The following is a collection of personal encounters demonstrating how Jewish thinking has been removed from the Church, including many Messianic Jewish circles.

Retrospective

While Palestine British Police Sergeant Flaherty (I never got to know his given name) was Irish, Sydney Charles Webb was English.

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the Holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen? (William Blake – Jerusalem)

The road to Mt. Scopus is open…

I am Jewish, 91 years of age, and am a believer in the God of Israel—in any form in which He may choose to manifest Himself in Holy Scripture.

In the article “Praise” or “Acknowledge”?, dealing with Gen. 49:8ff, I suggested that יודוך [YODUKHA]—rendered “will praise you” —might more logically be translated “will acknowledge {‘confess’} you”.

In the articles dealing with Ps. 110:4 [“After the Order Of”?] and with Isa. 53:5 [“By His Stripes”?]—both pronounced Messianic passages—I demonstrated differences between the Hebrew of the Masoretic text [MT] and the Greek Septuagint [LXX].

In an extraordinarily well-conceived article on snippets from biblical Hebrew (First Fruits of Zion, Nov-Dec 1997, issue 52), Rimona Frank—an Israeli with a very good command of Hebrew, as well as English—compares two words from the root bet-resh-khaf: brakha (blessing) and the seemingly ‘lowly’ berekh (knee).

August 1929. I was three-and-a-half years old, and I remember holding the hand of my paternal grandfather at a street corner, as he and other elders of the Romema neighborhood of Jerusalem (where I grew up) held animated discussion.