Ben Hur the novel, pt. 5

So Lew Wallace. We’re up to Chapter 7 of Ben Hur and Lew isn’t doing very well. He’s about to do even worse.

He pretends that Nazirites were part of a despised sect, that they don’t obey Jewish law. In fact, not cutting their hair IS Jewish law. Nazirites were not despised. They were odd, but they weren’t despised. Queen Helena of Adiabene (in modern Kurdish territory) took on a nazirite vow; are you telling me a queen is despised? And Wallace tells only half the tale, although all the laws of the nazirite are in one place in Torah. So not only is he not reading Jewish law, he’s not even reading his Bible to write this story.

Second, Samaritans were avoided because they did not obey the laws of tahor/tameh. The statement of these laws in Torah is very general. When it came to court cases, the courts set standards for when you had to worry about this subject. The Jews had their set of laws, which are documented and available for free online. The Samaritans obey their laws which are documented in Arabic and not available free online. I wouldn’t know how to refer you if you wanted to buy a copy, like I could for the Arabic version of the Samaritan Pentateuch.

What Wallace could not know, which DNA has revealed, is that the Samaritans did not intermarry with Assyrians. The priest that came back from exile to train the Kuteans was supposed to put an end to a plague of lions. But he never let Assyrians marry Samaritans. The same is still true: Samaritans, unlike Jews, do not accept male converts. To try and increase their numbers (there are less than 1000 left), they have agreed to accept women who agree to follow Samaritan law. I’m not following the news but I would guess that there hasn’t been a rush of women competing for Samaritan men.

Also, at the time this story is set, there was no Samaritan temple. The Hasmoneans destroyed it about 150 BCE. That was after the Seleucid war when the events occurred which are commemorated in Chanukah. The Hasmoneans were fighting to keep the Syrians from invading Egypt; the Samaritans were helping the Syrians.

And then Wallace does something really dumb. He has just been saying how cold it was on this winter day, but he has a Greek running around without a cloak.

Wallace has a guy in the market reject figs. At this time of the year, the figs would have been dried; these were a staple of the diet in Imperial Rome because they kept well when dried. Here in the US we hardly know figs under any other form. The same for dates.

Then we get into the foolishness about Jewish practice. Wallace has a man walking through the market, a place where taharut is a problem, wearing his tefillin. You put on your tefillin in the synagogue before morning prayers, and take them off afterward, keeping them in a little bag to protect them.

Both Ts’dukim and P’rushim wore tefillin. There are claims that the Ts’dukim took the commandment figuratively, not literally, but given that they were stricter in their interpretations, that makes no sense. Tefillin have been found at Qumran, a sanctuary set up by Ts’dukim in Hasmonean times as a refuge when the Hasmoneans took on the high priesthood as well as the monarchy. The Ts’dukim got their name by holding that the high priest had to be descended from David’s priest, Tsadok. The Hasmoneans were of Aaron’s lineage, but not through Tsadok. They were acceptable to the Ts’dukim as priests, but not high priests.

Now, I keep having to say this. We can’t fault writers for not knowing things that weren’t known in their times. Wallace had no clue to the existence of Qumran; it was discovered almost 100 years later. What he’s doing is taking the word of Christian scripture that demonizes the P’rushim. In fact, the P’rushim made many rulings in court trials that made things easier on people. The standards for taharut are one. If you think something is no longer tahor, you go to the experts to see what they think, otherwise you are paskening for yourself and that’s “unconstitutional”.

The experts hold a court, which takes three judges. They could rule that if you use the item in some other way than its normal use, you’re good. They could rule that it’s too damaged to be used normally, and as long as you don’t repair it, you don’t have to worry about its status. They could rule that it’s smaller than an established minimum size, and you have nothing to worry about. Or when they hear the whole story, they might realize that there were intervening contacts between the cause of tumah and the item you’re consulting them about. There’s a maximum number of sequential contacts after which the last item is not considered tameh.

The Ts’dukim and P’rushim did disagree over taharut. A document at Qumran documents disagreements that the Ts’dukim had, and one of them is quoted in Mishnah Yadaim. And the Ts’duki ruling is stricter.

Again, Wallace didn’t do his homework. Neither do other Gentiles who try to write about Jews. They don’t do their homework. And they have to do today’s homework, not repeat stuff that was proved wrong 20 or 200 or 2000 years ago.