Fact-Checking the Torah -- the second principle

The drill-down-structure is not the only way of organizing Torah material in the books of Exodus through Numbers. Two other features function to govern not only which drill-downs come in what order, but also what order material is presented inside a drill-down.

This one should ring a bell with anybody who has studied Mishnah and Talmud.

“All that is more frequent comes first.”

Expressly used in Mishnah Zevachim to prescribe the order of sacrifices on a New Year’s day that falls on Shabbat, it also suggests a structure for tractates and sedras in Mishnah. Tractate Berakhot or Blessings is used several times a day by Jews, and it comes at the head of the first Sedra in Mishnah, Zeraim which has to do with making sure to grow food in accordance with Jewish law. Hardly anything occurs more frequently than eating, unless it’s prayer and saying other blessings like grace before and after meals.

The frequency principle might govern the order in which the specifications for sacrifices show up.

The first offering discussed in Torah is the whole offering, brought at least twice every day, and it first shows up in Exodus.  Next come the class of zevachim, brought by individuals on their own behalf, usually to celebrate something. The owners get to eat part of these offerings.

The associated conclusion is that the sin offering, which we don’t get specs on until Leviticus 5, was less frequent than the zevachim. The very least frequent offering was brought by an individual who had transgressed by mistaking what a court said, or acting on what a court said when it was known that the court had made a mistake. This issue comes in Numbers 15.

The very last ritual specified is the laws of the red heifer in Numbers 19, and Mishnah Parah 3:5 records the tradition that only one was performed until after the Babylonian Captivity, under Ezra’s guidance. The frequency principle plays another role in this placement.

The use for the red heifer is with people who have come into contact with a corpse, and the possible situations include a battlefield. Numbers 20 records the battles with Sichon and Og. Lots of people died. Lots of Israelites needed the red heifer ritual before they could return to their homes and families after the battles.

But there’s another case where the red heifer ritual applied, in my opinion, and that’s the consecration of the Levites in Numbers 8. What unites the two cases is the term yitchata, the technical term for the ritual. Why would the Levites need the ritual?

Go back to Parshah Ki Tissa: in Exodus 30-34. The golden calf incident was punished by the Levites. Lots of other stuff intervenes, but by Numbers 8 we only have three kohanim; there’s no way they can do all the work of the tabernacle. To prevent ordinary Israelites from coming into contact with the tabernacle services (600,000 people is way too many to train all at once and prevent a catastrophe), Gd has Mosheh press the rest of Levi’s descendants into service.  The number is about 22,000 – but they are in a state of tumah due to the execution they have done. They can’t touch the tabernacle or its components in that situation, and they can only get out of it with the red heifer ritual, the same as any other soldier.

But 600,000 soldiers fighting the Emori in Numbers 20 is way more than the number of Levites so the laws of the red heifer gravitate to that.

So the red heifer ritual is an example of both the drill-down and the frequency principles, and that pulls them away from the consecration of the Levites.

What winds up in sequential order doesn't always rely on frequency, however, and that's for next week.
 

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:17, the death penalty

Genesis 2:17

 

יז וּמֵעֵ֗ץ הַדַּ֨עַת֙ ט֣וֹב וָרָ֔ע לֹ֥א תֹאכַ֖ל מִמֶּ֑נּוּ כִּ֗י בְּי֛וֹם אֲכָלְךָ֥ מִמֶּ֖נּוּ מ֥וֹת תָּמֽוּת:

 

Translation:     But from the tree of knowing good and evil, you will not eat of it ; because on the day of your eating from it MOT TAMUT.

 

Now we deal with the trees after the etnach in that other verse. Or at least we deal with one of them. The last one in the verse.

 

And here is another duplicate conditional and you will see almost this exact phrase over and over again in Torah. MOT TAMUT and its relatives mean “once due process has been satisified, if you are convicted, you are going to have to die.”

 

THIS IS THE DEATH PENALTY.  Obviously the conditions for this haven’t occurred yet, but Gd is giving Adam a heads-up: eating from this specific tree makes him liable to the death penalty.

 

The contexts in which the other forms of this phrase occurs all have to do with the death penalty in Jewish law. They include Exodus 21:15-17, Exodus 22:18, Exodus 31:14-15, Leviticus 20:2, Leviticus 20:10-13, Leviticus 20:15-16, Leviticus 20:27, Leviticus 21:9, Leviticus 24:16, Numbers 15:35, Deuteronomy 13:1-12, and Deuteronomy 22:20-21.

 

When this comes up again, I’ll point out the conditions under which the death penalty comes into play.

 

Also notice the aspectless verb with the object suffix, akhalkha. Again, this is a timing phrase, like b’yom asot at the start of the narrative.

 

NOW the narrative has us watching for Adam to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because use of the duplicate conditional means that the conditions under which he eats from it might be deadly. Then again, they might not.

 

The trees were brought up in the previous verse only so that these two trees could be made exceptions. In Genesis 9:3, the eating of meat is brought up, on purpose to introduce the subject so as to make the exception in verse 4, which prohibits eating blood and what is cut from a living animal. Now going back to Genesis 1:29-30, there’s no exception made. What’s the cultural significance?

