Ok. So here’s where I want to start, because I think it’s funny (in an ironic way).

Genesis 2:5 describes the land before the garden narrative gets going: no shrub, no plant, nothing had sprouted yet, because it hadn’t rained and there was no one to work the ground.

God doesn’t plant the actual garden until verse 8, so we’re a few verses early, standing in a field that hasn’t done a single thing yet. The word for sprouted is צְמָח, from the root צמח, tzamach. Dirt, waiting.

Genesis 3 picks the same root back up after the fall, but it’s not gentle anymore.

Same verb but different vibe.

By the time we get to the prophets, that ordinary agricultural verb has become charged with royal and messianic significance. Somebody took a word about seeds pushing up through soil and gave it to a king.

What Tzamach Actually Does

Tzamach is a verb before anything else. It means to sprout, to grow out of the ground… basically it’s dirt vocabulary. Trust me, no one is writing poetry about a weed.

Now, I see other word studies make a mistake all the time. Psalm 92 has this gorgeous line about the righteous flourishing like a palm tree, right after a line about the wicked sprouting like grass before God cuts them down. Some will tell you that’s the same word, tzamach, for both. It’s not.

That’s parach, a different Hebrew root that also means to sprout or flourish. It’s like your eyebrows… they’re sisters, not twins.

I am telling you this because if you ever see someone claim the Bible uses the identical word for the wicked sprouting and the righteous flourishing in Psalm 92, you now know that’s not quite accurate.

Isaiah Gets His Hands On It

Isaiah 61:11 is where I want us to focus for a minute. The image is so specific, and it uses our actual root, twice in the same verse.

Seeds go into soil. Something invisible (at least to us) happens underground. Then, without anyone forcing it, green pushes up into the light, and Isaiah puts justice and praise in the same picture.

The word itself doesn’t lock in anything about speed, and plants get used elsewhere in Scripture for things that happen suddenly too. But I just can’t shake the feeling that whatever God is growing here isn’t the kind of thing you rush.

Then…the Noun Steps In

There’s a noun that belongs to the same root family, צֶמַח, tzemach, a sprout or a growth. We see it in Jeremiah and Zechariah but it’s not something they invented. A Hebrew reader wouldn’t have to go looking for the connection. It’s as obvious as “growth” and “grow” are to us in English.

It also shows up in other places in the prophets as well, including a debated appearance in Isaiah 4:2. What Jeremiah and Zechariah do is pick up that ordinary noun and use it in royal prophecy.

Jeremiah gives us one of its clearest royal uses.

In Hebrew, tzemach tzaddik, a righteous Sprout. It’s not exactly a proper name but more like a title given to whoever this coming king turns out to be.

Jeremiah 23 comes from the final stretch of the monarchy, while there were still kings on the throne. Kings this chapter calls out by name for wrecking the flock. The dynasty is collapsing in real time and judgment and exile are looming large!

It hasn’t fallen yet.

Into that mess, God promises a Tzemach tzaddik is coming. Keep in mind, because it matters… this isn’t a promise that is spoken over rubble. It’s a promise spoken while the roof is still on fire.

The stump image people usually reach for here, the famous one, actually belongs to a different prophet. Isaiah 11:1 talks about a shoot from the stump of Jesse, a branch bearing fruit from the roots. Isaiah uses different Hebrew words there; choter and netzer, not tzemach.

So here’s a little Word Nerd bonus for you: the English word “Branch” is actually covering at least three different Hebrew plant words across these prophets; tzemach, choter and netzer.

I’m still going to bring Isaiah’s stump picture in alongside Jeremiah’s Tzemach because both prophets are kind of working the same idea… new growth out of David and Jesse as the promise of royal restoration, Just know they’re not using the same vocabulary to say it.

Zechariah Pushes Even Further

Zechariah uses the word twice and he takes it somewhere Jeremiah hadn’t quite gone.

My servant, Tzemach.

NOW the imagery has become very name-like. Not that a prophetic naming works the same way a birth certificate does BUT you can feel the shift. An ordinary word for a sprout has become something more.

Why I Love This One

I have a note in my Bible next to Zechariah 3:8 that just says “grown, not built”. A building is something you construct. A branch is something you wait for.

There is a real, well-documented linguistic link to the Gospel of Luke, and I want to avoid overselling it just because it might sound cool. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint/LXX) translates Zechariah’s Tzemach, in both 3:8 and 6:12, with the Greek word anatole. Then in Luke 1:78, Zechariah the priest, a different Zechariah entirely, sings over his newborn son about “the Sunrise from on high” visiting us:

That same Greek word, anatole. Part of what makes this so beautiful is that anatole is a word of rising. It can describe the rising of light and can also be used for vegetation springing up. So Luke’s line reads naturally as dawn breaking while settling on the very Greek word the LXX had already used for Zechariah’s Tzemach.

Now to be clear, that doesn’t prove Luke sat down intending to resonate with Zechariah. But it gives us a legit reason to ask whether he did!

A field where nothing had sprouted yet. Thorns after the fall. Justice pushing up out of the ground like something planted. And then a title edging toward a name, given to a promise that was spoken as a kingdom was still coming apart at the seams.

Verse Mapping Aid

My Final Thoughts

We tend to picture the Messiah arriving like an announcement. A trumpet, a throne, something that just can’t be missed. In Jeremiah and Zechariah, Tzemach paints a picture of the promised ruler arriving the way everything alive actually arrives and out of a family tree that looked like it was still burning down when the promise was first spoken.

Dig Deeper

Isaiah 11:1, Isaiah 4:2, Zechariah 6:12-13, Psalm 92:7-13, Luke 1:78-79

Isaiah 4:2 is worth your own time this week. It uses the exact phrase Tzemach Adonai, the Branch of the LORD, and scholars debate whether it’s describing a person or just renewed fertility for the land. Keep in mind that it’s not a flaw in the word study. That’s the whole point.

Tzemach doesn’t automatically mean Messiah every time the noun appears. Context is what turns ordinary growth language into a royal promise. Remember that the next time you see the word “Branch” capitalized in your Bible. I would even highlight the word everytime you come across it.

If this one stirred something in you, send it to a friend who needs to know a promise spoken in the middle of collapse is still a promise. And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I've got you! Paid subscribers get access to live Bible studies, extended studies, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of people who want depth without pressure or performance. If you're ready to step further into the Word, you're welcome inside.

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About the Author

Notes

1. Hebrew: וְקוֹץ וְדַרְדַּר תַּצְמִיחַ לָךְ, “thorns and thistles it will cause to sprout for you.” Same root, צמח.

2. Hebrew uses the root צמח twice in this verse: the noun צִמְחָהּ (tzimchah, “its growth”) and the verb תַצְמִיחַ (tatzmiach, “cause to spring up”).

3. Hebrew: וַהֲקִמֹתִי לְדָוִד צֶמַח צַדִּיק, tzemach tzaddiq, “a righteous Branch/Sprout.” This oracle is set during the final period of the Davidic monarchy, before the exile, not after the throne had already fallen. The precise military stage of Babylon’s advance at the time of this specific oracle isn’t independently datable; the broader setting is the judgment and coming exile of Judah’s final kings.

4. Hebrew: הִנְנִי מֵבִיא אֶת־עַבְדִּי צֶמַח.

5. Hebrew: הִנֵּה־אִישׁ צֶמַח שְׁמוֹ, “Behold, a man, Tzemach is his name.”

6. Greek: ἀνατολὴ ἐξ ὕψους. The Septuagint renders tzemach with ἀνατολή (anatolē) specifically in Zechariah 3:8 and 6:12, which is what makes Luke’s word choice notable. Whether Luke intentionally invokes the prophetic usage is a scholarly proposal, not a settled fact.

Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.

Fourteen years. That’s the number Paul gives before telling us he went up to Jerusalem again. Whether he’s counting those fourteen years from his call or from the earlier Jerusalem visit we talked ab…

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Not in Hammurabi's Babylon, where this formula shows up centuries before Moses.

Not in the Talmud, where the rabbis spend two pages arguing about whether it was ever meant literally.

And not in Matthew 5, where Yeshua is doing something a lot more interesting than simply overturning a harsh old law.

New episode is up. Grab your coffee.

At the start of Luke 11, Jesus had just finished praying somewhere off by Himself, and one of His disciples waits untik He’s done and asks Him to teach them to pray, “just as John taught his disciples.” It’s actually the detail that makes this whole passage make sense.

These were Jewish men formed in a culture where prayer was already woven into daily life. The Shema was associated with morning and evening recitation, rooted in the command of Deuteronomy 6 to speak these words “when you lie down and when you rise.”

Other second Temple evidence, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, shows regular prayer at fixed times, and Jewish patterns of fixed prayer that would eventually be preserved more fully in the Amidah was already developing. The later, fully codified forms shouldn’t be projected backward onto Galilee. But these were not men who needed prayer explained to them.

So it’s hard to hear the disciple’s request as Prayer 101. The more interesting question what, specifically, he wanted.

Rabbis and their Prayers

Here’s what I find interesting about first-century Judaism and it’s something a lot of Christian readers are never taught. Later rabbinic literature preserves personal prayers associated with individual sages… prayers those teachers would add onto the end of their fixed prayer rather than in place of it.

The Talmud. in tractate Berakhot, records a whole set of these, and a compressed statement of what mattered most to that particular teacher. One sage, Mar son of Ravina, is remembered for a prayer asking that his tongue be guarded from evil speech and that his heart stay open to Torah… both requests in the same prayer, said at its conclusion.

That evidence comes from centuries after Yeshua, so I can’t use it to prove that every first centurt rabbi handed his disciples a signature prayer as a matter of routine custom, and I don’t want to claim more than it supports. But it gives us a useful Jewish analogy for reading Luke 11, especially since the disciple’s own words point the same direction.

He doesn’t just ask Yeshua to teach them to pray. He asks “just as John taught his disciples,” which tells us John had given his followers some kind of identifiable instruction in prayer signigicant enough to be worth naming even if Luke doesn’t tell us whether it was one fixed prayer or a broader pattern.

He’s not claiming John’s followers had access to some secret formula everyone else missed out on. He is pointing to something John had actually done for his own talmidim (disciples), and asking Jesus to do the same.

The Avinu

Jesus obliges, and what He gives them in Matthew 6 and Luke 11 has come to be called the Lord’s Prayer. In some modern Hebrew-speaking Christian and Messianic Jewish circles it’s called the Avinu, from its opening words, “Our Father.”

The opening itself isn’t exactly as uniform as people assume, though. Matthew preserves the fuller address, “our Father in heaven.” Luke’s version, the one this scene comes from. begins more simply, just “Father”. Luke always did have an economy with words.

That’s the reading in the critical Greek text followed by the NIV and ESV. The KJV reflect a longer manuscript tradition and gives Luke the fuller “Our Father which art in heaven,” matching Matthew. Not sure how I feel about that one.

Either way, both open with an address to God as Father, which wasn’t unheard of in Jewish prayer. You find it in the Hebrew Bible itself, you find it in later Jewish liturgy. But it also wasn’t the default opening. Jesus reaches for something intimate and immediate right at the start, and Matthew’s fuller form already tells you something about what kind of community He’s forming. Not my Father only. Ours.

The Gospels give us the prayer in Greek, so any Hebrew version is a retroversion, one plausible way of translating Matthew’s Greek into Hebrew, not a recovered original. But it’s a useful one to have in front of you.

Following Matthew’s fuller opening:

אבינו שבשמים יתקדש שמך

Avinu shebashamayim, yitqaddesh shimkha. Our Father who is in the heavens, may your Name be sanctified.

That verb, yitqaddesh, is a Hitpael from the Hebrew root Q-D-Sh, the root associated with holiness and sanctification (kadosh, “holy,” is the adjective that comes from that same root).

In this construction it means something closer to “may it be sanctified” or
”may it be treated as holy.” Jesus isn’t asking God to become holy, as though God’s holiness were somehow in question. The petition asks that God’s Name be sanctified, honored, and vindicated as holy… language that also reflects the biblical hope that God would sanctify His Name before the nations, the same hope that we see in Ezekiel 36:20-23. When read next to “Your kingdom come,” that resonance isn’t difficult to hear.

What the Prayer is Actually Doing

Matthew’s fuller form moves from God’s Name, kingdom, and will to human need: God’s kingdom and will first, then daily bread, then forgiveness, then deliverance from trials. It’s not a random collection of requests.

Take “give us this day our daily bread.” That line sits right after the request for God’s kingdom to come, and I think that placement was deliberate. The word for daily, epiousios in the Greel, is genuinely rare and difficult, rare enough that translators have propsed “daily,” “necessary for existence.” “for the coming day.” and even an eschatological “bread of the age to come” as competing options.

