CCSB Title page
Title [∞] Discussion
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When you open a book, one of the first things you see is a title page. It has the name of the book on it. [a 1] We call it "The Holy Bible". God calls it something different. He calls it "A Revelation to Man". Since the Bible wasn't written all at the same time, there was no title page. In fact, there were no pages at all! It was first written on tablets of clay or stone. On the first tablet, the name of the Bible was written on the first line, with the first letter. [1]. |
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The Hebrew alphabet, the letters used to write the Bible, look funny to us.[1] And they are read and written right to left. The first letter of the Bible [2] , bet ב which is the title of the Bible has the same sound as our 'B'. When God made the alphabet of the Bible, called the Hebrew alphabet, he gave each of the letters a meaning. the bet ב means 'a revelation to man'. He also gave each letter a name. The name of the letter 'bet' is 'bet' I have been calling it by it's name. The name of the letter is a word, just like our names. Do you know someone named 'Sandy'? Do you think they spend time at the beach? Do you know someone named 'Rusty', 'Dusty', Windy', 'Heather', 'Iris'? Their names mean something. But I don't know anyone named 'Peanut Butter Sandwich'. |
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The letters of the Hebrew alphabet all have names. The name 'bet' means 'house', or 'daughter'. Do you know the name of a town starting with 'bet'? Think of Christmas...Oh, little town of Beth... Bethlechem is the 'house of lechem'. 'Lechem' is bread. Jesus was born in the house of bread. Do you remember when Jesus said that he was the bread? [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] God calls the Bible "The revelation to man" ב. It could be called the House of God, since it includes the story of everyone who is in the family of God. Since it includes the story of all those who are in his family, it might also be called "the Book of Life". |
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What is a revelation? It might be the answer to a secret, or the answer to a mystery. A secret is something that you are not supposed to know yet. A mystery is a secret when you are given clues to tease you that you don't know. A secret is something hidden, and a mystery is like a game of hide and seek. So a mystery is a special kind of secret. Right from the beginning God started writing a mystery book. |
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Questions
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Sometimes a paper or book will have an overview or summary at the start. The first sentence is the summary. It summarizes the first chapter of Genesis. [1] The Bible isn't really divided by chapters. Those numbers were added much later. The first story ends with a repetition of 'heavens and earth' which is described in verse 2:5 [2] |
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The first verse is also a summary of the whole Bible. We will see later that each day of creation... there were six of them... represents a large portion of the rest of the Bible. In a book we would call this the Table of Contents. It tells where each section of the book begins. THe days do that, and they point to everything else in the Bible, so the first verse summarizes the whole Bible. |
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The first verse also summarizes everything in all creation from the beginning to the end. There is a word which appears twice in the verse but is not translated. The word is ath את which is spelled with the first and last letters of the alphabet. If we were using Greek we might say alpha and omega. In English we can say 'everything from the beginning to the end'. |
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Questions
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