SNEAK PEEK! Daring To Be Different: Part 2

Hebrew Voices #248 – Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1

[https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/HV-248-1920x1080-1.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/midrash-for-the-modern-day-1 In this episode of Hebrew Voices #248 - Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/midrash-for-the-modern-day-1], Nehemia brings on Dr. Stephen Arnoff to talk about the art of midrashic interpretation, how the “secret sauce” works, and why it exists in the first place. I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio [https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Downloads/Hebrew-Voices-Midrash-for-the-Modern-Day-Part-1.mp3] Transcript Hebrew Voices #248 – Midrash for the Modern Day: 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]. Stephen: That is a massive intellectual theological claim. That’s why midrash is so important, because midrash is the technical system. It’s the technique which is running all the way through the story of scriptural peoples from the time where midrash becomes very much prevalent as a way of understanding commandment, law, community, purpose, the divine. — Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff. He is the CEO of the Fuchsberg Center in Jerusalem, Israel, which is an educational, spiritual, and cultural center in the heart of Jerusalem. He wrote his PhD dissertation on a topic that we’re going to get into today. It’s called Memory, Rhetoric, and Oral Performance in Leviticus Rabbah, which is an ancient midrash, and he’ll explain what midrash is. He’s got a sub-stack. He’s got a website, which, we’ll link to this on Nehemiahswall.com, but it’s stephendanielarnoff.com. And you can also find out about him at thefuchsbergcenter.org. Shalom, Dr. Aronoff. Shalom, Stephen. Stephen: Shalom, shalom, Nehemia. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me here. Nehemia: Yeah, I’m excited. So, we were speaking last week and trying to decide what we’re going to talk about, and you mentioned that you did your dissertation on midrash. I’m like, “Okay, that’s it. I love texts. And the midrash, number one, it’s a text, but it’s also a response to a text or texts.” So, what is midrash? Let’s start with that. And then ultimately, we want to ask the question; what is the relevance and application today for people, with midrash? Stephen: Amazing. Well, I should say that you’re in rare company actually asking me about midrash. That question is not asked enough. I think midrash is the special sauce that runs all the way through monotheism as we know it. Really do. Nehemia: Wow, that’s a heavy lift… a big statement. So, you have to explain that. Stephen: I’m confident in the statement. And I’m pretty good in the kitchen, so it’s a metaphor that I would stand by, “the special sauce.” The concept of midrash is essentially a kind of scriptural technology. It is the art of interpreting sacred text. It’s the art of interpreting sacred text. Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: So, even in the Hebrew Bible itself there is midrash. Deuteronomy is a midrash on the four books that precede it because it is a retelling, a second telling of a sacred text. In the same way that Chronicles, in certain ways, is a midrash, a retelling, of the narratives that preceded it. There is within the Hebrew Scriptures an inclination to reimagine or to interpret events, figures, concepts, that have occurred previously. The midrash, as it develops out of the world of the Hebrew Bible, is a late Second Temple phenomenon, which we see in a variety of forms of literature and structure. It actually probably emanates in some ways from the world of scribes, who are in the realm of manuscripts, both oral traditions and written traditions, and passing them down from generation to generation. And at a certain point, there’s a coalescence of a kind of set of rules about how one does interpretation. Some of those rules come from the world of Greco-Roman literature, where the understandings of what particular materials mean are interpreted by scholars, sages, poets, who are trying to parse the meaning of a received text. And some of these technologies, or these techniques, that become midrash are unique, or at least unique in the way they’re used in Rabbinic tradition, moving into late antiquity. In a sentence, midrash is the art of imagination which interprets received texts and ideas. You can say that there is a midrash, so I am doing an interpretation. It is a midrash. It is a singular moment or structure, engagement of text with interpretation. But we can also say Midrash, meaning the whole body of materials that do that. There’s a library of Midrash, and there’s also a singular midrash. And we can talk about all the different pieces of the puzzle and the comment that I began with about the secret sauce of monotheism. But that’s an introduction. Nehemia: Okay. So, help my audience who may have no background in this, some of them. Stephen: Sure. Nehemia: What does the word midrash mean? Let’s just start with the most basic thing. Stephen: Midrash comes from a Hebrew word in the Scriptures which seems to be something like asking a question, akin to asking a question of an oracle. The idea that one would take that three Hebrew letter form, Dalet-Reish-Shin, which in a verb is lidrosh, or, to ask. The framing is, is asking for understanding, for meaning, or asking a question that comes from some other place, where the answer is going to come from some other place. And as the way that languages sort of evolve over time, that understanding that midrash is asking some unique entity for an answer to the question becomes, not asking an oracle, not asking a prophet, but asking the text what it means. Asking, demanding, from the text what its intention is. Nehemia: Okay. Is that the question, what its intention is? Okay, now you just said a very important statement, which… Okay. So, I’ve explained to the audience many times that semitic languages, including Hebrew, are built on these three-letter roots, and here the three-letter root is Dalet-Reish-Shin, which means to seek. And I just pulled up here in my bible software… and so, we have Genesis 25:22 is, Rebecca goes “lidrosh et Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.” She’s going to seek God, because there’s these two children in her womb, and she’s like, “What’s going on here?” Stephen: Right. So, you can hear in that… I’m not implying that the systems are parallel… the system’s going to Delphi and going to Yud-kay-Vav-kay, right, to go to the Lord, to go to the divine, but the idea is that one needs to go to a force outside of oneself to ask a question that’s a faithful question. Nehemia: Well, but then here it’s maybe used in a more, I would even call, like, a secular daily sense. Maybe secular is definitely not the word here, but where God says that, if somebody commits murder, He says, “And their blood I will seek.” Right? So, in other words, if you murder a person, then God’s going to seek the blood of that person from the person who committed the crime. Stephen: Right. But it’s a unique valence, right, it’s a unique usage. Because there are lots of other verbs that could be used to find out something, to understand something. And it’s a very rarely used verb. So, in this sense, it shows that it is at a level of… almost like a level of unstoppable mystery or something that is a reversal. Rather than you going to the oracle to get something that you don’t understand, the oracle itself is going to come to you. There is no way you will not be found out. Right? An immovable force is coming to… Nehemia: So, here I have an example. Again, I’m just pulling up examples here. It’s talking here about a certain thing in Deuteronomy 13, and it says… let me just pull up the JPS translation here. “You shall investigate and inquire and interrogate thoroughly. If it is true, the fact is established that an abhorrent thing was perpetrated in your midst,” et cetera. And the word investigate here is, ve’darashta, you will darash. So, in other words, it means to seek and investigate. It can mean to seek, like for example, in Deuteronomy 18 famously, it’s “doresh el ha’metim”, where you’re seeking the dead. Which may be some kind of a prayer, or like you said, maybe it’s an oracle, where you’re expecting to actually hear an answer from… one version is there’s a skull, then the diviners would talk to the skull. I don’t think it originally necessarily meant that. But the point is, doresh is to seek, and you’re saying it could be to seek some sort of a, well, you said oracle, so we’ll stick with that terminology. Okay, but it doesn’t mean that in the Jewish context of… and it has different meanings. This is where people get confused, right? They’ll say, “Oh, there’s a beit midrash, and the beit midrash,” which you guys have at the Fuchs Center in Jerusalem… so, a beit midrash is where you study, and it’s a very broad thing of what you study. Right? Am I right? Meaning, you could be studying Talmud, you could be studying Tanakh, you could be studying different things. You could be studying ethical musar, or ethical studies. So, there’s midrash in that sense, and then there’s midrash like Leviticus Rabbah, what you wrote your dissertation on, which is a collection of midrashim, and that’s called midrash. And then you have the action of midrash. So, talk to me about the action of midrash in Second Temple times. What is that? Stephen: True. We’ll talk about the action of midrash, but I think the framing is important. The concept here is that any act relating to midrash is a religious or spiritual act. That this is not a classroom; a beit midrash is not a classroom. Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: You can study midrashim in a classroom, but it’s not a beit midrash. A beit midrash is intentional. The intent is that there is something which is divining. It is about an element of holiness in the act of engaging with the sacred text. It is, in some way… and when we think about this as sort of midrash emerging, and when it emerges, the beit midrash is, in some ways, the replacement of the Beit ha’Mikdash, which is the Temple. The house of study is emergent after the Second Temple is destroyed, and the beit knesset, which is the synagogue, the place of gathering, is also emergent after the destruction of the Second Temple. There were betei midrash, there were houses of study, in some form, while there was a Second Temple. And there were synagogues in some form during the period of the Second Temple. But as a cultural phenomenon, this idea that the study of sacred text is a holy act which carries with it an element of relationship between human and divine through text, is something that carries through all the way to today. And it’s carried through, in some ways, somewhat democratically, in the sense that, in ancient times, in Temple times, who had access to holiness? Holiness was centered in the Temple and there was a cast of characters and a cast of officiants who were responsible. And people used them as a vessel to engage with the holy. In the world of the beit midrash, if you are committed to learning in an environment where, you know, whomever wishes to learn can learn, you are entering into an engagement with holiness, with religious activity, which is akin to engaging with the divine through the study of text. So, the framing for that as a religious act is really important. And then the specific question of how that works in practice, which you asked, is essentially, as a person who is engaged in midrash, who is using midrash with a sacred text, I am asking what the text means in many, many different ways. Let’s imagine, for example, that there’s a character, and it’s not clear who is speaking in a particular passage. Or if there’s a character that is not named as a character, or if there’s a possibility that a verb could mean more than one thing in a passage. Or a question as to why a passage appears when it does, or if there is a misunderstanding about whether the scribal transmission of that particular passage, if there may be some questions around transmission. All of these are what could be called an irritant, a textual irritant, that’s calling out for interpretation. And it literally says, darsheni. Darsheni, which means interpret me, interpret me. Nehemia: Or perhaps literally, drash me, investigate me. Stephen: Drash me out. Nehemia: So, you said a lot of things there, and I think I want to start with, there’s a linguistic concept called false friends. False friends is where you have the same word in two different languages, and they actually come from the same root, like I say, a common root, but they mean different things. So, my favorite example is in Hebrew, lechem is bread, and in Arabic, lahm is meat. So, here we have a false friend that you used. And I think the audience might have missed it, so I want to make sure it’s explained. You use the word learning. And learning in standard American English doesn’t mean what it means in, I’m going to call it Judeo-English. Stephen: No kidding. Nehemia: No, and I’m serious. Stephen: Yeah. Nehemia: People have written about this, entire dissertations. When a Jew says, “I’m learning Torah,” it doesn’t mean the same thing as when a non-Jew says, “I’m learning accounting,” or something. You used that word, and I think you used it just as part of Judeo-English. What does it mean in standard American? What is learning? Stephen: You’re an excellent listener, and it’s a great point. And I often say to my kids, some of whom were born in the U.S., but all of whom grew up here, they’ll often say about their homework, “I’m learning math.” And I’ll say, “You’re actually not learning math, you’re studying math.” You might learn math in some form, but we’ll talk about what the difference is, just as you had posed it. Learning is the religious act of studying sacred text. One goes to learn. It means one is going to have a concentrated experience which has an element of holiness in it. Studying, as you said, one could study engineering. Very difficult to make a case for one learning engineering, in Judeo-English, as you said. Because there’s a… Nehemia: And there’s a term for this. This is called “semantic loan.” I just looked it up. So, semantic loan is where, like, there’s the example that some Americans who were immigrants from Germany, if they didn’t know what you said, they would say please. And that was in the sense of, repeat what you just said. Which we don’t say in American English, so maybe it’s not semantic loan because that’s a translation of the word bitte. Which means, please may you do something, but also please repeat what you said. So, here, learning comes from the Yiddish learning. So, explain to the audience what it means to learn Torah, because it’s a whole world of meaning there that’s not part of standard… Stephen: Yeah. Learning Torah, and this is true for every realm of Jewish life, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and every form, to learn means talmud Torah. Talmud Torah is the studying of sacred text. Nehemia: So, in this sense, it’s a calc. In other words, there’s a Hebrew concept, lomed talmud, which is translated into Yiddish. And then from Yiddish, because it has the same root, it comes over into English, unsuspecting, without people realizing it has a completely different meaning in English. Not a completely different meaning, but there’s nuances that are lost. Stephen: Well, I’m not an expert in Yiddish, so I wouldn’t be able to say. Nehemia: But when you’re saying learning Torah, you’re using the Yiddish meaning, which comes from the Hebrew meaning. Stephen: Right, but if I were to walk in, you know, seven or eight blocks from here to, you know, a Sephardic beit midrash, house of study, and say, “What are you learning?” They wouldn’t think, “Why are you speaking, you know, in a phrase that comes…” Nehemia: No, no, they would go directly back to the Hebrew word. Stephen: They’d understand that the point was, “What are you studying today? What part of Torah are you studying today? Where are you in Talmud?” Nehemia: So, I once had this encounter with someone who was… I won’t give the details. There was a discussion about something in the Book of Shoftim, of Judges, and I could see he clearly was unaware of anything in the Book of Judges, and I said, “Have you ever read the Book of Judges?” He said, “I don’t read Tanakh, I learn it.” I said, “Okay, did you ever learn the Book of Judges?” And he said, no. Right? But it struck me about that semantic distinction. So, still, what is learning in the Talmud Torah sense? Stephen: It’s a religious act of engaging with sacred text. Learning is considered one of the highest, if not the highest acts that a person can do. We say in tradition, in a litany of listing the mitzvot, “talmud Torah keneged kulam.” “Talmud Torah learning is higher than any of them combined.” So, this has all kinds of sociological aspects over time, including the fact that in Israel there is a kind of protected class of learners, of students of Torah, ultra-Orthodox men who make the claim that it is of national security