You all know me… I wouldn’t want to claim more certainty about its meaning than the evidence gives us. But the request naturally resonates with Israel’s manna story. Try to keep manna overnight and it bred worms, except for the double portion gathered in preparation for Shabbat. Israel had to depend on God for each day’s food, one day at a time, with no way to stockpile trust.

I wouldn’t say Exodus proves with epiousios means. But the theological resonance is hard to miss, and it fits a prayer that keeps circling back to daily, ongoing dependence rather than a single transaction settled once and for all.

Then forgiveness, phrased as a kind of built in reciprocity. Matthew has it as “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Luke puts it a little differently: “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” Luke actually places sin and debt language right next to each other in the same sentence, which tells you something.

That overlap between moral and financial language fits comfortably within Jewish and Semitic ways of talking about wrongdoing. Owing God something and having sinned against God weren’t two separate categories that needed translating between one another. But I would stop short of saying the economic sense disappears completely into metaphor.

Some scholars argue Yeshua’s language may convey both moral and material force at once, evoking actual debt remission alongside forgiveness of sin, which if anything makes the petition richer rather than settled.

Mark 11:25 pictures the disciples standing in prayer when Jesus tells them that if they’re holding a grudge against someone, they need to deal with that before expecting forgiveness from God.

Standing prayer certainly fits Jewish prayer practice, and it’s compatible with the Amidah, though the verse itself doesn’t tell us exactly which prayer they were saying. Either way, the theology lines up with what the Avinu already asks for. Forgiveness offered and forgiveness received aren’t separate transactions.

So Why Did They Need to Ask?

So back to that original question… if Jewish people already had a rich prayer tradition, why did the disciples need Jesus to teach them anything at all?

Like doesn’t tell us exactly what was going through that unnamed disciple’s mind. I don’t think the most natural way to hear the request is “we don’t know how to pray so teach us.”

It makes better sense as “Rabbi, teach us your way of praying, just as John taught his talmidim.” We know from Luke that John had taught his disciples how to pray, and the Talmud gives us later examples of individual sages doing something similar with their own added prayers. Whatever the full scope of that practice in Jesus’ own generation, when you read the Avinu against that background, each line reads less like an isolated devotional thought and more like Jesus compressing His message about the kingdom, provision, forgiveness, and testing into six lines even a child could memorize.

And it shows up very early in the life of the early church. By the time you get to the Didache, a teaching document for the Gentile believers often dated to the late first or early second century, believers are already being instructed to pray this prayer three times a day, which fits a Jewish rhythm of regular daily prayer.

My Final Thoughts

Whatever else the Lord’s Prayer became over the centuries of Christian use after that, Luke presents it as Jesus’ direct response to what the disciple had asked for. A Jewish teacher gave His talmidim a prayer, and the shape of what they prayed carried on what He’d been teaching them all along.

That’s a different thing than teaching Jewish men that prayer exists, which is how I used to hear this passage without even really realizing it. God’s Name sanctified. God’s reign established. Enough bread for today. Forgiveness received and extended in the same breath. Faithfulness held through whatever testing comes. That’s the curriculum, compressed into something a child could remember and a lifetime could keep unpacking.

For more information about The Didache, check out our post on the topic:

Sources and Further Reading

Primary texts

• Luke 11:1–4 and Matthew 6:9–13, the two versions of the prayer, worth reading side by side for the differences noted above. On the Luke 11:2 textual question: the NIV and ESV follow the shorter critical text, “Father”; the KJV follows the longer traditional text, “Our Father which art in heaven,” and the NIV notes manuscript witnesses containing this fuller, more Matthew-like wording.

• Mishnah Berakhot 1:1–2, on the timing of the Shema.

• Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 16b–17a, the personal prayers of individual sages appended to their fixed prayer, including Mar son of Ravina’s prayer at 17a.

• Exodus 16:16–30, the manna instructions and the Sabbath double portion.

• Ezekiel 36:20–23, on God sanctifying his own name before the nations, the background echo behind “hallowed be your name.”

• Mark 11:25, on standing in prayer and forgiving those who have wronged you.

• Didache 8:2–3, the earliest extra-biblical instruction to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times daily.

Secondary sources

• Kurt Niederwimmer, The Didache: A Commentary, translated by Linda M. Maloney, Hermeneia series (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). The standard critical commentary on the Didache, including its instructions on prayer.

• Peter J. Tomson, “The Lord’s Prayer (Didache 8) at the Faultline of Judaism and Christianity,” in The Didache: A Missing Piece of the Puzzle in Early Christianity, 165–188. Compares the prayer’s Jewish form with rabbinic short prayers while examining its distinctive function for Jesus’ followers.

• Toby Janicki, The Way of Life: The Rediscovered Teachings of the Twelve Jewish Apostles to the Gentiles (Marshfield, MO: First Fruits of Zion / Vine of David, 2017). A Messianic Jewish commentary on the Didache that traces its Hebrew and Jewish background in detail. I haven’t quoted directly from it here, but it’s a good next stop if this topic interests you.

A note on the Hebrew reconstruction above: the Gospels preserve the Lord’s Prayer in Greek. The Hebrew rendering in this piece is a modern retroversion meant to help readers hear the prayer the way a first-century Hebrew speaker might have framed it, not a recovered original text.

About the Author

You've been trying to carry this alone. Managing the loneliness quietly, faithfully, without anyone who fully understands this specific road.

Week 5 of Still Believing is about finding your people, t…

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I have moved MANY times in my adult life. My mother used to joke that she needed an address book just for me. And every single time, somewhere around week two in the new house, I have stood in the kitchen not knowing where anything is and thought, I don’t actually live here yet. The boxes are unpacked. The address is changed. My name is on the mailbox. And I still walk into a room expecting a light switch that isn’t there.

Arriving somewhere and actually being there are two different things.

Ki Tavo means “when you enter” or “when you come,” and that gap, the one between arriving and being there, is basically the whole portion. Israel has been circling this moment for forty years. They can see the land. Moses has described it so many times they could probably draw you a map. And now, finally, he starts talking about what happens the actual day their feet cross over.

And what he tells them to do first is strange, if you think about it. He doesn’t say fortify the borders. He doesn’t say build the Temple. He says: take your first fruits, put them in a basket, and go tell a priest a story about where you came from.

We’ll get there. But I want to walk through the whole shape of this portion first, because Ki Tavo is enormous, and it earns every bit of its size.

Word Study

תָּבוֹא

The portion’s name comes from the opening words of Deuteronomy 26:1, ki tavo, “when you come” or “when you enter.” The verb tavo is a form of bo, one of the most ordinary verbs in biblical Hebrew, simply meaning to come or to go in. There is nothing exotic about the word.

That’s part of what makes it interesting here. Moses doesn’t reach for dramatic vocabulary to describe the most significant geographic and spiritual transition Israel will ever make. He uses the same word you’d use for someone walking into a room.

The whole portion is built on top of that plainness. Entering isn’t framed as a conquest or a triumph in this opening line. It’s framed as simply, finally, arriving somewhere you’ve been walking toward for a very long time.

Torah: Deuteronomy 26:1–29:8

Firstfruits and the Story You’re Required to Tell

Deuteronomy 26 opens with a ceremony. Once Israel is settled and the land is producing, a farmer takes from the first produce of the land and carries it in a basket to the place where Adonai will choose to make His Name dwell.

Here’s the part I love. Handing over the basket isn’t the whole ceremony. You also have to say something out loud. A specific something. Moses gives the farmer a script.

That’s not a prayer, exactly. It doesn’t ask God for anything. It’s closer to a recitation, a fixed set of lines the firstfruits bringer recited, standing at the altar with dirt still on his hands from the harvest.

Notice the pronouns while you’re in there. He doesn’t say the Egyptians afflicted my ancestors and God brought them out. He says: they afflicted us. We cried out. Adonai brought us out. A farmer standing in his own field, generations after any of that happened to him personally, speaks as though he was in the story the whole time. That’s not sloppy grammar.

Biblical memory isn’t only remembering what happened to somebody else a long time ago. Israel remembers itself into the story, every single time the basket gets carried up.

Scholars have a name for this kind of passage. Gerhard von Rad, writing in the twentieth century, called Deuteronomy 26:5-9 a “little historical credo,” a compact confession that summarizes Israel’s whole salvation story in miniature: a wandering ancestor, descent into Egypt, affliction, the cry, the deliverance, the land.¹

Whether it’s actually as old as Von Rad thought is debated. Later scholarship has pushed back on dating it to Israel’s earliest period, and some now read it as a more developed literary composition, possibly as late as the Persian period, not a fossil of ancient liturgy.²

What isn’t debated is what the text does: it takes personal thanksgiving over a good harvest and forces it through the eye of a needle marked “you did not get here on your own.”

You brought fruit… you have to also bring a memory.

I think about this every time I’ve had a good year and caught myself starting to feel a little bit responsible for it. Like the harvest was mine because I worked for it. Which, fine, I did work for it. But nobody plants their own rain.

There’s a unique detail in verse 5. “My father was a wandering Aramean” is a legitimate and widely used translation, but Jewish tradition has argued about that line for a very long time. The Passover Haggadah reads it differently, as “an Aramean sought to destroy my father,” identifying the Aramean not as an ancestor but as Laban, pursuing Jacob with intent to harm him.

Rashi accepts that reading. Ibn Ezra rejects it outright on grammatical grounds, pointing out that the Hebrew verb here is intransitive and cannot mean “destroy” in this form. He reads the plain sense instead: my father, Jacob, was the one wandering, poor, on the brink of perishing, when he arrived in Aram.³

Two respected readings, built on the same three Hebrew words, pointing in almost opposite directions. Shocker! One turns the verse into a story about an enemy’s malice. The other turns it into a story about an ancestor’s vulnerability. I don’t think you have to choose a winner to find that remarkable.

This declaration is known in Jewish tradition as Mikra Bikkurim, the recitation or declaration of firstfruits. Its wording is preserved and expounded in the Passover Haggadah, where the classic exposition centers on verses 5 through 8, the wandering, the affliction, the cry, and the deliverance.

The original Bikkurim declaration itself continues into verse 9 with the gift of the land, but that part of the passage isn’t the focus of the Haggadah’s exposition the way the earlier verses are.⁴

The Haggadah takes that same instinct even further, teaching that in every generation a person is obligated to see himself as though he personally came out of Egypt. The farmer with his basket got there first.

Two harvests, in a sense. The one in your basket and the one in your memory.

The Twelve Curses and a Ceremony Written on Stone

Chapter 27 shifts from a private ceremony at the altar to a national one at two mountains. The instructions are oddly specific. Moses tells Israel that once they cross the Jordan, they’re to set up large stones, coat them with plaster, and write the words of the Torah on them, in public, where anyone could read them.

Then comes the part that always sounds a little like a liturgy of dread if you read it too fast. Six tribes stand on Mount Gerizim, six on Mount Ebal, facing each other across a valley near Shechem, and the Levites read out twelve curses, one at a time, and after each one, the whole nation answers Amen.

Jewish tradition, reflected in the Mishnah, pictures this scene with the priests, the Levites, and the ark stationed in the valley between the two mountains, the tribes arranged on the slopes above, so that the whole nation could hear both the blessing and the curse read aloud on the same day, in the same breath.⁵

Joshua 8 records the ceremony actually happening once Israel crossed into the land, which tells you this wasn’t a hypothetical instruction. It actually got carried out.⁶

The curses themselves cover real ground, secret idolatry, dishonoring parents, moving a neighbor’s boundary marker, exploiting the vulnerable. But it’s the Amen that totally gets me. Nobody got to hear the list read and stay quiet. You had to say it out loud, about yourself, in front of everyone, standing on a mountain and agreeing to the terms.

Chapter 28 is the long version of the same choice, blessing if you listen, curse if you don’t, laid out in exhausting, almost unbearable detail. I’m not going to walk you through all sixty-eight verses.

Some of it is hard to read, genuinely hard, siege language, exile language, the kind of description that isn’t trying to be gentle. Moses is not making it easier for them. He wants Israel walking into the land with their eyes open about what’s actually at stake.

Chapter 29: Eyes That Still Don’t See

By chapter 29, Moses has said almost everything he came to say, and what’s left is this strange, aching moment where he tells the truth about how much of it they actually grasped.

They saw the plagues. They saw the sea split. They ate manna for forty years and their sandals didn’t wear out, verse 5 says so plainly it’s almost funny, forty years and your shoes held up. And after all of it, verse 4 says plainly: you still don’t fully get it. You’re dense! Adonai hasn’t given you the heart to know it yet.

