Watch the Sneak Peek of this Support Team Study - Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 2. Nehemia continues his discussion with Dr. Stephen Arnoff about how midrash can be compared to modern events, used in Christianity and Islam, and leveraged for both good and evil.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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The post SNEAK PEEK! Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #248 - Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1, Nehemia brings on Dr. Stephen Arnoff to talk about the art of midrashic interpretation, how the “secret sauce” works, and why it exists in the first place.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Stephen: That is a massive intellectual theological claim. That’s why midrash is so important, because midrash is the technical system. It’s the technique which is running all the way through the story of scriptural peoples from the time where midrash becomes very much prevalent as a way of understanding commandment, law, community, purpose, the divine.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff. He is the CEO of the Fuchsberg Center in Jerusalem, Israel, which is an educational, spiritual, and cultural center in the heart of Jerusalem. He wrote his PhD dissertation on a topic that we’re going to get into today. It’s called Memory, Rhetoric, and Oral Performance in Leviticus Rabbah, which is an ancient midrash, and he’ll explain what midrash is. He’s got a sub-stack. He’s got a website, which, we’ll link to this on Nehemiahswall.com, but it’s stephendanielarnoff.com. And you can also find out about him at thefuchsbergcenter.org. Shalom, Dr. Aronoff. Shalom, Stephen.

Stephen: Shalom, shalom, Nehemia. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me here.

Nehemia: Yeah, I’m excited. So, we were speaking last week and trying to decide what we’re going to talk about, and you mentioned that you did your dissertation on midrash. I’m like, “Okay, that’s it. I love texts. And the midrash, number one, it’s a text, but it’s also a response to a text or texts.” So, what is midrash? Let’s start with that. And then ultimately, we want to ask the question; what is the relevance and application today for people, with midrash?

Stephen: Amazing. Well, I should say that you’re in rare company actually asking me about midrash. That question is not asked enough. I think midrash is the special sauce that runs all the way through monotheism as we know it. Really do.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s a heavy lift… a big statement. So, you have to explain that.

Stephen: I’m confident in the statement. And I’m pretty good in the kitchen, so it’s a metaphor that I would stand by, “the special sauce.” The concept of midrash is essentially a kind of scriptural technology. It is the art of interpreting sacred text. It’s the art of interpreting sacred text.

Nehemia: Okay.

Stephen: So, even in the Hebrew Bible itself there is midrash. Deuteronomy is a midrash on the four books that precede it because it is a retelling, a second telling of a sacred text. In the same way that Chronicles, in certain ways, is a midrash, a retelling, of the narratives that preceded it. There is within the Hebrew Scriptures an inclination to reimagine or to interpret events, figures, concepts, that have occurred previously. The midrash, as it develops out of the world of the Hebrew Bible, is a late Second Temple phenomenon, which we see in a variety of forms of literature and structure. It actually probably emanates in some ways from the world of scribes, who are in the realm of manuscripts, both oral traditions and written traditions, and passing them down from generation to generation.

And at a certain point, there’s a coalescence of a kind of set of rules about how one does interpretation. Some of those rules come from the world of Greco-Roman literature, where the understandings of what particular materials mean are interpreted by scholars, sages, poets, who are trying to parse the meaning of a received text. And some of these technologies, or these techniques, that become midrash are unique, or at least unique in the way they’re used in Rabbinic tradition, moving into late antiquity.

In a sentence, midrash is the art of imagination which interprets received texts and ideas. You can say that there is a midrash, so I am doing an interpretation. It is a midrash. It is a singular moment or structure, engagement of text with interpretation. But we can also say Midrash, meaning the whole body of materials that do that. There’s a library of Midrash, and there’s also a singular midrash. And we can talk about all the different pieces of the puzzle and the comment that I began with about the secret sauce of monotheism. But that’s an introduction.

Nehemia: Okay. So, help my audience who may have no background in this, some of them.

Stephen: Sure.

Nehemia: What does the word midrash mean? Let’s just start with the most basic thing.

Stephen: Midrash comes from a Hebrew word in the Scriptures which seems to be something like asking a question, akin to asking a question of an oracle. The idea that one would take that three Hebrew letter form, Dalet-Reish-Shin, which in a verb is lidrosh, or, to ask. The framing is, is asking for understanding, for meaning, or asking a question that comes from some other place, where the answer is going to come from some other place. And as the way that languages sort of evolve over time, that understanding that midrash is asking some unique entity for an answer to the question becomes, not asking an oracle, not asking a prophet, but asking the text what it means. Asking, demanding, from the text what its intention is.

Nehemia: Okay. Is that the question, what its intention is? Okay, now you just said a very important statement, which… Okay. So, I’ve explained to the audience many times that semitic languages, including Hebrew, are built on these three-letter roots, and here the three-letter root is Dalet-Reish-Shin, which means to seek. And I just pulled up here in my bible software… and so, we have Genesis 25:22 is, Rebecca goes “lidrosh et Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.” She’s going to seek God, because there’s these two children in her womb, and she’s like, “What’s going on here?”

Stephen: Right. So, you can hear in that… I’m not implying that the systems are parallel… the system’s going to Delphi and going to Yud-kay-Vav-kay, right, to go to the Lord, to go to the divine, but the idea is that one needs to go to a force outside of oneself to ask a question that’s a faithful question.

Nehemia: Well, but then here it’s maybe used in a more, I would even call, like, a secular daily sense. Maybe secular is definitely not the word here, but where God says that, if somebody commits murder, He says, “And their blood I will seek.” Right? So, in other words, if you murder a person, then God’s going to seek the blood of that person from the person who committed the crime.

Stephen: Right. But it’s a unique valence, right, it’s a unique usage. Because there are lots of other verbs that could be used to find out something, to understand something. And it’s a very rarely used verb. So, in this sense, it shows that it is at a level of… almost like a level of unstoppable mystery or something that is a reversal. Rather than you going to the oracle to get something that you don’t understand, the oracle itself is going to come to you. There is no way you will not be found out. Right? An immovable force is coming to…

Nehemia: So, here I have an example. Again, I’m just pulling up examples here. It’s talking here about a certain thing in Deuteronomy 13, and it says… let me just pull up the JPS translation here. “You shall investigate and inquire and interrogate thoroughly. If it is true, the fact is established that an abhorrent thing was perpetrated in your midst,” et cetera. And the word investigate here is, ve’darashta, you will darash. So, in other words, it means to seek and investigate. It can mean to seek, like for example, in Deuteronomy 18 famously, it’s “doresh el ha’metim”, where you’re seeking the dead. Which may be some kind of a prayer, or like you said, maybe it’s an oracle, where you’re expecting to actually hear an answer from… one version is there’s a skull, then the diviners would talk to the skull. I don’t think it originally necessarily meant that. But the point is, doresh is to seek, and you’re saying it could be to seek some sort of a, well, you said oracle, so we’ll stick with that terminology.

Okay, but it doesn’t mean that in the Jewish context of… and it has different meanings. This is where people get confused, right? They’ll say, “Oh, there’s a beit midrash, and the beit midrash,” which you guys have at the Fuchs Center in Jerusalem… so, a beit midrash is where you study, and it’s a very broad thing of what you study. Right? Am I right? Meaning, you could be studying Talmud, you could be studying Tanakh, you could be studying different things. You could be studying ethical musar, or ethical studies.

So, there’s midrash in that sense, and then there’s midrash like Leviticus Rabbah, what you wrote your dissertation on, which is a collection of midrashim, and that’s called midrash. And then you have the action of midrash. So, talk to me about the action of midrash in Second Temple times. What is that?

Stephen: True. We’ll talk about the action of midrash, but I think the framing is important. The concept here is that any act relating to midrash is a religious or spiritual act. That this is not a classroom; a beit midrash is not a classroom.

Nehemia: Okay.

Stephen: You can study midrashim in a classroom, but it’s not a beit midrash. A beit midrash is intentional. The intent is that there is something which is divining. It is about an element of holiness in the act of engaging with the sacred text. It is, in some way… and when we think about this as sort of midrash emerging, and when it emerges, the beit midrash is, in some ways, the replacement of the Beit ha’Mikdash, which is the Temple. The house of study is emergent after the Second Temple is destroyed, and the beit knesset, which is the synagogue, the place of gathering, is also emergent after the destruction of the Second Temple.

There were betei midrash, there were houses of study, in some form, while there was a Second Temple. And there were synagogues in some form during the period of the Second Temple. But as a cultural phenomenon, this idea that the study of sacred text is a holy act which carries with it an element of relationship between human and divine through text, is something that carries through all the way to today. And it’s carried through, in some ways, somewhat democratically, in the sense that, in ancient times, in Temple times, who had access to holiness? Holiness was centered in the Temple and there was a cast of characters and a cast of officiants who were responsible. And people used them as a vessel to engage with the holy.

In the world of the beit midrash, if you are committed to learning in an environment where, you know, whomever wishes to learn can learn, you are entering into an engagement with holiness, with religious activity, which is akin to engaging with the divine through the study of text. So, the framing for that as a religious act is really important. And then the specific question of how that works in practice, which you asked, is essentially, as a person who is engaged in midrash, who is using midrash with a sacred text, I am asking what the text means in many, many different ways.

Let’s imagine, for example, that there’s a character, and it’s not clear who is speaking in a particular passage. Or if there’s a character that is not named as a character, or if there’s a possibility that a verb could mean more than one thing in a passage. Or a question as to why a passage appears when it does, or if there is a misunderstanding about whether the scribal transmission of that particular passage, if there may be some questions around transmission. All of these are what could be called an irritant, a textual irritant, that’s calling out for interpretation. And it literally says, darsheni. Darsheni, which means interpret me, interpret me.

Nehemia: Or perhaps literally, drash me, investigate me.

Stephen: Drash me out.

Nehemia: So, you said a lot of things there, and I think I want to start with, there’s a linguistic concept called false friends. False friends is where you have the same word in two different languages, and they actually come from the same root, like I say, a common root, but they mean different things. So, my favorite example is in Hebrew, lechem is bread, and in Arabic, lahm is meat. So, here we have a false friend that you used. And I think the audience might have missed it, so I want to make sure it’s explained. You use the word learning. And learning in standard American English doesn’t mean what it means in, I’m going to call it Judeo-English.

Stephen: No kidding.

Nehemia: No, and I’m serious.

Stephen: Yeah.

Nehemia: People have written about this, entire dissertations. When a Jew says, “I’m learning Torah,” it doesn’t mean the same thing as when a non-Jew says, “I’m learning accounting,” or something. You used that word, and I think you used it just as part of Judeo-English. What does it mean in standard American? What is learning?

Stephen: You’re an excellent listener, and it’s a great point. And I often say to my kids, some of whom were born in the U.S., but all of whom grew up here, they’ll often say about their homework, “I’m learning math.” And I’ll say, “You’re actually not learning math, you’re studying math.” You might learn math in some form, but we’ll talk about what the difference is, just as you had posed it.

Learning is the religious act of studying sacred text. One goes to learn. It means one is going to have a concentrated experience which has an element of holiness in it. Studying, as you said, one could study engineering. Very difficult to make a case for one learning engineering, in Judeo-English, as you said. Because there’s a…

Nehemia: And there’s a term for this. This is called “semantic loan.” I just looked it up. So, semantic loan is where, like, there’s the example that some Americans who were immigrants from Germany, if they didn’t know what you said, they would say please. And that was in the sense of, repeat what you just said. Which we don’t say in American English, so maybe it’s not semantic loan because that’s a translation of the word bitte. Which means, please may you do something, but also please repeat what you said.

So, here, learning comes from the Yiddish learning. So, explain to the audience what it means to learn Torah, because it’s a whole world of meaning there that’s not part of standard…

Stephen: Yeah. Learning Torah, and this is true for every realm of Jewish life, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and every form, to learn means talmud Torah. Talmud Torah is the studying of sacred text.

Nehemia: So, in this sense, it’s a calc. In other words, there’s a Hebrew concept, lomed talmud, which is translated into Yiddish. And then from Yiddish, because it has the same root, it comes over into English, unsuspecting, without people realizing it has a completely different meaning in English. Not a completely different meaning, but there’s nuances that are lost.

Stephen: Well, I’m not an expert in Yiddish, so I wouldn’t be able to say.

Nehemia: But when you’re saying learning Torah, you’re using the Yiddish meaning, which comes from the Hebrew meaning.

Stephen: Right, but if I were to walk in, you know, seven or eight blocks from here to, you know, a Sephardic beit midrash, house of study, and say, “What are you learning?” They wouldn’t think, “Why are you speaking, you know, in a phrase that comes…”

Nehemia: No, no, they would go directly back to the Hebrew word.

Stephen: They’d understand that the point was, “What are you studying today? What part of Torah are you studying today? Where are you in Talmud?”

Nehemia: So, I once had this encounter with someone who was… I won’t give the details. There was a discussion about something in the Book of Shoftim, of Judges, and I could see he clearly was unaware of anything in the Book of Judges, and I said, “Have you ever read the Book of Judges?” He said, “I don’t read Tanakh, I learn it.” I said, “Okay, did you ever learn the Book of Judges?” And he said, no. Right? But it struck me about that semantic distinction. So, still, what is learning in the Talmud Torah sense?

Stephen: It’s a religious act of engaging with sacred text. Learning is considered one of the highest, if not the highest acts that a person can do. We say in tradition, in a litany of listing the mitzvot, “talmud Torah keneged kulam.” “Talmud Torah learning is higher than any of them combined.” So, this has all kinds of sociological aspects over time, including the fact that in Israel there is a kind of protected class of learners, of students of Torah, ultra-Orthodox men who make the claim that it is of national security significance that Torah is learned. Even to the extent that, during recent conflicts here in Israel, the case has been made in the headlines of papers, right, that we must not interrupt the learning of the ultra-Orthodox yeshivot, houses of study, yeshivas, because they are the highest, most important thing that can be done in any time for the Jewish people.

So, it’s a real phenomenon which goes back to the sanctification of learning as being a high, if not the highest, act that a person can engage in. And that is related, of course, to the fact that we’re talking about a tradition that goes back thousands of years which holds the Hebrew Scriptures as immutable, and the ultimate expression that humans can engage with, to engage with the divine, to engage with the oracle, if you will, forgive the parallel.

But there’s a second lane in that highest place, and that is Oral Torah. Written Torah is the received Torah of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is considered perfect and immutable, but there is also Oral Torah, which is the world of midrash, which is the world of interpretation. There is an understanding that there is an entire world of interpretive acts, of interpretation of text, of the parsing of text, of the use of midrash and other techniques, which is as holy and as necessary as the written text.

And so, the culture develops in two lanes, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, and the house of study, the beit midrash, is where they meet. That is where those lanes meet. That is the intersection of spiritual, intellectual life emergent in late antiquity. That doesn’t mean that the synagogue, the beit knesset, isn’t critical or doing the commandments, the mitzvot, isn’t critical. There are many other ways to do what’s considered the highest and best use of Jewish life, right?

But in terms of the map of Jewish life, there are two lanes in the map; Written Torah and Oral Torah. Written Torah, in the most simple terms, and I’m truly simplifying here, Written Torah is what the Oral Torah is bringing light to. And you don’t have Oral Torah without the Written Torah. But without the Oral Torah, the Written Torah… we don’t say it, but it’s implied; is incomplete. You need both. And that is a massive intellectual, theological claim. That’s why midrash is so important, because midrash is the technical system; it’s the technique which is running all the way through the story of scriptural peoples from the time when midrash becomes very much prevalent as a way of understanding commandment, law, community, purpose, the divine.

Nehemia: Okay, so, the way I’ve heard it described, and tell me what your thoughts on this are, is that the Written Torah is like, if you were to hear a lecture in the university, you know, setting, you hear your professor giving a lecture and you write down notes, and then somebody comes and they read your notes. Well, there’s pieces of the puzzle they’re missing. There might have been a slide up on the screen that you don’t see in the note, and the Oral Torah brings in all the information that elucidates, what are these notes really saying? Do you accept that explanation? That may come from a particular, like, maybe ultra-Orthodox perspective, I’m not sure.

Stephen: I think it’s part of the description, but it’s not complete. As I understand Oral Torah (and I’m limited by my own brain, and studies, and learning, and all the rest) but the concept is that the Oral Torah, as it’s described, for example, in the Ethics of the Fathers, in the mishnaic text, which is known as Pirkei Avot, which is a brief kind of litany of the chain of tradition and a variety of teachings, the Oral Torah is received by Moses and passed down from generation to generation as if the Oral Torah already existed in total, totally and completely at the beginning, in the same way that the Written Torah existed in total at the beginning. So, conceptually, there’s an idea that there is an entire universe of Oral Torah that is passed down from generation to generation and is revealed through study.

Now, that being said, I think it’s historically viable and practically fair to assume, even if you have a mystical, faith-based understanding that all Torah, whether it’s Written or Oral Torah, is complete and perfect and just discovered by humans in the Beit Midrash, as we see it in action in the classic texts of midrash and in the Talmud and all the way through to the present day, it looks a lot like people coming up with great ideas based on study, right?

So, whether it is predestined that that note that someone took in the class on the lecture already existed, and they’re just doing the act of being a scribe, inscribing it, and writing down Oral Torah, right? Writing down their oral Torah, even if they’re actually writing down something that is essentially new, that’s a question for mystics and prophets to determine, not me, obviously. The point being that my impression of what it means to engage in the world of midrash is that it is a creative act.

Nehemia: Okay, midrash is a creative act. A creative act (I’m writing it down) to engage the sacred text. So, you said midrash is a technique, and this technique is creative. So, tell us more about that. For someone who has no idea what you’re talking about.

Stephen: Oh, sure. Well, I’ll pretend that I do.

Nehemia: No, I’m saying someone… for the audience who’s hearing here the word midrash for the first time.

Stephen: I am also the audience.

Nehemia: Oh, I see!

Stephen: … to assume that they know truly and deeply, completely what they’re talking about is already a sign that they probably don’t. I mean, there’s knowing and then there’s knowing, right?

Nehemia: Gotcha.

Stephen: So, I know what I know, and I can describe it as I’m able to. But these topics are so vast and incredibly multifaceted that we’ve got to enter them with a level of humility.

Nehemia: Okay. Fair enough.

Stephen: And I’m going to endeavor to do that. The way I would describe midrash is that there are playbooks for midrash, right? There is the equivalent of the basic plays that one can play in the world of midrash. There are certain terms, kal va’chomer, or gozer hashava, or heikeshim, which are actual formulaic ways that you engage in a meaning of a text. So, kal va’chomer, for example, is part of a list, an early list, of the types of techniques that one can use, and it’s basically an a fortiori argument, right?

Nehemia: Which is Latin. So, what is that in English?

Stephen: Well, I’m hoping that some of our Latin scholars listening in will correct me if I’m wrong, but essentially it’s the relationship between what you would call a minor argument and a major argument, a smaller case and a larger case. So, if it’s true in small letter a, then it stands to reason that it’s going to be true in large letter A, right? There’s going to be, alike grows into even more alike, and there’s a relationship.

And there’s a whole list that comes in a couple of different forms (the list gets bigger) of what are the acceptable techniques that one can use to do midrash, in the same way that, if you’re playing basketball, there’s a lot of things you can do with the ball, but you cannot take a shot from a seat in the arena. That’s not part of the game. But you can do all kinds of things on the court as long as you follow the rules. Midrash functions in a similar way, in that there’s a court that becomes defined; here are the rules. Here’s what you can do with the ball, which is the sacred text, in order to advance it down the floor, right, and to score. Which is to enlighten your community. Which is to make a higher meaning, a meaning that suits and fits and is engaged with the problem you’re trying to solve. But also, above anything else, fully immerses you in the game, right? Midrash is about problem solving for Halacha, for legal reasons, for literary reasons, for religious practice reasons.

There are a lot of reasons why people come to the written text and say, “We’ve got to figure out what this means.” That’s a reason why my midrash is used, because there are no oracles, right? There are learned people who have to answer questions. “What does this text mean if I need to know whether I can turn my lights on during Shabbat or not,” right? Or whatever the question is going to be, right? Bad example, but the concept is that I need to solve a religious practice problem from written text into oral text, to oral tradition, in order to make sense, to know how to live religiously.

But there’s another reason why midrash is engaged, and that is simply for the love of the game. Right? Sometimes it’s to win the game, to use the basketball metaphor, and winning the game means knowing what to do, and sometimes it’s just because you love to play the game. Because you love to learn, you love to study, you love to engage in sacred texts, and the house of study is a house of problem-solving and a house of love. Love of study, problem solving for religious problems; it’s both. Midrash does both things, and that’s why, in general terms, you divide the worlds of midrash into Midrash Aggadah, which is the midrash of narrative and story (what’s this story saying?) and Midrash Halacha, which is the midrash that has legal implications. Now, many times it’s hard to see the difference because a story can lead to a legal implication. But the essential division of the types of texts are Midrash Aggadah texts, which are primarily focused on the narrative, and Midrash Halacha texts, which are primarily focused on the legal implications of the interpretations.

Nehemia: Okay, so, I want to try to have you bring some concrete examples, maybe from Leviticus Rabbah that you wrote your PhD dissertation on. Let’s start with Aggadah, which is the story, meaning the narrative side of midrash. Well, actually, before we get to that, can you say something about… and my audience has heard the term pshat before. What is the relationship? Because you say midrash is a technique, there’s another technique called Pshat, unless you’re using the terminology differently. So, that’s a question I’m going to throw out and let you deal with, or discuss.

Stephen: Midrash is, you know, it’s kind of like, you know… imagine cars; you start out with carburetors, and you get to electric vehicles. I mean, there’s layers of how the technology advances. So, pshat is part of a sort of a four-layered approach to interpreting text, which is pshat. I don’t know if you’ve gone through this with the…

Nehemia: They’ve heard of Pshat, Remez, Drash, Sod, but why don’t you explain it from your perspective?

Stephen: So, the idea of the PaRDeS, which is Pshat, Remez, which is literally the hint, Drash, and Sod, which is esoteric. And drash, maybe we’ll call it symbolic. Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Stephen: So, the idea is that pshat, the first level, the level that’s quote-unquote easiest to access, and pshat is from that root, like pshut, which means simple, or basic, or unencumbered, is the literal meaning of the text. What is the literal meaning of the text? So, the literal meaning of the text is different than the remez, which is the suggested meaning of the text. Okay? Which is different than the drash level of the text, which enters into the realm of the symbolic, or the associative perhaps, which is different than the quote-unquote highest level, which is sod, which is esoteric, which you probably can only learn from a master, okay?

In terms of examples of how an aggadic, or narrative-focused midrash works, let’s take something actually from Bereshit, from the Book of Genesis, because it’s a famous example. And it’s a good one; the story of Abraham smashing the idols in his father’s workshop. Is it in the Hebrew bible? Or is it midrash?

Nehemia: You’re asking me? No, it’s not in the Hebrew bible. It’s not explicitly anywhere in the text.

Stephen: Three points for Dr. Gordon. For House Gordon. It’s not in the Hebrew bible.

Nehemia: Before you explain that… So, using the word midrash, and I’m not sure; are you using the word midrash to include all of pardes? In other words, is phsat part of midrash technique? Or is it one technique within midrash in the way you’re using it? Because other people would use the word midrash as a synonym for drosh. So, I want to clarify that.

Stephen: Yeah, well…

Nehemia: Or is it multiple meanings?

Stephen: The realm of the four-level interpretation, which is something that seems to be present in, I believe, Origen, early Church Fathers; there’s elements of this in late antiquity at the same time, that sort of classical midrash is really starting to heat up. The industry is moving, you know, 3rd, 4th, 5th century. This is something that becomes very important in Kabbalah, in mystical interpretations of sacred texts, the idea that there are these four levels going from the simplest meaning to the most esoteric meaning. And it’s an area that, you know, I’m not in any way an expert in, but it’s something that evolves over time. It’s using the midrashic system for another kind of theological approach to text, and it develops over centuries.

The idea of pshat, the simple meaning, that is, I think, an inclination that one would see in all kinds of collections of midrash, but sometimes you’ll see one interpretation after another and none of them are privileged over the other. They will just come as a kind of encyclopedia entry or a dictionary, a lexicon, what the word could mean, what the phrase could be, as a kind of collection. And that’s probably what the collections of midrash were. They were almost like an encyclopedia in which Jewish knowledge was contained and hooked onto the particular text. We can talk about that.

Nehemia: Hooked is a good example, or good phraseology. Let’s now talk about Abraham smashing the idols. If it’s not in the book of Genesis, where does it come from?

Stephen: It comes from Midrash Aggadah. It comes from the attempt to explain something about, who is Abraham? What motivates him? It’s the liner notes to the album. It’s what the dramaturge knows about the character that’s not written into the play.

Nehemia: Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t know what a dramaturge is. Help me out with that.

Stephen: The dramaturge has to understand the guts, the heart, the motivations of the script, of the actors, of the staging.

Nehemia: What is a dramaturge? Is that like a director, or something? I don’t know what that is.

Stephen: It’s part of the team that creates a play.

Nehemia: It’s called the dramaturge?

Stephen: An easier example is, imagine that the student of the Hebrew Scriptures has come to be reading passages on Abraham and asks a question like a method actor, right? What’s Abraham’s motivation? We know that Abraham’s been told what to do by God, but, you know, maybe I’ve been told what to do by God sometimes, and it’s not so easy. Who is this person who was so brave to leave his homeland, and leave his family, and leave his customs, and go off and, according to tradition, to be the first monotheist? What motivated him? What was he like when he was a kid? What was his family like?

Nehemia: So, I looked it up here. Dramaturge is (according to Google, take it with a grain of salt) a literary editor on the staff of a theater who consults with authors (that’s interesting) and edits texts. And you’re saying the dramaturge’s job (I love that. I’ve learned a new word here) the dramaturge’s job is to help the actor say, “Okay, when you speak this line, here’s what’s going through the head of the character.” And you mentioned method acting, which if I understand correctly, is basically, they’re not just reciting lines, they’re like, “Okay, I’m talking about, the character’s mother died. I have to think about the worst thing that ever happened in my life so I can feel the emotion of what it’s like, as close as I can for my mother.”

Stephen: I know the motivation of the character I’m playing. Right. What’s Abraham’s motivation? So, in some sense, you know, there’s a linkage between the reader and the actor, right? In this case, the reader, the student, the student of the text, is trying to understand the text from the inside out.

Nehemia: But if the text doesn’t tell us what Abraham’s motivation is, and you called midrash a creative process or creative technique, creative process, help the audience understand; are you just making it up? That’s the question.

Stephen: You may just be making it up in practice, but the fact of the matter is, there are rules about how you can make it up as midrash develops. You can’t just come and say, “Abraham was like that because he had high cholesterol.” “Abraham was like that because he was chased by a dragon out of his homeland.” You have to tie it to something in the text.

Nehemia: Oh, beautiful. Okay.

Stephen: It could be a letter; it could be a curlicue on top of one of the letters. It could be the fact that a word sounds like a different word, and if you change the letter Sin and the letter Samekh, you get a different meaning. It could be you create a fault. You see a false friend and you make something of it. It could be because of the context of where the text appears. It occurs in a passage which has something before or after. It could be, even more broadly, because somewhere in the Book of Prophets, there’s a mention of Abraham saying that he had a temper. And you come and say, “Oh, we know that he must have had a temper.” How did he have a temper? He had a temper because he did the following, based on this inference that I make from the text.

So, you are inferring from the text. You are looking for a hook to hang an interpretation on, or you are seeing the hook. You are seeing where there’s a discrepancy; you’re seeing where there’s something unusual in the text, and you’re trying to explain it.

Nehemia: Okay. So, explain to the audience where they get the idea that Abraham smashed his father’s idols when there’s no verse that said, “And Abraham came down from the upper loft, and he smashed the idols, and he placed the hammer into the hand of the largest one.” There’s no verse like that in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible. So, where do you get that from?

Stephen: I would have to sit right here with the text in front of me and show you. And we could pause and try to do that. Or I think we could leave it as a sort of rule of how midrash works, which is that midrash can be highly speculative and associative and imaginative and creative, but it cannot disconnect itself from the text.

Nehemia: So, I looked this up. So, I think it’s worth looking at and discussing with you and getting your input on. So, it’s Genesis 15:17, and it says, “Va’yomer elav, ani Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey asher hotzetikha mi’Ur Kasdim. “I am the LORD who took you out of Ur Kasdim.” And Ur, in ancient Hebrew actually is a word that means a furnace. And so, “I am the LORD who brought you out of the furnace of the Kasteans,” or the Chaldeans. And then what midrash does is, it basically, I mean, obviously it takes the story from the Book of Daniel, of Hananiya, Mishael, and Azariah, or I think in English it’s Shadrach, Mishael, or how do they say that? And Abednego, or something.

So, in other words, they’re like, “Oh, God took Abraham out of a furnace.” And they know in the context, Ur Kasdim is the name of a place because it appears repeatedly. But I guess they’re employing the technique that you described. They want to understand; how did Abraham come to know God and how did that manifest itself? Right? And so, they’re like, “All right, God took him out of a furnace. You get thrown into a furnace by pagans because you do something against their idols.” Right?

Stephen: Well, so throw their idols into a furnace. If they’re clay idols, you have to put them in the kiln.

Nehemia: Fire them, that’s true.

Stephen: It provides specificity; it is specific where things are amorphous. So, if I can take a text like Ur Kasdim, and I can say, “Okay, every word, every letter, or as we say in one of the sayings, every jot and tittle of text is significant.” There is no element of the immutable, perfect Written Torah that is extraneous. So, I can interpret anything, which includes saying, why is Abraham the way he is? He came from Ur Kasdim. What do I learn from that? I learn from that that there was an element of him coming out of the furnace. What does that mean? He differentiates himself from those who put something that’s meant to represent the divine in the furnace and comes out and he sees that. He says, “No, no, no. I am in the image of God. Be’tzelem Elokim.” Right? “I am a son of God. I am…” You can interpret that by focusing, not on what you feel or think, but bringing what you feel and think to a word. It has to be locked down in an interpretive act. It’s not enough for me to dream up some weird story about the first monotheist smashing a bunch of idols. I need to tie it to a specific inference from the text, and then I can go as far as I want with it. But it’s got to be tied to it.

Nehemia: Talk about that, “I can go as far as I want.” And actually, just let me… I pulled up here on my Bible software program, Accordance. So, Targum Pseudo Jonathan translates Genesis 15:7. “Then He said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of the fiery furnace of the Chaldeans.” And then we have something called the fragmentary Targumim, which has the same thing. “I am the Lord who brought you out of the furnace of fire of the Chaldeans.” So, a slightly different order of words.

But in both cases, they’re interpreting Ur as basically a double interpretation; it’s both a furnace and a fiery furnace, right? So, this is an ancient interpretation which gets elaborated on, or you could say maybe the full story was known to the translator of Pseudo Jonathan and he’s putting up as much into the text as he can, right? He can’t put the whole story. I guess he could, right? But it’s going to be a push to put the whole story of the smashing the idols in.

So, talk to me about this; you can go as far as you want. I’d like my audience to understand that, because it’s not as far as you want, right? You can’t say anything you want, right? Or can you? I don’t know what… you said, it’s a creative process.

Stephen: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: So, how do we get from ‘there’s a furnace’ to ‘he smashed his father’s idols?’ Because part of that, you could say, is… and here I’ll use these big fancy terms. I apologize to the audience. I try to get them to understand the terms eisegesis and exegesis. Exegesis is, you read meaning out of something, and eisegesis, from the word eise in Greek, is you read meaning into something. And so, you could argue that it’s exe-gesis, reading the meaning out, to say that ur means furnace, even though maybe it’s clearly not in the context, but the story of the smashing of the idols is entirely eisegetical. There’s nothing in the text about that, even hinted at.

Stephen: Well, I didn’t prepare the text in advance, and I don’t want to…

Nehemia: Okay, so maybe bring a different example.

Stephen: I would say that if we went line by line, I’d be willing to bet, because midrash works this way, that it is eiso and exo. Midrash is eisegesis and exegesis, but you cannot have only eisegesis, right? You can call it the Midrashic imagination, perhaps, certainly in contemporary terms, and say, “Well, I’m doing midrash because I’m interpreting Jonah as a teenager who slams the door on his parents, and he’s so angry, he’s like a teenager.” You know? I mean, you can say that, and it does have a nice midrashic feel to it, but classical midrash would require you to find something referencing Jonah behaving like a teenager in the text. Exe-gesis, right?

So, an example of this idea of going as far as you want or you can. There’s a concept in midrash, and there are different forms of midrash, and one of the forms, a very popular form, is called the Petichta. Petichta. The Petichta is a homily, or an interpretive narrative, which is basically designed to go between two verses, a near verse and a far verse. Okay?

So, let’s say that I’ve chosen a verse from somewhere in the wisdom literature. Let’s say I’m choosing something from the Book of Job. I choose a verse, and a Petichta is where I show you how I put together a chain of interpretations, which are exegetical, which are coming out of the text, to link between that verse from the Book of Job all the way to something from Proverbs or Psalms. It doesn’t matter. The point is that I can show you that everything is connected through exegetical interpretation.

This is a performance. If I am in a synagogue in 5th century Galilee, and it is time for a sermon, I do not get up and talk necessarily about politics, or the way we would see a sermon in a synagogue or a church or a mosque necessarily in contemporary times. I would perform the feat of linking together as many verses as possible. That’s my Petichta.

So, imagine it like a jazz musician. Okay? A jazz musician is taking a jazz standard, Summertime, okay? Which is not even a jazz standard, it’s just a popular song that was made into a jazz standard. And the job of the jazz musician, who’s a virtuoso, is to go crazy on that melody. Now, they’re limited by how great they are, because some jazz musicians can even play atonal things that sound right. They can bang on the side of their cello, and it fits perfectly. They can pluck the strings, they can bow the strings, they can bump the cello on the ground and have a cacophony of sound. And if they’re a really great musician, it somehow all fits together, and is connected back to when they come back around to the melody. And here comes the melody of the song that I’m interpreting again.

It’s the same concept with the Petichta, or with midrash in general. It’s about a virtuoso act of engaging as much content as you can in that performative space, right? To amplify, embellish, raise up the core text by a virtuoso performance of the text and showing how it’s all connected. So, you can go all the way through the Torah and come back to where you started if you can link text to text to text to text because the basic understanding of what the Written Torah is, and what the Oral Torah does, is that it is all perfect. It all makes sense. There are no holes. You’re just to bring all your mind, all your heart, all your soul to the learning you do with it. And not only are you a better person because you’ve done that, not only, perhaps, have you solved some halachic problem because you’ve done that, but you’ve immersed yourself in something that is akin to being connected to the divine by being able to so deeply engage yourself in the Torah, through your interpretation of it, that it’s like your perfect prayer. It’s like doing all 613 of the mitzvot. It’s like very, very high level.

So, midrash goes from being a way to make sense of narrative, Aggadah, or law, Halacha, to becoming a dance for dance’s sake, for playing that perfect virtuosic solo, for a jazz player, right? Because it’s not solving anything. It’s just an incredible homily that is showing the beauty and perfection of the sacred text. Midrash can be a problem solver. It can be art.

Nehemia: So, tell me, in your dissertation, you have the phrase oral performance. Tell us how that plays in. What does it mean in this context? I know that that’s terminology that comes from an entire world of academic literature.

Stephen: Right.

Nehemia: And so, it’s a… what do you call that? A term to art, right? In other words, it’s like a technical term. What is oral performance here?

Stephen: So, I learned the terminology from sort of… the classic text on this is the Singer of Tales, Albert Lord, who was collecting epic songs from essentially uneducated Slavic epic poem singers and analyzing that, and it led him to understand that memory of epic tales was a function of creating what had already been heard, not rote memorization. Okay? What it means is that, when we think about Homeric epics, we think about the Odyssey. And then, when we think about ancient tales, Gilgamesh, and when we get into the world of sacred texts like the Hebrew Bible, there’s a line between what’s written and what’s performed. It’s complicated as heck to try to explain that vis-a-vis the Hebrew Scriptures, but, you know, people have tried to do it.

And the point is that, a poet, and we’re not talking about poet in the sense of someone sitting at their desk and writing poetry, we’re talking about someone who is basically the messenger of tradition; they’re somewhere between a scribe and a prophet. They are carrying those 100,000 lines of the Odyssey. Their immersion in the core text is recreated by them every time they perform it. So, I am not standing like an actor reciting lines in a play, but I am also not improvising. I am only using received content, and I am assembling it for you in real time. I am performing the epic.

