How to Study the Bible III - Greek Old & New Testaments I
Vern Peterman · Mar 20, 2016
How to Study Bible (2016), No. 12
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492653036500

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

from the Greek Old Testament, and you kind of have to wonder, wait a minute, how do we get a Greek Old Testament? It wasn't originally written that way. So here's kind of the quick story. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt in 1446 BC, brought them up to the east of the Jordan River in 1406 BC.

At that time, he presented the contents of most of the Book of Deuteronomy, then handed authority over to Joshua. By that time, Moses had compiled the book of Genesis from earlier sources. Moses wasn't around for Genesis, right? He wasn't around when the world was created, and wasn't around when the flood happened, and wasn't around when Abraham and Jacob and those guys were born. So Moses compiled it from earlier documents. So then he wrote Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. The first part of Exodus is kind of a summary of his earlier life, right? Here's a quick summary of my first 80 years.

What language did he write it in? What we have is Hebrew. And that's probably what he wrote in. However, what he compiled from earlier languages, we don't know. But some of the words and the composition of it is from some of these clay tablets. So when we talk about books, you're talking about a thick piece of clay. And there would be Acadian would be a language that he would have known. Akkadian, Sumerian, some of those earlier languages that were written in cuneiform. They'd have a clay tablet and a stylus and then you'd let the clay dry or even bake it to harden it.

And so that would be the way it would be composed. So we don't know what language the original one was but Akkadian would have been the language that he knew. having been trained up in the House of Pharaoh. Wasn't a lot of those stories handed down verbally? It actually didn't need to be.

In fact, the indications were that they were compiled from things on tablets. that could well go back to a very early time. Considering how long Adam, for instance, was recorded to have lived, could even be from tablets written during his lifetime. So while oral transmission would have been certainly possible, It's also quite possible and even I would say there's some evidence that it was handed down in writing on tablets, on clay tablets, that the tablets would have, you know, this is the history of, these are the generations of, and that kind of thing. And what we find is that kind of identification was written on the edge called Toledoft tags, right? That kind of identification is actually written into the text of Genesis. These are the generations of these, and that kind of thing would be a summary statement that we put on the edge of the tablet. So, at any rate, a quick answer, and we could actually even put more time into it, but we can't.

From the time that Joshua assumed command until about 430 AD when Malachi wrote the last book of the Old Testament, the remaining 34 books, so out of 39, of the Old Testament were written, either as the works of one man or the accumulation of the works of a number of men, such as the Book of Psalms. The Book of Psalms actually has content from Moses. So here's Psalms, and it was compiled mostly up until the Babylonian exile, but even some after that. So it was compiled over a period of about a thousand years. So that's a long time. But it's 150 Psalms, and it's basically, you could summarize it as Israel's national hymn book.

So now as we look at this, All the Old Testament was written in Hebrew except for some parts of Daniel and Ezra that were written in Aramaic. Aramaic ended up being the language that was commonly spoken in Israel during the time of Christ. So both Hebrew and Aramaic would have been understandable to those people.

Then, when Alexander the Great came to Israel in 332 BC, he brought a new form of Greek which was enforced upon the people. He actually invented it. He took earlier versions of Greek, which were very dialectical, as he had variations, and he put them together and made some changes and said, this is what you're going to speak. So here's this guy who started off in his teens in battles, tutored under Aristotle, and he was dead by his early 30s. But in the meantime, he had a huge impact and he enforced Greek upon the people that he conquered. And it was his particular form of Greek.

Subsequently, he moved a large number of Jews from Israel to the new city of Alexandria, which was founded in April 331 BC. Alexandria in the southeast quadrant is the Jewish section. It very well could be that Joseph and Mary and Jesus, when they escaped to Egypt, went there, because that would be a large Jewish group there. The Jews who had moved to Alexandria were learning the new coined Greek quickly, because they had to.

It was enforced. You will speak this kind of Greek. That's it. So that when they moved there, they were losing the ability to read their own scriptures in Hebrew. And then the Aramaic was even a further issue. So heavily enforced was the learning of this new Greek that just completely lost contact with whatever prior language you had. And that's what happened here.

So about 250 BC, translation of the first five books of the Old Testament into Greek was begun. Subsequent portions of the Old Testament were translated in the decades that followed, although the details of how this came about are not clearly known. Unfortunately, a lot of what we have is kind of written in the form of legend and not real clear history in terms of how this came about.

