The morning
Manna will be provided at 6am. Thanks. Studying
Genesis in the SSnet.org series Lesson 8, may the Holy Spirit be the speaker to
your heart. The Topic today
is: "Keturah the wife of Abraham". The Opening
Hymn will be 229 "Spirit of the Living God" The Sabbath
School Quarterly, downloadable from SSnet.org in the Teacher's Edition is on
page 103 and for the laymen edition or Standard Edition, on page 69. The SSnet.org
site allows anyone, anywhere to read the lesson in their own language. Choose
your own language to see God speaking also to your heart. ---One thing we
need to know, and which dr. Doukhan was criticized for by Hasel and others, is that he loves
"structuralism". ---Structuralism
tries to discover another message in the way the author of a book "set
out" or "park" his material in a certain order or not. ---This
"message" is not in the lines but an opinion floating
"around" the text. ---One can call
this paratextual or peritextual or even metatextual. ---One need to
know the dangers of these ideas because it is speculative and Hasel did not
like to speculate about God's Word. ---Judaism and
Rabbis are known to do this often and they collect then their ideas in
"Halakah" or "Midrash" and these became considered equal
with the Bible. ---Sometimes
ideas in Midrash was taken over against the biblical text and it resulted in
overloading the Sabbath with all kinds of rules and regulations that is not
biblical or the Word of God but the thinking and rationalization of men. ---Care and
caution is noted. ---The name
Sara has three consonants and that is typical Hebrew. The name Rebekkah has
four consonants and that may be Amorite in origin. The name Keturah has five
consonants and that may be Egyptian or Hamitic, like the wife of Moses. ---The closest
I could come to a meaning for Keturah from a Late Egyptian Dictionary, page
28, is the word ḳḏwr meaning "oil from Hatti" or the land of the Hittites.
The male would be Ketur and the female would be Keturah with the /h/ added to
the name. ---I do not
know if Keturah was the daughter of a wealthy oil baron? ---Another
Egyptian word was also found with similar phonics and it also was connected to
the idea of "oil". Even with my suggestion, one has to be hesitant
since other research may give more convincing data.