Nehemia: That’s the oral performance?

Stephen: So, the study of oral performance theory, or the study of oral performance, is studying the ways that traditions are carried over generations, hundreds of years, thousands of years, by figures who are the performers. And then the small ways that all of us use oral, O-R-A-L, performance as a way of conveying knowledge, as a way of conveying culture. The way it comes into play in midrash is that you can imagine… here we’ll go from jazz to blues. There are certain phrases…

Nehemia: And guys, Stephen here has a musical background, which I don’t know the first thing about, but go ahead. Jazz to blues.

Stephen: Can you think, Nehemia, of a phrase from the blues? If I say, “Give me a classic blues phrase. A phrase from the blues.”

Nehemia: I don’t even know what phrase means in the concept of blues. Is a phrase like words?

Stephen: Yeah, like a couple words that fit together.

Nehemia: So, if you asked me to list three blues songs, I couldn’t. If you played them to me and said, that’s blues, I’d say, “Oh, okay. That’s what you mean by blues.” I know almost nothing about music.

Stephen: Okay. So, let’s take an example of… let me think of one that’s kind of new.

Nehemia: What’s the most famous blues song my audience would have heard of?

Stephen: I don’t know.

Nehemia: What’s your favorite blues song?

Stephen: I’m a big B.B. King fan. I’m trying to grab one from there. “Nobody loves me but my mother, and she might be jiving too,” okay? There’s a ream of blue songs that relate to the mother, okay? There’s a whole semantic domain (that’s a biblical phraseology, right) of songs about mothers, phrases about mothers. Okay? So, if I am standing up to present my performance, right, I’m not going to be making up new phrases about mothers, I’m going to be using phrases that I already know.

Just like when the midrashist came to engage with the question of why Abraham was the way he was, just as you said. You said, or you mentioned Pseudo Yonatan, the Targum, the translation. I am actually drawing on my reservoir of phrases and stories and vocabulary that I picked up in my culture and assembling them. In Greek, the word for, to say, to speak, is lego. We use Legos to put together… Legos to make a design. Imagine texts like Legos. They are spoken, but they are assembled. I do not sit at home and create blocks of Legos out of plastic with the right little tabs so that they fit together. I go to the place where the Legos are sold in the store. They’ve been produced, they are the received tradition, and then I can assemble from them all kinds of things. I could assemble from them a picture that the Lego tells me exactly what to make, or I could make something out of them that I want to make. Okay?

The idea is that there is a core vocabulary in traditions, in cultures, that are assembled to meet the moment of what the interpretation demands. So, in oral performance theory, we think about midrash, we know that there are going to be certain characters, certain phrases, certain descriptive terms, which are used over and over again, that are used for the particular interpretive moment that comes into play. And that what we have in the texts that we have, the compendiums of midrashic texts that we have, these are in some ways an attempt to replicate what those creative moments were like, what those associative moments were like.

Imagine it as trying to look at, like, a snapshot of what some of those conversations, or study sessions, might have been like. That’s one way of thinking about midrash. Another way of thinking about midrash is, because no one really knows how these Midrashic collections, where they came from… you know, behind you, you have a collection of many, many old books, right?

Nehemia: It’s a photo from the Bologna University Library, but yeah.

Stephen: All right. Well, some of those are probably encyclopedias, right?

Nehemia: Could be, yeah.

Stephen: Let’s imagine that a Midrashic collection (just imagine for a sec) is like an encyclopedia. Vayikra Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, which I did my dissertation on, is an interpretation of the Book of Leviticus. How many verses, percentagewise… how many verses do you think of the Book of Leviticus, you know, the ultimate midrashic interpretation of the Book of Leviticus; what percentage of verses are covered in that massive encyclopedia of Leviticus Rabbah? What percentage do you think?

Nehemia: I’m going to guess at 10 percent.

Stephen: You under guessed, but you were not far off. It’s like around 18, 20 percent, okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Stephen: Now, how can…

Nehemia: In other words, this is important, guys. It’s not a systematic commentary, like, let’s say Rashi, who goes through pretty much every verse, right? “The Lord spoke to Moses saying,” he probably doesn’t have much to say. But almost every verse, his aim is to… anything that’s not clear, he’s going to try to explain. That’s the approach of, certainly, a medieval commentary. So, in one sense, it’s a commentary, but in another sense, it’s not.

Stephen: That’s where the hook idea comes in, again, to go back to a previous, I guess, metaphor that we used. Imagine that I am a 4th century Rabbinic Jew who has a distant memory of a Jewish world with a Temple, where everything was centralized, more or less, who is now seeing that Christianity is the emergent dominant form of monotheism and no longer needs people to become Jewish to become Christian. And Christianity is taking over the Roman Empire. I’ve got a small community which is scattered across certain places in Israel, and, you know, you’ve got communities in different places, maybe in North Africa, in Rome. You’ve got Jewish communities, but the continuity has been snapped, okay? I don’t have anywhere where I can go to tell me what Judaism is. I have the Holy Bible, right? But my community’s been shattered. There’s no longer a Temple. The Temple was the center, right?

So, what do I do? How do I teach my people what it is that we are? Well, I have all kinds of ideas. I have legal ideas. I have philosophical ideas. I have jokes. I have customs. I have all that. Where am I going to keep it? What epic poem will I use to carry the layers that I want to pass on to the next generation? I know what I’ll use. I’ll use Hebrew Scriptures, because Hebrew Scriptures have been around for thousands of years, right? And people have memorized, actually memorized Hebrew Scriptures, and we have a written version of it, which is really rare, because there’s very few books. Very few books.

So, what do I do? I store the things that are important to me in the text. Imagine that the Hebrew Scriptures are like a locker where I can keep the things that are important to my culture. I know that a lot of people know the Hebrew Scriptures well, and I know that a lot of people can read Hebrew Scriptures, because it’s actually a fairly highly literate community, by those standards, because we read the Scriptures in synagogue. People know it. They certainly know it orally. And it’s done year after year, same day, same reading, et cetera.

But there’s more that I need to convey. It’s not enough for me just to convey what’s in the Hebrew Scriptures, I need to convey all this other halakhic, this legal knowledge, all this customs knowledge, linguistic knowledge. I have languages that I’m speaking that… you know, I have Greek, I have Aramaic, right? So, I use the hook of the text to hang on it all kinds of other stuff that I want you to know. It’s not important for me in Vayikra Rabbah, in Leviticus Rabbah, in the, let’s say, the 4th century, to interpret every single verse of Leviticus, but it is important for me to cram into it as much as I can about what I want carried on from my culture.

And that is a role the midrash plays. It is giving you the place, the character, the language, the art, the custom, the jokes, the humor (because there’s a lot of humor in there) on the hook of the Scriptures. So, midrash comes to be, both a way to carry through like a Trojan horse, right, all kinds of other stuff within it, but it also remains, remains, a tool for solving real problems.

Nehemia: So, when you say there’s this hook that you’re hanging all these ideas on and all this information on, I want you to comment on this; does this mean that the person producing the midrash, or performing the midrash, however you want to call it, that they know very well that that doesn’t come from the text, but if they can connect it to the text, it can survive and live in a sense?

Stephen: Imagine the midrashist as a combination of a scribe and a prophet. The scribe and the prophet are both deeply connected to the text. When Ezekiel comes to speak, Ezekiel is bringing reference back to the Scriptures all the time, and is engaged in interpretation, not just declaiming whatever Ezekiel wants to declaim. Ezekiel is coming out of a tradition. The scribe is obligated to copy down the text.

So, there’s a way that the Rabbinic tradition sort of combines the role of the transmitter, of the core map, which is the Hebrew Scriptures, and the spirit of it, the launching of it, which is prophetic, in a kind of role that does both. But it’s also a bit of the judge, right? The judge is there too, because someone has to adjudicate what this text means. The prophet can tell you what is the, quote-unquote, right thing to do, or invoke, or inspire, or disparage you. The scribe can give you the best record possible. But who’s going to tell you what to do? If you’re coming with an injured goat and you need to know whether or not it can be sacrificed, in theory, right? Or if you are dealing with issues of property ownership, and you want to follow the law, but it’s not clear what the law is, who’s going to help you? So, the Midrashist is a judge, they’re a prophet, they’re a scribe, in a sense, and they’re also something else; they’re a performer. They’re an entertainer. They’re a magician.

Nehemia: A magician?

Stephen: Magician. Magician.

Nehemia: How so?

Stephen: In a sense that… because, watch this magic act I can do. I can go from a text in Job all the way to a text in Mishlei without missing a beat. I can impress you with this incredible tour de force of showing you the magic, the incredible nature of this universe of text that we live in. I’m going to wow you with it.

Nehemia: Does it involve exegetical sleight of hand? In other words, you used the word magician. I’m trying to wrap my head around what you mean by that.

Stephen: Because there’s magic in the text. There’s magic, not in the sense of occult. I mean, that’s not my area, right?

Nehemia: Well, no, I said sleight of hand.

Stephen: Magic in the sense of electricity, incredible energy. Wow. There’s a wow, this incredible text, and there’s a wow in linking the text together and seeing how the text plays with words in different places and different times in the text, to suddenly see, you know, as the story goes of, you know, Moshe Rabbeinu, of Moses. There’s a midrash that has Moses transported by the powers of time into Rabbi Akiva’s classroom. Rabbi Akiva, who’s an early Rabbinic figure, a famous one. And Moses is sitting in the back of the class, and he has no idea what’s going on. And he’s saying, “I don’t understand how it could be that I, Moses, have no understanding. This is the text that I brought. Who are these people? Right? What’s happening here?”

And there’s this idea that there’s a linkage between the generations, right? And you can be linked through the text, and the text can still be the text, and it can continue to evolve. And there’s something that goes beyond any human being, even the most versatile, brilliant human being, the text is what wins the day, because all that we’re doing is coming out of it.

So, you know, the tradition, the tradition, one can carry it far and wide, but ultimately the grounding for that, the force, the power, the magic, is embedded within the text itself. You can be an incredible scribal, prophetic, adjudicator, performer of the text, but just like a jazz artist or a blues musician, they will always tell you about the tradition of the blues or the tradition of the jazz. You are a servant of your genre. You are a servant of the artistry of the tradition that you’re interpreting.

So, that levels an element of humility on the whole midrashic process, because as great as you can be, as far as you can travel with midrash, you can only travel as far as you know the text. That’s the number one… The most important quality of a midrashist is not imagination, it’s knowledge. But then, when you combine imagination and knowledge, then you have the amazing midrash.

—

Nehemia: So, I remember back a long time ago, there was this discussion in American political sphere about the meaning of the phrase crimes and misdemeanors. This was when Bill Clinton was being put up on charges of… I’m not sure what the terminology is correctly, but they were trying to have an impeachment trial. There’s what I think they call, like, the French approach, which is, “No, the law is this clay from which I mold what I want it to be.” And then there’s the originalist approach, which says, “I have to find out what they thought it meant, the people who formulated this law.” Where does midrash come into those two approaches?

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We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Genesis 25:22
Genesis 9:5
Deuteronomy 13:14
Deuteronomy 18:11
Mishnah Pirkei Avot
Genesis 15:7
Babylonian Talmud Menachot 29b

BOOKS MENTIONED
The Singer of Tales (@57:31, Pt 1)
Amazon.com: About Man and God and Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #245 – Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1
Support Team Study - Secrets of the jots and Tittles: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center
Stephen Daniel Arnoff | Discover. Grow. Inspire — Get Started Today

The post Hebrew Voices #248 – Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this Support Team Study: Talmudic Judaism & the New Testament, where Nehemia and Prof. Lawrence Schiffman discuss the importance of the New Testament as a witness to Jewish history, as well as how the Talmud has been abused against the Jewish people.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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The post SNEAK PEEK! Talmudic Judaism & the New Testament appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #247 - Dead Sea Scrolls & the War of Light vs. Darkness, Nehemia sits down with Professor Lawrence Schiffman, NYU's leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, to explore the sectarian battles that gave rise to these mysterious texts. From the War Scroll's apocalyptic vision to Sadducean and Pharisaic clashes over control of the Temple itself, they uncover what the scrolls reveal about ancient Judaism, drawing surprising parallels to today's Middle East conflicts.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: So, if you went to a synagogue in the year 1,500 in Marrakesh or in Lithuania, you wouldn’t hear a sermon, you’re saying, on Shabbat?

Prof. Schiffman: Not on a regular Shabbat.

Nehemia: Wow. And you’re saying it’s Christian influence to have a sermon in the synagogue.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow!

Prof. Schiffman: So, I want to say something about jihad. I think the West doesn’t want to face the reality of what jihad really is. That’s why they can’t understand. And people ask them, “What good did it do to destroy the World Trade Center? All you did was kill people.” No, that is the idea, to kill people.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Prof. Lawrence Schiffman. He is the Global Distinguished Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, Director of Graduate Studies for the MA program at New York University, NYU. He’s a specialist in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Judaism and Late Antiquity, the History of Jewish Law and Talmudic Literature. And he’s given an audio lecture, which I love the title, The Dead Sea Scrolls – The Truth Behind the Mystique in the Hebrew Bible. I found that on your website. Shalom, Prof. Schiffman.

Prof. Schiffman: Hi, shalom. How are you?

Nehemia: I’m doing well. I know you were just over in Israel when the war with Iran started, and before the recording you started to tell me. I said, “Save this for the guests.” What happened when you were in Israel and the missiles started flying?

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, we were in the synagogue on Shabbat morning…

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: …when suddenly you had some kind of people, I don’t know, milling around and saying things to one another, right? And then, before maybe two or three minutes went beyond that, everybody knew what was going on. Apparently, some officers had been paged, and so they told everybody else what was going on. And at that point, the question was, how long are we going to get on with the service before we have to go to a shelter? But actually, we made it through the whole service before we had to go to shelters later on. So, that was the first beginning of the war.

Then, of course, we have an apartment. I was in our apartment with its own shelter. So, I was, of course, in and out of the shelter like everybody else. Actually, that Shabbat I was at my son’s, and we were all in his shelter once or twice. And that was no worse than the sad fact that some people really have missiles hitting either where they are or very close. So, we just, so to speak, suffered running in and out of a shelter.

And then I went back to Jerusalem, spent a few days there. But I had a problem because I ended up canceling one day of classes. I teach all my classes on one day. I ended up canceling them after consulting with people at NYU because I really didn’t have the right stuff to make it into an internet class. I didn’t have any of the materials with me because I expected to be home.

Nehemia: Ah, so your flight was canceled and you couldn’t make it home to New York.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, all the flights were canceled because it’s dangerous. Then NYU went into action with a company, that’s a security company that they use that specializes in evacuations, and I and a colleague, his wife and son, were, in quotes, “evacuated”, close quotes, by going to Egypt, and we drove to Egypt. We had security guards (which in Israel you don’t really need, but in Egypt you do need) but in any case, we drove to Taba, which is at the border. We made a perfectly normal, orderly border crossing into Egypt, along with a lot of other people doing the same thing, one way or the other, and we crossed into Egypt. And we had a car that picked us up, again, with security. We drove to Sharm el-Sheikh. We spent seven hours in a very fancy hotel, and I found out the hotel was only 150 dollars. You could say… sort of a privilege. They were constantly writing us, you know, “Where are you, you know, are you moving on?”

So, each stage of the trip… so, I joked with her later that you only put us in 150 dollar hotel, it turns out that it’s very cheap to go to Sharm el-Sheikh in the most luxurious hotel! And we were there for seven hours, got a little sleep. Twelve midnight, left for our airport to make our three o’clock flight, and then, because we wanted to get back before Shabbat, they couldn’t really get us a very good flight. So, we flew from Sharm el-Sheikh to Istanbul. We went from there to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to New York, but all those were regular flights, you know, normal, sitting in the airport, waiting, getting on the plane, you know, moving on.

And that was what happened. And it was really, actually turned out to be, for me, to be a great opportunity to see a part of Egypt I hadn’t seen. I was in Egypt; my wife and I were there in 1979 between Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the peace treaty. And so, it was a chance here to see Sharm el-Sheikh, Sinai on the right, the desert on the right (you get a sense what it’s like) and on the left, the shore of the Red Sea, the western shore of the Red Sea. I had only seen that from a boat many years ago when I was on a cruise that went to Aqaba. And when we went to Petra and got to spend one day at Petra on horseback with some Arab driver with a rifle, and it was a lot of fun.

So, anyhow, the bottom line, right, the evacuation was not bad and provided me some interesting opportunities. And I can only say that we have to be concerned for people who are suffering, but I would not put myself in that classification.

Nehemia: Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, and I have a lot of family over there, and they’re…

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, everyone seems to be… our family’s in and out of shelters, but as they say, if you follow directions, you’re almost 100 percent safe.

Nehemia: I saw a video the other day of this guy, he was alone in his house, and he said, “Look, my wife’s not even here, I’m not going to run into the shelter. I mean, nothing’s going to happen anyway.” And he said, “You know what? If I don’t run in the shelter, my wife will be upset with me.” He runs into the shelter, and his entire house is obliterated. The shelter is in perfect condition.

Prof. Schiffman: Yep.

Nehemia: So, I mean, this is happening. So, you know, I asked my sister and my mother the other day, “So, are you getting used to this? Is it becoming normalized?” And they both said, “There’s nothing normal about this. It’s surreal.”

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah. I think…

Nehemia: So, one of them said it’s like having a baby that wakes you up in the middle of the night, but the baby’s trying to kill you.

Prof. Schiffman: But, you know, I want to point out here that the events of this war and what led up to it starting the Gaza War, et cetera; this is sort of on the scale of the Six Day War in terms of major, major change in the whole power structure. I mean, when you think about it, that Israel is clearly the main military power. And, you know, Turkey is staying out, wisely. They are a serious military power, but they know that they’re certainly not a competitor, and they’re not interested in the whole thing.

So, what happens by the time this is over is that Israel unquestionably is the main military power, and you’ve got, right now, Arab nations being protected in different ways by Israel. And forgetting for a moment about the constant discussion about diplomatic relations, the fact is that the relations between Israel and their neighbors, and those countries that used to be their enemies, are just radically different. And even if they’re not the ones that we would best prefer, that these differences are really important.

I think the big deal that we have to wait to see is what happens with the government of Iran. And I know that Israel has backed down from claiming that they’re there to overthrow Iran, but it would be a great shame if Iran didn’t return to being the great country that it used to be. And I’d love to visit. That’s another thing. And by the way, I live on a street where most of the people living on the street are either people who had their childhood in Iran, or, if they didn’t have their childhood in Iran, they were born in America shortly after the parents’ arrival from Iran. I mean, most of the families on my street are Persian Jews. So, you know, I’m sort of, like, in closer contact with what’s going on there. It would be a shame if it didn’t go back to being a great country.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Prof. Schiffman: And what’s really interesting about Iran is how they can talk the way they can talk, begging the U.S. and Israel to attack them, when they have no resources at all. Very strange.

Nehemia: So, this is a good segue to your field of expertise, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls. And what comes to mind here is milchemet b’nei or u’bnei choshekh; the war of the sons of light and the sons of darkness…

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah.

Nehemia: …who, you had another group of people who perhaps weren’t living quite in reality, who thought they were going to fight an apocalyptic war against a foreign adversary, although those were Jews wanting to fight the Romans. So, this is really an interesting parallel. Is the mindset of these people in Iran, these fanatics; how does that compare to the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? In other words, you can’t possibly defeat the Romans. What are you thinking?

Prof. Schiffman: Right. So, I would go back for a second and say there are two different questions to discuss here. One question is the one you’ve already hit on, which is simply the question, how does a group, and this happened with the Jews in the revolt against Rome. It happened several times. These guys expected to revolt. They prayed to revolt. They wrote a text to revolt, but they didn’t do it.

Now, imagine what happens. We have, first of all, 63 BC, the Romans conquered the place. Then you’ve got the two revolts of 66 to 73, 132 to 5, which are totally hopeless from the start. Josephus has the speech of Agrippa that says they’re totally hopeless. So, our friends at Qumran, they share with a lot of other people the hope to overthrow Rome and be independent, even if it’s literally messianic. And even in the case of two revolts, if it fails. So, that is something they do indeed share with our friends, apparently, in Iran, who thought that they could overpower the great powers.

Nehemia: What do you mean by “it’s literally messianic?” I’m not sure that my audience knows… That’s an Israeli term that I think means something different to most of the world.

Prof. Schiffman: No, I think it’s something that’s very important to realize. Now we’re back to what I was going to say is the second thing. The second thing is that the type of Islam, this particular Sunni Islam and its Iranian variety, believe in a messianic redemption, which is not the case in most forms of Islam. Now, the Mahdi is supposed to come after great suffering of the people. So, you have a kind of ascetic messianism here, which seems to be part of this kind of Islamism.

Now, when we go to the Dead Sea Sectarians, you have an apocalyptic form of Judaism, but I don’t know whether or not the almost suicidal desire to suffer along the way is part of that. There’s an assumption when you read the War Scroll and some of the other texts that they’re simply going to win a gigantic battle against the enemies of good who represent, as you said earlier, the children of darkness, sons of darkness.

So, I think in each case, there is a certain form of apocalypticism that is motivating them. One can sort of jokingly say that the Qumran Sectarians were smart enough, apparently, not to start the war that the Iranians started, right?

Nehemia: So, this raises a really interesting… and you said messianism, and I want you to define that because I think a lot of my audience will not understand. So, in Israel, we’ll talk about, you know, something being meshichi, messianic, but it doesn’t mean the same thing in Jewish culture as it does outside of Jewish culture. So, what do you mean by “there’s a messianism?”

Prof. Schiffman: Well, I think the point is like this; that in a messianic ideology, messianic ideologies of Judaism come in two forms, the restorative and the utopian. This is something the great scholar Gershom Sholem worked out, and Shemaryahu Talmon wrote about it also for Dead Sea Scrolls. I wrote about it. The idea is like this: that in restorative messianism, that’s a kind of natural thing. That there once was a great empire, and you want to restore it. So, you work to re-attain the greatness of the empire that you had before. And you have a vision of restoring this greatness after having lost it. This is a rational thing, because this goes along with trying to make all the improvements, what they call in Kabbalah “tikkun”, to try to make the world better and better, and to bring about a redemptive state.

But then you have the other form. The other form, which is the utopian, is looking to create a society that never existed. That society that never existed is going to be created, usually, after some kind of violent war. This violent war is going to lead to an overturning of the whole world order. Now, it is expected that this type of violent war will lead to the destruction of all evildoers. This is the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness. The destruction of all the evildoers, and in the end, the group itself is the remaining, so to speak, winners in this apocalyptic process. Now, both are messianic. This is a messianic-type view which we would probably use the word apocalyptic, despite the tremendous scholarly debate about what that word really means. I like to use the word the way the dictionary uses it. I think that’s sometimes the best thing to do.

Nehemia: Which is what? So, what does apocalyptic mean?

Prof. Schiffman: Looking at that, that’s a kind of messianism which they usually mean when they say something is messianic, because it’s not realistic. And it’s not realistic and expects that something is going to happen to provide some kind of ideal situation that never existed. Like when the Jewish sources say there’ll be no disease, in some sources, at the end of days. That would be absolutely phenomenal.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Prof. Schiffman: But we realize that the rational type messianists, like Maimonides, will come and say, “No! What are you talking about? Of course there’ll be disease. But people will be better people, and they’ll try and help the diseased person more. The guy will never have to wait to get someone to cross the street for him if he can’t walk. But the fact of the matter is that there’ll still be natural order.” So, the utopian type of messianism is what you’re talking about in the Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness. And that’s the type of messianism which is part of, I say part, of the Iranian type view, because we can never discount the fact that the Iranians have taken over the whole heritage of Islamism and reshaped it in their own Sunni variety. So, it’s not the same as the Muslim Brotherhood because they’re influenced by Shi’ism. The two groups are influencing one another, but the fact is that what we call Islamism involves a commitment to a violent overthrow of the reality that we have today. And that’s where there’s some kind of continuity here, where…

Nehemia: So, I guess maybe I have a little bit of a different question. So, I’m young enough where, when I was growing up, there was this new movement, which was when Chabad started the chanting, “We want Mashiach now, we don’t want to wait.” But even Chabad didn’t mean “we’re going to implement,” I don’t think they meant, “we’re going to implement actively some of the things that we expect to,” let’s just say it. Meaning like, in other words, part of the Mashiach coming in Judaism is that the Third Temple is rebuilt. But nobody in Chabad in the 1970s was saying, “Oh, let’s go tear down the mosque,” because that will require some kind of supernatural intervention.

Prof. Schiffman: Right, right.

Nehemia: And the difference is, so in Judaism, at least as I’ve experienced it, this messianism is somewhat hypothetical. And then in Israel, when they’ll say meshichi, messianic, what they mean is somebody who takes it from the hypothetical to the active and says, “Okay, we’re going to go and settle on a hilltop in Judea because that will bring closer the coming of the Mashiach.” And I’m not saying whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, let’s leave those politics aside.

Prof. Schiffman: Right, right, right.

Nehemia: And I heard this from Haviv Retig Gur in a video he did where he was talking about that Twelver Shi’ism was very passive. Right? You would fast for the coming of the Mahdi and you would pray for the coming of the Mahdi. And then Khomeini comes in the 70s and says, “No, let’s make this happen…”

Prof. Schiffman: Right. You got it.

Nehemia: “…by triggering a world war.” So, to what extent was the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, when they wrote The War of the Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness, was this Chabad saying, “We want Mashiach now, we don’t want to wait?” Or was this, “No, let’s trigger this war?” That’s my question. And do we know?

Prof. Schiffman: Well, it looks… here’s the problem. The problem is that we still can’t figure out the extent to which the War Scroll is a kind of theoretical hope or something realistic. First of all, we need to remind people that in the War Scroll, there is a whole system of scheduled battles one after another with the nations around Israel, who are the ancient biblical enemies of the Jewish people. And each one is getting defeated one by one. Now, of course, we know that no war actually would work that way. So, there’s something idealistic about the way they pose the war. And then there are idealistic legal rulings that the text has regarding fulfilling the laws of war of Deuteronomy and ritual purity and other stuff like that, that does make it seem that it’s some kind of theoretical framework.

And of course, as everybody knows, they were apparently not collecting arms. Or at least none were found at Qumran in the excavations. Somebody took one knife that he found there and made a big deal about it, “Well, maybe this is the war.” No, that doesn’t make any sense. You’re not making a war with one knife. So, the point is, these are not the people of Masada (even if some of them may have run away there during the destruction of Qumran) but it’s not the people of Masada who are actively involved as the Sicarii in a revolt against Rome. So, it seems that what you’re dealing with here is a theoretical framework, and whether they really thought this framework would come about soon or not, I think they thought that there would be, soon, a divinely inspired messianic revolution. But there are others who think the opposite.

The difference, however, is, if we come back to the Israeli example, I think virtually all, if you want to call them more messianic forms of Israeli Judaism, have certain lines that are created by Jewish law which prevent certain types of actions. And once in a while, they may be violated. And there also may be some very confused people, because some of these groups do indeed have very confused people who do think that they should take actions that Judaism basically doesn’t think they should take.

Nehemia: What are some of those laws? Because you’re an expert on Jewish halakha historically.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, so I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. I teach a class almost every morning in our synagogue between two morning services. That is to say, people go to one or the other, and depending on where you’re going, you can stay after for the class or come early for the class. And it’s in the Sefer Hachinukh, which is a work that goes through the entire 613 commandments and laws pertaining to them, et cetera. Now, we are almost done with this book, having started in 2019. We used a 10-volume edition, and we are now on commandment 604.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Prof. Schiffman: Now, why do I mention this? Because we right now are on the destruction of Amalek. Now, this is a perfect example that a crazy messianist might think he’s supposed to destroy Amalek. Guess what? According to Jewish law, you may not destroy. Yes, you must remember. Yes, you must read a portion in the Torah that reminds you what Amalek did to the Jewish people, but you’re not allowed to kill an Amalekite because, A, we don’t know who the Amalekites are, and B, you’re not allowed to kill anybody without giving them a right to surrender or run away.

Now, the point is that here you see Jewish law coming and making, obviously, a crazy messianist would think the end of days is a great way to kill all the bad guys. So, who’s Amalek? So, we can all make our own judgments. I think today many Jews tend to associate a certain group of people, a certain subgroup of that group as Amalek, right? And you can’t just kill them!

Nehemia: In other words, this is a law…

Prof. Schiffman: … a person in a Hamas uniform who’s just standing there, right, and think, “Oh, I think he’s Amalek, I’ll kill him,” right? You may not do that. If he shoots at you, sure, right? But the point I’m making is that Jewish law has cut off the ability to put this almost messianic idea of destruction of all evil. To do it. You can’t do it! Or the conquering the seven nations. You can’t decide that the Palestinians are the Seven Nations, and therefore that you can kill them to get them off the land.

Now, we see in the news there are some very unfortunately sick individuals who seem to be perpetrating crimes against innocent Palestinians. But of course, we all know that any sensible person thinks that this is horrible and thinks they should be arrested and thrown in jail or whatever else. So, the point that I’m making is that Jewish law, in that example, stops you from putting through what someone might think is messianic.

Now, when it comes to the Temple, according to Jewish law, most people believe you’re not even supposed to go on the Temple Mount because of our ritual impurity. So, you can’t just go up there and destroy the mosque, et cetera, et cetera. This is not to mention minor issues, if you want to call it that, like Jewish legal restrictions on destroying someone else’s property. There’s a building there. Who are you? So, the point is, what happens in all these situations is that it gets put off for a real Messiah, where we will really believe this person is divinely sent, and the whole world will turn to worship God and want this to happen. That’s the point.

Nehemia: So, what’s interesting here is…

Prof. Schiffman: Your point is right. These things are put off in a way that certain actions can’t be taken. But other actions, and we’ll go back to Chabad for a second…

Nehemia: Mhm.

Prof. Schiffman: …trying to create a world, which is a perfect world in which we have brought about the messianic era, that you should do. That’s the difference.

Nehemia: But they do it not by killing people, they do it by saying, “We’re going to put on tefillin, phylacteries every morning…”

Prof. Schiffman: Right.

Nehemia: “…we’re going to keep Shabbat perfectly,” right? That’s Chabad’s strategy, which is a very different strategy…

Prof. Schiffman: I’ve often made a not-nice joke…

Nehemia: Okay, what’s that?

Prof. Schiffman: There’s one group of people where, if you’re really very, very religious you kill people. And there’s another group of people where, if you’re really very, very religious you study Torah all day and don’t work, and that’s a very big contrast. Because I’ll take the second one over the first one anytime. And it’s a very important contrast, because sometimes we like to criticize some Jewish brethren who have become very fanatical.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Prof. Schiffman: But at least the fanaticism almost always is limited to that type of activity. And when it’s not, the Jewish community opposes them. For example, that crazy sect that was mistreating children and marrying the…

Nehemia: Lev Tahor in Guatemala, or something…

Prof. Schiffman: …but they’re condemned by everybody, right? I remember a very interesting thing. When they were in Montreal, the government in Montreal wanted to take away the children. Who was ready to take in the children? The Belzer Hasidim. Why? Because these are Hasidim, they like the same clothes, but, of course, they were completely against the sick behavior of these people. So, the point I’m making is that, within the Jewish community, when somebody doesn’t understand where the proper lines are for this type of activity, the community comes and says, “You’ve gone overboard. Sorry, you can’t do this.”

Nehemia: So, this is a really important point. It’s a bit beyond the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I think it’s a really important point. So, leading up to October 7th, there were all these broadcasts on Al Jazeera. I watched a lot of them. And they were showing Jews, particularly in the context of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, or it’s actually the Dome of the Rock, because most Jews don’t care about the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Prof. Schiffman: You’re right.

Nehemia: So, there’s a confusion there on their part. They don’t know the difference. But in any event, they were saying, “Well, the Jews want to build their temple. They’re going to destroy our mosque, and we have to go defend it.” Right?

Prof. Schiffman: Right, they do that all the time…

Nehemia: They were whipping up the Palestinian population, because I think a Qatari likes nothing more than a dead Palestinian, unfortunately. So, Al Jazeera is whipping them up into this frenzy. And what they don’t understand is, and I want you to comment on this; I think it kind of fits with what you’re saying. The prayer for Jews to rebuild the Temple is, “Well, God’s going to have to do that. We’re not going to tear down any mosque.” But in the Muslim mind, and this is interesting, so, this is a debate within Islam; is jihad an individual obligation or is it an umma, a national obligation? And people like bin Laden were saying it’s an individual obligation. If you see a Jew… or ISIS in particular, they literally said this. They put out things to the Muslims of America. They said, “You have these gun shows. Go buy the guns and start killing people. What’s wrong with you?” And a rational Muslim says, “Wait a minute. Yes, maybe there’s some obligation to wage war in the name of Allah, but I’m not individually going to do that!” Is there any Jew… and of course, maybe there’s crazy people, right? But most Jews are not looking and saying, “Oh, we should go personally tear down the mosque.” The world will decide that when…

Prof. Schiffman: That’s right. There’s something also very important to understand, and this is going to sound a little funny. The government of the State of Israel exercises a certain legal control, which makes very clear to people that certain activities are not going to be permitted. So, just as an example, the people who want to bring an animal for Passover onto the Temple Mount and sacrifice, will not get onto the Temple Mount with that animal. On the other hand, the government has decided that if a Jew wants to open a prayer book on the Temple Mount, they should be allowed to. Because they decided this now. They used to forbid it.

Now, the point I want to make, though, is that the government and its laws exercise a certain control which is there, besides the inner religious control. So that if a person is going to go overboard in some of these things, the government will say this is not right. Now, these other governments are telling their citizens that they should kill people! So, I want to say something about jihad. I think the West doesn’t want to face the reality of what jihad really is. That’s what they can’t understand. People ask them, “What good did it do to destroy the World Trade Center? All you did was kill people.” No! That is the idea, to kill people.

Now, this is something we have a lot of trouble with, right? We don’t totally understand why someone thinks that simply killing people is a good thing. And we have to face reality that some of the Islamist groups are at that level of commitment to a type of jihad which may be destructive. Now, in the Jewish messianic idea, the idea is to be constructive. So, that also is going to affect the whole scene. But the problem about the jihadist is, the jihadist doesn’t care if it’s destructive. And I think, you know, with ISIS, you see this functioning in the extreme. But I think it’s important to understand that, like, I’ve got to tell you that people don’t realize this, that the type of Islamist point of view that has now become what we call Islamism, in reality is encouraging, as you saw on the TV, this type of stuff. And as you said, the rational Muslim knows better, because it doesn’t accomplish anything. Or wants to live according to classical Islam, in which the Jew and the Christian is a protected minority.

Nehemia: So, there’s a really important point here that I think some of my audience will miss. I’m familiar with the terminology, but they might not be. You use the term Islamism, and then Islam or Islamic, and there’s a difference.

Prof. Schiffman: Yes.

Nehemia: Would you explain that? Because…

Prof. Schiffman: Okay, there’s this person called a Muslim, okay? That’s a person who believes in Islam. Islam is the correct name for the religion, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, Islamic today is used in one and two different ways. I usually avoid using it for that reason, because it’s sometimes used just to describe what is the adjective Muslim would describe, but sometimes it refers to what we call Islamists.

Now, Islamists are people who believe in what we consider to be a fanatical form of Islam in which jihad is a central idea. Now, this is complicated because it comes in different varieties. Because the main varieties of it are, I would say, maybe now three. You have, I guess what we could call the most crazy, ISIS, right, which is almost dead, but not totally dead. It’s still operating in the Syrian desert. You know, I was in Syria for two days. I have now my passport…

Nehemia: You were in Syria for two days?

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, I was in Syria for two days in September. It was great, fascinating.

Nehemia: What…

Prof. Schiffman: We were guests of the government. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

Nehemia: Wait, wait, hold on. You were openly a guest of the government of Syria for two days? In 2025?

Prof. Schiffman: Correct. My wife, too. And a group of 12 Jews. Another group went in December, but we were guests…

Nehemia: Wow.

Prof. Schiffman: And from our point of view, we got to see the Dura-Europos paintings up close.

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Prof. Schiffman: They’re sitting on… from the 3rd century. To go back to the question now…

Nehemia: Wow.