I don’t think that’s an insult. I think it’s very Israeli… brutally honest.. Some things you can witness with your own eyes and still not understand for years. Sometimes decades. If I am being honest, sometimes a lifetime. I have watched things happen in my own life that I described one way at the time and only understood correctly a long time afterward, once I had enough distance to see what had actually been happening.

Our reading closes right at verse 8, mid-sentence in a sense, with Moses telling them to keep the covenant so that they’ll prosper, and then chapter 29 keeps going without us into the “secret things belong to Adonai” passage. The lectionary breaks here on purpose, a good place to pause. Everything Israel needs to know for entering the land has now been said. What they still don’t get stays unresolved as the covenant speech moves on without them.

Haftarah: Isaiah 60:1–22

Light That Doesn’t Ask Permission

The haftarah jumps us forward into a vision of Zion after devastation, being summoned into restoration and glory, and yet somehow lands on the exact same theme. Arrival. Except now it’s Zion herself being told to get up.

This is Isaiah’s vision for a devastated Jerusalem, walls broken, people scattered, and the prophet doesn’t tell her to rebuild first and then shine. He tells her to shine, present tense, because the light has already come. The glory has already risen. Arise, here, means stand up inside something that’s already true, not go produce it.

Deuteronomy told Israel what it would cost to enter the land faithfully. Isaiah tells a broken Jerusalem what it looks like on the other side of exile, to enter it again, lit up, gates never shut, nations streaming toward a light that isn’t hers, it’s His, she’s just standing in it.

Besorah: 1 Corinthians 15:1–11

What Paul Received, and What He Handed On

Here’s where the Besorah does something I didn’t expect the first time I studied Ki Tavo’s readings all the way through with the purpose of writing a drash on it.

Paul opens 1 Corinthians 15 with a word pair built for formal transmission.

Received. Passed on. The Greek verbs are paralambanō and paradidōmi, receive and hand on. They’re well suited to the formal transmission of tradition. Later rabbinic Hebrew expresses a very similar pattern with qibbel and masar, receive and transmit, as in the opening line of Pirkei Avot: Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua.⁷

Paul’s point is that this message was received and faithfully handed on, not invented on the spot. I did not make this up, he’s saying. This was given to me, and I am giving it to you intact.

Put that next to a farmer standing at an altar reciting words he didn’t invent either, my father was a wandering Aramean, words older than his own memory, retelling a story that isn’t only his. Same instinct.

Some truths are too important to leave to spontaneous personal expression. You receive them intact. You pass them on intact. Ki Tavo is a portion about entering something, land, covenant, a story, that was already there waiting, that you didn’t build and don’t get to redesign on arrival.

My Final Thoughts

Of all things in this portion, I keep looking at the basket.

Not the mountains, not the curses, not even Isaiah’s astonishing light. The basket. A farmer, hands still dirty, carrying the first of what he grew to a priest, and being given a script instead of being left to say whatever felt sincere in the moment.

We tend to think sincerity means unscripted. Say what’s really in your heart, right now, in your own words. And there’s a place for that. I often need to write out a script for myself for things like podcasts and teachings because, being a stroke survivor, I easily lose my train of thought and I tend to forget things. So a script or bullet points keeps me on track. However, they are still my words and still sincere… even if I am reading them later.

But Ki Tavo seems to think something else is also true: that some stories are too easy to forget on your own, and too important to risk forgetting, so you are given the words. My father was a wandering Aramean. What I received I also passed on to you.

Arriving is not the same as remembering how you got there. Ki Tavo gives Israel a whole toolkit for remembering, a recited history, a mountain full of Amens, a Torah written publicly on plastered stones, so that entering the land wouldn’t turn into forgetting the road that led there.

I think about that basket every time I catch myself skipping past gratitude straight to ownership. It’s mine, I earned it, look what I built. Ki Tavo doesn’t let you get away with that for very long. It gives you a script and says: say this instead.

Hebrew Letter Lesson

ז

Zayin

Zayin is the seventh letter of the aleph-bet. Later Jewish tradition has associated its shape with a weapon, and also with a crown and scepter, giving the letter themes of strength, authority, and sustenance.

Its numerical value is seven, naturally connecting it in Jewish reflection with Shabbat and completion. Six days of labor, a seventh of rest.⁸

Now, I want to be honest about what kind of claim that is. These associations, weapon, crown, sustenance, come from later Jewish interpretation of the letter’s block form and its number. They aren’t a secure recovery of what an ancient pictograph originally meant. I cannot say the earliest scribes intended any of this symbolism. But it’s a meaningful way later tradition has read the letter, and I think it fits this portion well enough to share.

A Little Nugget

Application

• Where in your own life have you been given something, a story, a practice, a piece of faith, that you’re responsible for passing on rather than rewriting?

• What would it look like to bring your “firstfruits,” giving to God from the beginning rather than whatever is left after you’ve already used what you needed?

• Is there a version of the Amen moment in chapter 27 in your own life, a place where you need to say something true out loud, in front of witnesses, instead of keeping it private?

Weekly Practice

Each night this week, before bed, name one thing you received this year that you didn’t create yourself, and one way you can pass it on faithfully rather than let it end with you. It doesn’t need to be dramatic. A recipe. A prayer someone taught you. A verse you were handed at the right moment by the right person.

Dig Deeper

Ki Tavo has more in it than one study can hold. A few places worth going deeper on your own:

• Read Deuteronomy 26:5–9 out loud, the way it was meant to be spoken. Notice how much of Israel’s whole story fits into five verses, and ask what five verses you’d choose to summarize your own.

• The twelve curses in chapter 27 aren’t random. Look at what they have in common, secret sins, hidden exploitation, things done where no one’s watching. What does it mean that the covenant specifically names what happens in the dark?

• Compare Isaiah 60:1 with Isaiah 6, where the prophet first hears the whole earth declared full of Adonai’s glory. What’s different about how the glory shows up in chapter 60, and why might that difference matter for a people returning from exile?

• Look up the full Passover Haggadah text sometime and find where Deuteronomy 26:5–8 appears. Notice what the rabbis chose to expand on, and what they left exactly as Moses wrote it. I love the Messianic Passover Hagaddah myself. It is the one we have used at all of our Passover seders.

• Read Paul’s word choice in 1 Corinthians 15:3 again, received and passed on, and think about what you’ve received that you’re responsible for passing on faithfully, without editing it into something easier.

Download This Portion

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Before You Go

If this study opened something up for you, share it with a friend who’s standing in the middle of a big transition, a new job, a new home, a season she can’t quite believe she’s finally living in, and needs to hear that arriving well means remembering, not just moving in.

And if you want to go slower and deeper into the Word together, I’ve got you. The Chavurah is a community of women who gather for live Bible studies, extended Torah portions, audio lessons, devotionals, theological teaching, and spiritual formation practices that go beyond what a single post can hold. If you’re ready to step further into the Word, you’re welcome inside. 👉🏻 Join The Chavurah.

If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕

About the Author

Footnotes & Sources

Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.

1. Gerhard von Rad first proposed reading Deuteronomy 26:5–9 as a “kleines geschichtliches Credo” (little historical credo) in his 1938 essay, later expanded in his commentary work.

2. Marius Bosman, “Reconsidering Deuteronomy 26:5–11 as a ‘small historical creed’: Overtures towards a ‘migrant reading’ within the Persian period,” HTS Teologiese Studies 75, no. 3 (2019), explicitly re-evaluates von Rad’s dating and argues for a later, Persian-period setting for the passage, summarizing related scholarship from Otto, Gertz, and Berlejung.

3. The Haggadah’s reading of Deuteronomy 26:5 as referring to Laban is followed by Rashi. Ibn Ezra rejects it on the grounds that the Hebrew verb oved is intransitive and cannot bear a transitive sense of “destroy” without a different verb form (such as ma’avid or me’abbed), and reads “father” as Jacob himself.

4. The standard rabbinic term for this recitation is Mikra Bikkurim (מִקְרָא בִּכּוּרִים), reflected in Mishnah Sotah 7:2–3 and Mishnah Bikkurim. The classic Haggadah exposition (Mishnah Pesachim 10:4 instructs expounding from “Arami oved avi”) centers on Deuteronomy 26:5–8.

5. Mishnah Sotah 7:5 describes the positioning of the priests, Levites, and ark between Gerizim and Ebal. Source: Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Sotah.7.5

6. Joshua 8:30–35 records the fulfillment of the Deuteronomy 27 instruction after Israel’s entry into the land.

7. The Greek paralambanō / paradidōmi pairing as formal transmission language, paralleling the Hebrew qibbel / masar pattern in Pirkei Avot 1:1 (“Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua”), is discussed by scholars including Craig Keener and Richard Bauckham in connection with 1 Corinthians 15:3.

8. The “weapon” and “crown and scepter” readings of Zayin, along with its association with Shabbat and completion via its numerical value of seven, are later interpretive traditions reflected in sources such as Chabad.org’s letter studies, not claims about the ancient pictograph’s original meaning.

Nobody measures a house they’ve given up on.

Fourteen years after Jerusalem burned, a defeated prophet gets handed a measuring rod instead of a comfort verse. Nine chapters of gates, walls, and cubits…

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We’ve made it to the final soul trait in Everyday Holiness. Morinis saved the hardest one to translate for last.

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I promise you Miss Patty never touched this one. No felt board, no flannel Ehud, no craft where you glue a cotton ball beard on a judge of Israel. And once you actually read Judges 3 in full, you understand exactly why.

Somebody decided that was not felt board material. Fair enough. But it's still Scripture, and it's stranger and funnier and more theologically loaded than anything I learned as a kid.

The Judge They Left Off the Rotation

Ok, quick setup, because Judges runs on a pattern you’ll recognize even if you’ve never read this book all the way through. Israel does evil, God lets an oppressor move in, Israel cries out, and God raises up a deliverer.

By the time we get to chapter three, the oppressor is Eglon, king of Moab, and Israel had been paying him tribute for eighteen years.¹ Eighteen years is most of a generation growingup under someone else’s thumb.

So now, enter Ehud, son of Gera, from the tribe of Benjamin. And the very first thing the text tells us about him, before going into any other details, is that he is left-handed.² Hang onto that detail because we will come back to it.

The Detail Nobody Explains

The Hebrew phrase that describes Ehud is closer to “restricted” or “bound” in his right hand than to our simple “left-handed.” Commentators genuinely disagree about what that means.³ Some read it as an actual physical limitation. Others point to the Septuagint (LXX), the ancient Greek translation, which uses “ambidextrous” and argue that this describes a trained skill rather than a ‘disability’. ⁴

What makes me lean more toward the trained skill reading is Judges 20:16, later in the same book, where seven hundred handpicked Benjaminite men are described the same way and are famous for being able to sling a stone at a hair and not miss. ⁵

It’s hard to imagine seven hundred men sharing one ‘disability’ by coincidence. Benjamine seems to have had a tradition of specially trained southpaw fighters.

The debate isn’t resolved but, either way, this detail carries some weight in the story beyond biography.

Where He Hid the Blade

Ehud makes himself a short, double-edged sword. Its length is given in Hebrew as a gomed, which is a word that turns up absolutely nowhere else in the Bible. So no one can give you an exact modern measurement. Most translations come out around a cubit. ⁶ But, however long it actually was, it was short enough that he could strap it to his right thigh, under his cloak.

A sword was normally worn on the left side, for a right-handed draw. Ehud hides his on the unexpected right thigh instead. I think, and commentators agree, that his left-handedness is what let him carry a concealed weapon without attracting the usual suspicion.⁷ The text doesn’t describe a search taking place. What it does say is that Ehud placed his weapon somewhere nobody expected it.

He strolls on into Eglon’s court carrying Israel’s tribute money like a good, harmless vassal. And once the gifts are delivered and the crowd is dismissed, he turns back.

The King the Text Wouldn't Let Be Dignified

One more detail before the scene itself. Eglon is described as “a very fat man.” ⁸ Some scholars have pointed to his name echoing the Hebrew word for a young bull or a calf, and that the narrator keeps describing him in language reserved for livestock being fattened for slaughter!⁹

A name connection like that is one scholar’s literary proposal. I’m passing it along as that and nothing more. The narrator sets up a punchline at the expense of the oppressor and I am not even mad.

The Filth Came Out

Ehud tells Eglon he has a secret message from God. The king gets up from his seat… maybe out of respect for receiving a divine message but the text doesn’t say why. Alone in his private roof chamber, Ehud drives the sword into his stomach. The description after that is graphic on purpose. The handle goes in after the blade. The fat closes over it. And then comes a word that we see exactly one time in the entire Hebrew Bible, translated here as “the filth came out.”¹⁰

One longstanding interpretation reads that word as bodily waste, which definitely fits the humiliation bathroom humor that’s been built around this whole scene. Other scholars think it describes the wound itself, the blade essentially making its way out the other side.