significance that Torah is learned. Even to the extent that, during recent conflicts here in Israel, the case has been made in the headlines of papers, right, that we must not interrupt the learning of the ultra-Orthodox yeshivot, houses of study, yeshivas, because they are the highest, most important thing that can be done in any time for the Jewish people. So, it’s a real phenomenon which goes back to the sanctification of learning as being a high, if not the highest, act that a person can engage in. And that is related, of course, to the fact that we’re talking about a tradition that goes back thousands of years which holds the Hebrew Scriptures as immutable, and the ultimate expression that humans can engage with, to engage with the divine, to engage with the oracle, if you will, forgive the parallel. But there’s a second lane in that highest place, and that is Oral Torah. Written Torah is the received Torah of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is considered perfect and immutable, but there is also Oral Torah, which is the world of midrash, which is the world of interpretation. There is an understanding that there is an entire world of interpretive acts, of interpretation of text, of the parsing of text, of the use of midrash and other techniques, which is as holy and as necessary as the written text. And so, the culture develops in two lanes, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, and the house of study, the beit midrash, is where they meet. That is where those lanes meet. That is the intersection of spiritual, intellectual life emergent in late antiquity. That doesn’t mean that the synagogue, the beit knesset, isn’t critical or doing the commandments, the mitzvot, isn’t critical. There are many other ways to do what’s considered the highest and best use of Jewish life, right? But in terms of the map of Jewish life, there are two lanes in the map; Written Torah and Oral Torah. Written Torah, in the most simple terms, and I’m truly simplifying here, Written Torah is what the Oral Torah is bringing light to. And you don’t have Oral Torah without the Written Torah. But without the Oral Torah, the Written Torah… we don’t say it, but it’s implied; is incomplete. You need both. And that is a massive intellectual, theological claim. That’s why midrash is so important, because midrash is the technical system; it’s the technique which is running all the way through the story of scriptural peoples from the time when midrash becomes very much prevalent as a way of understanding commandment, law, community, purpose, the divine. Nehemia: Okay, so, the way I’ve heard it described, and tell me what your thoughts on this are, is that the Written Torah is like, if you were to hear a lecture in the university, you know, setting, you hear your professor giving a lecture and you write down notes, and then somebody comes and they read your notes. Well, there’s pieces of the puzzle they’re missing. There might have been a slide up on the screen that you don’t see in the note, and the Oral Torah brings in all the information that elucidates, what are these notes really saying? Do you accept that explanation? That may come from a particular, like, maybe ultra-Orthodox perspective, I’m not sure. Stephen: I think it’s part of the description, but it’s not complete. As I understand Oral Torah (and I’m limited by my own brain, and studies, and learning, and all the rest) but the concept is that the Oral Torah, as it’s described, for example, in the Ethics of the Fathers, in the mishnaic text, which is known as Pirkei Avot, which is a brief kind of litany of the chain of tradition and a variety of teachings, the Oral Torah is received by Moses and passed down from generation to generation as if the Oral Torah already existed in total, totally and completely at the beginning, in the same way that the Written Torah existed in total at the beginning. So, conceptually, there’s an idea that there is an entire universe of Oral Torah that is passed down from generation to generation and is revealed through study. Now, that being said, I think it’s historically viable and practically fair to assume, even if you have a mystical, faith-based understanding that all Torah, whether it’s Written or Oral Torah, is complete and perfect and just discovered by humans in the Beit Midrash, as we see it in action in the classic texts of midrash and in the Talmud and all the way through to the present day, it looks a lot like people coming up with great ideas based on study, right? So, whether it is predestined that that note that someone took in the class on the lecture already existed, and they’re just doing the act of being a scribe, inscribing it, and writing down Oral Torah, right? Writing down their oral Torah, even if they’re actually writing down something that is essentially new, that’s a question for mystics and prophets to determine, not me, obviously. The point being that my impression of what it means to engage in the world of midrash is that it is a creative act. Nehemia: Okay, midrash is a creative act. A creative act (I’m writing it down) to engage the sacred text. So, you said midrash is a technique, and this technique is creative. So, tell us more about that. For someone who has no idea what you’re talking about. Stephen: Oh, sure. Well, I’ll pretend that I do. Nehemia: No, I’m saying someone… for the audience who’s hearing here the word midrash for the first time. Stephen: I am also the audience. Nehemia: Oh, I see! Stephen: … to assume that they know truly and deeply, completely what they’re talking about is already a sign that they probably don’t. I mean, there’s knowing and then there’s knowing, right? Nehemia: Gotcha. Stephen: So, I know what I know, and I can describe it as I’m able to. But these topics are so vast and incredibly multifaceted that we’ve got to enter them with a level of humility. Nehemia: Okay. Fair enough. Stephen: And I’m going to endeavor to do that. The way I would describe midrash is that there are playbooks for midrash, right? There is the equivalent of the basic plays that one can play in the world of midrash. There are certain terms, kal va’chomer, or gozer hashava, or heikeshim, which are actual formulaic ways that you engage in a meaning of a text. So, kal va’chomer, for example, is part of a list, an early list, of the types of techniques that one can use, and it’s basically an a fortiori argument, right? Nehemia: Which is Latin. So, what is that in English? Stephen: Well, I’m hoping that some of our Latin scholars listening in will correct me if I’m wrong, but essentially it’s the relationship between what you would call a minor argument and a major argument, a smaller case and a larger case. So, if it’s true in small letter a, then it stands to reason that it’s going to be true in large letter A, right? There’s going to be, alike grows into even more alike, and there’s a relationship. And there’s a whole list that comes in a couple of different forms (the list gets bigger) of what are the acceptable techniques that one can use to do midrash, in the same way that, if you’re playing basketball, there’s a lot of things you can do with the ball, but you cannot take a shot from a seat in the arena. That’s not part of the game. But you can do all kinds of things on the court as long as you follow the rules. Midrash functions in a similar way, in that there’s a court that becomes defined; here are the rules. Here’s what you can do with the ball, which is the sacred text, in order to advance it down the floor, right, and to score. Which is to enlighten your community. Which is to make a higher meaning, a meaning that suits and fits and is engaged with the problem you’re trying to solve. But also, above anything else, fully immerses you in the game, right? Midrash is about problem solving for Halacha, for legal reasons, for literary reasons, for religious practice reasons. There are a lot of reasons why people come to the written text and say, “We’ve got to figure out what this means.” That’s a reason why my midrash is used, because there are no oracles, right? There are learned people who have to answer questions. “What does this text mean if I need to know whether I can turn my lights on during Shabbat or not,” right? Or whatever the question is going to be, right? Bad example, but the concept is that I need to solve a religious practice problem from written text into oral text, to oral tradition, in order to make sense, to know how to live religiously. But there’s another reason why midrash is engaged, and that is simply for the love of the game. Right? Sometimes it’s to win the game, to use the basketball metaphor, and winning the game means knowing what to do, and sometimes it’s just because you love to play the game. Because you love to learn, you love to study, you love to engage in sacred texts, and the house of study is a house of problem-solving and a house of love. Love of study, problem solving for religious problems; it’s both. Midrash does both things, and that’s why, in general terms, you divide the worlds of midrash into Midrash Aggadah, which is the midrash of narrative and story (what’s this story saying?) and Midrash Halacha, which is the midrash that has legal implications. Now, many times it’s hard to see the difference because a story can lead to a legal implication. But the essential division of the types of texts are Midrash Aggadah texts, which are primarily focused on the narrative, and Midrash Halacha texts, which are primarily focused on the legal implications of the interpretations. Nehemia: Okay, so, I want to try to have you bring some concrete examples, maybe from Leviticus Rabbah that you wrote your PhD dissertation on. Let’s start with Aggadah, which is the story, meaning the narrative side of midrash. Well, actually, before we get to that, can you say something about… and my audience has heard the term pshat before. What is the relationship? Because you say midrash is a technique, there’s another technique called Pshat, unless you’re using the terminology differently. So, that’s a question I’m going to throw out and let you deal with, or discuss. Stephen: Midrash is, you know, it’s kind of like, you know… imagine cars; you start out with carburetors, and you get to electric vehicles. I mean, there’s layers of how the technology advances. So, pshat is part of a sort of a four-layered approach to interpreting text, which is pshat. I don’t know if you’ve gone through this with the… Nehemia: They’ve heard of Pshat, Remez, Drash, Sod, but why don’t you explain it from your perspective? Stephen: So, the idea of the PaRDeS, which is Pshat, Remez, which is literally the hint, Drash, and Sod, which is esoteric. And drash, maybe we’ll call it symbolic. Okay? Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: So, the idea is that pshat, the first level, the level that’s quote-unquote easiest to access, and pshat is from that root, like pshut, which means simple, or basic, or unencumbered, is the literal meaning of the text. What is the literal meaning of the text? So, the literal meaning of the text is different than the remez, which is the suggested meaning of the text. Okay? Which is different than the drash level of the text, which enters into the realm of the symbolic, or the associative perhaps, which is different than the quote-unquote highest level, which is sod, which is esoteric, which you probably can only learn from a master, okay? In terms of examples of how an aggadic, or narrative-focused midrash works, let’s take something actually from Bereshit, from the Book of Genesis, because it’s a famous example. And it’s a good one; the story of Abraham smashing the idols in his father’s workshop. Is it in the Hebrew bible? Or is it midrash? Nehemia: You’re asking me? No, it’s not in the Hebrew bible. It’s not explicitly anywhere in the text. Stephen: Three points for Dr. Gordon. For House Gordon. It’s not in the Hebrew bible. Nehemia: Before you explain that… So, using the word midrash, and I’m not sure; are you using the word midrash to include all of pardes? In other words, is phsat part of midrash technique? Or is it one technique within midrash in the way you’re using it? Because other people would use the word midrash as a synonym for drosh. So, I want to clarify that. Stephen: Yeah, well… Nehemia: Or is it multiple meanings? Stephen: The realm of the four-level interpretation, which is something that seems to be present in, I believe, Origen, early Church Fathers; there’s elements of this in late antiquity at the same time, that sort of classical midrash is really starting to heat up. The industry is moving, you know, 3rd, 4th, 5th century. This is something that becomes very important in Kabbalah, in mystical interpretations of sacred texts, the idea that there are these four levels going from the simplest meaning to the most esoteric meaning. And it’s an area that, you know, I’m not in any way an expert in, but it’s something that evolves over time. It’s using the midrashic system for another kind of theological approach to text, and it develops over centuries. The idea of pshat, the simple meaning, that is, I think, an inclination that one would see in all kinds of collections of midrash, but sometimes you’ll see one interpretation after another and none of them are privileged over the other. They will just come as a kind of encyclopedia entry or a dictionary, a lexicon, what the word could mean, what the phrase could be, as a kind of collection. And that’s probably what the collections of midrash were. They were almost like an encyclopedia in which Jewish knowledge was contained and hooked onto the particular text. We can talk about that. Nehemia: Hooked is a good example, or good phraseology. Let’s now talk about Abraham smashing the idols. If it’s not in the book of Genesis, where does it come from? Stephen: It comes from Midrash Aggadah. It comes from the attempt to explain something about, who is Abraham? What motivates him? It’s the liner notes to the album. It’s what the dramaturge knows about the character that’s not written into the play. Nehemia: Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t know what a dramaturge is. Help me out with that. Stephen: The dramaturge has to understand the guts, the heart, the motivations of the script, of the actors, of the staging. Nehemia: What is a dramaturge? Is that like a director, or something? I don’t know what that is. Stephen: It’s part of the team that creates a play. Nehemia: It’s called the dramaturge? Stephen: An easier example is, imagine that the student of the Hebrew Scriptures has come to be reading passages on Abraham and asks a question like a method actor, right? What’s Abraham’s motivation? We know that Abraham’s been told what to do by God, but, you know, maybe I’ve been told what to do by God sometimes, and it’s not so easy. Who is this person who was so brave to leave his homeland, and leave his family, and leave his customs, and go off and, according to tradition, to be the first monotheist? What motivated him? What was he like when he was a kid? What was his family like? Nehemia: So, I looked it up here. Dramaturge is (according to Google, take it with a grain of salt) a literary editor on the staff of a theater who consults with authors (that’s interesting) and edits texts. And you’re saying the dramaturge’s job (I love that. I’ve learned a new word here) the dramaturge’s job is to help the actor say, “Okay, when you speak this line, here’s what’s going through the head of the character.” And you mentioned method acting, which if I understand correctly, is basically, they’re not just reciting lines, they’re like, “Okay, I’m talking about, the character’s mother died. I have to think about the worst thing that ever happened in my life so I can feel the emotion of what it’s like, as close as I can for my mother.” Stephen: I know the motivation of the character I’m playing. Right. What’s Abraham’s motivation? So, in some sense, you know, there’s a linkage between the reader and the actor, right? In this case, the reader, the student, the student of the text, is trying to understand the text from the inside out. Nehemia: But if the text doesn’t tell us what Abraham’s motivation is, and you called midrash a creative process or creative technique, creative process, help the audience understand; are you just making it up? That’s the question. Stephen: You may just be making it up in practice, but the fact of the matter is, there are rules about how you can make it up as midrash develops. You can’t just come and say, “Abraham was like that because he had high cholesterol.” “Abraham was like that because he was chased by a dragon out of his homeland.” You have to tie it to something in the text. Nehemia: Oh, beautiful. Okay. Stephen: It could be a letter; it could be a curlicue on top of one of the letters. It could be the fact that a word sounds like a different word, and if you change the letter Sin and the letter Samekh, you get a different meaning. It could be you create a fault. You see a false friend and you make something of it. It could be because of the context of where the text appears. It occurs in a passage which has something before or after. It could