The following Scripture passages are offered to aid beginning fellowships. The readings and commentary for this week are more in line with what has become usual; for the following will most likely be familiar observations. The concept behind this Sabbath’s selection is the first unleavened.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of April 7, 2012
The person conducting the Sabbath service should open services with two or three hymns, or psalms, followed by an opening prayer acknowledging that two or three (or more) are gathered together in Christ Jesus’ name, and inviting the Lord to be with them.
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YHWH said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt [the preceding is a linguistic determinative clause and should not be vocalized: a determinative is only intended to be read with the eyes], "This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers' houses, a lamb for a household. And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the … Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am YHWH [again, this is a linguistic determinative that identifies the speaker]. The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.” (Ex 12:1–13 emphasis and explanations added)
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1.
If you—any person—would have been present when the Lord spoke to Moses, delivering to Moses instruction for how to keep the Passover, you would not need to be told who said what and to whom: you would know through being present. Thus, inscription of the words spoken convey less information than the oral communication contained even though every word uttered is recorded. To adjust inscription so that approximately the same information is conveyed—so that inscription is not inferior to oral discourse—additional words, signs, glyphs must be added to what has been uttered, these words forming linguistic determinatives that strive to replicate the context in which the communication occurred, with the context always providing meaning for the word, sign, or glyph … there is considerable difference between [a hypothetical case] President Obama declaring the first sighted new moon crescent following the spring equinox to be the beginning of months for Americans and the Creator-of-everything-made declaring the same new moon crescent to be the beginning of months for Israel, the people who are the firstborn son (Ex 4:22) of the Creator-of-everything. President Obama more closely resembles Pharaoh than he does the Lord.
Endtime Sabbatarian Christians receive the words of the Creator-of-everything in a book of some sort rather than hearing them while standing beside Moses roughly three and a half millennia ago. For most Sabbatarian Christians, books are inexpensive enough that the Christian has his or her own copy of the Bible that contains the book titled Exodus; so the Sabbatarian can read for him or herself what most people of the Book prior to the invention of moveable type in the 15th-Century CE heard read to them—and this is critical: hearing a book read is not the same as reading the book. Nuances are missed. The text of the book has been interpreted by the reader, thereby not allowing the hearer of a read book to produce an alternative text as a reader can do, with this being a subject that will be developed in other writings posted on associated websites.
In ancient Egypt, a person who could read, coming to a stele with a painted hieroglyphic inscription, would stand before the inscription and silently read both determinative glyphs and narrative glyphs, with the determinative glyphs identifying for the reader who said what, when, and in what language. The information contained in the determinative glyphs would not have been read aloud if a passerby asked the reader what the stele said: the reader would have only relayed to the passerby what the narrative glyphs disclosed, such as the great victory won by Ramses II against the Hittites when Ramses was lucky to return to Egypt alive.
The passerby would, now, knowing what the stele disclosed, relay to his or her fellow workman what the narrative glyphs reported—and the fellow workman would relay to his or her son what the narrative glyphs reported. Generation would pass, with the hieroglyphs read by now-educated priests who had been told from their youth what the narrative glyphs reported, knowing that the determinative glyphs were on the stele, but treating them as marking glyphs that separated the words formed from the glyphs that were phonetically uttered, the narrative glyphs.
Now, step forward a couple of millennia: memory of what the narrative glyphs reported has been lost. Egyptian hieroglyphs cannot be read—until after 1799, when Pierre-Francois Bouchard of Napoleon’s Expedition to Egypt, discovered the so-called Rosetta Stone, an Egyptian granodiorite stele dating to the reign of King Ptolemy V. The stele (i.e., the Rosetta Stone) has inscribed a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BCE, with the inscription in three languages, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic [Egyptian hieratic] script, and Koine Greek. And because the text of the decree is essentially the same—not identically the same—the discovery of the Rosetta Stone provided a window through which ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs could be understood, but understood without meaning being assigned to the determinative glyphs whose function was simply not understood.
