It’s difficult to overemphasize how vastly different the world of events in the Hebrew Scriptures is from the modern Western world. The cultures and lifestyles Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob indwelt are much closer to nomadic Bedouins living in tents in the Middle East, conservative, patriarchal, tied to the earth, than anything in North America.
Two snapshots of this popped up in Hewbrew class today. First, the word for “front” is the same as the word for “east”. See, the Ancient Near East geography did not revolve around compasses and maps of the globe like we have today. Rather, it revolved around the sun. The east, from where the sun rose, was in front. The Great Sea (the Meditteranean), was a place of evil, danger, and it was behind (ancient desert dwellers and hill country dwellers as the Hebrews were had little contact with the sea and greatly feared it). North was to the left and south was to the right.
Another example is time. The word for “in front of you,” in the physical sense, is related to the word for that which happened in the past. The word for “behind” is related to what is coming in the future. Essentially the ancient Hebrews walked into the future backwards, facing their past. The past is what they could see clearly, the future was behind them, unseen, uncertain. Unlike us, they did not forget their pasts and focus on the potential of the future, what they would do, where they would live, what they could become. Instead, they lived their lives looking at the long line of ancestors in front of them, and their goal was to live in faithfulness to those who were in front of them, living on the family land, working the family trade, carrying on family traditions, maintaining family ties. It was an extremely conservative culture.
For an example, think of how modern readers view the long genealogies in the Herbrew Scriptures. For us, they are boring, useless, let’s get to the stuff which will help us live into our futures. For the ancient Hebrews, the genealogies were key. Their ancestors provided their identity, who they were, what they were responsible for, where and how they should live.
If we are to understand the stories of Scripture, we must read them within the contexts they occurred and were written in, a world vastly different from our own.
This is very fascinating, and I sense that what is written is True. This “snippet” of information establishes that the Bible is not a “myth”, “legend” or “tradition”, but “it” is alive. If the Western mindset can catch up to the “Eastern” (true) mindset how much further would we be in “knowing and experiencing” the GOD of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob..