"Hearing Distant Echoes" by Pinchas Shir
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"Hearing Distant Echoes" by Pinchas Shir

This book captures many ancient voices, a collection of literary excerpts from ancient Jewish books: Jubilees, Josephus, 4 Ezra, Qumran Scrolls, Talmud, Enoch, Baruch, Maccabees, Mishna, Judith, Apocalypse of Moses, Philo, Mishna, Ben Sira, and many others, fifty passages to be exact. The excerpts are mostly short, sometimes even intentionally

You Are God's Temple: 1 Corinthians 3:16
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You Are God's Temple: 1 Corinthians 3:16

Apostle Paul was a first-century religious Jew, trained at the feet of the best rabbis of his time. Though he addresses primarily non-Jewish audiences, Shaul often writes as a rabbi, resorting to midrash and employing metaphors to illustrate his ideas. Sadly, his readers are not used to this

A Morning Prayer: May Your Will Always Be...
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A Morning Prayer: May Your Will Always Be...

I wanted to share with you a Morning Prayer and, more specifically, a musical piece I created based on it. The words of this song are inspired by the words of the traditional morning blessings found in the Siddur (Jewish Prayer Book). The person who is praying in the early

The Sign of Jonah and Something Greater (~3hrs)
>Seminars

The Sign of Jonah and Something Greater (~3hrs)

What is this Sign of Jonah? The traditional thinking is that it's Jesus' resurrection, three days and three nights... But the passage may not be so simple as it appears on the surface. Interested in taking a closer look and discovering another way to read the text?

Study the Three Visions of Enoch!
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Study the Three Visions of Enoch!

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,

The Best Hebrew-English Bibles 2: JPS Tanakh

The JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Student Edtion) features the traditional Masoretic Hebrew text (Biblia Hebraic Stuttgartensia) and the Jewish Publication Society’s renowned English translation. The Jewish Publication Society English translation is widely read in American Jewish congregations, a result

Pinchas Shir

Psalm 119:29 - Teach Me Your Law

If you love to read the book of Psalms, then you are aware of how often it mentions God’s law. When reading Psalms in English, people do not realize what Hebrew words lay behind the English translations.  Consequently, the

Pinchas Shir /Video

Name at The Bottom of the Sea

In 2016 during an underwater excavation in the Mediterranean Sea, Israeli archaeologists from Haifa University uncovered a large stone with an ancient inscription. The writing was determined to be roughly 1900 years old and bore the name of mostly unknown

Pinchas Shir /Articles