete or safe”. Finally, you have probably already figured out that these three characters also lie behind the Hebrew word for “peace”, which is SHALOM.

 

Finally, you need to render an ancient alphabet into modern English, and there is not a one-for-one correlation between the characters. This process, called “transliteration”, attempts to render the language phonetically. It is precisely why you will see the Jewish Winter holiday spelled variously as Hannukah or Channukah or even other ways.

 

Translation is very hard work.

 

Now, let’s SHUB (return) to YASAPH, and it is an alphabetic challenge that has confounded English readers for 400 years.

 

There is no letter “J” in Hebrew. When the first English translations of the Bible began to appear in the 1500s, they substituted the Hebrew YOD (י) for the newly emerging English letter “j”. A long and circuitous story explains how and why this happened. You can read about it here (https://tinyurl.com/5n6uz6y7) and here (https://tinyurl.com/ycktncs2). The practical upshot is that not only does the very Hebraic YOSEPH get turned into the common English Joseph, but also YAAKOB gets rendered into Jacob. Most seriously, the Holy Name – the four letters of the Tetragrammaton Y-H-V-H – gets converted into the execrable Jehovah, a word that does not exist in any way, shape, or form in Hebrew. (If you have any friends who use it, immediately strike them about the head and shoulders, and then gently correct their ignorance. And if those friendly missionaries from the Watchtower cult come to your door, you can point out how their translation of the Text is garbage.)

 

Now, where were we before we digressed? Oh, yes! YASAPH in Judges 13!

 

Why the author chooses one word over others which convey similar meanings is one we cannot answer with fixed certainty. But we can speculate here why the Divine Author, blessed be He, chose YASAPH instead of OD or SHANAH.

 

SHANAH means “again”. But it is also the word behind the Hebrew term for the number two: SHENI (שֵׁנִי). Does the Book of Judges tell a story where G-d’s people only do evil twice? Would that connotation be desired here? So SHANAH does not work because Israel are repeat offenders, not just “second offenders”.

 

The other candidate here -- OD (עוֹד) – certainly would work in this verse. In fact, OD is used in Chapter 13 several times to express the idea of “again” (13:8,9, 21). Why use YASAPH here, as well as in every other reference in Judges where Israel again does evil in G-d’s eyes?

 

YASAPH connotes adding, while the other two signify more repetition. Perhaps the author wants the audience to take away the sense of compounding the evil. It is not simply continuing or repeating. Rather, it is adding on – or building upon – the evil that was done by their fathers.

 

There is a metre to this repetition that we are meant to see and consider.

 

YASAPH is used again near the end of the chapter, where the Text informs us: 

 

“When the angel of the LORD did not show himself AGAIN to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realised that it was the angel of the LORD.”

 

Next up in this detour through Judges 13 are “did” and “evil” from verse 1. Understanding these two terms will have enormous significance for your reading of Scripture.

Bible Geek Word Nerd - Jeremiah 3 - The Eyes Have It

Walking through Jeremiah

March 17, 2023 (four-minute read)

 

If you have been paying attention to this page, you know we’ve been snagging words of interest as we read through Jeremiah. There are a lot of words. So six days in, we are just in chapter 3. Slow and steady may win the race, but it also means we will be in Jeremiah for a long time at this pace.

 

“LOOK UP to the barren heights and see. Is there any place where you have not been ravished? By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers, sat like a nomad in the desert. You have defiled the land with your prostitution and wickedness. ”

 

Yesterday, we looked at the idiomatic phrase, “lift up your eyes”, which the NIV translates as “look up.” We discussed NASA, the multi-purpose word behind “lift up”. Today, the eyes have it…the eyes that are lifted up.

 

The Hebrew noun for “eye” is AYIN (עַיִן). It occurs in the Text 887 times. But if you think it’s simple, it’s not. Because this clever little Hebrew word does more than just see stuff. Of course, it does.

 

First, let’s talk about the simple use of the noun. In Genesis 3:5-7, the first time we meet the word, the Serpent is talking to Eve. 

