One of the suggestions I liked was to make another blog and link to it here. I did exactly that, and the first post is up on "Not in Heaven." If there are future posts relevant to academic biblical theory, I can also cross-post them to this blog.
Hopefully the opening post and the "about" page will give you a feel for some of the topics I'd like to discuss.
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Possible Future for the Blog
Occasionally I'll get an email or a comment on reddit asking if I have plans to post more on this blog. I figure I'd post the answer I usually reply here first, and then after discuss the possibility of future directions.
When I started this blog several years ago now, the plan was to post something of content every week for a year. Over the course of the year, I wanted to build the case in support of some of the conclusions regarding the Torah that appear in academia. These include the idea that the Torah is a composition from multiple authors stitched together sometimes very artfully and sometimes not. I also brought significant support from archaeology to show, to the best of my ability, that many events described in the Torah are not historical, and were written at a much later date. I'd like to think I was successful at showing these things, but I also know, based on many of the comments that not everyone is convinced. That's very much ok.
The purpose was twofold. One was I wanted there to be a repository of this information, sourced to academic scholars, that could be used by me or others to argue against many of the religious apologetics that litter the web. The other purpose was more selfish. In the years prior to starting the blog, I had read a very extensive amount of history and commentaries on the Tanach and the Ancient Near East. I wanted to compile that information even if only for myself. The culmination of the blog was a personal discussion of why I do not believe the Tanach represents the production of a deity, but rather represents a very human creation.
During the year of writing I usually was able to keep ahead of the release schedule, sometimes by up to a month. About months from the actual completion of the blog, I had already completed all the final posts. There were a few miscellaneous topics that I didn't cover over the year, and I wrote up some of them, and others exist in unfinished drafts. At this point, though, I had stopped researching this specific topic and started reading on other topics. I've read a lot of works, some fiction but mostly nonfiction. Lots of history, some philosophy, and a good chunk of physics and mathematics. What I haven't read is works of biblical criticism. In fact, I recently opened an academic book on the Jewish approach to mythology but I found that my interest was very minimal. I read the first fifty pages and then put it aside. I still will read interesting papers or posts where I come across them, but what I haven't done is make a concerted effort to keep on top of the literature.
All this is to say, is that I'm unlikely to write another post like the one I wrote regarding the Exodus or the origins of Hannukah. I know that there are people who want such posts, but I really feel that I accomplished what I planned to accomplish over the year, and that I just don't have much more to say on the topic.
But let's look forward a bit. There are still things that I could say that may be tangentially related to the original purpose of the blog. If there's interest, I would write about them here. If not, they may find outlets through some other medium under some other name. Some topics are closely related to Jewish outlook or Hashkafah. These would be my thoughts about the existence of gods, souls and other such matters. Other topics could be related to modern Jewish life itself while not dealing with the Jewish religion per se. These would be posts on Anti-Semitism, Israel, and Ultra-Orthodox communities. Yet other posts would be pretty far afield. There are lots of interesting things I'd like to say about mathematics, physics, politics, sociology. I have thoughts about the state of the climate, the thorny political issue of abortion, an explanation of why I never plan to have kids, etc.
Anyway that's the question. I don't know if anyone is still following this blog, but if you are, let me know what you think. Would you want to hear my thoughts on things? Or should I leave this blog as it is, a testament to several years of research, and a year of posts.
If I do this, there won't be a schedule. The posts will be more haphazard, and the topics will be whatever I feel like writing about.
When I started this blog several years ago now, the plan was to post something of content every week for a year. Over the course of the year, I wanted to build the case in support of some of the conclusions regarding the Torah that appear in academia. These include the idea that the Torah is a composition from multiple authors stitched together sometimes very artfully and sometimes not. I also brought significant support from archaeology to show, to the best of my ability, that many events described in the Torah are not historical, and were written at a much later date. I'd like to think I was successful at showing these things, but I also know, based on many of the comments that not everyone is convinced. That's very much ok.
The purpose was twofold. One was I wanted there to be a repository of this information, sourced to academic scholars, that could be used by me or others to argue against many of the religious apologetics that litter the web. The other purpose was more selfish. In the years prior to starting the blog, I had read a very extensive amount of history and commentaries on the Tanach and the Ancient Near East. I wanted to compile that information even if only for myself. The culmination of the blog was a personal discussion of why I do not believe the Tanach represents the production of a deity, but rather represents a very human creation.
During the year of writing I usually was able to keep ahead of the release schedule, sometimes by up to a month. About months from the actual completion of the blog, I had already completed all the final posts. There were a few miscellaneous topics that I didn't cover over the year, and I wrote up some of them, and others exist in unfinished drafts. At this point, though, I had stopped researching this specific topic and started reading on other topics. I've read a lot of works, some fiction but mostly nonfiction. Lots of history, some philosophy, and a good chunk of physics and mathematics. What I haven't read is works of biblical criticism. In fact, I recently opened an academic book on the Jewish approach to mythology but I found that my interest was very minimal. I read the first fifty pages and then put it aside. I still will read interesting papers or posts where I come across them, but what I haven't done is make a concerted effort to keep on top of the literature.