The Hebrew is actually uncertain enough that at least one modern translation leaves the clause out of its main text completely. They treat it as maybe garbled in copying, since the word resembles another word, “vestibule,” that turns up one verse later.¹¹

This one is genuinely up in the air, and I really want you to feel how much uncertainty is packed into a line that most of us never read twice. I, personally, am going with the bathroom humor. That is my interpretation and I am dying on that hill.

Ehud gets out, locks the doors behind him and he’s gone! The servants come and find the doors locked, and reach for the most polite explanation they could find. Surely he’s relieving himself.¹² So they wait. They wait a while longer, past the point of comfort, because who wants to be THAT servant that interrupts the king in the bathroom?

By the time they finally get the key, Ehud is long gone, and their king is on the floor.

The narrator wanted you laughing, even if it is a little uncomfortably, at the exact moment something enormous was happening (no pun intended), and that kind of timing is way too careful to be serendipitous. Deliverance turns up here as a very awkward wait outside a locked door, and nobody in the room has a clue that’s what they’re witnessing.

The Rest of the Story

No, I am not trying to be Paul Harvey but I will tell you the rest of the story.

Ehud makes it past the idols near Gilgal, a place the text names twice… once on his way in and once on his way out, like a checkpoint.¹³ He gets to the hill country, sounds the shofar, and Israel rallies behind him. They seize the fords of the Jordan so no Moabite can make their way back across and escape, and the text says ten thousand of Moab’s strongest men fall that day.

Then it says something almost startling in how utterly simple it is: the land had peace for eighty years. ¹⁴ Eighty years, bought by a left-handed man, a hidden blade, and a very embarrassing bathroom joke.

Verse Mapping Aid:

My Final Thoughts

I think about how carefully this story avoids making its hero impressive in the typical ways. Ehud isn’t strong like Samson. He’s not a general. He’s just a guy with a southpaw and a short sword he made himself who walked into a room carrying a tribute for a king who had no clue what was hidden beneath his clothes.

Judges is just full of deliverers that the Sunday School feltboard never quite knew what to do with. Ehud is just the one where the discomfort seems to be the loudest. Scripture let a bathroom joke bring eighty years of peace and it never once apologized for it! And again, I’m not even mad!

Dig Deeper

Read Judges 3:12–30 out loud, all the way through, and notice where you want to laugh and where you feel like you need to stop yourself. What does it do to your reading of Scripture to admit it’s allowed to be funny?

Ehud’s most overlooked trait turned out to be the whole plan. Where have you assumed some limitation, or just an oddity about yourself, ruled you out of something that might actually have been the opening?

Notice the servants outside that door, too polite and too patient to check on their own king. Do you ever feel that your own politeness might be keeping you from asking a question that needs asking?

If this study stirred something in you, share it with a friend who needs it. And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I’ve got you! Paid subscribers get access to live Bible studies, extended studies, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of people who want depth without pressure or performance. If you’re ready to step further into the Word, you’re welcome inside!

👉🏻 Join The Chavurah

If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕

About the Author

Notes

1. Judges 3:12-14.

2. Judges 3:15.

3. The Hebrew phrase itter yad-yemino, literally “restricted/bound of his right hand,” is read by some commentators as physical impairment and by others as trained left-hand dominance; the debate is not resolved. See Ellicott’s Commentary and Keil-Delitzsch on Judges 3:15.

4. The Septuagint renders the phrase in a way generally understood as “ambidextrous,” cited by multiple commentaries as evidence for the trained-skill reading.

5. Judges 20:16.

6. Judges 3:16. The Hebrew term for the sword’s length (gomed) occurs only here in the Hebrew Bible; its precise length is uncertain, with most translations approximating a cubit.

7. The reading that the right-thigh placement helped conceal the weapon is a scholarly and literary inference drawn from ancient Near Eastern sword-wearing conventions (swords ordinarily worn on the left side for a right-handed draw); the text itself does not narrate a search or state this as Ehud’s explicit motive.

8. Judges 3:17.

9. H. Ausloos, “The Story of Ehud and Eglon in Judges 3:12-30: A Literary Pearl as a Theological Stumbling Block,” discusses the widespread, though not unanimous, scholarly reading connecting Eglon’s name and description to Hebrew terms for a calf or fattened animal, and argues for intentional sacrificial wordplay. Presented here as an established literary proposal rather than certain etymology.

10. Judges 3:21-22. The underlying Hebrew word (transliterated parshedonah) occurs only this one time in the Hebrew Bible.

11. Scholarly proposals for this word’s meaning include bodily waste, a description of the wound itself, or a possible scribal error connected to a similar word (”vestibule”) appearing in the following verse; at least one modern translation (NET) omits the clause from its main text for this reason. The meaning remains genuinely unresolved.

12. Judges 3:24.

13. Judges 3:19 and 3:26, both reference “the idols” near Gilgal as a location marker.

14. Judges 3:29-30.

15. Same sourcing as note 3.

I want to tell you about the day I finally understood why my orthopedic doctor keeps telling me my posture is "compensating."

You know how that works. Something in your body gets weak or hurt, so something else steps in to keep you vertical instead. You don't even notice it happening. You just notice, eventually, that your shoulder or your knee hurts for no reason, and it turns out the reason is your hip decided three years ago it wasn't going to pull its weight anymore.

Hebrew has a word for that moment something else holds your weight up. It’s samakh (סָמַךְ).

The dictionary gives you “lean”, “lay”, “rest”, “support”. ¹ True! Also, completely useless until you notice what it’s doing when it comes to actual sentences.

Samson braces himself against the two middle pillars of the Philistine temple, one hand on each, and the text uses samakh for that physical leaning. ² His actual weight, pressed into the stone.

Later, when the Assyrian Rabshakeh is taunting Judah for trusting Egypt, he says that if a man samakh-leans on Egypt, it will pierce his hand like a broken reed. ³ Same word, completely different outcome because, what you’re leaning on, matters!

And in Psalm 3, David is lying down at night with people rising up against him on every side, and he says he can sleep because the LORD sustains him (Psalm 3:6).

It is the same root. He’s not gritting his teeth throughout the night, full of anxiety. He’s put his full weight down on something else and gone to sleep.

Lean. Sustain. Rest against something that either holds or doesn’t. That’s samakh.

Then Leviticus happens, and the word turns up someplace I never expected and I had missed it for many years.

When Leaning Walks Into the Sanctuary

Here’s Leviticus 1:4 describing the burnt offering:

“Lay his hand” is samakh. It is the same verb as Samson on the pillars and a tired man leaning on a staff.

Now, here is the thing I got wrong the first time I worked through this, because you know I try to keep it 100 with you.. blemishes and all. I initially was going to say that samakh itself means “transfer”. But it doesn’t work that way. This exact gesture, the hand on the animal’s head, turns up all over Leviticus and Numbers and it is doing different things depending on where you find it. ⁴

It’s there for the ordination of the Levites in Numbers 8. It’s there for when Moses commissions Joshua. It’s even there when witnesses layhands on a man before his execution in Leviticus 24. The verb doesn’t specialize… context does.

So what does Leviticus actually claim happens on Yom Kippur? Here’s Leviticus 16:21, and this is one of the rare places the Torah spells it out for us instead of leaving us to infer it:

Both hands, with confession spoken over the goat. That two-handed detail is easy to miss. Most other hand-laying texts just say “his hand,” singular. This one goes out of its way to tell you both.

But the theological work in that verse isn’t coming from the word samakh by itself. It’s the whole sentence. Aaron confesses for all of Israel. The text says the sins are placed on the goat. The goat is sent away. That’s what tells you the ritual is enacting removal.

Verse 22 goes even further and says the goat will carry their iniquities away, into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:22).

The hand-laying gesture is part of how this happens, but the verb “lay hands” doesn’t mean “transfer sin” every time you see it in the Torah.

Numbers 27 is useful here because the surrounding words tell us what a different instance of this hand-laying means.

Moses lays his hand on Joshua and publicly commissions him, and the text separately instructs Moses to place some of his hod, his authority or splendor, on Joshua too. This is a distinct action with its own verb. ⁵

Deuteronomy 34:9 later connects Moses’ hand-laying directly to Joshua being filled with the spirit of wisdom. ⁶ So the gesture clearly matters to Joshua’s commissioning. It just isn’t carrying guilt the way it does in Leviticus 16. It’s the same verb but hbere the gesture belongs to commissioning and leadership, not sin-bearing.

One Gesture, Several Jobs

I want to be honest that what follows is my own interpretation and so I want to be clear that this is not anything the text says. ⁷

The physical picture we see all through the uses of samakh is one of leaning upon, supporting, placing something firmly on another. Scripture keeps taking that one bodily vocabulary into different situations. A man leaning against a pillar because he’s exhausted. An offerer identifying with his sacrifice. A leader being commissioned for the road ahead. And on the one day of the year built for it, a nation’s confessed sin, placed on an animal that walks it out of the camp.

Context is what tells you what it is doing.

Which sent me back to Isaiah 26:3, a verse I’d read a hundred times without connecting it to any of this. But when you start to study a word in Hebrew you stumble upon all the places it’s used. You can go down many, many rabbit holes when you open up a lexicon.

The word there for “stayed” is samukh, the adjectival form from the same root as samakh,⁸ describing a mind that has already done the leaning and is now, at rest, actually resting there.

I don’t think that’s an accident of vocabulary. I think it’s the same posture, doing what it does. Putting weight somewhere other than your own strength.

What that gesture means depends on the room it’s standing in. But samakh keeps bringing theology back into the body: leaning, supporting, laying a hand upon another.

Verse Mapping Aid

My Final Thoughts

When I started studying Hebrew in seminary, I started a running list in the back of one of my notebooks that I call “posture words.” They’re Hebrew words where the body itself tells you something about what’s happening. I haven’t pulled it out for some time. But I am going to.

I’m adding samakh to the list. And honestly, it may go right up near the top.

We tend to talk about faith and forgiveness in pretty abstract terms. Trust. Belief. Peace. Atonement. All true, but pretty easy to leave floating around as nice ideas. Hebrew keeps insisting on bodies. A hand laid down. A man leaning his whole weight against a wall because he cannot hold himself up one more hour (been there, done that, bought the t-shirt)!

What that gesture means, each time, depends on the room it’s leaning in. And as a devotional picture, I love the weight in it. Leaning. Resting. Placing a hand on something, or someone, else.

Dig Deeper

If you want to keep tracing this one, look at Exodus 29:10-19 (the ordination ram, same gesture, different offering), Numbers 8:10-12 (the Levites, hands laid by the whole community), and Hebrews 6:1-2, where “laying on of hands” shows up in a New Covenant list of foundational teachings, still with that Hebrew gesture behind it.

What’s actually being conferred or transferred in each case, and what stays constant about the physical act even when the object changes?

Let’s Talk in the Comments

Where in your life right now do you know you’re supposed to be leaning instead of holding yourself up?

Does knowing the same verb describes both leaning for support and laying hands on the Yom Kippur goat change how you picture the Day of Atonement?

What’s a burden you’re still carrying that you thought you’d already laid down?

If this one stuck with you, send it to a friend who’s been white-knuckling something they were never meant to carry alone.

And if you want to keep going deeper into words like this every week, along with live studies, extended teaching, and a community of people who want depth without pressure or performance, I’ve got you.

👉🏻 Join The Chavurah

If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕

About the Author

Notes

1. BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon), סָמַךְ (samakh), “to lean, lay, rest, support.”

2. Judges 16:29. Samakh, Niphal form (reflexive: “braced himself”).

3. 2 Kings 18:21; Isaiah 36:6.

4. Cf. Numbers 8:10-12 (Levites); Numbers 27:18 (Joshua); Leviticus 24:14 (witnesses and the blasphemer). Same verb, ritual function determined by context in each case.

5. Numbers 27:18-20. The hand-laying and the conferral of hod (authority/splendor) are two distinct actions in the text.

6. Deuteronomy 34:9.

7. Interpretive framing (the “posture word” through-line) is my own devotional reading, not a claim about the lexical definition of samakh itself.

8. BDB lists סָמוּךְ (samukh) as the passive participle/adjectival form of the root סמך, the same root as samakh.

Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.

The Evidence Room is now closed. At least for the time being anyway! That last case file, Matthew 7:6, pearls before swine, was the final one.

But here is what I have been mulling over for quite a whi…

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Every Palm Sunday, kids wave palm branches down a church aisle and most of us never ask why palm branches.

Two hundred years before Yeshua rode into Jerusalem, that same symbol was already tied to a Temple rededication, an armed revolt against an empire, and centuries of coins minted by people still hoping for the same kind of rescue.