Prof. Schiffman: …so, Islamist refers to what we consider to be fanaticism. I mean, where you have a guy giving his eight-year-old kid a gun to shoot someone in the head, right, in front of a video, which I never watched one of those videos. I am a strict observer of the Jewish law that you may not get benefit from a dead body. I do not watch videos of people being killed. However, here’s what I want to say; that that’s the extreme extreme, right? Where violence becomes even just, you know, completely out of sight.

Then you’ve got the problem of the two forms; the Muslim Brotherhood, which of course is Hamas, et cetera, in which, again, however, violence that’s normally prohibited by Islamic law becomes permitted. Namely violence against non-military personnel. And you see that with October 7th. But you also see the sickness of it when you get to baking babies and all these raping dead women, and a guy calling his mother to say he killed 10 people. It’s “good news,” you know. Okay.

Then you’ve got the Shiite Islamism of a country, Iran, that is willing to dedicate the entire country, strangely to supporting other Islamists who are Sunnis, right, to somehow or another upset the whole world, and, at least they claim, destroy the State of Israel. Now, nobody believes that’s real, that they could destroy the State of Israel, but having them build an atomic bomb when they say they want to use it? I don’t know. It’s worse than North Korea, because North Korea, they don’t intend to use the bomb, right? They’re not intending to use it.

Nehemia: North Korea has the bomb for the purpose of remaining in power…

Prof. Schiffman: Right.

Nehemia: Iran openly says they have the bomb for the purpose of destroying Israel…

Prof. Schiffman: Openly says, they’ll use the atomic… So, the point is that these are forms, these three forms, Muslims that are prominent today. Muslim Brotherhood, which in a certain sense, that and Hezbollah is the organization of massive guerrilla war, right? Then you got the ISIS thing, which is almost dead, but the U.S. is pulling out of the Syrian desert, so who knows whether the Syrian government will be able to keep them under control. They’re trying. And then you got this Iran thing.

Now, the Iran thing, as they called it, was the octopus that fed the others. But ideologically, they’re not exactly the same. Even though they’re not exactly the same, they all constitute a massive danger to what we call the civilized world. Now, here’s the point I want to make. That’s what we call Islamism. As opposed to the regular religion, which may see some of these things in its ideal system, but isn’t doing them. That’s more similar to your example of the Jewish system, where the guy who’s pumping gas, who came to the U.S. from Pakistan or driving the Uber car, is not interested in any of that. He just wants to support his family, and he wants to go to the mosque and worship God. And observe the holidays and stuff like that. And so, that guy is not in this. So, that’s what we distinguish between Islam and Islamism. That’s the way the terminology works.

Nehemia: Okay. So, now let’s go backwards 2,000 years.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah!

Nehemia: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? I was taught years ago that it was the Essenes, but what is your view?

Prof. Schiffman: The first question that I always have to point out about this is the word “wrote”. I don’t use this word and I’ll tell you why. Because there are several issues. There’s the composition and the copying. Now, about one-third of the material found in Qumran is the Hebrew Bible.

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: So, who composed? You know, anybody from Moses to Ezra, right? So, it’s got nothing to do with the people living there, they just copied and owned these manuscripts. Then we get to the question of who composed, which is what you really want to know, the Sectarian Scrolls. Because remember, there’s Second Temple literature composed by other Jews and either physically brought to the Sectarian center at Qumran, or maybe just copied at the Sectarian center at Qumran. But they weren’t composed by the people there, they were “written”, in quotes, when they copied them. So, good.

Now we get to, who composed the Sectarian? So, the dominant view is the Essenes. The question that we have to ask is a funny question; who are the Essenes? We have the descriptions in Josephus and Philo. They tell us certain things about the practices, and a few other places, but that’s the main thing. But what’s very important is Pliny the Elder, because Pliny the Elder says that there was a sect at a place north of En Gedi, of Essenes, and that is why most people think that Qumran was occupied by the Essenes.

Now, the problem is, as I say, who are the Essenes? Because the word Essene… we don’t know what it means in Hebrew, right? It’s never found in Hebrew, except from the Renaissance on, when Jews started reading Greek texts. They read about it in Josephus and Philo. But before that, it’s never mentioned. It’s not in the Talmud. It’s not in the New Testament. So, the question is, is that the correct word for the people we’re talking about? Khirbet Qumran? Or is it then… We don’t know what the word means. Somebody put an article together; he mentioned 22 possible explanations of the word Essene.

Nehemia: Wow.

Prof. Schiffman: And actually, the guy advocated a strange one; a beekeeper from a cult of Artemis on some island in the Aegean, and he advocated that they’re beekeepers. But there are no bees found in the Qumran caves that we know about, so it was pretty funny. But leaving aside the humorousness of this, we don’t know!

Now, a funny fact is that the word Isi’im in modern Hebrew has come to mean the Sectarians of Qumran. So, I once was giving a lecture to an Israeli audience in a Hebrew program somewhere, and a woman raised her hand she said, “Ha’im ha’Isi’im hayu ha’Isi’im?” “Were the Essenes the Essenes?” Were the Dead Sea Scrolls the Essenes? Now, what I want to say about this is, there are two possibilities…

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: …and this is a kind of simplistic way of putting it. Either they are the Essenes, and we have to change the way we understand the Essenes in accord with the Qumran materials, as the main sources about the group. Or the word Essene may refer to a whole variety of groups of which the group who left us the scrolls may be one of them, that therefore shares certain things with the ones that Josephus and Philo described, but they’re not exactly the same group. But you can’t throw out the fact that Pliny says that they were located above En Gedi.

Now, a funny fact is that somebody tried to come up with the idea that “above En Gedi” meant up on the hill above En Gedi. And the late Yosef Aviram, who was working until he was like 104, told me that when he was like 102, he went on a tour to see this place that they claimed was really the Essene settlement. And when he got there, he said all the pottery was Byzantine, and he didn’t know what the heck they were talking about.

Nehemia: So, I’ve done that hike from the entrance to the Ein Gedi reserve. You go up the mountain…

Prof. Schiffman: Right.

Nehemia: …over the mountain, down the mountain, and you come out at, I believe it’s Nachal Arugot.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s said to be a seven-hour hike. I was in much better shape about 15 years ago…

Prof. Schiffman: [Laughter]

Nehemia: …and I did it in five hours. But I don’t think… I wouldn’t make it today.

Prof. Schiffman: [Laughter]

Nehemia: So, I can’t imagine anyone… But there are water sources about, maybe like halfway up. That’s where the Ein Gedi Water Company gets their water from.

Prof. Schiffman: Yes. Well, they make believe they get it from there. Who knows?

Nehemia: Or it’s from the tap, but they put the label on that it’s from there.

Prof. Schiffman: Well, I don’t think… Someone pointed out to me, the genius that started selling water in bottles. I only buy a water bottle if I need an ice water somewhere. I’ll tell you a funny story. NYU had a project. We did a lot of research, together with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University, about Caesarea. So, I went with my wife to spend a day, an entire day in Caesarea. I wanted to see every single thing there from the beginning to the end. So, they sell water there for a fortune, but it’s ice water. And if you’re in Caesarea in July and you’re there the whole day, it’s well worth buying the ice water. So, we bought the ice water for four times the price, bottle after bottle after bottle, and it didn’t bother me. But normally, I would never buy water.

Nehemia: That’s supply and demand, is what they call it.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah…

Nehemia: So, all right, so, back to who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah!

Nehemia: So, Rachel Elior famously says it was the Sadducean Temple Library.

Prof. Schiffman: Right.

Nehemia: What is your thought on that?

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, so, here’s a problem about this. I’ve advocated the fact that the halakhic system of the scrolls is based on Sadducean approach. This seems to me to be proven without any question from a whole variety of places, in which case it gives us an opening to understand the exegesis in the Temple Scroll as an example of how Sadducean exegesis would have worked, and let us understand much better Rabbinic references, which are very partial and very unclear, et cetera. So, that part of this… here’s the irony; I think that’s correct, but she didn’t know that I wrote that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: She didn’t know that anybody ever discussed any of this, because she never read the literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls field. Now, the problem is when you go one step further and you say “the Sadducean Temple Library”, because the material is anti the Temple…

Nehemia: So, how could it be the Temple Library?

Prof. Schiffman: …the Temple Library have only works against the Temple, saying it’s not kosher! It makes no sense. They would have works that support the Temple.

Nehemia: Can we back up a little bit and do a little bit of order? Who are the Sadducees?

Prof. Schiffman: Okay, good.

Nehemia: Let’s assume the audience doesn’t know anything beyond what they read in one of the New Testament books. Who are the Sadducees?

Prof. Schiffman: Okay. Right. So, Sadducees are in the New Testament. So, anyhow… By the way, the New Testament is a great source for the history of Judaism. People don’t understand that.

Nehemia: Right.

Prof. Schiffman: Right? Really a great source. Now, there were, at this time, according to Josephus, three main Jewish sects. He discusses this starting in about 150 BCE, when he gets to that point in his history. He says, “And there were three Jewish sects.” The Pharisees are the forerunners of the Talmudic rabbis. That means that they are the forerunners of the Judaism of today, because all forms of Judaism today, with the exception of Karaism and Samaritanism, are based on the Pharisaic-Rabbinic approach. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, it’s all based on Pharisaic-Rabbinic approach.

Nehemia: Is that a controversial position? Because I’ve heard people say, “Rabbis have nothing to do with the Pharisees, and the rabbis of the Mishnah didn’t consider themselves Pharisees,” and I think that’s kind of a…

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, this is because people want to say something that sounds exciting. But the reality of the situation is, it’s not that they consider themselves Pharisees, they consider the Pharisees to be their forerunners. That’s not the same thing as considering yourself a Pharisee…

Nehemia: Well, when they talk about the zugot, the appearance… those are the Pharisees…

Prof. Schiffman: In other words… when we go into our university office, we’re doing something that started out in monasteries. Monasteries became universities. Does that mean if I say that that I think I’m in a monastery? Of course not, right? So, I mean, this is a… right? The argument that Pharisaism is not the origin of the Rabbinic movement is a bit specious. Though people say it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: The second group that we need to talk about, we’ve already talked about the Essenes, whether they are the Dead Sea Scroll sect, but we need to talk about the Sadducees. The Sadducees represent the high priestly elite, and we know that they had specific beliefs that differed from those of the Pharisees. We know this from Josephus, and they had specific legal rulings in Jewish law and sacrificial law that differed from the view of the Pharisees. And certainly differed from views later on in Rabbinic sources, who in a later period retroactively disagreed with the Sadducees.

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: So, this group of Sadducees, however, seems to have imparted its view on Jewish law to the Dead Sea Sectarians and some other groups as well, because Samaritanism and Karaism ultimately trace back to that kind of approach to Jewish law. To put it another way, there are two main approaches to Jewish law historically… Pharisaic Rabbinic on the one hand, and on the other hand, the one which starts with the Sadducees and is, besides being Sadducean, has tremendous influence on Samaritan and Karaite law.

Nehemia: So, can you just give an example? That’s interesting to me. What sense does the Sadducee approach influence the Samaritan law?

Prof. Schiffman: I’m going to have to remember these examples, I don’t remember them too well. There’s this guy, Boyd, who wrote about this. And what happens is that you have this tremendous stringency about menstrual impurity, and the actual separation of the menstruant, right? Which it also shares with Karaism.

Nehemia: And the Ethiopian Jews have that as well.

Prof. Schiffman: Yes, that’s right. Now, there is one manuscript of the Mishnah that seems to indicate that there may have been some regular Jews who did this. But the Temple Scroll has it. And so, it’s in Qumran, it’s in Samaritanism and Karaism. Now, we went on a visit to the Karaite synagogue in Jerusalem. You’ll like this story. So, first of all, the rabbi, whose name was Hefetz Hayim…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s a very long time ago. Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: Like, you’re talking about the 80s or 90s? No, 90s, it would have to be.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah. Any women who are ritually impure should not go in, because that’s the rule of Karaites, something which tried to spread to Rabbinic Judaism, but didn’t make it, right?

Nehemia: Hmm.

Prof. Schiffman: However, not one woman didn’t go in, because what Rabbinite Jewish woman is going to admit in a public place that she’s ritually impure? So, they all went in. Okay. And the point I want to make is that he told us that the way in which they operate is that menstruation, because of the separation thing, is not private. So, you call your friend up and you say, “Would you like to go out for pizza tonight?” Obviously, he means with their wives, right? And the guy says, “No, my wife can’t come because she’s nida.” She’s menstrually impure. Now, in a Rabbinite thing, why can’t she go have pizza? But this particular approach was to separate the woman, although they treated the woman luxuriously during this period (he explained that to us also) that the woman would be served, everything in bed, and taken care of, as if she was literally a sick person. Whereas, of course, in Rabbinism, you ignore the whole thing.

Now, this comes up in New Testament studies, because you have in the New Testament an example of this woman who’s impure, and many of the commentators mistakenly believe that in the Pharisaic type of world of Jesus, that she would have been separated. But she’s not separated at all, because she’s part of the community.

Nehemia: So, that’s really interesting. Are you saying that the Sadducee approach, and I guess we’re saying Sadducee in a very broad sense, perhaps…

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, this broader Sadducean approach influenced, can we say, early Jewish Christians? Or I don’t know what the terminology here is…

Prof. Schiffman: No, I would say it like this; what it influenced was the exegetes of the New Testament who didn’t understand that, in Rabbinic Judaism, the impurity of the woman extends only to going to the Temple, having relations with her husband (which is forbidden in that period) and/or making a sandwich for someone who’s going to the Temple because it’ll be impure. And other than that, there’s no restriction. She could go to work, take your kids to school, go to a social occasion, go out for pizza. I don’t know, could you believe there was a time before pizza? I actually saw somebody suggesting that, you know, tuna’s in the Talmud, tuna fish, right? So, maybe that pizza was invented by Jews.

Nehemia: Well, I mean, they had some early form of pizza, presumably without tomato sauce. But I was just over in Rome, and I had a bunch of pizza that had no tomato sauce, so…

Prof. Schiffman: [Laughter]

Nehemia: …anyway. So, even today, pizza potentially could be… it’s not necessarily New York style.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying this broader Sadducean approach is embedded in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Prof. Schiffman: Right. Now, I want to point out something else, which is interesting. I mentioned before that the idea that a menstruant woman shouldn’t come to the synagogue sort of tried to make it into Rabbinic Judaism.

Nehemia: Aren’t there some Rabbinical sources that have that idea? Am I wrong about that?

Prof. Schiffman: Well, you have some later discussion in the time of the Ga’onim, the early Middle Ages. Now, the reason I mention this… this is just a small example of the fact that, we have to reckon with cross-fertilization of all Jewish groups, all the time, over time. How this happens, why it happens, whatever, right? We have to do that. And there are some funny examples that you can come up with, even in modern times.

But one example that I like is reciting the Kiddish prayer on Saturday morning in the synagogue when everyone is going to go downstairs to eat it or outside to eat it in another room. Right? Which started in reform synagogues, spread to conservative synagogues, and spread to Orthodox synagogues, as opposed to letting everybody say it himself and make his own blessing when he gets to the place where they’re serving what used to be cake and wine and now became more extensive. Here, you see it moving; Reform, Conservative, Orthodox.

And there are other examples like that, and maybe the best example of that is the sermon on Saturday morning. So, in modern times, we also see that Jewish groups exchange, even when they claim to disagree greatly with one another, they exchange ideas, no matter what you say.

Nehemia: Wait, so tell us about the sermon. I assume my audience doesn’t know what the significance of that is. Is that something that comes from outside Judaism? Or, what’s the significance?

Prof. Schiffman: The sermon is originally a Christian thing that became part of Reform Judaism when it came into being in the 1820s through 40s in Germany and then began to become a serious movement. And then, when the Conservative movement came into being, it picked up the sermon and then the sermon made it into the Orthodox community. There used to be two sermons a year in Orthodox synagogues, not during the services, held in the afternoon.

Nehemia: When were the sermons? When were the sermons?

Prof. Schiffman: So, that’s where it comes from.

Nehemia: No, when were the two sermons a year? I didn’t know this.

Prof. Schiffman: The two sermons of the year were on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and before Passover, the Sabbath before Passover.

Nehemia: Wow. So, you’re saying if you…

Prof. Schiffman: And the rabbi gave two sermons! And they were very…

Nehemia: So, if you went to a synagogue in the year 1500 in Marrakesh, or in Lithuania, you wouldn’t hear a sermon, you’re saying? On Shabbat? On a regular Shabbat?

Prof. Schiffman: Not on a regular Shabbat.

Nehemia: Wow. And you’re saying it’s Christian influence to have a sermon the synagogue.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow!

Prof. Schiffman: So, that’s how it became. It’s… you know. Look, the wedding procession is a Christian thing, the white dress is a Christian thing, right? So, the point is that the influences go back and forth.

Nehemia: There’s a thing recently that the…

Prof. Schiffman: So, I just wanted to make the point…

Nehemia: Go ahead, yeah.

Prof. Schiffman: …you can’t talk about the Pharisaic and Sadducean-like Jewish legal systems as if they don’t have any influence on one another. They do.

Nehemia: Were there things in the Sadducean system… Do you have an example of something in the Sadducean system that influenced Rabbinical Judaism, other than the whole thing of the menstruant woman? Is there anything like that?

Prof. Schiffman: I think it’s mostly in the stringencies of menstruation. That’s really where it was. I don’t think we can document much more than that. But I just gave the one example of women coming to the synagogue. There are some texts in the Middle Ages that tried to make menstrual impurity even stricter, and these things somehow didn’t make it. But there are other examples of this, like preparing food and stuff like that, revival of some of these purity laws from Temple purity. Because, remember one thing very important; in the origin of all this, Sadducean-type law wants to take Temple purity laws in daily life. But Pharisaism does too, they just don’t want as much. Sounds funny, right?

Nehemia: Isn’t there something about the…

Prof. Schiffman: Each one wants to take over Temple purity. So, Pharisaism wants to take over Temple purity a certain amount. And Sadduceism seems to want to take over much more of it and put it into the regular system of life. And so, you get greater stringencies on these issues.

Nehemia: So, in other words, there are certain things in the Torah apply to sacrificial contexts, and you’re saying both the Pharisees and Sadducees wanted to extend those outside the Temple.

Prof. Schiffman: A perfect example of this is purity, not kosherness, but purity of food. Now, purity of food, the Pharisaic Rabbinic law, in the end, when it completely stopped after the destruction of the Temple, got left with one thing; washing the hands before eating bread.

Nehemia: So, what’s the origin of that? That’s a fascinating topic for the audience. What is the origin of… Because that’s not in the Torah, right, in the written Torah.

Prof. Schiffman: That’s not in the Torah. Washing your hands before eating bread is mentioned in Mark 7. I joke sometimes if I’m at a dinner with some Christians and I’m about to go and wash my hands before eating the bread, say, “Excuse me, I have to go fulfill what it says in Mark 7.” They may or may not know what I’m talking about, right?

Nehemia: All right. So, what’s the origin of that, if it doesn’t come from the Torah?

Prof. Schiffman: What is… it’s like this. It’s that the priests had to wash their hands, purify their hands, before eating the truma, which was the holy offerings that they got to support them. So, they and their families had to be ritually pure in order to share in this food. Now, in order to do this, right, so, one of the things they had to do was wash their hands. So, Jews, to this day, wash their hands before eating bread. Now, we’re not talking about cleanliness, right? Because people wash their hands for cleanliness, too. But they wash their hands for ritual purposes, even if they just washed them, you know, 20 minutes of soap and water, like they tell you to make sure you don’t get a disease. I’d like to see anybody washing his hands for 20 minutes. I mean, by the time you get finished…

Nehemia: You’ll be flaking skin by the time you’re finished.

Prof. Schiffman: Yes, it would be kind of tiring, also, right? But anyhow, jokes aside, right, irrespective of personal cleanliness (which is, by the way, required in Jewish law) you wash your hands to fulfill this ritual because the priests used to do this in the Temple when they ate the truma. So, you’re doing a Temple ritual, but you’re doing a Temple ritual when you carry a lulav and etrog in a synagogue, right, on Sukkot, because the main ritual was in the Temple, and that’s where it was required by the Torah.

So, there are quite a number of things in regular Rabbinic Judaism that emerges out of the Pharisee tradition that imitate Temple worship. Okay. But the Sadducees seem to be stricter about this. And also, of course, the stricter way of understanding the words of the Torah more literally, which comes out in quite a number of examples. So, a lot of people think, you know, Sadduceism just died when the Temple was destroyed. But it didn’t die when you see its legal tradition affecting these various groups.

By the way, people who want to get a really interesting experience should see the movie about the Samaritans that accompanied the exhibit in the Museum of the Bible. The exhibit was arranged by Prof. Stephen Fine of Hebrew University, but the movie was fascinating, about Samaritans marrying women from the Ukraine because there are too few women. But the most interesting thing to me there was, you know, they do the paschal sacrifice. They actually slaughter the lambs. And there was a woman talking about how the tremendous joy that she experiences when she hears the noise of the animals being slaughtered. And it made me realize that we are so far away from the idea of sacrificial worship that, even if we study it in the most open way, we don’t totally understand how it works. And here’s a woman speaking Hebrew, right, wearing modern clothes, a nice up-to-date type person, explaining the tremendous joy at hearing the animals as they’re being slaughtered. Very interesting.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting, because there’s an experiential side of religion, I’ll call it.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, but we’re not used to it.

Nehemia: Well, not just that we’re not used to. So, you’re obviously, I’m going to make some assumptions here, a religious person. But I have some colleagues who are scholars who are just avowed atheists…

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah.

Nehemia: …and I think there’s a side of religion that they don’t understand. And then they look at… especially they look at Islam, and they just have no idea what’s going on. They’re like, “Oh, well, they’re going to surrender if Gaza is blown up.” And I’m like, “You don’t understand how, certainly, a religious fanatic thinks. You clearly do not understand.”

Prof. Schiffman: I think, though… this is a little bit different, because no matter how much a Jewish person could be… I’ll use this word with a small f, fanatically, involved in fulfilling Jewish practices, I think that they still wouldn’t understand the Islamism in its conceptual framework. So, I think they understand Muslim religious practice, yes.

But the other thing about what you’re saying, which is important, is to realize, I think when it comes to something like the sacrificial system, any modern person would not have a very good sense of how to understand it, simply because we don’t experience it no matter what.

Nehemia: Well, in Islam, they have, I want to say it’s Eid al-Fitr, but someone will correct me in the comments, and they slaughter a lamb or a goat…

Prof. Schiffman: Yes.

Nehemia: …if I’m not mistaken, and the whole family consumes it. And it’s obviously modeled on the Passover sacrifice.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, they probably understand it, maybe better than we do.

Prof. Schiffman: That may be the case.

Nehemia: Because I’ve never participated in an animal sacrifice. I once went to see the Samaritans do it, but I’m a tourist there, it’s not the same thing.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah. Well, I watched it on TV once. It was in Israel. It was a different night from the Jewish Passover. But you see in this movie, you get to see much of it, and it’s quite interesting. And they interview the woman afterwards. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the movie

Nehemia: So, on the one hand you say the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect Sadducean Halakha…

Prof. Schiffman: Legal tradition, right.

Nehemia: Legal tradition. But on the other hand, they’re opposed to the Temple, the people who wrote… the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of them, or many of them are…

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah…

Nehemia: …avowedly opposed to the Temple, right? There’s the famous… the wicked priest…

Prof. Schiffman: Yes.

Nehemia: …attacked the teacher of righteousness in the day of his Yom Kippur…

Prof. Schiffman: Yes. Yes.

Nehemia: Pesher Habakuk. So, how is it that you have this quasi-Sadducean belief, or ritual, that’s opposed to the Temple, which is dominated by the Sadducees? What am I missing?

Prof. Schiffman: Okay, so, I personally think… now we’re not talking about something that everyone agrees to. I got to admit that. I personally think that what happened is, in 152 BCE, when Jonathan the Hasmonean gets the approval, basically, to rule over Judea from the Seleucids, this is the real end of the Hanukkah story, not the lighting of the menorah. Because after those events, right, and the conquest by Judah the Maccabee, we see that the Temple was taken back by Hellenistic forces. So, Jonathan, only in 152, gets the right to rule, and that’s the beginning of the Hasmonean Empire. And my assumption is that, because the Sadducees were seen as responsible for everything that went on leading up to the Hellenistic reform and everything that went on there, that he basically threw them out and priests who agreed with the Pharisees were in control in that point.

Nehemia: From 152 BCE…

Prof. Schiffman: And therefore, the Qumran Sectarians leave the Temple. At least their priestly leadership, leaves the Temple and sets up this sectarian group in opposition to the Temple that they no longer approve of, because it’s following halachic rulings that they think are incorrect.

Nehemia: I’m having trouble following here. So, 152 BCE, Jonathan the Hasmonean, who, I think we have coins of his in Paleo-Hebrew… so, he adopts Pharisaical halacha? Is that what you’re saying?

Prof. Schiffman: It’s not a question of what he adopts. He puts priests in control of the Temple who are going to follow what we later would call the Pharisaic-Rabbinic or Pharisaic way, rather than the Sadducees, whom he blames for the extreme Hellenism that went on in the Temple. Remember, they even had an idol in there!

Nehemia: But if Sadducees are so strict in their observance of the Torah law, how were they having idols in the Temple?

Prof. Schiffman: Well, because they were corrupt. The people who did it, obviously, were corrupt extreme Hellenizers. Now, here we’ve got to get into something else very important. It seems that there are two different kinds of Sadducees. There are pious Sadducees who do what you’re supposed to do according to Sadducean way of understanding the Torah, and these are your middle-level priests. And then there are these big-shot, highly Hellenistic people who are part of the Sadducean group. And the one group is constantly, in Josephus’ stories, leading people down the wrong path. And the other group is the real pious people, who when, whoever takes over in the aftermath of the Hasmonean Empire coming into existence with Jonathan in 152, our group opposes them. And that you can see from the so-called MMT Text in which they write a letter to the mainstream guys running it and say, “If you’ll do X, Y, and Z, we’ll come back. But you know we’re right, and we are following the true way.”

Nehemia: Can you talk a little bit about 4QMMT? That’s a really important… miktzat ma’asei torah.

Prof. Schiffman: Yes.

Nehemia: Can you talk about… That’s a really important text.

Prof. Schiffman: Yes, in which presumably the Sectarians are writing to the leadership in Jerusalem and to these priests that are now running it, and saying, “You’re doing it all wrong!” And this becomes a matter of laws, sacrificial law, impurity law, that it’s all being done not according to the way the Sectarians think. Why? Because they’re following a Pharisaic approach.

Nehemia: So, 4QMMT clearly aligns with Sadducean Halakhah as it’s brought down in the Talmud in particular, right?

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, that’s right?

Nehemia: Okay. And so, this is why I think maybe you’re saying there’s two Sadducean varieties…

Prof. Schiffman: Two kinds of…

Nehemia: There’s one that very much cares about the Torah, and there’s another one that’s like, “Eh, an idol that’ll make our masters happy and…”

Prof. Schiffman: I want to give you an example of the same phenomenon. You know that the term Reform Jew is used for two kind of people; one kind of person that goes paying dues to a Reform synagogue, going there on Sabbath and holidays and sending his kid to a Hebrew school. How many times do you hear somebody call a Reform Jew who actually has nothing to do with the Jewish community? Right? So, the term is being used in two very different ways, right?

So, now, what’s going on here, that’s how the term Sadducees, because it’s a little different, because this upper crust of highly Hellenized people are part of the Sadducean high priestly inner social, economic, et cetera, group, which is the ruling class. And by the way, this is the ruling class that was supposed to control the country and keep it from rebellion against Rome. And of course, from the Roman point of view, this ruling class failed.

Nehemia: So, I’m going to bring a different Reform analogy. So, I once encountered… I was visiting in Ohio, and I was at a Conservative synagogue, and they were telling me about the Reform synagogue down the road, where there was a young boy who wanted to do his bar mitzvah, and they wouldn’t allow him to wear a talith or a kippah at his bar mitzvah reading of the Torah!

Prof. Schiffman: Yes.

Nehemia: And now, compare that to the Reform synagogue in Baqa in Jerusalem, near where I live when I lived in Israel; that’s a completely different type of Reform, right? Meaning, they’re deeply immersed in Jewish ritual, traditional Jewish ritual, but they both go by the label “Reform.” And then… comment on this. So, imagine if I’m somebody from, I don’t know, China, and I’m trying to explain what Protestants in America are, and I say, “Oh, you know, David Koresh was a Protestant.” Which is true.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah.

Nehemia: But he was nothing like the Protestants at the Methodist Church, or something.

Prof. Schiffman: So take this example, let’s just take the position on matters pertaining to Israel, most of the Evangelicals and most of the mainline Protestants, and they’re all Christians. So, that is a better example than talking about someone crazy. Talking about regular, normal Americans who take very, very different positions on something which is important in current affairs and from a religious point of view. So, you know, why not?

Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, you could say, “What do Protestants believe about Israel?” You ask Tucker Carlson, and you ask Ted Cruz, and you get completely different answers.

Prof. Schiffman: Well, you do, but Ted Cruz is the majority.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, no, Ted Cruz represents more evangelical Christianity, and…

Prof. Schiffman: No, the majority of Evangelical Christians don’t agree with Tucker Carlson.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, I don’t know that he’s Evangelical.

Prof. Schiffman: I think that’s read very clear.

Nehemia: Okay. So, all right. So, there’s different varieties…

Prof. Schiffman: He’s making a career. You know how much money he’s making by this stuff? That’s the problem; in America, if you say outlandish things, you can make a lot of money.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, so, let’s go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Prof. Schiffman: We should try it right now. We can make so much money.

Nehemia: [Laughter] Let’s talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, they’re reflecting Sadducean Halakhah, or religious practice and ritual, but they’re opposed to the Temple, so…

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, they actually say you’re not allowed to go there. You’re impure.

Nehemia: So, I’ve got a lot of Christians who watch this, and they’ll say, “Wait a minute. The Temple was controlled by the Sadducees because the high priest Ananias was a Sadducee,” in the Book of Acts or something.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, but see, that’s what I’m arguing…

Nehemia: So, how do we get from 152 BCE, where the Temple’s controlled by Pharisees, or Pharisee halakha, proto-Pharisee, whatever you want to call it? Now fast forward to the New Testament. What happens 180 years later?

Prof. Schiffman: Well, because here’s what’s going on. If you follow the Maccabean period, you’ll see the gradual reemergence into the aristocracy and the leadership of Sadducees. In fact, when you get to John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, they are cultivating them to get into their leadership group in order to have more power within the society and to have a more consolidated rule.

Once the Romans come in, since 63 BCE with the end of the Hasmonean Empire, they start to appoint the priests. And by this time, the Hasmoneans have deteriorated, for all intents and purposes, into Hellenized pseudo-Sadducees anyhow. And so, they appoint priests who basically are Sadducees, and the priests are controlling the Temple from some time in the end of the Hasmonean period, basically running up through the Roman period, no question.

Nehemia: So, for example, Alexander Jannaeus persecuted the Pharisees, didn’t he? Especially Josephus.

Prof. Schiffman: Right, right, right.

Nehemia: With the etrog pelting, and all that.

Prof. Schiffman: Right. By that time, you see it.

Nehemia: Yeah. Okay. So, in other words, the Pharisees are controlling the Temple in 152 BC, in your model, which, like you said, maybe not everybody agrees with…

Prof. Schiffman: Or certainly priests. When I say the Pharisees, I’m talking about the priests who agree with the Pharisee position.

Nehemia: Okay. Pharisee Halakhah.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, approach. And then, can you talk to the audience a little bit about the Tractate of Horayot, where they’re instructing the high priest on how to perform the ritual because there’s an assumption that he’s a Sadducee. So, how does that tie into this?

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah, no, actually the main part of that comes in the Tractate Yoma, that starts out right in the beginning by explaining how the high priest is prepared. Now the question is whether this is exactly what happens or not. This tractate assumes that the position of, let’s call them the Pharisaic proto-rabbis, is going to be practiced in the Temple.

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: And what they do is, they go to the high priest before the Day of Atonement, and they make him promise that he’s going to follow their ruling. Now, what are we talking about here?

Nehemia: Meaning, he actually swears…

Prof. Schiffman: We’re talking about, when do you light the incense before going into the Holy of Holies? The high priest goes into the Holy of Holies (everybody agrees with this) once a year.

Nehemia: Okay.

Prof. Schiffman: Now, when he goes into the Holy of Holies, he’s going to go in and perform an incense ritual in there. There are two possibilities. The Sadducee position was, light it outside. When you come in, you don’t want to see the divine. So, you’ve got to have it burning already. The Pharisees said, “What? Are you crazy? There’s no divine! It’s an empty room! That’s the whole point of our religion, that there is nothing to see! Yeah, there’s an Ark in there, and there’s cherubim. There’s no God. He’s not in there anymore. I mean, He is, but He’s everywhere, right? His presence is there but nothing to see. So, therefore, you got it wrong! You don’t light it before you go in. You do exactly like the Torah says; you go in, and then you transfer the incense onto the coals in this shovel he carries, and at that point the incense comes up.”

Now, this may sound unimportant to some outsider somehow, but it has to do with how you interpret the Torah. So, what the Pharisees would do every year is, they’d go to the high priest, according to this account, and make him swear that he wouldn’t do according to the Sadducean way, that he would not put the incense onto the coals until he got inside the Holy of Holies. And then it says, right, that he would go away and cry, and they would go away and cry.

Nehemia: Wow.

Prof. Schiffman: Why would they all cry? They cried because they had to make him swear, and he cried because they suspected him of being a Sadducee.

Nehemia: So, you have this dichotomy. There’s a Sadducean presumed high priest, but then the people who call the shots and tell him what to do are Pharisees.

Prof. Schiffman: That’s the assumption of this account. Now, that may have been at some times, right? And it also may have been… see, we can’t know this. In the later Second Temple period, there might have been a consensus. They may have said, “Okay, you know what? We’ll do it your way.”

Nehemia: I mean, look, that very much fits with what we read in the Book of Acts, that you have this council, we’ll call it Sanhedrin…

Prof. Schiffman: Right.

Nehemia: …that has people who are Sadducees, and some are Pharisees. And they’re debating about Paul, and he realizes he can turn one group against the other. Meaning, it kind of rings true.

Prof. Schiffman: Yeah. There’s one thing we’ve got to remember about the Book of Acts and these other things. We’ve got to remember that the Jews are not ruling the country. The country is ruled by Rome. The capital is Caesarea, not Jerusalem, and the Roman governor and his officials run the country. Because this is what people don’t understand, both about the New Testament and much of the Mishnah. They think that this is the government. It’s not the government!

Nehemia: Okay. So…

Prof. Schiffman: It’s some inner self-government within a big empire.

—

Nehemia: So, there’s this big thing going on now in social media about the Talmud, and that the Talmud is all these horrible things about the Virgin Mary and Jesus, and about goyim means animals, and Jews are required to kill them. Can you talk about this?

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VERSES MENTIONED
Pliny the Elder, Natural History V.xv
Matthew 9; Mark 5; Luke 8
Matthew 15; Mark 7; Luke 11
Acts 23-24
Mishnah Horayot
Mishnah Yoma 1
Leviticus 16:11-13

BOOKS MENTIONED
Sefer HaChinukh | Sefaria Library

RELATED EPISODES
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Support Team Study – Pesher in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Hebrew Voices #44 – The Rebirth of Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Hebrew Voices #80 – Fake Dead Sea Scrolls Explained
Support Team Study – The Most Important Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The post Hebrew Voices #247 – Dead Sea Scrolls & the War of Light vs. Darkness appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this Support Team Study - Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 2, where Dr. Nehemia Gordon sits down with Mordechai Weintraub who explains his discovery of previously unknown fragments of the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll - one of the most ancient Torah scrolls after the Dead Sea Scrolls. What began as just two known pieces turned into something much bigger… revealing that this was not just a fragment of Exodus, but likely an entire Torah scroll.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
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 | TuneIn
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The post SNEAK PEEK! Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #246 - Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 1, Dr. Nehemia Gordon sits down with manuscript expert Mordechai Weintraub to uncover the secrets of the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, a 1,300-year-old Torah from ancient Babylonia. Examined under infrared light at Cambridge, Mordechai's discovery of 13 hidden fragments is rewriting what we know about the Bible's transmission. Does the Torah we read today match what Jews read 1,300 years ago?