Is it important to know that the Lord said to Moses,
This day [the Passover] shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to YHWH; throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast. (Ex 12:14)
Note what is and what isn’t said: the Passover is a memorial day, not a memorial week. No holy assembly [convocation] is to be held on the Passover. But confusion entered into the narrative because a linguistic determinative that should be present is missing.
Consider the following passage that fits tightly against the command to keep the Passover:
Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. On the first day you shall hold a holy assembly, and on the seventh day a holy assembly. No work shall be done on those days. But what everyone needs to eat, that alone may be prepared by you. And you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day, throughout your generations, as a statute forever. In the first month, from the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread until the twenty-first day of the month at evening. For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened, that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a sojourner or a native of the land. You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your dwelling places you shall eat unleavened bread." (Ex 12:14–20 emphasis added)
Again, one day isn’t seven days. The day on which a memorial to the sacrifice of the Passover lamb is observed isn’t seven days long. There are two memorials present without a noticeable distinction between them. And again, a linguistic determinative that was never vocalized but that would have been present in the inscription when Moses recorded this utterance of the Lord was omitted by a scribe that heard the passage read [that was taking dictation], but didn’t see the text as Moses had written it. So the essence of the Lord’s utterance is recorded, but a portion of the context is missing.
How can this be asserted? Because of what Moses told the Israel:
Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans, and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. For YHWH will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when He sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, YHWH will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever. And when you come to the land that YHWH will give you, as Hhe has promised, you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, “What do you mean by this service?” you shall say, “It is the sacrifice of YHWH's Passover, for He passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when He struck the Egyptians but spared our houses." And the people bowed their heads and worshiped. Then the people of Israel went and did so; as YHWH had commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did. (Ex 12:21–28 emphasis added)
The Passover is not the Feast of Unleavened Bread as Pharisees [Herod’s temple officials] in the 1st-Century CE declared it to be: no Israelite who did as Moses commanded left his house on the night when the Passover lamb was sacrifices, roasted whole and eaten. No Israelite who did as Moses commanded, other than Moses and Aaron, was out and abroad after the death angel passed over the land of Egypt until dawn:
At midnight YHWH struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. And Pharaoh rose up in the night [sometime after midnight], he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night [before dawn] and said, "Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve YHWH, as you have said. Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also!" (Ex 12:29–32 emphasis and explication added)
Again, Israel didn’t leave their houses until dawn on the 14th day of the first month. The nation had no favor in the eyes of the Egyptians prior to the death angel passing through the land; therefore, it would have done an Israelite no good to ask favors of the Egyptians prior to midnight and the death of their firstborns.
So what followed happened after dawn on the 14th day:
The Egyptians were urgent with the people [this could only have happened after dawn on the 14th day] to send them out of the land in haste. For they said, "We shall all be dead." So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls being bound up in their cloaks on their shoulders. The people of Israel had also done as Moses told them [when? When the Egyptians were urgent to send away the people of Israel], for they had asked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing. And YHWH had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. Thus they plundered the Egyptians. And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. A mixed multitude also went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds. And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves. (Ex 12:33–39)
The Feast of Unleavened Bread celebrates/commemorates Israel leaving Egypt in haste, after spoiling the Egyptians, but before their bread dough had risen, with all of the bread they had previously baked having been eaten the evening before while they waited hours for the Passover lamb to roast whole, without being skinned or dressed. Israel left Egypt at the end of the 14th day of the first month, not at the beginning of the 14th day, when Israel sacrificed its Passover lambs. Hence, the Feast of Unleavened Bread extends from the end of the 14th day for seven days through the 21st-day of the first month, or from the 15th to the end of the 21st day: 15th, the High Sabbath, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st, the other high Sabbath that ends the Feast.
The Passover is a separate feast that is not a high Sabbath; thus the Passover serves as the Preparation Day for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for the death angel at midnight on the 14th day prepared the people of Egypt to urgently send Israel out from the land of Egypt, lest The Egyptians shall all be dead.
