Dr. Brown Answers Your Hebrew Questions

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. We're going to dig into the Hebrew language today on the Line of Fire. It's time for the Line of Fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on the Line of Fire. And now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us on Thoroughly Jewish Thursday on the Line of Fire.

This is Michael Brown. I will not be taking your calls today because I am with family at our granddaughter Eliana's graduation at Liberty University today. So proud of her, our oldest grandchild and just doing great.

University may be going on for masters as well. But I have solicited questions already, so don't post them now. I've solicited questions already on our Facebook page. If you don't follow us there, it's AskDrBrown, A-S-K-D-R Brown on Facebook.

I've also solicited questions on Twitter. So my Twitter handle is at D-R-M-I-C-L-L Brown. So like Dr. D-R-M-I-C-L-L Brown. But there are two Ls in the middle, Michael and then the L. All right, so first let me tell you how I got into Hebrew language study. You say, well, that's obvious, you're Jewish, right? But I was not a religious Jew. So I went to Hebrew school for a few years, but it was superficial. It was after regular school, a couple days a week, a few of us would go, we'd finish school, walk over to the synagogue, do the classes and then walk home, maybe a half mile home.

And that was it. So we learned a little Jewish history. We learned to speak very, very, very little Hebrew. And we learned to read the letters and pronounce them and, you know, very, very small amount of vocabulary. And what happened was for my Bar Mitzvah, I had to chant a portion of the Hebrew Bible. So there are certain accents that come in later in the textual transmission history. So I had to learn to chant a certain portion of Hebrew.

So the rabbi would work with me on it and learn to chant it. I never even knew what I was reading. I don't remember at any point anyone telling me, oh, check this out.

This is the English for it. This is what the passage is about. I didn't think of asking because it was kind of the rite of passage where you had to learn this, chant it, read it, right? And that's just the thing you went through. I honestly don't remember the rabbi ever telling me this is what the passage was about.

If he did, I certainly don't remember hearing it. I never remember wondering, oh, I should really study this and learn what it's about. It's just you had to do this, right? So that was it.

That was as far as it went. So now, the year after that, I'm in my days of rebellion. I'm getting high.

I'm going to rock concerts, playing drums in a rock band, et cetera. So no connection to Hebrew or anything like that, right? Then I get radically saved a couple years later, end of 1971. So now I'm on fire for the Lord.

My life has changed. My dad said, okay, Michael, it's great you're off drugs, but we're Jews. We don't believe in this, right? It's great you're off drugs, but we're Jews.

We don't believe in this. So he meets, he brings me to meet with the local rabbi. And we've got a new rabbi in the synagogue since the one that was there when I was bar mitzvahed. And he's fresh out of Jewish Theological Seminary, brilliant young man. I'm 16.

He's 27 probably at that point. Takes a real interest in me, but begins to challenge me. I could quote verses to him. I'm just learning to read the English Bible now little by little and talking to him. And he goes, oh, no, this is not the right translation. The New Testament gets it wrong. I'm not explaining things. He goes, you don't even know Hebrew.

I said, well, in the meantime, because I was now learning certain references, I said, in the meantime, I can use the dictionary in the back of Strong's Concordance. He goes, meantime, shmeentime, if you don't know Hebrew, it doesn't mean anything. So once I started college, I thought, you know, I should take Hebrew. I think I need to know this in order to be able to answer the rabbis, because I just want to follow the truth.

Right? I know Jesus has changed my life, but they're raising strong challenges, because at this point I had met with quite a few different rabbis. And, you know, they'd all take out the Hebrew Bible. I remember meeting with rabbis. I'd been in the Lord almost two years. I'd read through the Bible cover to cover five times at that point. I'd memorized probably 4,000 verses. I had a streak of over six months of memorizing 20 verses a day, without fail, every single day.

And they were staying, they stayed with me. And I'm sitting there quoting verses to them, and they're taking out the Hebrew. It's like, can you read? It's like, no, I don't. I remember some of the letters.

I feel like a little child now, like a little school child with the teachers. So I said, okay, I should start studying Hebrew. But in college, where I started, they only had modern Hebrew. So I started taking modern Hebrew classes, but I had no interest in modern Hebrew. I wanted to learn biblical. So I asked the rabbi what was a good book.