All this is to say, is that I'm unlikely to write another post like the one I wrote regarding the Exodus or the origins of Hannukah. I know that there are people who want such posts, but I really feel that I accomplished what I planned to accomplish over the year, and that I just don't have much more to say on the topic.
But let's look forward a bit. There are still things that I could say that may be tangentially related to the original purpose of the blog. If there's interest, I would write about them here. If not, they may find outlets through some other medium under some other name. Some topics are closely related to Jewish outlook or Hashkafah. These would be my thoughts about the existence of gods, souls and other such matters. Other topics could be related to modern Jewish life itself while not dealing with the Jewish religion per se. These would be posts on Anti-Semitism, Israel, and Ultra-Orthodox communities. Yet other posts would be pretty far afield. There are lots of interesting things I'd like to say about mathematics, physics, politics, sociology. I have thoughts about the state of the climate, the thorny political issue of abortion, an explanation of why I never plan to have kids, etc.
Anyway that's the question. I don't know if anyone is still following this blog, but if you are, let me know what you think. Would you want to hear my thoughts on things? Or should I leave this blog as it is, a testament to several years of research, and a year of posts.
If I do this, there won't be a schedule. The posts will be more haphazard, and the topics will be whatever I feel like writing about.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Corrupted Texts and Manuscript Edits
If you spend time reading through academic commentaries on biblical texts, you often will come across individuals who claim that the text is probably corrupted and should be read in a different way. A good example of this kind of academic analysis is in the works of Frank Moore Cross (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic) where he analyzes both Az Yashir (the song of the sea) and Psalm 29. In both cases he proposes edits to restore the text to what he thinks is its original version.
As someone with a reasonably good background in Talmudic argumentation, I often felt that these arguments were a bit too similar to the common Gemara phrase, "Don't read x, read y" often substituting an entirely different word in for the original one in order to justify some law or custom. I have several questions on this topic, I probably won't be able to answer them all, but I will provide what I think is a compelling example of what textual corruption might look like.
Here are the questions I have:
When the Talmudic authors say, "don't read x, read y" did they actually mean that there were versions of the text with y, or that the text might have been corrupted from y to x?
What types of textual corruption are likely, what kinds are unlikely?
What kind of manuscript edits are likely, what kinds are likely?
Can we distinguish between a text that has been corrupted and one that has been edited?
Which texts are the most likely to have been corrupted or edited?
Textual Corruption/Editing in Early Sources
The best way to figure out what corruption or editing would look like is to find examples of texts that were edited. To date we have several early versions that provide exactly this kind of analysis. By comparing the Masoretic Text (currently used by nearly all Jews) the Septuagint (Early Greek Translation), the Samaritan Bible, and the Dead Sea Scroll fragments, we can piece together what an original text might look like. If three sources say one thing but the fourth differs, then probably the fourth is edited. As a side note, this is precisely how the Talmud comes to conclusions about what the actual text should read. (See Masechet Soferim 6:4 for example).
While this approach works well for academics, and we've used it in this blog in the past to argue for different readings of specific verses, if you come from a religious background, this analysis won't carry much weight. After all, the Masoretic text is "obviously" the correct one, and all the others are corruptions.
Luckily the Tanach itself supplies us with some examples of the same text repeated in different places, but with significant edits. The most glaring example is the comparison between Divrei Hayamim (Chronicles) and Melachim (Kings). This was touched on in this post. But while this tells us a lot of what changes later editors were willing to make, it doesn't answer too much about textual corruption. Instead we look at two Psalms.
Psalms 14 and 53
Here are the texts of Psalms 14 and 53, in Hebrew and English.
א לַמְנַצֵּחַ, לְדָוִד:
אָמַר נָבָל בְּלִבּוֹ, אֵין אֱלֹהִים;
הִשְׁחִיתוּ, הִתְעִיבוּ עֲלִילָה-- אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב.
ב יְהוָה-- מִשָּׁמַיִם, הִשְׁקִיף עַל-בְּנֵי-אָדָם:
לִרְאוֹת, הֲיֵשׁ מַשְׂכִּיל-- דֹּרֵשׁ, אֶת-אֱלֹהִים.
ג הַכֹּל סָר, יַחְדָּו נֶאֱלָחוּ: אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב--אֵין, גַּם-אֶחָד.
ד הֲלֹא יָדְעוּ, כָּל-פֹּעֲלֵי-אָוֶן: אֹכְלֵי עַמִּי, אָכְלוּ לֶחֶם; יְהוָה, לֹא קָרָאוּ.
ה שָׁם, פָּחֲדוּ פָחַד: כִּי-אֱלֹהִים, בְּדוֹר צַדִּיק.
ו עֲצַת-עָנִי תָבִישׁוּ: כִּי יְהוָה מַחְסֵהוּ.
ז מִי יִתֵּן מִצִּיּוֹן, יְשׁוּעַת יִשְׂרָאֵל:
בְּשׁוּב יְהוָה, שְׁבוּת עַמּוֹ; יָגֵל יַעֲקֹב, יִשְׂמַח יִשְׂרָאֵל.
1 For the Leader. [A Psalm] of David.
The fool hath said in his heart: 'There is no God';
they have dealt corruptly, they have done abominably; there is none that doeth good.
