Hope it's ok to ask this.
Reading Numbers 6 and researching Nazarites in Scripture:
"For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb." Luke 1:15 And he followed through - Luke 7:33 "For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil."
yet
"And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey." Matt 3:4
Know Samson touched a jawbone of a donkey (Judges 15:15) and ate honey from the carcase of the lion: Judges 14:8
Does the "dead body" (Num 6:6) just mean human bodies? Or saying that Nazarites aren't to touch "anything unclean" adding too much?
Thanks.
We had another thread long ago on the issue which went into depth/detail on the subject - entitled
Torah, Food & Bugs: Which Kosher Insects Would You Be Comfortable Eating? which sought to cover the issue.
As far as I'm aware, Samson ate honey from the carcass of a dead lion ( Judges 14:7-9 ), eating the honey and giving some to his parents while not telling them where he got it, or that he killed a lion, for that matter. According to Numbers 6:3-6, Nazirites are not supposed to eat grapes or touch a corpse. Moreover, touching the carcass of an unclean animal makes an Israelite impure until the evening, meaning he must wash his clothes (Leviticus 11:27-28)...and thus, many have rightly noted where he sinned by defiling himself through eating honey that was defiled through its contact with a corpse (and of an unclean animal, no less)....
Thus, for Samson, he did make himself unclean in what he ate.
With others like John the Baptist, there doesn't seem to be any record of ever breaking a Nazarite Vow - even though John was a child dedicated to the Lord. Lou Engle spoke before on the issue in a very awesome sermon on the ways John the Baptist and others were consecrated unto the Lord - as seen in
International House of Prayer, Kansas City (IHOP-KC) - The Nazarite Consecration.
I've always thought Yeshua would have been a Nazarite from birth. But He wouldn't have had to make the sin offerings. .
As far as I'm aware, Yeshua making sacrifices would be akin to the Lord asking for something to be done on humanity's part as a means of being right with Him--with the Lord setting the rules for how he wanted the people to approach Him if they wanted to be clean, IMHO. The Lord did not need to have sacrifices...but as it concerns relationships, it was not an option for the people not to bring them if they wanted to connect with Him. Of course, that can also be an issue of semantics since sacrifices in/of themselves were never able to cleanse people of their sins.....and there was always the dynamic of what sacrifices symbolized when it came to what they poitned to (more shared in #
22 ).
As a Jew, Jesus must have kept the Law of Moses perfectly. Yet that same law required all Jews to keep the Passover celebration ( (Exodus 12:47 ). The Gospels specifically mention Jesus keeping three Passover feasts in Jerusalem....even as a boy (Luke 2:41-51). In order to keep the feast, the participants were given roasted lamb, bitter herbs, and unleavened bread to eat (Exodus 12:3-4). The entire lamb had to be eaten during the feast. If there were any leftovers, they had to be burned (Exodus 12:10). If Jesus did not eat the lamb, he would have been violating the Law and could have been accused of sin ( Numbers 9:10-13 ). The New Testament records that Jesus did eat the Passover feast, which would include the eating of the roasted lamb (Luke 22:14-15).
On the Nazarene Vow, Yeshua didn’t have to have the Nazarite principles to live by because He had no sin to begin with. Numbers 6:6 says that a Nazarite was to “come at no dead body” meaning they couldn’t even approach it. ...and yet we see the Lord approaching the dead/touching them to make them live again (Luke 7:14, Luke 8:53, & John 11:39).
Jesus was a
Nazarene in the sense that He was from the city of Nazareth, but He was not a Nazarite in the strict sense. For the word Nazirite occurs much more frequently in the early Old Testament than in the later books - even though the practice hadn't died out in the New Testament era, as shown by Acts 18:18, which reads Paul had his head shaven because he was previously under a vow....and later in Acts 21:27-26, Paul sought to appease the Jews by declaring he has four Nazirites among his following who he fulfilled a vow with (more discussed
here). It's highly likely that John the Baptist was probably a Nazirite (Luke 1:15), even though it is by no means certain that Yeshua had been a Nazarite as well. For if He had been a Nazirite, again, He would have sinned as He touched the coffin of the widow's dead son (Luke 7:14) and as He called into Lazarus' grave (John 11:43, compared with Numbers 6:6)....and Yeshua also drank wine, (
Matthew 11:19, compared with Numbers 6:3).
