Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

Hebrew Voices #247 – Dead Sea Scrolls & the War of Light vs. Darkness

[https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/HV-247-1920x1080-1.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/dead-sea-scrolls-war-of-light In this episode of Hebrew Voices #247 - Dead Sea Scrolls & the War of Light vs. Darkness [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/dead-sea-scrolls-war-of-light], 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: Download Audio [https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Downloads/Hebrew-Voices-247-Dead-Sea-Scrolls-the-War-of-Light-vs-Darkness.mp3] Transcript Hebrew Voices #247 – Dead Sea Scrolls & the War of Light vs. Darkness You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support] Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com [https://www.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. — 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;

24 de jun de 2026 - 1 h 14 min

Hebrew Voices #245 – Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1

[https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/HV-245-1920x1080-1.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/secrets-jots-tittles-1 In this episode of Hebrew Voices #245 - Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/secrets-jots-tittles-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: Download Audio [https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Downloads/Hebrew-Voices-245-Secrets-of-the-Jots-Tittles-1.mp3] Transcript Hebrew Voices #245 – Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1 You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support] Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com [https://www.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

27 de may de 2026 - 1 h 33 min