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Hebrews 1:3 – He is the radiance of His glory
. . . best rendered Jewishly as the Sh’khinah, which the Encyclopedia Judaica article on it (Volume 14, pp.1349-1351) defines as:
“The Divine Presence, the numinous immanence of God in the world. . . a revelation of the holy in the midst of the profane. . . .”
The article continues:
“One of the more prominent images associated with the Shekhinah is that of light. Thus on the verse, “. . .the earth did shine with His glory” (Ezekiel 43:2), the rabbis remark, `This is the face of the Shekhinah’ (Avot diRabbi Natan [18b-19a]; see also Chullin 59b-60a). Both the angels in heaven and the righteous in olam ha-ba (“the world to come”) are sustained by the radiance of the Shekhinah (Exodus Rabbah 32:4, B’rakhot 17a; cf. Exodus 34:29-35). . . .
“According to Saadiah Gaon [882-942 C.E.], the Shekhinah is identical with kevod ha-Shem (“the glory of God”), which served as an intermediary between God and man during the prophetic experience. He suggests that the “glory of God” is the biblical term, and Shekhinah the talmudic term for the created splendor of light which acts as an intermediary between God and man, and which sometimes takes on human form. Thus when Moses asked to see the glory of God, he was shown the Shekhinah, and when the prophets in their visions saw God in human likeness, what they actually saw was not God Himself but the Shekhinah (see Saadiah’s interpretation of Ezekiel 1:26, 1 Kings 22:19, and Daniel 7:9 in Book of Beliefs and Opinions 2:10).”
“The point of these citations is not to suggest that Yeshua is a ‘created splendor of light,’ but to convey some of the associations of the expression, “the brightness of the glory” or the radiance of the Sh’khinah .” (Stern, p.662-663)
Another point worth noting is that since Jesus is the Radiance of God, or the Shekinah of God, then following Jesus is very Jewish – even their fathers unknowingly were following Jesus. Jesus preexisted before His incarnation.
For LXX uses of glory/doxa, see Ex.24:17; Deut.5:24; Ex.40:34; Num.14:10; 16:19,42; Ezek.10:4; 43:4,5; 1:28; 3:23; Lev.9:23, plus more. Also see Ex.33:18-23; 34:5,7.
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