Fact-Checking the Torah -- the solution

You fell behind reading this page, and you gave up when you got too far behind.
Or you just found it and you realize you missed 77 articles!
Or you're trying to fact-check me and it's hard to cross-reference when you download articles one at a time.
The solution is near.
In July you will be able to buy
Fact-Checking the Torah: The Laws.
Electronically only.
PDF only.
$7 only.
It has a table of subjects with the Torah citations, the list of free online learning resources, and a subject-specific bibliography culled from the Bibliography page.
You will not be able to buy this book anywhere else except this blog -- unless somebody has violated the copyright laws.  You should let me know about that.

Email me if you are interested.

State sales tax or VAT may have to be charged.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- forgetting your history

Quoting out of context usually applies to using part of the words to mean something when what was said actually means something else. 

With Jewish law, part of the urban legends come from this classic aspect of quoting out of context.

Another part comes from thinking of Jewish law from the wrong historical context.  This will come up again in the next section of the blog but with Jewish law the issue is confusing concepts in Jewish law with something that has to be historically impossible.

Calling tumah uncleanness and thinking it means failed hygiene is an example.

I’ll give another example of this issue although it doesn’t involve the kind of tumah that requires immersion.  Deuteronomy 23:13-15 says soldiers should have a “pin” in their packs to use when they “go” outside the camp.  On the surface of it, you would think this was a hygienic regulation, despite the fact that it comes from 33 centuries before the Germ Theory of Disease.

It also originated 34 centuries before medicine understood the origin of dysentery.  Western medicine once thought that dysentery was a disease of the tropics, but large outbreaks in New York State helped prove that was wrong.

Dysentery is the result of an infected water supply, and soldiers had to camp close to their water supply, such as a river.  So this regulation had the potential to spread dysentery.  Nobody knew that at the time, and nobody had the science to prove it until late in the 1800s CE.  So the urban legend that Deuteronomy helps prevent disease in the camp is out of context for the state of medical knowledge at the time.  The people then didn’t know it. 

The other historical facet that leads to misunderstanding is viewing Torah only as a series of stories or laws that applied in other times.  I’ve shown that Torah deals with issues that the law still has to deal with: ownership, permanent or temporary; transfer of ownership and the rules for that; economic exchanges and disparities; physical conflict.  The idea that it’s outdated is an urban legend.

So is the idea that just because we’re living in the 21^st century, we do things better.  The same human needs and habits drive law today that drove it when people started living by Torah law.  There have been dreamers thrown up in history from time to time who tried to come up with a way to get away from law by pretending to codify it in simple terms.  It even provided one company with an ad tag: “No rules, just right.”  That’s an oxymoron.  “Right” always has to be defined by rules that can be applied by an impartial party when two people come into conflict over what it means. 

As long as human nature remains the same, Torah will not be outdated because human nature is exactly what Torah and Jewish law deal with from a perspective of millennia of experience.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 3:7-8

Genesis 3:7-8

 

ז וַתִּפָּקַחְנָה עֵינֵי שְׁנֵיהֶם וַיֵּדְעוּ כִּי עֵירֻמִּם הֵם וַיִּתְפְּרוּ עֲלֵה תְאֵנָה וַיַּעֲשׂוּ לָהֶם חֲגֹרֹת:

ח וַיִּשְׁמְעוּ אֶת־קוֹל יְהוָֹה אֱלֹהִים מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם וַיִּתְחַבֵּא הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ מִפְּנֵי יְהוָֹה אֱלֹהִים בְּתוֹךְ עֵץ הַגָּן:

 

Translation:    The eyes of the two of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and sewed fig leaves and made themselves girdles.  They heard the voice of **** Gd who was walking around in the garden in the day’s breeze and the man and his wife hid themselves from **** Gd among the tree of the garden.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יִּתְפְּרוּ	They sewed
עֲלֵה	leaf
תְאֵנָה	fig
חֲגֹרֹת	girdles
קוֹל	voice
מִתְהַלֵּךְ	Walking around
יִּתְחַבֵּא	He hid himself

 

“Walking around.”  The mit at the start of this word is the sign of the hitpael binyan.  While its normal use is reflexive, you can’t say “he walked himself” – at least not in this context.  This is one of many times that Torah uses the hitpael in the sense of something done more than once in a row. 

 

“Hid himself” is a true reflexive use of the hitpael.

 

	Active	Passive
Simple	paal or qal	nifil
Habitual/repetitive	piel	pual
Causative	hifil	hufal
Reflexive/repetitive	hitpael

 

While there’s no support in Torah for the idea that apples were the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Torah literally says that the man and woman used fig leaves to make the girdles that covered their nakedness, once they realized that they were naked and ought to be covered.