By the time a crowd grabbed palm branches to meet Yeshua, they weren't waving something neutral.

This episode walks through the Maccabean revolt, the Hasmonean and Bar Kokhba coinage, and what "hoshia-na" actually meant to people who knew exactly what they were asking for, and what it cost when the rescue that came didn't look anything like the one they expected.

It was 2000 or 2001, and you just couldn’t escape The Prayer of Jabez. I know because I tried.

It was everywhere! Friends from church wouldn’t stop talking about it. Christian TV had Bruce Wilkinson on CONSTANTLY, walking through his four-point outline as though generations of rabbis and scholars had somehow missed the obious and, thank the Lord, he was finally here!

The book sold over 9,000,000 copies in the first two years alone and, for a while there, it felt like every conversation in evangelical circles eventually circled back to territory and blessing and a man named Jabez.

What is the Prayer of Jabez

The Prayer of Jabez comes from 1 Chronicles 4:9-10, two verses buried in a genealogy, where an otherwise unknown man named Jabez asks God for four things:

• Blessing

• Enlarged Territory

• God’s hand upon him

• Protection from harm

The text tells us God granted the request. That’s the whole prayer. What got built on top of those two verses over the next twenty-five years is a totally different story and it’s the one I actually want to tell.

Why? Because I eventually fell for the created version too. I prayed the prayer every morning for a while, the way the book instructed you to, just waiting for my territory to enlarge. I didn’t know a lick of Hebrew at the time so I wasn’t able to ask the text the difficult questions. I just knew the book made two little verses in a genealogy feel like the magic key to unlocking God’s blessings and purpose in my life.

Twenty-five years later, I want to go back and read those two verses. I have no interest in a paraphrase or a four-point outline. I want the actual text.

What the Prayer Actually Says

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. We get one verse of introduction, one verse of prayer and a single line telling us God said yes.

There isn’t a whole lot of room in two verses for an entire theology, which means whatever gets built on it has to come from somewhere else. I want to look at what got added, what’s actually there, and what got lost somewhere between some obscure Juadahite and a self-help shelf at a Christian bookstore.

Meet the Man Nobody Introduces

The Chronicler is in the middle of chapter after chapter of names… father begetting son. The kind of pages many people just kind of skim. We all did it!

And then, without warning, he pivots. He gives us a person instead of a lineage. A person with a mother, and a name, and a reason for that name, and a moral judgment attached to him before he even says a word.

His name is Yabetz and the name is connected by the narrator through wordplay with otzev: pain or sorrow.

Now the connection is not a clean dictionary etymology. Even the lexicons handle the derivation of the name as uncertain: BDB says that Jabez in interpreted in verse 9 as being akin to otzev.

The NET Bible just says the name SOUNDS like otzev and the Revised JPS Tanakh states in a note on 1 Chronicles 4:9: pain Heb. ʻoṣeb, connected with “Jabez.” ¹

[I had considered describing this as metathesis, letters rearranged for effect, but three standard references (BDB, the NET Bible, and the Revised JPS Tanakh 2023) independently descrive the Yabetz/otzev connection as wordplay or association rather than direct derivation. ² So that is what I am going with… not a single source’s guess.]

Imaging growing up with a name your own mother connected with the pain of bringing you into the world. Every introduction, every time she called your name, every time someone else said your name, her worst memory came rushing back.

Four Requests, One Breath

Bless me. Enlarge my territory. Let Your hand be with me. Keep me from harm.

There’s something the prosperity version skips right on over. The last line circles back to his name. This matters!

Verse 9 gave us ‘beotzev’ (in pain). Verse 10 ends with otzbi, from that same root… “so that it might not cause me pain.”

The Chronicler didn’t just tell us Jabez’s name sounded like pain and then moved on. He framed both verses with it. His mother’s pain at the start and Jabez’s own prayer against that pain at the end.

I read that as Jabez asking God that his history doesn’t get the last word on his life. That’s my read on it and not a claim about what the Hebrew says. But the vocabulary choice is the Chronicler’s on both sides of the prayer and not something I am inserting into it.

A man looking at the sentence life wrote about him and asking God to edit it. One specific man, one specific prayer over one specific situation. He didn’t want his name to speak his future.

Where the Book Went Off the Rails

Ok, let me just say that I am not here to torch Bruce Wilkinson personally. I feel like there is a level of sincerity that lies under The Prayer of Jabez that doesn’t deserve any mockery at all. The publisher itself describes the book as encouraging readers to offer this prayer regularly, in expectation of extraordinary blessing, favor, power, and protections.

That’s a fair description of what Wilkinson actually argued and “territory” in his interpretation often meant ministry reach and influence as much as anything financial.

BUT… in the Name It and Claim It culture that grew up around the book over the following twenty-five years, “enlarge my territory” could easily become shorthand for more money, more success, more of everthing!

A two-verse prayer from that obscure Judahite got turned around into something closer to a technique. Pray these words, in this order, with enough faith, and things expand.

That is not at all what the text does. The text does NOT give Jabez a formula. It gives us a plea from a man whose story had been marked from birth by the language of pain. There’s actually a small grammatical detail I think is worth pointing out.

The prayer opens with the Hebrew im, “if”… a construction the NET Bible notes may reflect an oath or vow formula rather than a simple casual request. We don’t know what, if anything, Jabez vowed since the text only preserves the petition itself. But the grammar may carry more weight than “please” implies in English.

And God, we’re told simply, granted his request. What is important here is that there is absolutely no commentary on technique, no promise that the “formula” repeats for the next guy who just says the same words. We are just told he asked and it was granted.

A Prayer Not a Spell

Jabez prayed like someone who believed God was listening, not like someone who believed he cracked some secret code. The honor described in verse 9, before we ever hear him pray, matters more than the prosperity crowd tends to give it credit for.

He was already “more honorable than his brothers,” nikhbad me’echav. The prayer wasn’t what made him honorable. The prayer came from a man who already was.

That is not a story about a technique that works if you say it right. It’s a story about a man whose name held his mother’s pain, and who took that history straight to God instead of trying to run away from it.

Verse Mapping Aid

My Final Thoughts

I don’t think Jabez needs to be turned into a formula, and I definitely don’t think he needs a bracelet. Honestly, the two verses are interesting enough without everything we piled onto them.

Two verses about a man whose name held his mother’s pain, who took that history straight to God, and asked that it not determine what comes next.

That’s no formula. I don’t think it was ever meant to be.

Dig Deeper

Genesis 32:22-32 - Jacob wrestling for a new name and a blessing he refused to let go of

1 Samuel 1:10-11 -Hannah’s prayer, another prayer born out of personal pain

Psalm 34:17-19 - the LORD near to the brokenhearted

Deuteronomy 12:20 - God’s own promise of enlarged territory to Israel

Tell me in the comments…

Has a label from your past ever tried to write the ending of your story for you? What did you do with it?

If this study stirred something in you, share it with a friend who's been handed a bracelet with this verse on it and never actually read the two verses behind it. And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I've got you! Paid subscribers get access to live Bible studies, extended studies, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of people who want depth without pressure or performance. If you're ready to step further into the Word, you're welcome inside.

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About the Author

Notes

1. NET Bible, note on 1 Chronicles 4:9: the name “sounds like” the Hebrew ‘otseb, “pain.”

2. Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, entry for יַעְבֵּץ (Ya’betz), which notes the name is interpreted in 1 Chronicles 4:9 as akin to עצב (‘atsav/otzev), without asserting a direct derivation; NET Bible, note on 1 Chronicles 4:9; THE JPS TANAKH: Gender-Sensitive Edition (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2023), note on 1 Chronicles 4:9: “pain: Heb. ‘otseb, connected with ‘Jabez.’”

Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.

You have prayed the same prayer for so long you could say it in your sleep. And some days it feels less like faith and more like stubborn refusal to give up.

Wee 4 of Still Believing is about persiste…

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You know this one. Kids make fun of Elisha for being bald, he curses them, two bears come out of the woods and maul forty-two of them. It’s the story people bring up when they want to make the Old Testament sound unhinged, and most of us don’t have anything to say back.

Turns out the Hebrew is a lot less neat and clean than the Sunday school version… in both directions. This one’s worth the listen.

Read more

I counted this week. Seventy-four. That’s how many commandments Jewish tradition counts in Ki Tetze, more than in any other weekly Torah portion, and I would love to tell you I read every one of them slowly and devotionally with a candle lit.

What actually happened is I read about the captive woman, put my coffee down, picked it back up, read about the mother bird, and said out loud to nobody, “How is this even the same chapter?” Then the ox and the donkey. Then the guardrail on your roof. Then the fringes. Then a man who decides he hates his new wife. It reads like somebody emptied a kitchen drawer onto the table and said, here, sort that.

So I went looking for a frame, and I had the book The Mussar Torah Commentary on my bookshelf so I grabbed it, and Rabbi Bonnie Koppell gave me a commentary on this portionthat I just had to use. She says this whole portion is a long argument between two Hebrew words. Tzedek. Rachamim. Justice and mercy. And then she asks the question I didn’t know I needed: when is it one, and when is it the other?¹

I spent most of my life as a believer assuming mercy was the upgrade. Law was the old model. Grace was the new one. Justice was what the Old Testament did before Jesus came and fixed it. I don’t believe that anymore, and I hadn’t gotten three verses into Deuteronomy 21 before the text itself started arguing with me.

Because here is a soldier, and here is a woman he has captured, and the Torah doesn’t say “be kind to her.” It gives her thirty days, and a legal status, and a clause that says you may not sell her. Mercy shows up in this passage.

And Yeshua won’t let us separate the two either. When He goes after the Torah scholars and Pharisees in Matthew 23, the charge isn’t that they cared about Torah too much:

Justice and mercy, the weightier matters of Torah. He didn’t import mercy into Moses from somewhere else. He found it there, called it weighty, and expected His disciples to notice. So that’s our frame.

I want to do something a little different this week. Walking through Ki Tetze front to back would take us until Sukkot, so instead I’m going to follow those two words, tzedek and rachamim, all the way through and see where they take us. Then we’ll go to the haftarah, Isaiah 54, where God says He hid His face for a moment and will gather with great compassion. Then John 21. A charcoal fire on a beach. Peter, who deserved one thing but got another, and found out the other one cost more.

Word Study: Tzedek and Rachamim

Two words. Let me take them one at a time, because I think we don’t really do them justice (no pun intended).

Tzedek (צֶדֶק) is the one you’ve met if you were with me in Shoftim last week.

It’s a noun. The same root gives us tzaddik, a righteous person, and tzedakah, which is the word Jewish people use for giving to the poor. That last one should make you pick up your pen and take notes. Giving to the poor gets filed under justice. It’s owed. Tzedek is rightness. Things as they ought to be. The scales level. The judge refusing the bribe. The stone in your bag weighing exactly what it claims to weigh, which, as it happens, is a law in this very portion (Deuteronomy 25:13–16).

Rachamim (רַחֲמִים) is softer on the ear, fun to say, and harder to pin down. English Bibles give you compassion or mercy or tender mercies, and all three are trying to get there…they really are.. It’s plural in form, which Hebrew does with abstractions sometimes, and nearly every Hebrew teacher I’ve ever had (I have had four!) will tell you it shares a root with rechem (רֶחֶם), womb.²

I used to think that was a great sermon illustration. And I still don’t want an etymology to carry the whole weight of a word; a shared root is a family resemblance, not a definition. But Scripture itself uses that image. In Isaiah 49:15 God asks whether a woman can forget her nursing child. I love that! Rachamim is compassion with a body to it. A ruling comes from the bench but this comes from somewhere deep down.

So here is the tension Rabbi Koppell names, and I think she’s right to call it a conflict and not a misunderstanding. I want to be cautious here, because what I’m going to give you is a teaching frame, not a dictionary. I am not that smart!

Tzedek in the Bible is kind of a broad word: righteousness, justice, right order, even vindication. Rachamim is compassion, mercy. But for this study I’m going to let Koppel give us two questions to ask through the portion. Tzedek asks: what does rightness require? Rachamim asks: what does compassion require? Most of the time those two questions get the same answer. But, sometimes they don’t. And the Torah, in Ki Tetze, seems perfectly willing to sit them down at the same table and let them argue.

One more thing before we go in. When God describes Himself to Moses in the cleft of the rock, this is the order He chooses:

Among the first attributes He proclaims after the Name is rachum, compassionate. Same root as rachamim. And then, in the very same breath, He says He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. Both. One sentence. I’ve come to think that it is the whole of Ki Tetze compressed into two verses, and the seventy-four commandments are just God showing His work.

Torah: Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19

The Captive Woman

The portion opens in a place none of us wants to go. A soldier, a war, a woman among the captives. I’m not going to pretend this passage is comfortable, and I’d be suspicious of any teacher who softened it just to make the people in the seats more comfy.