We know it's complex. It came to be known as the Septuagint, that's the Latin for 70, Septuaginta, and the LXX, which are just the Roman numerals for 70. Now, even this is conflicted because supposedly six scholars from each of the tribes of Israel were brought in, and that number comes out to 72, right? But 70 ended up being the number. So at any rate, it's again one of those things where, hmm, the exact detail of how it got translated and how many scholars there were, you know, is foggy. Even sometimes within the same document, the two numbers will be used. So anyway, so people ask about that, there just isn't any real good detail. The Greek Old Testament in its various versions was distributed throughout the Greek-speaking world. In 331, Jews were brought there to Alexandria. About the year 200, One of the empires that came from Alexander's original empire asked the Jews who were in Babylon, Persia area to move to Ephesus and to give them motivation to cooperate with that. They gave them 10 years free of taxes if they would move to Ephesus area.

A number of families took them up on it, thousands. Jewish families. So that area ended up having a minority but significant number of Jews. So you ended up by New Testament times having a cluster of Jews around Ephesus, a cluster of Jews still in Babylon, and a cluster of Jews in Alexandria. So those three areas. So not only would the people in Alexandria be very interested in having a Greek New Testament, But the people up around Ephesus, the Jews around Ephesus would be very interested.

And then the Jews moved from there. OK. What you have here is a diagram on the middle of the front page there. It shows in a kind of a symbolic way, not a specific way, how the different versions of the Greek Old Testament, because there were variations on it, came to be developed from the Hebrew Old Testament text.

And it turns out one of those, the Theodotion, in the lower right there of the diagram, the Theodotion came to be in use around Ephesus. So that one, very interesting, that particular version, the Theodosian version, got quoted in the Old Testament quotes of Ephesians, Revelation, right? Where was Revelation written, in what area? Patmos, written to which churches? And the first one was Ephesus, right? So here you have Ephesians, and then the book of Revelation, and then interestingly, the book of Hebrews. All have markers of that Theodosian version of the Greek Old Testament.

Yeah? Two questions. Apostolic Bible website, is that www.apostolicbible.com? Yeah. Is that what it is? Yeah. And you can download the Greek Old Testament and New Testament for free at that website. And you can also get versions of the Old Testament in Hebrew with Strong's numbers, right? Not there, but you can get them, yes. They are available in various forms. So you can actually make the comparison using Strong's numbers? Yes, that's correct. And that's the key is We have here, let's take it for instance, atop of page 3 here.

So the apostles and their associates who wrote the New Testament in most cases quote the Old Testament directly out of the Greek Old Testament. Where Jesus quotes the Old Testament about 80% of the time it's out of the Greek Old Testament. Yeah, not translated from the Hebrew directly, but specifically out of the Greek Old Testament. Is that because he could reach more people because they were speaking Greek at that time?

That's very likely. It's also possible that that's what the authors of scripture had available to them. So that's where I note that Ephesians, Hebrews, and Revelation quote a version of the Greek Old Testament that is closest to the Theodosian version of the Greek Old Testament, from the chart on the prior page there, in use around Ephesus. Which also tells you Hebrews, since it uses that version around Ephesus, and it uses lots of nautical terms, lots of shipping terms, good chance that Hebrews was written by someone who was operating and two people who were operating in and or around Ephesus.

So Jesus quoted the Septuagint about 80% of the time? About 80% of the time. Most of the time it was from the Hebrew? And other times it was more directly translated from the Hebrew. Let's translate it right now, but 80% of the time it's straight out of the Greek Old Testament.

So, the values of accessing the Greek Old Testament in the form that can be freely downloaded from the Apostolic Bible website is that the entire Greek Old Testament is presented by strongest number, which we had the class that met in the church office.

Basically, you're looking up Strong's numbers from the Complete Word Study of the New Testament. You have other sources to find out what's the Strong's number here. And so this is the Strong's number. Frequently, a lot of your word definition references, including our Complete Word Study of the New Testament dictionary, those indicate Strong's numbers that are available.

So you're able to look things up. Even if a person like those in the class doesn't have the Greek alphabet down, you can still look at the Strong's number and get information about the definition of that word. And you can also compare it then to how that same word is used in the New Testament. So this example is here from Genesis chapter 1. verses 1 through 3 and then part of 4. And so you see they translated it into the Koine Greek.

