God is my Judge G
od is my Judge. For someone whose name means “God is my judge” it is not surprising that the theme of judgement is something of interest to me. At first it was a scary thought. God is my Judge. That somehow meant that I would receive the punishment that I deserved, since I’m a bad girl. Where that thought—that I’m a “bad girl”—came from is a topic for another time, but the desire to find out what the meaning of judgement is in the Bible pushed me to do a thorough search.1 I started with the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, or Torah as these books are also called. The Pentateuch is the foundation of the Bible. The stories we encounter there are carried out to the rest of the Scriptures. Why not check that out first? As it turns out, judgement is a word that was used much
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more often in the early Bible translations. The King James Version (KJV) has 340 occurrences in the Old Testament while The Living Bible (TLB) only has 78. The Pentateuch KJV (published in 1611) uses the word 64 times while TLB (published in 1971) only four. It looks like translators used that term less and less as the years passed. Perhaps it’s because the term judgement is sometimes openly, sometimes subtly juxtaposed to those of promise, justice and mercy. The message that seems to linger is that judgement is a negative idea. When you think of the word judgement, what comes to mind? Is there a positive or negative connotation attached to it? Do you sometimes connect judgement and punishment as one and the same thing, or one that inevitably leads to the other? When considering the term judgement being increas-