Today we begin Leviticus Chapter 24.
For the Complete Jewish Bible, click here.
For the King James version, click here.
“Adonai said to Moshe…”
-Leviticus 24:1
Leviticus chapter 24 is a hodgepodge that deals with a variety of different rulings and topics.
The first few verses address matters concerning HASHEM’s sanctuary which was the Wilderness Tabernacle but later became the Temple in Jerusalem.
A lot of what we’ll encounter in Leviticus chapter 24 is already material we’ve studied before but there is some new information added for our learning.
What’s interesting to know is that the Rabbis struggled with some of the contents of Leviticus chapter 24.
In a later post, I’m going to show you some areas of disagreement that have led to furious debates.
So right off the bat, from verse 1, we’re told in no uncertain terms that the contents of what we’re about to read is what YHWH is communicating to Moses.
This is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that although most Bibles will say the “Lord” spoke to Moses or “Adonai” spoke to Moses, the original Hebrew here is YHWH or the letters YUD-HEI-VAV-HEI.
Practically every instance in our English Bibles when we come across the word “God”, “Lord”, or “Adonai”, it is safe to replace those words with God’s personal name, YHWH.
Why can I rightly say this?
Because all we’re doing is restoring the text to what it originally was via a process of substitution.
Again, LITERALLY 99% of the time you see the words “Lord” or “God” in your English Bibles, the original Hebrew was
יְהֹוָה
This isn’t conjecture folks.
Nor is it some sneaky reverse engineering.
We’ve got the Masoretic texts in Hebrew dating back to the 800’s A.D.!!!
And we’ve got the Dead Sea Scrolls which consist of most of the OT books and date back to at least the time of the birth of Yeshua and possible a century earlier.
Here’s the thing.
It is very, very, very, very RARE that we will find the Hebrew terms for “God” or “Lord” used in place of יְהֹוָה.
Instead we will see his personal name being used more than 6000 times in the TANACH (Old Testament).
And of course, it is the Lord’s personal name that is used to start off Leviticus chapter 24.
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