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: He wasn’t an anti-Semite. This is a Christian who says, you know, “Jesus was a Jew, so I want to practice some form of Judaism that Jesus would have been familiar with.” And he had this post on the internet where he’s talking about the Talmud, and he’s saying, “But the Talmud is so horrible it should be burned.” And I contacted him. I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying. People burn the Talmud, and then they often burn the Jews along with the Talmud, and/or force them to convert.”

—

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Mordechai Weintraub. He’s a doctoral candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Talmud and Biblical Studies, also from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Master’s in Talmud, Talmud Ha’halakha, technically the department is called. He also, before entering into the academic sphere, studied for many years in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas where he acquired a vast knowledge of traditional Jewish literature. Shalom, Mordechai, and welcome to the program.

Mordechai: Hi, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Oh, and I forgot to mention; you’re also a researcher at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research, of which I’m the executive director. So that’s also quite important.

Mordechai: I am proud to be a member of this institute.

Nehemia: Well, thank you. Thank you for coming on the program. One of your really great discoveries that I want to talk about, I want to get to, but we want to talk about other things first, is, there is a Torah scroll known as the Ashkar Scroll or the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll. I saw it when it was on display at the Israel Museum many years ago in the Shrine of the Book, and there were two known fragments. And you discovered 13 more fragments, and maybe you have more now that… and if it’s not published, you don’t have to say it, but you published 13 more fragments, which is significant because… Why don’t you tell us; what’s important about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll? Right? If you go to any synagogue, there’s a Torah scroll. What’s special about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll from a historical perspective?

Mordechai: Yeah, of course. The historical perspective is the issue, because it’s one of the most ancient Torah scrolls known after the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Judean Desert Scrolls is more accurate.) This is the first one. It’s ancient, and we all are interested more in ancient items than modern. And this is not just one ancient items, scrolls, but it’s in a period that we don’t have mostly any Hebrew scrolls from this era.

Nehemia: Let’s back up. When you say it’s a scroll; it’s a scroll of what? Because we have Dead Sea Scrolls that are like the War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. What is the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll? What does it contain?

Mordechai: So, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, now we know that it’s a Torah Scroll. So, all the Pentateuch in one scroll. So, in the beginning, the first discovery of the two parts that you mentioned was just from Exodus, and the assumption was that this can be a scroll just of Exodus.

Nehemia: In other words, you’re saying when the first two pieces were known, it could have been it was just a stand-alone scroll of Exodus and not of the whole Torah. Oh! So, I didn’t realize that. Okay, so, your discovery… keep going, this is important.

Mordechai: So, my discovery is of some fragments from other books.

Nehemia: So, that proved it was the whole Torah, not just Exodus.

Mordechai: Yes. So, the fragments I recognized I discovered are just from four books of the Torah, of the Pentateuch, and so Leviticus… I didn’t find any fragment from Leviticus.

Nehemia: You didn’t? Okay. Well, but if there’s…

Mordechai: But probably it was a complete Torah.

Nehemia: So, if you had said you found fragments of Genesis through Numbers, somebody could say, “Well, Deuteronomy wasn’t included.” But it’s pretty unlikely that if it was Genesis through Deuteronomy, that Leviticus was excluded.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, that’s really interesting. So, this actually brings up a different question that maybe you’re actually the expert to talk about, I think. Is it unusual to have a scroll in the ancient world as big as the Torah? Or is that normal? Do we even know?

Mordechai: So, we don’t have a lot of evidence. The first literature mention of a scroll with all the Pentateuch is in the Talmud, in the Babylonian Talmud and Jerusalem Talmud, but not in the Tanaic period. So, in the Tanaic literature, there is probably just the existence of scrolls of one book.

Nehemia: Wait, so they mentioned that there were scrolls of one… So, actually, can you explain? You are the expert again to explain; what is the Tanaitic period versus the Amoraic period? Because some of my audience have never heard of a Tana or an Amora.

Mordechai: Yeah, okay. So, the Tanaic period and the Amoraic period are periods that are internal in Jewish history. So, it’s not connected to the history of other people.

Nehemia: No, but that’s normal. In other words, if you’re talking about Christianity, you can talk about the period of the Apostles and the period of the Church Fathers…

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah…

Nehemia: …and someone who isn’t familiar will say, “Church Fathers? They’re not the father of my church.” No, that’s a period of history guys.

Mordechai: Yeah…

Nehemia: It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s… historians use that. Yeah.

Mordechai: So, the Tanaic period is probably from after the year 70, so after the…

Nehemia: Destruction of the Temple.

Mordechai: After the destruction of the Second Temple, and until the…

Nehemia: And guys, Mordechai’s native language is Hebrew. He’s also fluent in Yiddish, I understand. So, I really appreciate you stepping out of your comfort zone and explaining these things in English. And we could have the conversation in Hebrew, but most of the audience wouldn’t understand it. So, all right.

Mordechai: Yeah, so, my English is…

Nehemia: It’s actually wonderful. I hear this all the time from non-native English speakers. You speak English much better than many people who live in Dallas, where I live, so… Oh, they don’t even speak English, many people, so… All right, so, it’s from the around the year 70, the destruction of the Temple, until…

Mordechai: Until the beginning of the 3rd century.

Nehemia: Okay, so, like around the year 200, 210 or something?

Mordechai: 220.

Nehemia: 220 even, okay.

Mordechai: 220, yeah. 220 is the…

Nehemia: The cutoff.

Mordechai: The date. Yeah.

Nehemia: But it wasn’t that somebody woke up today and said, “The Tanaitic period has ended, and now we’re in the period of the Amoraim,” right? In other words, it’s similar, like, to the Byzantine Empire. No one in the Byzantine Empire knew they were in the Byzantine Empire, they thought they were in the Roman Empire. Right.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: But at a certain point, they realized, “Okay, we’re not really…” well that might be different. Okay. Because there was a period where people looked back and said, “You’re not a Tana, you’re an Amora. So, you can’t disagree with him unless you have a Tana source.” Isn’t there something like that?

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. There are some sources like that. And the first generation of the Amoraim… so, after 220, there are some sages, some rabbis, that are considered like Tanaim.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: So, there was a little blow…

Nehemia: So, we’ve got from around 70 to 220 is the period, guys. This is a really important part of history. If you want to understand Jewish history, you’ll see these terms thrown about, and if you don’t know what they are it can be very confusing. So, that’s the period of the Tana, the Tanaim, or Tanaitic…

Mordechai: Yeah, and they create a very massive literature, a corpus…

Nehemia: And the most important piece of literature of the Tanaim is?

Mordechai: Is the Mishnah.

Nehemia: The Mishnah, right. But it’s not only the Mishnah, it’s other things as well. But that’s the most famous, the most important. And then the Amoraim start in around the year 220 and go until when?

Mordechai: Oh, this is a very, very tricky question. So, it differs in Eretz Yisrael…

Nehemia: The Land of Israel, yeah.

Mordechai: …the Land of Israel and Babylonia. So, in Babylonia, the consensus is around the 6th century, so around 500 or maybe a little bit later.

Nehemia: So, the story that I was told in elementary school, that the last Amoraim were Ravina and Ravashi in the year 500. Is there any validity to that from an academic, historical perspective?

Mordechai: Yeah, of course. So, the death of Ravina, one of the…

Nehemia: Ah, because there were two. I wasn’t told that!

Mordechai: He is called the editor of the Babylonian Talmud, is 500. But probably the edition was some years later. So, maybe 550 or… we don’t know exactly.

Nehemia: But give or take 500, 550, something like that.

Mordechai: Okay, yeah. In the Land of Israel Talmud, so Talmud Yerushalmi.

Nehemia: Oh, wait a minute. So, in English, that’s usually called, and this is weird to me, it’s called the Jerusalem Talmud, even though it wasn’t written in Jerusalem. In Hebrew, it’s called the Jerusalem Talmud, because I guess Jerusalem there means the Land of Israel. I guess, I don’t know. And then, in English, sometimes they’ll call it the Palestinian Talmud. I don’t quite understand why. But I think that goes back to an earlier period of history, meaning, modern history. So, the Jerusalem Talmud…

Mordechai: I think the Palestinian Talmud is not because of the modern history. The Palestinian Talmud, because it was there, it was called Syria-Palestina, so…

Nehemia: Okay. Oh, so, the Jerusalem Talmud, from a Jewish perspective, was called Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud. But from the non-Jewish perspective, that province was, after the year 135, I guess, after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, was renamed Syria-Palestina. Okay, makes sense.

Mordechai: Of course, the Palestinian Talmud is, of course, a modern term, but I… because of that…

Nehemia: No, right, right. What do they call it in Jewish literature from, I don’t know, 500 years ago? They didn’t call it the Palestinian or the Jerusalem Talmud, did they?

Mordechai: They used both terms.

Nehemia: No, but they don’t say Palestinian, right?

Mordechai: No, not Palestinian. Of course not.

Nehemia: Okay, what do they say when they’re writing in Hebrew and Aramaic when they talk about the Jerusalem Talmud?

Mordechai: So, it’s Talmud Eretz Israel, so the Land of Israel Talmud…

Nehemia: Oh, Land of Israel. Oh, okay.

Mordechai: And Talmud Yerushalmi, also.

Nehemia: Okay. Don’t they also say something like Bnei Ma’arava or something?

Mordechai: Yeah, this is a mostly Aramaic term, Talmuda d’Bnei Ma’arava.

Nehemia: Which is very interesting. What does it mean, Bnei Ma’arava?

Mordechai: The west. Of the west, because it’s the opposite of…

Nehemia: It’s opposite of the east, of Babylonia.

Mordechai: Opposite of the east.

Nehemia: So, guys, this is a really interesting thing. We today, in America, at least… and it comes from England. The English called it the Near East, the Land of Israel, and Americans call it the Middle East. And middle, by the way, here means near, like Midwest in English. I come from the Midwest, is the near west. Like a midwife is the person who stands next to the wife. So, the Middle East. But in Hebrew sources, Israel is… or at least in some Hebrew sources, in Hebrew it’s called the West, and Babylonia the East. It’s very interesting. That’s an interesting perspective. Okay, so, we have the Tanaim and the Amoraim, they’re writing the Babylonian Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud; when does it end, and when does the period of the Amoraim end in Israel?

Mordechai: So, the Palestinian Talmud is probably the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th century. So, it’s about one hundred years, one century before the Babylonian Talmud.

Nehemia: So, what happened that…

Mordechai: There were historical events. So, there was some persecutions about the Jewish community, and their literature was also…

Nehemia: Suppressed? Or…

Mordechai: Suppressed, or decreased…

Nehemia: Okay. So, you have the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. And they have a lot of overlaps, don’t they?

Mordechai: Yeah. So, basically, they have a lot of common traditions.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: So, the Talmud… that’s saying, what’s the difference between the Tanaitic period and the Amoraite period? So, in the Tanaitic period, the main work is the Mishnah. But in the Talmudic, the Amoraite period, the Talmudim, the Talmud Yerushalmi and the Talmud Bavli, so, the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud, and they are interpreting the Mishnah. Mostly. So, there is a lot of other literature in there. So, the work is very, very… a lot of associations, so it’s not a commentary like modern commentary with a structure.

Nehemia: So, it’s what we call the principle of association. I’ll just explain to the audience. So, their jumping-off point is, “Well, the Tanaim said in the Mishnah these different things,” and they start discussing it, and then they’ll say, “Well, you know they mentioned trees, and we have this other tradition about trees.” And they’ll say, “You know, Rabbi Akiva also said this third thing, or Rabbi Yossi said this other thing about trees, or he said this other thing not related to trees,” and now they start talking about the traditions of Rabbi Yossi. It’s not an actual example, but it’s a lot of the principle of association. It’s interesting that we have the principle of association in the Tanakh. People don’t realize that.

One of my favorite examples, because I love dogs, is, it talks about not bringing the price of a dog to the Temple, and then right next to that, I don’t remember if it’s before or after in Deuteronomy, is the commandment about interest. And the word for interest is neshekh, which could actually be translated as something like “biting interest”, perhaps, but then nashakh is a dog biting, although not in biblical Hebrew. But apparently it existed at the time, because there’s still that connection. So, we have these principles of association in the Tanakh as well. But it goes on steroids in the Talmud!

Mordechai: I think all the ancient world literature was like this.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Mordechai: Yeah. The literature we know now is an outcome of the Greek work; Aristotle.

Nehemia: So, that’s interesting. So, in other words, we think today of things being organized systematically, although even the term systematically is a loaded term, right? In other words, we want it to be done chronologically. We want it to be done by subject, which are actually two different ways of doing it. But if I think about, like, the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, right? So, he has a section on, I don’t know, finance, right? He has a legal section about damages, right? And everything in there is about damages.

And you open up the Talmudic tractate on damages… or one of them, there’s multiple ones, and you see they’re talking about, like, demons and stuff. And you’re like, “What does this have to do with damages?” Well, because it’s a principle of association. And we got sidetracked, but it’s a really important piece of information for people to have, the difference between Tanaim and Amoraim. You said something that surprised me a bit. You said the Tanaim begin with the destruction of the Temple. So, we have names of people before the destruction of the Temple in the Mishnah, in the early Rabbinical literature. What are they called if they’re not called Tanaim? Did Shammai and Hillel, who lived around 30 BCE, are they not Tanaim, in your…

Mordechai: So, we can call them Tanaim, but it’s common to differentiate between the rabbis, the sages, before the destruction of the Temple, and they call them the Zugot.

Nehemia: Okay. The pairs.

Mordechai: The pairs. So, until Shammai and Hillel… the pairs, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, so, the Zugot is an earlier period of history, you’re saying, than the Tanaim proper.

Mordechai: Tanaim, yes.

Nehemia: Okay, and what is the Zugot? What is the significance of that?

Mordechai: The Zugot are pairs of the sages that are… One of them was the head of the court, Av Beit Din, and one was the president, president of the Jews, of the minority. So, there is a list of all the pairs. I don’t remember how long the list is…

Nehemia: But this is in Pirkei Avot; Ethics of Our Fathers, it’s usually translated.

Mordechai: Yeah, they are mentioned in Pirkei Avot.

Nehemia: So, one was the head of what? The Sanhedrin, you’re saying…

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Or you say he was the head of the court, the Sanhedrin. And the other one was…

Mordechai: Sanhedrin was the Jewish court.

Nehemia: Right, okay. A nice Greek word, sunedrion.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: And so, the other one was… what was the other role, the other one? He was the president of…

Mordechai: A president. So, one was Av Beit Din…

Nehemia: Ah, so, you mean the title in Hebrew, nasi.

Mordechai: Nasi…

Nehemia: Okay, so guys, that’s like an official title… or, I don’t know if it was then, but it later was understood as an official title. It’s not clear to me exactly what nasi is. Maybe we could save that for a different discussion. Meaning, like, what was his actual job as nasi? That’s an interesting question. But there’s an implication he’s a descendant of King David, isn’t there? If he’s nasi, or not necessarily…

Mordechai: I don’t remember.

Nehemia: Okay. So, like, the most famous nasi that people would have heard of is Hillel II, who, according to somewhat later traditions, established the Rabbinical calendar. Or as it was later… or some form of the calendar, at least. He’s in the year 359. So, you’re saying nasi is not the head of the Sanhedrin, but it’s some other…

Mordechai: The head of the community. So, the head of the…

Nehemia: Of the community, okay.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s interesting because… I don’t know if you want to get into that, but it’s interesting. So, in the time of Hillel and Shammai, was Hillel the head of the Sanhedrin, or the nasi, do you know?

Mordechai: Hillel was the nasi. Hillel was the nasi, and Shammai was the…

Nehemia: He was the nasi. And so, Shammai was the head of the Sanhedrin, okay. That’s interesting. But at the time of Hillel, you had Herod, who was the head of the community. No? Right? I mean, he was the tetrarch of… he was not a tetrarch? Ethnarch; he was the ethnarch.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s anachronistic, so, it’s not…

Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, the term nasi later had a function that it’s not clear what it was or how it functioned in Second Temple times. Okay. So, let me ask you this, and I don’t know if you want to comment on this; it’s totally off topic of what I thought we would talk about. But I had this conversation recently in a different podcast, and I’ve had this conversation outside the podcast. There’s an approach within the academic world, and a lot of times it comes from the perspective of, you know, historians want to understand the cultural context of Jesus, who is, let’s call it roughly around the year 30 CE, or AD Christians say. And so, one approach is to say, “Well, what’s our earliest literature? We’ve got the Dead Sea Scrolls. Okay, but that’s of a particular group. We have Josephus, we have Philo, but that’s outside of Israel. So, that’s of limited value. But then the major source we have, to understand the context of Jesus, and the Gospels perhaps, from an academic perspective, more importantly, is the Mishnah and the Talmud and all the literature of the Tanaim and Amoraim.” That’s one approach.

A second approach says, “No. There was this thing called Judaism, and out of Judaism of the Second Temple period, of the time of Jesus, grew two completely different unrelated movements: Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism. And Rabbinical Judaism can teach you no more about the time of Jesus… well, probably less than about the time of Jesus than if you study the Christianity of Constantine, for example. That’s an approach I encounter a lot, that second approach.

What are your thoughts on that? And here’s how I put it for a different podcast; if Shammai or Hillel went into a beit midrash in Babylonia, and Rava and Abaye were there, and excuse me for my Ashkenazi pronunciation, would Shammai and Hillel be more familiar with the 3rd century beit midrash of the Amoraim, or the church of Origenes, of Origin? And I don’t know if we know the answer, but what are your thoughts on that?

Mordechai: Well, I never thought a thing about that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: So…

Nehemia: So, in other words, is there a continuity… and this is something I think you study; is there a continuity into the Amoraic period of something that existed earlier in this Tanaitic period? Of course, I mean, there, almost obviously. Right? But that predates 70… That’s the question. To what extent is there a continuity? And to what extent is it; “The Temple’s destroyed, let’s make a completely different religion now.” Right?

Mordechai: Yeah, so I think the continuity is large.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: All their theology is to follow the Father, to follow the ancient generations. So, Josephus called it, I remember that just the term in Hebrew: minhagei avot.

Nehemia: What is it?

Mordechai: Minhagei avot.

Nehemia: “The traditions of the fathers.”

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: “The traditions of the fathers” is minhagei avot.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, in other words, there’s an ideology within Rabbinical Judaism in the Amoraic period…

Mordechai: The Amoraic period, the Tanaitic period, and also the…

Nehemia: …which goes back to the Tanaitic period, which Josephus mentions that you should follow the traditions of the fathers. Okay.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Interesting.

Mordechai: So, of course, the Amoraic period is not exactly identical to the Tanaitic period and, of course, not to the Temple period, but they think about themselves that it’s a continuation of the Tanaitic and the…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s really important, because I’ll hear this all the time, from some scholars, that the rabbis in the Mishnah and the Talmud didn’t think of themselves as Pharisees, and thought the Pharisees had nothing to do with them, the prushim. Is that…

Mordechai: No, I don’t think so. The rabbis in the Mishnah… In the Talmud it’s too far, but in the Tanaitic literature, it’s clear that they thought about themselves as Pharisees. So, it’s a continuation…

Nehemia: So, it’s a continuation of the Second Temple Pharisees, right?

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow, okay. I mean, I knew that, but I’ve been told by… well, it doesn’t matter. There’s an idea out there that the Pharisees were something that ended when the Temple was destroyed on the 9th of Av in the year 70 CE. And then after that, they said, “Oh, no, Pharisees, we have nothing to do with those guys.”

Mordechai: I don’t know if there are some opinions like you mentioned, but it can be a debate about if they are correct, they are the continuation of the Pharisees. But what they thought about themselves is clear, I think.

Nehemia: Okay. And look, you have figures… and here you can tell me historically, as someone who studied this in the universe.

Mordechai: Just let me finish.

Nehemia: Please. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Mordechai: Origenes on the other hand, didn’t think of himself as a continuation of the Pharisees…

Nehemia: Okay, so, Origen, guys, is an early 3rd century Christian church father. And again, church father is a technical term. And Origen is spelled O-R-I-G-E-N. Right? So, in Hebrew, we say Ori-ggeness or Ori-ggeness, which is the Greek form. And look, he’s a very important figure for what I do because he studied the Septuagint. And we won’t go into that. But the point is, you’re saying that if you asked Origenes, Origen, “Is your belief a continuation of the Judaism of the time of Jesus?” He would have said, “No, of course not. That’s the whole point, that we’re not.”

To what extent was it? And maybe that’s beyond your scope of expertise, but in other words, you could say that Origen said that, but maybe it wasn’t true, or to some degree it wasn’t true. In other words, there could be things that are continuations from Second Temple Judaism that Origen didn’t realize where he got them, and he’s like, “No, no, no, this is an original thing that was established by the apostles.” And actually, it’s just something they lifted out of Second Temple Judaism. I think there are things like that. But anyway, let’s not go into that.

All right, so, this is an important background now, because you made the statement… now, I think hopefully people can understand, that in the literature of the Tanaim, the Tanaitic literature, I think this is what you said, “There is no reference to a Torah scroll that contains the entire Torah.”

Mordechai: In the Tanaitic literature, yeah. There are no…

Nehemia: There isn’t? So, it’s only, you have a scroll of Exodus, and you have a scroll of Deuteronomy… but a scroll with the entire Five Books, you’re saying there’s no explicit reference to?

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Mordechai: Yeah. Yeah. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls there is one example of fragments from two books.

Nehemia: Oh, so, which one is that? Do you remember what that is?

Mordechai: I don’t remember the…

Nehemia: Okay, but you’re saying it’s Torah books. In other words, there was such a thing as a scroll in the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Second Temple, where they had at least two books together, if not the whole Torah. Okay. Look, and that seems to be alluded to by Josephus, where he says the Romans came and they took a copy, this book of the law from the Temple, and they paraded it through Rome… Although maybe not; maybe that was just the volume of Leviticus they took, and they didn’t know any different, right? That’s interesting; I never thought of that for what Josephus is saying.

So, that’s interesting. So, in other words, today, when we say a Torah scroll, it’s always the Five Books of Moses. It’s never just one. But even in Tanaitic periods, you could have just a scroll of Exodus, you could have just a scroll of Leviticus. That’s very interesting. So, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll… at one point it was feasible to say… And by the way, give me a date on the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll.

Mordechai: Oh, okay. So, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, in 1989, there was two carbon-14 tests made of the one fragment.

Nehemia: Of one fragment, okay, yeah.

Mordechai: An Ashkar-Gilson fragment. And Ashkar-Gilson is just one fragment of all this. And the date was about the 7th, 8th century.

Nehemia: So, the 600s or the 700s. And you say about, because C-14, people will think, “Oh, C-14 came back and it was from…” I’ve seen this back when I used to watch CSI and Law and Order, and they would have like, you know, a carbon-14 test of a body, and they’d say the person died in the year 1943. Which, I mean, is impossible now, or it’s too recent. Meaning, carbon-14 doesn’t actually work very well if something’s too recent. But if you go back far enough… So, it’s not an exact year, it’s a range. So, it could be the 600s or 700s. And so, when’s the last Dead Sea Scroll?

Mordechai: So, the last Dead Sea Scroll is… I think the more accurate term is Judean Desert Scrolls, because the Dead Sea is just next to the…

Nehemia: So, they’re popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, but in Hebrew we call them Megilot Midbar Yehuda, the Judean Desert Scrolls. Okay. So, when’s the last Judean Desert Scroll?

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: I mean, still, the organization that publishes them is called the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. But okay. So, when is the latest of the Judean Desert or Dead Sea Scrolls, so-called Dead Sea Scrolls?

Mordechai: Yeah. So, it’s at the end of the Bar Kochba Revolt.

Nehemia: 135. So, 135 is the latest Judean Desert Scroll, meaning, it wasn’t necessarily written in 135, but it was put in the cave in 135. Or it couldn’t have been put in the cave later than that, let’s put it that way. Okay, and then from 135, other than the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll (which is the exception that we’re talking about, that you discovered 13 more fragments of) when is the next earliest dated biblical manuscript? Where the date is not disputed, let’s put that way, because that becomes important. Let’s limit it to things that have been published, because I know you know about stuff that’s not published that you’re going to publish. Let’s save that for when you publish it. Other than that, what is the earliest undisputed dated manuscript of the Bible?

Mordechai: So, probably the En Gedi Scroll. So, the En Gedi Scroll is a scroll that’s also from the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea. So, En Gedi is next to the Dead Sea and it’s…

Nehemia: I mean, it’s a lump of carbon today, isn’t it? It was burned.

Mordechai: Yeah, it’s a lump of carbon, yeah.

Nehemia: It was burned, okay.

Mordechai: And with advanced technology, the researchers were able to read it is a scroll of Leviticus, exactly the parts…

Nehemia: So, we’ve got the Ein Gedi Scroll, and from what century is that, do you think?

Mordechai: We don’t know exactly. I think that it’s from the 5th century, probably.

Nehemia: Okay. But some people have said 4th century. 5th century, okay.

Mordechai: And also, the 2nd century.

Nehemia: Second century, maybe, which puts it not that much later than the Bar Kokhba Scrolls. Were there Jews left in En Gedi in the 2nd century after the Bar Kokhba Revolt?

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: There were? Okay. All right.

Mordechai: There were inscriptions, and…

Nehemia: So, what I’m actually trying to get at is, of the medieval scrolls, what are the earliest ones? Let’s skip the exceptions to the rule, which are the Ashkar, because this is why the exceptions are so important. The Ashkar Scroll and the En Gedi Scroll and the other scrolls that you haven’t published (that one day you will, so we won’t say what those are right now) what are the earliest manuscripts that we have from the medieval period? Meaning, we jump from 135 to…

Mordechai: Okay. So, when we want to date a manuscript, it can be like in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We can know that they are before 135 because of the historical event, and there is internal evidence in a manuscript, like a colophon. So, a colophon is a text, mostly in the end of the manuscript, that mentioned the name of the scribe, and the date, and the place.

Nehemia: So, guys, it’s like a title page, but it’s generally at the end, because until the end, the scribe doesn’t know when he finished.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: It might take him years.

Mordechai: Mm-hmm. In the beginning of the print, in the 15th, 16th century, the printers… I don’t know about Latin printed books, but in the Hebrew books we can see all the information that now is in the beginning are also, like in the manuscripts…

Nehemia: Oh, at the end. Oh, that’s cool. Alright, so, they were continuing the manuscript tradition early on in printing. One of the really cool things I saw in Cambridge was, it was a Chumash, the Torah, and it was printed on parchment. Right? So, it’s an early printed book, and they said, “Somebody must have said, ‘Hey, this is too important a book to print on paper. Let’s print it on parchment.’” And it’s very beautiful, so… Okay. Oh, so, you didn’t tell me a year, did you? Or a century…

Mordechai: Okay. So, the first one, the first colophon is from… There are some dates that are not so clear, but the first one, the earliest one, is 956, I think. I’m not…

Nehemia: Well, no, we have one from 903, 904 from Iran, right? So, we have the fragment…

Mordechai: Yeah, from the Bible, but there are Mishnah codex…

Nehemia: Oh, you’re talking about… so, then it’s 800, right? So, you’re talking about the one that Judith Schlanger recently identified. It’s from 8-something…

Mordechai: I think 856.

Nehemia: Eight what? 856? It’s the 850s or something. Okay. So, all right. And then we have Bible fragments that are… and you’re the expert in paleography. Mordechai, guys, is actually a paleographer. So, there are Bible fragments that are from roughly around the same time, so they’re also from the 800s. Right?

So, in other words, we have this gap, guys, from the year 135 up until the 800s. And if we want to talk about where there’s an actual date in the manuscript, and the date is not disputed, that’s where things get complicated. So, then we’re at the year 903, 904, where there are fragments from the Cairo Geniza from Iran. There are earlier dates in manuscripts; one’s from the year 847. But it’s pretty much universally considered a forgery. And there’s another one from the year 895, that’s a little bit more disputed. But now, the difference between 895 and 903 is not important, right? I mean, that’s close enough. Right? For this purpose.

So, in other words, we have stuff from… and we have things that Israel Yevin argued were from the early 9th century, right? So, okay. Well, we could say 850 for sure. If he wants to say it’s 825, sure, why not. So, anyway we have 135 to 850. That’s a huge gap. What is that called in your field?

Mordechai: Okay, it’s called two main terms; the Dark Age…

Nehemia: The Dark Age?

Mordechai: Yeah…

Nehemia: What do they call it in Hebrew? Wait, wait, what do they call it in Hebrew?

Mordechai: Tkufat Ha’choshekh.

Nehemia: The Period of Darkness. Okay, the Dark Age. So, there’s either the Dark Age, or what’s the other one?

Mordechai: Or the Silent Period.

Nehemia: The Silent Period. I’ve heard it called the Great Silent Period. Right? So, in other words, you have something very surprising between 135, and let’s call it roughly… we’ll be generous, we’ll call it 825. But if you wanted to say it was, you know, 903, right, that’s disputable. But between 135 and 825 you don’t have any Hebrew Bible manuscripts. In fact, you don’t have almost any Jewish manuscripts whatsoever. And then we start to talk about the exceptions, the En Gedi Scroll, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, the Afghani Siddur, prayer book, whatever it is. So, in other words, if you include what Mordechai knows that he hasn’t published, you could count on two hands. Without what he knows that he hasn’t published, you could count on one hand.

How many manuscripts come from the Great Silent Period, that we know for sure? Look, and part of the problem is some of these things haven’t been carbon-14 tested, right? In other words, what’s important about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, unlike the Ein Gedi scroll (correct me if I’m wrong) nobody’s done C-14 on the Ein Gedi Scroll. Is that right? Because it’s probably not enough…

Mordechai: No…

Nehemia: There’s not enough to test!

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: But the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll has been C-14 tested, and it came back to the 600s or 700s, from the Silent Period, or the Period of Darkness. And why is this so ironic to me? One of the greatest periods of Jewish literary production, let’s put it that way, is this Great Silent Period, this Period of Darkness. In other words, the Talmud, which I know if they read two pages every day, it takes them seven years. So, I’m going to say that’s something like 20… Do you know how many pages are in the Talmud, in the Vilna edition? I don’t know. Is it 21,000 pages?

Mordechai: Not two pages; one page a day.

Nehemia: No, it’s one folio, so that’s…

Mordechai: One folio, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, it’s two pages for English. So, how many pages, roughly, are in the Babylonian Talmud?

Mordechai: 2,700.

Nehemia: No, 27,000 you mean.

Mordechai: 2,700.

Nehemia: 2,700 pages? Oh, okay. I’m bad at math, see? Okay. So, there’s 2,700 folios in the Talmud?

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: Let me see what Google says. Yeah. 2,711 folios. Okay, so, that’s 5,422 pages, and those come from the Great Silent Period, from the Period of Darkness, from the Dark Ages. So, it’s Dark Ages of manuscripts, not of literary production.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: And in the Talmud… go ahead, sorry.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, in the Talmud they mentioned books! Right? They mentioned they have manuscripts. Where are those manuscripts? Do you have any explanations of where those manuscripts are?

Mordechai: Okay, so… that’s…

Nehemia: And let me stop you for a second here. So, we have, from the Christian world… so, this is almost comical. In the Christian world, an early manuscript will be… when we say an early manuscript of the New Testament, they’ll be referring to, you know, P66 and P75, which are from the 2nd century. Well, that’s kind of disputed, but let’s not get into that; but let’s call them 2nd century CE. And then you have the larger, more well-preserved manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, and then Codex Bezi, which is 5th century. So, you have these thousands of pages preserved from the 4th century and the 5th century, and then, by the time you get to the 8th and 9th century, New Testament scholars are like, “Yeah, don’t really care that much about that manuscript, it’s kind of late. And yeah, it’s still important because it’s magiscule, but it’s a late magiscule.” And then you go to Hebrew Tanakh studies, and our early manuscripts are from the 9th century, and our equivalent to Codex Vaticanus is the Aleppo Codex from the 10th century. So, what’s going on here? So, do you have an answer?

Mordechai: So, there are some explanations, of course, and I think…

Nehemia: What are the explanations? What are the primary explanations?

Mordechai: Okay, so, one of the explanations is that there were not so many books in this period. So, most of the literature was transmitted orally, like the Talmud, and the Mishnah, and all those books.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: All those books. So, until the first mention of a written book of the Mishnah, is from the 8th century.

Nehemia: Oh, really? Okay.

Mordechai: Yeah. So, the absence of books from the Tanaic and Amoraic literature is because they didn’t write it.

Nehemia: So, there weren’t that many copies to begin with…

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: And is this…

Mordechai: The 8th century is the end of the Silent Period.

Nehemia: Right, it’s very close. Well, it’s still within the Silent Period. In other words, the Mishnah manuscript that we know today is from around the year 850, we just said, written in what’s called the proto-square, or pre-square, or whatever.

Mordechai: If it’s correct, this explanation, they began to write books in the 8th century, and they increased writing in the 9th century. So, we have from the 9th century because, of course, not all of the manuscripts that were written are available today, survived until…

Nehemia: Yeah. So, that’s very interesting. So, in other words, and I’m just going to throw out a made- up number, let’s say one in a thousand manuscripts survive. And so, if you have, I don’t know, I don’t know how many are in the Greek New Testament up until the end of our Silent Period. Meaning, how many do you have up until the 8th century? Let’s call it 500. I made up a number. But maybe they had to begin with 500,000. How many copies were there of the literature that we’re missing, that we know was composed in that period? Right? The 2,711 folios, or 5,422 pages of the Talmud, at least in the most popular printing, those pages didn’t survive, because, number one, they generally weren’t written, and even when they were written, it was relatively rare.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. What about the Tanakh, the Torah?

Mordechai: Yeah, so…

Nehemia: Every synagogue had a Torah scroll, no? I mean, is that right? Do we think that?

Mordechai: So, this explanation doesn’t consider the Torah, the Bible. The Bible was written, of course, all the years, all the period.

Nehemia: So, why don’t we have Torah scrolls? Other than En Gedi and your Ashkar-Gilson scroll, and a few others you haven’t published, where are all the rest? Why is the Silent Period so silent?

Mordechai: Yeah. So, I think we need to differentiate between two kinds of preservation. So, there are books that are intentionally preserved in libraries, by private hands, but one… there’s a decision to preserve them.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: And there are non-intentional preservation, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Cairo Genizah, that was forgotten in some caves, buried in some places, and we were lucky, because of the climate and because of the work of the archaeologists, and we found them again. So, the non-intentional preservation books are just kind of lucky. We were lucky to find the Dead Sea Scrolls from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, and the Cairo Genizah from the 9th century onwards. But we don’t have the same luck to find a Genizah, to find…

Nehemia: So, in other words, and this is something I learned when I did my undergrad in archaeology, is that what you find in archaeology, to some extent, is happenstance.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s miqreh. And one of the things they taught us at Hebrew University in archaeology is, you had to be very careful to say something didn’t exist because you didn’t find it. Because, number one, in archaeology in particular, and you’re digging in an ancient site, you never dig the entire site. And usually, a very big excavation might do five percent of a site right? Well, maybe it’s in the other 95 percent, you just didn’t find it. And then what you find is somewhat random. At least, that’s the scientific principle that’s employed, right? That you have to assume what you’re finding is random, and therefore, what you didn’t find may or may not have existed, which is, I think, a principle in science in general. Right?

There’s an ancient Jewish adage I cite all the time, “Lo matzinu eino re’ayah.” “We didn’t find isn’t proof,” or, I think they say in English, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Right? That’s the English version. Well, I mean, we know there were manuscripts during this period, and we just didn’t find them. Well, why is it that we found the Christian manuscripts? And I would say we found the Quranic manuscripts, but I don’t know enough about it. I’m not so sure that’s actually true. In other words, I don’t think you have Quranic manuscripts earlier than the Sanaa Manuscript, and when that’s from is beyond the scope of this discussion. Meaning, okay but they didn’t… they’d only start in the 7th century. So, we’re not going to find much.