be, even more broadly, because somewhere in the Book of Prophets, there’s a mention of Abraham saying that he had a temper. And you come and say, “Oh, we know that he must have had a temper.” How did he have a temper? He had a temper because he did the following, based on this inference that I make from the text. So, you are inferring from the text. You are looking for a hook to hang an interpretation on, or you are seeing the hook. You are seeing where there’s a discrepancy; you’re seeing where there’s something unusual in the text, and you’re trying to explain it. Nehemia: Okay. So, explain to the audience where they get the idea that Abraham smashed his father’s idols when there’s no verse that said, “And Abraham came down from the upper loft, and he smashed the idols, and he placed the hammer into the hand of the largest one.” There’s no verse like that in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible. So, where do you get that from? Stephen: I would have to sit right here with the text in front of me and show you. And we could pause and try to do that. Or I think we could leave it as a sort of rule of how midrash works, which is that midrash can be highly speculative and associative and imaginative and creative, but it cannot disconnect itself from the text. Nehemia: So, I looked this up. So, I think it’s worth looking at and discussing with you and getting your input on. So, it’s Genesis 15:17, and it says, “Va’yomer elav, ani Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey asher hotzetikha mi’Ur Kasdim. “I am the LORD who took you out of Ur Kasdim.” And Ur, in ancient Hebrew actually is a word that means a furnace. And so, “I am the LORD who brought you out of the furnace of the Kasteans,” or the Chaldeans. And then what midrash does is, it basically, I mean, obviously it takes the story from the Book of Daniel, of Hananiya, Mishael, and Azariah, or I think in English it’s Shadrach, Mishael, or how do they say that? And Abednego, or something. So, in other words, they’re like, “Oh, God took Abraham out of a furnace.” And they know in the context, Ur Kasdim is the name of a place because it appears repeatedly. But I guess they’re employing the technique that you described. They want to understand; how did Abraham come to know God and how did that manifest itself? Right? And so, they’re like, “All right, God took him out of a furnace. You get thrown into a furnace by pagans because you do something against their idols.” Right? Stephen: Well, so throw their idols into a furnace. If they’re clay idols, you have to put them in the kiln. Nehemia: Fire them, that’s true. Stephen: It provides specificity; it is specific where things are amorphous. So, if I can take a text like Ur Kasdim, and I can say, “Okay, every word, every letter, or as we say in one of the sayings, every jot and tittle of text is significant.” There is no element of the immutable, perfect Written Torah that is extraneous. So, I can interpret anything, which includes saying, why is Abraham the way he is? He came from Ur Kasdim. What do I learn from that? I learn from that that there was an element of him coming out of the furnace. What does that mean? He differentiates himself from those who put something that’s meant to represent the divine in the furnace and comes out and he sees that. He says, “No, no, no. I am in the image of God. Be’tzelem Elokim.” Right? “I am a son of God. I am…” You can interpret that by focusing, not on what you feel or think, but bringing what you feel and think to a word. It has to be locked down in an interpretive act. It’s not enough for me to dream up some weird story about the first monotheist smashing a bunch of idols. I need to tie it to a specific inference from the text, and then I can go as far as I want with it. But it’s got to be tied to it. Nehemia: Talk about that, “I can go as far as I want.” And actually, just let me… I pulled up here on my Bible software program, Accordance. So, Targum Pseudo Jonathan translates Genesis 15:7. “Then He said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of the fiery furnace of the Chaldeans.” And then we have something called the fragmentary Targumim, which has the same thing. “I am the Lord who brought you out of the furnace of fire of the Chaldeans.” So, a slightly different order of words. But in both cases, they’re interpreting Ur as basically a double interpretation; it’s both a furnace and a fiery furnace, right? So, this is an ancient interpretation which gets elaborated on, or you could say maybe the full story was known to the translator of Pseudo Jonathan and he’s putting up as much into the text as he can, right? He can’t put the whole story. I guess he could, right? But it’s going to be a push to put the whole story of the smashing the idols in. So, talk to me about this; you can go as far as you want. I’d like my audience to understand that, because it’s not as far as you want, right? You can’t say anything you want, right? Or can you? I don’t know what… you said, it’s a creative process. Stephen: Mm-hmm. Nehemia: So, how do we get from ‘there’s a furnace’ to ‘he smashed his father’s idols?’ Because part of that, you could say, is… and here I’ll use these big fancy terms. I apologize to the audience. I try to get them to understand the terms eisegesis and exegesis. Exegesis is, you read meaning out of something, and eisegesis, from the word eise in Greek, is you read meaning into something. And so, you could argue that it’s exe-gesis, reading the meaning out, to say that ur means furnace, even though maybe it’s clearly not in the context, but the story of the smashing of the idols is entirely eisegetical. There’s nothing in the text about that, even hinted at. Stephen: Well, I didn’t prepare the text in advance, and I don’t want to… Nehemia: Okay, so maybe bring a different example. Stephen: I would say that if we went line by line, I’d be willing to bet, because midrash works this way, that it is eiso and exo. Midrash is eisegesis and exegesis, but you cannot have only eisegesis, right? You can call it the Midrashic imagination, perhaps, certainly in contemporary terms, and say, “Well, I’m doing midrash because I’m interpreting Jonah as a teenager who slams the door on his parents, and he’s so angry, he’s like a teenager.” You know? I mean, you can say that, and it does have a nice midrashic feel to it, but classical midrash would require you to find something referencing Jonah behaving like a teenager in the text. Exe-gesis, right? So, an example of this idea of going as far as you want or you can. There’s a concept in midrash, and there are different forms of midrash, and one of the forms, a very popular form, is called the Petichta. Petichta. The Petichta is a homily, or an interpretive narrative, which is basically designed to go between two verses, a near verse and a far verse. Okay? So, let’s say that I’ve chosen a verse from somewhere in the wisdom literature. Let’s say I’m choosing something from the Book of Job. I choose a verse, and a Petichta is where I show you how I put together a chain of interpretations, which are exegetical, which are coming out of the text, to link between that verse from the Book of Job all the way to something from Proverbs or Psalms. It doesn’t matter. The point is that I can show you that everything is connected through exegetical interpretation. This is a performance. If I am in a synagogue in 5th century Galilee, and it is time for a sermon, I do not get up and talk necessarily about politics, or the way we would see a sermon in a synagogue or a church or a mosque necessarily in contemporary times. I would perform the feat of linking together as many verses as possible. That’s my Petichta. So, imagine it like a jazz musician. Okay? A jazz musician is taking a jazz standard, Summertime, okay? Which is not even a jazz standard, it’s just a popular song that was made into a jazz standard. And the job of the jazz musician, who’s a virtuoso, is to go crazy on that melody. Now, they’re limited by how great they are, because some jazz musicians can even play atonal things that sound right. They can bang on the side of their cello, and it fits perfectly. They can pluck the strings, they can bow the strings, they can bump the cello on the ground and have a cacophony of sound. And if they’re a really great musician, it somehow all fits together, and is connected back to when they come back around to the melody. And here comes the melody of the song that I’m interpreting again. It’s the same concept with the Petichta, or with midrash in general. It’s about a virtuoso act of engaging as much content as you can in that performative space, right? To amplify, embellish, raise up the core text by a virtuoso performance of the text and showing how it’s all connected. So, you can go all the way through the Torah and come back to where you started if you can link text to text to text to text because the basic understanding of what the Written Torah is, and what the Oral Torah does, is that it is all perfect. It all makes sense. There are no holes. You’re just to bring all your mind, all your heart, all your soul to the learning you do with it. And not only are you a better person because you’ve done that, not only, perhaps, have you solved some halachic problem because you’ve done that, but you’ve immersed yourself in something that is akin to being connected to the divine by being able to so deeply engage yourself in the Torah, through your interpretation of it, that it’s like your perfect prayer. It’s like doing all 613 of the mitzvot. It’s like very, very high level. So, midrash goes from being a way to make sense of narrative, Aggadah, or law, Halacha, to becoming a dance for dance’s sake, for playing that perfect virtuosic solo, for a jazz player, right? Because it’s not solving anything. It’s just an incredible homily that is showing the beauty and perfection of the sacred text. Midrash can be a problem solver. It can be art. Nehemia: So, tell me, in your dissertation, you have the phrase oral performance. Tell us how that plays in. What does it mean in this context? I know that that’s terminology that comes from an entire world of academic literature. Stephen: Right. Nehemia: And so, it’s a… what do you call that? A term to art, right? In other words, it’s like a technical term. What is oral performance here? Stephen: So, I learned the terminology from sort of… the classic text on this is the Singer of Tales, Albert Lord, who was collecting epic songs from essentially uneducated Slavic epic poem singers and analyzing that, and it led him to understand that memory of epic tales was a function of creating what had already been heard, not rote memorization. Okay? What it means is that, when we think about Homeric epics, we think about the Odyssey. And then, when we think about ancient tales, Gilgamesh, and when we get into the world of sacred texts like the Hebrew Bible, there’s a line between what’s written and what’s performed. It’s complicated as heck to try to explain that vis-a-vis the Hebrew Scriptures, but, you know, people have tried to do it. And the point is that, a poet, and we’re not talking about poet in the sense of someone sitting at their desk and writing poetry, we’re talking about someone who is basically the messenger of tradition; they’re somewhere between a scribe and a prophet. They are carrying those 100,000 lines of the Odyssey. Their immersion in the core text is recreated by them every time they perform it. So, I am not standing like an actor reciting lines in a play, but I am also not improvising. I am only using received content, and I am assembling it for you in real time. I am performing the epic. Nehemia: That’s the oral performance? Stephen: So, the study of oral performance theory, or the study of oral performance, is studying the ways that traditions are carried over generations, hundreds of years, thousands of years, by figures who are the performers. And then the small ways that all of us use oral, O-R-A-L, performance as a way of conveying knowledge, as a way of conveying culture. The way it comes into play in midrash is that you can imagine… here we’ll go from jazz to blues. There are certain phrases… Nehemia: And guys, Stephen here has a musical background, which I don’t know the first thing about, but go ahead. Jazz to blues. Stephen: Can you think, Nehemia, of a phrase from the blues? If I say, “Give me a classic blues phrase. A phrase from the blues.” Nehemia: I don’t even know what phrase means in the concept of blues. Is a phrase like words? Stephen: Yeah, like a couple words that fit together. Nehemia: So, if you asked me to list three blues songs, I couldn’t. If you played them to me and said, that’s blues, I’d say, “Oh, okay. That’s what you mean by blues.” I know almost nothing about music. Stephen: Okay. So, let’s take an example of… let me think of one that’s kind of new. Nehemia: What’s the most famous blues song my audience would have heard of? Stephen: I don’t know. Nehemia: What’s your favorite blues song? Stephen: I’m a big B.B. King fan. I’m trying to grab one from there. “Nobody loves me but my mother, and she might be jiving too,” okay? There’s a ream of blue songs that relate to the mother, okay? There’s a whole semantic domain (that’s a biblical phraseology, right) of songs about mothers, phrases about mothers. Okay? So, if I am standing up to present my performance, right, I’m not going to be making up new phrases about mothers, I’m going to be using phrases that I already know. Just like when the midrashist came to engage with the question of why Abraham was the way he was, just as you said. You said, or you mentioned Pseudo Yonatan, the Targum, the translation. I am actually drawing on my reservoir of phrases and stories and vocabulary that I picked up in my culture and assembling them. In Greek, the word for, to say, to speak, is lego. We use Legos to put together… Legos to make a design. Imagine texts like Legos. They are spoken, but they are assembled. I do not sit at home and create blocks of Legos out of plastic with the right little tabs so that they fit together. I go to the place where the Legos are sold in the store. They’ve been produced, they are the received tradition, and then I can assemble from them all kinds of things. I could assemble from them a picture that the Lego tells me exactly what to make, or I could make something out of them that I want to make. Okay? The idea is that there is a core vocabulary in traditions, in cultures, that are assembled to meet the moment of what the interpretation demands. So, in oral performance theory, we think about midrash, we know that there are going to be certain characters, certain phrases, certain descriptive terms, which are used over and over again, that are used for the particular interpretive moment that comes into play. And that what we have in the texts that we have, the compendiums of midrashic texts that we have, these are in some ways an attempt to replicate what those creative moments were like, what those associative moments were like. Imagine it as trying to look at, like, a snapshot of what some of those conversations, or study sessions, might have been like. That’s one way of thinking about midrash. Another way of thinking about midrash is, because no one really knows how these Midrashic collections, where they came from… you know, behind you, you have a collection of many, many old books, right? Nehemia: It’s a photo from the Bologna University Library, but yeah. Stephen: All right. Well, some of those are probably encyclopedias, right? Nehemia: Could be, yeah. Stephen: Let’s imagine that a Midrashic collection (just imagine for a sec) is like an encyclopedia. Vayikra Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, which I did my dissertation on, is an interpretation of the Book of Leviticus. How many verses, percentagewise… how many verses do you think of the Book of Leviticus, you know, the ultimate midrashic interpretation of the Book of Leviticus; what percentage of verses are covered in that massive encyclopedia of Leviticus Rabbah? What percentage do you think? Nehemia: I’m going to guess at 10 percent. Stephen: You under guessed, but you were not far off. It’s like around 18, 20 percent, okay? Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: Now, how can… Nehemia: In other words, this is important, guys. It’s not a systematic commentary, like, let’s say Rashi, who goes through pretty much every verse, right? “The Lord spoke to Moses saying,” he probably doesn’t have much to say. But almost every verse, his aim is to… anything that’s not clear, he’s going to try to explain. That’s the approach of, certainly, a medieval commentary. So, in one sense, it’s a commentary, but in another sense, it’s not. Stephen: That’s where the hook idea comes in, again, to go back to a previous, I guess, metaphor that we used. Imagine that I am a 4th century Rabbinic Jew who has a distant memory of a Jewish world with a Temple, where everything was centralized, more or less, who is now seeing that Christianity is the emergent dominant form of monotheism and no longer needs people to become Jewish to become Christian. And Christianity is taking over the Roman Empire. I’ve got a small community which is scattered across certain places in Israel, and, you know, you’ve got communities in different places, maybe in North Africa, in Rome. You’ve got Jewish communities, but the continuity has been snapped, okay? I don’t have anywhere where I can go to tell me what Judaism is. I have the Holy Bible, right? But my community’s been shattered. There’s no longer a Temple. The Temple was the center, right? So, what do I do? How do I teach my people what it is that we are? Well, I have all kinds of ideas. I have legal ideas. I have philosophical ideas. I have jokes. I have customs. I have all that. Where am I going to keep it? What epic poem will I use to carry the layers that I want to pass on to the next generation? I know what I’ll use. I’ll use Hebrew Scriptures, because Hebrew Scriptures have been around for thousands of years, right? And people have memorized, actually memorized Hebrew Scriptures, and we have a written version of it, which is really rare, because there’s very few books. Very few books. So, what do I do? I store the things that are important to me in the text. Imagine that the Hebrew Scriptures are like a locker where I can keep the things that are important to my culture. I know that a lot of people know the Hebrew Scriptures well, and I know that a lot of people can read Hebrew Scriptures, because it’s actually a fairly highly literate community, by those standards, because we read the Scriptures in synagogue. People know it. They certainly know it orally. And it’s done year after year, same day, same reading, et cetera. But there’s more that I need to convey. It’s not enough for me just to convey what’s in the Hebrew Scriptures, I need to convey all this other halakhic, this legal knowledge, all this customs knowledge, linguistic knowledge. I have languages that I’m speaking that… you know, I have Greek, I have Aramaic, right? So, I use the hook of the text to hang on it all kinds of other stuff that I want you to know. It’s not important for me in Vayikra Rabbah, in Leviticus Rabbah, in the, let’s say, the 4th century, to interpret every single verse of Leviticus, but it is important for me to cram into it as much as I can about what I want carried on from my culture. And that is a role the midrash plays. It is giving you the place, the character, the language, the art, the custom, the jokes, the humor (because there’s a lot of humor in there) on the hook of the Scriptures. So, midrash comes to be, both a way to carry through like a Trojan horse, right, all kinds of other stuff within it, but it also remains, remains, a tool for solving real problems. Nehemia: So, when you say there’s this hook that you’re hanging all these ideas on and all this information on, I want you to comment on this; does this mean that the person producing the midrash, or performing the midrash, however you want to call it, that they know very well that that doesn’t come from the text, but if they can connect it to the text, it can survive and live in a sense? Stephen: Imagine the midrashist as a combination of a scribe and a prophet. The scribe and the prophet are both deeply connected to the text. When Ezekiel comes to speak, Ezekiel is bringing reference back to the Scriptures all the time, and is engaged in interpretation, not just declaiming whatever Ezekiel wants to declaim. Ezekiel is coming out of a tradition. The scribe is obligated to copy down the text. So, there’s a way that the Rabbinic tradition sort of combines the role of the transmitter, of the core map, which is the Hebrew Scriptures, and the spirit of it, the launching of it, which is prophetic, in a kind of role that does both. But it’s also a bit of the judge, right? The judge is there too, because someone has to adjudicate what this text means. The prophet can tell you what is the, quote-unquote, right thing to do, or invoke, or inspire, or disparage you. The scribe can give you the best record possible. But who’s going to tell you what to do? If you’re coming with an injured goat and you need to know whether or not it can be sacrificed, in theory, right? Or if you are dealing with issues of property ownership, and you want to follow the law, but it’s not clear what the law is, who’s going to help you? So, the Midrashist is a judge, they’re a prophet, they’re a scribe, in a sense, and they’re also something else; they’re a performer. They’re an entertainer. They’re a magician. Nehemia: A magician? Stephen: Magician. Magician. Nehemia: How so? Stephen: In a sense that… because, watch this magic act I can do. I can go from a text in Job all the way to a text in Mishlei without missing a beat. I can impress you with this incredible tour de force of showing you the magic, the incredible nature of this universe of text that we live in. I’m going to wow you with it. Nehemia: Does it involve exegetical sleight of hand? In other words, you used the word magician. I’m trying to wrap my head around what you mean by that. Stephen: Because there’s magic in the text. There’s magic, not in the sense of occult. I mean, that’s not my area, right? Nehemia: Well, no, I said sleight of hand. Stephen: Magic in the sense of electricity, incredible energy. Wow. There’s a wow, this incredible text, and there’s a wow in linking the text together and seeing how the text plays with words in different places and different times in the text, to suddenly see, you know, as the story goes of, you know, Moshe Rabbeinu, of Moses. There’s a midrash that has Moses transported by the powers of time into Rabbi Akiva’s classroom. Rabbi Akiva, who’s an early Rabbinic figure, a famous one. And Moses is sitting in the back of the class, and he has no idea what’s going on. And he’s saying, “I don’t understand how it could be that I, Moses, have no understanding. This is the text that I brought. Who are these people? Right? What’s happening here?” And there’s this idea that there’s a linkage between the generations, right? And you can be linked through the text, and the text can still be the text, and it can continue to evolve. And there’s something that goes beyond any human being, even the most versatile, brilliant human being, the text is what wins the day, because all that we’re doing is coming out of it. So, you know, the tradition, the tradition, one can carry it far and wide, but ultimately the grounding for that, the force, the power, the magic, is embedded within the text itself. You can be an incredible scribal, prophetic, adjudicator, performer of the text, but just like a jazz artist or a blues musician, they will always tell you about the tradition of the blues or the tradition of the jazz. You are a servant of your genre. You are a servant of the artistry of the tradition that you’re interpreting. So, that levels an element of humility on the whole midrashic process, because as great as you can be, as far as you can travel with midrash, you can only travel as far as you know the text. That’s the number one… The most important quality of a midrashist is not imagination, it’s knowledge. But then, when you combine imagination and knowledge, then you have the amazing midrash. — Nehemia: So, I remember back a long time ago, there was this discussion in American political sphere about the meaning of the phrase crimes and misdemeanors. This was when Bill Clinton was being put up on charges of… I’m not sure what the terminology is correctly, but they were trying to have an impeachment trial. There’s what I think they call, like, the French approach, which is, “No, the law is this clay from which I mold what I want it to be.” And then there’s the originalist approach, which says, “I have to find out what they thought it meant, the people who formulated this law.” Where does midrash come into those two approaches? You have been 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]. 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Your donation is tax-deductible. [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/Support-the-Mission-Choosen.png?resize=512%2C342&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support ---------------------------------------- VERSES MENTIONED Genesis 25:22 Genesis 9:5 Deuteronomy 13:14 Deuteronomy 18:11 Mishnah Pirkei Avot Genesis 15:7 Babylonian Talmud Menachot 29b BOOKS MENTIONED The Singer of Tales (@57:31, Pt 1) Amazon.com: About Man and God and Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan [https://www.amazon.com/About-Man-God-Law-Spiritual/dp/1631956884/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1] RELATED EPISODES Hebrew Voices Episodes [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/category/media/audio/hebrew-voices] Hebrew Voices #245 – Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/secrets-jots-tittles-1] Support Team Study - Secrets of the jots and Tittles: Part 2 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/secrets-jots-tittles-2] OTHER LINKS Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center [https://fuchsbergcenter.org/] Stephen Daniel Arnoff | Discover. Grow. Inspire — Get Started Today [https://www.stephendanielarnoff.com/] [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/webstore-banner-big.png?resize=584%2C307&ssl=1]https://store.nehemiaswall.com The post Hebrew Voices #248 – Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/midrash-for-the-modern-day-1] appeared first on Nehemia's Wall [https://www.nehemiaswall.com].

SNEAK PEEK! Talmudic Judaism & the New Testament

Sneak Peek! Talmudic Judaism & the New Testament [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/STS-SP-Talmudic-Judaism-the-New-Testament1.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/sp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament Watch the Sneak Peek [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/sp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament] of this Support Team Study: Talmudic Judaism & the New Testament, where Nehemia and Prof. Lawrence Schiffman discuss the importance of the New Testament as a witness to Jewish history, as well as how the Talmud has been abused against the Jewish people. I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio [https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Downloads/SP-Talmudic-Judaism-New-Testament.mp3] https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support-team-members-only-contentWATCH THE FULL EPISODE TOMORROW PLUS HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF OTHER IN-DEPTH STUDIES BY BECOMING A SUPPORT TEAM MEMBER! [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support-team-members-only-content] Talmudic Judaism & the New Testament [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/STS-Talmudic-Judaism-the-New-Testament1.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1] ---------------------------------------- SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testamenthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/telegram?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testamenthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testamenthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testamenthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testamenthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/x?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testamenthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testamenthttps://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament&title=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Talmudic%20Judaism%20%26%20the%20New%20Testament ---------------------------------------- Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app! Apple Podcasts [https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/nehemias-wall-podcast/id935092991?mt=2] | Amazon Music [https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f059eda6-8a58-4e8d-9ba1-290ffb0dd613/dr-nehemia-gordon---bible-scholar-at-nehemiaswall-com] | TuneIn [http://tunein.com/radio/Nehemias-Wall-p888757/] Pocket Casts [https://pca.st/Y4ZW] | Podcast Addict [https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/dr-nehemia-gordon-bible-scholar-at-nehemiaswallcom/4574109] | CastBox [https://castbox.fm/channel/Dr.-Nehemia-Gordon---Bible-Scholar-at-NehemiasWall.com-id384877?country=us] | iHeartRadio [https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-nehemias-wall-podcast-31110272/] | Podchaser [https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/dr-nehemia-gordon-bible-schola-142019] | Pandora [https://www.pandora.com/podcast/dr-nehemia-gordon-bible-scholar-at-nehemiaswallcom/PC:53432] ---------------------------------------- SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS (Please click here to donate) [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support] Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible. [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/Support-the-Mission-Choosen.png?resize=512%2C342&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support ---------------------------------------- [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/webstore-banner-big.png?resize=584%2C307&ssl=1]https://store.nehemiaswall.com The post SNEAK PEEK! Talmudic Judaism & the New Testament [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/sp-talmudic-judaism-new-testament] appeared first on Nehemia's Wall [https://www.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;

SNEAK PEEK! Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 2

[https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/STS-SP-Secrets-from-the-great-silent-period_P2-1920.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/sp-silent-period-2 Watch the Sneak Peek [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/sp-silent-period-2] of this Support Team Study - Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 2, where Dr. Nehemia Gordon sits down with Mordechai Weintraub who explains his discovery of previously unknown fragments of the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll - one of the most ancient Torah scrolls after the Dead Sea Scrolls. What began as just two known pieces turned into something much bigger… revealing that this was not just a fragment of Exodus, but likely an entire Torah scroll. I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio [https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Downloads/SP-Secrets-from-the-Great-Silent-Period-Part-2.mp3] https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support-team-members-only-contentWATCH THE FULL EPISODE TOMORROW PLUS HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF OTHER IN-DEPTH STUDIES BY BECOMING A SUPPORT TEAM MEMBER! [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support-team-members-only-content] Secrets from the Great Silent Pediod: Part 2 [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/STS-Secrets-from-the-great-silent-period_P2-1920.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1] ---------------------------------------- SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/telegram?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/x?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&linkname=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nehemiaswall.com%2Fsp-silent-period-2&title=SNEAK%20PEEK%21%20Secrets%20from%20the%20Great%20Silent%20Period%3A%20Part%202 ---------------------------------------- Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app! Apple Podcasts [https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/nehemias-wall-podcast/id935092991?mt=2] | Amazon Music [https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f059eda6-8a58-4e8d-9ba1-290ffb0dd613/dr-nehemia-gordon---bible-scholar-at-nehemiaswall-com] | TuneIn [http://tunein.com/radio/Nehemias-Wall-p888757/] Pocket Casts [https://pca.st/Y4ZW] | Podcast Addict [https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/dr-nehemia-gordon-bible-scholar-at-nehemiaswallcom/4574109] | CastBox [https://castbox.fm/channel/Dr.-Nehemia-Gordon---Bible-Scholar-at-NehemiasWall.com-id384877?country=us] | iHeartRadio [https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-nehemias-wall-podcast-31110272/] | Podchaser [https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/dr-nehemia-gordon-bible-schola-142019] | Pandora [https://www.pandora.com/podcast/dr-nehemia-gordon-bible-scholar-at-nehemiaswallcom/PC:53432] ---------------------------------------- SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS (Please click here to donate) [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support] Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible. [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/Support-the-Mission-Choosen.png?resize=512%2C342&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support ---------------------------------------- [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/webstore-banner-big.png?resize=584%2C307&ssl=1]https://store.nehemiaswall.com The post SNEAK PEEK! Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 2 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/sp-silent-period-2] appeared first on Nehemia's Wall [https://www.nehemiaswall.com].