 

There’s no absolute commandment in all of Jewish law to eat meat. If there were, poor people would be violating that commandment most of their lives. Meat was terribly expensive because most meat animals were also sources of labor, wool, and milk. Birds provided eggs. For enjoyment on Shabbat and festivals, the rabbis did all they could to bring meat within the means of the poor, requiring a butcher to slaughter on Friday or the day before festivals even if he would lose money on it. But equally there is no prohibition on eating meat in Jewish law, as long as it is kosher and not consumed on a day of fasting. So I don’t believe that chapter 1:29-30 commanded restricting food to plants.

 

Culture capsule: Why is this tree called ha-daat? Most translations say it means “knowledge” but in Hebrew that would be y’diah. In Jewish culture daat is the ability to form legal intent. It is inherent in adults of sound mind and senses, an issue that will come up soon. People with daat can testify in court and execute contracts. Such is not true for people of unsound mind or senses because it’s hard to know when they know what they’re doing. It’s also not true for non-adults or for animals. The rest of the narrative will turn on daat so pay attention.

 

By the way, this verse has a revia, a zaqef qatan, an etnach and a revia, so you can see the differences between these punctuation marks.

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.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:14, a crossover

OK, I owe you two posts because as you very well know, I never covered this verse.

Genesis 2:14

יד וְשֵׁ֨ם הַנָּהָ֤ר הַשְּׁלִישִׁי֙ חִדֶּ֔קֶל ה֥וּא הַֽהֹלֵ֖ךְ קִדְמַ֣ת אַשּׁ֑וּר וְהַנָּהָ֥ר הָֽרְבִיעִ֖י ה֥וּא פְרָֽת:

Translation: The name of the third river is Chideqel, it goes east of Asshur; the fourth river is Prat.

The Chideqel was known to the Greeks as Tigris, and the Prat as Euphrates.

These verses about the rivers are part of what Olrik would call a horizon, the geographical setting of material. Horizons are not fixed in the material. Olrik says that oral narratives arise close in time and place to whatever cultural or historical events inspire them. He does not require that they contain geographic material. When they do, it's because the location helps the audience understand the narrative.

But if the culture survives and the narrative is transmitted for long enough, the horizon may dissolve. Olrik says this is particularly common if the population migrates, whether voluntarily or under compulsion.  In the previous verses about the other two rivers, they are described in detail. In particular, if Kush is the great city of Kish, the narrative about Gan Eden made sense to an audience that knew Kish well, and probably lived within the territory it controlled.

In this verse, the name of the third river mirrors the name used for it in Mesopotamia, and gives another geographical reference for it, but does not go into the detail needed for the Pishon or Gichon. It's a bigger river and only needs one other geographical identifier -- only just less famous than Prat, which needs no other introduction.

There is a claim that this narrative was invented hundreds of miles from Mesopotamia, but that doesn't allow for this level of geographic detail. The invention supposedly took place centuries after the ancestors of the Jews left Mesopotamia on their own, and a few centuries before they were sent there forcibly. The claim arose as part of DH, which I do to death on the other Torah thread. You should read at least the first four posts to clear your head, and then come back here and finish learning Hebrew.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:16, duplicate conditional

Genesis 2:16

 

טז וַיְצַו֙ יְהוָֹ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים עַל־הָֽאָדָ֖ם לֵאמֹ֑ר מִכֹּ֥ל עֵץ־הַגָּ֖ן אָכֹ֥ל תֹּאכֵֽל:

 

Translation:     **** Gd commanded the man saying: “eating you are permitted to eat” from every tree in the garden.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יְצַו

commanded

 

The two words at the end of this verse are crucial and I put their translation in “”. You will see this structure over and over again and I have given it a special name: duplicate conditional.

 

The duplicate means that you have the same verb root twice: akhal in this case.

The binyan is qal; sometimes this structure will be in an agentless binyan.

The first verb is aspectless.

Aspectless verbs are used for commandments that must be met on demand, not constantly or on a specific schedule.

The second verb in a duplicate conditional is always imperfect aspect and that’s what makes it conditional. It is not a done deal. Some condition has to be fulfilled.

 

In fact, there’s a secondary condition here. The vowel under the kaf should be patach, but it’s tseire: not tokhal but tokhel.

That connects this imperfect to a verb form tokhelu which I call the permissive/prescriptive. It shows up in Leviticus 11 with the animals and so on that Jews are “permitted” to eat.

 

So the point is that Adam has permission to eat, when he does eat, from every tree in the garden. (Don’t get ahead of me here, that’s what THIS verse says.)

 

Duplicate conditional in most cases identifies a situation where due process applies. In this case, the due process is eating from all the food trees in front of the etnach in that other verse. The next verse will, however, have a form of the duplicate conditional that is crucial to Jewish law and shows up over and over again in Torah.