2 The LORD looked forth from heaven upon the children of men,
to see if there were any man of understanding, that did seek after God.
3 They are all corrupt, they are together become impure; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
4 'Shall not all the workers of iniquity know it, who eat up My people as they eat bread, and call not upon the LORD?'
5 There are they in great fear; for God is with the righteous generation.
6 Ye would put to shame the counsel of the poor, but the LORD is his refuge.
7 Oh that the salvation of Israel
were come out of Zion! When the LORD turneth the captivity of His people, let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad.
ב אָמַר נָבָל בְּלִבּוֹ, אֵין אֱלֹהִים;
הִשְׁחִיתוּ, וְהִתְעִיבוּ עָוֶל-- אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב.
ג אֱלֹהִים-- מִשָּׁמַיִם, הִשְׁקִיף עַל-בְּנֵי-אָדָם:
לִרְאוֹת, הֲיֵשׁ מַשְׂכִּיל-- דֹּרֵשׁ, אֶת-אֱלֹהִים.
ד כֻּלּוֹ סָג, יַחְדָּו נֶאֱלָחוּ: אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב; אֵין, גַּם-אֶחָד.
ה הֲלֹא יָדְעוּ, פֹּעֲלֵי-אָוֶן: אֹכְלֵי עַמִּי, אָכְלוּ לֶחֶם; אֱלֹהִים, לֹא קָרָאוּ.
ו שָׁם, פָּחֲדוּ פַחַד-- לֹא-הָיָה-פָחַד:
כִּי-אֱלֹהִים--פִּזַּר, עַצְמוֹת חֹנָךְ; הֱבִשֹׁתָה, כִּי-אֱלֹהִים מְאָסָם.
ז מִי יִתֵּן מִצִּיּוֹן, יְשֻׁעוֹת יִשְׂרָאֵל:
בְּשׁוּב אֱלֹהִים, שְׁבוּת עַמּוֹ; יָגֵל יַעֲקֹב, יִשְׂמַח יִשְׂרָאֵל.
1 For the Leader; upon Mahalath. Maschil of David.
2 The fool hath said in his heart: 'There is no God';
they have dealt corruptly, and have done abominable iniquity; there is none that doeth good.
3 God looked forth from heaven upon the children of men,
to see if there were any man of understanding, that did seek after God.
4 Every one of them is unclean, they are together become impure; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
5 'Shall not the workers of iniquity know it, who eat up My people as they eat bread, and call not upon God?'
6 There are they in great fear, where no fear was;
for God hath scattered the bones of him that encampeth against thee; Thou hast put them to shame, because God hath rejected them.
7 Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion!
When God turneth the captivity of His people, let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad.
So what's going on here? The Psalms are almost identical, in fact we can sum up all the differences. They are:
But there's really one point of difference that is more striking, and that is difference 5. One Psalm (14) uses the tetragrammaton 3 times, and Elohim 3 times. The other only uses Elohim. Again, it is hard to imagine that this is a coincidence. Either the author of Psalm 53, didn't want to use the tetragrammaton and changed all the instances to Elohim, or the author of Psalm 14 changed some of the instances of Elohim to the tetragrammaton perhaps to ensure that the Psalm equated the two names. Either way, there is a clear theological motivation for the change, although we're not sure which one represents the original.
Answering the Questions
Now maybe we can look at the questions, and provide some semblance of answers to them, using these psalms as a guide.
When the Talmudic authors say, "don't read x, read y" did they actually mean that there were versions of the text with y, or that the text might have been corrupted from y to x? Answer: They probably did not have a version that said y. Although we can't rule it out. The types of changes often mentioned in the Talmud are not similar to the changes we see here. They tend to fall more in the "wordplay" category.
What types of textual corruption are likely, what kinds are unlikely? Answer: Single character typos are very likely, especially for letters that are similar. In this example 4 we have a Resh exchanged with a Gimel, which seems very plausible in the old Israelite writing system.
What kind of manuscript edits are likely, what kinds are likely? Answer: Replacing words with synonyms are plausible. Fixing up sentences grammatically are also plausible. Most importantly, larger theologically motivated edits are definitely plausible, especially when the name of God is concerned.
Can we distinguish between a text that has been corrupted and one that has been edited? Answer: Corrupted texts probably have more typo corrections than grammatical or theological edits.
Which texts are the most likely to have been corrupted or edited? Answer: There isn't enough sample size here to really answer this. But if you start looking at some of the other old sources, you can find out that the most questionable texts tend to be the ones with the most archaic language and poetry.
As someone with a reasonably good background in Talmudic argumentation, I often felt that these arguments were a bit too similar to the common Gemara phrase, "Don't read x, read y" often substituting an entirely different word in for the original one in order to justify some law or custom. I have several questions on this topic, I probably won't be able to answer them all, but I will provide what I think is a compelling example of what textual corruption might look like.
Here are the questions I have:
When the Talmudic authors say, "don't read x, read y" did they actually mean that there were versions of the text with y, or that the text might have been corrupted from y to x?
What types of textual corruption are likely, what kinds are unlikely?