Mordechai: So, the question, “from when are the earliest complete Hebrew manuscripts?” So, from where we have an intentional preservation of…

Nehemia: Or relatively complete. In other words, if it’s missing the first 50 pages, the last 50 pages, close enough, right? Ah, so, this is important, guys. I want to summarize. So, the Dead Sea Scrolls did not survive because somebody said, “We need to preserve these really important scrolls.” They were stuck in a cave, in the case of Cave 4, certainly after they were already falling apart in ancient times. In other words, Cave 4 was probably a Geniza in ancient times. Cave 1, you could argue, “Well, no, they hoped to come back after the Romans were defeated by a substantial event.”

Mordechai: Yeah, but it’s not important what they thought about it.

Nehemia: Ah, okay.

Mordechai: The question is, how it came to us.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: There was a very long period that the book was not preserved.

Nehemia: Give us an example of something that was preserved intentionally and never really lost, it was just kept. What would that look like? Give me an example of that of a Hebrew manuscript.

Mordechai: A Hebrew manuscript. So, it can be a codex, mostly a codex, but also Torah scrolls, and they are preserved mostly in the public libraries.

Nehemia: Okay. What would be an example?

Mordechai: EBR 66. It’s a codex of a Tanaic book, Torah Ha’kohanim.

Nehemia: Is it sifrei or is it sifri? I always confuse this.

Mordechai: Sifra.

Nehemia: Sifra, okay.

Mordechai: Sifra in Aramaic is “the book”. The book. Sifra.

Nehemia: Right. But it’s a collection of Midrash from the Tanaitic period. Okay.

Mordechai: Yeah. And it’s from the 9th century. So, this is a complete book from the 9th century. There are no dates, because in the matter of the polygraphical test, we can date it to the 9th century. But other manuscripts, like the Aleppo Codex, or the Leningrad Codex…

Nehemia: That’s a good example, yeah. So, the Aleppo Codex is, I don’t know that we know where the Leningrad Codex was before it came into the Firkovich Collection, but the Aleppo Codex we know, right? The Aleppo Codex was kept in the synagogue in Aleppo.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: When people came to see it, they were told no and turned away, and sometimes they bribed one of the people who worked at the synagogue. And so, you have two photographs, apparently based on bribes, of pieces that have lost, but not since been lost. But it was kept in a safe, until the safe was attacked on November 29th, 1947, after the United Nations announced that there would be a state of Israel, or they would split the British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. And the synagogue was attacked and ransacked, but it was kept in that synagogue. I mean, I guess since the 13th century or so, right? Meaning, the theory is that the son of Maimonides…

Mordechai: 14th century.

Nehemia: 14th century. I thought it was the son of Maimonides who took it with him to Aleppo.

Mordechai: Yeah. Not the son, it was fourth generation from Maimonides.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, Maimonides must have had it in his possession, it seems. Which makes sense, because he says he used it. It sounds like Maimonides borrowed it and never gave it back, and then one of his descendants took it with him to Aleppo. That seems to be the case, to me, at least. Okay, but there is an example where it was kept in a public… and we have, actually, an inscription, or we had an inscription that was copied in 1942 that says it was kept in a public institution in Jerusalem. And then later ends up as a publicly available manuscript in Cairo, and then in Aleppo, and now at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. So, it’s very intentionally, in every generation, being preserved, because they say, “Hey, this is important.” Meaning, as early as the 1050s we know that they said, “This has to be preserved. It’s too important to let it fall apart.” Okay.

And then you have other ones, like, you go to the Russian National Library, and you have a manuscript that looks like it was gnawed on by a family of rats. And I mean literally there’s one that looks like that. But it’s a very important, relatively early for Jewish studies, early Masoretic manuscript. I think it’s EVR2B59, or something like that. And that presumably, you know, had a bunch of damage from rats or water or something, and they stuck it in the Genizah in Cairo. And then Firkovich came and said, “Hey, what books can I buy from you from the Genizah?” Right? But nobody intentionally kept it. The opposite; they stuck it in this chamber in the synagogue for it to naturally deteriorate. So, that’s interesting.

Okay. So, given that dichotomy, why don’t we have more manuscripts that were intentionally preserved from the 5th century? Why don’t we have, and here I’m going to bring a concrete example… isn’t there something where… is it Rabbi Mayer who mentions he has a sefer mughah, a proofread manuscript?

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, where is that manuscript? It belonged…

Mordechai: It belonged to Rabbi Mayer.

Nehemia: So, it’s the book of Rabbi Mayer. Where is it? Surely, somebody said, “Hey, this belonged to Rabbi Mayer. We should keep it, and we should preserve it carefully.” Where is it?

Mordechai: Okay, so, when we look at the Christian manuscripts, the Latin manuscripts, and Greek manuscripts, and we try to understand why they were preserved, the answer will be, there was an interest of preserving them, and there was an ability to preserve them. There were institutions for preservation. There were monasteries, and after that, universities, and some of the kings of Europe were collecting some manuscripts. So, there was an interest of manuscripts, and there was a continuation of institutions along the history, along the thousand years or more. But about the Jewish manuscripts, there was a lot less ability to preserve for a long distance, for a long period.

Nehemia: Why was there less of an ability for Jews to preserve the manuscripts?

Mordechai: So, the Jewish communities were not able to preserve manuscripts for a long distance because of the persecution and the exile of Jewish communities from their places. And there were some occasions of burning their books, Jewish books.

Nehemia: Why did they burn the Jewish books? And who burned the Jewish books? I don’t know if the audience is familiar with that.

Mordechai: Okay, so, the Christian authorities burned the books because they argued that in the Jewish books there are insults on Jesus.

Nehemia: Okay. Meaning, the Talmud insulted Jesus, so they burned the Talmud.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And they didn’t always know what they were burning, and they weren’t necessarily discriminating and saying, “Oh, no, this is a Bible. Let’s not burn this one.”

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Unfortunately. Well, I mean, in both cases, unfortunately.

Mordechai: It’s a lot more challenging to keep a book.

Nehemia: It’s very interesting. I was talking to this young man who is a Christian, but I would call him a… he wasn’t an anti-Semite. This is a Christian who says, you know, “Jesus was a Jew, so I want to practice some form of Judaism that Jesus would have been familiar with.” And he had this post on the internet where he’s talking about the Talmud, and he’s saying, “But the Talmud is so horrible it should be burned.” And I contacted him. I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying. People burned the Talmud, and then they often burned the Jews along with the Talmud, and/or forced them to convert.”

And so, this was someone who was truly innocent, and I don’t mean necessarily that in a good way, right? Innocent in the sense of naive, in that he didn’t know history. He didn’t know that there were people who literally burned the Talmud and then burned the Jews who wrote, or preserved, those volumes. And I said to him, “Look, if you disagree with something in the Talmud, argue with it, don’t burn it.”

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: But how interesting; this isn’t someone who’s like a medieval anti-Semite. This is someone who genuinely, in a sense, loves Israel and loves the Jewish people. But he encounters these things, or frankly, he encounters caricatures of these things that he read online. It’s not necessarily what’s actually in the Talmud, although we’ll save that for a different discussion.

Mordechai: I don’t want to correct this argument. Sometimes they are correct about what the Talmud says, but in every ancient literature we can find some texts that are against other groups. We can find texts that we don’t feel comfortable with in our modern time to read. So, we know it. Our perspective on the world is different.

Nehemia: So, I think the point here is, your perspective on the world might be different, but then there’s lots of people out there today who have a… if I want to be generous, I’ll say, have a traditional perspective on things. And if I want to be not generous and nice, I’ll say, a medieval perspective on things. In other words, there’s people who read in the Quran that the Jews and the Christians are monkeys and pigs… I don’t know if that’s in the Quran or the Hadith, I don’t remember. I’m not an expert in that. And they say, “No, this is true. Allah said it, or the prophet said it, and we should treat them like monkeys and pigs.” And there’s other people who say, “You know, that’s a time when Muhammad was being attacked, and he was saying things in defense. And that’s not a way to sustain a modern society, and that wasn’t his intention.” Now, you’re, of course, reading intentions in a text from over a thousand years ago, right? But we do that all the time in one way or another, right? If you say, “Yes, I should treat them as monkeys and pigs,” you’re saying, “Oh, and he meant that to be applied today,” right?

So, the point is, how do you deal with that today? And look, I just read a horrible thing today, that some Jew in 2015 burned a church, and he wrote on the side of the church a verse from the Tanakh, where it says, “their idols should be surely cut off”. And I read this, and I love the Tanakh, and I think, “What a dummy! What a stupid and evil person, in the 21st century to go and burn somebody else’s church.” Because, okay, yes, it says that, and even if you want to say a church is a place of idolatry… which we could debate, right? And Jews do debate. So, how do you implement that into your life? This is my view. This is my personal views. If you’re implementing that in a way that causes suffering and destruction, then you’re doing something wrong. That’s just my personal view. In other words, we have all kinds of things in ancient texts which, taken in a certain way, could sound horrific to a modern ear. And maybe to an ancient ear as well. What do you do with that? So, you’re saying there might be things negative about Jesus in the Talmud.

Mordechai: Of course. No, I want to clarify; finding hatred in the Talmud is possible. We can find some expressions that are not… I can agree that it’s hatred. But the question is, if someone chooses to focus on those expressions in the Judaism literature, in the Talmud, and ignores all this kind of text in other religions’ texts. And so, these kind of texts are common in a lot of texts. And if someone focuses just on this type, just on Judaism, he’s anti-Semite. So, the same can be… I can find some behavior of Jewish communities that I don’t agree with at all, and I think it’s evil. But in any society, there are some groups, some people that are evil, that are not right. But if you focus just on what is going on in Judaism, then you are a hypocrite. So, this is my view.

Nehemia: So, in other words, to put this into, like, very recent terms, there were people protesting in the streets against Israel, and then, when there were massacres in Yemen for years, and in Syria for years, there certainly were no mass protests, if anybody protested.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then, when Hamas, during a ceasefire, rounded up people in Gaza and shot them in the streets in public so people would see, there were no protests from the same people who were protesting against Israel. And therein lies the hypocrisy. Even if you have a valid point there (which I don’t think they do) but the fact that you’re focusing on only when Jews are involved, that shows something about those people who are focusing on it, yeah. There’s something to be said… I did a program about a church father who writes something like a Passover Haggadah. He was actually what’s called a quarto deciman, meaning, he kept Easter on the day of Pesach, on the eve of Pesach, in Asia Minor, in today’s Turkey. And in his Passover Haggadah, this sort of Christian Passover Haggadah, he describes the Jews killing God and the Jews nailing the nails in with their own hands. Well, wait a minute; that’s not what it says in the New Testament, right? It doesn’t say that at all! Says the Romans did it, right?

So, the point is, here you have something in an ancient Christian text which is just horrific, right? It’s just blatantly hateful, and not even consistent with his own… it’s so hateful it contradicts the New Testament, right? So, should we condemn all Christians for that? No! I mean, there’s good Christians and bad Christians, there’s good Jews and bad Jews, there’s good Jews who say bad things, and there’s bad Jews who say good things, and that’s like every group of people. And there are wonderful, beautiful things in the Talmud, and there are things in the Talmud that turn my stomach. I’ll just say it. Okay, but that’s way off topic.

All right. Actually, we’ll edit here. This has been an amazing conversation. We’ll continue the conversation in the second half, where you’ll actually talk about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, the scroll that was written during the Great Silent Period. And what’s so important about it is that we can count on one, or possibly two, hands how many Tanakh manuscripts we have from the end of the Dead Sea Scrolls up until the 9th century, and you discovered 13 of the 15 fragments of one of these scrolls.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: To be more correct, there are six fragments of Bible fragments in this Silent Period.

Nehemia: What do you mean, six Bible fragments? What do you mean?

Mordechai: We have just six Bible fragments.

Nehemia: No, but of the Ashkar-Gilson, I know you published 15 fragments. Am I wrong?

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Actually, this one is in the end of the Silent Period.

Nehemia: Ah! So, there’s five others from the Great Silent Period…

Mordechai: Six others.

Nehemia: So, there’s six others. And did I include the En Gedi Scroll?

Mordechai: No, no. It’s the En Gedi scroll and six more.

Nehemia: So, we have eight Bible manuscripts from this period, and how many of those did you discover?

Mordechai: I’m not sure. I don’t feel comfortable to make some announcements like this, but I will give more details.

Nehemia: So, we’ll talk in more detail in the next part. Thank you.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Deuteronomy 23:18-19
Mishnah Pirkei Avot 1:4-12
Josephus, Wars of the Jews 7.5.5
Quran 7:166; 2:65; 5:60

BOOKS MENTIONED
Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 103b

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OTHER LINKS
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The Ashkar-Gilson Scroll - by Kim L Phillips

The post Hebrew Voices #246 – Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #245 - Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1, Nehemia brings on scribe Dr. Marc Michaels for a deep dive into his discoveries of the “jots and tittles” and their place in archaeological and phonetic history. Join us as they dig for the truth from the Dead Sea Scrolls and key Jewish sources for clarity.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Marc: But the thing is, all these medieval reinventions of what they think the letters are and what they think tagin are, are wrong. This is the brunch part of my PhD.

Nehemia: Wait, so, tell us… here we have…

Marc: So, I have…

Nehemia: Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Marc: Well, we have Obi-Wan Kenobi going, “These are not the letter forms you’re looking for.”

Nehemia: “These are not the letter forms you are looking for.”

Marc: Exactly.

—

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today with Dr. Marc Michaels, who earned his PhD recently from the University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam College. We’ve had him on the program before, but he wasn’t Dr. Michaels before, he was, I guess, Mr. Michaels. Shalom, and welcome to the program. And congratulations on earning your PhD.

Marc: Shalom, Nehemia, thank you very much. Yeah, it was definitely earned. It wasn’t given. You have to work very hard. I got it in July last year. I went and did the lovely ceremony.

Nehemia: Did you wear the Harry Potter outfit?

Marc: I did wear the Harry Potter outfit, yes. But no hats. No hats.

Nehemia: Oh, you don’t wear a hat?

Marc: One of the rules in Cambridge; you don’t have a hat.

Nehemia: Oh. I don’t remember if Harry Potter has a hat or not. I don’t honestly…

Marc: I think they do; they have the sorting hat. I’ve never watched Harry Potter.

Nehemia: I watched the movie and fell asleep multiple times and eventually gave up. So, but okay, to each their own.

Marc: You have a special ceremony at the Senate House, and I was one of the few people who did not kneel and bow. Obviously.

Nehemia: I don’t know what you’re referring to. What do you mean? What? Do they kneel and bow? What are you talking about?

Marc: Yeah, yeah. When you go up to receive your degree, to receive the PhD, they basically say a particular Latin phrase, which varies depending on which God you believe in. And most people kneel, and they bow to the person who is conferring the…

Nehemia: That’s so interesting.

Marc: So, I didn’t. I just put my hands out, kind of like that…

Nehemia: So, tell us what it means. Or, why didn’t you kneel and bow?

Marc: Because I’m Jewish. And you don’t do any bowing to human beings.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: I mean, I don’t know if you’re aware, but we recently had Purim, and Mordechai got into a lot of trouble with the prime minister, the evil Haman, for precisely that; refusing to bow. So, we organized that well in advance, when…

Nehemia: So, what’s interesting is that in our Megillah… and by our Megillah, I mean the one that you write; the one that’s in the Masoretic text, it doesn’t say why he doesn’t kneel and bow. But in the Greek editions to Esther, they explain that. I mean, it’s kind of implied in the Hebrew. Like, okay, Haman wants to wipe out all the Jews. Well, why all the Jews? Just one Jew didn’t respect you. No, it’s because he didn’t bow because he’s Jewish. But that’s implied; it’s not stated explicitly. In the Greek editions, it explicitly states that Jews don’t bow to humans.

And what’s really interesting is the word for bow there is, and I’m getting this wrong, but proiskanisen, or something like this, in Greek, and that shows up in the stories of Alexander the Great. When Alexander conquered Persia, he said, “Oh, the Persian officials are bowing to me. I like this! Let’s have everybody bow to me.” And his Macedonian and Greek cohorts say, “That’s disrespectful to the gods to bow to you. You’re not a god.” Right? It’s not just that they don’t want to bow to a human, it actually belittles the gods, was their response. So, it’s fascinating; this is in the story of Esther. It’s in the Greek editions of Esther more explicitly, in case you missed the point. That’s obvious to us, right? But maybe the Greek readers didn’t understand that. And then it shows up in the story of Alexander the Great, which I think is so cool. So, you didn’t kneel and bow, and all the others did. Were they bowing? Wait, so the Christian is…

Marc: No Trinity is mentioned, just one God in the Latin.

Nehemia: Wait, so…

Marc: Not that I understood the Latin anyways.

Nehemia: Wait, so, the Latin for everybody else has the Trinity in it?

Marc: Well, everybody who’s Christian, yes. Latin with the Trinity, and anybody who is an atheist doesn’t get God at all in the Latin, and anybody who’s Jewish, Muslim, will get one God.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: It’s slightly different phraseology.

Nehemia: Now I’m so curious. What does God have to do with you getting your PhD? I’m not trying to be funny.

Marc: Well, it’s a very good question. I think it’s to do with the fact that, a lot of it… So, when you get introduced, the person who introduces you, they doff their hat (they’re allowed a hat). They doff their hat, and they basically say that this is a proper, upstanding person, and merits this degree and having it conferred on them. And God gets into that, because obviously it’s about being a good, ethical person. All the Cambridge and Oxford… all these universities, are all originally Christian. They’re very heavily Christian. I mean, they have Lent term and Easter term and…

Nehemia: So, it’s not just that they’re Christian, they were religious institutions to begin with, right?

Marc: From what I understand, yes.

Nehemia: Okay. Right. Meaning, universities were invented by, I guess, the Catholic Church, because there wasn’t really another… well, the church, whatever, you know.

Marc: The church.

Nehemia: Right. I once heard the statistic that… and I know you got it from Cambridge, but Oxford was founded before the founding of the Aztec empire, and before the founding of the Inca empire. And still continues to exist, which is like a mind-blowing thought.

Marc: Very possible. I have no idea.

Nehemia: Okay. Like, maybe more of an American orientation…

Marc: That could be completely made up, I have no idea at all.

Nehemia: I don’t know Cambridge…

Marc: And Oxford is, of course, the dark side.

Nehemia: Right, so, they’re the rival of Cambridge, I suppose.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: So, when I earned my PhD at Bar Ilan University in Israel, I don’t recall that God was mentioned. Maybe there was a prayer for the defense of the State of Israel or something at the beginning, I honestly don’t remember. If it was, like, it’s kind of one of those things you don’t pay that much attention… like it wasn’t… that’s interesting. Kneel… wow, that’s so interesting.

All right, so, the subject of your PhD is relevant here, because one of the things we talked about before you coming on was that you were going to share the insights of your PhD. And I saw a lecture you gave a while back, and I think it was like a speed version of your PhD dissertation.

Marc: It was an hour. It was my PhD in an hour. I’ve given it twice since, and it really is sort of strapping where we’re going now. And I go through quite a lot of information in a very short period of time.

Nehemia: So, do you have slides that you can share with people? Like, I don’t know if you prepared that.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have slides.

Nehemia: Okay, so I’m going to ask you… So, we did a program where we called it something like, or maybe one of my editors had the idea, I don’t remember… they called it the decorative doohickeys, and you thought that was very funny. And I found out since that doohickey is an Americanism.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And yes, it sounds a little bit odd, that word in American English, but probably not nearly as odd as it sounds in British English.

Marc: Yeah, people don’t tend to use the word doohickey in normal conversation, which is why I thought it was funny at the time.

Nehemia: Well, maybe not in normal conversation either, but… So, like, it was being used… I looked it up, by Mark Twain, right? I mean, it’s a very old word in American English…

Marc: We know it because we have American TV shows. We’ve heard the word doohickey, yes.

Nehemia: So, I recently saw a video where they were talking about some differences between American English and British English, and one of the phrases we have is “to table a resolution”, which means we put it aside and we’re not going to talk about it. We’re sticking it on the table.

Marc: Oh!

Nehemia: And in British Parliament, it means, “we’re going to discuss it now and deal with it.” Which is so interesting. And then…

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is exactly… So, I’m married to a Canadian…

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: … Aviella Barklay, who is the first ever female soferet.

Nehemia: Quick story; my wife said, “Who are you interviewing today?” I said, “Marc Michaels.” She said, “Who’s that?” I said, “You met his wife,” meaning, because we interviewed her in London.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And so, it’s funny; I’ve had you on twice, but she knows Aviella better.

Marc: So, when Aviella and I were discussing our wedding, and we were talking about various things, and it was all getting, you know, like all weddings, complicated stuff, and we were talking about the reception. She was talking about tabling something, i.e. putting it aside. And I was going, “No, I don’t want to talk about it now. We want to talk about it later.” And it went on for at least an hour before we realized we were using, completely, this… we were agreeing. We didn’t want to talk about it now, we were going to do it later, but it sounded like we were disagreeing.

Nehemia: So, this actually happened in World War II, where the U.S. forces were meeting with U.K. forces, and they were talking about tabling something. And the Americans are like, “No, this is really important. We don’t want to table this.” And it also took them quite a bit of time to figure out, “Oh, you use that phrase differently.” And what they said in this video I saw is that in Canada, they use it both ways. In the Canadian parliament, or whatever they have, they use it in the British sense. But in daily speech they use it in the American sense. So, they’re kind of like this hybrid in Canada.

Marc: See, over here, we would say… if we want to put something aside and think about it later, we’ll park it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Which apparently in Canadian means we’ll talk about it now.

Nehemia: You know, it took me a long time to understand, when the British would say “full stop,” I’d be like, “What is full… what?”

Marc: Period. You say period.

Nehemia: So, you mean… oh, period. Because you call the period, full stop, don’t you? Like, you say, “I wrote a full stop in a sentence.”

Marc: We call it full stop, yeah, absolutely.

Nehemia: Right. So, isn’t that interesting? And speaking of paratextual notations like the period or the full stop, tell us about the doohickeys, meaning, the decorative features in Torah scrolls. Can you define for the audience… I know I used the term, but can you tell people what paratextual is?

Marc: Okay. So, on any manuscript, there is the main script, the main writing, the text, which in the cases of what I’m dealing with, is usually Hebrew, in various scripts. But around that there will be extra things. Now that might be some dots, it might be the letters are made large, it might be the… well, we don’t tend to get underline, but you get boxed round stuff in some manuscripts, which you know about very much because it’s about deleting things. And you get, sometimes there’s a Zayin or a Nun sofit letter in the margins, which also has some textual meanings. There are inverted Nunim, which are brackets, and they were originally brackets, Sigma and anti-Sigma, and I’ve written about that in the past. And there’s all these things that are happening in and around the text, hence paratextual. But what you’re talking about, really, when you talk about the doohickeys, isn’t really paratextual.

Nehemia: Oh, it’s not?

Marc: No, it’s not.

Nehemia: Okay. So, I was in Heidelberg, Germany about a year ago at a conference, and it was a conference on Masoretic studies. And you had some of the really top scholars in Masoretic studies there, and there was this fierce debate about whether Masoretic notes are paratextual or whether they are a text unto themselves. Because the Masoretic notes will be… you know, there’ll be a certain word spelled a certain way and they’ll say in the margin, “That’s spelled two times this way and three times that way.” And so, from my perspective, the Bible is the text, the biblical text, and the note in the margin is para-textual; it’s not part of the text. And some of the other scholars were saying, “No, it’s its own text!”

Marc: It is its own text.

Nehemia: Why?

Marc: So, the Mesorah Magna, the Gedolah, the big Mesorah, is an independent text. Probably, you get away with the small Masoretic notes in the columns; they aren’t really because they are, fundamentally, a shortcut to the bigger discussion. So, then one refers to the other. So, I would probably agree with you that the ones in the margins are paratextual…

Nehemia: Well, I didn’t take a position there, but…

Marc: The actual Masoretic notes are a text in themselves.

Nehemia: Yeah, but in relation to the biblical text, they’re paratextual.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Meaning, if it says, “Three times spelled full,” that’s like a typical note. Well, you’re right. That’s a small Masoretic note. The larger notes will say, “It’s three times full, and here are the three times.” Right?

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: But without the text, that’s meaningless. But anyway… so, we were talking about paratextual notations, and my point was that there is not a consensus about what is a paratextual, where the line between paratextual and textual begins. So, for example, in English, I think you mentioned an underline; if you have something underlined to emphasize it, that would be paratextual because I can’t read that when I read the text. And it doesn’t have… well, it does have meaning, so, it’s a bit complicated.

So, tell us about the decorative features, what’s called the strange… well, you don’t call them strange letters, you call them different letters, right? Otiot meshunot.

Marc: Well, actually, yeah, I don’t call them… otiot meshunot means strange letters. I tend to refer to them as visual midrash.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Because strange letters sounds a little bit negative, but visual midrash kind of sums up what they’re trying to do; they’re trying to take the letters on the page, and by the shape of them, or the decorative features around them, tell a story.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Now, what I’ve proved is, to a large extent, those stories are post-inventions, because the real reason behind the strange letters is different to what people say they are. But it doesn’t invalidate the stories.

Nehemia: So, can you show us an example of a strange letter, or… again, in Hebrew, guys, they’re called otiot meshunot, which means strange letters or modified letters. Shoneh is different, right? They’re being made different. And for those listening, you’ll have to describe what we’re seeing, because a lot of people listen to the podcast.

Marc: Oh, wow, okay.

Nehemia: I know it’s a challenge.

Marc: Can you see my screen?

Nehemia: Yes.

Marc: Okay.

Nehemia: I can see the screen.

Marc: So, strange letters; and this is very important, there are other reasons… otiot meshunot. Otiot meshunot include large letters and small letters and dotted letters, and then Nunin hafukhim, the reversed upside-down Nuns; those are not part of Sefer Tagin. So, Sefer Tagin is the thing I did my PhD on, but they get lumped in with Sefer Tagin always. And there’s a very good reason why, and if we get to that, I’ll explain why. But they get lumped in, but they’re very different. So, the oddly…

Nehemia: But… go ahead, sorry…

Marc: …the oddly shaped letters are not an independent tradition; they are part of Sefer Tagin. They are not the large letters or the small letters or the dotted letters, that’s something completely different.

Nehemia: So, we haven’t defined Sefer Tagin, so, that makes this a bit complicated. So, I want to show people here the backwards Nuns, and I would show them in the Aleppo Codex, but we don’t have that page.

Marc: Numbers 10:35 to 36.

Nehemia: So, every Torah scroll in the world is supposed to have a backwards Nun here, and a backwards Nun here, and this is the passage that talks about, when the Ark would travel, Moses would say, “Arrive, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and scatter Your enemies, and let Your enemies flee from before You.” And when it would rest, he would say, Moses would say, “return, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey,” and this is probably why the brackets are here. “Return, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, of the tens of thousands of the thousands of Israel.”

Okay, so there’s the backwards Nun here and the backwards Nun here, and you were explaining why those… and these aren’t part of the text, right? I could read the text, and I don’t say, “Be’nosam min ha’machaneh, Nun hafukha, va’yehi binso ha’aron.” You don’t say that.

Marc: No, you don’t say that. And in fact, they’re not in all Sifrei Torahs. They’re not in Kararite Torahs. And in some Sifrei Torah, if they follow a particular Rabbinic tradition, they are in the word. So, in binsoa, and ka’mit’onenim, they actually have the Nuns backwards…

Nehemia: Ah, interesting.

Marc: …as opposed to having them as brackets.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, tell us what you mean by brackets? What does that mean, that they’re brackets?

Marc: Right. Okay. So, the reason for these upside-down reverse Nunim is not what you might think it is, because, originally, they were not letters Nun.

Nehemia: What do I think it is? Meaning, I have a reason I heard from Emanuel Tov, but most people have no idea what they’re doing there!

Marc: Emanuel Tov is correct.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Basically, they are Sigma and anti-Sigma. So, they were originally actual brackets. And you know this, because you know how people…

Nehemia: Yeah, but explain to the audience because they don’t know.

Marc: Right, okay. So, in the very old days, the ancient… when I mean, ancient, so, sort of Dead Sea Scrolls days; in order to delete a letter that was wrong, or a word that was wrong, they would put dots on it. And there’s 10 in the Torah and 15 in the Tanakh, of dotted letters. And the reason those dotted letters or words are there are because they probably shouldn’t have been written. The brackets surround a lump of text that either should be deleted or is in the wrong place. And in this case, with Numbers 10:35-36, they’re in the wrong place.

Nehemia: How do you know they’re in the wrong place?

Marc: Because if you look at the Septuagint, you will see that the order of the verses is different. So, I think it goes 35, 36, 34. And what is probably happening is that the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint… because there were various different versions, not that many versions, but versions of the Torah, which were minorly different… you can see in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint, what became eventually the Masoretic text… We understand what became the Samaritan text, the proto-Samaritan text, all slightly different.

If you look at the Septuagint, the verse ordering is different. Because what’s happening is, somebody is correcting the Masoretic text to the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint and saying, “This should be in a different place. These two verses are in the wrong place.” And there was probably a dot that said, “this is where they’re supposed to be.” The dots disappeared.

Nehemia: Ah.

Marc: Right? A bit like we have an asterisk now saying, move this, right? And what happened is that, over time, people seem to have forgotten what the purpose of these brackets were. And as a result, they just copied them. So, they never moved it to where it was supposed to be, they just carried on copying them, and over time the brackets became Nuns. And that is how that happened.

Nehemia: So, this is really interesting. So, here I’m going to pull up… this isn’t what I thought we would talk about, but this is more interesting. I mean, I don’t know if this is more interesting. It’s too interesting…

Marc: It’s more interesting than my PhD.

Nehemia: Well, no, it’s too interesting to gloss over. So, we have these two verses, and they’re marked with these backwards Nuns. And Emanuel Tov explained them… I’m just reviewing here, as basically deletion marks. Everything between this… these were marks that you see in Greek manuscripts called Sigma and anti-Sigma, or they were called parenthesis. Meaning, there’s the parenthese is plural, and these are… each one is the first parenthesis and the last parenthesis, and everything between them should be deleted. That’s one explanation; or they’re in the wrong place is the other explanation.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And as you point out… and here, I’m going to show up on the screen here. So, here I have in Accordance… so, we have verse 34, which is… well, let’s go back. So, verse 33 is the same in the Greek and the Hebrew, and then 34 is parallel. Meaning, 33 is followed by 34 in the English, which seems almost obvious, but then in the Greek, 33 is followed by 36, and then 34, 35. So, that’s very interesting.

Where it doesn’t, sort of, make sense is when you read the flow of the text. Meaning, they make more sense where they are in the Masoretic text. To me, at least.

Marc: Not much in it, that’d be perfectly honest.

Nehemia: What do you mean?

Marc: If you can read it both ways and it still makes sense.

Nehemia: Okay. All right. So, here’s the explanation I heard, which, you know, there’s a bunch of possibilities. So, one possibility that is just worth stating is that these verses were in the margin, and somebody copied them into the text. And the Masoretic text copied them into a different place than the Septuagint. And let’s just look real quick at the Samaritan, because that would be really significant here. So, the Samaritan has the order of the Masoretic text. So, it’s really hard to explain that if that’s not the original order.

Marc: The Rabbinic midrash on this suggests that this actually is so misplaced that it should be 50. Hence Nun equals 50; 50 verses previous, I think, in the chapter on the de Gallium on the flags…

Nehemia: Which makes more sense for it; it’s more organic there. And that would explain a little bit better; meaning, it got misplaced. It was in the margin, and different people copied it into the text in a different place. But here’s the interesting thing that I find intriguing. So, one of the explanations is that there was a theological reason for removing it, and the theological reason was, when the Ark would rest, Moses would say, “Return, O Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey,” which someone might have read in a later period and say, “Wait, is he calling the Ark Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey?” Which is a theme in the Tanakh, right? So, that’s one of the explanations I’ve heard from scholars. I don’t know if that’s right.

To me, the fact that the Samaritan has it in the same order as the Masoretic text, against the Septuagint, tells me that it must go back, at least, to a time when the Jews and the Samaritans split. And the Septuagint here is the sort of aberration. But the point is, when scribes copy a Torah scroll, they insert this backwards Nun, whether into the letters or into just the margin (or the blank space, not so much the margin) and I call that a paratextual feature because it’s not part of the text.

Marc: That is a paratextual feature, definitely.

Nehemia: All right, now let’s talk about the doohickeys, which are not paratextual features.

Marc: So, Sefer Tagin, which means the book of… well, it’s translated as tittles in most of the New Testament translations that you come across, and they are decorative flourishes on the Hebrew letters.

Nehemia: Wait, wait, wait. You said the New Testament translation; this is not part of the New Testament though…

Marc: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Nehemia: Sefer Tagin is part of the New Testament?

Marc: No, no, no. Something in the New Testament is describing the same phenomena as Sefer Tagin.

Nehemia: Yeah, Matthew 5:17, “I’ve come, not to do away with,” I’m paraphrasing, “one jot and one tittle,” and what you’re saying is that in the time when that was recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, some sort of features existed. Is that what you’re saying?

Marc: Yes. So, tagin, as we understand them today… and you see (on the screen you’ll see some examples of tagin) at the top from a line of a recent Megillat Esther, as I wrote, and you can see that some letters have one little line with a dot on the top. So, ball on a stick; we quite often refer to them as ball on the stick.

Nehemia: What do you call it? Ball on a stick, okay.

Marc: Ball on a stick.

Nehemia: All right.

Marc: So, these are ball on a stick, tagin.

Nehemia: So, basically there’s a straight line with a little ball at the end of it, just for those who are listening.

Marc: Yeah…

Nehemia: And that’s added to the letter, and that’s called a tag, or plural tagin.

Marc: It’s called a tag, right? And tagin is the plural in Aramaic, and they’re balls on sticks. And they’re used only in the Torah scrolls, or Megillat Esther, or mezuzot, or tefillin, i.e. what’s called kitvei ha’kodesh, which is Jewish Holy Writings. Some of them take three, as you can see, on the Shin and the Ayin and the Nun and the Zayin, they have three. And Tzadi as well. And some only have one, and then some have none. Oddly enough, the acronym for the ones that have none is melechet sofer, which means “work of the scribe.” Is that a coincidence? Who knows?

Nehemia: Wait, hold on a second. So, the letters that have no crowns on them are the letters melechet sofer. Mem-Lamed-Aleph-Kaf-Tav Samekh-Vav-Peh-Reish. Is that a coincidence? Probably not.

Marc: Yes. Probably not.

Nehemia: That’s itself sort of a midrash, right?

Marc: Who knows? Now, you also see, and I’ve collected a few examples here of these very decorative tagin, which are beautiful, but they have no historical or religious significance whatsoever. They’re purely artistic. But they’re lovely.

Nehemia: So, it looks like a peacock’s feathers. And is the idea that, instead of just three, maybe he had some extra space and so he elaborated it?

Marc: Yeah. They’re usually at the top margins because you’ve got extra space. So, they go mad. They have trees and peacock tails and explosions and, you know… it’s lovely. It’s lovely, pretty, but it’s just pretty. There’s nothing specifically important about this whatsoever. So, there is this book called Sefer Tagin, which is a manual. It’s in Aramaic, supposedly, and up until me coming along, everybody… read anything, it says, “It’s a Kabbalistic manual from Gaonic times.” So, around 700, 800 CE…

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: But it isn’t.

Nehemia: Well, that’s your conclusion, that it isn’t. So, let’s save that for…

Marc: Yeah, yeah, it isn’t. But I haven’t told you exactly what it is yet. So, it covers extra tagin and special letter forms that are on 1,914 words, roughly, in the Torah. Unfortunately, the Latin book, the first sort of printed copy of this, is particularly faulty, because it’s copied from a particularly faulty manuscript. Which is a bit difficult, because it means that most of what people talk about Sefer Tagin is not correct, because they’re basing it on this particular book from 1866.

But you can see an example here of… I mean, this is just one example, of a medieval reinvention of Sefer Tagin. And you can see an Aleph there with seven tagin, and a Bet with three, and a Gimel with four…

Nehemia: So, let me try to… my job is to… for the audience, to try to interface for them and help them understand. So, we’re seeing here a Shin. And let’s go back to the previous slide if we can. So, there’s sha’atnez getz, which is the seven letters, Gimel-Tzadi-Shin-Ayin-Tet-Nun-Zayin, which form the acronym sha’atnez getz. So, those seven letters systematically have crowns on them.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: But then Sefer Tagin is, and correct me if this is wrong. I’m trying to, again, explain to the audience, there are specific instances of specific letters that have crowns different than the systematic crowns of the sha’atnez getz or the Bet or whatever.