 

“‘For God knows that when you eat from it your EYES will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the EYE, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the EYES of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” 

 

The final time we meet AYIN is in the last prophetic book of your Jewish text, which in the TaNaK is 2 Chronicles 36:5: “Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem for eleven years. He did evil in the EYES of the Lord his God.” Of course, the Christian Bible has a different last book, the prophet Malachi, where we read in 2:17: “You have wearied the Lord with your words. ‘How have we wearied him?’ you ask. By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the EYES of the LORD, and He is pleased with them’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’” 

 

Of course, it would not be Hebrew if a simple noun did not pull double duty in its use. AYIN is also used for “spring” and “fountain”. There are at least two explanations for why this is. The Hebrew word for “spring” is MAYAN (מַעְיָן). In the middle of that word is the word AYIN (עְיָן). The second reason we could perhaps call an aesthetic one. A spring reflects the sky and appears bright like an eye when seen from a distance.

 

 

 

In the Flood account, AYIN is translated as “springs” twice. Here is Genesis 7:11, “ In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the SPRINGS of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” And in 8:2, we read, “Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.” It was by an AYIN in the wilderness where the LORD found Hagar when she fled from Sarah in Genesis 16. And it was by an AYIN that Abraham’s servant meets Isaac’s future wife, Rebekah.

 

AYIN is obviously an extremely important word in the Scripture, both literally and figuratively. But it is also important in Jewish tradition and in subsequent teaching from Jewish sages and mystics. It’s beyond the scope of this page (and your reading appetite) to discuss mysticism, Kabbalah, or Chasidism (all of which attach symbolic importance to AYIN). Instead, let us leave you with the words from our favorite Jewish sage, who taught in the Galilee 2000 years ago. This teaching has puzzled translators and readers alike because it hides a Hebraic idiom that our modern EYES have difficulty understanding (this is called “irony”). From the Gospel of Matthew:

 

“The EYE is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy (GRK: HAPLOUS (ἁπλοῦς) means sound or perfect), your whole body will be full of light. But if your EYES are unhealthy (GRK: PONÉROS (πονηρός) meaning evil or bad), your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Matthew 6:22-23

 

Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount are challenging to translate into English because Greek does not render Hebrew idioms easily or smoothly. Jesus is talking about the widespread Hebrew idiomatic expressions of the AYIN TOVAH and the AYIN HARA: the good eye and the evil eye. In Hebraic thinking, these expressions describe generosity and greed or covetousness. To have a good eye is to be generous toward others. To have an evil eye is to be selfish or covetous toward others. If you are generous, “your whole body will be full of light”. If you are coveting, “your whole body will be full of darkness”. And thus, the Sage from Galilee ends this section with the summary: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God (good eye) and Money (bad eye).”

 

May you have good eyes, serve G-d, and thus be filled with light.

Bible Geek Word Nerd - Jeremiah 3 - Forgive

Walking Through Jeremiah
Jeremiah 3 - Look on Up

March 16, 2023

We have made it to chapter 3 of the prophet’s book. It’s going to be a while. Hopefully, you can take in some of the sights as we pass them by. There’s a lot to take in. Did you know that Jeremiah contains about 33,000 words? That makes it the longest book of the Bible. (Jeffrey Kranz at overviewbible.com has some intriguing factoids if you’re of a mind. Their YouTube channel is also pretty excellent.) We will not explain each of those 33,000 words. But you have to grant that it’s a target-rich environment for interesting words whose understanding has significant implications for understanding G-d’s story. Taking our time will bear fruit.

 

We have done verse 1. If you’re reading along through the prophet, it would be tempting to hurry quickly through the poem that opens chapter 3. But if you hurry, you will miss some sights. What gems lay in plain sight in verse 2?

 

“Look up to the barren heights and see. Is there any place where you have not been ravished? By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers, sat like a nomad in the desert. You have defiled the land with your prostitution and wickedness.”

 

The first verb phrase needs some explaining, if only to give you an insight into how Hebrew expresses itself. Sometimes, our English translations get the sense correct, but lose some of the poetic beauty that is there.

