Culture and languages are codependent upon each other. In fact, it's been proven that if you eliminate a culture, you eliminate a language. It's gone. The Hebrew language has somewhat survived all the way to this day because the Hebrew culture has survived. But as soon as the culture is obliterated, so is the language itself.
And no different with Biblical Hebrew. This language is tied to their culture. So by understanding their culture a little better, we can understand their language a little bit better.
What we're going to do is I'm going to start off with one verse tonight. I'm going to take a look at a verse here. This is going to be Isaiah 40, verse 22. It is he who sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to dwell in. Now, you know what, that sounds really nice.
You know, we kind of get an idea of what's going on here. But do we really understand what the author was saying? Especially that last part is the part I'm focusing on here, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain.
Okay, yeah, we can kind of see that. And spreads them like a tent to dwell in. Well...
In order to really understand that, we've got to understand the ancient Hebrew nomad's tent. The nomad's tent was made out of goat hair, spun goat hair, which is black. And it's a very porous material. In fact, there's a lot of pinholes, if you will, in the goat hair.
So if you were sitting inside the tent on a bright, sunny day and looked straight up, you'd see this black tent with all these white pinholes all the way around it. Well, guess what it looks like? It looks like the night sky. It looks like stars in a night sky. So when they walk outside at night, they see the exact same thing that they do inside their tent.
So they saw the night sky as God's tent over his family. So just like the family resides within the tent, his children, God's children, are also residing under God's tent. That's what they saw. That's how they understood that.
Interestingly, if it clouds over and starts to rain, the stars go away, right? You can't see the stars anymore. It's just a black sky.
Well, the same thing happens with the goat hair tent. When it gets wet from the rain, the hair fibers swell, and it seals off all of those pinholes, and the pinholes are gone. So there's really a lot of similarities. By studying the ancient Hebrews'tents, their goat hair tents, it opens up a lot of understanding to the biblical text because it was a foundational part to their scriptures.
or to their culture. Let's take a look at another verse here that just kind of alludes to the ancient Hebrews'nomadic tents. Dark am I, dark like the tents of Kedar, like the tent curtains of Solomon. It's just alluding to the darkness of the tents, the black tents.
By the way, in Israel today and in the Near East, there are the Bedouins who still live in these goat hair tents. They're kind of transitioning now over into canvas. and some other materials, but they still do have the goat hair tents.
By studying their culture, we can actually see the culture of the ancient Hebrews. An interesting thing, when you start looking at some of the individuals in the Bible, we notice that a lot of them were nomads. For example, we have Abraham.
He lived as a nomad. He lived in goat hair tents. Also his son Isaac and his son Jacob.
Moses, for 40 years. David was also a nomad. He was a shepherd and had flocks. By definition, in the desert, you had to be a nomad.
You can't stay in one place. You have to move around for water and green pastures. David was a nomad.
He was a shepherd. He was also a nomad. The prophet Amos.
Now, there's other ways of being a nomad besides being a shepherd. Anybody give me an idea of who the somebody else? Pretty popular figure in the Bible.
Who was a nomad? Not necessarily a shepherd, but he was a nomad. Any ideas? Oh, good. Cain.
Yes. Paul. I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you could say he was a nomad as well.
John the Baptist was a nomad. Who else were nomads? Yeah, that's it.
That's right. Yeshua was another one. He was not necessarily a shepherd, but he was a nomad. He was an itinerant rabbi.
And so he had no home. He traveled from place to place in his ministry. Why is this important?
Is this important? Why am I bringing this up? Well, I'm going to explain something here, and hopefully this will make sense. We're going to take a look at the Hebrew word for God first, and that word is El, and it's spelled with two Hebrew letters, and there's three words that's translated as God. This is one of them.
It's the Aleph and the Laman. The Aleph in the pictographic script, the way it was originally written, is a picture of an ox head. It's ancient Hebrew is written like hieroglyphs, as pictographs. The alas is a picture of an ox head and it represents strength of the ox. That's what this represents, this letter.
And the lamed is a picture of a shepherd's staff. Now the shepherd's staff represented authority. You know, the shepherd would carry his staff and it was a sign of his authority. So when we put these two together, we got the strong authority. And that's exactly what God is.
He's a strong authority. Interestingly, we think of God... as the deity which is sovereign over the universe. And that's true. I'm not arguing that.
That's true. But the word El is a strong one of authority, and that can be applied to God or a God, a false God. It can apply to even men. In fact, the word El is used for Abraham's hand, his hand, just his hand, because his hand is a strong authority. But it can apply to people as much as it can apply to God himself.
So in the biblical Hebrew perspective, an El is anyone with strong authority. Now let's take a look at those two pictographs here real quick. The Aleph is a picture of an ox head, and an ox has what?
Horns. Now the shepherd's staff is the sign of authority. And if we put those two together, that's what ancient rulers used to use to show that they were a leader. The ancient people used to wear horns on their head, and they would carry around a staff, and that showed that they were the king. Now, interestingly, those things have evolved through the ages into modern times, and the modern-day crowns that kings wear with those jagged ends on them, those are actually representations of horns.
And the scepter they carried is a representation of the scepter. staff this gets a little tricky but have you ever heard that the pharaohs were considered gods by the egyptians the caesars they were considered a god and from a biblical perspective that's absolutely true they were gods because l by definition which we translate as gods is a person a strong one of authority and the the egyptian pharaohs the caesars the kings of different nations They are strong ones of authority. They are El.
Now, Abraham was in the city of Ur, or probably on the outside of the city of Ur. He was a shepherd. He was a nomad, so he probably pitched his tent on the outside of the city. But he was still under the control of that nation and their king. So God took him out of that environment and brought him into the wilderness where there was no king.
Why? Because... The El in Ur is the king of Ur, but in the wilderness there is no king, so therefore God could be the El. That's why he brings Abraham out of Ur and he brings Moshe out of Egypt and all of Israel. Because in Egypt, the El there is the Pharaoh.
He's the strong one of authority over them. He had to bring them out into the wilderness in order to be their El. But by understanding... Understanding the word El from a Hebraic perspective, we can better, I believe, better understand what's going on in the Tanakh, in the Bible. Okay, so he brings Abraham out and into the wilderness.
He brings Moses and then Israel out into the wilderness. Abraham, his children, all of Israel. And then Israel also wandered in the wilderness for 40 years.
Why? Because they blew it. They were supposed to go in the promised land, but God said, you know what, you guys don't understand. You guys haven't figured it out yet, so I'm going to make you wander in this wilderness for 40 years so you can learn what it means to have me as El. Because he knew that if you put him in the promised land, they'd go right back to their old ways.
When I was asking about why is it important to be a nomad, Look at our own culture today, the way that we live. We depend upon governments, our cities, and other people for our livelihoods, whether it's getting gasoline, water, groceries, you name it. We depend on other people. If you live in a city or if you depend upon electricity, if that went away, what would you do? What would happen?
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last year, people were starving.