Leviticus 19:3: “Each of you must respect your mother and father, and you must observe my Sabbaths. I am the LORD your God.”
Leviticus 26:42: “Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land.”
Exodus 6:26: “These [are] that Aaron and Moses, to whom the LORD said, Bring out the children of Israel from the land of Egypt according to their armies.”
Read these three passages of Scripture and try to tell me if you don’t see something a little odd. I was reading a passage in the Jewish Midrash and these rabbis pointed out something that they saw a bit strange.
I was told by a rabbi many years ago that we Christians were just too one dimensional. This is particularly true with Western Christianity. We are a scientific culture. When we teach Hebrew in Bible colleges and Seminaries, at least when I taught Hebrew in Bible College I taught like a good Western educated Christian would teach it. I taught the science of Hebrew. I looked for precision. “No, No, No, that qammets under the Hei tells you that there is an article and that the word that begins with the Hei is a noun. Now come on students, let’s get our act together, we need to be precise here, this is the Bible for crying out loud, study with precision.” And we end up studying the Spirit of God right out the Bible.
The biggest difference I found when I studied Hebrew in a Christian setting verses a Jewish setting is that as Western Christians we tend to study Hebrew with our minds and the Jewish rabbis studied it with their heart.
If you study Hebrew with your mind, from a scientific Western mindset and not with your heart, you will not see something a bit strange about these three passages. If my title has not given it away, look closely at these three passages, does something seem out of whack to you? Ok, maybe you see it, does it mean anything, is it just some linguistical anomaly? Was it just a whim of the writer? Or was there a divine intent. If a divine intent, what was God trying to show us?
Now for those of you who still do not know what I am talking about, look at the order of individuals in each verse. Everywhere in Scripture where it speaks of a mother and father it is always father and mother with father coming first. We always read about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, yet only in Leviticus 26:42 do we find Jacob coming first in that order. Finally, everywhere in scripture where it speaks of Aaron and Moses it is always Moses first and then Aaron.
I know what some of you are thinking, “There he goes again, better watch out for that Chaim Bentorah fellow, he’s trying to find hidden meanings in Scripture that are not really there.” Well, like excuse me if I happen to believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and that God had intent behind every grammatical and syntactical anomaly.
Beside rabbis who were much more wiser and intelligent that I find these anomalies to be very interesting and to contain, not a hidden message, but a deeper message. If you study the Word of God and search for Him like He instructs you in Jeremiah 29:13, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” you see that? Heart? That is Bible talking. You may just look beyond the intellect and find a message from God’s heart. What the Midrash is saying is that God knew that by giving a specific order when listing persons we Western mindset one dimensional people would automatically assume God to be listing in order of importance rather than just simply listing in a logical order. Hence God messed up the order just to remind us that no one person is more important than the other. Sure Abraham was the first and most important in creating the Jewish race, but that does not mean God loved Abraham more that Jacob and to prove it, in Leviticus 26:42 God puts Jacob at the top of the pecking order.
Oh, and of course God loved Moses more than Aaron, after all he spoke to Moses face to face and Aaron commissioned the building of a golden calf, He’s lucky God even kept him on the payroll. Yet, here in Exodus 6:26, God puts Aaron at the head of the list of the two who were to bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. You know, I always kind of looked down on old Aaron as a sort of black sheep of the family after some of the stunts he pulled, yet, here he is right at the top of the food chain coming just before old Moses. God did not love Moses best, God is a good parent and loves all His children equally.
Speaking of parents. Women tend to get a bad rap culturally and seemingly Biblically as well. It seems that men always are mentioned before women. Well, if you read Scripture carefully, you will find that God is telling us that just because men are mentioned first does not make them better or more superior for if that were the case then we learn in Leviticus 19:3 that mothers are to receive more respect that the fathers.
God has no pecking order, He loves everyone equally and no one gets special privileges. There are no teacher’s pets in God’s kingdom.
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