Marc: Yes, and indeed Sefer Tagin preceded the sha’atnez getz.

Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, this tradition of marking special letters in a special way predates systematically putting the little doohickeys on those seven letters mechanically.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay. And again, for the people who are listening, not seeing, some of the letters aren’t little tittles or crowns added to the letter. Like, for example, you have a strange Vav here, and here I really feel comfortable calling it strange. Where, if I didn’t know what that was, I’m not sure I’d know it was a Vav.

Marc: No, you’d think it was a Nun. And that’s part of the problem with Sefer Tagin, is that some of the medieval reinventions of it have corrupted the letter so much that authorities would consider them pasul, which is invalid. They can’t be used. And there are Zayins and Nun Sofits that look like a Kuf. There’s all sorts of stuff that wouldn’t really be permitted anymore under strict halakhic guidelines for rules for scribes. So, that Vav is a good example. And in fact, the Me’iri was one of the rabbis who wrote a version of Sefer Tagin. He calls it ra, a bad form. So…

Nehemia: And for those who aren’t familiar, Menachem HaMe’iri, he’s 1249 to 1316. That doesn’t sound right, he didn’t live very long. I guess that’s right, and he lived in what today is southern France; in Perpignan, wherever that is. It’s interesting; although he’s living in France, he’s not considered a French rabbi. He is part of the, I guess, cultural region of Provence, or Narbona, it would have been called in the Middle Ages. But anyway, so, he’s a rabbi in what today is southern France, Menachem HaMe’iri. And what’s interesting about him is, he was a scribe. So, unlike me, who studies scribal practices, he’s more like you; he was an actual working scribe.

Marc: Yes. So, what he writes is generally very good. But his version of Sefer Tagin is massively additive. Where he’s not sure of where something should be, he just guesses and puts in some extra ones.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, that causes, kind of, some issues.

Nehemia: So, just to summarize; there are seven letters that systematically have crowns. That doesn’t mean anything particularly special, but then there’s specific instances… there’s a certain Aleph and a certain verse which has, I don’t know, seven crowns according to one version.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Even though you said before that Aleph is what it doesn’t…

Marc: There are in fact seven Alephs. There are in fact seven Alephs in the Torah…

Nehemia: Oh, seven…

Marc: …that have seven crowns, and they are in specific places. And in fact…

Nehemia: So, you’re saying it’s deliberate which Aleph they chose, it’s not just arbitrary.

Marc: Oh, it’s one hundred percent deliberate.

Nehemia: Okay, alright.

Marc: And this is the pattern that I was trying to unravel for my PhD.

Nehemia: Okay. So, why does this Aleph have crowns, and why does that Chet… and the Chet here is almost like a splayed Chet, it’s not…

Marc: Yes. So, it is actually…

Nehemia: Well, one of them doesn’t have crowns.

Marc: …called that. It’s called a splayed Chet.

Nehemia: Okay. It’s like doing a split.

Marc: … m’shokh, the split, splayed Chet. Yes, it’s exactly what it’s called.

Nehemia: What’s the word in Aramaic, or Hebrew?

Marc: M’shokh.

Nehemia: How do you spell that?

Marc: M-E-S-O…

Nehemia: How do you spell it in Hebrew?

Marc: S-H-O-K-H, in your translation.

Nehemia: Oh m’sokh. So, like, Mem-Samekh-Vav…

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: …Kaf or something. Okay.

Marc: Yes. So, regardless… I mean, it’s called that now, but it’s not what it is. That’s the thing. It’s very difficult because a lot of this stuff has been reinterpreted over time. So, one of the things I had to do was, in order to prove the patterns, by extension, I ended up doing a critical edition, which is going to get published at some point. It’s almost complete; I am just revising a certain section, and I’ll explain why in a minute.

But I had to go and find the different sources of Sefer Tagin. The probably oldest source, and I call these the core sources, because they are just Sefer Tagin; they haven’t added in all the other stuff. And we talked about the large letters and the dotted letters, and all that stuff, maleh, chaser, all those things; they’re not Sefer Tagin, right? They’re not. They become…

Nehemia: You’re saying some later versions of Sefer Tagin have all those little other features?

Marc: They have all those other stuff, all pushed into them. So, one of the first breakthroughs on the PhD was to identify core sources and then, well, I’m going to call later, compiled sources. So, the core sources are important; they’re only Sefer Tagin, only in alphabetical order. They have an introduction that talks about how this was passed down from Joshua’s 12 stones in Gilgal and passed down through the rabbis and to a particular person.

Nehemia: Tell us what you mean by Joshua’s 12 stones in Gilgal.

Marc: So, Joshua was told by God… well, actually Moses was told by God earlier, but Joshua does it when we get to the Book of Joshua, to set up 12 stones when he gets into Gilgal. And supposedly, on those stones, the Torah was written. And they wrote out the whole Torah on these stones.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, he does that. And the story, the instruction, which is a later piece, because again, it wasn’t originally in Sefer Tagin, it’s a later addition. It talks about how these ideas have been passed down all the way from Joshua. It’s very like, if your listeners and viewers are familiar with Mishnah Avot 1:1, where it says, “ve’Mosheh kibel mi’Sinai”, “Moses received from Sinai,” and then he…

Nehemia: Let’s assume they don’t know. It’s worth explaining what that is.

Marc: Okay, so Mishnah Avot, so, The Ethics of the Fathers, is an ethical tractate of the Mishnah, and it gives you sort of life lessons, so to speak. But at the start, it has an introductory section that very much talks about passing this tradition down. And Moses passed it to Joshua, and Joshua passed it to the elders, and the elders passed it to the rabbis, and blah, blah, blah, blah, till it gets to the Tanaitic rabbis, the Pharisees. And Sefer Tagin has a very similar introduction that’s doing exactly the same job, which is to give it authority. Because if you can claim your thing goes all the way back to Moshe or Yehoshua, you have authority. So, that’s exactly…

Nehemia: So, I want to read this for the audience, because it’s worth dwelling on. So, Deuteronomy 27:2, this is the JPS translation. It says, “As soon as you cross the Jordan into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall set up large stones, coat them with plaster, and inscribe upon them all the words of this teaching,” which is in the Hebrew, Torah. And then Joshua then does that later in the Book of Joshua. So, in other words, there was a physical copy, according to Deuteronomy… well, Deuteronomy commanded it. Joshua, let’s see, where is this in Joshua? It’s somewhere in there. I think it’s Joshua, I want to say 8. He actually does this, it says. Here it is, Joshua 8:32, “And there on the stones he inscribed a copy of the teaching,” meaning, the Hebrew Torah, “that Moses had written for the Israelites.”

So, in other words, we think of the Torah as a scroll, which isn’t wrong, but according to the Torah itself, there was a copy written on stone, technically on plastered stone. Which is interesting because there’s the Deir Allah inscription, which mentions Balaam, the son of Beor, and it’s a very old inscription in Aramaic from Transjordan in a place called Deir Allah, which was biblical Sukkot, almost certainly. And there, it has the story of Balaam written on plaster, which… coated stone. So, there was such a practice, and you’re saying that Sefer Tagin… Who makes the claim that Sefer Tagin goes, or that these special forms, go back to the Torah written by Joshua?

Marc: Right. So, a later author who is reusing the work of probably the original author of Sefer Tagin… so he’s sort of moving on, adds this section that claims it goes all the way back to Joshua, because it gives it extra authority.

Nehemia: So, this is what we call a chain of transmission.

Marc: Chain of transmission.

Nehemia: So, the Oral Law in Avot 1:1 in the Mishnah has the chain of transition. “Mosheh kibel mI’Sinai”, “Moses received the Torah at Sinai”. He transmitted it to Joshua, transmitted it to the elders who transmitted it, etc. on, as you said, until the rabbis. And you’re saying that Sefer Tagin has the same claim of transmission.

Marc: Yes…

Nehemia: That’s very interesting. But that’s a later accretion, you’re saying? Well, I mean, these are all later things, presumably, but I guess it’s a matter of… In other words, like, if you asked an ultra-Orthodox Jew today, would he believe that this goes back to the Torah?

Marc: No, because they don’t tend to think about Sefer Tagin. Sefer Tagin is not that well known.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. But if they knew about it, would they take that at face value and say it goes back?

Marc: They might. It wouldn’t be correct. But anyway, so, this one…

Nehemia: Well, is Mishnah Avot 1:1 correct? That’s perhaps where I would disagree with many Orthodox Jews.

Marc: Of course it is, Nehemia.

Nehemia: As a Karaite, I would say no, but that’s fine. Let’s leave that for…

Marc: Yeah, yeah, alright.

Nehemia: …the story as…

Marc: So, Sefer Tagin; this is probably the oldest version of Sefer Tagin. This is the one I found in the Cairo Genizah. So, I’m a volunteer at the Cairo Genizah. Prof. Ben Outhwaite, Prof. Jeffrey Khan were my two supervisors, so I spent a lot of my PhD at the Cairo Genizah.

Nehemia: Okay. In Cambridge…

Marc: In Cambridge…

Nehemia: Oh, so that’s important. The Cambridge Genizah Unit at Cambridge University Library, although the university is not called Cambridge University, it’s called University of Cambridge.

Marc: University of Cambridge.

Nehemia: Very confusing.

Marc: Anyway, this is the oldest version, so, in theory, the least corrupt version, maybe. And then there’s some other versions that are also core ones. One of the most important is Sassoon 82, which I think you’ve seen in person, and I have…

Nehemia: So, I examined that in Geneva in 2019. And at the time, I was there looking at the Sassoon Codex, which is, you know, a different manuscript; a more important one, from my perspective, of course. Meaning, that’s Sassoon 1053, the one I was looking at. But while I was there, I was asked to also look specifically at Sefer Tagin in Sassoon 82 to try to see if I could get anything with the microscope that would make it more legible. And it was not successful. That was actually a request of Jordan Penkauer, who has passed away recently, so, I’ll say of blessed memory. And we should talk more about that afterwards; there’s something that’s relevant to that that you might be interested in.

Marc: And if you recall, you told me that you were doing that, and I said, “I would also like that imagery.” Which I have used in the sort of study, and it wasn’t completely useless. I mean…

Nehemia: Okay, I didn’t know that.

Marc: We did get the odd reading from it, but I’ve kind of gone a step further. There’s one in Oxford which is rather nice. There’s one which is in Palmer, which is known as… I have acronyms for these, ST, OBP, so it helps me say these things quickly.

Nehemia: So, you’ve assigned letters to each of these different sources.

Marc: I’ve assigned letters to it to help me with the critical edition, but also, just generally I use them a lot. The Palmer one is probably the most complete version…

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: …but it’s also corrupt. Basically, there’s a few other manuscripts, and so forth. But then it kind of all went wrong, and we got what I like to refer to as the “Masoretic mixtape”, where somebody came up with, in theory, a very good idea of taking all of the paratextual features, if you want to call that, and the maleh and the chaser, and whether it’s a stuma or petucha, an open or closed section, and jamming them all together in parasha order, so, the sections that you read each week.

Nehemia: The weekly Torah portion.

Marc: What they did, though, is, it completely destroyed the integrity of Sefer Tagin. So, Sefer Tagin is still the biggest bit of it, because it’s 1,914 instances, but it’s buried. It’s buried in…

Nehemia: So, originally Sefer Tagin was in alphabetical order, and it said, “These seven Alephs have this form, and these whatever Bets have that form,” and you’re saying that…

Marc: And then it listed each one.

Nehemia: Okay. And then, you’re saying, they said, “Oh, wait, no. Let’s make this in chronological order of the biblical sections.”

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And that messed it up.

Marc: Messed it up, big time.

Nehemia: And then here’s another thing I think is worth emphasizing. So, you have these systematic lists that say, you know, “These seven Alephs have this form, but when you compare the manuscripts,” maybe not in that feature, but “in various features are not identical.” Meaning, that’s why you’re looking at multiple manuscripts?

Marc: Yes, because you have to try and work out what might be more original. I hesitate to say you’re going back to an urtext, because people don’t like urtext, but you…

Nehemia: You have to explain what an urtext is, for my audience.

Marc: So, an urtext is a master text, the original text that was conceived by the author. And then, over time, it may have been corrupted. But in modern, sort of academia now, people don’t like the idea of an urtext, and they don’t like the idea of the idea that some texts are corrupt, because all texts have value. But that’s not the case. If you’re talking about a list, it’s a list.

Nehemia: Okay, hold on a second. So, this was another thing that was debated in Heidelberg, about what’s called the new philology.

Marc: New philology.

Nehemia: Can you talk a little bit about that for the audience, who’s never heard of it? First of all, define what philology is, and then define what new philology is.

Marc: No, I’m not going to go into any detail, but I will show you a slide.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, we talked about all these different versions, right? Unfortunately, every single extant source is corrupt. Now, this is where you get to your new philology, because you’re not allowed to say that something is corrupt anymore. Because the paradigm behind new philology is that every variant should be celebrated and every variant has merit, and you can’t assume that the author wouldn’t have wanted it to be like that. Maybe. And in fact, in many works, the author does change, because it’s a bit like print on demand now. You can actually change your book, right?

Nehemia: So, let me explain for people. Philology is… and there’s different definitions of philology. In Germany, they have a slightly different definition. But my definition of philology, which is the correct one, is that it’s the study of ancient texts using various tools, linguistics, codicology, paleography. Whereas a linguist is interested in and of itself in the linguistic forms, a philologist says, “I want to understand this as far as it’s necessary to understand the ancient text. But I don’t really care that much inherently about linguistics.” It’s a tool that a philologist will use.

So, the old philology did something like this: they said, “Every modern text we have is corrupt, and let’s peel away the layers to get to what’s called the urtext.” U-R is German for original, the urtext. And they said, “The later ones, we don’t really care about that, we want to get to the urtext.” The new philology says, “No.” They’ll sometimes use the term like the reception of the text, and the reception of the text is a text as well. And even if the text changed over time, each one of those is a valid and legitimate text for study and important in and of itself.

Whereas the old philologist said… and I’ll give a really easy to understand example. So, many New Testament scholars will say the story of the stoning of the woman, you know, where there’s the famous line, “he who is without sin will cast the first stone,” isn’t in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. And therefore, the original Gospel of John didn’t have it, and therefore, that story is completely irrelevant for understanding the urtext.

And a new philologist would say, “Well, no. People made paintings and sculptures based on that story because in their version it was there. And so, that’s just as valid a part of the text, even if it wasn’t there in the 1st century.” And so, they don’t want to say there’s such a thing as an urtext. When it comes to Masoretic studies, it’s very interesting, because, was there ever an urtext of the masora? That’s a very debatable thing, but let’s not get into that.

So, do you believe there was an ur, an original Sefer Tagin?

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And have you been able to reconstruct that? But you’re saying something, I think… let me say this: even if the later corrupt versions aren’t the urtext, the original text, there are people who made midrashim on these later corruptions. Am I right?

Marc: They did. Yes, they did.

Nehemia: So, in that sense, the new philologists have some validity in what they’re saying.

Marc: They do.

Nehemia: It depends what your question is. If your question is, “what’s the original text,” then you don’t care about the later ones. But if you want to study the reception of the text, then it is interesting and important.

Marc: What I want to understand, and this is why you have to try and get to an urtext of some kind, is because this was originally a list. It said: there are seven Alephs with seven decorations, and this is what the decorations are, and here are the seven. And that had a pattern behind it, right? There are a certain amount of Daleds. That has a pattern, and we’ll look at the patterns later. If you destroy the integrity of that list by adding extra ones and making new midrash and changing it to parasha order, you lose the original meaning of why he chose those particular letters in that list. And the fact that it’s a list, I mean, it’s deliberately put in a way that you don’t add it. You’re supposed to have seven. So, if you’ve got nine, something’s wrong. This is the thing. But you don’t know anymore, because once it gets spread out over the parshiyot, you can’t tell.

Nehemia: So, an interesting example of an urtext (and this is a totally different field) is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. So, in the original… and when I say original, the one that was printed, the first edition; there were certain details that, in the later edition, he changed. And that’s what they call, the young people call, today, retconning.

Marc: Yes, retconning.

Nehemia: Retroactive… what does the con stand for? Continuity. So, after he wrote The Lord of the Rings, there were some details in The Hobbit that contradicted the continuation of the story, so he rewrote the story. And so, there you have an urtext of the first edition, but we could say there’s an urtext of the later edition. In other words, there we would talk about the first recension and the later recension in, let’s say, philological studies.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And they’re both written by the author. Here you’re dealing with something a bit different, which is, over the centuries, people didn’t understand what this strange Aleph was, and they made up a bunch of stories about it. And then they ended up adding a bunch more, and you gave the example of Me’iri, who added a bunch for whatever reason. But you’re asking the question, “what did the original version of Sefer Tagin, what was the purpose of these unusual forms?” That’s the question.

Marc: Well, basically I was answering two questions. What is the form and what is the function?

Nehemia: Okay. And those are related.

Marc: So, what is the form of Sefer Tagin, i.e. what was it originally intended to be? And what is the function? Why was it? Why did they have it?

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: And this faulty transmission over time meant that things just got bonkers. I mean, I don’t know if I can make this bigger on the screen, but…

Nehemia: Well, my editor, if you send him this, he can put that in really big. Which part do you want large?

Marc: So, I think…

Nehemia: He’ll make it larger.

Marc: The bits where… there’s a couple from my book where you can see some of the forms of the letters, the medieval recensions. Remember, you said you thought the Vav was weird. You think the Vav’s weird? Some of the other letters are just bonkers.

Nehemia: Well, I’ve looked at some of these Torah scrolls, and if I didn’t know what the word was, I would have no chance of reading that word.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: If I don’t know the word in its context, and that’s just because I’m not that familiar with them. And I can’t even imagine a medieval Jew who’s not fluent in Hebrew, but he learns for his bar mitzvah to read (if they did that, I don’t know) he learns for his bar mitzvah to read from the Torah. What chance does he have of knowing that that’s a Vav or a final Peh?

Marc: So, I mean, some of these things, Vavs that look like Pehs, and Zayins that look like Kufs, they are somewhat crazy, which is why they’re otiot-meshunot.

Nehemia: Which means?

Marc: Weird letters. Weird, strange letters.

Nehemia: Weird, strange letters, right. Okay.

Marc: Yeah, strange letters.

Nehemia: So, actually… can you zoom in? I’m going to draw here on the screen, so, I don’t know how to point to it, and we can remove that later. So, this one here, what is this letter? Because that looks to me like a final Kuf.

Marc: All of these…

Nehemia: Or it looks like a Kuf, rather. And you’re saying that’s a Zayin. Amazing.

Marc: That’s a Zayin. So, all of the ones on the top one are Vavs, and all of the ones on the bottom one, bottom page, are Zayins.

Nehemia: So, if you didn’t know better and you saw this letter, which I’ve just circled here, you would think that’s a final Peh, and it’s actually a Vav?

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: That’s amazing!

Marc: So, the problem is, over time, because people didn’t really understand what Sefer Tagin was about, and it had been mixed up in this Masoretic mixtape, you got more errors, emissions, mistranscriptions, misspellings, innovations, which tended to be additions, and they just didn’t know where they were supposed to happen.

Nehemia: By the way, this one here that I’m circling, there’s no chance without context that anybody but a scribe would know that they would think it was a Kuf.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Right? The scribe who wrote it would know that’s a Zayin. And from the context, you know it’s a Zayin because the Kuf doesn’t fit there, but it really genuinely looks like a Kuf. Especially…

Marc: The more outlandish they got, the more there is doubt over the kashrut, the validity, of the Torah.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying… well, I guess this is one of your conclusions that I know from the lecture you gave, but you’re saying that originally, no, it didn’t look like this.

Marc: It didn’t.

Nehemia: It looked something different, and that then informs you of what the purpose and function was of making that unusual-shaped letter.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, we have this problem…

Nehemia: Can you tell us what mixtape means? Can you go back to…

Marc: Oh, sorry, mixtape is a…

Nehemia: I know because I’m old enough, but the younger people may not know.

Marc: Right. A mixtape is… let’s say you have a girlfriend, and in the old days, before you had streaming and downloads and mp3s and stuff like that, you would take her favorite music, and you would put it on a cassette tape and mix the different bits of music together.

Nehemia: So, this was sort of a way of… boy, we’re that old. This was a way of sort of honoring the woman you were interested in, or maybe other people did in other contexts too. You’d hear on the radio a song, and you’d hit record, and then you hit stop at the end of the song, and then the next song came on, you know, “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” and you hit record real fast and you send her that. That’s a mixtape. So, what do you mean, “This is a mixtape of Sefer Tagin”? Or a Masoretic mixtape?

Marc: It’s a mixtape of compiled versions of Sefer Tagin. This mixtape is, they’ve taken things like the small letters… hang on, let me go back to the compiled thing. So, this mixtape is, they took all these other traditions, the small, the large, the dotted, maleh and chaser, petuchot and stumot, the special layouts for Shirat Hayam and Ha’azinu, and they bung them all together in parasha order. They took off the introduction of Sefer Tagin, they took out the descriptions of the letters… that was the most terrible thing to do, because that’s why you end up with all of these crazy forms, because they no longer…

Nehemia: So, there wasn’t just the form of the Aleph, there was a verbal description of it, and they stripped that out.

Marc: There was a written description.

Nehemia: They’re like, “You can see it! You don’t need a written description.”

Marc: Yes, exactly. [Laughter] And then over time, the description has gone, and everybody’s going, well, I didn’t know what it is, and they make stuff up. And that’s what they do.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, the real Sefer Tagin, the core bit of it, just gets buried.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: And then you get partial versions of it, as well. So, there’s all sorts of stuff. It all goes a bit wrong, and confusion reigns supreme, literally. And then, as scribal practice has become stricter and more standardized, you start to get deliberate omissions. And then eventually, in the 1800s, the tradition sort of disappears. It just goes because it’s too far out; it’s too meshunot, it’s too crazy.

Nehemia: Well, and just a practical sense, if you have people who are used to reading printed books, and then you have them go up and read from the Torah, and they see a Zayin that looks like a Kuf, they’re like, “I don’t even know what to read here.”

Marc: Yeah. But the thing is, is that all these medieval reinventions of what they think the letters are, and what they think Tagin are…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Marc: …are wrong. This is the brunch part of my PhD.

Nehemia: Wait, so tell us here, we have… I see Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Marc: We have Obi-Wan Kenobi going, “These are not the letter forms you’re looking for.” And…

Nehemia: “These are not the letter forms you are looking for.”

Marc: Exactly.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Because they’re not, at all. What actually is happening is that all of the letter forms that are being described in the Aramaic are allographs. An allograph is a variant form of the letter.

Nehemia: Give us an example from English of an allograph so that people can understand.

Marc: Well, it doesn’t really kind of work, but basically…

Nehemia: Sure, it does. Think about the letter G, how you write G when you’re writing…

Marc: Okay, so, G; sometimes you have it like that and sometimes you have it like that.

Nehemia: Yeah, guys, think about the G in the printed form, which is almost like an 8, like with two circles…

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: I don’t even know how to write that. I can read it, because I’ve been learning since kindergarten to read it. But when I write a G, it looks completely… so, that’s an allograph. It’s an allograph between different writing methods. But within a single text, you could have an allograph.

Marc: Yes, because humans aren’t robots.

Nehemia: And allo is… graph is obviously graphic, and allo is, what, different or something, I believe?

Marc: I think it’s variant.

Nehemia: Yeah, so it’s a variant form. This is a term I learned from Judith Schlanger, the greatest living paleographer of medieval Hebrew. So, you’re saying that these modified, or strange, forms are allographs that existed in ancient times. Okay.

Marc: Well, no. The modified versions are reinventions to try and understand what they originally meant, but they’re wrong because what they originally were referring to… the descriptions are referring to allographs that you can find in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: Okay, guys, the young people have the expression TLDR; too long, didn’t read. The TLDR here is that most scholars say Sefer Tagin is from the Gaonic period, let’s call that the 700s. And Marc Michaels, in his PhD, argues that the core idea of Sefer Tagin goes back to the Second Temple period. Is that right?

Marc: It goes back to just after the destruction of the Temple.

Nehemia: After the destruction? Ooh, that’s…

Marc: Just after. And there is a reason for that.

Nehemia: So, it doesn’t predate the destruction of the Temple?

Marc: It doesn’t, no. Because it actually is… well, we’re going to see.

Nehemia: Alright. So, that’s really the big idea and the major conclusion that I took away from your lecture, at least.

Marc: Yes, the major conclusion.

Nehemia: And this is very significant, because there’s a lot of scholars, guys, who study Sefer Tagin and say, “Gaonic times? No, that’s some much later thing.” And you’re saying the opposite. It’s a much earlier thing, at least in some form or another.

Marc: It’s a much earlier thing. It’s a much earlier thing, because if you actually read the Aramaic descriptions, they are describing letters that only existed in late Tanaitic times. They did not exist later on.

Nehemia: In late Tanaitic times. Tell us what it is. Give us a century.

Marc: Basically the 1st century, so it’s…

Nehemia: Because I would say late Tanaitic times is Yehudah Hanasi, which is the early 3rd century.

Marc: Yeah, well, okay. It’s fundamentally somewhere between 70 and 250.

Nehemia: Okay, 250 already brings us into the Amoraic times, if I’m not mistaken. But let’s not split hairs over that. All right.

Marc: I’m just talking about when Sefer Tagin was written, how that fits. That’s the problem; it’s difficult because there’s no definitive “this is the time.”

Nehemia: Right. And nobody said to these rabbis, “Hey, the Tanaitic times have ended, now we’re in Amoretic times.” That’s a retrospective…

Marc: Right. No one says this. But this is a Tana. Well, this is in the Tanaitic milieu.

Nehemia: So, guys, when you talk about the rabbis, let’s say the ancient rabbis, you have two periods of history. Well, you have more than two periods, but there’s the Tanaim, or singular Tana, which is up until… generally thought of up until when Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi codified the Mishnah, around the year 210. And then between 210 and 500… and all these are give or take, guys, is the Amoraim, and the Amoraim… and it’s important in the Talmud, because an Amora can disagree with another Amora, but if he disagrees with a Tana, then he has to justify it by bringing a second Tana to justify his opinion. Right? So, this is kind of an internal chronology within the Talmudic way of thinking.

So, the Amoraim are interpreting the words of the Tanaim. Sometimes they’re interpreting their own words, right? But by and large, they’re interpreting these earlier periods. And another interesting feature is, by and large, the Tanaim are writing in Hebrew, sometimes Aramaic, but usually Hebrew. And then the Amorim are almost exclusively formulated in Babylonian Aramaic. There are exceptions, of course, but anyway… All right, go ahead. So, this is Tanaitic, you’re saying?

Marc: So, this is Tanaitic.

Nehemia: Wow.

Marc: Because the descriptions of the letters are letters that you can find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And from 2017, when I discovered this, I’ve found them all.

Nehemia: And guys, an example of a Tana would be Rabbi Akiva, you might have heard of; it would be Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi, or Judah the Prince, which maybe you haven’t heard of; but Jews have. And also, Shammai and Hillel would be considered Tanaim.

Marc: The importance of the critical edition, trying to get back to an urtext was important, because if you can, then that can unlock the patterns behind the choices. So, those two things are joined at the hip.

So, in effect, these allographs have certain letters coexisting in manuscripts, and Yardeni talks about this in particular.

Nehemia: So, tell us who Ada Yardeni is.

Marc: So, Ada Yardeni was, was a wonderful paleographer, but she was also a graphic designer and a font designer, who I adore, and think was just the best thing since sliced bread. And being a graphic designer, calligrapher and scribe, I kind of follow in her footsteps.

Nehemia: So, one of the really powerful things about Ada Yardeni is, she didn’t just study the forms of the letters, she would write them out, and she learned things about… I’ll just throw out the fancy word ductus.

Marc: Ductus.

Nehemia: The ductus, or ductus; it’s the order of strokes, let’s call that. When I was in China, I paid this calligrapher to write my name, Nehemia, in Hebrew, and I wrote it down for him. He showed it to me and he said, “What’s the order of strokes?” I said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what the order of strokes is. I just write it; I don’t know what you mean! It doesn’t matter.” But in Chinese, the same exact character, to us, written with a different stroke order, means something completely different. So, in Hebrew that’s not necessarily the case, but what she would learn by writing out… and one of her great accomplishments was helping to decipher the Elephantine Papyri, which we did a whole series with Betzalel Porten, of blessed memory, on. She wrote out every letter of the Elephantine Papyri, and that was one of the ways they were able to figure out what it actually said, because it’s so difficult to read. So, Ada Yardeni… sorry, what’s her connection to this?

Marc: Ada Yardeni, she specifically talked about the coexistence, in manuscripts, of allographs…

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: And she was very… So, a lot of my work was based on Yardeni, Birnbaum, Frank Moore Cross, Naveh, Avigad, these are all greats. Malachi Beit-Arié, all these really important people, right? You can’t do it without… you know, we do stand on the shoulders of giants.

Nehemia: There you go. So, that’s a British expression, actually. I understand it was Isaac Newton who said that. Wouldn’t he say we’re dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants?

Marc: Standing on the shoulders of giants. I mean, you know, without their work…

Nehemia: And that was a jab at Robert Hook, who was actually a dwarf, his rival.

Marc: Without their previous work on paleography and the development of Hebrew scripts, I wouldn’t have known where to start. But as a graphic designer, I also do abecedaries, and I specifically do abecedaries that are multiple.

Nehemia: What are abecedaries for those who don’t…

Marc: Abecedaries are exactly what Yardeni did, which is tracing out letters to understand how they’re formed. And then have visual representation of these letters so that you can compare them against other scripts, to help take things, et cetera.

Nehemia: So, you look at a manuscript, and you say, “Oh, this is the form of Aleph,” but you keep looking on the same page and you say, “You know what, this is also an Aleph.”

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: “And then, this is a third Aleph, and they’re all on the same page.” That’s an a-BE-cedary, I always said, but I’m American.

Marc: Yeah. So, you have to…

Nehemia: That’s A-B-C-D-ary. That’s what abecedary…

Marc: Yeah, ABC-daries, I call them.

Nehemia: ABC-daries. Maybe that’s right, I don’t know.

Marc: Because I’m British.

Nehemia: I only ever saw it in writing, to be honest with you. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody say it before now.

Marc: I’m not sure, actually, I’ve heard anybody ever say it either, to be honest. But there you go. But it’s very important, and it’s very important that you do multiple letter forms. Because if you do one, that’s really dangerous, because you are not looking at the importance of these paragraphs.

Nehemia: So, I can’t under-emphasize the importance of allographs for what I do, and obviously you’re doing something maybe on a whole different level because you’re dealing with the strange letters, which are really different. But when I’m looking, for example, at a manuscript, and I see the corrector in a 10th century manuscript has a different form of the letter than the original scribe, and then I say, “Oh, wait, there’s two correctors.” But then I realize over time, if you collect enough, “Oh, those are just allographs.” Sometimes he writes his Shin like this, sometimes like that, but when you take all the letters together… and I don’t write them out. I do a lot of cropping and pasting to make the abecedaries. And I’m like, “Okay, there’s three forms of the Shin, and the original scribe had two other forms.”

So, if you give me a second here, I want to show this. And tell me if this is what you’re referring to, and then you’ll tell us how it applies to… let me share the screen real quick here. This is a book by Malachi Beit-Arié, who went through probably thousands of manuscripts, I want to say, and for each manuscript that he had a solid date for, and this is an important one here, guys. This is 903 to 904. It is the earliest undisputed date on a Hebrew bible manuscript. And this is, I suppose, apropos to what’s going on in the world right now. It’s from a place called Da Gunbadan, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing, in Iran or today in Iran…

Marc: Iran.

Nehemia: …and it was written by Yosef Ben Nimrod, or NimROD. And so, what he did is, he took the page here, right? This is the page of that manuscript, and he goes through, and he says, “That’s an Aleph. I mean, those are all very similar, right? But wait a minute; that Aleph is not the same as this Aleph.” So, here let’s zoom in. So, for example here, the bottom of the Aleph sort of curves in, and here it doesn’t curve in, it points down. And if you don’t do these abecedaries, then you might think, “Oh, so Scribe A has a curved in Aleph, and the Scribe B has sort of like this little pointy down thing.” But no! It’s the same guy; he just has variations of his letters.

Or here’s a really good example. The Gimel’s foot sort of sticks out here, but here it points down. Well, is that two different scribes? No. Those are very minor allographs compared to what you’re talking about. But this, to me, is a much bigger difference. So, does the left leg of the Hey attach to the roof or not? Well sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. He’s not consistent. So, these, I would definitely… I don’t know if you called these allographs, because maybe they’re so similar. But these are definitely allographs in my terminology.

Marc: No, no, they are allographs. They’re absolutely…

Nehemia: Okay, all right. And this is an abecedary… how do you say that?

Marc: A-B-C-dary is what I say, because it’s ABCs, you know.

Nehemia: Right, right. Well, and you could technically call this an abjadary, but whatever. Let’s not confuse the audience too much.

Marc: Yeah, that’s right. It’s a good point, abjadary.

Nehemia: Yeah, whatever. It’s an A-B-C-dary. And look at the left leg of the Tav; does it touch the roof, or doesn’t it? Well, it would be a big mistake to say, “Oh, this is Scribe A and this is Scribe B.” No, it’s the same guy who writes his letters… He’s a human; not every letter is identical, and this is important to realize the allographs. Okay, now that we understand what an allograph is, what does that have to do with the strange letters?

Marc: Well, hang on. Before we get to that, let me just talk to this. Let’s ram this home. Script really matters, right? I taught on Cambridge last week on this one. So, this is an example of one of my abecedaries.

Nehemia: You made this?

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow! And what’s the manuscript here?

Marc: So, the manuscript… I was asked to come in particularly to look at something that had a really interesting damage pattern. It was a Megillat Esther, and it was going to go into a book, a nice coffee table book, for the 50th anniversary of the Cambridge Genizah. And I said, “Yeah, it’s really interesting. It looks very pretty, but it’s also the oldest Megillah on the planet.”

Nehemia: Wow. And Megillah is a scroll of Esther written out as a scroll, not as a book form.

Marc: Yeah. So, if you can see here, you’ve got the damage pattern, and what I’ve done is reconstructed…

Nehemia: Wow.

Marc: …what it would have looked like. But also, by pairing its script here…

Nehemia: Wait a minute. Sorry, finish what you’re saying. You just said something that blew my mind. Not said something, I read it in the note there. Esther is not in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so this is the earliest ritual Esther. Not just in the Cairo Genizah, but ever.

Marc: Ever.

Nehemia: In Hebrew. Wow!

Marc: In Hebrew.

Nehemia: Wow!

Marc: Which was my discovery, which I’m really…

Nehemia: That’s a very important discovery.

Marc: It was very exciting.

Nehemia: Wow.

Marc: And there were various clues that sort of gave it away, but one of the things was particularly the script type, which is very similar to a dated ketubah. So, a ketubah is a wedding marriage document, and it’s got a date on it, right? So, that’s great. It’s a properly dated thing. So, one of the things that Beit-Arié and Engel didn’t do, they didn’t look at gitin and ktubot, and they’re actually resources that I think are completely undervalued in the Genizah.

Nehemia: So, Edna Engel and Malachi Beit-Arié are… Edna Engel is one of the greatest paleographers alive, and Malachi Beit-Arié passed away a couple years ago. He was more of a codicologist but also dabbled in paleography. And you’re saying… so, why didn’t they look at gitin, or ghets, divorce certificates?

Marc: They were generally interested in the codices, because they had colophons…

Nehemia: So, one of their approaches, especially Beit-Arié, was: if it doesn’t have a date, it’s not very useful because I want to compare other things to it. And how do I know what the date of that thing is, if I don’t have… Meaning, I have to start with something where I can put a pin in it, meaning, I need points on like, you know, if you think of a map. I put a pin on the map, and in this case it’s a date, so if I don’t have a date, then it’s not useful. But a ketubah and a ghet does have a date. So, it’s a bit surprising.