He recommended a book. It's very technical, actually, but it's Thomas Landon's grammar of biblical Hebrew. So I taught myself Hebrew out of that while taking modern Hebrew classes. But I was so uninterested in modern Hebrew that to this day I've suffered from it, that I don't speak Hebrew well at all. Now, after two years in college, I switched over and became a Hebrew major, and all my classes that were taught in Hebrew, and I always had to really strain to hear and understand better, and my speaking was never that good. But that's how I got into Hebrew, and then the more I studied it, the more I realized this was something I really wanted to pursue, ultimately getting a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University. So I asked for questions today just on Hebrew. And those who didn't know my story, I thought you'd appreciate hearing it. All right, so Dakota asks this. Your thoughts on Yeshua speaking Aramaic versus Hebrew.

Sorry if you've answered it before. To me, it just seems like Hebrew being one of the top-preserved languages throughout history seems like Hebrew would have been his first language. So if we're trying to dive into more understanding of the intent of Gospel writers, is it permissible to look up the potential Hebrew translation instead of the Greek?

Example, blessed are the pure and hard. Is it okay to supply ashrei instead of makarius? Okay, so ashrei would be Hebrew for truly happy, blessed, and makarius is the Greek. All right, number one, it is most likely that the household language that Jesus Yeshua grew up with was Aramaic, not Hebrew.

That is the most likely. Now, there is debate among scholars, so this is my own view, my own understanding, that the household language that he would have grown up with was Aramaic, that that would have been colloquial, that that would have been commonly spoken in Galilee in particular. Now, for many years, there were scholars who believed that Hebrew had died as a spoken language. It was still used as a literary language, it was still used in religious writings and things like that, but the argument was that it had been displaced by Aramaic by the time of Jesus. And in recent decades, a good number of decades now, there's been a real pushback against it to say, no, Hebrew was used much more. It was not just used as the shana kodesh, the holy language, the holy tongue. It was not just used for those purposes. It was not even just used for literary purposes, but it was still spoken. So there's been a pushback. Many Israeli scholars have argued for that as well.

It became popularized through different books, some of which went too far. My own view, all right, just giving you my own view without getting into a super technical discussion, is that Yeshua's first language would have been Aramaic, that that would have been the colloquial language, but that he certainly knew Hebrew to read from the Hebrew Scriptures and could have spoken Hebrew as well. And perhaps, this is speculation, perhaps in some of the debates with religious leaders in Jerusalem, they would have been conducted in Hebrew. Now again, there are all kinds of arguments for, no, it was all Aramaic, others saying no, it was all Hebrew, not getting into those distances.

That's my own view, my own understanding as I have studied things in a good amount of depth. All right, so in his initial teaching though, for sure, he wasn't going around teaching in Greek. When he spoke in the Sermon on the Mount, he wasn't speaking in Greek. So in my mind, most likely Aramaic, but possibly Hebrew. So is it right to go back to the Hebrew concept there? Yes, ashrei means truly blessed. It means truly happy. It does not mean blessed, which is baruch in Hebrew, in other words, blessed by God, but blessed. Truly blessed, truly happy would be the way to say it in Hebrew. But that's the same that the Aramaic would mean, and it's actually the same as what Makarios means.

In other words, Makarios does not mean blessed by God, but being in a truly blessed state of contentment, joy. That's what it's referring to. So the concepts are the same. You just have to be careful to not try to reconstruct things where now you rewrite the Greek New Testament based on an original Hebrew or an original Aramaic. That's dangerous. That's pure speculation.

All right? God has preserved the New Testament for us in Greek. If any part goes back to a Hebrew original, that is not what we have in our possession today, or an Aramaic original.

All right, this is from Benny Benay Alishakov. The significance of the Hebrew letters is the holy tongue, the three mother letters, seven doubles, 12 elementals, and the five final forms. Why, it's a script from above full of divine secrets and not just a historical God book. And please do incorporate the holy book of Zohar, Radiance, and the commentary on the live event, meaning now that I'm speaking to you. Blessings, Shalom, may all the glory be ascribed to Hashem, which is the traditional Jewish way or Orthodox Jewish way of saying God. Okay, I disagree with that.

Sorry to disappoint you. I do not believe that there are mystical meanings in the Hebrew letters. I believe that when later mystics or rabbis read mystical meanings into the letters, they are reading something in that was not originally there. It was originally simply a script.

Some argue it began with the Israelites and can be even traced back to Egypt, but most scholars would say it began with the Phoenicians. It is simply an alphabet. It has no more mystical meanings in the letters than the Greek letters have mystical meanings or our English letters have mystical meanings.

And we really get misled into that. Why are there final forms? Why is there one form for capital A in English and one form for small a? Why is it that when a B is written in cursive, it's joined to a C a certain way?

You know, why? Because that's just writing styles, okay? Why do certain letters have a different form if the beginning of the word capitalized in a name, right? So the name Adam, capital A at the beginning, right? Because you capitalize the first letter. In Hebrew, you don't have caps.