What kind of manuscript edits are likely, what kinds are likely?
Can we distinguish between a text that has been corrupted and one that has been edited?
Which texts are the most likely to have been corrupted or edited?
Textual Corruption/Editing in Early Sources
The best way to figure out what corruption or editing would look like is to find examples of texts that were edited. To date we have several early versions that provide exactly this kind of analysis. By comparing the Masoretic Text (currently used by nearly all Jews) the Septuagint (Early Greek Translation), the Samaritan Bible, and the Dead Sea Scroll fragments, we can piece together what an original text might look like. If three sources say one thing but the fourth differs, then probably the fourth is edited. As a side note, this is precisely how the Talmud comes to conclusions about what the actual text should read. (See Masechet Soferim 6:4 for example).
While this approach works well for academics, and we've used it in this blog in the past to argue for different readings of specific verses, if you come from a religious background, this analysis won't carry much weight. After all, the Masoretic text is "obviously" the correct one, and all the others are corruptions.
Luckily the Tanach itself supplies us with some examples of the same text repeated in different places, but with significant edits. The most glaring example is the comparison between Divrei Hayamim (Chronicles) and Melachim (Kings). This was touched on in this post. But while this tells us a lot of what changes later editors were willing to make, it doesn't answer too much about textual corruption. Instead we look at two Psalms.
Psalms 14 and 53
Here are the texts of Psalms 14 and 53, in Hebrew and English.
תהילים פרק יד
א לַמְנַצֵּחַ, לְדָוִד:
אָמַר נָבָל בְּלִבּוֹ, אֵין אֱלֹהִים;
הִשְׁחִיתוּ, הִתְעִיבוּ עֲלִילָה-- אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב.
ב יְהוָה-- מִשָּׁמַיִם, הִשְׁקִיף עַל-בְּנֵי-אָדָם:
לִרְאוֹת, הֲיֵשׁ מַשְׂכִּיל-- דֹּרֵשׁ, אֶת-אֱלֹהִים.
ג הַכֹּל סָר, יַחְדָּו נֶאֱלָחוּ: אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב--אֵין, גַּם-אֶחָד.
ד הֲלֹא יָדְעוּ, כָּל-פֹּעֲלֵי-אָוֶן: אֹכְלֵי עַמִּי, אָכְלוּ לֶחֶם; יְהוָה, לֹא קָרָאוּ.
ה שָׁם, פָּחֲדוּ פָחַד: כִּי-אֱלֹהִים, בְּדוֹר צַדִּיק.
ו עֲצַת-עָנִי תָבִישׁוּ: כִּי יְהוָה מַחְסֵהוּ.
ז מִי יִתֵּן מִצִּיּוֹן, יְשׁוּעַת יִשְׂרָאֵל:
בְּשׁוּב יְהוָה, שְׁבוּת עַמּוֹ; יָגֵל יַעֲקֹב, יִשְׂמַח יִשְׂרָאֵל.
1 For the Leader. [A Psalm] of David.
The fool hath said in his heart: 'There is no God';
they have dealt corruptly, they have done abominably; there is none that doeth good.
2 The LORD looked forth from heaven upon the children of men,
to see if there were any man of understanding, that did seek after God.
3 They are all corrupt, they are together become impure; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
4 'Shall not all the workers of iniquity know it, who eat up My people as they eat bread, and call not upon the LORD?'
5 There are they in great fear; for God is with the righteous generation.
6 Ye would put to shame the counsel of the poor, but the LORD is his refuge.
7 Oh that the salvation of Israel
were come out of Zion! When the LORD turneth the captivity of His people, let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad.
תהילים פרק נג
א לַמְנַצֵּחַ עַל-מָחֲלַת, מַשְׂכִּיל לְדָוִד.ב אָמַר נָבָל בְּלִבּוֹ, אֵין אֱלֹהִים;
הִשְׁחִיתוּ, וְהִתְעִיבוּ עָוֶל-- אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב.
ג אֱלֹהִים-- מִשָּׁמַיִם, הִשְׁקִיף עַל-בְּנֵי-אָדָם:
לִרְאוֹת, הֲיֵשׁ מַשְׂכִּיל-- דֹּרֵשׁ, אֶת-אֱלֹהִים.
ד כֻּלּוֹ סָג, יַחְדָּו נֶאֱלָחוּ: אֵין עֹשֵׂה-טוֹב; אֵין, גַּם-אֶחָד.
ה הֲלֹא יָדְעוּ, פֹּעֲלֵי-אָוֶן: אֹכְלֵי עַמִּי, אָכְלוּ לֶחֶם; אֱלֹהִים, לֹא קָרָאוּ.
ו שָׁם, פָּחֲדוּ פַחַד-- לֹא-הָיָה-פָחַד:
כִּי-אֱלֹהִים--פִּזַּר, עַצְמוֹת חֹנָךְ; הֱבִשֹׁתָה, כִּי-אֱלֹהִים מְאָסָם.
ז מִי יִתֵּן מִצִּיּוֹן, יְשֻׁעוֹת יִשְׂרָאֵל:
בְּשׁוּב אֱלֹהִים, שְׁבוּת עַמּוֹ; יָגֵל יַעֲקֹב, יִשְׂמַח יִשְׂרָאֵל.
