In modern Shavuot celebrations, it is customary to stay up late and to study Torah into the morning hours. Why? Many rabbis would say that we follow this custom because when Hashem decided to give Israel the mitzvot (commandments), they were asleep at the foot of Sinai. They were not...
This part of the teaching on the prophets focuses on Trei Asar, "The Scroll of the Twelve." The videos in Part 2 are just over 2 hours long and are broken up into multiple segments covering Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. This is a multi-part seminar...
Has anyone ever complained to you that you are a difficult person? Have you been described as “rough around the edges”? Don’t despair. It just means you are human, and you do not hide it very well. I will tell you, though, that life may throw you around a...
We live in a world full of people who think they know how everything works. The audacity of science and investigative thought is often revealed in claiming to have figured it all out, as mere theories are too often presented as facts. This is sadly true with all human knowledge...
What makes one a prophet? How can their words be validated? How can their calling from above be verified? In this socio-cultural study of ancient Israelite prophets, it would not be proper to only discuss the lives of those who left us books named after them, such as Isaiah, Amos,...
In this segment, the Hebrew Prophets are presented in the context of the broader Near Eastern culture. Israel is not the only people group that has had individuals endeavor to reach out and interact with the supernatural world. Understanding who the prophets were against the broader cultural backdrop of enquiring...
The words of the prophets can only be understood in their context. Only the books of the prophets themselves do not always give much context. Usually, we encounter their oracles without any explanations. To make sense of the world of the biblical prophets, we have to develop a grasp of...
Many Jewish scrolls scribed between 300 BCE and 200 CE can be classified as “apocalyptical” because of their frequent focus on the heavenly scenes, secrets, revelations, and visions of the future. Apocalypse is a Greek word that means “to reveal” or “uncover something hidden.” So, these books contain a good...
Over the years of teaching, I have often referred my students to the books of Enoch. But most of the time, I did so with some reservations. I knew that the broadly distributed copies they would likely come across would be littered with archaic and hard-to-digest language. Finally, between 2023...