So you just have different forms. There are not mystical meanings. You say, oh, but it's so rich when you read them in. That's the problem. You're reading them in. You're reading them in. And I could show you word after word after word after word after word where there is clearly no meaning. You try to read the things in. It doesn't work.

You say, oh, yeah, but every so often it works. That's not the way God communicates truth. It's like saying, yeah, there's 10 buckets of poison here, but one has some antidote for, you know, an anti-venom in it.

Well, you don't drink the poison to try to find the anti-venom. So the same way God does not hide stuff that it's like one in fifty or one in a hundred has meaning and all the others don't. No, so they're letters. What is meaning is the words. The meaning is the words. That's what has meaning. Let's see here.

Okay. Yahweh, YHWH. I know it means Lord, but is there a deeper meaning to it in context? And as people, we sing his name in songs, but do we really understand who Yahweh is? So Yahweh does not mean Lord. Yahweh is the personal name of God pronounced in centuries past Jehovah based on what I would say is a misunderstanding of the Hebrew. Most scholars today would say Yahweh, but even without debating that, it fundamentally means either he is who he is or he is the one who brings things into existence or he is the one who causes things to be. That would be the meaning of the name.

Some would break it down and he was, he is, he is to come, but I believe that's more of a homiletical breakdown than a grammatical breakdown. So it is his covenantal name and it speaks of who he is. Look in the context in Exodus 3 where based on that name, he says, I will do this, I will do this, I will do this. It is the covenantal revelation of who he is. If you want to get a covenantal revelation of where he gives his name, speaks it twice to Moses, and then what follows is his nature, you'll find that in Exodus, the 34th chapter.

Alright, we'll be right back with more of your Hebrew language questions on 30 Jewish Thursday. Check out the special ad from our co-sponsor, Travita. This is Michael Ellis and founder and CEO of Travita Wellness. I'm thrilled to join with you as listeners and donors in supporting Dr. Brown and the Line of Fire broadcast. Truly a voice of moral sanity and spiritual clarity. I believe this voice must be heard across America.

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Get on the line of fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back to Thoroughly Jewish Thursday.

Michael Brown delighted with you. Taking questions that have been posted on Hebrew language. Yeah.

So I'm just going to dive into these, going back to Twitter. RJ, do you think chesed is the equivalent of grace, so charis, in the New Testament? They're very similar concepts. Charis also has to do with empowerment, enduement, so someone can be filled with charis and power, with grace and power. When God's grace is made perfect in our weakness, it doesn't mean His unmerited favor, it means His empowerment is made, God's power and grace are made manifest through us. But in terms of the mercy of God, the kindness of God, the covenantal love of God, which is conveyed in chesed, yes, that does tie in a lot with charis. There's not an exact, one exact word that explains chesed in English. Some translate loving kindness or covenantal love. There's not an exact equivalent in Greek either, but there's certainly overlap between those. I see selah listed, does that mean what does selah mean?

We don't know for sure. Selah. It could be calling for a pause, it could be a grammatical notation or a musical notation, we do not know for sure. Let me just say this, don't base your whole ministry on your understanding of the Hebrew word selah. Don't become famous for the one who teaches on this, we simply do not know for sure. Those who think it means some type of pause for reflection, that may be a common view and it could well be true, we just don't know for sure. Dwayne, hello brother, are you familiar with the ancient Hebrew pictographs? There are several articles about the ancient Hebrew pictographs showing that when God spoke to Moses in Exodus 3, 13 through 15, gave him his name, that if you research his name at the pictographs, you'd find that it means behold the hand, behold the nail.

This obviously would be alluding to Jesus on the cross, draws an interesting interaction when you read John 20, 25 to 27, with Jesus' interaction with doubting Thomas. My questions would be, do the pictographs have validity and are familiar with the correlation between it and the verses that I post it? What are your thoughts? Yeah, not true. Absolutely, categorically, not true. You have no idea the amount of hatred that comes our way for simply saying what any Hebrew scholar or Semitic scholar on the planet knows.

Not true. There are not hidden pictographic meanings in the Hebrew alphabet, and there were not hidden pictographic meanings in the Hebrew alphabet when scripture was written, and the vast majority of words you will not find some amazing pictographic meaning if you try to trace it back. For those that want to watch this in depth, an in-depth study, I took a lot of time to prepare it, but it's like I touched somebody's sacred cow.

It's like I poked somebody in the eye. People call me heretic and of the devil, simply for saying what any Hebrew scholar on the planet would say. Dr. Michael Heiser echoed my comments when I addressed these things.

