What did Yeshua look like? We don't really know, do we? There's a reason for that.
We all make assumptions that what we say and what we believe are right and valid. But where do these assumptions come from? They’re all from some premise, belief, or idea of reality. The purpose of my next few posts is to make us aware of the difference between thinking biblically, that is to say, thinking like Hebrews rather than Greeks. Our American culture is not just American, but as one historian put it, we are “swimming in a Greek soup” in many ways. You may find as we go on that some of these thoughts can be quite challenging, even to us Bible believing folk. Our church culture and much of our American culture is a product of the bible with its Judean-Christian influences.
The Bible is Not Hebraic!
So then, to say that the bible is Hebraic – both O.T. and N.T. -- is to say it had human authors who were Jewish through and through.[2] It’s not really a Hebrew or a Greek book. But its actual Author is God Himself. In fact, all of Israel’s ancient culture was designed and birthed by God. What He gave to Moses for the nation addressed basically every aspect of their lives to be the one people through whom He would touch the rest of the world. God’s covenant promise to Abraham that he would bless the world through his (Abraham’s) desendents is a huge study in itself in the myriad ways in which that has been a reality even these thousands of years later. God keeps His promises, often despite our weakness and disinclinations. So we begin our study with the premise that it is God Himself who is the Author of the Bible.
So the Bible is not a product of a culture, nor of human inspiration, but of God. That’s why we refer to it as God’s Word. Though God did inspire the Scriptures He didn’t bypass doing it through people in human language that is understood by everyday people He wanted to communicate with. The fact that God chose a particular group of people through which to reveal Himself and His ways does not lessen the truth of divine inspiration. Nor does it lessen the fact that the message is intended for all people of every culture. That said, we would still do well to read the Scriptures through the eyes and understanding, as much as we are able, of ancient Hebrew culture and customs.[3] These ways, you will find, are often in contrast to us as much as they were to the Greeks and Romans around them.
How Hebrews Think
For ancient Greeks, and for us as Americans, our primary emphasis is on how things look, in the form of things. The visual impact is important to us; how we view them in the physical. Appearance often determines how we assess someone – by their appearance. Also how we categorize things, as good or not, valuable or not. Not so the Hebrews. Their focus was on the essence of a thing, on the character of a person, or on the meaning of a thing. The value is placed on the intrinsic meaning, rather than the outward appearance. That assessment would come first, the external later, if at all. Consider that we know much about the character and values and what is meaningful to the Bible characters without knowing a thing about what they looked like. If you had written a bible story, would you have been inclined to introduce them with what they looked like, including Yeshua Himself? The only thing we know about what He looked like is one prophetic prediction of the Messiah, though He was evidently so real to Isaiah that he wrote it in present tense: “He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him” (Isaiah 53:2). No outward appearance to draw us to Him evidently. It was who He was ‘inside,’ not outside that drew thousands of Jewish people to Him.
What is of primary concern is the essence of things. The content came first, then the external form.[4] Let’s look at an example of Noah and his ark. Of course, we have no idea of what Noah looked like but we do know God considered him “a just man.” So what does “just” mean? It has the meaning in Hebrew of righteous but also of being fair, impartial, even handed, objective. And get this – it can also mean non-partisan. Imagine that! The definition I looked up really did say that. So what would that mean? Ponder worthy perhaps. To go on….
What do we really know about the ark? We do know what type of wood Noah used, its dimensions, a window opening was around the top for air circulation, and it had a roof and three levels. But we don’t know what it looked like. There have been many depictions of what men think it looked like, but usually it has a bow, a point on the front. But those points on the front of boats are to cut through water when the vessel is being propelled by oars or a motor. There were none of those on the ark. It wasn’t propelled by anyone but God. The Hebrew portrays it basically as a wooden box. But what about the essence? Is it possible that there is more prophetic meaning to the ark than we have been aware of?
Well, it wasn’t the box itself that kept them from being destroyed in the flood, it was the fact that this box was waterproof. God told Noah to cover it inside and out with a material much like tar. In Hebrew the word for this covering is capar, or capara related to atonement. It is the same word used 69 times in Scripture for the blood of Yeshua that is a capara, a covering, that is the very thing that keeps us from being destroy, we could say, because of our sin. The essence of the whole ark experience was a picture of the righteous being “saved” because of the capar, the covering. I love how God hides Yeshua in the Old Testament Scriptures , and how He becomes visible once we are born again.
What About The Visuals?
God told Israel in the beginning of the Ten Commandments to have no graven – carved or painted – images of Him. No visuals.There is no way any human concept of Him would be the least bit adequate. They would only limit their expectations and concepts of Him and make them physical, not spiritual. This extended to the early Hebrew/Jewish believers having no depictions of Yeshua either. It is not until the 3rd century that Roman believers began to carve images of biblical stories that they begin to appear. These would not include Jewish believers but rather this would be a part of what would cause the Jewish believers to separate away from the "Christians" who had no qualms about doing what God spoke to Israel about specifically.