It makes more sense to say that the Messiah was not a Nazirite but a
Nazarene, meaning: someone from Nazareth. It is within the Book of Matthew where it's explained that the move ofYeshua and His parents to Nazareth was something predicted by the prophets (Matthew2:23) - although the name Nazareth does not occur in the Old Testament.
And with Nazarath, Nathanael the disciple seemed to have no knowledge of any prediction that something good was to come from Nazareth (John 1:46, 1:43-51)...yet that was often done due to how others had associated negative things with places which had Biblical significance. In example, as others often seemed to see Christ's upbringing as problematic, recall John 7:
John 7:37-53
Still others asked, “How can the Messiah come from Galilee? 42 Does not Scripture say that the Messiah will come from David’s descendants and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?” 43 Thus the people were divided because of Jesus. 44 Some wanted to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him.
Unbelief of the Jewish Leaders 45 Finally the temple guards went back to the chief priests and the Pharisees, who asked them, “Why didn’t you bring him in?”
46 “No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards replied.
47 “You mean he has deceived you also?” the Pharisees retorted. 48 “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? 49 No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”
50 Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus earlier and who was one of their own number, asked, 51 “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?”
52 They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.”
[The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36, John 21:25, Luke 21:38 or Luke 24:53.]
53 Then they all went home,
The Pharisees that Jesus came against, often noted to be apart of the School of Shemi, were not accepting of Gentiles....and this is not surprising since the School of Shemai taught such. Thus, using their authorities, they often tried to silence anything that was supportative of Gentile praise. Its one of the reasons they came in conflict with Christ---as with him being more in line with the School of Hilel, he would have been very much opposed to Him. Though they could claim nothing good came out of Nazareth/Galilee, they could only reinforce that thought if they skipped over what the Prophets had already said.
As said of Galilee by Isaiah:
Isaiah 9: 1
Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress.
In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan.
What the Pharisees did not tell the people was that yes in the past God did humble the land of Zebulun but in the future God will honour Galilee of the Gentiles.....and the future had arrived, as the Messiah was from Galilee---The One place that many Ethocentric Jews just could not stand. Bear in mind that the Jews LITERALLY wanted to kill him after praising Gentiles (like Naaman the Syrian or the Widow who the prophet fed) in Luke 4/Matthew 4...as they felt that only Jews could have truth faith...but this was apart of prophecy
For as much as the Pharisees (minus the godly ones, such as Nicodemus---a secret follower of Christ) and Saducess would say Christ was illegitimate due to his upbringing, they had no real basis...and their desire to kill Jesus was birthed out of how he was really challenging their biases/prejudices toward certain groups. When they said "Examine the Scriptures.....you will see that out of Galilee there ariseth no prophet!!!!", it was a reflection of something that often happens in history when certain groups deliberately leave out the stories of where other groups have made contributions---and then all precedding generations afterward believe the lie. For the Pharisees were simply false in their claims (as were others agasinst Galilee) since Jonah was of Gathheper, in Galilee ( 2 Kings 14:25, compared with Joshua 19:13). As said before, Jonah was a prophet from Galilee (Gath-hepher) who counseled Jeroboam II in his successful conflict with the Syrians...making our date for the prophet Jonah to be that of 786-746 B.C.E. During Jeroboam II's reign, the boundaries of Israel reached the former limits of David's kingdom. And a new threat arose in the move of Assyria as it expanded and swalloed up kingdoms. Jonah came from Galilee to prophesy during expansion of Israel under Jeroboam II. ..and as the story of Jonah shows, God responded compassionately to Israel
Outside of Jonah, other prophets came from the "Ghetto" of Israel. In example, the Prophet Nahum was also a Galilean ( (Na 1:1) ), for he was of the tribe of Simeon. And some suppose that Malachi was of the same place. If that wasn't enough, the greatest of the prophets was Elijah the Tishbite (1 Kings 17:1)---and even HE was of Galilee.
And so again, Yeshua being from Nazareth would make him "Nazarene" in the sense of identification in location - and the pressure he endured in being faithful to the Lord would also be included in regards to how He chose to be faithful to the consecrated life He was called to even when others doubted him