But on the Ask Dr. Brown Ministries app, if you don't have it, download it, ASKDR Brown, that's one word, Ministries, Ask Dr. Brown Ministries. Just search for a paleo. All right, paleo. Paleo is not a Hebrew language. It's a form of writing. Paleo Hebrew just means the old way of writing Hebrew. Okay, it's not a different dialect. It's not, oh, I speak paleo Hebrew.

There's no such thing as speaking paleo Hebrew. Paleo is the type of script. It's the old script.

That's all it means. All right, so the old script comes from pictographs and then switches at a certain point, taking on the Aramaic form, which is a more square form, which is the type of Hebrew that you'll see printed today and has been used for centuries and centuries. All right, paleo Hebrew is just the old form of the Hebrew. The letters came from pictographs.

So if you just search for paleo on the app or on our website, AskDrBrownMinistries.org online, just search for that and type in paleo. You'll see a video maybe 20 minutes long. I put up slides. I get into detail. I go through the history of the letters and everything.

It is a myth. The idea that the Hebrew letters, similar to what I just said about having mystical meaning, it is a myth. So number one, what do you do with all the words that when you look at what the letters originally allegedly meant as pictographs and now supposedly they still mean that, that has no meaning whatsoever. And if you read through a whole verse, it becomes complete gibberish if you try to read these meanings back into the words. What do you do with the fact that the vast majority of time, whatever alleged meanings you come up with don't work? Number two, what do you do with the fact that you have to now create meanings and find what works best? And that's not how God communicates in Scripture.

That's never been how He communicates in Scripture. It would be like trying to find the secret code of every third word and fourth letter and now putting it of what I'm saying on the air today and putting it together and finding something and maybe one time in a thousand you get a sequence that's like, wow, Dr. Brown was downloading all this at once. No, you just found something that's not there. That's all that happened. Who told you that that first word means behold, by the way? Who told you that that's what the pictograph means? Well, that's what I read. Who told you? Where did that come from? How do we know that for sure?

We don't. And the word for nail is really the word for hook, all right? So even if it meant behold hand, behold hook, which it doesn't mean that, it's simply His covenantal name, all right? Even if you try to allege it meant that, so it's hook, it's not nail, you don't crucify someone with hooks, that's the first thing.

And then let me press it again. Who told you that the letter, so it'd actually be if reading it in order, hand, behold, hook, behold, all right? Because the hey is allegedly behold, the last letter, the YHWH, you're the hey above hey in Hebrew, right? So in Hebrew you wouldn't say it in that order anyway, you'd put behold first, so the order's wrong.

To come up with your argument, it would mean hand behold, hook behold, so it would be calling a hand to behold something and calling a hook to behold something, so it's got nothing to do with crucifixion anyway. Plus you can't definitively say that that hey originally meant behold. It just, the pictographs were no longer pictographs. So the first letter of the pictograph was the sound that used, which is why you don't have thousands of pictographs. That's how you have to communicate with pictographs like in ancient hieroglyphics or an old Chinese script. You need thousands of these different pictographs.

Once you reduce them to 22, they're no longer pictographic in meaning. It is completely bogus. If you have any respect for the fact that I have a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University, and that you will not find a Semitic scholar on the planet who agrees that we should read the Bible in light of an alleged pictographic meaning in the letters that still adheres in the letters, if you can't respect what I'm saying, then spend the years, you're not going to learn this in months, spend the years or the decades to learn what I've learned and then come and tell me I'm wrong.

I don't normally pull rank, but when it comes to something like this, I will. But I've got amazing insights from it. You get amazing insights reading the phone book if you want, but you're reading something into the Bible that is not there. Thank you for the question. Let's see here. Kathy, about the compound hyphenated names of God that begin Jehovah, Canoe, Uret, et cetera.

The materials I've read in the names for God. Hey friends, this is Dr. Michael Brown. I want to invite you to join our support team.

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Get on the line of fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back to Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. This is Michael Brown answering your great Hebrew questions that have been posted. I wish I had time to get to every one of them, but we're going to get to a bunch more and then a special little treat as we're getting ready for our Israel trip next week, leaving God willing on Monday, getting there a day ahead of the tour groups, everyone on the tour with us. Boy, I can't wait to see you in the land. It's amazing that it's so close after all these months. It's now several years since we've been there because of COVID, and what a perfect time to be in the land. We'll probably talk to you a bit more about that in a show that we're recording for you for Monday as I'll be flying.