Now let's think about these translators. These translators, they had no idea because this was before Christianity was around, right? They had no idea what Christianity was about. They didn't have any Christian bias or anything of the sort. And so there are some things that can be discovered about how they understood the Hebrew Old Testament by what words they used to translate. And we'll be taking a look at that in a minute.

So, having the Greek Old Testament and the New Testament in this format, where you have Strong's number, then the Greek, and then an English equivalent, We can see why, in some cases, the authors of the New Testament chose specific Greek words in certain places that were taken directly out of the Greek Old Testament. Sometimes, curiously, why did they pick that word? And so we'll take a look at that. We can see how the translators from Hebrew into Greek understood the Hebrew words that they were translating before there was even the possibility of any Christian influence on the translation. So very interesting.

Next, number three, we can find more contexts for many words in which to better understand the range of use and meaning of a specific Greek word. Often the various references will provide the context specific definitions in the Greek Old Testament. For instance, the complete Word Study of the New Testament would say here is this word and here's how it was used in the Septuagint. And some references will say the LXX. So you'll have that in there. Number four, with the Greek Old Testament arranged in this format, we can see where the authors of the New Testament drew from Greek Old Testament words, word pairs, and phrases. So what we're going to do is take, we have numbers one through four here of ways that we can use the Greek Old Testament, and we'll do an example of each. So let's turn to page three. So here's Hebrews chapter 3 verses 1 through 6.

Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession. He was faithful to him who appointed him, as Moses also was in all his house. For he has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, by just so much as the builder of the house has more honor than the house. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God. Now Moses was faithful in all his house as a servant, as strong as number 2324, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken later. But Christ was faithful as a son over his house, whose house we are if we hold fast our confession and the boast of our hope until the end. So a few questions to ask. How many houses do we have here? Megan, you said it. You said many, alright. How many houses? Ah, ultimately three. Okay, what's one house?

Moses is over his house, which is what? Is Israel, the Jews, right? And then we have Jesus, who is over his house, which is what? The church, whose house we are, right? But there's another house, one more. What is it? God's house. So when we say God's house, that includes both the Jews and the Gentiles, right? So God is managing everything. So here is this term house, and we're seeing that used for Israel, we're seeing it used for the church, and we're seeing it used as an overarching term for everybody.

But, strangely enough, what we have here, the usual words for servant is often doulos, diakonos, or oikotes. That's a household servant. And we give a strong number for each. But this word for servant, therapon, related but not at all equal to our word therapy. But Auden went, wait a minute, thereupon. So a very different definition. The derivation doesn't tell us what the meaning is.

It's only found here in all the New Testament. There is no other place in the whole New Testament that word is used. Thereupon. And so I looked at that, and I thought, that gets my attention. What's going on here that only that word was used when there are other words? more commonly used and more easily, you know, drawn upon, but he chose specifically that one. And I'm wondering, I thought, why that? That's very curious.

So, as we end up looking at, for example, the book of Joshua, the word for servant that is used in Moses in these passages, thereupon, Strong's number 2324 focuses on the voluntary nature of the service, one, and the personal and intensive attention to one who is served. So it's voluntary and it's intensive and a lot of personal attention. So it isn't just some household servant that sort of does things. It looks particularly at a specific person's needs and you just do everything. with devotion.

So it's a very specific word. So the author of Hebrews, a Jew himself, wrote to his fellow Jews using a special word for servant that was used several times of Moses in the Greek Old Testament. And so we see here in the book of, excuse me, we see here in the book of Joshua chapter 1 verse 2. Moses, my attendant, that word. Who's my? Who's speaking? Joshua's writing, but who's speaking? God's speaking, right? So God is saying, through the pen of Joshua, God is saying that Moses attended to me intensively and personally and voluntarily.

So this is not just a usual word for some kind of servant. It's specific to that, and that is the specific word that the author of Hebrews, a Jew, writing to Jews, chose. Setting aside all the other words that are translated servant, he chose that one, because it was a word that was specifically used several times for Moses. It's also used in Exodus 14, 31, Numbers 12, 7, 8, and then in this passage here in Joshua. But it's used specifically of Moses, yeah. So it's only used for Moses, right? It's not only, we can't make that statement, that it's only used for Moses, but it's used several times specifically of Moses.

