Exodus and G-d’s watchful care over his folks

Jewish tutorial and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster displays on Exodus 18-20 and why God is described as being ‘jealous’.

Recently we’ve got been taking a look at Exodus Chapters 18-20, identified in Hebrew as ‘Yitro’. This crucial a part of the Exodus story is known as after Moses’ father-in-law, who just isn’t Jewish, and involves symbolize for the Jewish folks the epitome of the one who might not be Jewish themselves, however helps what might be referred to as ‘the Jewish undertaking’.

An entire part of the Torah is subsequently named after a Midianite who just isn’t Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Moses, however is somebody whose recommendation is seminal to the way forward for the Jewish folks.

And it’s this part of the Torah which additionally accommodates the portion identified in English as ‘The Ten Commandments’, thus implying that these 10 Sayings are common, and embrace everyone.

One of essentially the most misunderstood statements made about G-d in the course of the giving of the ten Sayings is that we must always not worship idols as a result of ‘I’m the Lord your G-d – a jealous G-d.’

Often a phrase can have had a special which means a couple of hundred years in the past, and actually that is the case with the phrase ‘jealous’, which now retains a a lot narrower sense than it did initially.

For occasion, within the Christian translations of each John Wycliffe (1388) and Myles Coverdale (1549), each of which preceded the King James model of the early 1600s, the phrase ‘jealous’ is interpreted as ‘watchful look after preservation.’

‘Watchful care’ denotes that G-d is searching for us, which is why there is no such thing as a must worship idols. It just isn’t that G-d Himself is ‘jealous’, nor that He must be. Rather, we human beings don’t want to hunt for alternate options to G-d, as G-d is all the time there for us.

A ‘jealous’ G-d, subsequently, doesn’t suggest envy of idols, however relatively that there’s the truth is no must worship idols, as G-d is all the time searching for us in any case. This is a really totally different interpretation of the phrase, and one which additionally explains the character of Yitro, a Midianite, who merely needed one of the best for the Jewish folks and acted accordingly.

From the Jewish perspective, a great way of describing G-d in fashionable terminology can be that He demonstrates ‘passionate dedication’ in direction of the Jewish folks, and in direction of others who additionally decide to the well-being of the Jewish folks.

This implies that we also needs to show passionate dedication to our fellow beings and to the atmosphere through which we discover ourselves, simply because the Midianite, Yitro, provided help and sensible recommendation to his son-in-law, Moses, which Moses took to coronary heart and adopted, all the time.

And that’s the reason Yitro the Midianite is so essential to the story of the Jewish folks and even has a complete Torah Sedra named after him.