Again, a missing, never vocalized linguistic determinative kept Pharisees and now rabbinical Judaism from keeping the Passover as Moses commanded for two-plus millennia.
2.
Was this missing determinative ever known to Israel, and when did this determinative go missing as Alaskans use the expression for a snow machine rider who doesn’t return, or for an ice fisherman who is never found?
Perhaps when the linguistic determinative went missing can be ascertained; for it is unimaginable that King David, a man after the Lord’s heart did not keep the Passover yet the chronicler who authored 2nd Kings recorded,
Then the king sent, and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem were gathered to him. And the king went up to the house of YHWH and with him all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the priests and the prophets, all the people, both small and great. And he read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant that had been found in the house of YHWH. And the king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before YHWH , to walk after YHWH and to keep His commandments and His testimonies and His statutes with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people joined in the covenant. (2 Kings 23:1–3)
And Josiah removed all the shrines also of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which kings of Israel had made, provoking YHWH to anger. He did to them according to all that he had done at Bethel. And he sacrificed all the priests of the high places who were there, on the altars, and burned human bones on them. Then he returned to Jerusalem. And the king commanded all the people, "Keep the Passover to YHWH your Elohim, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant." For no such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel, or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah. But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah this Passover was kept to YHWH in Jerusalem. (2 Kings 23:19–23)
The Tetragrammaton YHWH is an unpronounced linguistic determinative that should be read without vocalizing the sign/glyph.
When reading a passage aloud and the need to vocalize the determinative YHWH arises, the traditional practice of Judaism has been to utter the name Adoni or Adonai, the imagined vowel pointing for the proto Semitic Tetragrammaton, with the determinative [the sign/glyph] if ever being pronounced producing in translation a word such as <YaHdonWaiH> with the sound “don” representing a meaning something like, another such. Deconstructing the Tetragrammaton into two radicals, {YH} and {WH}, is supported by the Semitic <d~n> with its reasonable assignment of meaning being, plus another. But the primary support comes from the regular Hebrew plural, Elohim, the plural of [Eloah] and which deconstructs to [El + ah] + [El + ah] an undetermined number of times, with [El] being the Semitic name for God and [ah] representing aspiration or breath. And the multiple for the number of times [El + ah] is repeated is two, coming from deconstructing the Tetragrammaton YHWH. To this add Matthew 22:32 and John 1:1–3 as argued in The Case for Primacy.
Now returning to the Passover: throughout the period when the Book of the Covenant was lost in the dilapidated temple, the house of Judah and the people of Jerusalem might not have been keeping the Passover at all, but in the generations between the Judges and King Solomon, it is difficult to believe that Israel was not keeping the Passover in some way, even if the way was contrary to Moses’ command. Therefore, when traditions coming from the oral Torah are inserted into the belief paradigms of the Pharisees, we can almost see what happened … the text Moses wrote would have physically existed beside the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies (Deut 31:26) of the tent that was the tabernacles for a couple of centuries at best. Moses’ writings would have had to be physically copied at least once and probably twice and maybe as many as six or seven times before Saul became king of Israel. And on one of those occasions during the reign of the Judges, probably late during this period, a scribe—not understanding what an unpronounced linguistic determinative was doing in the text or how unpronounced determinatives functioned—omitted the determinative that separated the Passover from the Feast of Unleavened Bread so that from this time forward until the days of Josiah when an early copy of the Book of the Covenant was found, the Passover was observed on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the practice of rabbinical Judaism today and the practice of Pharisees of the Second temple.
However, apparently 1st-Century Sadducees did not share this practice, nor did Jesus and His disciples, nor does the 21st-Century The Philadelphia Church. And while it can be stated with certainty that Jesus and His disciples in the 1st-Century and in the 21st-Century keep the Passover as Moses commanded, as King Josiah did, it seems that 1st-Century Sadducees were also better readers of Holy Writ than were Pharisees.
3.
In writing correction to the holy ones at Corinth, the Apostle Paul records,
But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another—if anyone is hungry, let him eat at home—so that when you come together it will not be for judgment. (1 Cor 11:17–34 emphasis and double emphasis added)
For Christians, Paul, relaying what he had received directly from Christ Jesus, instructs Christians to take the Passover sacrament of bread and wine on the night that Jesus was betrayed, this night being the 14th of Aviv, the night before the high Sabbath that is the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread as the Gospel of John clearly records in chapters 18 & 19.
Because of the work of translators, what the other Gospels record isn’t quite as plain: Matthew’s Gospel, however, is the easiest to correct, ΤΗ ΠΡΩΤΗ ΤΩΝ ΆΖΥΜΩΝ ΠΡΟΣΗΛΘΟΝ — The first the Unleavened approached (Matt 26:17), or, “As the First Unleavened approached …”
The night of the First Unleavened is the night on which Jesus was betrayed: it is an eighth day during which unleavened bread is eaten and as such it is analogous to the Last Great Day that follows the seven days of the Feast of Tabernacles, and because the First Unleavened precedes the seven day long Feast of Unleavened Bread as the Last Great Day follows the seven day long Feast of Tabernacles, the spring feast forms the mirror image of the fall feast, with the focus of the spring feast being the harvest of firstfruits or the early barley harvest whereas the focus of the fall feast is the Millennium and the great White Throne Judgment, the greater harvest of humankind as symbolized by the main crop wheat harvest of Judean hillsides.
There is now sound reason for reading the spring holy day season as the reversed image of the fall holy days season, with the 10th day of the first month representing when the selected Passover lamb is chosen and penned as Israel entered into the Promised Land on the 10th day of the first month (Josh 4:19) and as Jesus entered Jerusalem on the 10th day of the first month—with the 10th day of the seventh month being Yom Kipporim, the Day of Coverings [plural], and the symbolic compression of the entire spring holy days season into a day … unleavened bread is the bread of affliction, and on Yom Kipporim, Israel is to afflict its souls by fasting. John calls the first 1260 days of the seven endtime years of tribulation the Affliction [ΤΗ ΘΛΙΨΕΙ] as he calls the last 1260 days the Endurance in Jesus [ΥΠΟΜΟΝΗ ΕΝ ΊΕΣΟΥ].
Jesus said He was the beginning and the end, the first and the last (Rev 22:13), with that format being evident in the spring and fall holy day seasons as well as in there being two grain harvests of of the hillsides of the Promised Land, the barley harvest that begins with the Wave Sheaf Offering and ends with the Feast of Weeks, and the later main crop wheat harvest, with both of these harvests being of Christ Jesus and God the Father, with the first harvest being of the Body and Bride of Christ and the later harvest being of younger sons of God the Father.
Academics practicing historical criticism and relying upon rabbinical Judaism for understanding of how the Passover was kept in the 1st-Century will say foolish things such as Mark’s Gospel has Jesus being killed on a different day than does John’s Gospel when this is simply not the case. Mark records, ΚΑΙ ΤΗ ΠΡΩΤΗ ΗΜΕΡΑ ΤΩΝ ΆΖΥΜΩΝ ΌΤΕ ΤΟ ΠΑΣΧΑ ΈΘΥΟΝ ΛΕΓΟΥΣΙΝ ΑΥΤΩ ΟΙ ΜΑΘΗΤΑΙ ΑΥΤΟΥ — And the first day the Unleavened when the Passover was being sacrificed say to Him the disciples of Him (Mark 14:12) … the day on which, according to Moses, when Passover lambs were to be sacrificed is, again, at even going into the dark portion of the 14th day of the first month, with the Preparation Day for the high Sabbath that is the great Sabbath of the Sabbath (John 19:31) being the 14th day of Aviv.
It is the Pharisees of the Second Temple that have Passover lambs being sacrificed on the wrong day, a necessary mistake so that Jesus could both eat the Passover and be the Passover Lamb of God, sacrificed by an erring nation of Israel.
But more of this next week.
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The person conducting the Sabbath service should close services with two hymns, or psalms, followed by a prayer asking God’s dismissal.
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"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."