Here’s what I think we can say without pretending the passage is kinder than it is. The law puts real restrictions on the Israelite captor. The woman gets a full month to mourn. If he later rejects her, he cannot sell her or treat her as merchandise; he has to let her go.

Those restrictions matter and the text gives its reason clearly: since you have humiliated her. The Torah names what he did to her as humiliation. That’s not nothing. But the text never gives us her voice or records her consent, and that matters too.

Scholars disagree about whether this law is best read as holding back the sexual violence common in ancient warfare, or as writing a coercive form of captive marriage into law, and even the head-shaving gets read very differently, from mourning, to stripping away what made her desirable, to a ritual of entering enslaved status.¹⁵ I don’t want to resolve that tension by just looking through the soldier’s eyes.

Rabbi Koppell reads this as the Torah working the way Mussar (the Jewish discipline of cultivating Godly character…we have it as part of the Chavurah membership) works, gradually, against a yetzer hara (an evil impulse) that a flat out prohibition wouldn’t have touched in that world. Her argument, drawing on Sefer HaChinuch, is that the month is a brake, a space in which the man might be moved toward mercy by watching her grieve.³

I think that reading is pretty persuasive, and I also want to be honest that it’s a reading…a perspective. The text gives us the law. What it doesn’t do is narrate the soldier’s heart. What I can say with confidence is that the legal restrictions here fall overwhelmingly on what the Israelite man may do to her, while the provisions concerning her create time for mourning and prevent him from treating her as disposable property. The law keeps moving in one direction: restricting what the Israelite man can do with the woman in his power.

Justice and mercy both, then, and neither one fully satisfied. A woman is still taken, and the text still doesn’t give us her consent. Yet the law refuses to give the Israelite man unlimited power over what happens next. She’s given time to mourn. She cannot be resold. That is rachamim shoving its way into a situation the surrounding world would have called settled.

The Wife Nobody Loves

The very next case, and this one makes me sad. A man with two wives, one loved and one, the TLV says outright, unloved. The Hebrew word there is even harsher; it’s the word for hated. And the firstborn son belongs to the wife he hates.

This is tzedek. The right of the firstborn is his. Full stop. A father’s feelings don’t get a vote. But read it again and notice who else is protected. The woman he hates cannot watch her son’s firstborn status get erased because the father’s affection lies elsewhere.

The law doesn’t let a father’s favoritism rewrite inheritance. Rabbi Koppell puts it this way: justice demands the firstborn be treated as the firstborn, and compassion is extended to the less loved wife and her child.⁴ Both at once. If you’re hearing Leah in the background of this law, I am too. Though, once again, that is my interpretation and not the text’s claim.

A Drawer Full of Mercy

Then chapter 22 opens and the whole tone shifts. Your brother’s ox wanders off. You bring it back. His donkey collapses on the road. You help him lift it. You find a bird’s nest:

I love that this is in the Bible. I love that the God who parted the sea legislates even what Israel can do when it comes upon a mother bird and her young. Now, I’ll be honest with you… the text doesn’t tell us why. Many readers across the centuries have heard compassion in this command, and I hear it too, but the rabbis themselves were cautious about stating that as the reason.

The Mishnah actually rules against praying “Your mercy extends to a bird’s nest,” precisely because it turns a mitzvah into a claim about God’s motives.¹³ What we CAN say is what the text says, and look at the reward attached: that it may go well with you and you may prolong your days. That’s the same promise attached to honoring your father and mother (compare Deuteronomy 5:16). The Torah is putting the mother bird in serious company.

Then the guardrail. When you build a house, you build a railing on the roof so no one falls (22:8). Then don’t plow an ox and a donkey together (22:10), which some interpreters, Jewish and Gentile both, have read as concern for the unequal burden on the weaker animal. But the text itself doesn’t give a reason. Then we have don’t muzzle the ox while it’s threshing (25:4), a verse Paul picks up twice, in 1 Corinthians 9:9 and 1 Timothy 5:18, and turns toward those who labor in ministry and in the Word. The animal gets to eat while it works. So does the one who feeds the flock.

None of these are about crime. Nobody’s being punished. This is the Torah teaching a people to have a merciful reflex, and doing it through their livestock and their rooflines and their birds’ nests. Rabbi Koppell calls these precepts designed to reinforce our merciful impulse, and I can’t improve on that phrase.⁵

When Compassion Overrules

Now the case that, I think, tips the whole argument.

Under laws like Hammurabi’s, where a slave counted as property, a runaway had to be returned to his owner, and harboring him could get you killed.¹⁶ Deuteronomy refuses that norm. The fugitive is not handed back. He lives where he chooses. Israel cannot mistreat him.

And I want to be careful how I say the next part, because it matters for this whole study: the Torah defines Israel’s obligation from the ground up, on its own terms, instead of decorating somebody else’s definition of justice with a little compassion. What the surrounding world called the owner’s right, Deuteronomy refuses to recognize as a right at all. You don’t hand him back. He lives where he chooses. You don’t mistreat him.

Rabbi Koppell puts it in her own terms: in this case, compassion overrides justice; justice may be blind, but compassion calls on us to see the other with open hearts.⁶ I’d say it a little differently, as you’ve just heard, but we’re pointing at the same thing.

Now, I know I have said this ad nauseum, but the text doesn’t give a reason for this particular law. But a chapter later, a reason appears for the first time and it won’t be the last. First in 24:18, right after the command not to twist justice for the outsider or orphan or take a widow’s clothing as collateral, and then again here:

That’s what’s driving the whole back half of the portion. Israel’s compassion is supposed to come from memory. You were the one with no rights. You were the one someone could have sent back. So rachamim for the outsider, for the orphan, for the widow, comes to Israel as a family resemblance, something they carry in them from Egypt, rather than a feeling they have to work up.

The Talmud, in a line Rabbi Koppell sets at the head of her chapter, goes so far as to say that whoever is compassionate to others is surely of the seed of Abraham, and whoever is not, is not.⁷ That is a rabbinic saying, not a verse, so take it as such. But Yeshua says something very close when He tells His disciples to be merciful as their Father is merciful (Luke 6:36).

The Poor Man’s Coat

Chapter 24 is where the portion gets a bit more tender. If you lend to your neighbor, you stand outside and let him bring the pledge to you. You don’t walk into his house and take it. And then:

Read that last clause again. The word translated righteousness there is tzedakah. Giving the poor man back his coat so he’s warm at night is called tzedakah. Not kindness. Righteousness. Now, to be exact, the verse uses tzedakah and not rachamim; the connection is mine to point out, not a two-word phrase in the Hebrew. But here a materially compassionate act is explicitly named righteousness. What we would instinctively call mercy is what Torah calls tzedakah. The categories meet in practice.

Then pay the hired man the same day he works, because he’s poor and his heart is set on it (24:15). Don’t take a widow’s clothing as collateral (24:17). Leave the forgotten sheaf, leave what’s left on the olive branches, don’t go back over the vineyard (24:19–21). Ruth 2 gives these gleaning laws a human face, by the way, alongside Leviticus 19:9–10. Boaz is obeying Ki Tetze.

Even the Guilty

I want to show you one more, because I think it surprised me most.

This is a man who has been found guilty. He’s being flogged. And even here there’s a floor. Forty and no more, because past that your brother would be degraded. Your brother. The guilty man is still called your brother! Justice goes all the way to punishment, and mercy goes right there with it and says, this far… and not one stroke further.

The dominant rabbinic practice became thirty-nine, which is the number Paul says he received five times in 2 Corinthians 11:24, though the Mishnah records a dissenting view that held to forty.¹⁷ The reasoning has to do with how the phrase is read but whatever the legal logic, the concern to keep punishment inside the Torah’s boundary is unmistakable. Punishment does not erase his humanity.

What I’m Not Going to Smooth Over

Deuteronomy 22:13–29 is in this portion, and it deals with accusations of infidelity and with rape, and I’m not going to skip it or try to clean it up. Rabbi Koppell, a military chaplain for thirty-eight years, doesn’t either. She says that judging by modern standards of justice and mercy, we may be appalled, and she means it.⁸

Here is what I can say honestly. In the one case where the text is sure the woman was forced, the field, where she cried out and no one could hear, the Torah says this:

The attack is compared to murder and the woman is innocent. That is tzedek speaking clearly on her behalf, and I don’t want it lost. Then come verses 28 and 29, the notoriously difficult case of an unbetrothed young woman whom a man “grabs” and lies with.

Ok I have to tread lightly here, because the Hebrew doesn’t settle what most English readers assume. The verb in verse 25, the field case, is chazaq, to overpower, and the context is unmistakably force. The verb in verse 28 is taphas, to seize or take hold of, and whether that describes rape, seduction, or some other illicit union is debated among scholars (shocker.. I know) and has been for a long time. The vocabulary contributes to the question; the verb difference by itself doesn’t settle it.

What the law requires is clear enough: the man pays the bride-price, marries her, and permanently loses his right to divorce her. In a world where a woman’s future depended on being able to marry, losing that possibility could leave her without support, and that helps explain why the financial and marital obligations land on the man. It doesn’t give us her voice, and it doesn’t erase the coercive possibilities in the law. Rabbi Koppell names it precisely: considered merciful then, and we cannot help but be appalled now.⁹

The parallel in Exodus 22:16–17 explicitly concerns seduction and gives the father the right to refuse the marriage; some read that alongside Deuteronomy 22, others aren’t sure the two passages are meant to be read together.

I’ll leave that debate where it is. And for anyone reading this who has survived sexual assault, I want to say it plainly: your discomfort here is not weak faith, and Scripture never asks us to make the vulnerable disappear in order to defend Scripture. What I will offer, and I’ll mark it as a theological lens and not something Deuteronomy 22 says about itself, is this. Scripture sometimes regulates realities shaped by human sin and hardness of heart instead of treating every regulation as God’s ideal design.

Yeshua Himself makes that clear when He’s asked about Mosaic divorce law in Matthew 19:8. I find it a faithful way to hold a passage like this without either excusing it or tossing it out. Our discomfort may be the Torah doing its job.

Amalek

The portion ends with a command to remember and a command to blot out.

I used to read this as the justice end of the portion, the hard ending. Now I think it’s the same thing from the other side. What was Amalek’s crime? He attacked the stragglers, the tired, the weary, the ones at the back. The very people this entire portion has been teaching Israel to protect. Amalek is what a people looks like with no rachamim at all, and the Torah’s verdict is that such a people does not fear God.

That’s the text. Devotionally, here’s what I hear in it: justice, here, works as compassion’s bodyguard. And one caveat, because this passage has a long and ugly history of misuse: nothing here is permission to label the people we fear or resent “Amalek” and turn Torah into a warrant for hatred. Yeshua tells us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and Paul reminds us our struggle is not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12).

Blotting out Amalek is God’s business. Protecting the stragglers is ours.

Haftarah: Isaiah 54:1–10

This is the fifth of the seven haftarot of consolation, the readings that carry us from Tisha B’Av toward Rosh Hashanah. And if you wanted to choose a passage where God Himself shows you the proportion between His justice and His mercy, you couldn’t do much better.

Look at the nouns. A brief moment. A surge. A moment. That’s the justice side, and God doesn’t deny it; the exile was real, the hidden face was real. But set against it? Great compassion. Everlasting kindness. The Hebrew behind great compassion is rachamim gedolim, our word with an adjective. And in verse 8, with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you, is chesed olam, covenant love that doesn’t expire, joined to the verb form of rachamim. Then verse 10 closes the section with the phrase one more time:

Three times across these verses the language of rachamim, the root ר־ח־ם, returns. God is, in effect, quoting Himself. This is Exodus 34:6 again. And look at the proportion: the anger, which is real, is described as a moment; the compassion is wrapped inside everlasting chesed and a covenant of peace that will not be shaken.

One more thing I just can’t stop thinking about. Isaiah 54:6 describes Israel as a wife deserted, the wife of one’s youth that is rejected, and God calls her back. In our Torah portion, Deuteronomy 24:1–4 lays out a specific case: a man divorces his wife, she marries another, that second marriage ends by divorce or death, and the first husband may not take her back.

Jeremiah 3:1 deliberately presses the marriage metaphor against that exact boundary. Israel has gone after many lovers; under the law Jeremiah is pointing back to, the situation looks closed. And God’s word is still, return to Me. I’m connecting the dots to Isaiah myself; the haftarah doesn’t cite Deuteronomy.

But I think the prophets are doing something deliberate: using Torah’s own fence to make covenant mercy feel as astonishing as it actually is. Not God breaking His Torah. God’s faithfulness outrunning what any case law could have prepared us for. Isaiah 54 gives that return its language: the wife of youth called back, and chesed that will not depart.