But today in Lynchburg, Virginia, celebrating our pioneer grandchild and our pioneer college grad among grad children at Liberty University. All right, I'm not giving you a number to call because I'm just answering questions that have already been posted. But the end of the show, going to have a little treat for you, a special video audio presentation about the regathering of the Jewish people that you will enjoy. All right.

Let's see. Ross, why do you think the New Testament was written in Greek when Christianity is Jewish, to quote Francis Schaeffer? Because it was a message for the whole world. If it had been primarily transmitted in Hebrew, then it would have been for the Jewish people. It would not have been for the whole world, whereas the message of the good news of the Messiah is through the whole world. God's promise to Abram in Genesis 12, 3 was that through his seed the whole world would be blessed, and that it's through the coming of Jesus the Messiah into the world, then that message carried by the Jewish apostles to the Gentile world from whence it spreads. So you had the Roman Empire with good travel in place that enabled the Gospel to spread more quickly. You had the Greek language being widely spoken and used through much of the world at that time, especially in those regions. And then you also had the supernatural spreading of the word through thousands of Jewish people hearing the message of Shavuot Pentecost, which comes at the end of this month, and then taking that message back in their own native languages.

Now, there may be certain portions. It could have been original Hebrew Matthew. Some think there was an original Hebrew to the Hebrews. Certainly there was a document in Hebrew, some would think Aramaic, but most likely Hebrew of Matthew and perhaps some other portions. But for sure, the New Testament as it was given preserved, and especially, you can think of Luke writing for a largely Gentile audience, explaining certain things along the way. You think of Paul's letters to the Corinthians and so on, and others, Greek speakers. So of course, it was in Greek.

Let's see. Joe, could you give history of Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Masoretic text? So this is complex, and we could spend many hours on it. But we have the most accurately preserved text form of the Hebrew Bible that we have. It's called the Masoretic Text. It's actually the Masoretic Textual Tradition because there are thousands of Masoretic manuscripts. But that has preserved the most accurate, original form of the Hebrew text as best as we can tell, and that's the only thing that's been preserved for the whole Bible.

Now, the Masoretes who were active the last, well, let's say about seven, eight hundred years, a thousand years after the writing of the New Testament, so they were active a little over a thousand years ago or culminating their work at that time. They added vowel points to clarify readings of things. They added accents to clarify the reading of things. Those are not part of the original text, but in many cases are highly accurate, and that's our starting point.

They did not invent a text. They simply were transmitters. That's what Masoret means, a transmitter. The mazara is that which has been transmitted. So any complete Hebrew Bible you pick up anywhere in the world, academic, popular, in other words, if it's just, you know, wherever you get it, it's going to be based on the Masoretic Textual Tradition.

I'll write the Masoretic Text, MT, as it's abbreviated. And among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are parts of books like the Isaiah B scroll, not the Isaiah A scroll in K4, which is the complete text of Isaiah, basically, the Isaiah scroll, but a smaller one, so only certain portions of it, are almost letter for letter exactly the same as we have in our Hebrew Bibles today. So you have the Masoretic Textual Tradition preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls representing copies of biblical manuscripts and then copies of other writings, sectarian writings from the group, the Jewish group, that took refuge there and then stored their documents in jars in hidden caves and things like that. So their sectarian documents, the Damascus document, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll, different things like that, 4Q MMT, which is legal discussions, those are all stored there, and then copies of fragments of, and in some cases like Isaiah, complete books of the Bible, all with the exception of Esther, have been found there.

It doesn't mean there weren't many other scrolls in other caves that were not discovered or somehow lost to history, but that's what was preserved. But the Dead Sea Scrolls also preserve in Hebrew some texts that deviate from the Masoretic Textual Tradition and are preserved in the Septuagint. So the Septuagint scholars wondered, did the Septuagint scholars have a, the Septuagint translators translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek a few hundred years before the time of Jesus? Did they have different Hebrew in front of them? Was it the same Hebrew, they made a mistake? Oh, no, they had sometimes a different text.

So you also have that. And then the Samaritans, they had their own distinct version of the Torah. And scholars would say, well, they have some errors in these different places, but then some of the Samaritan readings are preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well. So it's telling you that even a hundred years, 150 years before the time of Jesus, you did have some different readings that had to be sorted out as to, in terms of which was the original, and the different Jewish groups, each would quote them freely.