Okay. Right? Yeah, in other words, if you go through the Greek Old Testament and you download this program and you search for that number, you'll find it in these passages that I've referenced and a few others. Yeah, specifically, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. But specifically, it's used several times for Moses. And that I thought was an interesting thing that the author of Hebrews said, I'm going to use this word because that any knowledgeable Jew will grab onto that and understand that. Above Therapon, there's 2324-1473. What's that? Oh, that's my. That's the next one. 1473 is my. Yeah. My servant.

So then you can do a strong number search for a word that you find in the New Testament and say, where is that used in the Old Testament? I was recently going through something with someone where we were wondering about the use of the word to meet. And it's in the Greek apontosis, but to meet. And so the question was, well, is that a very special word with a special meaning? And then you go through the Greek Old Testament and you find that that word to meet is used for the Philistines met with the Israelites for war, right?

So you find, no, that's not a real specific word. It just means to meet where two people come from different places and they meet up. And it's not a technical term, because you can keep finding it in different contexts. And it's not a technical term for something very specific, but it's used in a lot of different ways.

And that's another way to look at the Greek Old Testament. And so you can use it to kind of fill out your understanding of what did this word mean, and was it a very special technical term, or was it something that was very broadly used. And so it's a good way of testing out your understanding and is this definition correct and that kind of thing. All right, so then the next one, does it really mean virgin?

This has to do with Isaiah 7.14.

Somebody look up Isaiah 7.14 and read it for us. Somebody be willing to do that.

There are some who contend that the Hebrew word Alma in Isaiah 7.14 simply means young woman and not specifically virgin. So the intent of those who say this sometimes is to undermine the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ. So that contention will be made sometimes of people who are skeptical of scripture. people who have no confidence in scripture, and people who say that the virgin birth is not an essential doctrine.

So, somebody have that? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign, the virgin will be with a child and bear a son, and she will call his name in the name of the Lord. Good, good. Alright. So a virgin will bear a son and then those who would say, ah, that's, you know, overstated, The virgin birth of Christ is not essential. We'll say that Alma does not just mean virgin. But a study of the Old Testament, including a study of the Greek Old and New Testaments, helped clarify the matter for us. We'll see shortly that the answer is, does it really mean virgin?

Yes. All right, so let's take a look at page four. This is taken out of a slide set when I was teaching through Isaiah here. Some will claim that Bethula is the Hebrew word that only means virgin. But it can be shown in several contexts that Bethula doesn't only mean virgin as some claim.

Finally, if the word Alma in Isaiah 7.14 does not mean in context virgin, then Isaiah 7.14 is no sign at all. How does a young woman will bear a son serve as a sign.

Then the next here we have Isaiah 7.14-16 and then we have noted there a virgin there's a definite article indicated in the Hebrew and it is present in the Greek of the Old Testament in Matthew and in Matthew 1.22 so the virgin not a virgin so that actually New King James and NIV have that correct and the New American Standard and the King James do not. Yes?

I think the man's name was that he was talking to when he said that prophecy. Right. But the reaction that he got from that man definitely meant something more than just a young woman. Yes. Yes. To say a young woman will bear sons like Okay, what's so special about that, right? Who was it, Ram or somebody that he was talking to, the leader of some big country, right? Well, he was talking to Ahab, that's what he... Yeah, okay, that's okay.

So, when we look at it, the Hebrew word translated virgin, Alma, can have a broader meaning like maiden, which only implies virginity. But, in the Old Testament, Alma always means an unmarried woman. Genesis 24 gives the account of finding Rebekah a suitable wife for Isaac.

In Genesis 24.16 it said no man had had relations with her.

And in Genesis 24.43 Rebekah is referred to as an Alma. So by the very definition in that same chapter it would indicate that she was a virgin.

In Genesis 3.15, the Lord tells the outcome of the serpent's temptation and yet the hope of the Savior. Her seed, he shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel. The prophecy was for her seed, thus no human father, which indicates that the Savior would be born of a virgin.

Back in Isaiah 7.14, did Jews before the time of Christ view Alma as virgin? So this is a good test because in the Greek Old Testament, it was translated by Jews who had no idea Christianity was coming. So how did they see that word?

Very good test. So here's the Strong's number, and then the Greek words, and then the English words. and behold the virgin, okay? And virgin is 3933. And you can see the larger quote down right below at the bottom of the page there. You can see it for yourself.

So Matthew 1.22.23 quotes Isaiah 7.14 from the Greek Old Testament and clearly conveys in context that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin until after Jesus was born.

