Ben Hur the novel, part 8

So we’re up to chapter 10 of Ben Hur and right above it Mary says “the place is sanctified.” Have you ever thought about what that is supposed to mean?

I did the first ever complete English translation of the transcript from the 1913 Mendel Beilis trial on a charge of ritual murder, the blood libel that falsely says Jews need children’s blood at Passover to put in matso. That is false, but the connection to Ben Hur is about consecration of land and buildings.

Late in the trial a government official takes the stand. Beilis’ bosses were building a hospice on one corner of their property. In autumn of 1910 they got the plans approved. Then this little twerp Merder gets involved and makes them change the plans. He sees things in the plans that look like part of a Christian church so he decides this isn’t really a dining room, it’s a prayer house. Well, the Zaitsevs had already examined Kyiv laws on building new Jewish prayer houses and the site fit the requirements, but they decided to use it only as a dining hall for the doctors. But supposedly the blood of the murder victim would be used to consecrate this ground.

Judaism does not require consecrated ground for synagogues. There is no consecration ritual for any real estate that Jews use. They put up mezuzot, and that’s it. The proper place to initiate Shabbat, or hold the Passover seders, or light the Chanukiyah, is at home, not in a synagogue. Still less do you need a consecration ritual for a place where a woman is going to give birth.

Next, there is no “sacred ninth hour”. Sacrifices were offered morning and evening in the Temple, according to the ritual specified in Exodus.

The rest of the chapter is Christian stuff and I promised I would leave that alone. Same for chapters 11, 12 and 14, but in chapter 13 he tries to drag in Rabbi Hillel. Rabbi Hillel never got involved in “the Christ” being born. That is a Christian phrase; it is meaningless in Judaism. Herod would never ask such a question; Hillel would never take it up seriously.

The phrase was unknown to Jews for at least a century after Herod’s death; the King of the Jews after him was his grandson Agrippa, about whom there are stories in Mishnah, Tacitus and Suetonius as well as Josephus. In between, Augustus and his governors ruled Judea, and a bad lot they were, too, raping the lush province to enrich themselves. At last, patience worn out, the Jews rebelled and killed off three Roman legions before the Second Temple was destroyed.

In the next 30 years Josephus became client of the Flavians and wrote his War of the Jews. One of the surviving copies has a forged insertion about “the Christ” which is also copied into his Antiquities. The forgery is in very bad Greek; I checked out one thing I didn’t understand with a professor of Greek at Cambridge and he said it was nonsense. Between 400 and 1453 CE, knowledge of Greek declined in Europe and was rediscovered when Christian scholars fled Constantinople ahead of the Muslim conquerors. That’s the setting for the bad forgery in Josephus.