 

By the way, have you been keeping up with your etnachs and revias? Because it’s time to go on to a more common “comma”, the zaqef. Above elohim in this verse are two vertical dots like a sheva, only on top. That’s a zaqef qatan; it’s a slightly milder pause than the revia, and it has a cousin, the zaqef gadol, which has a vertical line to the left of the dots.

DIY -- frozen food part 2

Way back in this page on this blog, I had a lesson on boiling water. If you were one of the newbies that I taught to boil water, here are some things you might be glad to know years later when you're baking your own bread and things.

First, almost any bread or baked snack will freeze well. So I usually make a double batch of English muffins and freeze half.

Most of my bread recipes make two loaves. But I'm on a two-grain a day eating program. So what I do is make one loaf, turn the rest into six rolls, bake and freeze the rolls. I eat the loaf, and then the unspoiled rolls are available as needed. You never need to run out and buy bread before a hurricane if you do this. Unless you forget to bake between hurricanes.

Recently I made a batch of Italian bread. What I didn't make into a loaf, I cut in four pieces. What you can do with them at this point is either ball them up and freeze, or roll into circles about the size of a small pizza, partly bake, and freeze with freezer paper between them. Pull out of the freezer, thaw, top, and bake. It doesn't rise as much as you might like so if you insist on a puffy raised crust, make your pizza the day you make your Italian bread.

Even the dreaded croissant freezes well. Either freeze the dough, or do everything including the third roll-in of the butter and then freeze. Take out in the morning and thaw IN THE FRIDGE. The next morning, roll out, shape, rise, brush with egg-and-water glaze, and bake. I haven't tried this yet but my croissant recipe specifically says that it will work either way.

Cookies are great for freezing. There are online recipes for the equivalent of the cookie dough you usually buy in the store; look for "icebox cookies". Or, wait to freeze them until you bake them. Works with brownies, whether plain, frosted, with raisins and walnuts, or with cherries black-forest style.

And now for a hot weather treat which I discovered just in time. Keep bottled lemon juice in the house. Make up a batch of lemonade with equal parts lemon juice and sugar, and pour some of it into an ice cube tray. You can either eat them straight, or put them in a glass of plain water or sparkling water, to both chill and flavor it. This should also work with any fruit juice, just remember to sweeten lime or pomegranate juice a little.

It should also work with any drink that uses fruit juice, the way you freeze a daquiri so -- vodka lemonade, screwdrivers, tequila sunrise (although you lose the layers).

I wouldn't freeze fresh fruit, however. If you're going to that expense, eat it while it's fresh or make it into jam or pie.  Pillsbury says you can put together a fruit pie and then freeze it until you're ready to bake it, but put it in three layers of plastic wrap to prevent freezer burn.  Better Homes and Gardens says you can freeze a baked pie but use two layers of plastic wrap. We put too much plastic into our trash and it ends up in the ocean, so I say fuhgeddaboudit.

You'll realize what great ideas these are when you look at the ingredients on the pre-packaged frozen stuff like this. Once again, you will avoid obesity-causing amounts of sugar and fat and salt, harmful emulsifiers and other chemicals, if you just DIY.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- some implications

One more advantage to Olrik’s principles; they apply regardless of how Torah got started.

Based on Olrik’s principles, I say that if the people who first transmitted these stories couldn’t write, or had learned to write but had low literacy, it doesn’t matter whether they developed the narratives themselves or had them handed down by, say, Gd. The same features would show up because they help the human brain transmit narratives for, obviously, millennia.

These people were descendants of the people in Africa who were the first narrators in the world and whose stories “invented” the features Olrik observed, features shared by oral traditions worldwide.  The features cope with human memory, human needs, and how humans are affected by the passage of time and by migrations away from the place where a culture comes together as a unit and develops its characteristic method and content of communication.

Even if Mosheh wrote down Gd’s words about 1628 BCE and read the record to the Israelites, the likelihood of low literacy means that the material transmitted afterwards orally, not in writing. To say nothing of the expense of making a copy of a writing, and the inevitability that errors would creep in. Or the fact that the tablets that Mosheh engraved remained in the ark forever, along with the scroll referred to at the end of Deuteronomy.

The fine structure of Torah is the same one it would have been, had Torah developed out of tales invented by people as far back as 5000 BCE when proto-Semitic arose between the Caucasus and Lake Van. They had to transmit orally back then because the most we could say about creating records at that time is that things could be painted on cave walls and house walls, and clay figurines could represent the quantity of a given product in a shipment, but pictorial representations of abstract concepts were centuries in the future, let alone wedge or linear abstract representations of more or less abstract concepts.

Just like with the timing of creation, I refuse to argue the divine origin of Torah with you, because it’s irrelevant to the structure. The resemblance of Torah to oral narratives worldwide comes from the nature of the human mind.

In his 1987 book, Whybray called for somebody to go through every last bit of Torah to see if Olrik is a worthwhile tool for its study; that’s what I’ve done in Narrating the Torah, with just one more parshah to go in its final comprehensive draft.

There’s more to it than Olrik’s principles, however.