So the words translated, Behold the Virgin, in Matthew 1.22-23 are identical to those in the Greek Old Testament of Isaiah 7.14. And here again, when the authors wrote, did they translate or did they just quote the Greek Old Testament as they had it? And 80% of the time, they just took it straight out of the Greek Old Testament.

So Parthenos means virgin in both Matthew 1.25 and Luke 1.34.

Because remember, Gabriel told Mary, you're going to be pregnant with the Holy Spirit, and you're going to have a son, and he shall be, and she's going, how can this be, Gabriel, because I'm a Parthenos? Exact same word that they chose here, as the translator were choosing it, before Christianity even existed. So Alma may not mean virgin, but Parthenos does. Alma in the Old Testament context does mean virgin, in every context where we find it. And that doesn't mean that outside of that we won't find it with some other usage, but in the Bible it always means virgin. we find that Parthenos is what they translated, and that's the word that Mary used when Gabriel said, you're going to bear a son. And she's thinking, how can this be? I'm a virgin. And Parthenos is the word that's used there for Mary's puzzlement. And it's the exact same word that the Jewish translators used a couple centuries before. who had no idea Christianity was coming.

So the clear indication from studying and chasing out both the Hebrew and the Greek Old Testament, and taking that into the New Testament, is consistent. Both the Old and New Testaments indicate that a virgin will bear a son, and that virgin's name was Mary, we find out in the New Testament. which she herself said, I'm a virgin, how am I going to be pregnant, right?

That makes you think about when Peter was talking about the inspiration in writing the scriptures, this is pretty specific, I mean this just isn't an idea that they put on paper, this is the words, the proper words. must have been pretty strong, pretty specific. Yes, and specific. And I think one of the things we look at, what did God inspire in terms of what was the original writing of the Old Testament? It was in Hebrew except for a couple places where it's in Aramaic. So that's what's inspired.

Still we can get, as we point out here, at least four different kinds of insights from the Greek Old Testament. including understanding how did those Jewish translators who were translating from Hebrew into Greek, how did they understand that word Alma and that context before having any Christian influence at all?

And they understood it as Parthenos, and it's a word specific enough that Mary says, how can it be that I'm going to have a child? I'm a Parthenos, I'm a virgin. obedient they were, because even though it didn't make sense, they went ahead and translated it that way. Yeah, yeah. So that's another insight that's to be gained by, in other words, the Hebrew, when you study it out, it says, yes, it's virgin, but then the Greek Old Testament confirms it. And we compare that right with the New Testament.

It's that word parthenos is the exact word that Mary used with Gabriel. How am I going to have a child? I'm a virgin. And she had gotten engaged to Joseph, but what was the Jewish tradition regarding that engagement period? You don't have physical relations while you're engaged. You do that only when you're married.

Okay, so let's take a look at page 5. He made him to be sin for us. Now, a lot of people look at that and think, hmm, how do I understand that? So Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers have 99 references to a sin offering as part of the temple rituals in the Law of Moses. How did that get translated into Greek? And what we discover in Exodus 29, 14, He says, and he's describing the sacrifice, but the meat of the calf and the skin and the dung you shall incinerate with fire outside the camp, right? And then an offering on account of sin for us gets translated as what?

One word. A sin offering, okay, a sin offering gets translated as one word, Just one word, that's it. I thought harmonica was the word for sin. It is! But the translators just put, for sin offering, they just put that word there. Ah, ding! And did they do it just once? No, they did it repeatedly.

Here's Exodus 29-36. here, and in that one it says, and the young calf, the one of the sin offering, you shall offer in the day of the cleansing, and you shall cleanse the altar in your sanctifying upon it, and you shall anoint it so as to sanctify it. Again, sin offering gets translated with what? One word, sin, hamartia, that's it. So, what we find here, if we take that understanding, what is otherwise a puzzling translation, he made him to be sin for us, oh wait a minute, I thought he was the perfect one who took on our sins, but then I look at it, that would make, if I took that pattern where it's 99 times the Greek Old Testament, That would make this, he made him who knew no sin to be a sin offering on our behalf.

Ding! Oh, that makes a lot more sense. And I don't have to sit there and struggle. How do I make sense out of this? Right? That's how they translate it with just one word. And so when we look at passages like this, is that what they're doing? And it's not just once or twice, it's 99 times. So that's something you look at and say, that helps a lot. So are you saying that just about every place in the Hebrew or the Old Testament, the word atonement was translated armarchia in the Septuagint?

