Yeshua and the Hebrew Language

In our discussion about the Y Team Bible Study Method we created our first version of Yeshua’s Linguistic Profile. One of the cultural factors we learned about Yeshua is that he read and spoke Hebrew. Today we are going to examine one of the sources of that information. It is found in Luke 4:16-17:

So he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Shabbat and stood up to read. And he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had unrolled the scroll, he found the place where it was written . . .

Between late 1946 and early 1947 the first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Qumran Cave 1, by a group of three Ta'amireh shepherds, near the Ein Feshka spring off the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. One of those scrolls is the Great Isaiah Scroll. It is the oldest complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, being approximately 1000 years older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts known before the discovery. The scroll Yeshua read that day in the synagogue was probably very much like it.

Below is a picture of it. The three sections pictured below were all part of the one scroll Yeshua unrolled and found the section he was to read in the synagogue that day.

SOURCE

The scroll consist of 17 sheets of parchment that are stitched together to create a scroll that contains 54 columns of text and is about 24 feet long – that’s 8 yards on a football field. Below is a picture of column that contains the words Yeshua read. (SOURCE)

The portion he read begins close to the bottom where someone has inserted “Chapter 61.” Make sure to note that they also inserted verse numbers. Here is an enlargement of the words he read.

The Hebrew was written by hand by scribes. If you are familiar with printed Hebrew Bibles, you will notice that there is a big difference in the letters.

Thanks to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we are able to get a glimpse of something that was very familiar to Yeshua and the people that lived in his world. Only a small percentage of the Jewish population at that time could read Hebrew and even a smaller percentage would have been to find a specific section of the Hebrew scrolls by themselves. This reveals some very important information we can add to our Linguistic Profile of Yeshua -- and it helps us know him a little better than we did before.

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