NIV

Tov Ayin – A Good Eye

Lois Tverberg 2 Comments

by Lois Tverberg

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matthew 6:22-23 NIV)

Often things Jesus says in the gospels make little sense until we understand that they are Hebraic idioms and even lead to wrong interpretations. For instance, in the passage above, it isn’t clear why Jesus is talking about our eyes. The descriptive word for eye is translated “single,” “sound,” “healthy” or “good.” Some New Age teachers have said that Jesus was talking about the third “inner eye,” developed through meditation. An opthamologist has written a book to say that Jesus was describing a neurological condition!

Jesus’ saying appears, however, to be a Hebraic idiom that was used to describe a person’s outlook towards others. A person with a “good eye” (tov-ayin or ayin-tovah) was a person who looked at others with compassion and had a generous spirit, and gave to others as needed. The person with the evil eye (ayin ra’ah) is one who is stingy toward others and greedy with money.

This expression is still used in Hebrew today. When people go through Jerusalem raising money, they say, “Please give with a good eye!” The same idiom is also found in Proverbs: “A generous man (Literally, “A good eye”) will be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor.” (Proverbs 22:9) Jesus also uses it at the end of the parable of the landowner who pays the workers all the same, no matter how long they work. The landowner says to the complainers, literally, “Is your eye evil (greedy) because I am good?” (Matthew 20:15).

Understanding this idiom helps us understand the whole passage in Matthew 6 that begins with “Do not lay your treasures up on earth,” then talks about the good/evil eye, and then ends with “One cannot serve two masters – both God and money.” All three of these sayings are part of a greater teaching on having the right attitude toward money.

Now we know what Jesus means in terms how we can be filled with light and darkness. If we love others and help them by sharing our money and time, our life will be full of light. If we think only of ourselves and our bank accounts, turning a blind eye to the needs of others, we will be blind indeed.

~~~~

Further reading:

See Listening to the Language of the Bible, by Lois Tverberg and Bruce Okkema, En-Gedi Resource Center, 2004. This is a collection of devotional essays that mediate on the meaning of biblical words and phrases in their original setting.

For a friendly, bite-sized Bible study of five flavorful Hebrew words, see 5 Hebrew Words that Every Christian Should Know, by Lois Tverberg, OurRabbiJesus.com, 2014 (ebook).

Da’at Elohim – Knowledge of God

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

“For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)

When English speakers use the verb “to know,” we think of knowing in terms of the mental grasp of facts. In Hebrew, the word for “to know,” yadah, is much broader and will enrich our understanding of the scriptures. Many languages have two different verbs to express the idea of knowing a fact (information) as opposed to knowing a person (relationship). Hebrew tends toward the second idea: having a relationship with a person, and even extending it to mean to care about someone, even to be intimate sexually. For instance, the very literal King James version reads,

And Adam knew (yadah) Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain.
(Genesis 4:1)

This idea is especially important when we learn about the biblical concept called the “knowledge of God,” da’at elohim. A Westerner opens the Bible and wants to prove God’s existence and develop a theology about God’s nature, and would call that “knowledge of God.” But the Hebraic view is that “knowledge of God” is having a life in relationship with him. This is true spiritual wisdom: to know the Lord’s will and live it out. We can see this thinking when we compare Christian Bibles to a Jewish translation. In the NIV we read,

The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him – the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD. (Isaiah 11:2)

but in the Jewish Tanakh it reads,

The spirit of the LORD shall alight upon him: a spirit of wisdom and insight, a spirit of counsel and valor, a spirit of devotion and reverence for the LORD. (Isaiah 11:2)

In this verse, da’at is translated as devotion. They see knowledge of God as intimacy with God, knowing him as a son does his father, and a wife her husband. We should think of that when we evangelize – are we trying to fill peoples’ heads with facts, or bringing people to know him personally?

Our ministry has always struggled with how to explain that we are educational, but devotional in nature, that we want to bring people closer to the Lord by understanding the Bible in its context. A verse we felt the Lord had given us was, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9, also Habakkuk 2:14). When we read it in the Jewish translation, we finally understood why. It says that the earth “shall be filled with devotion to the LORD as water covers the sea.”

~~~~

Further reading:

See Listening to the Language of the Bible, by Lois Tverberg and Bruce Okkema, En-Gedi Resource Center, 2004. This is a collection of devotional essays that mediate on the meaning of biblical words and phrases in their original setting.

For a friendly, bite-sized Bible study of five flavorful Hebrew words, see 5 Hebrew Words that Every Christian Should Know, by Lois Tverberg, OurRabbiJesus.com, 2014 (ebook).