1 For the Leader; upon Mahalath. Maschil of David.
2 The fool hath said in his heart: 'There is no God';
they have dealt corruptly, and have done abominable iniquity; there is none that doeth good.
3 God looked forth from heaven upon the children of men,
to see if there were any man of understanding, that did seek after God.
4 Every one of them is unclean, they are together become impure; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
5 'Shall not the workers of iniquity know it, who eat up My people as they eat bread, and call not upon God?'
6 There are they in great fear, where no fear was;
for God hath scattered the bones of him that encampeth against thee; Thou hast put them to shame, because God hath rejected them.
7 Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion!
When God turneth the captivity of His people, let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad.
So what's going on here? The Psalms are almost identical, in fact we can sum up all the differences. They are:
- The introductory verse is different, although both are attributed to David
- The verse breakdown is different (from here on, I'll use v. x(y) where x is in psalm 14 and y is in psalm 53
- Some words are replaced with synonyms v. 1(2)
- Some words look as if one verse has a typo v. 3(4)
- In some places different names of God are used v. 2(3) 4(5) 7(7)
- Minor grammatical differences, probably for clarity in reading v. 4(5), 7(7)
- One verse is completely different 5-6(6).
But there's really one point of difference that is more striking, and that is difference 5. One Psalm (14) uses the tetragrammaton 3 times, and Elohim 3 times. The other only uses Elohim. Again, it is hard to imagine that this is a coincidence. Either the author of Psalm 53, didn't want to use the tetragrammaton and changed all the instances to Elohim, or the author of Psalm 14 changed some of the instances of Elohim to the tetragrammaton perhaps to ensure that the Psalm equated the two names. Either way, there is a clear theological motivation for the change, although we're not sure which one represents the original.
Answering the Questions
Now maybe we can look at the questions, and provide some semblance of answers to them, using these psalms as a guide.
When the Talmudic authors say, "don't read x, read y" did they actually mean that there were versions of the text with y, or that the text might have been corrupted from y to x? Answer: They probably did not have a version that said y. Although we can't rule it out. The types of changes often mentioned in the Talmud are not similar to the changes we see here. They tend to fall more in the "wordplay" category.
What types of textual corruption are likely, what kinds are unlikely? Answer: Single character typos are very likely, especially for letters that are similar. In this example 4 we have a Resh exchanged with a Gimel, which seems very plausible in the old Israelite writing system.
What kind of manuscript edits are likely, what kinds are likely? Answer: Replacing words with synonyms are plausible. Fixing up sentences grammatically are also plausible. Most importantly, larger theologically motivated edits are definitely plausible, especially when the name of God is concerned.
Can we distinguish between a text that has been corrupted and one that has been edited? Answer: Corrupted texts probably have more typo corrections than grammatical or theological edits.
Which texts are the most likely to have been corrupted or edited? Answer: There isn't enough sample size here to really answer this. But if you start looking at some of the other old sources, you can find out that the most questionable texts tend to be the ones with the most archaic language and poetry.
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Purim: The Jewish April Fools
It's been several years since I posted here, and I still don't plan to post regularly. But I had an idea about the possible origins of the holiday of Purim, which I wanted to share. As far as I know, this idea is not found anywhere else, and obviously because of that, it's not backed with fancy sources. It's my own idea, and should therefore be subject to an extra critical eye, as there very well may be obvious things I'm overlooking. Anyway those caveats aside, let's begin.
The Question - How did Purim start?
In my original post on Purim, I noted that the holiday is very strange, and that there does not appear to be any Persian, Babylonian, Canaanite, or other cultural holiday around this time period for the Jews to have based Purim off of. Since the story itself is definitely ahistorical, it is interesting to wonder how the whole thing got started in the first place. There are two key features that bring me to the hypothesis I'll lay out in this post.
1) The holiday, and the book of Esther, are both focused on humor and satire.
2) The timing of the holiday is exactly one month before Pesach (Passover).
We'll see why these two facts lead me to the idea that Purim bears significant similarities to the modern day "holiday" of April Fools. But before we get there, we need to digress a bit and talk about the calendar.
How long is a year exactly?
The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, with months beginning with new moons. Lunar months are around 29.5 days long, which means that a lunar year of twelve months tends to be about eleven days shorter than a solar year. If you measure a year of twelve months then the two calendars will gradually desynchronize. This is exactly how the Islamic calendar is run, and the result is that major Islamic festivals can fall at pretty much anytime in the solar year. Ramadan can be in the summer or the winter. In Judaism such a solution would not work because of the specification that Pesach fall in the springtime. This requires the calendars to be synchronized in some manner.
The solution to synchronizing the two calendars was first practiced in Babylon and was called intercalation, or in common terms, making a leap year. The Babylonians would add an extra month at the end of their calendar year (like Jewish calendars, the Babylonian last month was Adar). Babylonian mathematicians figured out that you could synchronize the two calendars over a 19 year period by adding 11 extra months. This scheme would eventually be adopted in Judaism as well, but not until past the Talmudic period. What did they do before then?