Besorah: John 21:1–25

Seven disciples in a boat. A long night and empty nets. And then a man on the shore at dawn calling out:

I’m SO glad the TLV kept “Boys.” There’s affection in it and I low-key love the humanity in it. Then the net, the 153 fish, Peter throwing himself into the water in his clothes, and this:

A charcoal fire. The Greek word is anthrakia, and John uses it exactly twice in his Gospel. Here, and in 18:18, where Peter stands warming himself in the high priest’s courtyard and denies Yeshua three times.¹⁰ I’ve said many times that John is not a careless writer, and I’ll own this as my reading of his intent: I think he wants you to smell the same smoke.

So now watch what Yeshua does with Peter, because I think it’s the tzedek and rachamim of Ki Tetze done to one man, by the Messiah, in person. And I want you to know this restoration didn’t start on the beach. Before Peter ever denied Him, at the seder table, Yeshua had already said:

So when we get to John 21, Yeshua already knows how this ends. He brings Peter’s failure into the light and hands the restored disciple exactly the work He’d said would be waiting for him.

He doesn’t wave it off. That’s what I notice. He could have. He’d risen from the dead; He was entitled to skip the awkward part. Instead He walks Peter back through it, three questions for three denials, beside the same kind of fire, and John tells us Peter was grieved. Mercy doesn’t require pretending the denial never happened. Yeshua brings the wound out into the open, and then, inside that honesty, He restores Peter to love and responsibility and costly discipleship. Feed My lambs. Take care of My sheep. Feed My sheep. The restoration comes with a job.

Peter gets restored and recommissioned in the same breath, and nobody sends him home to think about what he did. Yeshua never actually says the word forgiven. Instead, the restoration becomes visible in the commission: Feed My lambs. Take care of My sheep. Feed My sheep. And then, almost immediately, Yeshua tells him how he’s going to die (21:18–19). Restored, commissioned, and warned, all before the fish are cold.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Peter walks away from that beach having tasted, in one life, the shape Isaiah 54 gives to Israel’s story, and I say shape, not prophecy; Isaiah is speaking to Zion, and she gets to keep her own haftarah. A moment of the hidden face, and then great compassion with a future attached. Peter couldn’t claim that as something he’d earned. He received it as grace, and the grace didn’t leave him unchanged, and it included being told the truth.

Pulling It Together

Ok, this was a long one and here is where I end up.

The Torah legislates mercy inside justice. It doesn’t hold mercy off to the side as the exception. The poor man’s coat is tzedakah. The forty lashes stop because he’s your brother. The runaway slave stays, and the reason given a chapter later for so many of these laws is that you were a slave. The mother bird goes free and the reward is long life. Ki Tetze never asks Israel to choose between the two words. It asks Israel to get good at hearing which one a given moment needs, and it trains that ear on oxen and birds’ nests and sheaves before it ever trusts it with a person.

Isaiah shows us the proportion in God Himself. A moment of anger. Compassion folded into everlasting chesed. Don’t picture a God who is sometimes just and sometimes merciful, as if one attribute clocks out when the other clocks in. Exodus 34 gives us one God who forgives sin and refuses to call evil good. His compassion and His righteousness come from the same holy character, and He put compassion at the front of the sentence.

And John shows us the Messiah doing it to one man on one morning. Not skipping the justice but not stopping at it either.

Rabbi Koppell ends her chapter with a daring line from the Talmud, a rabbinic picture of God Himself praying: may it be My will that My mercy should conquer My anger and prevail over all My other middot.¹¹

That’s rabbinic imagination, not scripture, and not a doctrine about competing parts inside God; I want to be SO clear about that. But I don’t have to turn it into doctrine to hear its challenge. She says it’s a good prayer for us, too, and I find I’ve been praying my own version of it: Lord, by Your Spirit, make me merciful as You are merciful, and don’t let my anger win over truth or love or justice.

My Final Thoughts

I know which one comes more naturally to me. I’ll spare you the details, but if you polled the people who live with me, I’m fairly certain no one would need time to think about their answer.

What Ki Tetze did to me was take away my excuse. I’d always filed justice and mercy as temperaments. Some people are justice people. Some people are mercy people. God made us different, bless us all. And then I read a portion where the same God, in the same chapter, protects the rights of the firstborn and frees a mother bird and puts a ceiling on a flogging and hands a runaway slave his freedom, and I realized the Torah is describing one kind of God and asking His people to grow into both of His hands. The two-kinds-of-people thing was mine.

The Mussar teachers would say this is middot work, character work, and that it’s slow. Character work is always a process. My Mussar students would likely agree. Rabbi Koppell says change must be gradual and the traits must be continually practiced.¹² I’m inclined to believe her, partly because she spent thirty-eight years as a chaplain watching soldiers learn and unlearn the humanity of the people across from them, and partly because I’ve tried the fast version and it doesn’t stick.

So this week I’m not asking myself to become a more merciful person. I’m asking myself, in each actual situation, which question does this moment need? What does rightness require, or what does compassion require? And then I’m trying to answer the one I’d rather skip.

One more thing before we get to the letter. None of us is ancient Israel standing at the Jordan, and I’m not giving you Deuteronomy as a civil code. But believers receive these texts as Scripture, and so we ask what they show us about God’s character, about human dignity, about justice and mercy and a life shaped by Messiah. And Messiah Himself told us justice and mercy are the weightier matters of Torah.

Then He showed Peter what that looks like with skin on. He didn’t pretend the denial never happened. He didn’t make Peter earn his way back either. He told the truth, restored the man, and gave him sheep to feed. So maybe the question I’m carrying out of Ki Tetze is bigger than am I a justice person or a mercy person. Yeshua won’t let me hide inside either label.

The question is whether the God who is righteous and compassionate is forming both in me, and whether I’ll follow Him when He refuses to let me pick the easier half.

Hebrew Letter Lesson: Vav

ו

The Letter. Vav (ו) is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with a numerical value of six. It’s one of the simplest letters to draw, a single vertical stroke with a small hook at the top, and its name is the same Hebrew word used for a hook or fastening. In Exodus 26:32 and 27:10, the gold and silver hooks that held up the curtains of the tabernacle are called vavim. The letter shares its name with the thing that fastens.

The Function. Vav is the letter Hebrew most often uses for “and.” It does other grammatical work too, depending on where it sits in a sentence, so I’m not going to tell you it only ever means one thing. But attach it to the front of a word and, most of the time, you’ve joined that word to whatever came before. Open a Hebrew Bible and the page is full of them, verse after verse beginning with vav, and this happened, and this, and this. The whole story is stitched together with hooks.

The Lesson. What follows is a devotional picture, not a grammar lesson, so take it as that. I like thinking of the vav as the little hook that joins what might otherwise stand apart. And Ki Tetze keeps refusing my urge to separate justice from mercy, which makes the vav a fitting little picture for this portion: justice and mercy, held together without pretending they’re the same thing. Seventy-four commandments showing you what the and looks like in a field, a house, a courtroom, a marriage, a battlefield.

A Little Nugget

Application

• Notice this week where you tend to write “or” in your head: justice or mercy, truth or kindness, accountability or grace. Ask what it would look like to write “and” instead, and what it would cost you.

• The vav is the letter that connects what came before to what comes next. Think about one relationship where a past wrong is still standing between you and someone else, and ask whether justice and mercy together might build a hook where right now there’s only a gap.

• When you read your Bible this week, watch for the word “and” at the start of a verse. Often there’s a vav underneath it, though Hebrew vav does more than one kind of connecting and English doesn’t reproduce every one.

• Let the rabbinic image prompt your own prayer: Lord, by Your Spirit, make me merciful as You are merciful. Keep my anger from outrunning truth, love, or justice.

Weekly Practice

This one’s borrowed from the Mussar tradition, and it’s simple on purpose, because Rabbi Koppell is right that the big swings don’t last.

Each day this week, before bed, write down two things in your notebook. One moment when you did what was owed, tzedek. One moment when you did what was needed, rachamim. Just the moment, one line each. No grading yourself.

By the end of the week, look at the two columns. You’ll see a pattern. One column will be longer, or easier to fill, or will have come more naturally. That’s your starting place. Not a verdict on your character. Just the place where the next bit of growth lives. Mussar calls this a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, and the point is never shame. The point is to see clearly enough to take the next small step.

And on Shabbat, rest from the columns. This practice is discernment, not a scorecard for earning God’s favor. He already has compassion on you.

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Bible Study Questions

1. Read Deuteronomy 21:10–14 slowly. List every restriction placed on the soldier. What does each one protect? What does the text say the soldier has done to her in verse 14, and why do you think the Torah names it that way?

2. Compare Deuteronomy 23:16–17 with what you know (or can find) about how other ancient law codes treated runaway slaves. What does it tell you about God that His law goes the other direction? How might the repeated memory in chapter 24, “you were a slave in Egypt,” help us hear this command within the larger moral world of Deuteronomy?

3. Look at Deuteronomy 24:13 and the word “righteousness” (tzedakah). Why do you think the Torah names returning a poor man’s coat as righteousness? What changes if mercy toward the poor is something owed rather than something given?

4. In Isaiah 54:7–10, make two columns: the words describing God’s anger or absence, and the words describing His compassion. What do you notice about this proportion? How does Exodus 34:6–7 help you read this?

5. John 21:9 and John 18:18 are the only two places John mentions a charcoal fire. Read both passages back to back. Why do you think John wants us to connect them? What does Yeshua’s threefold question accomplish that a single “you’re forgiven” would not?

Reflection Questions

6. Rabbi Koppell asks, “When is it justice? When is it compassion?” Think of a situation in your own life right now where you’re not sure which one the moment needs. What would it look like to ask both questions, what is owed and what is needed, before you act?

7. Which of the two words, tzedek or rachamim, comes more naturally to you? Be honest. Who in your life would confirm your answer? What would it cost you to grow in the other one?

8. The Torah trains compassion on birds’ nests and oxen and rooflines before it trusts it with people. Where are the small, low-stakes places in your week where you could practice a merciful reflex?

9. Peter was restored and commissioned in the same conversation, and then warned about his death. Have you ever received mercy that came with a job attached? How was that different from mercy that let you off the hook and nothing more?

A pastoral note before the challenges. Mercy does not require you to stay in danger, hide abuse, decline appropriate legal help, restore trust before it’s safe, or reconcile with someone who keeps harming you. Sometimes justice and mercy together look like telling the truth, setting a boundary, bringing in wise pastoral or professional help, or letting the authorities do the work entrusted to them (Psalm 82:3–4; Matthew 18:15–17; Romans 13:1–4). Forgiveness, reconciliation, restored access, and restored trust are related questions. They’r not the same question. Please read what follows with that in mind.

Action Challenges

10. Do the Weekly Practice. Two lines a night, tzedek and rachamim, in your notebook. At the end of the week, read both columns and tell one trusted person what you noticed.

11. Identify one ordinary debt you are owed, an apology, a repayment, an acknowledgment, and ask God whether this is a moment for tzedek or for rachamim. Then act on the answer, even if it isn’t the one you wanted. (If the situation involves abuse or ongoing harm, see the pastoral note above; that is not what this challenge is about.)

12. Find one concrete way this week to do the Deuteronomy 24 thing: pay someone promptly, return something you’ve been holding, leave something for someone who has less. Don’t announce it. Call it tzedakah, because that’s what it is.

Before You Go

If this study made you look sideways at your own “or” where God has been writing “and,” share it with a friend who’s been carrying a justice-and-mercy tension of their own, the one who can’t decide whether to hold the line or let it go.

And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I’ve got you! Paid subscribers get access to live Torah studies, extended Torah portion teaching, audio lessons, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of people who want depth without pressure or performance. If you’re ready to step further into the Word, you’re welcome inside.

👉🏻 Join The Chavurah.

If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕

About the Author

Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.

She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.

When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.

Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.

