Timing is everything.<\/p>\n
It was the Feast of Dedication. As the people engaged Jesus in a heated argument over his identity, Jesus quoted a song. Today, we read about the exchange in John 10:22-42, but we hardly know the song.<\/p>\n
What Jesus said was, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’?” (10:34). The people revolted against Jesus’ title “Son of God,” so Jesus invoked the authority of the Hebrew Scripture and Psalm 82 to validate the designation.<\/p>\n
The problem is the next few lines in the song (which to most readers today are unfamiliar) — “But you will die like men and fall like one of the rulers” (Ps 82:7). The Psalm itself is about God judging injustice! Was Jesus trying to enrage his listeners?<\/p>\n
But it gets even more interesting because there is a reference in the Mishnah to the songs that the Levites sang in the temple corresponding to the days of the week (m. Tamid <\/em>7.4).** On the third day of the week (Tuesday), guess what they sang? Psalm 82!<\/p>\n This song, Psalm 82, was well-known in Jesus’ experience. His words cut like a knife. And the attendees of the Feast of Dedication, the people in the temple court, mobbed to grab him.<\/p>\n ** Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah : A New Translation<\/i> <\/em>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 873.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Timing is everything. It was the Feast of Dedication. As the people engaged Jesus in a heated argument over his identity, Jesus quoted a song. Today, we read about the exchange in John 10:22-42, but we hardly know the song. What Jesus said was, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telling-the-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spendayearwithjesus.com\/djp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}