Marc: It does. It’s just… they had about three-and-a-half-thousand manuscripts, which is a lot of stuff. I think were dated in filedata, which is a database, but ghettim and ketubot didn’t feature as much, and they were more concerned with codices. Anyway, that’s…

Nehemia: Well, and Beit-Arié is a codicologist, so he’s actually interested in the structure of the codex, and the choirs, and, you know, meaning, that’s part of… And look, that comes from a long tradition of Latin codicology and Greek codicology. So, they were like, “All right, people, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. People have been doing this for centuries in Europe. Let’s just do it for Hebrew manuscripts.” But they weren’t looking at marriage certificates?

Marc: Yeah, it’s unexplored and undervalued, and I find quite useful in my bibliographical activity.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, going back to Sefer Tagin. So, the allographs; the type of allographs that I found were archaic or older forms that survived alongside more recent developments in how the script was written. Semi-ligatures, which are basically when the scribe rushes to the next letter and creates a little uptick, or sometimes a downtick as well. And there’s two types; one is de-akim and one is de-a’kim with an Ayin, if you can do the proper Ayin sound. One is raised up and one is bent backwards, downwards from the right.

Nehemia: So, guys, there’s two words even in some dialects of ancient Hebrew would be pronounced almost identically, and this has to be deliberate, that they want similar sounding words just to mess with you.

Marc: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: Meaning, it seemed poetic to them, right?

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: In other words, you have… that is literally standing up, and that is bent, and you’re saying one is going up and one is going down. So, those are two forms. Semi-ligatures, okay. And those exist in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Marc: Because they’re rushing to the next letter. That’s how the medial forms in the letters were created anyway. The original Tzadik, for example, Tzadik sofit, the final Tzadik, went down like that, and then in the middle of the letter it curved upwards, and that’s how we got those letters. Or decorative slab serif tagins, which are protrusions from the monoline, and there’s three kinds.

Nehemia: Okay, what’s a monoline? Tell us that.

Marc: Right, I’m going to have to show you in a minute. I’m going to show you. It’s difficult. So, when Sefer Tagin talks about chad karna, which is Aramaic, means one horn, it means a tip. It’s an approach stroke. You mentioned Judith Schlanger. She calls this the atac de plume. It’s when you go around like this.

Nehemia: She’s a French speaker. So, what is that in English?

Marc: It’s an approach stroke, when you come down the letter. And then karnei, which are horns, that’s a triangular shape. I’m going to show you those in a minute. Ziyunin, which unfortunately has got a different meaning in Modern Hebrew, is a kind of tripartite dagger knot shape.

Nehemia: So, this comes from the word Zayin, which is one of the letters. And so, ziyun is an ancient Hebrew, medieval Hebrew in this case… or no, actually ancient. What is ziyun? How do you translate that?

Marc: Ziyun is a weapon or an armament.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: In what it meant back then. That’s what it meant back then.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, here are the three, sort of tagin things. So, you can see on the Reish, the monoline is just a curve round. And then you get this little approach stroke, which is the karna.

Nehemia: Can you point to that on the screen? Because I’m not sure what we’re looking at, sorry. Oh, there you go, okay. So, that, I would call that a serif. You’re saying that’s an approach stroke, okay.

Marc: It’s an approach stroke. It’s an approach stroke; it is a serif, in our understanding of serifs, but it’s a slab serif, because it’s not pretty…

Nehemia: And guys, what’s a serif? So, the font he has here on the screen is… what is this, Arial, or something? What is this?

Marc: It’s Calibri. It’s a sans serif.

Nehemia: Calibri, okay. So, it’s a sans serif, which is without serif. And then my favorite font, because I’m old, is Times New Roman, which is a serif font.

Marc: You can have a favorite font, it should be Bembo.

Nehemia: It should be what?

Marc: Bembo.

Nehemia: I’ve never heard of Bembo.

Marc: Bembo is the most beautiful serif font you’ll ever see.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: It’s Italian. Anyway, sorry. We own Helvetica, the movie, that’s how much we’re geeks.

Nehemia: The movie? There’s a movie about the font?

Marc: There’s a movie about typeface. Yes.

Nehemia: You’re kidding me.

Marc: No, I’m not. Look, that’s how you can tell a geek; ask them if they own Helvetica, the movie.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Okay. Meanwhile, the second shape, here, with the Dalet, these are karnei, right? These are horns, because they double back on themselves. There’s several ways of doing them in terms of the ductus, or ductus. And then here, at the end, you have got this, and we talked about monoline. So, a Zayin, originally, in the very oldest Dead Sea Scrolls, right? So, the archaic ones, the early Hasmonean… Zayin is a straight line. Over time, it gains a little; it’s the de-akim, so it goes a stroke downwards. But then, towards the Herodian period, it gets this little hat. These are the ziyunin. It gets this little hat decoration.

Nehemia: So, originally a ziyun was a little decoration on the top of a Zayin?

Marc: Yes. And different letters, as well. And this is the important thing for you and your…

Nehemia: Ah! Okay.

Marc: So, when Matthew talks about the jot or tittle, he’s not talking about the jot or tittle. A jot, in the Greek, he’s actually saying “Iota” and “kariah“. And “Iota” is the letter Yud, and you can see right at the bottom down here, that is a Yud in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: So, help me out; this is the letter Yud.

Marc: This is the letter Yud. It’s the smallest letter, and this is how it was formed in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Marc: So, when he’s talking about…

Nehemia: So, guys, what you’re seeing here is one and two, that’s what’s called the ductus or the ductus. So, in other words, the first stroke is what he has written here as one, and the second stroke is two. And how does he know that? Because he’s a scribe, and he can figure these things out. That’s why I’m a consumer and not a producer of paleography, at least not in the sense of ductus. All right.

Marc: So, when Matthew is talking about Iota, he’s talking about Yud, which is formed by a line and then a sort of sideways karnei form, a triangle.

Nehemia: And karnei is a horn.

Marc: Is a horn. It’s horns, plural.

Nehemia: Horns. So, these two things are horns, okay.

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, chad karnei is one horn?

Marc: Right. So, chad karnei is one horn, which is what he calls a kariah. So, our approach stroke…

Nehemia: Ohhh.

Marc: Yes, is a horn. And kariah is the Greek for horn. He is using the same terminology as the guy from Sefer Tagin.

Nehemia: So, this is something… wait a minute, wait a minute. So, kariah is the Greek word for horn.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay, hold on. So, this is important, guys. Let’s stop here for a second. So, let me share the screen here for a second, if I may. This is important. So, let’s go back to the Greek here. So, we have here Matthew 5:18. “Verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” And jot in the Greek here is iota, which, that’s my Israeli pronunciation. Apologies to the Greek people. And tittle, which is kariah. And kariah, when we look in the Greek dictionary, is a horn, from the word keras, and it could also be the antenna of a crayfish or an insect, anything projecting like a horn.

Marc: It’s a protrusion from the monoline.

Nehemia: Okay. So, now I don’t know the answer to this question; the Hebrew word for horn is keren. It’s hard to believe that keras is not related to keren.

Marc: I suspect that there is a relationship.

Nehemia: Or, if it’s not, this is what’s called phonosemantic matching. That’s where you’re trying to translate a word, and you already have a word that has a similar meaning to begin with, so you choose that word. So, the example I love is, in Biblical Hebrew, tur is to spy out the land, latur et ha’aretz, and in Modern Hebrew tur is to tour, tourist, tayar. And that’s an example of phonosemantic matching. They say, we’ve got to come up with a word for tourist. We already have a word that means to spy out the land, and here you’re doing it for leisure, not for espionage. So, they chose that word in Modern Hebrew tayar, based on the biblical tur. And then the symbol of the Israeli tourism industry is two of the ancient Israelite spies carrying the grapes, right? Because that’s what’s described; it’s actually the midrashic interpretation that describes, but we don’t need to go into that. So, that’s phonosemantic matching.

So, kariah here is presumably phonosemantic matching of the Hebrew word keren. Meaning, that it must be; it’d be too big of a coincidence. Wow! So, in other words, there’s this Hebrew concept that’s being used that the Greeks are like, “Okay, well we have a word very similar to that, that has almost the same meaning. Let’s use that word.” Wow! Amazing!

Marc: So, they are describing these protrusions from the monoline. That’s the point.

Nehemia: What did he mean by the Yud? By the iota? Is that also a seraph? Or is it just the letter Yud?

Marc: That’s just the letter Yud.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Marc: That’s the most common version of a letter Yud.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Funny enough, it’s not the one that Sefer Tagin is describing, because that’s the really common one.

Nehemia: Okay. Wow, this is amazing stuff. So, when is your book coming out? Because I think a lot of people are going to be very interested to learn… You know, there are these secret meanings that may go back to the 1st century, and you’ve uncovered them, and they’re going to be available in your book. And am I right? Up until your discovery, nobody knew this. Am I right?

Marc: Nobody knew this.

Nehemia: Okay. So, that means this is a big discovery.

Marc: Very few people heard… Anything written about Sefer Tagin says it’s a kabbalistic work from Gaonic times.

Nehemia: Was there such a thing as Kabbalah in Gaonic times? I mean, Kabbalah, I think it was…

Marc: It probably wasn’t known as kabbalistic then, but it’s become known as kabbalistic. And this is the thing; this is very important. It doesn’t invalidate these kabbalistic interpretations that are layered on top of it and these compiled versions of seven. That doesn’t invalidate them at all. But it’s not what the original author intended. What he intended was to say, “The Temple’s been destroyed. I want to put the Temple into the Torah. I want to give some meaning to letters and themes that will bring out the fact that God is still here, but if you don’t behave, He’ll punish you just like He did with the Temple.” You know, this is what he was trying to do, this coded theodicy. And yeah, nobody knew.

Nehemia: Wow. So, that’s a very important discovery, guys. We’ll look forward to… for his book being released. Is there a timeframe?

Marc: Well, I would probably say, because I’m having to edit it, and be putting all the stuff back that I had edited out for PhD, and also finish the critical edition with the new multi-spectral imagery. So, it’s difficult to say exactly when, because all these things go through a very long production cycle. However, this presentation is on Academia. So, you can link to that. That’s on the…

Nehemia: Academia.edu. We’ll link to that, okay.

Marc: Yeah. And also, my PhD is controlled access, because it’s got a few images in that need copyright clearance for the book, which I have now, but I didn’t have it for the PhD. And also, there’s going to be a book. But if somebody wants to get the PhD for their own private study, there’s a link. You can go to Cambridge and ask for it, and they’ll send you it as long as you don’t use it for nefarious purposes.

Nehemia: All right, wonderful. Thank you so much. This is an amazing conversation, and we’re going to have to have you back on when the book comes out. And then we’re going to squeeze you for every mystical interpretation of the Samekhs and the Ayins and the Nun sofits, and whatever.

Marc: Yeah. There is a lot. There is, the Qof Debuqa article is out. The pe melufefet article is in train…

Nehemia: We’ll link to…

Marc: Because the book takes so long, I am doing bits of it as articles…

Nehemia: That’s smart.

Marc: …to get stuff out to people, so that they can get an idea. And I’m happy to give talks, like I’ve just done, kind of thing, and go through the presentation properly.

Nehemia: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Marc Michaels. We appreciate it.

Marc: And lovely to see you again, Nehemia.

—

Marc: So, for example, Dalet. Dalet de lehon, Dalet tagin karnei. This is very important. It means the Dalet that has four tagin, consisting of karnei, horns. Now if you look at the development of a Dalet, it starts off and it’s got two protrusions from the monoline, and then it gradually starts to have this doubling back. And then it ends up with this double karnei as a quite rare form, and generally in Sefer Tagin he’s talking about the rare forms, the rare allographs that turn up.

Nehemia: And so, he doesn’t need to describe the common ones, because those are just everywhere.

Marc: Exactly. He’s describing… He’s describing special ones, and then he’s going to put a meaning on the special ones.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, there are 11, and it’s figured as 10 plus 1, and they all appear in either of the word adam or dam. Adam meaning man, or dam meaning blood, and they’re all about avoiding the murder or the shedding of innocent blood, and the consumption of blood, which is not allowed.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Esther 3
Numbers 10:35-36
Matthew 5:18
Joshua 4; Deuteronomy 27
Mishnah Pirkei Avot 1:1
Joshua 8:30-35
John 7:53-8:11
Mishnah Peah 2:6

BOOKS MENTIONED
The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #145 – Decorative Doohickeys
Support Team Study – Paleo-Hebrew and Papal Parchment Repair
Support Team Study – The Dog Ate My Torah Scroll 
Hebrew Voices #142 – Sign Language of the Synagogue
Hebrew Voices #102 – The Scribe’s Toolbox
Hebrew Voices #181 – The Woman Who Writes Torah Scrolls: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Woman Who Writes Torah Scrolls: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #188 – Writing a Torah Scroll: Part 1
Support Team Study – Writing a Torah Scroll: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 4
Hebrew Voices #187 – Second Temple Hebrew in the Middle Ages: Part 1
Support Team Study – Second Temple Hebrew in the Middle Ages: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #91 – The Aramaic Name of God

OTHER LINKS
Marc’s website
Marc’s PhD thesis
Presentation used in the video
Oldest megillah in the world
Qof Devuka article

The post Hebrew Voices #245 – Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of Daring To Be Different: Part 2, where Nehemia continues his discussion with Tanakh-only teacher Israel Horowitz about the fine line between devout Torah observance and the potential for counterproductive extremism in pursuit of what the Torah says.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
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 | TuneIn
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The post SNEAK PEEK! Daring To Be Different: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #244 - Daring To Be Different: Part 1, Nehemia brings on Tanakh-only teacher Israel Horowitz to discuss how ancient superstitions became the basis for Rabbinic laws, why arguments based on majority rule contradict the Torah, and how we should be overcoming the rulings of our earthly fathers rather than our Heavenly Father.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Israel: If I had to respect Moses or Rabbi Eliezer, I’m going with Moses, right? And the point is that they seem to not understand the hierarchy here, which is that you’re going to have to throw someone under the bus. Either it’s going to be Rashi or it’s going to be Noah. I’d rather throw Rashi under the bus than throw Noah under the bus. Apparently, you’d rather throw Noah under the bus than Rashi. So, I think it comes down to that… It’s impossible to maintain allegiance to the written Torah and the oral Torah when they contradict each other.

—

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today, once again, with Israel Horowitz. He was raised ultra-Orthodox and found out, in his words, that the written Torah is the way to go and has been teaching and practicing written Torah ever since. Shalom, Israel. How are you?

Israel: Shalom. It’s good to see you again.

Nehemia: Yeah, it’s good to have you back on the program. We had a really interesting conversation last time, got some really good feedback. So, I think one of the big developments since we last spoke is you got married. Am I right?

Israel: That would definitely be it, yes.

Nehemia: So, what I should say as a Jew is mazal tov, but that’s a very problematic statement that we can discuss if you’d like.

Israel: Good luck.

Nehemia: Well, mazal tov is good constellation. Mazal is a constellation in ancient Hebrew. And what the alternative is, is siman tov, which is good omen. Right? You say mazal tov ve’siman tov, ve’siman tov umazal tov. Right? So, it’s good constellation, good omen. And omen meaning, like a comet, or something like that, right? So, it just goes to show how deeply rooted, let’s say, superstition is in Jewish culture.

Israel: Oh yeah. Zodiacs, everything. They got it all. The zodiac signs. Yeah. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between Judaism and eastern religions.

Nehemia: I gave an academic lecture a couple years back, and I’m writing a paper about it when I get around to it. And I cite, there, this rabbi… I want to say from the 12th century or so, maybe it’s 13th; I don’t remember, it’s been a while. And he’s discussing the question about whether the constellations actually affect us. And he says, “Well, look, if the constellations affected how you live your life, then there’d be more Jews in certain professions. Because there are Jews born every month of the year. And the fact that there’s no Jews in these particular professions,” that’s my interest there, because he’s talking about parchment making, right? So, he’s like, “How come you don’t have any Jewish parchment makers if there are Jews born every month of the year?” But he’s got to justify it, like, because to his Jewish audience he’s speaking to, it’s like these are just givens, that the constellations affect us.

And we have this passage in Jeremiah, maybe we can discuss that. It’s a very famous passage, Jeremiah 10. It’s Jeremiah 10… well, he starts in 10:1. I’ll read the JPS. Let me actually share my screen here, show people what I have here. So, he has, “Hear the word which the LORD has spoken to you, O house of Israel. Thus says the LORD: Do not learn to go the way of the nations and not to be dismayed by portents in the sky. Let the nations be dismayed by them, for the laws of the nations are delusions.” And then he starts talking about idols, you know, statues and stuff.

But, you know, Deuteronomy 18 talks about not learning the ways of the nations, the divination and such, and so, Jeremiah is directly referring to Deuteronomy 18, about learning the ways of the nations. And so, they look in the skies, and they see an omen, and they see, you know, constellations, and they think, “Oh, okay, that’s going to be bad because the bad constellation.”

Israel: Right.

Nehemia: And he said those are nonsense; they’re hevel, they’re vapor.

Israel: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you see so much of that superstition. Yeah, it’s kind of concerning. A hundred percent. Obviously, the Torah itself cautions against all forms of witchcraft, superstition, worship of the constellations and things like that. And ultimately, these ideas are not even found within the Torah, or the Tanakh, for that matter. Yet you have that as a mainstream belief in Judaism, and you wonder, “How did that development even take place?”

If we’re told this is the foundation of your religion, and you’re actually not supposed to change it. And then suddenly you look thousands of years down the road, and they’ve completely deviated and it’s been assimilated into the religion. So, I mean, one of the examples, and Jeremiah brings it up as well, with the queen of heaven being worshipped by the Israelites, and then you have on Shabbat, for example, they’re welcoming the Queen of Shabbat, the Shabbat bride. And even within the prayers, they sometimes refer to God in the feminine. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. Like, they say…

Nehemia: Give me an example of that. I don’t know that off the top of my head. I know there’s a passage in Numbers where it’s been argued that God is feminine in one verse, but that’s a bit complicated. But give me that from the prayers. I’m not familiar with that.

Israel: So, for example, they have a prayer called Modim, which is when they say, “Bless you God,” they say, “modim anachnu lakh”. So, instead of saying lekha, they say lakh. Or very often, like, they’ll use feminine ways to describe God.

Nehemia: So, I think in the original context, lakh there is just an Aramaicism. In other words, lakh is the masculine singular. So, for the audience, in Spanish they have singular and plural you, unlike in… well, in spoken English we have you and you guys, where I come from, and in the South it’s all y’all or y’all. So, in Hebrew, there’s not only singular and plural, there’s masculine and feminine. So, there’s four forms of you. So, what Israel’s referring to is, lakh is… in standard, let’s say, Biblical Hebrew, lakh is feminine. But in later, let’s say, Rabbinical Hebrew, you have a heavy influence of Aramaic, and lakh is just you for masculine as well. So, I’m not sure that… Are there people who say that that’s feminine?

Israel: Yeah, that’s why… I didn’t know that.

Nehemia: So, there’s different linguistic layers within Hebrew literature, and they’re mixing the linguistic layers. They do that quite a bit.

Israel: Okay, well, I mean, that’s good to know. It’s good to know that it’s just an Aramaic thing, because I was told, you know, sometimes we refer to God in the feminine based off of context. We’re speaking to the femininity of God, or something like that, or the Shekhinah.

Nehemia: So, here what you have is some modern rabbi who doesn’t know Hebrew linguistics. And let’s talk a minute about your upbringing, because in my upbringing, I was also raised with an ultra-Orthodox education, and grammar, dikduk, was something that women did. It was beneath men, because men were studying Talmud. And I look back, and I’m like, “Boy, no wonder they were so ignorant of language, because they didn’t consider it worthwhile. But how can you even understand the Talmud if you don’t understand the language, let alone the Tanakh?”

And here’s an example where they’re looking back, through the lens of Kabbalah, at different linguistic layers and trying to find some Kabbalistic features, like God is feminine, and coming to weird conclusions, let’s put it that way. All right, so, tell us about your upbringing. So, where were you raised? I don’t know if we discussed that last time.

Israel: Yeah, we discussed it a bit. But I was raised in Los Angeles, so, it’s not really the hub of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. But…

Nehemia: A lot of people don’t realize that Los Angeles is something like… am I wrong? There’s like hundreds of thousands of Israelis, not just the Jews…

Israel: Yeah.

Nehemia: … in the LA metropolitan area?

Israel: Absolutely. Yeah, there’s a lot of Israelis. There’s a ton of Jews here. And there’s Orthodox community as well, Hasidic community. I was raised in the ultra-Orthodox community, in the Hasidic community as well. And pretty much going through that, I saw a lot of benefits. More because of their extremism. And I say it because, for a time I didn’t value the extremism. But now I tend to value it a bit more, because…

Nehemia: You’re going to have to explain it. But let’s back up. For the audience who doesn’t know… I have to explain this to my wife sometimes. Like last week, she was like, “Wait. Hasidic ultra-Orthodox and Haredi; isn’t that the same thing?” So, let’s do some order here, la’asot seder. What is ultra-Orthodox? What is Hasidic? Which Hasidic variety were you educated in?

Israel: Yeah, I mean, again, to an outsider, these distinctions are not that significant, because they’re really not. It’s all variations of the same thing. Within the bubble of Orthodoxy, there are definitely claimed to be big differentiations between these groups. But they really are pretty much the same groups of Haredi, ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic. They’re all very tight-knit, ultra-observant of what they call the Torah, which is really the Talmud and the Halakha and the Kabbalah and all that.

But yeah, I mean, the differences, according to them, would be that while the yeshiva people put more of an emphasis on Talmudic study, the Hasidic people put more of an emphasis on the spiritual connection to God, which is through prayer and song. So, again, it’s molded itself and morphed into each other a lot. So, I really don’t see much of the difference. It almost comes down more to garb, and like, you know, the…

Nehemia: Not almost, meaning, in some cases it’s literally garb. But so, I’ll give you my understanding of the different, let’s say, persuasions. Let’s say this is how it is in Israel more; you have a broad category, which is called Haredi, which is translated as ultra-Orthodox. Haredi literally means shakers, because they quake, or shake, before God. It’s a term they lifted from the Tanakh. And they distinguish between ultra-Orthodox and modern Orthodox. And the difference is, historically, that the modern Orthodox said, “Okay, modernity, we don’t have a problem with that. We’ll embrace it and incorporate it into the Orthodox lifestyle.” And the ultra-Orthodox said, “No, everything freezes in time.” And the famous phrase was, “chadash asur min ha’Torah”, “anything new is forbidden from the Torah.” Which is kind of a pun because it’s an ancient phrase, but it’s referring to new grain that’s eaten before the Omer offering. But now they’re applying it to anything of modernity.

So, you look at the ultra-Orthodox, and they’re dressed in, like, 18th century, more or less, garb, or they’re wearing hats from the 1920s, and you’re like, “Why do you wear those hats?” And then if you go really deep into the rabbit hole, or the rabbi hole, I suppose, you’ll hear people say, you know, “There’s ancient references to Jewish garb, and the kapata, the long clothing is what Jews wore in ancient times.” Which seems extremely unlikely to me. But in other words, whenever they were coming out against what was called the Enlightenment, which the modern Orthodox embraced, more or less, and the ultra-Orthodox rejected, they’re like, “Okay, it freezes here in time. If it’s, you know, 1795,” or whatever year it was, “we have to continue to dress like it’s 1795,” with some modifications. Right? Meaning, the reality is, if you look into the fine details, fashion changes even in the last 20, 30 years. But in the broader big scope, they’re wearing the big fur hats, the Hasidic Jews, because that’s what their ancestors wore, you know, hundreds of years ago when the Enlightenment started to encroach upon their, as they saw it, upon their control. So, you have ultra-Orthodox and modern Orthodox.

And then in Israel, you have something in between, which is half-jokingly called chardal. Chardal literally means mustard, but it means ultra-Orthodox nationalist, or something like this, right? Dati leumi – national religious. So, you have national religious, which is the modern Orthodox; they wear the knit kippahs. And people don’t realize what a big deal it is, whether your kippah, your skullcap, is knitted or if it’s made of a solid piece of whatever, felt or plastic or whatever. It’s a really big deal to them.

So, the modern Orthodox are the knitted kippahs, also called national religious in Israel, and then there’s the ultra-Orthodox, and then you have sort of a mix between them, which is becoming more, I’d say, widespread in Israel now. Yeah, Israelis tend to be much more extremist than Americans. So, like, when I was growing up, I went to an ultra-Orthodox school, and there were two kids in the class who had televisions in their house. I was one of them. So, all the kids came to my house to watch television, and then condemned me for being an idolater because I had a TV in my house. But they came to my house to watch.

Yeah, so, in Israel, what I’m told by ultra-orthodox is, they have a computer, a laptop, hidden in the back room for their kids to watch videos. Right? But if the neighbors find out, the kids will be kicked out of school. Like, I could openly have a television and I was ridiculed, but in Israel you have to hide it.

Israel: Yeah. No, there’s definitely a lot of that. What’s funny about the “you cannot have new grain until the Omer offering,” I guess we won’t be able to change our clothing until they bring the Omer offering.

Nehemia: Well, no, so…

Israel: It’s all tied into the Messiah.

Nehemia: So, they’ve reinterpreted the concept. In other words, when it’s talking about in Leviticus 23, just to give people the background, is you harvest the grain, and you’re not allowed to eat that; that’s called chadash, new grain. You can’t eat it until the Omer offering is brought, and so the phrase is, “that which is new is forbidden from the Torah,” but only up until the Omer offering.

Israel: Exactly…

Nehemia: But now they apply it to their own way of life.

Israel: Yeah, but using the metaphor, there’s got to be a point in which the Omer offering is brought, and then we can change our clothes. So, I don’t know when…

Nehemia: No, see, you’re pressing the metaphor.

Israel: Yes, exactly.

Nehemia: Now, it’s a metaphor taken out of context, so…

Israel: Like all of the Rabbinic statements.

Nehemia: So, tell me about your upbringing. Did you have a television? Did you…

Israel: No, no.

Nehemia: Like, what was your…

Israel: Yeah, we did not have a television. But yeah, it’s funny that you mentioned the 18th century garb, which is really just European garb, or like, Polish, Hungarian garb, which they claim is holy in some respect. And then they also would tell us how in Egypt, the Jewish people did not change their Jewish names, and they did not change their Jewish language, and they did not change their Jewish clothing.

Nehemia: Which is, by the way, not true! Joseph had an Egyptian name, right? He kept the name Yosef, but he also had the name, you know, Tzafnat Paneach, right? And we just… we just had Purim, which we know we could talk about, and Esther was Hadassah. Esther was her pagan name.

Israel: Right, yeah. Exactly. So, obviously that’s not true. But besides that, they would claim that their, you know, shtreimel fur hat was equivalent to the Jews not changing their garb in Egypt, and whatever. And then they would give us drawings in preschool, and like, when they would give us coloring books it would have little pictures of Joseph and his brothers with long payes and shtreimels, like Hasidic Jews as biblical figures. So, it’s clearly…

Nehemia: So, I’ve shared the story that when I was a kid, we had the Passover Haggadah, and the ancient Israelites were dressed in Hasidic garb, a hundred percent. And look; how literally did they take that? Well, as a kid, you don’t know any better, right? You’re like, “All right, that must be that…” I mean, you don’t even question it, right? Like, what you see today is what must have been in ancient times. And then, this is one of, sort of, the rude awakenings that I had, and it sounds like you had, is, you’re like, “Wait a minute; what we’re being told exists today, and always existed, is kind of itself is the innovation.” Right? So, in other words, they’re against innovation; the new is forbidden from the Torah, but their whole way of life is an innovation.

Israel: Exactly. That gets to what I wanted to say about the extremism part, which is that, if you go to that point of extreme, which is, we cannot innovate beyond the point that God wants us to innovate. And of course, they claim it’s the will of God that you wear a certain hat, which is ridiculous. But if we talk about what the actual will of God is, as defined in the Torah, which you shall not add or subtract to that document, they’re actually the innovators by creating 5,000 new laws and concepts and ideologies that are nowhere to be found in the foundational text.

So, in one sense, I was attracted to that hardline stance, and I do think in many ways they’ve managed to shield themselves from the problems of secularism. At the same time, as you pointed out, it ends up coming out covertly as they hide the computer in the back room. They’re not actually able to deal with secularism because they’re too afraid of it, and they’d rather avoid it than deal with it head on.

Nehemia: So, I want to talk about secularism, but go back to your upbringing. So, which Hasidic sect were you affiliated with or educated by?

Israel: It wasn’t a particular one because there’s not enough Hasidim in LA. So, it was just like a Hasidic school with all the Hasidim in LA went there, and then there were some non-Hasidim. So, my family was…

Nehemia: Was your family Hasidic?

Israel: No, my family was not Hasidic. But this was like the most religious school in LA, because the Hasidim are obviously upholding the most high standard of, you know, insulation and all that. And it was like a smaller school as well. So, yeah, they were speaking Yiddish and everything.

Nehemia: Oh wow, so, you speak Yiddish?

Israel: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I speak fluent Yiddish.

Nehemia: Oh wow! Okay. I know like ten words of Yiddish.

Israel: Yeah?

Nehemia: Or maybe 20 or 30, right? But I don’t know a whole lot of Yiddish. So, in my upbringing, in my school, most of the people were what they call in Israel “Litvish”, meaning, they were non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox, and I think I had one rebbe who was… no, maybe two rebbes who were Hasidic. Like homeroom teacher rabbis. One was Gur, and I couldn’t tell you what the other one was. But they were considered kind of like, well, we sort of tolerate them, but they’re kind of like the spiritual stuff.

And like you said, so, the Hasidic have an emphasis on spirituality, which we should give them some credit for, and the Litvish, which aren’t necessarily from Lithuania, but that’s the term in Israel that’s taken hold, the Litvak or Lithuanian approach, not necessarily of ethnicity, is more of an intellectual. Like my father used to say, you know, the Amaratzim, they’re kind of uneducated peasants, the Hasidim.

And then there’s an exception to the rule, which is Chabad. Which is known… well, maybe we could talk about that a little bit. Chabad, or Lubavitch Hasidim, are known for their intellectual pursuits, but they’re kind of like the exception to the rule within the Hasidic world.

Israel: Yeah. Again, from the point that I’m at, I just kind of laugh at it all because it’s so minor to me.

Nehemia: It’s six is one, half a dozen of the other.

Israel: It’s just hilarious. But… yeah.

Nehemia: I think it’s important for people to understand what these terms are. Look, I mean, it’s like you and I would… if we were to talk about, you know, the difference between Baptist and, I don’t know Southern Baptist, and American Baptist, and I don’t know the difference, I won’t lie. I know some jokes about it, but that’s all I really know. The substance there, I couldn’t tell you what… Look, I’ve spoken to pastors who are pastors of some churches, and they don’t know the difference. They’re like, “Well, there was an historic split a hundred years ago. There’s not really any…” But sometimes there are profound differences, right? But to you and me, maybe it’s not that different, right?

Israel: Right. Yeah. So, basically, pretty much, my father was of the Litvish discipline, so, the yeshiva world, but, you know, he also had, like, a feel for the Hasidic view. So…

Nehemia: Okay.

Israel: …seeing that the Hasidic school was the most insular kind of religious school in the city, he sent us there. But then, for high school and post-high school, I went to the yeshiva, the Litvish yeshivas, so relating more to Lakewood and Baltimore, and like that whole scene. Whereas, you know, elementary school was spent more among the Hasidim, like Gur and Satmer and all these different groups.

Nehemia: So, you said that one of the things you learned that was good from the ultra-Orthodox was extremism, and I want to challenge you on that. And maybe this is just, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I was definitely an extremist when I was younger and have come to not… Tell us what extremism is and why it’s a good thing.

Israel: I’ll tell you what it means. It means that I grew up my entire life as a kid always being different than everyone else. And when I walked down the street, I was a little 10-year-old boy with a kippah the size of my head, and payes coming down the side of my head, and tzitzit sticking out. And we knew that Hollywood was a shanda, and it was disgusting, and, you know, the way in which society operates with the latent pornography everywhere, and all the imagery and the culture; we knew that it was unholy and that we were different than all that.

And I find myself in my adulthood circling back to that, really, which is that, it’s not wrong, you know. Like, society is extremely flawed, and when you move past all the traditional values without any care for preserving, right, the orthodoxy… which I would just say, preserve the Torah and you have everything there. But the reality is, you do need to maintain family, and you do need to have many children. And you do need to maintain marriages. And you do need to distance yourself from the promiscuous lifestyle of the rest of the world. And you do need to be different than everyone else.

What’s funny to me is, though, I realized, well, even orthodox Judaism is not good enough, you know? Like, I have to be different than them, too. So, I kind of just find myself going to the logical conclusion, which it like; if everyone’s wrong, maybe you’re wrong too. You know, I guess that’s kind of, like…

Nehemia: Wait, wait, who’s you? Yourself? Or the orthodox?

Israel: No. The ultra-Orthodox. Because, you know, I grew up believing that everyone in the world was wrong…

Nehemia: Okay.

Israel: … except for me and my community of ultra-Orthodox Jews. And then I said, “Okay, fair enough, like, you make a good case for that.” And when I say wrong, I don’t mean that everything about everyone is wrong. I just mean that like, ultimately, the way of the world, the way of, say, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism, Communism, right; all the different isms in the world, they’re not… they don’t measure up to the truth of Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism. Well, then, what if Orthodox Judaism is wrong too? And that’s kind of where I had to question, which was like, “Okay this is pretty ironclad, but at the same time I’m seeing the same hypocrisy here. I’m seeing the same corruption here, and the same immorality.” And again, as you pointed out, hiding the truth, being afraid to face the world and things like that. And so, it just kind of led me to the logical conclusion, which is, well, it seems like all institutions are corrupted, yours included.

Nehemia: So, this is something that has been sometimes called the numbers argument, and it’s a bit ironic. So, when Jews have these encounters with Christian missionaries, one of the arguments will be, and has historically been, “Well, there’s over a billion Christians and there’s only 15 or 20 million Jews. Like, you’re standing against the current of history. History is like this massive river, and how do you Jews think you have the… why would you think you’re right? Surely, you know, a billion people is more likely to be right than the 15 or 20 million.” That’s their argument, right?

And of course, the Jewish response is, “Well, there’s a billion Hindus, and you don’t worship cows. And there’s a billion Muslims, and you could argue, well, there’s two billion Christians,” or, you know, whatever. We could now start splitting hairs about what the numbers are. But the Jewish position has been, in these engagements, “Well, numbers don’t matter.” But then when you speak out, and I’ve seen this in your videos on TikTok, you’ll get people in the comments who will say, “Well, how do you have the gall, the chutzpah, to think that you’re right and all these rabbis are wrong? Their numbers prove they’re right.” And it’s not just numbers today, but numbers over time, really, is what they’re saying.

So, how do you have the chutzpah to think you’re right and all these rabbis are wrong? I’d like a real answer on that. I can tell you how I think that, but I think we probably have different approaches.

Israel: Okay, yeah, I’m looking forward to hearing your answer as well. Obviously, immediately what comes to mind is Exodus 23:2.

Nehemia: Oh, let’s read it. I love reading verses.

Israel: Yeah, I mean, that’s just one of my favorite verses.

Nehemia: Exodus 23:2. And here we’ve got to just tell the audience that I feel like in some of the translations, there’s a different verse numbering. But no, I’m looking here and King James has the same one as the Hebrew. Okay.

Israel: Good. I like when they’re aligned. Yeah, sometimes they’re like… it’s so annoying, like one verse…

Nehemia: At least according to my software they’re the same verse. Do you have, like, a Tanakh there you can pull up or a computer…

Israel: Absolutely, yeah, I got the…

Nehemia: … to read that?

Israel: I got that book right here so… yeah, let’s…

Nehemia: And this is an important one also to the Rabbinical perspective. In other words, what they do is something very clever. What they do is, they take the verse that disproves their entire position, and then they plant their flag on that and they say, “This proves our position.”

Israel: It’s the out of context verses.

Nehemia: It’s not just out of context; of all the verses you could have chosen to prove your position, you chose the one that disproves it the most. But that was, as we say in Yiddish, davka. In other words, it was very deliberate that they chose this verse, because if they don’t, it’ll be used against them. So, they’re actively appropriating the verse.

Israel: They had to reclaim it. It’s like…

Nehemia: A hundred percent, that’s what they’re doing. They’re appropriating the very verse that disproves their position. All right, so, let’s read that.

Israel: Yeah. I just… I have to give the example that came to mind. When black people reclaim the N-word, you know, it’s kind of like that.