The Talmud in Sanhedrin describes the laws of adding extra months. If you're interested it begins on 11a and continues for about four pages. It's far too long even to summarize. Even though there is significant debate over how you decide when to intercalate, all sources agree that one of the key deciding factors in the decision is the tekufah, or the equinox. The gemara brings a source that the timing of the equinox suffices alone to decide to add an extra month, and that other signs such as crop or tree blooming are of lesser importance. The equinoxes and solstices were key calendar markings in ancient cultures. In Judaism, the equinoxes marked the beginning and end of the rainy season, and thus had agricultural importance. The holidays of Pesach and Sukkot are essentially described by the equinoxes.
Another important feature of the leap year decision is that it needed to be made from a central location (namely Israel) and it needed to be made by a Nasi. This makes sense because you don't want different cultures declaring leap years differently and observing holidays on different days. The latest day that they could declare a leap year was the 13th day of Adar. Supposedly this would give enough time for Passover preparations.
April Fools!
So what in the world does this have to do with April Fools? The origin of April Fools is a bit obscure. One common hypothesis, and the one that is important for this post, is that the holiday came about because people used to celebrate New Year's between March 25 and April 1. When most regions adopted Jan 1 as New Year's Day, they made fun of the people who celebrated it on April 1, by having a lighthearted April Fool's holiday. Whether this is the actual origin or not is not really important. What is important, is the idea of a holiday that begins because different groups are celebrating a joint holiday on different days.
So what does this have to do with Purim? Let's imagine a scenario. You're a Jew living in Persia, and it's the twelfth day of the thirteenth month since the beginning of last year. You're probably preparing for Pesach. The fourteenth day rolls around and you start your seder, when all the sudden a messenger from Israel comes and says to stop because a leap year has been declared and it's not actually Pesach for another month. What do you do now? You already had this feast prepared. You might as well finish it.
Let's go a bit further. The thirteenth month starts and you're not sure whether it's Adar II or Pesach because you haven't heard about the leap year declaration yet. So you decide, just to be safe, you'll prepare a festive meal for the 14th of this month too. Then if a leap year is declared, you'll just prepare another one for the next month.
These kinds of scenarios might play out fairly often in places far from Israel, where it took a long time to get the message about leap year declaration. Namely Persia, where many Jews lived, and where Purim appears to have originated. The idea is that just like April Fools is New Year's Day on the wrong day, Purim is Pesach on the wrong day. Just like everything else, as the holiday grew in popularity, it eventually became part of Jewish culture as a whole.
This also helps explain why Purim is always celebrated in the leap month if there is one. In the April Fool's theory of Purim, the holiday would have originally been celebrated only on these months. It also help explain why the holiday is light-hearted and satirical, just like April Fool's is.
So there you have it. Purim is the original April Fool's.
The Question - How did Purim start?
In my original post on Purim, I noted that the holiday is very strange, and that there does not appear to be any Persian, Babylonian, Canaanite, or other cultural holiday around this time period for the Jews to have based Purim off of. Since the story itself is definitely ahistorical, it is interesting to wonder how the whole thing got started in the first place. There are two key features that bring me to the hypothesis I'll lay out in this post.
1) The holiday, and the book of Esther, are both focused on humor and satire.
2) The timing of the holiday is exactly one month before Pesach (Passover).
We'll see why these two facts lead me to the idea that Purim bears significant similarities to the modern day "holiday" of April Fools. But before we get there, we need to digress a bit and talk about the calendar.
How long is a year exactly?
The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, with months beginning with new moons. Lunar months are around 29.5 days long, which means that a lunar year of twelve months tends to be about eleven days shorter than a solar year. If you measure a year of twelve months then the two calendars will gradually desynchronize. This is exactly how the Islamic calendar is run, and the result is that major Islamic festivals can fall at pretty much anytime in the solar year. Ramadan can be in the summer or the winter. In Judaism such a solution would not work because of the specification that Pesach fall in the springtime. This requires the calendars to be synchronized in some manner.
The solution to synchronizing the two calendars was first practiced in Babylon and was called intercalation, or in common terms, making a leap year. The Babylonians would add an extra month at the end of their calendar year (like Jewish calendars, the Babylonian last month was Adar). Babylonian mathematicians figured out that you could synchronize the two calendars over a 19 year period by adding 11 extra months. This scheme would eventually be adopted in Judaism as well, but not until past the Talmudic period. What did they do before then?
The Talmud in Sanhedrin describes the laws of adding extra months. If you're interested it begins on 11a and continues for about four pages. It's far too long even to summarize. Even though there is significant debate over how you decide when to intercalate, all sources agree that one of the key deciding factors in the decision is the tekufah, or the equinox. The gemara brings a source that the timing of the equinox suffices alone to decide to add an extra month, and that other signs such as crop or tree blooming are of lesser importance. The equinoxes and solstices were key calendar markings in ancient cultures. In Judaism, the equinoxes marked the beginning and end of the rainy season, and thus had agricultural importance. The holidays of Pesach and Sukkot are essentially described by the equinoxes.
Another important feature of the leap year decision is that it needed to be made from a central location (namely Israel) and it needed to be made by a Nasi. This makes sense because you don't want different cultures declaring leap years differently and observing holidays on different days. The latest day that they could declare a leap year was the 13th day of Adar. Supposedly this would give enough time for Passover preparations.
