Here is yet another* word which has had a lost meaning, so much so that in all our long lives most of us never heard this, even despite extensive Bible study for many of us, until now. Let us make this clear truth plain to more followers of Christ. Water baptism existed from the very beginning.
“I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud, and that they all passed through the sea. ²They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.”
1 Corinthians 10:1-2
To be sure, there are various baptisms, and there is a baptism, such as that of John, which is not new covenant baptism. But there are so many other examples of baptism, and this becomes plain and clear by the opening of one single Hebrew word which signifies water baptism, miqveh.
Transliterated this is generally mikveh or mikvah. A fairly simple study of this word, despite its other various renderings in translation, is the clear forerunner and old testament origin, counterpart or prototype of what we now know as water baptism in the new covenant.
The abundance and common knowledge of various types of baptism also makes perfectly clear why the writer of Hebrews referred to baptisms in the plural the way he did, as regarding doctrines of baptisms. Indeed, with the prevalence of the use of the Hebrew word mikveh in the old testament and the historical proliferation of mikveh from the very beginning, the largely lost understanding of water baptisms in the old testament times becomes abundantly apparent once again.
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Mikvah
Genesis 1:10
Exodus 7:19
Leviticus 11:36
1 Kings 10:28
1 Chronicles 29:15
2 Chronicles 1:16
Ezra 10:2
Isaiah 22:11
Jeremiah 14:8
Jeremiah 17:3
Jeremiah 50:7
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* see Devoted
Wisdom in the WORD 