Nehemia: Okay, I don’t know as much about that as you probably do, but okay. I might be too old for that cultural reference but go ahead.

Israel: So, we got here, Exodus 23:2. “You shall not be after the majority for evils and you shall not respond over a dispute to turn after the majority to pervert.” Right? So, clearly in the case of evil and perversion, when the majority is wrong, do not follow them. Of course, the rabbis take the last three words of the verse, turn after the majority, right? So, after the majority to turn.

Nehemia: Right. And they actually distort the meaning of lehatot, which is really something like to pervert justice, and they take it in the sense of lehintont, which appears a few words earlier, as in to incline. And they say you have to incline after the majority. And that’s the famous story of Rabbi Eliezer. Did you ever have that story thrown in your face, The Oven of Achnai and the story of Rabbi Eliezer?

Israel: Oh, of course. Yeah, I was told that…

Nehemia: So, tell that. Because I’ve shared my experience with that. I don’t think people realize how important that story is in Rabbinical thought.

Israel: Yeah, it’s extremely important. It marks the departure from prophecy to Talmudism.

Nehemia: Tell the story. Assume nobody knows it.

Israel: Yeah. Well, the story is, Rabbi Eliezer is having this debate with the chakhamim, which is the majority of sages. And they’re having an argument about this oven, whether it’s considered impure, whether you have to smash it based off of Torah law. And he’s making the case for his argument, and they say, “No, we’re the majority. We rule.” And he says, “Well, I will provide you with miracles.”

So, I don’t remember the exact order, but essentially, he has the walls of the study house cave in as a miracle. And they say, “Ah, we don’t care.” And then he goes and he says, “I’ll have this tree get uprooted.” And the tree gets uprooted and flies away. And then he says, “I have this stream. It’s flowing downstream. It’ll go flow the opposite way.” Which is, again, all these supernatural phenomenon’s that he’s performing to prove the truth of his position. And they don’t buy any of it. And finally, a voice of God calls out from the sky and says, “The truth is with Eliezer.” And they still don’t listen because they say, “The Torah is not in the heavens.” Right? Which is also a way of saying…

Nehemia: Which is another verse taken out of context.

Israel: Exactly, another verse taken out of context, which does not have anything to do with the authority of the rabbis. It has to do with, actually, the individual’s ability to process God’s will, if you actually point to the truth of that verse. But, of course, they reject God Himself. And then later on, there’s a rabbi who’s walking in the forest and he encounters Elijah the prophet, who apparently visits Earth once in a while, according to Rabbinic lore. And he says, “Well, what did God think about this event?” And he said, “Oh, God, you know, kind of laughed and said, ‘My children have won over Me.’” And God was happy. He was happy that we overcame Him with our Rabbinic rulings.

And so, yeah, that sets the stage, obviously, for Rabbinicism to be framed as virtue. For people going against God to be considered, actually, what God wants, because as long as we have the majority of rabbis in the system, the man-made system of rabbis that was created, that’s superior to God Himself.

When people hear that, those stories, outside of a Rabbinical context, religious people, they’ll shudder at such a story. You know, it’s told in Christian circles kind of as a way to be like, “Look at these people, they’re screwed,” right? But like, Jews hear it and they’re like, “Well you don’t understand.” No, I understand, that’s not…

Nehemia: “It’s a deeply profound…” And look, there are some parts of it that are deeply profound. Like, just think about the idea my sons have… b’nai nitzchuni, b’nai nitzchuni, my sons have vanquished me, or defeated me, or something like this. They’ve been victorious over me. So, you know, Freud talked about… and here I’m way out on a limb. I don’t know anything about psychology. But from my pop psychology understanding, before I talked about how there’s this idea where every child, to establish himself as a sovereign adult, needs to overcome their parents. And so, you know, the metaphor he talked about was where Oedipus slays his father at a crossroads, right? It’s one of the ancient Greek tragedies, right? Or tragedy is a type of play. Where there’s a prophecy; the child’s going to kill the father, and so, the father orders the child killed. And the person’s job it is to kill the child leaves him at a crossroads, and somebody picks him up and raises him. And then years later he encounters his father at another crossroads, and he kills the father. And so, Freud said slaying the parent is the child declaring themselves an adult and no longer subject to the judgment of the father, or the instruction of the father, but being like a sovereign adult.

And look, so, I think someone like Jordan Peterson would say there are universal truths in these stories; that’s why we keep telling them. And the Rabbinical story takes that universal truth, which is that a child, to be an adult, has to stand on their own. And they say, “Well, we did that with God. God’s our father, and we’ve defeated God, and God’s proud of us.”

And look, I’m a father. And yes, when my son stands up to me, in a good way, not in a bad way, and says, you know, “I’m going to do this thing on my own. I’m not going to have you hold my hand.” Like, his car was totaled, and he went to get a loan. And I said, “I’ll co-sign with you. You’ll save a few points.” He’s like, “No, I want to do it as an adult.” And he got his own loan, and I was very proud of him, right? He’s a bit of a friar, as we say in Israel, because he could have saved some money on the co-sign. That’s fine. I was proud of him that he stood up and said, “No, I’m going to take care of this myself.” That was him at the crossroads saying, “I’m not a child anymore. I can take care of this myself.” I was very proud of him.

So, the rabbis have taken that and said, “Look, God’s proud of us that we’ve overruled His decision!” And an outsider hears that, and they say, “It is profound; it’s profoundly perverse. You’ve defeated God? What are you even doing this for?” Look, and I’ll hear this from Ben Shapiro, who is a devout Orthodox Jew, and he’ll say things like, “Well, God gave us the Torah as this negotiation between…” which maybe there’s a bit of truth in that. But for him, it’s a negotiation by these other people, by these rabbis.

And look, people will say to me, “Who do you think you are, Nehemia, to question all of your ancestors who were these great rabbis?” And my answer is, “I’m the one who stands before God on the day of judgment. I’m the one who has to answer for my actions. I can’t say, my great-grandfather told me to do that. I can up until when I’m a child, but at some point, I have to be at the crossroads. And I have to overcome my ancestors, and say, ‘I’m a man, and I’m the one who answers for my questions in the presence of God.’”

Israel: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, I mean, I think there’s a profound truth in that. They’ve just taken it in the wrong direction. I’m not supposed to defeat God; I’m supposed to overcome the rulings of my parents.

Israel: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: And look, there’s a prophecy in Jeremiah where the Gentiles come and they say, “We’ve inherited lies from our fathers.” Like, I hear this, and they say, “Well, how do you think you know more than your ancestors?” Imagine if the Gentiles said that. “Well, you know, St. Augustine told me to do such and such, so I’m going to do it.” Well, God expects more from you than that, right? That’s what he’s saying in Jeremiah.

Israel: Yeah. Amen. I mean, look at Leviticus 26. “Confess your sins and the sins of your fathers”.

Nehemia: Let’s look at that. Let’s look at Leviticus… ooh, I love that. That’s the tokhecha. It’s one of the two passages where there’s the blessing and the curse, Leviticus 26, if I’m remembering the right passage. And the other one is Deuteronomy 28 to 29, which is the more elaborate one.

Israel: So, Leviticus 26:40, “They shall confess their sins and the sins of their fathers, and their transgression, which they have transgressed against Me, as they went with Me in casualness.” They went with Me coldly.

Nehemia: And keri, which is… we don’t really know what keri is, but something like rebelliousness it’s usually translated.

Israel: Yeah, I can see it as being like, kar is cold, like, “you walk coldly or casually with me”.

Nehemia: Maybe.

Israel: Maybe.

Nehemia: I don’t know. JPS has hostile. King James has contrary. It’s one of those words where… So, it’s interesting. I’m doing these Bible studies every morning with my wife, and there’ll be verses where, like, I don’t know what that word means. “Oh, look it up.” “No, nobody knows what the word means.” And there are other verses where I know every single word, and I have no idea what it’s saying. Right? This is particularly in Proverbs. I’m like, “No, there’s no hard words in this verse. I know every single word, and they are common words. But I have no idea… I shouldn’t say I have no idea, right. There’s four different explanations; which one is correct? It’s anybody’s guess, right? Because when you put those words together, they’re almost like a riddle, which is like a feature, not a bug, in Proverbs. But, yeah.

So, that’s really interesting; confessing the sins of your fathers. So, this makes me think about… People have heard me talk; we want to hear what you have to say. So, tell us, how do you engage with this question? In other words, I’ve seen this in your videos, where people are constantly saying, “How do you have the chutzpah? Who do you think you are?” Right? “All these people for all these generations got it wrong, and suddenly Israel Horowitz thinks he’s got it right.” So, what is your response to that?

Israel: I’ll give you an example, right? Because you have to choose here. You either have to choose between vanquishing and defeating your father, God, or vanquishing and defeating your human fathers, right? And when it comes to the word of God versus the word of man, or God Himself versus man, you’ve got to go with God.

And so, a good example would be when it comes to Noah. Right? So, Noah, by all accounts, is an extremely righteous man. He maintains his righteousness and walks with God in the most corrupt time in world history. And God loves Noah. Noah finds favor in God’s eyes, and God saves him. It says Noah was a righteous man in his generations. And the rabbis say, or at least one school of rabbis say, that Noah was righteous in his generations, but if he was in another generation, he would be considered nothing. Direct quote from the Midrash.

And I see that quote, and I’m disgusted, because I have so much admiration for Noah, that God Himself places on Noah, saying, “This is the man that is responsible for your survival, and you all owe your thanks to this man.” And their claim about him is that, if he was in another generation, he would be considered nothing. And so, I would mention things like that. Like, I find that quote to be disturbing. I think it’s like, if I had to respect Noah or I had to respect Rabbi Akiva, I’m going with Noah, right? If I had to respect Moses or Rabbi Eliezer, I’m going with Moses, right?

And the point is that they seem to not understand the hierarchy here, which is that you’re going to have to throw someone under the bus. Either it’s going to be Rashi or it’s going to be Noah. I’d rather throw Rashi under the bus than throw Noah under the bus. Apparently, you’d rather throw Noah under the bus than Rashi. So, I think it comes down to that. It’s impossible to maintain allegiance to the written Torah and the oral Torah when they contradict each other openly, right?

Either you’re going to place the word of God over the word of man, or you’re going to place the word of man over the word of God. And to me, the answer is very obvious. So, I’m not really phased when people are like, “How dare you? How dare you?” Well, how dare you, again? As you pointed out, how dare you go against a billion Christians? How dare you go against a billion Muslims? This is not a numbers game, it’s a truth question, and we need to actually sit here and explore the truth.

And you, yourself, just admitted, as someone who claims that scripture is understandable, you don’t always understand every word. You find that there are multiple interpretations. No one is denying that. In fact, that’s really the nature of the Talmud; it’s a bunch of different interpretations and understandings and independent opinions of different rabbis. The problem with the Orthodox system is that it is saying that these particular opinions are narrowed down, and then we follow one of those particular opinions. Even though there could be other opinions, and all those opinions could be wrong, or one of them could be right.

No, we go with Maimonides’ choice. We go with the consensus of rabbis over 2,000 years. And again, to me, that’s just transparently absurd. It has no merit on its own. It always appeals to authority or faith claims, or like, how dare you, right? The great rebbies, and like, who says they’re great? Because you say they’re great because they lived 2,000 years ago. Lots of people lived 2,000 years ago, right? Just because someone lived 2,000 years ago and wrote a book doesn’t mean everything he says is true.

So, again, we just have to use our better judgment, and I love what you said. I’m the one who’s standing before God. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for my life. This is a genuine pursuit of truth, not an attempt to undermine what other people have done. They’ve done a lot of good, but they’ve also done bad. And so, when we look to our fathers, it says in Deuteronomy 32, “Ask your father and he will tell you, your elder, and he’ll reveal it to you, and remember the generations of old,” right?

So, it’s like, okay, well, you can learn from your father’s teachings. You can also learn from your father’s mistakes, right? You have to look to history not just to worship history, but to see the problems with history, of which there have been many problems. And something we talked about last time as well, which is that, look at the actual facts on the ground of the Jewish people; exile, destruction, remaining few in number scattered across the world. That’s not a redeemed people. That’s not a people who are in the good graces of God.

If you read the Torah, God promises blessings to His people when they follow Him. And based off of Jewish history, it doesn’t really look like the Jewish people are in… I mean, God has given them a lot of blessings, but still, you know, God said Israel will be like the sand of the sea and the stars of the sky. And we don’t see that, because instead, we’re few in number scattered across the world. So, there’s the blessings and there’s the curses, and it looks like we’re not accessing those blessings properly.

So, what are we doing wrong? And we have to have that conversation; we have to be open enough to question pretty much everything. But when it comes to God, that’s where we should start to humble ourselves. But instead, it’s the opposite. You know, they’d rather dismiss what the Torah says, dismiss the characters in the Torah. Like, I heard a rabbi say that, because Jacob told Pharaoh that his life was hard, he lost like 20 years of his life, one year for every word that he spoke, or something like that. It’s like, okay, so, now you’re calling out Jacob because he was an authentic person and spoke honestly. I don’t know, there’s just… also, you don’t know any of these things. All of this is completely arbitrary. It’s made up. Your source is, “trust me bro”, as they say, right. Like, no. Like…

Nehemia: Tell people in my generation what that means; your source is, trust me bro. I’m not sure I know what that means.

Israel: Like, when you ask someone, “What is your source for what you just said?” He’ll be like, “Trust me bro; don’t worry.”

Nehemia: I’m not familiar with that. But so, there’s a few different things here that… I’m not sure which direction we should take this. So, one aspect here, and I think this is important, for me at least, is to identify that it’s not just the specific interpretations the rabbis come up with, it’s the method of interpretation that they employ. In other words, you know that in my field they’ll make a difference between exegesis and hermeneutics. Exegesis is the specific interpretation. Right? “Do not boil a kid in his mother’s milk.” Is a kid a goat? Or is it any animal, and is any milk… Let’s say that’s exegesis.

But then the hermeneutic is the principle behind it. Are we interpreting based on the context, or, like you said, is it just arbitrary? And the Rabbinical approach says, on the one hand you can interpret arbitrarily, what’s called the Midrashic approach. But on the other hand, not everybody can do it. Right? And I’ll watch these videos with Tovia Singer arguing with Christians, and he’ll say, “But you’re taking it out of context.” Yeah, but he takes everything out of context. Right?

In other words, when Tovia says he’s not allowed to eat a hamburger, he’s basing that on taking it out of context. And I heard him once give a lecture at the Orthodox Union in Jerusalem, on, I believe, it’s Karen Hayesod street, and his explanation was, “Well, my rabbis have the authority to do that. I don’t trust your rabbis.” Meaning, if the gospel of Matthew takes something out of context, it means nothing to me. But if Rabbi Akiva does it, well, I trust Rabbi Akiva, so I follow him.

Israel: Exactly.

Nehemia: So, on the one hand you have an issue of the method of interpretation. On the other hand, there’s what they call an appeal to authority, openly an appeal to authority. Right? I’m not imagining it, right? When you combine the appeal to authority with arbitrariness, they can say anything, but only they’re allowed to say it.

Israel: Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: And that’s extremely frustrating, I would say. And then they come to you and say, “Who do you think you are?” No, I’m not appealing to an authority, only over my own life, right? Meaning, like, what authority do I have over my own life? I’m a grown man who is responsible as a human being for my action; that’s the appeal to authority over my own life. And I think the Ben Shapiro reply to that, or the Asher Meza reply, I think… I shouldn’t quote him, but I think he would say something like, “Well, there’s this consensus of the community.” But what if the community is wrong?

Israel: Mmm.

Nehemia: We’ve seen that before throughout history. And look, if you look at the actual consensus of the community, if we take the majority of rabbis in the world, they’re Reform rabbis. Let’s say in the United States, for sure, the majority of rabbis are Reform rabbis, and they themselves say they really don’t have any kind of authority. Maybe over very specific things, perhaps they do, right, over communal things. But I was told by one Reform rabbi, you study a commandment, and you decide if it’s relevant for you, and then you decide to keep it or not. Well, I mean, then why would I keep any commandments? What are you talking about?

Israel: Yeah.

Nehemia: Like, life would be much easier if I could do whatever I wanted. But I do it because God commanded me to do it, right? And I do the best I can. So, here’s another important difference, let’s say, between the Tanakh, and I’ll take Islam as the example. So, in the Quran, there is this statement, or this concept in Islam, that the Quran is muban, that it’s clear and not difficult to understand. We don’t have that claim in the Torah. What we do have is that the commandments should be clear to understand, but it doesn’t mean we understand them today because we’re after thousands of years of exile. We’re doing the best we can to reconstruct what would have been obvious to an ancient Israelite. That’s my approach to it, anyway. What are your thoughts on that?

Israel: Yeah, I think that it’s very understandable in a lot of ways. I think sometimes there are points of doubt, and we can discuss those doubts. But the real problem is that the whole system of the Torah relating to the priesthood and the court system and the justice system are non-existent. So, you can’t process these things or litigate them in any sort of court with any sort of real binding authority. It really just boils down to opinions of people. In which case, why are some people’s opinions more valid than others?

And even in the context of courts, courts can become corrupted too. So, I don’t know what you think about this idea, but even in Deuteronomy 17, which is the source they always bring, it says, “Do not go to the right or the left from what the High Court in the Temple commands you.” So, first of all, obviously, they’re not the High Court in the Temple, so let’s just settle that.

But one of the things that it says in the end, it says, “The man who acts be’zadon.” And be’zadon, I think, is translated to mean with malicious intent, to do the wrong thing. The man who acts with malice, that’s the man who is punished. But if you’re acting with righteousness to challenge a corrupt court or to question a ruling, a genuine court would entertain that question. They wouldn’t just say, “we said so.” Right? You’re not God. You’re here to handle disputes; you’re not here to force your authority on other people.

So, what we should be hearing out of people in positions of authority is a voice of humility, as it says about the king. The king, by the way, who needs to be chosen by God. He needs to write himself a copy of the Torah and read it every day of his life, not be too materialistic, not abuse his power, not take too many of the resources or the women of the people. And he has to be humble and not let his heart be raised above others to think that he’s better than anyone. God put him in this position; he needs to know the laws of God, and he needs to follow those humbly and righteously and faithfully.

So, leadership is about being faithful to God and serving your fellow man. And what it’s become in all forms of government, not just Judaism… that’s why, again, once you can see corruption in religion, you can see corruption in politics. You can see corruption in medicine. You can see corruption in just about everything. Because unfortunately… this is an unfortunate fact. It’s not… it brings me no joy to say this; that people usually get corrupted by power. And the Torah is very aware of this.

That’s why, you know, Jethro tells Moses to pick men of truth who fear God, who hate greed, men of valor who have courage, right? Those are the qualifications for judges. That’s clearly not what we have right now. So, that’s the bottom line. The bottom line is like; you have to make your case. And we are an exiled people; there is no centralized authority. And even if there was a centralized authority, they would still have to make their case.

And that’s what God wants from us. He wants us to be subservient to Him, not subservient to men. That’s literally the whole story of the Exodus from Egypt; God took us out of slavery to a pharaoh in order to be servants to Him, right? Not to be slaves to rabbis. And that’s what they want; they want you to be slaves to them.

One of the crazy out-of-context ones, I think you might be aware of this, in Eruvin, is it 21b? Where they take the quote from Ecclesiastes out of context. Where at the end of Ecclesiastes, Solomon says, “My son, beware of too many books, for they weary the flesh and destroy the spirit,” or something like that. And they take it out of context, and they just say, “beware my son for the many books”. And they say, “Oh, you see? The many books of the scribes are more important than the Torah, and whoever goes against the scribes is deserving of death, but whoever goes against the Torah it doesn’t really matter that much.”

Nehemia: Oh, yeah, I’ve quoted that in the… but I didn’t remember it was referring to Ecclesiastes. Let’s have a look at that; that’s worth looking at.

Israel: Yeah, it’s actually insane. They completely corrupt this verse, which is explicitly saying not to write too many books. They take the first three words of the verse out of context and say, “therefore, only worry about all those many books that we wrote.” So, yeah, it’s just another example of this.

Nehemia: “What is the meaning of which is written? And more than these, my son, be careful of making many books.” And guys, when we’re looking at this in Sefaria, everything in bold is what it actually says in Hebrew and Aramaic, and the non-bold is their interpretation of it. Or in this case, they’re filling out a verse that wasn’t fully quoted. “My son, be careful to fulfill the words of the sages [the Sofrim], even more than the words of the Torah, for the words of the Torah induce positive and negative commandments, even with regard to the negative commandments.” And this is probably an English translation of Steinsaltz here. “The violation of many of them is punishable only by lashes, whereas with respect to the words of the sages, anyone who transgresses the words of the sages is liable to the death penalty.” Wow!

Israel: Now look at that verse in Ecclesiastes. The verse in Ecclesiastes is 12…

Nehemia: 12:12.

Israel: 12:12. And it says, “More than this, my son, beware of making too many books, because there’s no end to them, and it is a great,” like, it tires out the flesh. And here, I’ll just, “much study is a weariness of the flesh.” So, “beware of making too many books because there’s no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” which of course completely destroys the whole concept of the yeshiva system, if it hasn’t been destroyed already by the Torah itself, which tells you to live and support your family. But he’s literally saying the opposite, which is: watch out, all these books… you don’t want to get caught up with books and all that stuff, it just wearies the flesh. They take the first three words out of context, which says, “My son, beware more with the books.” Right?

Nehemia: So, here we have the passage in Eruvin 21b. Let me make this thing go away. There it is, okay. So, I’m trying to understand. I’m not sure I understand. Just again, what’s the hermeneutic here and the exegesis? So, what they’re saying here doesn’t… I feel like something’s almost missing, right? So, it says, “My son, beware of the words of the Sofrim.” And divrei Sofrim are a category of Rabbinical takanot, which are relatively early, so they can’t tack them on to the name of a specific rabbi, right? That’s divrei Sofrim. “More than the words of the Torah,” right? In other words, Sofrim is a period of Rabbinical history; maybe fictitious, right? But it’s the… meaning it’s… they have the anshei kneset ha’gdola, and that’s the Sofrim. Meaning, in the late Persian period, early Hellenistic period, that’s Sofrim. It’s a technical term, even though it literally means just scribes.

So, “Beware of the words of the scribes more than the words of the Torah, because the words of the Torah have positive commandments and negative commandments, and the words of the Sofrim, anyone who violates the words of Sofrim is worthy of death.” So, I feel like I’m missing something here, because for the words of the Torah he says there’s positive and negative commandments, which obviously there are, right? It says, “rest in the Shabbat”, and it says, “don’t do work”, right? That’s what they mean by positive and negative commandments.

But the words of the Sofrim, he’s explaining in terms of… if you violate them, you’re worthy of death. And the implication there, which Steinsaltz added here, or somebody added here, which is that you only get lashes for violating the words of the Torah. Meaning, let’s say anything that doesn’t specifically have the death penalty, the rabbis say you get lashes.

So, I’m not sure I understand how they tie this to the verse. Even if it’s taking it out of context, I’m still not even sure… asot sfarim harbe. Okay, so, what they’re doing is asot sfarim harbe, making many books, they’re interpreting as doing the words of the Sofrim, that’s what they’re interpreting as.

Israel: Yeah. Again, either they’re just colossally stupid and illiterate, or they’re terribly manipulative and sinister.

Nehemia: They’re not stupid and illiterate. Meaning, they’re very deliberately doing these things. So, they interpret the word sfarim as divrei Sofrim, that’s pretty clear. And so, they’re interpreting this Midrashically, deliberately and knowingly out of context. And I’ve said that before, right? Either they’re stupid or they very deliberately know what they’re doing. I think they very deliberately know what they’re doing. These are smart people. Unlike some later rabbis, they understood grammar. They just chose to ignore it.

It’s kind of like when I had a dog, Georgia, who died in 2011, 15 years… oh wow, is that 15 years ago? And I would tell her to sit, and she knew exactly what was happening. She would just ignore me, unless she wanted a treat, right? So, the rabbis are like Georgia; they know exactly what they’re doing here. So, they’re interpreting sfarim… they’re changing the vowels and interpreting them as divre Sofrim, and they’re saying, “My son, be careful to do the words of the Sofrim,” these Rabbinical takanot, or enactments from the period of the late Persian, early Hellenistic period. I think that’s how they’re taking this, it seems to me.

Like, an example of divrei Sofrim would be, when I was a kid, I said, “Well, where are we required to read the Torah over the course of a year?” I read the Torah every day. Where does this idea come from where I have to go to the synagogue and hear somebody chant it? And you’re not paying attention enough to where you can make out the words. Today I could, but back when I was a kid I couldn’t. I’m like, “It’s much better if I just sit and read it, then I can understand it.” And they’re like, “Oh no, that’s divrei Sofrim, that’s takanat Sofrim. Ezra and Nehemiah made that enactment.” “Oh, okay. So, I read the whole Book of Ezra; couldn’t find it. The whole Book of Nehemiah; couldn’t find it. They just made it up. Now, it’s possible Ezra and Nehemiah made that enactment and it’s just not recorded in the Tanakh. But how do I know that? Meaning, there’s a very common phenomenon of attributing something to a famous person, right?

Israel: Yes. Of course, yeah.

Nehemia: Without it being true, right?

Israel: Yeah, and even if they did, by the way, so what? It’s not a law. It’s not a law in the Torah. First of all, yeah, there’s zero evidence for that in the Tanakh; the Tanakh being the authoritative source here. And even if they did make that decree, you’re not obligated to follow man-made decrees. Like the Torah says, “do not add or subtract to these commandments”.

Nehemia: And what they didn’t tell me is that it’s quite clear that even if this isn’t… I mean, it is an ancient custom, right? In other words, it goes back to some relatively early Second Temple period custom. But the custom wasn’t to read the 54 Torah portions that we have today. That was the tradition of Babylon. And in Eretz Yisrael, in the Land of Israel, they read it over either a three- or three-and-a-half-year period. Right?

And then it wasn’t necessarily a fixed reading. In other words, each week, in each synagogue, they would open up the scroll, and they’d read a certain number of verses. And wherever they stopped, they would pick up the next week. It wasn’t that there was a fixed reading, let’s say, originally. And we know that because it talks about not reading less than three verses. Well, why do you need to tell me that if there’s a fixed portion? Right? Meaning, in Rabbinical literature it talks about that.

So, the point is that they’ll attribute things to the Sofrim, and that’s just their way of saying, it’s really old and we don’t know who said it so we’re going to attribute it to somebody famous.

Israel: Yeah, and hey, I mean, no one’s denying that there may be these traditions. But at the same time, your traditions are not law. So, you want to follow tradition? Okay. Don’t tell me I have to.

Nehemia: That’s an important point. We were discussing before about, where do these things go back to? And the very fact that it talks about superstition in the Torah means superstition existed. Now, it calls out the ways of the nations in Deuteronomy 18, but if there weren’t Israelites doing it, it probably wouldn’t have bothered to tell us about that, right? In other words, these were things that, either they were already doing, or they were likely to do.

And look, if you’ve ever been to the Western Wall, you’ll see the lady selling the red string. And they’ll tell you the red string was wrapped seven times around the Tomb of Rachel. Have you ever heard that? And so, it’s holy; it will bring you good luck. Ashton Kutcher, I think, like, 20, 30 years ago, he was in a movie where he refused to take the red string off, because he said, “It gives me good luck. It blesses me.” Whatever, something like that. And they had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to airbrush it out of every single scene. This is before CGI graphics were much… you know, today would be probably relatively trivial, but back then they had to go through every frame of the movie and remove it, that he was in, at least.

So, the red string is actually mentioned in the Tosefta. There’s a list in the Tosefta Shabbat, which is kind of like an apocryphal… it’s what’s called as part of early Rabbinical literature, right? It’s a debate whether it’s from the Tanaitic period or Amoreic period, but it’s probably Tanaitic. So, the Tosefta has a list of the different superstitions, which it calls Darkei Ha’amori, the way of the Amorites, based on Deuteronomy 18.

So, the Torah tells us in Deuteronomy 18, don’t follow the ways of the nations. Okay, what is that? So, they give a list, a very long list, of very specific superstitions that are forbidden, and one of those is wearing the red string. So, think about that; there’s a red string in the 21st century that you can get at the Western Wall that brings you luck, and Ashton Kutcher refuses to take it off. And as far as I know, there’s no official rabbinical source that says, “Oh, you’re supposed to wear a red string. It’s good for you, it brings blessing.” It’s a folk custom. And it’s a folk custom that was known, like, 1,800 years ago in the time of the Tanaim, these early rabbis, who are saying, “Oh, this is one of the things the Amorites did.”

So, think about that; like, these things survive for millennia. It’s very surprising. And the fact that they’re old doesn’t mean they’re valid. That’s my point.

Israel: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, that’s the argument. It’s old. It’s like… what? Literally, the Canaanites and paganism and everything predated the Torah and that… So, it’s just a very bizarre argument to say, “Oh, it’s been going on for so long, therefore, we should keep it going on.” Like, there have been so many terrible things going on for a long time that we need to stop. Now, there are some things that have been going on for a long time that we need to continue, and again, I think no book does a better job at defining what needs to be preserved and what needs to not matter at all than the Torah itself.

The Torah, which you should not add or subtract to these commandments, does a perfect job outlining what God wants from humanity, what society is supposed to look like. And anytime people deviate from that, there’s chaos, whether they add or subtract. And so, you’re not extra holy for adding, you’re just as bad as the person who’s subtracting. And that seems to be lost on Orthodox Jews because they think, “Well, how could we be doing something wrong if we’re doing so much extra? We just love God so much that we do so much more than He tells us.”

Nehemia: Wait, so what’s your Torah response to that? Shouldn’t we just, like, let’s just take Shabbat, for example, right? They’ll keep it for 25 hours, and we could talk about the whole mourning thing, if you want, but they’ll keep it for 25 hours and say, “We added an extra hour to Shabbat because we’re showing how sacred it is, and we really want to show how much we’re dedicated to God. So, we’ve added to the Shabbat. We’ve enhanced it and made it more beautiful and more expansive.” So, what’s your response? Why is that wrong, to add to the Torah?

Israel: Because the Torah says not to add to it. That’s the whole point.

Nehemia: Right. Deuteronomy 4, let’s look at it, actually. Can you pull that up?

Israel: Yeah, it’s 4:2.

Nehemia: So, it’s Deuteronomy 4:2 and then 13:1 or 12:32, depending on which version you’re using.

Israel: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, what do you have in 4:2?

Israel: “Do not add upon the word which I command you, and do not subtract from it to guard all the words of Yahweh your God which I command you.”

Nehemia: Okay, and then 12:32 or 13:1… in the Hebrew versions it’s usually 13:1.

Israel: Yes.

Nehemia: 12:31 in the JPS. Oh no, but JPS has it as 12:31 as well. No, I’m in the wrong verse. It is 12:32 in the King James and 13:1 in the JPS.

Israel: Yes. So… “All the matter that I command you, you shall guard it and perform it. Do not add upon it or subtract from it.”

Nehemia: Right. So, if you’re adding commandments to the Torah, you’re actually violating the Torah.

Israel: Exactly.

Nehemia: And it’s almost like they… Like, I almost feel like they’re saying, “Well, the Torah is not enough. We need more.”

Israel: That’s exactly what they say.

Nehemia: He told you don’t do that.

Israel: I mean, they have to undermine the Torah in order to justify all of their additions. So, they say that the Torah is not understandable, the Torah is not enough, and all these things. And what they’re doing is, they’re just undermining God’s communication with humanity. And they’re saying that you couldn’t possibly read the word of God directly and discuss it all the time and teach it to your children, which is what it tells you to do.

No, you would have to enter into years-long study in Rabbinic institutions to get to that understanding, and even then you still wouldn’t understand it. So, you can finish the Talmud once, twice, three times, and you’ll still be an ignoramus. And they always pride themselves in talking about how ignorant they are, and they’ll never compare to their rabbi before them. And so, where’s the accountability here? Who do we get to hold accountable here? Because it sounds like everyone’s just appealing to the authority of the rabbi before them, and when I ask you, “What is the basis for doing this?” There’s no answer.

So, for example, you know how they make every holiday two days? And then I ask them, “Well, then why is Yom Kippur not two days?” They’re like, “Oh, we have a doubt, but Yom Kippur…”

Nehemia: Tell the audience what that is, because a lot of people have no idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean “two days”?

Israel: So, what they do is, they have something called two-day holiday. All the holidays in the Torah are one holy day at a time, and they make every holiday two days based off of a doubt that they had 2,000 years ago, because they created a law that you need to receive witnesses from the High Court and the Temple to proclaim the new month. Either way, it’s completely irrelevant modernly because there’s a set calendar, and even they admit that. But I was asking them, they have a doubt on every holiday except for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which happens to be a day of affliction. And suddenly, on the Day of Affliction, they’re like, “Well, we’re not going to make people fast for two days. That’s not going to work out.” So, suddenly there’s no more doubt.

Nehemia: And you talked about extremism, right? And you were saying it in a positive way, which I still challenge, but I don’t know if we’ll have time to get to that. So, in other words, there are many instances where they’ll take a very extreme position. So, there’s a famous passage in the Talmud that says there’s three things you should be martyred for rather than do, which is the “yehareg vebal ya’avor”, in Rabbinical terminology. And those three things are, you shouldn’t murder another person, because why is your life worth more. You shouldn’t commit sexual immorality, and you shouldn’t worship idols. Okay. And then they say in the Talmud, “However, if the Gentiles try to force you to do something publicly, you should be martyred even for the color of your shoelaces.”

Israel: Yeah, I remember that.

Nehemia: So, the point is, in the right circumstances, they’ll take a very extreme position. Okay, so, why don’t we fast for two days? Meaning, if you really don’t know which day is the biblical holiday, and so, therefore you should keep the first day of Sukkot two days, and the eighth day of Sukkot, right? So, they’ll do the eighth and the ninth day of Sukkot where they don’t work; why not fast for two days, right? Maybe some people will die, but you’re supposed to be martyred for everything but those three things, right? So, it’ll show how whole you are by starving to death. Or maybe you’ll make it through, right? Not everybody will starve.

Israel: People won’t starve to death.

Nehemia: No, but water will be the bigger issue than food, right? In other words, there will be people who…

Israel: They’ll survive.

Nehemia: Not necessarily. There’ll be people who will die of thirst. Look, there’s people who die of thirst from a one-day, 24-hour fast, right? If you have certain medical conditions, you could die from not drinking water. And the rabbis say, “Well, in that case, drink the water.” So, yeah, in other words, yeah. So, Israel, where can people find your teaching and what you’re doing?

Israel: YouTube. I got my YouTube channel. I’m on all the social medias, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X. And I got a bunch of projects; I got some books on Amazon. God willing, we’ll be doing more.

Nehemia: All right, awesome. Would you end with a prayer?

Israel: Yeah, my pleasure. So, please, dear God Yehovah, thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s a blessing to find some like-minded people in this vast expanse of the desert of godlessness in this world. May You bring everyone back to You and to Your truth, to the simplicity of Your faith, to Your existential reality that You’ve placed before all of us, and may we always choose blessing in life for all eternity. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen. Alright.

—

Nehemia: Talk to me a little bit more about extremism, because I would have agreed with you 20 or 30 years ago, but now… You know what changed, what really changed it for me more than anything? Was seeing ISIS…

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VERSES MENTIONED
Jeremiah 10:1-3
Deuteronomy 18:9-14
Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17-19, 25
Leviticus 23:14
Genesis 41:45
Esther 2:7
Exodus 23:2
Babylonian Talmud Bava Metzia 59a-b
Jeremiah 16
Leviticus 26:40
Genesis Rabbah 30:9
Deuteronomy 32:7
Genesis 47:9
Deuteronomy 17:8-20
Exodus 18
Babylonian Talmudd Eruvin 21b
Ecclesiastes 12:12
Tosefta Shabbat 7:11
Deuteronomy 4:2, 13:1 (12:32)
Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 74a

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OTHER LINKS
https://israelhorowitz.com/

The post Hebrew Voices #244 – Daring To Be Different: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this Support Team Study - The Divine Name YHVH in Ancient Greek Manuscripts: Part 2, where Nehemia and “Dr. Tetragrammaton” continue their exploration of how the name of God appears in the Greek New Testament, tracing its development and transformation across the manuscript tradition and examining how those changes shaped the texts we have today.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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