It is critical to remember that these texts contain a wide range of opinion. Their proper use will help shed
great light on any Bible study and help in arriving at a proper Hebraic (original) understanding of the more
difficult passages.
Many of the concepts Y‘shua taught were already present in Jewish thought. His teachings were not entirely
"new‖, but the authority with which He delivered them was.
Also see the list of exhaustive resources under the heading BIBLIOGRAPHY to make this study a possibility.
I also want to thank each and every person and group whose knowledge contributed to make this exegesis a
possibility.
WHY DO WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THE NEW TESTAMENT FROM A HEBREW PERSPECTIVE?
I discovered that much Scripture was from a Semitic (Hebrew) original. To confirm this discovery, I went to
many Jewish bookstores in South Africa as well as in Israel. I bought many books, and to my astonishment I
found that almost everything in the New Covenant had a parallel in the Old Covenant or in other Jewish
sources corresponding to or pre-dating the time of Y‘shua.
The daily use of the Old Testament was a principal concern of the writers of the New Covenant. Throughout
the New Covenant, the writers were basically arranging and commenting on common Jewish knowledge and
the Law of YHWH, both oral and written.
It makes you think that the students of the Old Covenant do not necessarily need to have the New Covenant
to know YHWH, because under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit they can draw from the Old Covenant and
come to know the ―fulfillment‖ of it. But the reverse is not true.
Once a person has discovered that Y‟shua is the ―fulfillment‖, he or she is then ready to learn the complete
meaning of that fulfillment. From the Old Covenant, we could almost completely compile another New
Covenant, minus historical events. The New Covenant does give us information from the Old Covenant, as
well as historical facts and the cultural setting of the time. However, from the New Covenant alone, we
cannot reassemble the Old Covenant, but can only guess as to its content.
We need to go back a few centuries to the translating of the Old Covenant into Greek. This translation is
called the Septuagint (the ―Seventy‖) and was written around 284-247 B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt by,
according to popular tradition, seventy Jewish elders.
By 331 B.C., there were Jews all over the Middle East, and Greek was the common spoken language on
many of the trading routes. Greek was also the language spoken by the majority of people in the
synagogues outside of Israel, making it extremely difficult to read the Hebrew Scriptures to Greek-speaking
people. This created a need to translate the Hebrew into Greek.
Hebrew is a pictorial, realistic language and does not have the concept of "past, present, and future‖; but has
a verb construction called "vav conversive‖. To quote from a textbook called Contemporary Hebrew, "some
of the outstanding features of biblical Hebrew is the use of vav conversive with verbs. When the conjunction
'and' (vav) is prefixed to the past (perfect) tense, it changes its meaning to future (imperfect). When the vav
is prefixed to the future (imperfect), it changes its meaning to the past (perfect)‖.
It is important to note that the Hebrew thought imparted is that YHWH spoke everything in the beginning and
it is either completed or being completed. The Greek thought is just the opposite, which presents us with
our first problem.
In Greek, we have a tense of verbs called aorist, meaning non-defined. Some non-Greeks using Seminar
Greek will tell you that this is past tense, but it is not. It derives its tense from Hebrew thought. Aorist tense
comes from the past and is current in the present (whenever it is read; that is, the present), and in the future
it will still be current. This first problem of tenses was solved by writing most of the Hebrew in aorist tense,
thereby retaining its Hebrew thought.
The second problem was the fact that Hebrew is pictorial and realistic, while Greek is analytical and
scientific. There was no simple way around this. The next step required the elders who were extremely
qualified in Hebrew and Greek, and in the cultures of both peoples, as well as the Scriptures, to become very
creative with classical Greek. They combined additional letters and sometimes even other words to allow the