Monday, February 21, 2011

A Little Snippet, part 3

Cool stuff I learned in Bible Study this morning:

1) If you list the 66 books of the Bible in three columns Proverbs, Luke and 3rd John all line up.

2) They also line up with the 20th Hebrew letter, resh. The symbolic meaning of resh is “head”. (Ever heard of Rosh Hashana? The Jewish New Year or “Head of the Year”)

3) The letter resh starts the Hebrew word for friend which occurs more than twice as often in these 3 books combined than any other 3 books.

4) The Greek word for proverb is parabole from which we get parable. There are more parables in Luke than in any of the other Gospels. (John has none.)

5) Proverbs are words of wisdom. When Luke tells the same story as Matthew and Mark, Luke makes a reference to wisdom. (Luke 21:12-15, Matt. 10:19-20, Mark 13:11-12) (Luke 11:49, Matt. 23:34)

6) Luke describes Jesus (2:40, 52): And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

7) Other Hebrew words that start with resh are physician, heal, mercy and womb which all occur more in Luke than any other NT book.

8) Mercy and Womb are written with the exact same Hebrew letters. Womb exemplifies a woman’s attributes of warmth, a nurturing spirit, love and mercy toward her child as well as protection. When we come across the words mercy (compassion) in reference to God we can infer that He has those same “womb” characteristics as a mother. (English is so much less descriptive than Hebrew and we lose so much in translation.)

9) To connect Proverbs and Luke to the tiny book of 3rd John we can look beyond the #3 above – that the word friend occurs many times – and see a connection with the word “health”, too. This word appears more in Proverbs than any OT book. Luke was written by a physician. 3rd John opens with John saying he will pray for Gaius’s health (the only reference to health in all 22 epistles).

10) I love God’s word more every day.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Debbie, Thanks for stopping by my blog (last week, I'm slow!) I like your blog. You have an interesting post!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great stuff! Those little 'side-trivia' are always fun~

    *visiting from Winter Friends Wednesday Hop.
    please visit me back:
    http://kabersblog.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.