The fact is, we don’t know what Yeshua looked like. But we know a whole lot about His character, His beliefs, the way He thought, His values, His speech, His absolute obedience to Father-God and His love for and interactions with people. The essence of His inner being is the focus, not His externalities….. His inner content rather than His physical form.
About Solomons’ descriptions
His poetry in the Song of Songs of the woman he loved is a word picture. (7:3). What would you say he’s describing when he says to his beloved, “Your belly is a heap of wheat”? To us that sounds like she’s rather on the chubby side. But to him it would mean she is a woman of fruitfulness, capable of a bountiful harvest in what she does with her life. These are words of her essence and internal character. It may also have expressed his anticipation of her fruitfulness in bearing children. Or He also says, ”Your nose like a tower of Lebanon which looks toward Damascus” (7:4). This is a woman who perceives what is happening in the world, and whose dignity and bearing is that of a woman fit to be a queen. She “towers” over others in comparison. As a Hebrew, he sees her inner values and they are what is important to him before what may be her external beauty.
The Greeks, on the other hand, were about structure and form. Think of their emphasis and focus on sculpture of the human body in seeking to depict its perfection. Consider the gymnasiums in which those perfections were aspired to. Or the buildings which we still often seek to emulate in Greek forms of columns and arcs, etc. The art museum in my home city of Philadelphia is an exact replica of the Parthenon in Rome, which is a copy of the kinds of buildings found in Greece and Rome.[5]
How Much Do We Each Matter?
Hebrews, on the other hand, viewed human history as going somewhere with each person of value in the process. Consider all those names of people listed in the geneologies or the lists of David or Solomon's staff or soldiers. Israel and all who comprised Israel had a definite beginning - in God – and was headed toward a goal, toward the Messianic reign of Israel’s Redeemer, and toward a time when all that is harmful will be no more. Everything had, and still has, meaning. History, and therefore, each life, is moving forward toward a great culmination. Each person is created in God’s likeness, and therefore each person has intrinsic value. The Hebrew’s value of their children, with regard to them becoming the adults to carry on the values of godliness to their own children, and so on, lovingly and carefully raised them to be a part of God’s purposes and plan and values. This paradigm is certainly contrary to Greek practices of infanticide in which it was often decided within ten days whether or not a baby was worth keeping alive or not. If not, it was either thrown off a cliff in Sparta or put in a clay jar in the Athenian temple as an offering to the gods. If not, the child was done away with, sometimes left exposed to the weather without food or liquid to die. If that shocks us, as it should, today we don’t even wait till a baby is born before it is decided the child isn’t worth keeping alive. This has its roots in Greek thinking, certain, not Hebrew.
It's All In The Name
Names also have specific value in the Hebrew culture. To go back to Noah, for instance, most of us are aware his name first and foremost means "comfort." His father named him for the comfort He expected this baby boy would somehow bring freedom from the curse that came upon the earth when Adam sinned. Somehow he had some prophetic sense that this baby would bring a great change to the world they lived in. Well, he got that part right. Looking it up in Hebrew Noah’s name also can mean: Resting place, to stay, to remain or to set down. When all others were taken out of the earth as result of the flood, Noah and his family were the only ones remaining, who stayed on earth, as their ark set down on a resting place. How awesome is that?
The Law of First Mention”
This "law" means when something is first mentioned in the bible, be on the lookout for where it will manifest as God’s way of things as the Bible unfolds. In this case, it is Noah and his family who are the just and righteous who remained on the earth while the unrighteous were taken away, who no longer remained on the earth. It seems from this that the righteous remain on the earth while the unrighteous are taken out. This fits in with “The meek shall inherit the earth” (Matthew ), especially when we consider that the Hebrew understanding of “meek” (a poor translation actually) is indicative of “a faithful remnant.” How, I wonder, does that inform our expectation of a pre-trib rapture? Could this be one of those challenges to thinking like a Hebrew? I wonder.
[1] Some of this introductory information and further articles in our study are taken from Assumptions That Affect Our Lives by Christian Overman, 1996.
[2] There is much thought that all the writers were Jewish with the exception of Luke. I believe Luke may also have been Jewish as there was a high priest at that time whose name was Theophilus. To read my article, “Was Acts Written to Israel’s High Priest?” go to: https://sidroth.org/?s=theophilus&post_type=my_article .
[3] Many of this Biblical values, culture, customs and ways of thinking are still present in today’s Jewish people in Israel and elsewhere in the world.
[4] How much would this emphasis on character rather than outward appearance change what we value today, or the way we evaluate people? Think of what’s on the media. What are our kids’ aspirations based on from what they see valued? Oh, my!
[5] Rome had no real culture of their own in this sense. They were largely about warfare and armies; But capturing Greece, in 146 B.C., they adopted much of their culture and values, not to mention their gods.
[6] It is noteworthy that often it was Christians who would often find the abandoned babies that were left exposed to die and raise them as if they were their own children.