Hebrew Voices #246 – Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 1

[https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/HV-246-1920x1080-1.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/silent-period-1 In this episode of Hebrew Voices #246 - Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/silent-period-1], Dr. Nehemia Gordon sits down with manuscript expert Mordechai Weintraub to uncover the secrets of the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, a 1,300-year-old Torah from ancient Babylonia. Examined under infrared light at Cambridge, Mordechai's discovery of 13 hidden fragments is rewriting what we know about the Bible's transmission. Does the Torah we read today match what Jews read 1,300 years ago? I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio [https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Downloads/Hebrew-Voices-247-Secrets-from-the-Great-Silent-Period-Part-1.mp3] Transcript Hebrew Voices #246 – Secrets from the Great Silent Period: 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]. Nehemia: He wasn’t an anti-Semite. This is a Christian who says, you know, “Jesus was a Jew, so I want to practice some form of Judaism that Jesus would have been familiar with.” And he had this post on the internet where he’s talking about the Talmud, and he’s saying, “But the Talmud is so horrible it should be burned.” And I contacted him. I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying. People burn the Talmud, and then they often burn the Jews along with the Talmud, and/or force them to convert.” — Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Mordechai Weintraub. He’s a doctoral candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Talmud and Biblical Studies, also from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Master’s in Talmud, Talmud Ha’halakha, technically the department is called. He also, before entering into the academic sphere, studied for many years in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas where he acquired a vast knowledge of traditional Jewish literature. Shalom, Mordechai, and welcome to the program. Mordechai: Hi, Nehemia. Nehemia: Oh, and I forgot to mention; you’re also a researcher at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research, of which I’m the executive director. So that’s also quite important. Mordechai: I am proud to be a member of this institute. Nehemia: Well, thank you. Thank you for coming on the program. One of your really great discoveries that I want to talk about, I want to get to, but we want to talk about other things first, is, there is a Torah scroll known as the Ashkar Scroll or the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll. I saw it when it was on display at the Israel Museum many years ago in the Shrine of the Book, and there were two known fragments. And you discovered 13 more fragments, and maybe you have more now that… and if it’s not published, you don’t have to say it, but you published 13 more fragments, which is significant because… Why don’t you tell us; what’s important about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll? Right? If you go to any synagogue, there’s a Torah scroll. What’s special about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll from a historical perspective? Mordechai: Yeah, of course. The historical perspective is the issue, because it’s one of the most ancient Torah scrolls known after the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Judean Desert Scrolls is more accurate.) This is the first one. It’s ancient, and we all are interested more in ancient items than modern. And this is not just one ancient items, scrolls, but it’s in a period that we don’t have mostly any Hebrew scrolls from this era. Nehemia: Let’s back up. When you say it’s a scroll; it’s a scroll of what? Because we have Dead Sea Scrolls that are like the War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. What is the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll? What does it contain? Mordechai: So, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, now we know that it’s a Torah Scroll. So, all the Pentateuch in one scroll. So, in the beginning, the first discovery of the two parts that you mentioned was just from Exodus, and the assumption was that this can be a scroll just of Exodus. Nehemia: In other words, you’re saying when the first two pieces were known, it could have been it was just a stand-alone scroll of Exodus and not of the whole Torah. Oh! So, I didn’t realize that. Okay, so, your discovery… keep going, this is important. Mordechai: So, my discovery is of some fragments from other books. Nehemia: So, that proved it was the whole Torah, not just Exodus. Mordechai: Yes. So, the fragments I recognized I discovered are just from four books of the Torah, of the Pentateuch, and so Leviticus… I didn’t find any fragment from Leviticus. Nehemia: You didn’t? Okay. Well, but if there’s… Mordechai: But probably it was a complete Torah. Nehemia: So, if you had said you found fragments of Genesis through Numbers, somebody could say, “Well, Deuteronomy wasn’t included.” But it’s pretty unlikely that if it was Genesis through Deuteronomy, that Leviticus was excluded. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: So, that’s really interesting. So, this actually brings up a different question that maybe you’re actually the expert to talk about, I think. Is it unusual to have a scroll in the ancient world as big as the Torah? Or is that normal? Do we even know? Mordechai: So, we don’t have a lot of evidence. The first literature mention of a scroll with all the Pentateuch is in the Talmud, in the Babylonian Talmud and Jerusalem Talmud, but not in the Tanaic period. So, in the Tanaic literature, there is probably just the existence of scrolls of one book. Nehemia: Wait, so they mentioned that there were scrolls of one… So, actually, can you explain? You are the expert again to explain; what is the Tanaitic period versus the Amoraic period? Because some of my audience have never heard of a Tana or an Amora. Mordechai: Yeah, okay. So, the Tanaic period and the Amoraic period are periods that are internal in Jewish history. So, it’s not connected to the history of other people. Nehemia: No, but that’s normal. In other words, if you’re talking about Christianity, you can talk about the period of the Apostles and the period of the Church Fathers… Mordechai: Yeah, yeah… Nehemia: …and someone who isn’t familiar will say, “Church Fathers? They’re not the father of my church.” No, that’s a period of history guys. Mordechai: Yeah… Nehemia: It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s… historians use that. Yeah. Mordechai: So, the Tanaic period is probably from after the year 70, so after the… Nehemia: Destruction of the Temple. Mordechai: After the destruction of the Second Temple, and until the… Nehemia: And guys, Mordechai’s native language is Hebrew. He’s also fluent in Yiddish, I understand. So, I really appreciate you stepping out of your comfort zone and explaining these things in English. And we could have the conversation in Hebrew, but most of the audience wouldn’t understand it. So, all right. Mordechai: Yeah, so, my English is… Nehemia: It’s actually wonderful. I hear this all the time from non-native English speakers. You speak English much better than many people who live in Dallas, where I live, so… Oh, they don’t even speak English, many people, so… All right, so, it’s from the around the year 70, the destruction of the Temple, until… Mordechai: Until the beginning of the 3rd century. Nehemia: Okay, so, like around the year 200, 210 or something? Mordechai: 220. Nehemia: 220 even, okay. Mordechai: 220, yeah. 220 is the… Nehemia: The cutoff. Mordechai: The date. Yeah. Nehemia: But it wasn’t that somebody woke up today and said, “The Tanaitic period has ended, and now we’re in the period of the Amoraim,” right? In other words, it’s similar, like, to the Byzantine Empire. No one in the Byzantine Empire knew they were in the Byzantine Empire, they thought they were in the Roman Empire. Right. Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: But at a certain point, they realized, “Okay, we’re not really…” well that might be different. Okay. Because there was a period where people looked back and said, “You’re not a Tana, you’re an Amora. So, you can’t disagree with him unless you have a Tana source.” Isn’t there something like that? Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. There are some sources like that. And the first generation of the Amoraim… so, after 220, there are some sages, some rabbis, that are considered like Tanaim. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: So, there was a little blow… Nehemia: So, we’ve got from around 70 to 220 is the period, guys. This is a really important part of history. If you want to understand Jewish history, you’ll see these terms thrown about, and if you don’t know what they are it can be very confusing. So, that’s the period of the Tana, the Tanaim, or Tanaitic… Mordechai: Yeah, and they create a very massive literature, a corpus… Nehemia: And the most important piece of literature of the Tanaim is? Mordechai: Is the Mishnah. Nehemia: The Mishnah, right. But it’s not only the Mishnah, it’s other things as well. But that’s the most famous, the most important. And then the Amoraim start in around the year 220 and go until when? Mordechai: Oh, this is a very, very tricky question. So, it differs in Eretz Yisrael… Nehemia: The Land of Israel, yeah. Mordechai: …the Land of Israel and Babylonia. So, in Babylonia, the consensus is around the 6th century, so around 500 or maybe a little bit later. Nehemia: So, the story that I was told in elementary school, that the last Amoraim were Ravina and Ravashi in the year 500. Is there any validity to that from an academic, historical perspective? Mordechai: Yeah, of course. So, the death of Ravina, one of the… Nehemia: Ah, because there were two. I wasn’t told that! Mordechai: He is called the editor of the Babylonian Talmud, is 500. But probably the edition was some years later. So, maybe 550 or… we don’t know exactly. Nehemia: But give or take 500, 550, something like that. Mordechai: Okay, yeah. In the Land of Israel Talmud, so Talmud Yerushalmi. Nehemia: Oh, wait a minute. So, in English, that’s usually called, and this is weird to me, it’s called the Jerusalem Talmud, even though it wasn’t written in Jerusalem. In Hebrew, it’s called the Jerusalem Talmud, because I guess Jerusalem there means the Land of Israel. I guess, I don’t know. And then, in English, sometimes they’ll call it the Palestinian Talmud. I don’t quite understand why. But I think that goes back to an earlier period of history, meaning, modern history. So, the Jerusalem Talmud… Mordechai: I think the Palestinian Talmud is not because of the modern history. The Palestinian Talmud, because it was there, it was called Syria-Palestina, so… Nehemia: Okay. Oh, so, the Jerusalem Talmud, from a Jewish perspective, was called Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud. But from the non-Jewish perspective, that province was, after the year 135, I guess, after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, was renamed Syria-Palestina. Okay, makes sense. Mordechai: Of course, the Palestinian Talmud is, of course, a modern term, but I… because of that… Nehemia: No, right, right. What do they call it in Jewish literature from, I don’t know, 500 years ago? They didn’t call it the Palestinian or the Jerusalem Talmud, did they? Mordechai: They used both terms. Nehemia: No, but they don’t say Palestinian, right? Mordechai: No, not Palestinian. Of course not. Nehemia: Okay, what do they say when they’re writing in Hebrew and Aramaic when they talk about the Jerusalem Talmud? Mordechai: So, it’s Talmud Eretz Israel, so the Land of Israel Talmud… Nehemia: Oh, Land of Israel. Oh, okay. Mordechai: And Talmud Yerushalmi, also. Nehemia: Okay. Don’t they also say something like Bnei Ma’arava or something? Mordechai: Yeah, this is a mostly Aramaic term, Talmuda d’Bnei Ma’arava. Nehemia: Which is very interesting. What does it mean, Bnei Ma’arava? Mordechai: The west. Of the west, because it’s the opposite of… Nehemia: It’s opposite of the east, of Babylonia. Mordechai: Opposite of the east. Nehemia: So, guys, this is a really interesting thing. We today, in America, at least… and it comes from England. The English called it the Near East, the Land of Israel, and Americans call it the Middle East. And middle, by the way, here means near, like Midwest in English. I come from the Midwest, is the near west. Like a midwife is the person who stands next to the wife. So, the Middle East. But in Hebrew sources, Israel is… or at least in some Hebrew sources, in Hebrew it’s called the West, and Babylonia the East. It’s very interesting. That’s an interesting perspective. Okay, so, we have the Tanaim and the Amoraim, they’re writing the Babylonian Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud; when does it end, and when does the period of the Amoraim end in Israel? Mordechai: So, the Palestinian Talmud is probably the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th century. So, it’s about one hundred years, one century before the Babylonian Talmud. Nehemia: So, what happened that… Mordechai: There were historical events. So, there was some persecutions about the Jewish community, and their literature was also… Nehemia: Suppressed? Or… Mordechai: Suppressed, or decreased… Nehemia: Okay. So, you have the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. And they have a lot of overlaps, don’t they? Mordechai: Yeah. So, basically, they have a lot of common traditions. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: So, the Talmud… that’s saying, what’s the difference between the Tanaitic period and the Amoraite period? So, in the Tanaitic period, the main work is the Mishnah. But in the Talmudic, the Amoraite period, the Talmudim, the Talmud Yerushalmi and the Talmud Bavli, so, the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud, and they are interpreting the Mishnah. Mostly. So, there is a lot of other literature in there. So, the work is very, very… a lot of associations, so it’s not a commentary like modern commentary with a structure. Nehemia: So, it’s what we call the principle of association. I’ll just explain to the audience. So, their jumping-off point is, “Well, the Tanaim said in the Mishnah these different things,” and they start discussing it, and then they’ll say, “Well, you know they mentioned trees, and we have this other tradition about trees.” And they’ll say, “You know, Rabbi Akiva also said this third thing, or Rabbi Yossi said this other thing about trees, or he said this other thing not related to trees,” and now they start talking about the traditions of Rabbi Yossi. It’s not an actual example, but it’s a lot of the principle of association. It’s interesting that we have the principle of association in the Tanakh. People don’t realize that. One of my favorite examples, because I love dogs, is, it talks about not bringing the price of a dog to the Temple, and then right next to that, I don’t remember if it’s before or after in Deuteronomy, is the commandment about interest. And the word for interest is neshekh, which could actually be translated as something like “biting interest”, perhaps, but then nashakh is a dog biting, although not in biblical Hebrew. But apparently it existed at the time, because there’s still that connection. So, we have these principles of association in the Tanakh as well. But it goes on steroids in the Talmud! Mordechai: I think all the ancient world literature was like this. Nehemia: Oh, really? Mordechai: Yeah. The literature we know now is an outcome of the Greek work; Aristotle. Nehemia: So, that’s interesting. So, in other words, we think today of things being organized systematically, although even the term systematically is a loaded term, right? In other words, we want it to be done chronologically. We want it to be done by subject, which are actually two different ways of doing it. But if I think about, like, the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, right? So, he has a section on, I don’t know, finance, right? He has a legal section about damages, right? And everything in there is about damages. And you open up the Talmudic tractate on damages… or one of them, there’s multiple ones, and you see they’re talking about, like, demons and stuff. And you’re like, “What does this have to do with damages?” Well, because it’s a principle of association. And we got sidetracked, but it’s a really important piece of information for people to have, the difference between Tanaim and Amoraim. You said something that surprised me a bit. You said the Tanaim begin with the destruction of the Temple. So, we have names of people before the destruction of the Temple in the Mishnah, in the early Rabbinical literature. What are they called if they’re not called Tanaim? Did Shammai and Hillel, who lived around 30 BCE, are they not Tanaim, in your… Mordechai: So, we can call them Tanaim, but it’s common to differentiate between the rabbis, the sages, before the destruction of the Temple, and they call them the Zugot. Nehemia: Okay. The pairs. Mordechai: The pairs. So, until Shammai and Hillel… the pairs, yeah. Nehemia: Okay, so, the Zugot is an earlier period of history, you’re saying, than the Tanaim proper. Mordechai: Tanaim, yes. Nehemia: Okay, and what is the Zugot? What is the significance of that? Mordechai: The Zugot are pairs of the sages that are… One of them was the head of the court, Av Beit Din, and one was the president, president of the Jews, of the minority. So, there is a list of all the pairs. I don’t remember how long the list is… Nehemia: But this is in Pirkei Avot; Ethics of Our Fathers, it’s usually translated. Mordechai: Yeah, they are mentioned in Pirkei Avot. Nehemia: So, one was the head of what? The Sanhedrin, you’re saying… Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: Or you say he was the head of the court, the Sanhedrin. And the other one was… Mordechai: Sanhedrin was the Jewish court. Nehemia: Right, okay. A nice Greek word, sunedrion. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: And so, the other one was… what was the other role, the other one? He was the president of… Mordechai: A president. So, one was Av Beit Din… Nehemia: Ah, so, you mean the title in Hebrew, nasi. Mordechai: Nasi… Nehemia: Okay, so guys, that’s like an official title… or, I don’t know if it was then, but it later was understood as an official title. It’s not clear to me exactly what nasi is. Maybe we could save that for a different discussion. Meaning, like, what was his actual job as nasi? That’s an interesting question. But there’s an implication he’s a descendant of King David, isn’t there? If he’s nasi, or not necessarily… Mordechai: I don’t remember. Nehemia: Okay. So, like, the most famous nasi that people would have heard of is Hillel II, who, according to somewhat later traditions, established the Rabbinical calendar. Or as it was later… or some form of the calendar, at least. He’s in the year 359. So, you’re saying nasi is not the head of the Sanhedrin, but it’s some other… Mordechai: The head of the community. So, the head of the… Nehemia: Of the community, okay. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: That’s interesting because… I don’t know if you want to get into that, but it’s interesting. So, in the time of Hillel and Shammai, was Hillel the head of the Sanhedrin, or the nasi, do you know? Mordechai: Hillel was the nasi. Hillel was the nasi, and Shammai was the… Nehemia: He was the nasi. And so, Shammai was the head of the Sanhedrin, okay. That’s interesting. But at the time of Hillel, you had Herod, who was the head of the community. No? Right? I mean, he was the tetrarch of… he was not a tetrarch? Ethnarch; he was the ethnarch. Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s anachronistic, so, it’s not… Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, the term nasi later had a function that it’s not clear what it was or how it functioned in Second Temple times. Okay. So, let me ask you this, and I don’t know if you want to comment on this; it’s totally off topic of what I thought we would talk about. But I had this conversation recently in a different podcast, and I’ve had this conversation outside the podcast. There’s an approach within the academic world, and a lot of times it comes from the perspective of, you know, historians want to understand the cultural context of Jesus, who is, let’s call it roughly around the year 30 CE, or AD Christians say. And so, one approach is to say, “Well, what’s our earliest literature? We’ve got the Dead Sea Scrolls. Okay, but that’s of a particular group. We have Josephus, we have Philo, but that’s outside of Israel. So, that’s of limited value. But then the major source we have, to understand the context of Jesus, and the Gospels perhaps, from an academic perspective, more importantly, is the Mishnah and the Talmud and all the literature of the Tanaim and Amoraim.” That’s one approach. A second approach says, “No. There was this thing called Judaism, and out of Judaism of the Second Temple period, of the time of Jesus, grew two completely different unrelated movements: Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism. And Rabbinical Judaism can teach you no more about the time of Jesus… well, probably less than about the time of Jesus than if you study the Christianity of Constantine, for example. That’s an approach I encounter a lot, that second approach. What are your thoughts on that? And here’s how I put it for a different podcast; if Shammai or Hillel went into a beit midrash in Babylonia, and Rava and Abaye were there, and excuse me for my Ashkenazi pronunciation, would Shammai and Hillel be more familiar with the 3rd century beit midrash of the Amoraim, or the church of Origenes, of Origin? And I don’t know if we know the answer, but what are your thoughts on that? Mordechai: Well, I never thought a thing about that. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: So… Nehemia: So, in other words, is there a continuity… and this is something I think you study; is there a continuity into the Amoraic period of something that existed earlier in this Tanaitic period? Of course, I mean, there, almost obviously. Right? But that predates 70… That’s the question. To what extent is there a continuity? And to what extent is it; “The Temple’s destroyed, let’s make a completely different religion now.” Right? Mordechai: Yeah, so I think the continuity is large. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: All their theology is to follow the Father, to follow the ancient generations. So, Josephus called it, I remember that just the term in Hebrew: minhagei avot. Nehemia: What is it? Mordechai: Minhagei avot. Nehemia: “The traditions of the fathers.” Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: “The traditions of the fathers” is minhagei avot. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: So, in other words, there’s an ideology within Rabbinical Judaism in the Amoraic period… Mordechai: The Amoraic period, the Tanaitic period, and also the… Nehemia: …which goes back to the Tanaitic period, which Josephus mentions that you should follow the traditions of the fathers. Okay. Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: Interesting. Mordechai: So, of course, the Amoraic period is not exactly identical to the Tanaitic period and, of course, not to the Temple period, but they think about themselves that it’s a continuation of the Tanaitic and the… Nehemia: Oh, that’s really important, because I’ll hear this all the time, from some scholars, that the rabbis in the Mishnah and the Talmud didn’t think of themselves as Pharisees, and thought the Pharisees had nothing to do with them, the prushim. Is that… Mordechai: No, I don’t think so. The rabbis in the Mishnah… In the Talmud it’s too far, but in the Tanaitic literature, it’s clear that they thought about themselves as Pharisees. So, it’s a continuation… Nehemia: So, it’s a continuation of the Second Temple Pharisees, right? Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: Wow, okay. I mean, I knew that, but I’ve been told by… well, it doesn’t matter. There’s an idea out there that the Pharisees were something that ended when the Temple was destroyed on the 9th of Av in the year 70 CE. And then after that, they said, “Oh, no, Pharisees, we have nothing to do with those guys.” Mordechai: I don’t know if there are some opinions like you mentioned, but it can be a debate about if they are correct, they are the continuation of the Pharisees. But what they thought about themselves is clear, I think. Nehemia: Okay. And look, you have figures… and here you can tell me historically, as someone who studied this in the universe. Mordechai: Just let me finish. Nehemia: Please. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Mordechai: Origenes on the other hand, didn’t think of himself as a continuation of the Pharisees… Nehemia: Okay, so, Origen, guys, is an early 3rd century Christian church father. And again, church father is a technical term. And Origen is spelled O-R-I-G-E-N. Right? So, in Hebrew, we say Ori-ggeness or Ori-ggeness, which is the Greek form. And look, he’s a very important figure for what I do because he studied the Septuagint. And we won’t go into that. But the point is, you’re saying that if you asked Origenes, Origen, “Is your belief a continuation of the Judaism of the time of Jesus?” He would have said, “No, of course not. That’s the whole point, that we’re not.” To what extent was it? And maybe that’s beyond your scope of expertise, but in other words, you could say that Origen said that, but maybe it wasn’t true, or to some degree it wasn’t true. In other words, there could be things that are continuations from Second Temple Judaism that Origen didn’t realize where he got them, and he’s like, “No, no, no, this is an original thing that was established by the apostles.” And actually, it’s just something they lifted out of Second Temple Judaism. I think there are things like that. But anyway, let’s not go into that. All right, so, this is an important background now, because you made the statement… now, I think hopefully people can understand, that in the literature of the Tanaim, the Tanaitic literature, I think this is what you said, “There is no reference to a Torah scroll that contains the entire Torah.” Mordechai: In the Tanaitic literature, yeah. There are no… Nehemia: There isn’t? So, it’s only, you have a scroll of Exodus, and you have a scroll of Deuteronomy… but a scroll with the entire Five Books, you’re saying there’s no explicit reference to? Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: Wow. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Mordechai: Yeah. Yeah. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls there is one example of fragments from two books. Nehemia: Oh, so, which one is that? Do you remember what that is? Mordechai: I don’t remember the… Nehemia: Okay, but you’re saying it’s Torah books. In other words, there was such a thing as a scroll in the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Second Temple, where they had at least two books together, if not the whole Torah. Okay. Look, and that seems to be alluded to by Josephus, where he says the Romans came and they took a copy, this book of the law from the Temple, and they paraded it through Rome… Although maybe not; maybe that was just the volume of Leviticus they took, and they didn’t know any different, right? That’s interesting; I never thought of that for what Josephus is saying. So, that’s interesting. So, in other words, today, when we say a Torah scroll, it’s always the Five Books of Moses. It’s never just one. But even in Tanaitic periods, you could have just a scroll of Exodus, you could have just a scroll of Leviticus. That’s very interesting. So, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll… at one point it was feasible to say… And by the way, give me a date on the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll. Mordechai: Oh, okay. So, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, in 1989, there was two carbon-14 tests made of the one fragment. Nehemia: Of one fragment, okay, yeah. Mordechai: An Ashkar-Gilson fragment. And Ashkar-Gilson is just one fragment of all this. And the date was about the 7th, 8th century. Nehemia: So, the 600s or the 700s. And you say about, because C-14, people will think, “Oh, C-14 came back and it was from…” I’ve seen this back when I used to watch CSI and Law and Order, and they would have like, you know, a carbon-14 test of a body, and they’d say the person died in the year 1943. Which, I mean, is impossible now, or it’s too recent. Meaning, carbon-14 doesn’t actually work very well if something’s too recent. But if you go back far enough… So, it’s not an exact year, it’s a range. So, it could be the 600s or 700s. And so, when’s the last Dead Sea Scroll? Mordechai: So, the last Dead Sea Scroll is… I think the more accurate term is Judean Desert Scrolls, because the Dead Sea is just next to the… Nehemia: So, they’re popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, but in Hebrew we call them Megilot Midbar Yehuda, the Judean Desert Scrolls. Okay. So, when’s the last Judean Desert Scroll? Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: I mean, still, the organization that publishes them is called the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. But okay. So, when is the latest of the Judean Desert or Dead Sea Scrolls, so-called Dead Sea Scrolls? Mordechai: Yeah. So, it’s at the end of the Bar Kochba Revolt. Nehemia: 135. So, 135 is the latest Judean Desert Scroll, meaning, it wasn’t necessarily written in 135, but it was put in the cave in 135. Or it couldn’t have been put in the cave later than that, let’s put it that way. Okay, and then from 135, other than the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll (which is the exception that we’re talking about, that you discovered 13 more fragments of) when is the next earliest dated biblical manuscript? Where the date is not disputed, let’s put that way, because that becomes important. Let’s limit it to things that have been published, because I know you know about stuff that’s not published that you’re going to publish. Let’s save that for when you publish it. Other than that, what is the earliest undisputed dated manuscript of the Bible? Mordechai: So, probably the En Gedi Scroll. So, the En Gedi Scroll is a scroll that’s also from the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea. So, En Gedi is next to the Dead Sea and it’s… Nehemia: I mean, it’s a lump of carbon today, isn’t it? It was burned. Mordechai: Yeah, it’s a lump of carbon, yeah. Nehemia: It was burned, okay. Mordechai: And with advanced technology, the researchers were able to read it is a scroll of Leviticus, exactly the parts… Nehemia: So, we’ve got the Ein Gedi Scroll, and from what century is that, do you think? Mordechai: We don’t know exactly. I think that it’s from the 5th century, probably. Nehemia: Okay. But some people have said 4th century. 