You follow what I'm saying? That these were texts that were received or recognized, so the overall text, there's complete harmony, but there were these deviations just like we have to this day. God's preserved much for us, and sometimes in several different voices, speaking to us at the same time. All right, so there are those, like Counter-Missionary Rabbi Tovia Singer, who argue that the original Septuagint is just the five books of Moses. That was completed before the time of Jesus, but this rest of the Septuagint was after the time of Jesus, and that was by Jews who followed Jesus, and therefore the text was changed. So when the New Testament is quoted in the Septuagint, it's actually a text that was being translated, written at that point. Forget that.

Nonsense. Virtually all top Septuagint scholars in the world recognize that the Septuagint was completed, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, at least a hundred years before the time of Jesus. Also, the myth that is preserved in the letter of Aristeas and then reflected in Talmudic literature, that 72 different scholars, so six from each of the 12 tribes, were gathered in Alexandria, Egypt.

They were each put in their own booth. They translated the five books simultaneously, and they came out, and it was letter for letter, word for word, identical. That's a myth. I'm sure there's much truth behind the myth in terms of scholars getting together in the work originating in Alexandria. But top Septuagint scholars will tell you, oh, no, we can see different hands here in Genesis, this part here, this part there. In other words, that there were different people involved over a period of time translating the five books and the rest of the Septuagint as well, and that it's not a perfect translation either. Then some rabbis would say, well, we don't have that original. It's only a later Septuagint we have, in which case, how can you argue against someone just saying, well, it's there somewhere? Anyway, that's, again, hours and hours and hours condensed to a few minutes, which I hope didn't leave everyone in the dust.

If so, I recommend when you're tired tonight, if you're fighting insomnia, just re-listen to this portion, and you should be out in a matter of seconds. All right. Let's see this one. Can you explain when the spirit of Elijah was upon Elisha? I ask because here in the Caribbean spiritus twists the scripture along with others from the New Testament to justify reincarnation. I know it's not biblical, of course, but would like to get a scholarly answer to correct them. Thanks. Yeah, so the spirit that empowered Elijah, the anointing that was on Elijah was now on Elisha.

It wasn't a change of persons. All right? What does Elisha ask for when Elijah's going up in 2 Kings 2, 1 Kings 2? What does he ask for? A double portion of your spirit. So, what does a double portion mean?

It doesn't mean twice what Elijah had, although we commonly teach and preach like that in our Pentecostal Charismatic circles, you know, that it's, you get twice. I'm going to lay hands on you and give you twice what I have. You can't give what you don't have. If I've got ten dollars in my pocket, which I do, got a ten dollar bill, I can't give you twenty. All right?

Otherwise, just think of this. I lay hands on you and you get a double portion of what I have, right? Now, you lay hands on the person next to you. They now get four times what I had because you just doubled it. The next person lays hands on the person next to them and they, I'm sorry, so you go from two to four. Now you double it again, go from four to eight just to have a prayer line. Each person give a double portion to the next, right?

Well, you go from two to four to eight to sixteen to thirty-two to sixty-four to a hundred twenty-eight to two fifty-six to five twelve to a thousand twenty-four to two thousand forty-eight, and on and on it goes in a matter of minutes. Obviously, that's not what double portion means, even though Elisha did perform twice as many miracles as Elijah if you count the resurrection when someone touched his bones after his death. But he was not in any way twice the figure that Elijah was or had twice the authority in Israel, in history, in the Bible, period. So, double portion means twice what the others get.

What's it based on? Well, if you go into Deuteronomy, the twenty-fifth chapter, if a man has two sons, then the firstborn son gets a double portion. In other words, instead of splitting it fifty-fifty, you take the inheritance, split it in three parts, and he gets twice as much as the other. So, what Elijah was saying is, I want the portion of the firstborn.

I want double what the others are going to get. Now, here's the deal. Elijah was not splitting himself up into many pieces, so all of his disciples got a piece of him. Rather, he was going to leave a spiritual legacy, a certain anointing for them, just as the spirit that was on Moses was taken and put on the seventy elders in Numbers the eleventh chapter.

Now, think of it for a minute. That was not, that was not the spirit of Moses physically or himself. That was the Holy Spirit that was on Moses was now on the others. So, the Holy Spirit, Ruach HaKodesh, and if you're going to say Hebrew, pronounce it rightly, it's Ruach, got that right? Ruach HaKodesh, accent on the Ko, not on the desh, accent on the Ko, Ruach HaKodesh. In any case, and that is, by the way, one of the most mispronounced Hebrew words. People put the accent on the last syllable wrongly in the second word there. And, hey, if you're going to say it, say it right. Will a Jewish person get saved if I pronounce the Hebrew right? No, that's not going to get them born again, especially if they've studied Hebrew since they're children. But might as well say it right. So, a double portion of the spirit of Elijah was given to Elisha twice.