What I'm saying is, if you find a passage that you look at and you say, hmm, that's a little hard to explain. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf? And that's kind of, hmm, how do I explain that? And then when I look at this pattern, I say, well, that's a place, if I understand it to be, He made Him who knew no sin to be a sin offering, all of a sudden the lights come on.

Oh, that makes a lot more sense, right? And so the sin offering definition, if you're looking at it, you say, okay, which one, how do I, carry that across. How do I interpret it? How do I translate it? This is a passage that makes a lot more sense if I take it as a sin offering.

I mean, that's why Jesus used the Septuagint 80% of the time. Yeah, in other words, it would be something that people would understand and relate to, and they'd look carefully at patterns like this. And 99 times, you're not going to miss that. That's not just like it shows up a time or two. This is a bunch, and that's just 99 times in those three books. Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. And each case you look at it, it's a sin offering. No exceptions.

So that if I look in the New Testament and I find something a bit puzzling, I can then say, oh, I wonder if this is intended to convey sin offering and then that makes a lot more sense of the verse. And it's also hard to explain that here is the sinless one who is now suddenly to be sinned, right? But to have him as a sin offering, now all of a sudden makes lots of sense.

And by the way, here's the Apostle Paul, and what's his background? Before he became a Christian, by the interaction and intervention of the Lord, he was a Pharisee. And he would have read this stuff, you know, a whole bunch, and 99 times, three books, that's a bunch.

They would have used both because by New Testament times it was getting worked in even to the point where the gospel authors quoting Jesus in the New Testament and the Gospels in Israel, right? Because Jesus with minor exceptions operated only in Israel among the Jews.

So they were scrolls of both Hebrew and Hebrew? Yep, and they would have both, and specifically this kind of word pattern. So when Paul was in prison that one time, and I can't remember where, maybe the Philippines, but he was saying, have, I think it was Mark, bring my cloak and my books or scrolls. My parchment, yeah. So that would have been, what do you think that was? Do you think that was the Greek or the Hebrew?

Here's an interesting thing, he might have wanted both, but when he wrote to other people who spoke Greek, like for example, Ephesians, that quotes the Greek Old Testament. So he would have used that, that's what they would have used throughout much of the Roman world, Greek was kind of the standard language of commerce, and people would know that.

And if you brought somebody, for example, in Thessalonica, something in Hebrew, questionable whether they'd be able to read it. But if you quoted something out of the Greek Old Testament, they say, yep, that's the word. Yeah, oh yeah, they'd get down and they'd see, just like we saw with that word therapon used with Moses. The author of Hebrews didn't just use the word doulos or oikathos or some other equivalent word for servant.

He picked that one word and it's only used there in the whole New Testament. Paul just took a big step up in my mind by memorizing both the Hebrew and the Greek. Think about it, Paul's background, he would have known Hebrew and Greek and probably Aramaic and Latin. Those would have been within Paul's range is Latin and Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic. Pretty certain that he knew those well. What kind of percentages of people could read? Could read? It varied is the first answer. There was a high degree of literacy among the Jews.

In various other places you'd have different answers depending on different cultures. In some places where you're just, it's very, you know, If you're a slave and you're reading doesn't have anything to do with anything, you're probably not going to, and born a slave, you're probably not going to get reading training. They're just going to say it's not worth it. So the answer is it varies.

And that's another thing. that the men would be more likely to read than the women. If it was more rural agricultural, there would be a general tendency to have less reading ability. So anyway, quick answer is it varies. In general, among the Jews, literacy rates were higher.

There's an example of the eunuch that was on that or whatever, when Stephen spoke to Ian. Well, he recited something to Stephen and then Stephen explained it to him, right? Or Philip, yeah. So, obviously, he could either read or otherwise he had heard this and remembered it. So I think maybe a lot of what happened at that time was what he had said earlier, which is memorization.

We've got one more and then we'll call it here. We're just about running out of time. So the next one we have on the last page is Paul and Peter quoting Genesis, Psalms, and Daniel. So 2 Corinthians 1.3, Ephesians 1.3, and 1 Peter 1.3 begin with, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That one in Ephesians is, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. So that was just the New Testament language. Was that just the New Testament language of the apostles, or is that something that draws from the Old Testament?

