Ben Hur, the novel, part 10

We are up to Book II chapter 3 of Ben Hur and I want to finish off something I said last time because it probably hasn’t occurred to most readers.

There was no reform or conservative Judaism in the Roman Empire. There were no Chassidic Jews or Reconstructionists. You had the P’rushim like Rabbis Hillel and Shammai; you had the Ts’dukim who evaporated after the destruction of the Second Temple. You had the Samaritans who were on a downhill slide because you had to be born a Samaritan, you couldn’t convert. And you had the common people who couldn’t afford the time to get a solid Jewish education and might not know about new enactments of the Sanhedrin. In a good edition of Mishnah there will be an index of rabbis linked to sections that report their decisions, so you can go through and see what they ruled and get an idea of when it happened from their biographies.

Everything in Mishnah that isn’t cited to an individual rabbi is an agreed position of the Sanhedrin by 50 CE. At least 50% of Mishnah falls into this category. And because Judaism is a culture, everybody grew up living by these rules. So you didn’t have to stop in the middle of the day and say, now, what did my teacher say about – let’s say, finding a dead bug on the greens I just sprinkled with water to keep them fresh. You knew from growing crops every year that you had to throw out the greens that the bug touched.

Judah ben Hur, a rich boy, should have been brought up first to read Torah and live by it. Judah should have accompanied his father Ithamar in his business dealings and also, since the father was a rich and important man, in his attending Jewish courts.

That’s because he was eligible to be a witness in business cases, such as testifying to signatures and seals on documents. (Judah was eligible to testify to his father’s signature and seal even before bar mitsvah.) He was also eligible to be a judge. In a civil case, each of the two parties chooses a judge and then they agree on the third, which gets them part way to agreeing about the case.

If a case reached an impasse, anybody observing the case could speak up about it. If what he said was relevant, probative, and exculpatory, he joined the judges’ bench and then another person was chosen to make sure there was always an odd number of judges. The father would have wanted Judah to be ready to join the judges’ bench as an adult, and he would have taken the boy to court with him every time he attended.

Judah was minimally eligible for a witness or a judge as soon as he passed the age of bar mitsvah, 13 years and one day. He was not running around with a Gentile boy or reading Greek philosophy; he was living his culture, learning or running the family business, and attending the courts where he learned and maybe participated in applying or formulating Jewish law. There was no 8 years of idly waiting for his majority before Book II opens.

Judah running wild with a Gentile boy is a plot device Wallace needs to carry out his work. It is not realistic, any more than the idea that Judah was a self-hating Jew, uneducated and vulnerable to conversion. So a major component of Wallace’s plot dissolves in the face of reality.