The anointing that others would get was given to Elisha. It really is that simple. Okay, we come back. I want to go over to, oh, let's see, I'm going to go over to our Twitter questions, maybe another Facebook question, and I may pick these up again in the future.

We get so many great ones posted. And then I want to remind you of a couple things you could do that would really bless you and won't cost you a single dime. All right friends, we will be right back.

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800-771-5584. Thanks for joining us on the Line of Fire today. Here's what I want to do. At the end of this segment, I'm going to play a Consider This video for you. You'll hear all the audio.

You just won't see the graphics, of course. I want to play this for you. It's called Is God a Zionist? And I ask the question of who regathered the Jewish people back to the land if it wasn't God?

And if God did, does that make him a Zionist? I think you'll find it really interesting. You say, where can I find that? So, if you have the Ask Dr. Brown Ministries app, this is what I want to remind you about. Ask Dr. Brown Ministries.

Ask Dr. Brown Ministries. Download that if you haven't yet. And to all of our great new listeners in Phoenix and Dallas and other stations around America, make sure you download the app. It will link you to thousands of articles and videos, all for free. Yeah, a ton of amazing content for you. And then for our monthly support, there's even more content that you get on top of thousands of free resources. So, we want to bless you. We're here to bless you, strengthen you, encourage you.

When it comes to Israel, give you good understanding and equip you to pray for the Jewish people and to reach the Jewish people with the good news of the Messiah. But on your app, just scroll down and you'll see Consider This. And we've got 11 videos. They're each big productions.

That's why it takes a while to put these out. We've got 11 videos on great controversial subjects broken down, normally about five minutes long. And you can watch this. You'll be edified by it. It's a great graphics presentation, but just listen to the audio loud and clear. Play it for your churches. I think you'll find it really, really helpful. And for those that want to help us on the front lines of reaching the lost sheep of the House of Israel, by God's grace, we are making a difference and we get testimonies on a very wonderfully regular basis.

I wish I could share all of them with you, but you can join our support team and then get access to all kinds of additional classes and videos and material absolutely free. A dollar a day makes you a torch bearer. All right? Dollar a day.

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Mike Winger, our buddy. What are your thoughts on the nature of the genealogies in Genesis in particular? Do we have reason to see flexibility, generational skipping or symbolic ages? This is something I've heard plenty of seemingly unevident speculation on. I haven't spent much time on it though.

Okay. So the question is, if you just take the genealogies at face value, it would point to the earth being about 6,000 years old or at least humanity on the earth being about 6,000 years old. And obviously that doesn't jive with the idea of an old earth.

So there are many scholars who would say, look, in the ancient world, if you look at like Sumerian king list and things like that, people lived thousands of years, not just to 900, but many thousands of years. And we know actually that that is not the case. So the numbers are symbolic. And anyone in the ancient world would know they're symbolic. You can make that argument.

Now I'll respond to it in a moment. You could make the argument that when you look at the numbers that they break down into groups of sevens or just a few key numbers repeated over and over and statistically to have it happen that many times would be almost impossible. So that would clearly add to the symbolism of the numbers. And there is something to these arguments.

In other words, you might even be a young earth person and say, yeah, there's something to these arguments. Or others would say that there is skipping and that when it says that so-and-so bore so-and-so, right, Adam and Eve bore Seth, and then Seth bore next and next, that it means after you get, unless it's explicitly laid out, right, like with some of the others that you have, okay, here they are living form and we can actually trace the genealogies onward, that it means that so-and-so gave birth to X and X is several generations later, right? So Joe gave birth to Sam. It doesn't really mean Sam. It means we're going to skip a few generations until we get to the next major player who's Sam. And the argument would be, yeah, that son of in Hebrew could mean grandson, your sons could be your grandchildren, your descendants, right, the children of Israel, that sons of Israel, that's many generations down.

So it's the same thing here. Others would say not with that Hebrew formula. So there are strong arguments for symbolic numbers, for skipping of generations, to be part of the genealogies that sound Bible-believing scholars have raised, not just skeptics, not just critics, but sound Bible-believing scholars have raised. However, if you go to the standard sites creation.com or Answers in Genesis or look at Jonathan Sarfati's great commentary on the opening chapters of Genesis, you'll see a strong pushback to all of these things. So there are solid arguments raised by sound scholars. However, there are very solid responses by young earth creationist scholars. So they need to be taken seriously. In other words, it's not just some fundamentalist saying, well, God started six days and I believe it. No, I'm talking about solid scholarships. And of course they have scientific scholarship behind it. So there are strong challenges to the views of symbolic numbers or to skipping generations.