So what we find, and this is not the only instance, Genesis 14.20, Psalm 66.20, Psalm 68.35, and Daniel 3.28 all have the exact same reconstruction as 2 Corinthians 1.3, Ephesians 1.3, and 1 Peter 1.3, blessed be the God. The exact same construction.

You see it there in Genesis 14.20 that we give as an example. And blessed be the God, the highest who delivered up, etc. So it's the exact same Greek words. So this is a pattern out of the Old Testament that both Paul and Peter grew from when they began writing. So they grew from the Old Testament.

One of the things we'll take a look at next week While we're speaking of Ephesians and Daniel, Ephesians chapters 1 through 3 have many, and I mean a lot, of words and phrases identical to or similar to the Greek Old Testament of Daniel chapters 2, 3, and 10. So we'll take a look at that next Sunday. It is astounding how much of Ephesians and Daniel The verbs and even words and even whole phrases are just drawn upon right there.

And you don't immediately see it in the English. There's one other secret we're going to be looking at, and that is, and you'll never see it in the English translations, I haven't found one yet that does, is THE Christ, which is specifically THE Messiah, right? Caiaphas asks, when he's interrogating Jesus, he says, are you the Christ? And what does he mean? Are you the Messiah? Right? 23 times in Ephesians.

23. 23 times in Ephesians. So we'll be taking a look at that, because when you look at that and you translate it, the Messiah, it jumps out at you. It is amazing. So from the first chapter, verse 10, where it starts, into chapter 6. The Messiah. The Messiah. The Messiah.

We won't look at it next week, but we'll look at it subsequently. There's a reason why he did that. And we'll see why as we continue our study through how to study the Bible. But it is amazing when you start to look at that. It jumps out at you and if you translate it, D-Messiah. Boom! It is astounding.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Synagogues, I guess, have their own copy of the entire Old Testament. So let's think about this. How much room would it take to store something? Okay, so what you would have is a synagogue ruler, right? And he would essentially be the dictator. But they had a set of traditions that all the synagogues operated by. That synagogue ruler would have an appointed person who was in charge of the scrolls.

One reason is just out of respect for the scrolls. The other thing is they're very expensive. Imagine what it takes if you have scrolls made of sheep or goat skin. And I'm going to take those of Isaiah, which has, in our breakdown, 66 chapters. The eunuch that got the Isaiah scroll only had the Isaiah scroll probably, and he paid an arm and a leg for it. So you ask the question, would the synagogues have the scrolls?

They would work towards accumulating all of them, but they were pricey. So if you had just established a synagogue, and that required 10 men, 10 adult Jewish males, if you just established a synagogue, you might not have all the scrolls right away, but you would buy them as soon as you could afford them.

In the Greek-speaking world, you'd go with the Greek Old Testament versus the Hebrew. And here's why. The places outside of Israel where you had Jews, that actually numbered two-thirds of the Jews lived outside of Israel by New Testament times. And a lot of those were in Greek-speaking realms.

And so you didn't have, for example, a synagogue in Philippi, but you had one in Thessalonica. And so where you would establish a synagogue, you would try to accumulate those, but they were pricey, expensive, but you would have Greek-speaking, God-fearing Gentiles and Cornelius in the Acts chapter 10, that Peter went to, was a God-fearing Gentile. Luke, from all the evidence we have, was a God-fearing Gentile. And so the Gospel of Luke was written to God-fearing Gentiles. And they would sit in the back, but be allowed to hear, and of course if you read Hebrew, they would have no idea what you're saying. so that the scriptures would often, outside of Israel, often be read out of the Greek Old Testament.

So how much room did you need to store? Well, it would take quite a bit. Think of it, you know, an Isaiah scroll, you're looking at something like this, right? And so by the time you look at the whole, you know, okay, 39 books of the Old Testament, that's a lot of space. And so you'd have a dedicated space for those scrolls. And you'd have one person who's personally charged with the care and safety of those, and he would be the one to bring it out to whoever's reading. And they had specific traditions that they would follow. But if you had them all, it would take up quite a bit of space. Like I said, Isaiah's scroll would be about like this. So by the time you get the whole Old Testament, you've got quite a collection of scrolls, and very expensive. And very expensive.

Okay, let's pray, because we've got people pressing their noses up against the door, so to speak. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the very valuable and special insights that we can get out of the Greek Old Testament. We thank you for that, and as we move ahead in the next couple of weeks, we look forward to other insights that we're going to gain from looking at the Greek Old Testament and the New Testament. So we give you thanks for that, and we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.