 

“Tree of the garden.”  Now, we all know that you can’t hide “among” one tree.  This is one of a number of cases when a singular noun is used to represent plural nouns.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- May

Ahhhhh now the real stuff can start.
You should have thinned your leafy greens and eaten the microgreens in omelets.
You should see turnips and beets starting to round on the top.
Your green peas and snow peas should be blooming.
By the end of the month you should be harvesting all of these. 
They don't like hot weather and nasty things will happen.
In the interim, if you see your pea vines vibrating or sparrows flying in and out of them
RELAX.
The sparrows are eating the aphids and keeping your vines healthy.
They will feed their chicks with the aphids, raising the next generation of debuggers.
You should not be pruning anything right now; that will help the birds raise their little debuggers.
That includes robins, cardinals, catbirds, mockingbirds, starlings, wrens, chickadees, titmice.......
What you should be doing is getting ready to plant warm-weather veggies.
See Mike McGrath's article on tomatoes.  Remember, he's talking about sets that you buy.
I plant from seed.  I have known tomato seed to overwinter and sprout the next year.
The plants from now on are squash, peppers, eggplant, corn, okra, beans, more carrots, ........
Oh yeah, and mowing your lawn.
NOT SEEDING.
NOT fertilizing.
NOT putting down weed and feed.
Just mowing at 3 inches, no more, no less.
Until the summer drought, if you get one. 
Then STOP MOWING.
Oh, and you might want to get freezer bags in case it looks like you're going to get more veggies than you can eat without packing on weight.
I hope.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- twin set

Classic twin sweater sets were always in cashmere. 
They were expensive.
You had maybe one in a color that suited you and you wore it to special event that didn't need formal wear.
Then you cleaned it and put it in a special storage pouch to keep the moths away.
Now that you can make pullovers with short or long sleeves and a cardigan, you can make yourself a twin set.
You can get 100% cashmere yarn in DK (double knit) weight which is heavier than Perly Perle.
The label on the ball will show you how many stitches should make an inch, depending on the size of needles you use.
So you will have to do some arithmetic to figure out your stitch counts, but you had to do that anyway if you don't have a 40-inch chest.
Cashmere yarn is expensive.
Palette Peruvian yarn in fingering weight uses the same stitch count as Perly Perle and is much cheaper and comes in more colors than cashmere usually does.
Wool of the Andes Peruvian sport weight yarn uses a different stitch count but is much cheaper than real cashmere and comes in more colors.
It all depends on what you want to go for.
But if you bought the sweater guard/chain I talked about in March, you still don't have to make those pesky button holes.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Outdoors -- the gang's all here

Last Thursday the catbird mewed for the first time.
Last Friday the swallows twittered high over the Co-op grocery parking lot.
The cardinals are quiet -- that must mean they've got a nest they're minding.
The woodpeckers have announced themselves.
The mockingbirds are beating up on squirrels so their eggs must be near hatching.
All that's missing is the goldfinches and they are slow to appear because they like wild seeds.
High spring indeed.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Quoting out of Verbal Context

Logic, logic, I’m sick to death of your logic.

OK, now that I have the Trekker in me out of the way, let’s talk about logic.

I watched some online lectures on a particular field of Judaism and afterward I emailed the teacher.  I got some interesting ideas out of the course.  But the field strongly relied on a fallacy.  Since 1998 it has become increasingly clear to me that fallacies are at the basis of the urban legends about Torah.

When it comes to Jewish law, the main fallacy is quoting out of context.  There are three layers to the context, and each plays its role.

One layer is the simple verbage context.  You saw right off the bat that the urban legend of lex talionis comes from using two verses of Torah but ignoring related verbage.

You also saw that the issue of “thou shalt not kill” ignored the textual requirement for execution by the court under specific conditions (as well as being mistranslated, which is a subject for much later).

And so on and so forth.

Those legal experts I talked about who run Jewish courts know Torah backwards and forwards.  They also know Mishnah backwards and forwards, and Gemara, and Mishneh Torah, and Shulchan Arukh, and all the legal decisions made since then.

They can't look things up like an American lawyer.  That is so much easier now with digital systems like Westlaw and Lexis, that it isn’t even funny.  In Jewish law, the experts know everything by heart.  They still do their homework because the human memory is a funny thing and they don’t want to bring on ill-repute by doing a sloppy job.  But it’s not like American law where you don’t dare walk into court without doing your homework because yesterday’s superior court decision may have invalidated part of your argument.

The verbage on Jewish law extends to 30,000 pages or more.  And the experts know it all.  Through years and decades of study.  The person who isn’t willing to study all of that material will never become expert enough to participate in a Jewish court.

I’m not that expert.  All I know is that every time somebody comes up with a question that reveals an urban legend about Torah, the single most important step in answering it is to look at the verbage.  And usually, the answer is right next to it.  A rabbi said that 19 centuries ago, and it’s still true today.  Samuel Levine found that every time a missionary used what was supposedly a supporting quote, examination of the context “right next to it” showed that the verbage actually meant exactly the opposite.  This will also come up again much later.

Everybody knows about the problem of quoting out of context, if they know anything about sound bytes and how they lead to arguments because they don’t accurately reflect what the person really meant.  It’s time to remember that the same thing applies to the Bible.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved