that Abraham said to his young men stay here with the ass the donkey and I the lad will go Yonder and worship and come again to you who's he worshiping here who's he going to go worship god let's take a look at shimode 18:7 Moses went out to meet his father-in-law and did obeisance and kissed him and they asked each other of their welfare and went into the tent both these by the way are from the RSV translation now what this word here what who did he do obeisance to his father-in-law in the Hebrew this is the word Shaka Shaka the Hebrew for this word is Shaka the same word can you worship a man in our Christian teachings you cannot Jewish or Christian teachings you cannot worship a man but here if we're going to take the word Shaka and translate as worship and translate it the same way every time let's do that over here Moses went out to meet his father-in-law and he worshiped and kissed him can you worship a man sure you can Moses did it there's nothing wrong with it it's our Christian or Jewish or modern Western understanding of what worship is that says we cannot worship a man we can only worship God there's nowhere in scripture does it say you cannot worship a man okay it's not there these are the translators changing the rules on you if the word Shaka is being applied to Yahweh or God they'll translate as worship but if it comes to a man they're going to change it and they're going to say no we can't use the word worship we're going to use the word obas what is the word shakar let's take a look at the next slide this is a picture of Shaka do we do this in our culture I don't know I've never seen it myself I've never done it this is very common in the ancient Hebrew and other Semitic cultures this is what Moshe was doing to his father-in-law the word Shaka literally means is to bend down and put your face to the ground to bow down in respect homage to another person so when it says in the text or if you want to worship God literally this is what you should be doing this is Shaka you can do this towards God you can do it towards another man this idea of worship is fabricated within our culture and does not exist within the biblical text there is nowhere in the Bible where it says you only worship God there is a passage that says that you shall only serve God sometimes that's translated as worship God alone but that word AED means to serve okay you should only serve God it's a completely different word what I'm trying to bring out here is that a lot of times our culture has caused us to translate the text differently and we are stuck with a translation that is fixing the text for you to make it so that it's more user friendly