Bible Review

A baraitha is a rabbinic teaching that was not incorporated in the Mishnah, a component of the Talmud.

Midrashim (singular: midrash) are rabbinic homilies and commentaries on specific books of the Bible.

The Talmud is a collection of Jewish law and teachings, consisting of the Palestinian Talmud (compiled in the fifth century C.E.) and the Babylonian Talmud (compiled in the sixth century C.E.).

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by this author are the alternate designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D. often used in scholarly literature.

A late-second-century B.C.E. translation of the book into Greek adds a number of passages and includes the name of God. Those passages have been incorporated into Catholic versions of the Bible. In Protestant versions of the Bible, they are included in the Apocrypha.

For the sake of illustrating the acrostics, we use here a standard system of letters and diacritical marks that scholars have developed to correspond to the Hebrew letters. However, this system does not tell us exactly how to pronounce the Hebrew words. Therefore, following in parentheses, each phrase is rewritten to enable you to say each word.

In Jewish prayer YHWH is pronounced adonay (my Lord) because the ineffable name of god is too sacred to be uttered. In the days before 70 C.E., when the Temple was standing in Jerusalem, the tetragrammaton was pronounced only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies of the Temple. How he pronounced it, no one knows. See Choon-Leong Seow, “The Ineffable Name of Israel’s God,” BR 07:06.

The first through tenth letters have the values of one through ten respectively; the 11th through 19th letters have the values of 20, 30, etc. through 100; the 20th through 22nd letters have the values of 200, 300 and 400.

A late-second-century B.C.E. translation of the book into Greek adds a number of passages and includes the name of God. Those passages have been incorporated into Catholic versions of the Bible. In Protestant versions of the Bible, they are included in the Apocrypha.