 

“Look up” is actually a pretty good rendering of a common Hebrew idiomatic expression… <hitting the brakes hard> You DO know what an idiom is, right? Familiar English idioms are “raining cats and dogs” or “beat around the bush”. Here’s the dictionary definition: “A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements.”

 

The Hebrew phrase that begins verse two is “lift up your eyes”. In the Hebrew Bible, there is a lot of lifting of eyes, not to mention lifting of voices. 

 

The Hebrew verb behind “to lift” is one of our favorite Hebrew puns, though doubtless an unintentional one. The verb is NASA (נָשָׂא). It means “lift, carry, or take”. The pun comes from thinking about America’s space program, NASA, which “carries and lifts” rockets into space. Okay, not really a great pun. But we wager that you will not forget the verb. 

 

NASA is used 653 times in the Text. But it does not only mean “to lift”. Like many Hebrew words, it works really hard to convey other concepts beside the literal “to lift”. Here are some of them.

 

In Genesis 18, when Abraham is negotiating with the Angel of the LORD, NASA is behind “spare” in verses 24 (also in verse 26): “What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not SPARE the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?”

 

In many places, NASA is used for “forgive” or “pardon”, as in Exodus 23:21, where the Text says, “Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not FORGIVE your rebellion, since my Name is in him.” Here is Micah 7:18, where NASA is used for “pardon”, but a different Hebrew expression for “forgive”: “Who is a God like you, who PARDONS sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy.” Numbers 14:18-19 reads, “The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and FORGIVING sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation. In accordance with your great love, FORGIVE the sin of these people, just as you have PARDONED them from the time they left Egypt until now.”

 

It's probably not too difficult to imagine how a verb that means primarily “to carry” came to also be used for the idea of forgiveness. 

 

When we forgive someone, we lift the burden of the debt they owe us for whatever harm they have done. G-d forgives us by lifting our burden and carrying it away. There are other Hebrew words for “pardon” and “forgive” (e.g., SALACH (סָלַח)). But there is something about the imagery of our Lord lifting away or burden.

 

NASA. Not just for space.

 

Next, we look at eyes.

Bible Geek Word Nerd - Obsessions

 March 16, 2023

The long, slow march through Jeremiah (will continue later)

 

This cozy corner of Facebook started as a way to express our love for the languages of the Bible, Hebrew in particular. At first, we thought about translating some words and writing some devotional thoughts about them, much like Lois Tverberg has done in her excellent “Listening to the Language of the Bible”. Except that is precisely what Tverberg has already done. It would be redundant.

 

It has become apparent, however, that whatever its original intent, this Facebook page has really become more of a harmless, victim-free outlet for our obsessive-compulsive attachment to translating English Text into Hebrew or Greek as we read along. We write these posts to avoid boring innocent family members to tears or death. Knowing that our obsession does not suit all tastes – or even any tastes – we confine our comments to this cozy corner of Facebook. And nobody gets hurt!  Except maybe the writers.

 

 

 

Yes, we realize that at times we appear a little “off”, a bit too obsessive when speaking or when writing these posts, like conspiracy theorists ranting about the Great Reset or UFOs. So in polite company, we bite the tongue. Often, we maintain silence and smile politely when someone mispronounces a Hebrew. And we retreat to this cozy corner to write a post.

 

We will return to the walk through Jeremiah (we are in chapter 3) in just a bit.

Bible Geek Word Nerd - Jeremiah 3 - Prostitutes and Lovers

A long, slow crawl through Jeremiah
Jeremiah 3: Prostitutes, Lovers

March 15, 2023
(four minute read)

 

If finishing something is important to you, let us advise you to move along to a different page. We will not finish. Because the Text is never really finished. You read through a book or a chapter today, and it means one thing. Read it next week, and it means something

different. The proverb has it that you never step into the same river twice. And so it is with Scripture. All that to warn you that we plan to slog through Jeremiah on this page, pausing to reflect on particular words in the Text that catch our interest…and we are only in Chapter 3…at the FIRST VERSE! This is going to take a while. But hopefully, the journey will be worth the read.