April Fools!
So what in the world does this have to do with April Fools? The origin of April Fools is a bit obscure. One common hypothesis, and the one that is important for this post, is that the holiday came about because people used to celebrate New Year's between March 25 and April 1. When most regions adopted Jan 1 as New Year's Day, they made fun of the people who celebrated it on April 1, by having a lighthearted April Fool's holiday. Whether this is the actual origin or not is not really important. What is important, is the idea of a holiday that begins because different groups are celebrating a joint holiday on different days.
So what does this have to do with Purim? Let's imagine a scenario. You're a Jew living in Persia, and it's the twelfth day of the thirteenth month since the beginning of last year. You're probably preparing for Pesach. The fourteenth day rolls around and you start your seder, when all the sudden a messenger from Israel comes and says to stop because a leap year has been declared and it's not actually Pesach for another month. What do you do now? You already had this feast prepared. You might as well finish it.
Let's go a bit further. The thirteenth month starts and you're not sure whether it's Adar II or Pesach because you haven't heard about the leap year declaration yet. So you decide, just to be safe, you'll prepare a festive meal for the 14th of this month too. Then if a leap year is declared, you'll just prepare another one for the next month.
These kinds of scenarios might play out fairly often in places far from Israel, where it took a long time to get the message about leap year declaration. Namely Persia, where many Jews lived, and where Purim appears to have originated. The idea is that just like April Fools is New Year's Day on the wrong day, Purim is Pesach on the wrong day. Just like everything else, as the holiday grew in popularity, it eventually became part of Jewish culture as a whole.
This also helps explain why Purim is always celebrated in the leap month if there is one. In the April Fool's theory of Purim, the holiday would have originally been celebrated only on these months. It also help explain why the holiday is light-hearted and satirical, just like April Fool's is.
So there you have it. Purim is the original April Fool's.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Vort: Replacing the Old Laws
If I were to sum of Christianity (from a religious Jewish perspective) it might go something like this: Christianity is a religion where the actual laws of Judaism were considered too difficult, so they decided to institute a new set of laws that removed all the difficult laws and replaced them with extremely simple requirements of belief that anyone could follow. And how do we know that this is what God wants? Well, according to the Christians we just have to trust Jesus and his disciples. The Jews of course saw through this ruse, but the goyim didn't, and many converted to the "simple" religion that promised large rewards for no hard work.
That view is of course a bit slanted, but there is some truth here. Christianity did abrogate the old laws, which they termed the "Old Testament" and replaced them with a new set, the "New Testament." The "New Testament" did focus more on belief rather than religious precepts like dietary laws, sacrifices, circumcision and the like. The religious spin comes in when describing the motivation for the switch. Perhaps the founders of Christianity, mainly Paul, thought that the old laws were actually "bad laws" and should be replaced. They hampered the approach to God rather than enabling it. Christians say that the replacement came directly from God through Jesus, but Jews scoff at this explanation. God doesn't change his laws. Why would he ever do that?
This week we'll see where at least one prophet accuses God of giving bad laws in the past and attempts to rectify them, an idea that seems pretty "Christian."
Before we get there, I'll note that Judaism itself does try to soften or excise "bad laws". One example of this is the "eye for an eye" which was completely neutered in Talmudic times. Other examples were all the commands for capital punishment which were also essentially removed by the Rabbis, who then claimed they had never been in effect in the first place. But we're not talking about this kind of change in the laws, we're going to talk about something more direct.
Yehezkel's "Bad Laws"
The prophet is Yehezkel (Ezekiel) and the versed in question are Ezek. 20:24-25. Here they are in Hebrew:
Instead, I merely want to draw attention to the pretty monumental claim that Yehezkel is making. He is basically saying that there were some laws, given directly by God, that are bad and that people should not do. And he gave these laws as a sort of punishment. Presumably he's coming to tell you what the good laws are and what the bad laws are.
Of course, as a person listening to Yehezkel, why should you believe him? After all, the old laws, those "bad" ones were given by God himself, and who is he to contradict God? But more importantly, we see an idea wherein Yehezkel's concept of Judaism is very different from the concept today. Yehezkel obviously does not believe in a static set of laws that are in effect for all time, and he's actively seeking to abrogate some of the old laws he doesn't like. Instead of using the same approach of Christianity or the Talmudic Rabbis, that the old laws are outdated, he actually says that God gave the old "bad" laws as a form of punishment for disobedience. It's actually a pretty crazy idea if you think about it. It's a level of malevolence that most people would not ascribe to God.
When you read through the book of Yehezkel, you find that he has a very different idea of how Judaism's laws came about. In some places he directly contradicts the Torah story about when laws were given, and like every other prophet, he makes absolutely no mention of the revelation at Har Sinai. Here it seems, that he thinks the laws are a bit more fluid, and that we should actively get rid of "bad laws" and replace them with good ones. How exactly we should know what is bad and what is good? Well we just need to trust Yehezkel.
