Fact-Checking the Torah -- the third wave

A long time ago I hinted that there were two ways of describing the structure of Torah, besides DH. I just spend lots of posts going over one, Olrik’s principles. The other will take fewer posts and is rooted in Jewish classics.

Most people who study Jewish classics have come across Rabbi Yishmael’s 13 principles of deriving legal decisions from Torah. They are documented in Midrash Halakhah, in the introduction to the section on Leviticus. They include gezerah shavah, and qal va-chomer (a fortiori). These rules apply only to the legal material.

But the legal material in Exodus through Numbers also seems to be organized along other structural principles that involve narratives. I derive them from some online lectures in Jerusalem Talmud, the smaller and lesser known collection of gemara.

R. Yosef Gabriel Bechhofer discussed, on a tape about Jerusalem Talmud Tractate Berakhot pp. 23-24, an important difference in how the two Talmuds derive rulings. Babylonian Talmud, the larger one, drives at general principles. Jerusalem Talmud requires verses, not principles, and often a narrative of an actual case which illustrated acceptance of one halakhic proposition over another.

This is where another light went on for me. Jerusalem Talmud seems to derive this tendency directly from Torah.

In Narrating the Torah, I discuss how everything from Exodus 18:1 to Leviticus 10:20 is related.

The narrative is Leviticus 10:1-20. Part of this text is the story of Nadav and Avihu, but that’s not the denouement of the narrative. The denouement is verses 16-20 in which the sin offering cannot be found. Yes, Nadav and Avihu did something wrong, and that’s part of the problem; the two of them (Law of Twins) were punished by death, leaving only three (Law of Magic Numbers) of the consecrated priests to carry on.

Because Aharon and his remaining sons left the sanctuary -- Mosheh tells them to come no further than the door of the tabernacle enclosure – they might be subject to the same punishment as Nadav and Avihu. You just consecrated five (another Magic Number) priests; if you suddenly learn that it might all go for nothing because they and their descendants might all be killed by Gd for a transgression, how upset would you be?

Mosheh has them perform the final parts of the ritual. Then he realizes that, having left the sanctuary, they might have brought pieces of the sin offering with them, and that makes them subject to the punishment of keret.

When he finds out that they didn’t bring any pieces of the sin offering with them, his next concern is did they eat it as specified in the ritual. They didn’t, and then it might be retroactively invalid.

The final answer is: it was burnt up without any of it being eaten, it is not retroactively invalidated. Mosheh is mad about that, but Aharon says to him, considering everything else that happened today, isn’t this the least bad thing that could have happened? And Mosheh is appeased.

This incident would be incomprehensible without the foregoing specifications in Leviticus for the sin and other offerings (Parshiyot Vayiqra and Tsav).

Those offerings have to be offered in the tabernacle, and the description of its building precedes the instructions for the sacrifices (Parshiyot Vayekhel and Pequdey).

Before that, we have the commandments for making the tabernacle (Parshiyot Terumah and Tetsaveh), with the Golden Calf interlude (Parshah Ki Tissa).

The commandments are issued to Mosheh in 40 days and nights on the mountain, but before he goes up, Mosheh tells the Israelites how to deal with their ordinary lives while he is away (Parshah Mishpatim).

And we find that they have to be tried using due process in a court system specified in Exodus 18, in a narrative involving Mosheh’s father-in-law, Yitro, in the parshah named for him.

Starting in Parshah Bo (Exodus 12), with the actual departure from Egypt, Torah drills down through a series of laws, and then gives a narrative related to the preceding laws. Then it backs out and, as I said in a post about three months ago, it repeats a verse to orient the audience to where it is going to pick up from, and drills down again on an issue it hasn’t covered before, or one that it only partially covered and about which it gives new details. There are exceptions which I will get to soon. The series of drill-downs stops about Numbers 15.

This is not chiasmus or a ring structure; the portions between the narratives are not parallel. They address different legal material organized by principles I'll discuss in the next few posts. They demonstrate that Jewish culture does not use ring structures.

If you know of a Jewish traditional comment on Torah or Talmud which says something like what I just described, put a comment on this blog. The text base is too large and the possible ways of expressing it are too diverse for me to search online for it. Also, it might not be online. You may have heard something like this from your rabbi, in a face-to-face study session, without realizing the implications.

Next week I'll start discussing a principle for sequencing laws and even the drill-down structures themselves.