And those challenges should be looked at very, very carefully. All right. Do I have time? Okay. No, I answered. Yeah, Matthew, the Hebrew concept of repentance, please.

I'm going to do that in 30 seconds. Shuvah is a turnabout. Turn around, turn back, turn away from your sin and turn to God. God would say to Israel, Shuvah Elavah, Shuvah Lechem, or Shuvah Adavah, Shuvah Adehem, meaning turn back to me and I will turn back to you. Man repents, God relents, but all the same word in Hebrew. My favorite Jeremiah 3, Shuvah banim, Shovavim, erpam, shuvot echem, turn back, oh, back turning children.

I will hear your backslidings all with that root, Shuv in there. Man turns away from sin. God turns away from wrath.

Mercy is poured out. And now is God a Zionist? Is God a Zionist? Before we can answer the question, is God a Zionist? We first need to define the term Zionist. Well, a Zionist is simply someone who believes that the Jewish people should have a homeland in what is now Israel. That's it. Based on that definition, we can say that yes, for sure, God is a Zionist.

How can I be so confident? First, the Scriptures make it perfectly clear that the land of Israel was to be the lasting homeland of the Jewish people. And when I say perfectly clear, I mean perfectly clear. God himself promised this, repeating it over and over in scores of different texts, most clearly in Psalm 105. In fact, in this passage alone, this theme is repeated in so many different ways that it's almost redundant. The Lord was making a point. The Psalm states, he is ever mindful of his covenant. The promise he gave for a thousand generations that he made with Abraham swore to Isaac and confirmed in a decree for Jacob, for Israel as an eternal covenant saying, to you I will give the land of Canaan as your allotted heritage.

Notice the vocabulary used. This is God's covenant, his eternal covenant, the promise he made, his decree. This was something he swore and confirmed.

It is eternal for a thousand generations. Could he have made himself any more clear? It's true that under the law, the Sinai covenant, God said that he would exile his people from their homeland if they sinned and bring them back only if they repented. But this does not annul his previous promises. As Paul explained, what I'm saying is this, the Torah, the law, which came 430 years later, meaning 430 years after God gave his promise to Abraham, does not cancel the covenant previously confirmed by God so as to make the promise ineffective.

For if the inheritance is based on law, it's no longer based on a promise, but God has graciously given it to Abraham by means of a promise. That promise still stands, which means that God is still the Zionist. Second, it's impossible to explain the existence of the Jewish people and their ancient homeland today without divine intervention. No other nation has been expelled from its homeland for a period of many hundreds of years only to maintain its identity and then return to its original homeland. Every other nation that has been scattered from its homeland for a period of centuries has ceased to exist as a nation without exception, except for the Jewish people. And note that the Jewish people survive as a nation despite centuries of terrible suffering, being expelled from country after country, being herded together in ghettos, being reduced to second-class citizenship, sometimes even facing annihilation most recently under the Nazis. Yet the Jewish people live as celebrated in Hebrew, Am Yisrael Chai, because God has preserved them. As a Jew myself, I can say he has preserved us. Not because of our faithfulness, but because of his faithfulness.

Not because of our goodness, but because of his goodness. And just think, the Nazis slaughtered six million Jews. Two out of every three Jews in Europe. And yet today, there are more than six million Jews living in Israel. This could not have happened without the hand of God.

Don't take my word for it. This is supported by the Scriptures as well, based on simple biblical logic. You see, according to the Scriptures, when God blesses, no one can curse. And when he curses, no one can bless. When he opens a door, no one can close it. And when he closes a door, no one can open it. When he smites, no one can heal. And when he heals, no one can smite. In the same way, when he gathers, no one can scatter.

And when he scatters, no one can gather. Since the Bible tells us that God scattered the Jewish people in his anger, there's only one possible way they can be back in the land today. God himself regathered them. To suggest that the Jewish people themselves, the United Nations, re-established Israel, is to say that God's will was overthrown by human effort.

Perish the thought. This also explains why there's such extreme hostility towards the state of Israel, why so many radical groups want to wipe out the Jewish state, why the nations of the world want to determine Israel's boundaries, why these same nations refuse to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. It's the same pattern that has existed for millennia. The nations of the world are hostile to the purposes of God. In particular, his purposes for Israel. This doesn't mean that everything Israel does is right, but everything the Palestinians do is wrong. And it doesn't mean that lovers of the God of the Bible should not pursue justice for all the Middle Eastern peoples. But it does mean the state of Israel exists today because God decreed it. And that means that God is a Zionist.