“‘If a man DIVORCES his wife and she leaves him and marries another man, should he return to her again? Would not the land be COMPLETELY DEFILED? But you have LIVED AS A PROSTITUTE with many LOVERS – would you now return to me?’ declares the LORD.”

Jeremiah 3:1 (the upper case words give us our words)

 

In yesterday’s post, we looked at DIVORCE (SHALACH (שָׁלַח)) and COMPLETELY DEFILED (CHANEPH (חָנֵף)) in the verse. In today’s post, we will examine PROSTITUTE and LOVERS.

The Hebrew word translated as “lived as a prostitute” is ZANAH (זָנָה). It means “to commit fornication, to be a harlot”. It occurs over 90 times in the Text. Its first appearance is in Genesis 34, when the sons of Jacob defend the honor of their sister, Dinah. Responding to the father, who complained that the family was now obnoxious to their neighbours, Simeon and Levi say:

 

“But they replied, ‘Should he have treated our sister like a PROSTITUTE?’”

Genesis 34:31

 

ZANAH is used both literally for people, as in the verse above, and figuratively for nations, such as the nation of Israel, as in both our verse in question, and in other places, such as this:

 

“Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they PROSTITUTE themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you, and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons, and those daughters PROSTITUTE themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same.”

Exodus 34:15-16

 

The term, interestingly, is used to identify two heroes in Jesus’ genealogy: Tamar (Genesis 38:15,24), the daughter-in-law of Judah, and Rahab (Joshua 2:1, 6:17,22,25), the one who hid the spies.

 

Its final use is in the prophet Nahum, condemning the city of Ninevah, the city of blood and lies (according to the prophet):

 

“Charging cavalry, flashing swords, and glittering spears! Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses – all because of the wanton lust of a prostitute, alluring, the mistress of sorceries, who enslaved nations by her PROSTITUTION and peoples by her witchcraft.”

Nahum 3:3-4

 

Of our two words in question, LOVERS is the more intriguing. Hebrew, like Greek (and really like most languages), has several words that describe affection. The most common word for “love” in the Hebrew Bible is AHEB (אָהַב), with 249 uses as a verb or a noun. DOD (דּוֹד) , meaning “beloved”, “love”, and oddly, “uncle”, appears 61, including many in the Song of Solomon (which should give you an idea of how it’s used). CHABAB (חָבַב) appears once, in Deuteronomy 33:3. RACHAM (רָחַם), which can mean love, is most often translated as compassion. AGAB (עֶגֶב) means sensuous love or lust, and is found only twice (Ezekiel 33:31-32). Finally, YADID (יְדִיד) is used nine times and means “beloved”, such as in Isaiah 5:1.

 

The word in our verse is none of these. Our word behind “lovers” is REA (רֵעַ), which is a fascinating word for all the ways that it is used in the Text. Here is the first of its 186 appearances:

 

“They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar.”

Genesis 11:3

 

Can you guess which word in the verse is from REA? It is “other”. REA means “friend, companion, or fellow”, but as with many other Hebrew words, it also has other meanings.

 

For a religiously observant Jew who knows his Scriptures, however, REA has a singularly important reference point in the TORAH. Let’s turn to an ancient Rabbi, who was asked about the TORAH's greatest commandment (MITSVAH). Here is his answer:

 

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Matthew 22:37-40

 

The two commandments are from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, respectively. There are two things to mention here.

 

First, the Rabbis in Jesus’ day often linked verses that shared common words, particularly at the beginning. These two commandments begin with the Hebrew verb phrase, “you shall love”: WƎ-AHAB-TA (וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥). They caJesus and others linked the verse in Leviticus with the verse in Deuteronmy as the two greatest commandments because of “you shall love”. They call this practice “stringing pearls”.

 

The second thing to mention relates to the second great commandment. The word for “neighbor” in this verse is REA. So when Jeremiah speaks of “many lovers”, he uses a term that will immediately remind his audience of the commandment they would doubtless know quite well. And its use in a pejorative sense would have been arresting. 

 

The Hebrew Scriptures are replete with surprises and confounding images that are (we think) designed to grab your attention, hold it, and make you think about what you are reading. The trick is to slow down and look.