My foundational verses are these two. You can see that face and presence are the same root. The English corresponds to the bolded pn in the Hebrew. My point here is not to repeat the sounds but to show the immediacy and tangibility of 'presence'. In most places I want to show repetition, but here a slightly different view of our relationship to this 'living God'. (See previous post).
| wmot lg | Exodus 33 |
|
i't viamr ani aybir cl-'tubi yl-pniç vqrati bwm ihvh lpniç vknoti at-awr akon vrikmti at-awr arkm |
19 And he said, I myself will make all my good pass over your face, and
I will call in the name of Yahweh in your presence. And I am gracious with whom I will be gracious, and I have compassion on whom I will have compassion. |
| wmot ld | Exodus 34 |
|
v viybor ihvh yl-pniv viqra ihvh ihvh al rkum vknun arç apiim vrb-ksd vamt |
6 And Yahweh, passed over before him, and he called, Yahweh, Yahweh, a
God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in kindness and truth, |
These two verses are alluded to by a host of other verses in the Scripture. I think we may conclude that the Old Testament, just from this starting point, testifies to a character of God that is meant to be present to others in us, teaching us maturity (and thus overcoming our tendencies to 'me first'). Maturity is a word I might return to. It is glossed largely as reward, recompense, but also wean, grow (acrostic necessity), mature. Detail here of course.
Here are the other references: First to gracious preceded by compassionate. al rkum vknun. If you look at knn in the glossary and scan for lag = rkm, there are only two additional. Look the other way around for eight more. And slow to anger (ap preceded by arc) raises 16 more verses that allude to Exodus 34:6. I could stop here with laying out these verses. You can find them all easily in the concordance.
So I will move on to the explicit statements of the character of the living God in the Psalms. You know my favorite section, Psalms 146, verse 6 and following. Can you read it?
This section speaks of
ihvh
yowh wmiim varx at-him vat-cl-awr-bm
hwomr amt lyolm
yowh mwp't lywuqim
notn lkm lrybim
ihvh mtir asurim
ihvh poqk yivvrim
ihvh zoqf cpupim
ihvh aohb xdiqim
ihvh womr at-grim
itom valmnh iyodd
vdrç rwyim iyvvt
Here as usual, the phrasing illustrates the compactness of the Hebrew. You can find early posts on Psalms 146 here and here. They do have a version of my translation. I am just learning to read SimHebrew too.
Do the stories of Jesus reflect the character of the living God of the Old Testament? They do. Why is the general presumption different? Because what we also hear and see in the OT are the violent actions of many peoples and the interpretations of the consequences.
One example: Cain murders his brother, and then most translations into English have Cain say: My punishment is greater than I can bear. If Cain is punished, who is punishing him? Implied answer, God.
But there is no word for punish in the Biblical Hebrew of the OT. There are a half-dozen words that translators have glossed as punish. But they have also glossed them as other English words as well, in every case, more often than they used punish. In this case for Cain the word is yvn. If you look, you will see that I always translate yvn as iniquity. (Maybe) Cain perceives punishment as the consequence of his iniquity. But it is just plain wrong to translate it as punishment. And there are 50 different translations that copied the King James translation and therefore got this wrong again. And therefore they get the character of God wrong again. And they can't blame it on the Vulgate: Major est iniquitas mea, quam ut veniam merear. Or the old Greek.
Of course Cain can't bear his iniquity. Who will? Well, maybe we will together. Following the character of God will be costly.
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