5th century, okay. Mordechai: And also, the 2nd century. Nehemia: Second century, maybe, which puts it not that much later than the Bar Kokhba Scrolls. Were there Jews left in En Gedi in the 2nd century after the Bar Kokhba Revolt? Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: There were? Okay. All right. Mordechai: There were inscriptions, and… Nehemia: So, what I’m actually trying to get at is, of the medieval scrolls, what are the earliest ones? Let’s skip the exceptions to the rule, which are the Ashkar, because this is why the exceptions are so important. The Ashkar Scroll and the En Gedi Scroll and the other scrolls that you haven’t published (that one day you will, so we won’t say what those are right now) what are the earliest manuscripts that we have from the medieval period? Meaning, we jump from 135 to… Mordechai: Okay. So, when we want to date a manuscript, it can be like in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We can know that they are before 135 because of the historical event, and there is internal evidence in a manuscript, like a colophon. So, a colophon is a text, mostly in the end of the manuscript, that mentioned the name of the scribe, and the date, and the place. Nehemia: So, guys, it’s like a title page, but it’s generally at the end, because until the end, the scribe doesn’t know when he finished. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: It might take him years. Mordechai: Mm-hmm. In the beginning of the print, in the 15th, 16th century, the printers… I don’t know about Latin printed books, but in the Hebrew books we can see all the information that now is in the beginning are also, like in the manuscripts… Nehemia: Oh, at the end. Oh, that’s cool. Alright, so, they were continuing the manuscript tradition early on in printing. One of the really cool things I saw in Cambridge was, it was a Chumash, the Torah, and it was printed on parchment. Right? So, it’s an early printed book, and they said, “Somebody must have said, ‘Hey, this is too important a book to print on paper. Let’s print it on parchment.’” And it’s very beautiful, so… Okay. Oh, so, you didn’t tell me a year, did you? Or a century… Mordechai: Okay. So, the first one, the first colophon is from… There are some dates that are not so clear, but the first one, the earliest one, is 956, I think. I’m not… Nehemia: Well, no, we have one from 903, 904 from Iran, right? So, we have the fragment… Mordechai: Yeah, from the Bible, but there are Mishnah codex… Nehemia: Oh, you’re talking about… so, then it’s 800, right? So, you’re talking about the one that Judith Schlanger recently identified. It’s from 8-something… Mordechai: I think 856. Nehemia: Eight what? 856? It’s the 850s or something. Okay. So, all right. And then we have Bible fragments that are… and you’re the expert in paleography. Mordechai, guys, is actually a paleographer. So, there are Bible fragments that are from roughly around the same time, so they’re also from the 800s. Right? So, in other words, we have this gap, guys, from the year 135 up until the 800s. And if we want to talk about where there’s an actual date in the manuscript, and the date is not disputed, that’s where things get complicated. So, then we’re at the year 903, 904, where there are fragments from the Cairo Geniza from Iran. There are earlier dates in manuscripts; one’s from the year 847. But it’s pretty much universally considered a forgery. And there’s another one from the year 895, that’s a little bit more disputed. But now, the difference between 895 and 903 is not important, right? I mean, that’s close enough. Right? For this purpose. So, in other words, we have stuff from… and we have things that Israel Yevin argued were from the early 9th century, right? So, okay. Well, we could say 850 for sure. If he wants to say it’s 825, sure, why not. So, anyway we have 135 to 850. That’s a huge gap. What is that called in your field? Mordechai: Okay, it’s called two main terms; the Dark Age… Nehemia: The Dark Age? Mordechai: Yeah… Nehemia: What do they call it in Hebrew? Wait, wait, what do they call it in Hebrew? Mordechai: Tkufat Ha’choshekh. Nehemia: The Period of Darkness. Okay, the Dark Age. So, there’s either the Dark Age, or what’s the other one? Mordechai: Or the Silent Period. Nehemia: The Silent Period. I’ve heard it called the Great Silent Period. Right? So, in other words, you have something very surprising between 135, and let’s call it roughly… we’ll be generous, we’ll call it 825. But if you wanted to say it was, you know, 903, right, that’s disputable. But between 135 and 825 you don’t have any Hebrew Bible manuscripts. In fact, you don’t have almost any Jewish manuscripts whatsoever. And then we start to talk about the exceptions, the En Gedi Scroll, the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, the Afghani Siddur, prayer book, whatever it is. So, in other words, if you include what Mordechai knows that he hasn’t published, you could count on two hands. Without what he knows that he hasn’t published, you could count on one hand. How many manuscripts come from the Great Silent Period, that we know for sure? Look, and part of the problem is some of these things haven’t been carbon-14 tested, right? In other words, what’s important about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, unlike the Ein Gedi scroll (correct me if I’m wrong) nobody’s done C-14 on the Ein Gedi Scroll. Is that right? Because it’s probably not enough… Mordechai: No… Nehemia: There’s not enough to test! Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: But the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll has been C-14 tested, and it came back to the 600s or 700s, from the Silent Period, or the Period of Darkness. And why is this so ironic to me? One of the greatest periods of Jewish literary production, let’s put it that way, is this Great Silent Period, this Period of Darkness. In other words, the Talmud, which I know if they read two pages every day, it takes them seven years. So, I’m going to say that’s something like 20… Do you know how many pages are in the Talmud, in the Vilna edition? I don’t know. Is it 21,000 pages? Mordechai: Not two pages; one page a day. Nehemia: No, it’s one folio, so that’s… Mordechai: One folio, yeah, yeah. Nehemia: So, it’s two pages for English. So, how many pages, roughly, are in the Babylonian Talmud? Mordechai: 2,700. Nehemia: No, 27,000 you mean. Mordechai: 2,700. Nehemia: 2,700 pages? Oh, okay. I’m bad at math, see? Okay. So, there’s 2,700 folios in the Talmud? Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: Let me see what Google says. Yeah. 2,711 folios. Okay, so, that’s 5,422 pages, and those come from the Great Silent Period, from the Period of Darkness, from the Dark Ages. So, it’s Dark Ages of manuscripts, not of literary production. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: And in the Talmud… go ahead, sorry. Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: So, in the Talmud they mentioned books! Right? They mentioned they have manuscripts. Where are those manuscripts? Do you have any explanations of where those manuscripts are? Mordechai: Okay, so… that’s… Nehemia: And let me stop you for a second here. So, we have, from the Christian world… so, this is almost comical. In the Christian world, an early manuscript will be… when we say an early manuscript of the New Testament, they’ll be referring to, you know, P66 and P75, which are from the 2nd century. Well, that’s kind of disputed, but let’s not get into that; but let’s call them 2nd century CE. And then you have the larger, more well-preserved manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, and then Codex Bezi, which is 5th century. So, you have these thousands of pages preserved from the 4th century and the 5th century, and then, by the time you get to the 8th and 9th century, New Testament scholars are like, “Yeah, don’t really care that much about that manuscript, it’s kind of late. And yeah, it’s still important because it’s magiscule, but it’s a late magiscule.” And then you go to Hebrew Tanakh studies, and our early manuscripts are from the 9th century, and our equivalent to Codex Vaticanus is the Aleppo Codex from the 10th century. So, what’s going on here? So, do you have an answer? Mordechai: So, there are some explanations, of course, and I think… Nehemia: What are the explanations? What are the primary explanations? Mordechai: Okay, so, one of the explanations is that there were not so many books in this period. So, most of the literature was transmitted orally, like the Talmud, and the Mishnah, and all those books. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: All those books. So, until the first mention of a written book of the Mishnah, is from the 8th century. Nehemia: Oh, really? Okay. Mordechai: Yeah. So, the absence of books from the Tanaic and Amoraic literature is because they didn’t write it. Nehemia: So, there weren’t that many copies to begin with… Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: And is this… Mordechai: The 8th century is the end of the Silent Period. Nehemia: Right, it’s very close. Well, it’s still within the Silent Period. In other words, the Mishnah manuscript that we know today is from around the year 850, we just said, written in what’s called the proto-square, or pre-square, or whatever. Mordechai: If it’s correct, this explanation, they began to write books in the 8th century, and they increased writing in the 9th century. So, we have from the 9th century because, of course, not all of the manuscripts that were written are available today, survived until… Nehemia: Yeah. So, that’s very interesting. So, in other words, and I’m just going to throw out a made- up number, let’s say one in a thousand manuscripts survive. And so, if you have, I don’t know, I don’t know how many are in the Greek New Testament up until the end of our Silent Period. Meaning, how many do you have up until the 8th century? Let’s call it 500. I made up a number. But maybe they had to begin with 500,000. How many copies were there of the literature that we’re missing, that we know was composed in that period? Right? The 2,711 folios, or 5,422 pages of the Talmud, at least in the most popular printing, those pages didn’t survive, because, number one, they generally weren’t written, and even when they were written, it was relatively rare. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: Okay. What about the Tanakh, the Torah? Mordechai: Yeah, so… Nehemia: Every synagogue had a Torah scroll, no? I mean, is that right? Do we think that? Mordechai: So, this explanation doesn’t consider the Torah, the Bible. The Bible was written, of course, all the years, all the period. Nehemia: So, why don’t we have Torah scrolls? Other than En Gedi and your Ashkar-Gilson scroll, and a few others you haven’t published, where are all the rest? Why is the Silent Period so silent? Mordechai: Yeah. So, I think we need to differentiate between two kinds of preservation. So, there are books that are intentionally preserved in libraries, by private hands, but one… there’s a decision to preserve them. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: And there are non-intentional preservation, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Cairo Genizah, that was forgotten in some caves, buried in some places, and we were lucky, because of the climate and because of the work of the archaeologists, and we found them again. So, the non-intentional preservation books are just kind of lucky. We were lucky to find the Dead Sea Scrolls from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, and the Cairo Genizah from the 9th century onwards. But we don’t have the same luck to find a Genizah, to find… Nehemia: So, in other words, and this is something I learned when I did my undergrad in archaeology, is that what you find in archaeology, to some extent, is happenstance. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: It’s miqreh. And one of the things they taught us at Hebrew University in archaeology is, you had to be very careful to say something didn’t exist because you didn’t find it. Because, number one, in archaeology in particular, and you’re digging in an ancient site, you never dig the entire site. And usually, a very big excavation might do five percent of a site right? Well, maybe it’s in the other 95 percent, you just didn’t find it. And then what you find is somewhat random. At least, that’s the scientific principle that’s employed, right? That you have to assume what you’re finding is random, and therefore, what you didn’t find may or may not have existed, which is, I think, a principle in science in general. Right? There’s an ancient Jewish adage I cite all the time, “Lo matzinu eino re’ayah.” “We didn’t find isn’t proof,” or, I think they say in English, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Right? That’s the English version. Well, I mean, we know there were manuscripts during this period, and we just didn’t find them. Well, why is it that we found the Christian manuscripts? And I would say we found the Quranic manuscripts, but I don’t know enough about it. I’m not so sure that’s actually true. In other words, I don’t think you have Quranic manuscripts earlier than the Sanaa Manuscript, and when that’s from is beyond the scope of this discussion. Meaning, okay but they didn’t… they’d only start in the 7th century. So, we’re not going to find much. Mordechai: So, the question, “from when are the earliest complete Hebrew manuscripts?” So, from where we have an intentional preservation of… Nehemia: Or relatively complete. In other words, if it’s missing the first 50 pages, the last 50 pages, close enough, right? Ah, so, this is important, guys. I want to summarize. So, the Dead Sea Scrolls did not survive because somebody said, “We need to preserve these really important scrolls.” They were stuck in a cave, in the case of Cave 4, certainly after they were already falling apart in ancient times. In other words, Cave 4 was probably a Geniza in ancient times. Cave 1, you could argue, “Well, no, they hoped to come back after the Romans were defeated by a substantial event.” Mordechai: Yeah, but it’s not important what they thought about it. Nehemia: Ah, okay. Mordechai: The question is, how it came to us. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: There was a very long period that the book was not preserved. Nehemia: Give us an example of something that was preserved intentionally and never really lost, it was just kept. What would that look like? Give me an example of that of a Hebrew manuscript. Mordechai: A Hebrew manuscript. So, it can be a codex, mostly a codex, but also Torah scrolls, and they are preserved mostly in the public libraries. Nehemia: Okay. What would be an example? Mordechai: EBR 66. It’s a codex of a Tanaic book, Torah Ha’kohanim. Nehemia: Is it sifrei or is it sifri? I always confuse this. Mordechai: Sifra. Nehemia: Sifra, okay. Mordechai: Sifra in Aramaic is “the book”. The book. Sifra. Nehemia: Right. But it’s a collection of Midrash from the Tanaitic period. Okay. Mordechai: Yeah. And it’s from the 9th century. So, this is a complete book from the 9th century. There are no dates, because in the matter of the polygraphical test, we can date it to the 9th century. But other manuscripts, like the Aleppo Codex, or the Leningrad Codex… Nehemia: That’s a good example, yeah. So, the Aleppo Codex is, I don’t know that we know where the Leningrad Codex was before it came into the Firkovich Collection, but the Aleppo Codex we know, right? The Aleppo Codex was kept in the synagogue in Aleppo. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: When people came to see it, they were told no and turned away, and sometimes they bribed one of the people who worked at the synagogue. And so, you have two photographs, apparently based on bribes, of pieces that have lost, but not since been lost. But it was kept in a safe, until the safe was attacked on November 29th, 1947, after the United Nations announced that there would be a state of Israel, or they would split the British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. And the synagogue was attacked and ransacked, but it was kept in that synagogue. I mean, I guess since the 13th century or so, right? Meaning, the theory is that the son of Maimonides… Mordechai: 14th century. Nehemia: 14th century. I thought it was the son of Maimonides who took it with him to Aleppo. Mordechai: Yeah. Not the son, it was fourth generation from Maimonides. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, Maimonides must have had it in his possession, it seems. Which makes sense, because he says he used it. It sounds like Maimonides borrowed it and never gave it back, and then one of his descendants took it with him to Aleppo. That seems to be the case, to me, at least. Okay, but there is an example where it was kept in a public… and we have, actually, an inscription, or we had an inscription that was copied in 1942 that says it was kept in a public institution in Jerusalem. And then later ends up as a publicly available manuscript in Cairo, and then in Aleppo, and now at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. So, it’s very intentionally, in every generation, being preserved, because they say, “Hey, this is important.” Meaning, as early as the 1050s we know that they said, “This has to be preserved. It’s too important to let it fall apart.” Okay. And then you have other ones, like, you go to the Russian National Library, and you have a manuscript that looks like it was gnawed on by a family of rats. And I mean literally there’s one that looks like that. But it’s a very important, relatively early for Jewish studies, early Masoretic manuscript. I think it’s EVR2B59, or something like that. And that presumably, you know, had a bunch of damage from rats or water or something, and they stuck it in the Genizah in Cairo. And then Firkovich came and said, “Hey, what books can I buy from you from the Genizah?” Right? But nobody intentionally kept it. The opposite; they stuck it in this chamber in the synagogue for it to naturally deteriorate. So, that’s interesting. Okay. So, given that dichotomy, why don’t we have more manuscripts that were intentionally preserved from the 5th century? Why don’t we have, and here I’m going to bring a concrete example… isn’t there something where… is it Rabbi Mayer who mentions he has a sefer mughah, a proofread manuscript? Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: So, where is that manuscript? It belonged… Mordechai: It belonged to Rabbi Mayer. Nehemia: So, it’s the book of Rabbi Mayer. Where is it? Surely, somebody said, “Hey, this belonged to Rabbi Mayer. We should keep it, and we should preserve it carefully.” Where is it? Mordechai: Okay, so, when we look at the Christian manuscripts, the Latin manuscripts, and Greek manuscripts, and we try to understand why they were preserved, the answer will be, there was an interest of preserving them, and there was an ability to preserve them. There were institutions for preservation. There were monasteries, and after that, universities, and some of the kings of Europe were collecting some manuscripts. So, there was an interest of manuscripts, and there was a continuation of institutions along the history, along the thousand years or more. But about the Jewish manuscripts, there was a lot less ability to preserve for a long distance, for a long period. Nehemia: Why was there less of an ability for Jews to preserve the manuscripts? Mordechai: So, the Jewish communities were not able to preserve manuscripts for a long distance because of the persecution and the exile of Jewish communities from their places. And there were some occasions of burning their books, Jewish books. Nehemia: Why did they burn the Jewish books? And who burned the Jewish books? I don’t know if the audience is familiar with that. Mordechai: Okay, so, the Christian authorities burned the books because they argued that in the Jewish books there are insults on Jesus. Nehemia: Okay. Meaning, the Talmud insulted Jesus, so they burned the Talmud. Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: And they didn’t always know what they were burning, and they weren’t necessarily discriminating and saying, “Oh, no, this is a Bible. Let’s not burn this one.” Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: Unfortunately. Well, I mean, in both cases, unfortunately. Mordechai: It’s a lot more challenging to keep a book. Nehemia: It’s very interesting. I was talking to this young man who is a Christian, but I would call him a… he wasn’t an anti-Semite. This is a Christian who says, you know, “Jesus was a Jew, so I want to practice some form of Judaism that Jesus would have been familiar with.” And he had this post on the internet where he’s talking about the Talmud, and he’s saying, “But the Talmud is so horrible it should be burned.” And I contacted him. I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying. People burned the Talmud, and then they often burned the Jews along with the Talmud, and/or forced them to convert.” And so, this was someone who was truly innocent, and I don’t mean necessarily that in a good way, right? Innocent in the sense of naive, in that he didn’t know history. He didn’t know that there were people who literally burned the Talmud and then burned the Jews who wrote, or preserved, those volumes. And I said to him, “Look, if you disagree with something in the Talmud, argue with it, don’t burn it.” Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: But how interesting; this isn’t someone who’s like a medieval anti-Semite. This is someone who genuinely, in a sense, loves Israel and loves the Jewish people. But he encounters these things, or frankly, he encounters caricatures of these things that he read online. It’s not necessarily what’s actually in the Talmud, although we’ll save that for a different discussion. Mordechai: I don’t want to correct this argument. Sometimes they are correct about what the Talmud says, but in every ancient literature we can find some texts that are against other groups. We can find texts that we don’t feel comfortable with in our modern time to read. So, we know it. Our perspective on the world is different. Nehemia: So, I think the point here is, your perspective on the world might be different, but then there’s lots of people out there today who have a… if I want to be generous, I’ll say, have a traditional perspective on things. And if I want to be not generous and nice, I’ll say, a medieval perspective on things. In other words, there’s people who read in the Quran that the Jews and the Christians are monkeys and pigs… I don’t know if that’s in the Quran or the Hadith, I don’t remember. I’m not an expert in that. And they say, “No, this is true. Allah said it, or the prophet said it, and we should treat them like monkeys and pigs.” And there’s other people who say, “You know, that’s a time when Muhammad was being attacked, and he was saying things in defense. And that’s not a way to sustain a modern society, and that wasn’t his intention.” Now, you’re, of course, reading intentions in a text from over a thousand years ago, right? But we do that all the time in one way or another, right? If you say, “Yes, I should treat them as monkeys and pigs,” you’re saying, “Oh, and he meant that to be applied today,” right? So, the point is, how do you deal with that today? And look, I just read a horrible thing today, that some Jew in 2015 burned a church, and he wrote on the side of the church a verse from the Tanakh, where it says, “their idols should be surely cut off”. And I read this, and I love the Tanakh, and I think, “What a dummy! What a stupid and evil person, in the 21st century to go and burn somebody else’s church.” Because, okay, yes, it says that, and even if you want to say a church is a place of idolatry… which we could debate, right? And Jews do debate. So, how do you implement that into your life? This is my view. This is my personal views. If you’re implementing that in a way that causes suffering and destruction, then you’re doing something wrong. That’s just my personal view. In other words, we have all kinds of things in ancient texts which, taken in a certain way, could sound horrific to a modern ear. And maybe to an ancient ear as well. What do you do with that? So, you’re saying there might be things negative about Jesus in the Talmud. Mordechai: Of course. No, I want to clarify; finding hatred in the Talmud is possible. We can find some expressions that are not… I can agree that it’s hatred. But the question is, if someone chooses to focus on those expressions in the Judaism literature, in the Talmud, and ignores all this kind of text in other religions’ texts. And so, these kind of texts are common in a lot of texts. And if someone focuses just on this type, just on Judaism, he’s anti-Semite. So, the same can be… I can find some behavior of Jewish communities that I don’t agree with at all, and I think it’s evil. But in any society, there are some groups, some people that are evil, that are not right. But if you focus just on what is going on in Judaism, then you are a hypocrite. So, this is my view. Nehemia: So, in other words, to put this into, like, very recent terms, there were people protesting in the streets against Israel, and then, when there were massacres in Yemen for years, and in Syria for years, there certainly were no mass protests, if anybody protested. Mordechai: Yeah. Nehemia: And then, when Hamas, during a ceasefire, rounded up people in Gaza and shot them in the streets in public so people would see, there were no protests from the same people who were protesting against Israel. And therein lies the hypocrisy. Even if you have a valid point there (which I don’t think they do) but the fact that you’re focusing on only when Jews are involved, that shows something about those people who are focusing on it, yeah. There’s something to be said… I did a program about a church father who writes something like a Passover Haggadah. He was actually what’s called a quarto deciman, meaning, he kept Easter on the day of Pesach, on the eve of Pesach, in Asia Minor, in today’s Turkey. And in his Passover Haggadah, this sort of Christian Passover Haggadah, he describes the Jews killing God and the Jews nailing the nails in with their own hands. Well, wait a minute; that’s not what it says in the New Testament, right? It doesn’t say that at all! Says the Romans did it, right? So, the point is, here you have something in an ancient Christian text which is just horrific, right? It’s just blatantly hateful, and not even consistent with his own… it’s so hateful it contradicts the New Testament, right? So, should we condemn all Christians for that? No! I mean, there’s good Christians and bad Christians, there’s good Jews and bad Jews, there’s good Jews who say bad things, and there’s bad Jews who say good things, and that’s like every group of people. And there are wonderful, beautiful things in the Talmud, and there are things in the Talmud that turn my stomach. I’ll just say it. Okay, but that’s way off topic. All right. Actually, we’ll edit here. This has been an amazing conversation. We’ll continue the conversation in the second half, where you’ll actually talk about the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, the scroll that was written during the Great Silent Period. And what’s so important about it is that we can count on one, or possibly two, hands how many Tanakh manuscripts we have from the end of the Dead Sea Scrolls up until the 9th century, and you discovered 13 of the 15 fragments of one of these scrolls. Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Nehemia: Okay. Mordechai: To be more correct, there are six fragments of Bible fragments in this Silent Period. Nehemia: What do you mean, six Bible fragments? What do you mean? Mordechai: We have just six Bible fragments. Nehemia: No, but of the Ashkar-Gilson, I know you published 15 fragments. Am I wrong? Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Actually, this one is in the end of the Silent Period. Nehemia: Ah! So, there’s five others from the Great Silent Period… Mordechai: Six others. Nehemia: So, there’s six others. And did I include the En Gedi Scroll? Mordechai: No, no. It’s the En Gedi scroll and six more. Nehemia: So, we have eight Bible manuscripts from this period, and how many of those did you discover? Mordechai: I’m not sure. I don’t feel comfortable to make some announcements like this, but I will give more details. Nehemia: So, we’ll talk in more detail in the next part. Thank you. You have been 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]. We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. 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[https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/Support-the-Mission-Choosen.png?resize=512%2C342&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support ---------------------------------------- VERSES MENTIONED Deuteronomy 23:18-19 Mishnah Pirkei Avot 1:4-12 Josephus, Wars of the Jews 7.5.5 Quran 7:166; 2:65; 5:60 BOOKS MENTIONED Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 103b RELATED EPISODES Hebrew Voices Episodes [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/category/media/audio/hebrew-voices] Hebrew Voices #219 – Halakhic Purist Rabbi: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/halakhic-purist-rabbi-part-1] Support Team Study – Halakhic Purist Rabbi: Part 2 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/halakhic-purist-rabbi-part-2] Hebrew Voices #223 – Halakhic Purist Rabbi: Part 3 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/halakhic-purist-rabbi-part-3] Support Team Study – Halakhic Purist Rabbi: Part 4 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/halakhic-purist-rabbi-part-4] Hebrew Voices #182 – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/man-who-taught-his-children-ancient-greek-part-1] Support Team Study – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 2 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/man-who-taught-his-children-ancient-greek-part-2] Hebrew Voices #243 – The Divine Name YHVH in Ancient Greek Manuscripts: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/divine-name-greek-part-1] Support Team Study – The Divine Name YHVH in Ancient Greek Manuscripts: Part 2 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/divine-name-greek-part-2] Scholar Club Exclusive – Duplicity in the Trinity Doctrine? [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/sce-duplicity-in-the-trinity] OTHER LINKS Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research – Dedicated to researching the Hebrew Bible [https://ihbmr.com/] The Ashkar-Gilson Scroll - by Kim L Phillips [https://kimlphillips.substack.com/p/the-ashkar-gilson-scroll] [https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/webstore-banner-big.png?resize=584%2C307&ssl=1]https://store.nehemiaswall.com The post Hebrew Voices #246 – Secrets from the Great Silent Period: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/silent-period-1] appeared first on Nehemia's Wall [https://www.nehemiaswall.com].