Notes

1. Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, “Ki Teitzei: Tzedek/Rachamim: A Conflict of Values,” in The Mussar Torah Commentary: A Spiritual Path to Living a Meaningful and Ethical Life, ed. Rabbi Barry H. Block (New York: CCAR Press, 2020), 307–311.
2. For rachamim and rechem sharing the root ר־ח־ם, see the standard lexica (BDB, HALOT) under רחם. Koppell, 311, also notes the womb connection in her study questions.
4. Koppell, 308.|
5. Koppell, 308.
6. Koppell, 307–308.
7. Babylonian Talmud, Beitzah 32b, as quoted in Koppell, 307. Translation hers.
8. Koppell, 309–310.
9. Koppell, 310.
10. Anthrakia (ἀνθρακιά) appears in the New Testament only at John 18:18 and 21:9.
11. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 7a, as quoted in Koppell, 311.
12. Koppell, 309.
13. Mishnah Berakhot 5:3.
14. Scripture quotations are taken from the Tree of Life Version. Copyright © 2014 by the Messianic Jewish Family Bible Society. Used by permission.
15. For the range of scholarly readings of the captive woman, see Caryn A. Reeder, “Deuteronomy 21.10–14 and/as Wartime Rape,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 41 (2017): 313–336; and Mónica Isabel Rey, “Head Shaving as a Ritual of Enslavement in Deuteronomy 21:10–14,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 93, no. 4 (December 2025): 643–658.
16. Code of Hammurabi §§15–20, on fugitive slaves and the penalty for harboring them.
17. Mishnah Makkot 3:10, where the majority sets the count at thirty-nine and Rabbi Judah holds to forty.

There’s a widow in 1 Kings 17, in the middle of a drought, down to a handful of flour and a little oil, gathering sticks for what she’s sure will be the last meal she ever makes her son. Elijah shows…

Read more

Exodus 3 and 4 contain a five-round negotiation. A man standing barefoot in front of the Voice speaking from the bush tried, repeatedly, to talk his way out of the assignment. He asked who he was. He asked for a name. He said they wouldn’t believe him, he said he couldn’t talk, and then he just asked God to send somebody else. Moses was not the model employee we were led to believe.

And God kept answering. Five objections, five answers, and the narrator doesn’t mention God’s anger until the last one.

Miss Patty taught us “God called Moses and Moses obeyed.” Next lesson, plagues, which were much better for the felt board anyway. Frogs are fun to stick on things.

And look, I get it. You’ve got twenty seven-year-olds and forty-five minutes. Nobody’s teaching theological protest to a room full of kids who can’t tie their shoes yet. But somewhere between the felt board and adulthood, most of us never went back and read what obedience looked like here. It was messier than anybody let on, and a good deal more interesting.

Objection Number One: Who Am I?

I don’t read that as false modesty. Acts tells us Moses was approaching forty when he first tried to intervene on his people’s behalf in Egypt, and that another forty years passed in Midian before this moment at the bush (Acts 7:23, 29-30).

By the time we meet him here he’s spent four decades tending Jethro’s flock, which is to say his most recent professional accomplishment is that the sheep are still alive. And now he’s being handed the single most consequential mission in the story of his people. Of course he asks who he is. I’d ask too!

God doesn’t answer the question Moses asked. Nothing about qualifications, no “you’re more capable than you think,” no “I’ve been preparing you for this.” God says, “I will surely be with you” (3:12).

The whole answer is presence. Nowhere in the exchange does Moses get told he’s ready. He just gets told he won’t be going alone, and that’s supposed to be enough.

Objection Number Two: What Is Your Name?

Moses pushes further. If I go to Bnei-Yisrael and tell them the God of their fathers sent me, and they ask me His name, what do I say?

God answers, “I AM WHO I AM” (3:14). Ehyeh asher ehyeh, if you want the Hebrew. And He keeps going, in the very next verse:

Scholars have debated for centuries exactly how ehyeh asher ehyeh should be understood. One way of hearing it is as a name that refuses to be pinned down into something Moses (or those after him) can manage or manipulate. Moses wants something solid to hold onto before he’ll move. Don’t we all? What he gets points him away from mastering the situation and back toward the promise already made: “I will surely be with you.”

Objection Number Three: They Won’t Believe Me

Now Moses gets specific.

God’s response is three physical signs. The staff becomes a snake. The hand becomes afflicted with tzara’at and is then restored. Water from the Nile becomes blood on dry ground. These signs are given to authenticate the message Moses is being sent to deliver. Also, I’d note that God leads with the snake. He knows His audience.

Objection Number Four: I Am Not a Man of Words

This is objection number four, by the way. For a man who isn’t a man of words he’s doing a fair amount of talking.

The answer sharpens here into something closer to a rebuke.

The narrator still hasn’t mentioned anger. And it’s interesting that God doesn’t deny Moses’ weakness either. He redirects him toward the One who will be with his mouth.

Objection Number Five: Please Send Somebody Else

Five objections. Five rounds of a frightened man speaking candidly before the God who has called him. The narrator saves the first explicit mention of God’s anger for THIS moment, after Moses moves from “how can I possibly do this” to “please send somebody else.”

I don’t want to turn that into a formula for every calling story in Scripture. But in this scene, at least, the narrative makes room for fear and objection while still pressing Moses toward obedience.

This Wasn’t a One-Time Thing

Now the part that got me this week, and I owe credit where it’s due. One of my professors, Rabbi Dr. Joshua Brumbach, shared his dissertation with me on Facebook when he was finalizing his doctorate. It’s on theological protest in rabbinic literature², which is the kind of thing I read for fun, and yes, I know I’m a nerd.

Something in his opening chapter made me go back and re-read Moses through new eyes. Rabbi Josh traces theological protest through both biblical and rabbinic traditions and treats it as something rooted in the covenant relationship between God and His people, rather than as some strange anomaly.

Because the burning bush isn’t even the last time Moses argues with God. It isn’t close to the boldest, either.

Go to Exodus 32, the Golden Calf. Moses is up on the mountain. Israel is down below, and after Moses has been gone for a stretch they decide that’s plenty long enough and melt down their jewelry into a god they can see. God tells Moses:

And Moses argues.

He brings up what the Egyptians will say. He invokes the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel by God’s own self. He makes a case. Four decades with sheep and the man argues like he went to law school.

Then, later in the same chapter, Moses goes back up the mountain to intercede again, and he says something I don’t think I fully absorbed until this week.

He offers to be erased along with them if God won’t forgive. God’s answer in the next verse is telling too:

God doesn’t accept the substitution Moses offers. But He hears the offer, and He answers it.

That’s a man whose relationship with God clearly includes the freedom to speak openly.

Why This Isn’t Blasphemy

Somewhere in church culture, we picked up the idea that a good Christian doesn’t argue with God. You submit. You trust. You definitely don’t accuse. You say “Your will be done” in a nice soft voice and then go cry in the car. And there’s real wisdom underneath that instinct. I’m not suggesting disrespect is a spiritual gift.

Brumbach draws a distinction between lament and protest that I found useful.³ Lament grieves the circumstances. Protest accuses, and specifically accuses God of causing harm, or of refusing to act.

Most of us are fine with lament. We’ll cry out. We’ll say “why, God, why.” What makes people nervous is the accusation part, the part where you say, out loud, this feels unjust and You could have stopped it.

Except that line gets crossed CONSTANTLY in Scripture. Not by the unfaithful. By Moses. By Jeremiah, who at one point asks God directly:

That’s a startling thing to say to God. And what follows matters too. God answers Jeremiah in the next few verses with both correction and reassurance, calling him back while promising to remain with him (15:19-21). Scripture preserves the protest without pretending every accusation gets a simple pass.

The psalmists do it too, over and over. Psalm 22 opens,:

Nobody would call that resignation. The psalm doesn’t stay there either. It moves through the anguish toward trust and praise. And for those of us who read this through Yeshua, those opening words mean something more again, because He takes them onto His own lips at the cross (Matthew 27:46).

The rabbis who developed this tradition further weren’t inventing something foreign to the text. They were building on patterns already visible in Scripture, though they also argued among themselves about how far that kind of confrontation could go. They were rabbis. Arguing is the job.

Now, I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to overstate this. Not every biblical challenge to God gets treated the same way in Scripture.

Job protests his innocence for chapters, and even though he eventually gets a lengthy response from God, he never actually receives an answer to his central question about why he’s suffering.

Isaiah 45 has God responding sharply to the very idea of the created thing quarreling with its Maker:

And Habakkuk protests injustice in chapter 1 (ALOT), receives an answer that’s honestly more unsettling than comforting, protests again, and is ultimately told to wait. No lightning strike though.

So there are limits. What Scripture does show, repeatedly, is that protest can remain inside the life of faith. A hard question, even an accusatory one, even one that never gets resolved, doesn’t get treated as apostasy just for being hard.

Faith That Argues Back

I have a book by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and I’ve been reading and re-reading one chapter all week… called Faith in Protest. Speaking specifically about Jewish faith, Sacks writes: “faith is not acceptance but protest … faith lies not in the answer but the question.” ⁴ I think believers have something to learn from that too, especially set beside the biblical prayers that refuse to hide grief, confusion, or moral anguish from God.

Think about what has to be true for you to argue with someone. You have to believe they’re actually listening… that’s a good start. You have to believe the relationship can survive what you’re about to say. You don’t pick a fight with a stranger at the grocery store, or if you do, we have bigger things to discuss.

Moses’ objections assume that the God who called him is present enough to hear him and sovereign enough for his prayer to acturally matter. Exactly how that responsiveness relates to God’s eternal purpose is a much bigger theological conversation than this article needs to or is going to solve. The text itself lets us say something simpler: Moses speaks, God hears, and the conversation is real.

That relationship is the covenant Brumbach keeps coming back to. He argues that this relationship is a “mandatory precondition” for theological protest to even be possible, strong enough language that he explicitly distinguishes his own position from other scholars in the field. I agree with Rabbi Josh, in case you were wondering. I usually do.

I’m not going to pretend every scholar of rabbinic literature agrees on exactly how covenant functions here. But the basic shape of it matches what’s on the page: a relationship sturdy enough to survive the argument.

My Final Thoughts

Moses didn’t lose his calling because he admitted his fear. God gave him signs, promised to be with his mouth, and appointed Aaron to speak alongside him. But the story also refuses to turn Moses’ reluctance into a virtue. By the fifth objection, the text tells us clearly that God is angry.

Maybe that’s the tension. Honest wrestling can happen inside obedience, but wrestling doesn’t make obedience unnecessary. Moses gets to speak honestly before God, and God keeps calling him forward anyway. He does not, you’ll notice, get to stay with the sheep.

Christians don’t have to borrow this idea of bold, honest prayer from outside their own tradition, either. Whatever your own church background, it’s worth knowing that even the Catholic Catechism describes the burning bush conversation as a lengthy debate in which Moses balks and makes excuses before his will finally aligns with God’s call, and it treats his later intercession as one of Scripture’s models of prayer.

Yeshua does something recognizably similar in Gethsemane, voicing exactly what He wants before yielding Himself to it: “Yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). Honesty and submission show up in the same prayer.

I don’t know what you’re currently arguing with God about. Maybe nothing right now, and if that’s you, wonderful, go enjoy your peace… the rest of us are a little jealous. But if you are, if there’s a “why did You let this happen” or a “why me” or a “I don’t think I’m the right person for this” in your chest that you’ve been too polite to actually say out loud to God, I’d point you back to this story before I’d point you toward silence.

Dig Deeper

Read Exodus 3:1 through 4:17, out loud if you can, and count the five objections yourself before you reach Exodus 4:14. Then read Exodus 32:7-14 and 32:30-33 side by side. Notice what Moses is willing to risk on Israel’s behalf the second time, compared to how hesitant he was to risk anything for himself the first time.

Then go back a book. Read Genesis 18:16-33, where Abraham stands before the LORD and haggles over Sodom, fifty righteous down to ten, and at one point asks, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” Notice who starts the conversation. God is the one who decides Abraham should know what’s coming. Notice too that Abraham keeps apologizing for his own boldness but keeps going anyway.

Where’s the line for you between honest wrestling and outright avoidance? Is there a “who am I” you’ve been holding back, something you’ve assumed was a bad question to bring to God rather than a starting point for a conversation? What would it look like to bring the actual objection instead of a cleaned-up version of it?

If you want to go even further, read Jeremiah 15:15-21 or Psalm 22 this week. Notice the accusation buried inside the prayer, and notice that the prayer still counts as prayer.

Let’s Talk in the Comments

Have you ever actually said the hard thing to God, out loud, instead of the polished up Sunday version? What happened?

If you enjoyed this article, send it to a friend who’s been arguing with God in secret and feeling guilty about it.

And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I’ve got you! Paid subscribers get access to live Bible studies, extended studies, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of people who want depth without pressure or performance. If you’re ready to step further into the Word, you’re welcome inside.

👉🏻 Join The Chavurah

If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕

About the Author

Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.

She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.

When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.

Notes

1. Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version. Copyright © 2014 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission.

2. Joshua Brumbach, “Theological Protest in Midrash Tehillim” (DHL diss., Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, 2024); see also Brumbach, “Theological Protest in Midrash Tehillim,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 28, no. 1 (2025): 33-51.

3. Brumbach, “Theological Protest,” 21-22, drawing on William S. Morrow, Protest Against God: The Eclipse of a Biblical Tradition (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006).

4. Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 27

Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.