That view is of course a bit slanted, but there is some truth here. Christianity did abrogate the old laws, which they termed the "Old Testament" and replaced them with a new set, the "New Testament." The "New Testament" did focus more on belief rather than religious precepts like dietary laws, sacrifices, circumcision and the like. The religious spin comes in when describing the motivation for the switch. Perhaps the founders of Christianity, mainly Paul, thought that the old laws were actually "bad laws" and should be replaced. They hampered the approach to God rather than enabling it. Christians say that the replacement came directly from God through Jesus, but Jews scoff at this explanation. God doesn't change his laws. Why would he ever do that?
This week we'll see where at least one prophet accuses God of giving bad laws in the past and attempts to rectify them, an idea that seems pretty "Christian."
Before we get there, I'll note that Judaism itself does try to soften or excise "bad laws". One example of this is the "eye for an eye" which was completely neutered in Talmudic times. Other examples were all the commands for capital punishment which were also essentially removed by the Rabbis, who then claimed they had never been in effect in the first place. But we're not talking about this kind of change in the laws, we're going to talk about something more direct.
Yehezkel's "Bad Laws"
The prophet is Yehezkel (Ezekiel) and the versed in question are Ezek. 20:24-25. Here they are in Hebrew:
כד יַעַן מִשְׁפָּטַי לֹא-עָשׂוּ, וְחֻקּוֹתַי מָאָסוּ, וְאֶת-שַׁבְּתוֹתַי, חִלֵּלוּ; וְאַחֲרֵי גִּלּוּלֵי אֲבוֹתָם, הָיוּ עֵינֵיהֶם. כה וְגַם-אֲנִי נָתַתִּי לָהֶם, חֻקִּים לֹא טוֹבִים; וּמִשְׁפָּטִים--לֹא יִחְיוּ, בָּהֶם.And here's my translation:
24: Because they did not do my judgments, and disdained by laws, and profaned by Sabbaths, and their eyes were directed towards the idols of their fathers. 25: And then I gave them bad laws, and judgments that they would not live by.A lot of the scholarly discussion regarding this verse comes with the context of the verses after, which seem to imply that one of the "bad laws" that Yehezkel is referring to is child sacrifice. But this is not the topic I wish to discuss. (If you're interested in this topic, you can see this series of blog posts 1, 2, 3, where the second and third link deal entirely with this section of Yehezkel)
Instead, I merely want to draw attention to the pretty monumental claim that Yehezkel is making. He is basically saying that there were some laws, given directly by God, that are bad and that people should not do. And he gave these laws as a sort of punishment. Presumably he's coming to tell you what the good laws are and what the bad laws are.
Of course, as a person listening to Yehezkel, why should you believe him? After all, the old laws, those "bad" ones were given by God himself, and who is he to contradict God? But more importantly, we see an idea wherein Yehezkel's concept of Judaism is very different from the concept today. Yehezkel obviously does not believe in a static set of laws that are in effect for all time, and he's actively seeking to abrogate some of the old laws he doesn't like. Instead of using the same approach of Christianity or the Talmudic Rabbis, that the old laws are outdated, he actually says that God gave the old "bad" laws as a form of punishment for disobedience. It's actually a pretty crazy idea if you think about it. It's a level of malevolence that most people would not ascribe to God.
When you read through the book of Yehezkel, you find that he has a very different idea of how Judaism's laws came about. In some places he directly contradicts the Torah story about when laws were given, and like every other prophet, he makes absolutely no mention of the revelation at Har Sinai. Here it seems, that he thinks the laws are a bit more fluid, and that we should actively get rid of "bad laws" and replace them with good ones. How exactly we should know what is bad and what is good? Well we just need to trust Yehezkel.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
God's Coconspirators
The last post described a single verse in the Torah in which I offered an interpretation where, Asherah, the consort of God, appears at his right side. This week we'll look at three other places in the Tanach where there appears to be other divine beings, who are either at the same level or slightly subservient to God. One example is known by everyone, one is known by all religious Jews, and one I would never have ever discovered without academic insights.
What Shall We Do?
One of the more bizarre but well known stories in the Torah is that of Migdal Bavel (The Tower of Babel). Along with the general strangeness of the story itself, there is some weird descriptions of God's actions which are almost entirely confined to this one brief narrative. Specifically, God appears to talk to other being to discuss the actions. Specifically Gen 11:7 says:
Edit: zdub rightly points out in the comment that there is another salient example of the plural "we" which appears near the creation of man. Gen 1:26 reads:
The Divine Council
One of the traditional options for "who is God talking to" in the Migdal Bavel story is that he's talking to a "divine council." In traditional Judaism, this council is made up of entirely subservient beings, angels and the like. The actions of the council are merely a formality. However, perhaps at a point in time this type of council meant something different, with God acting more or less as one of the group of equals. We previously saw one instance that hinted at this type of arrangement, but there might even be a better example. We turn to Psalm 82. Verses 1 and 6 are specifically salient. Here is verse 1 in Hebrew:
Before we go on, we'll note that this Psalm uses the uncommon form of God's name, Elyon. This name of God always seems to pop up in places where it seems to imply some deity other than the God of the Hebrews, someone higher up, older, possibly even aloof. We've seen two other instances of this in the blog of this, which I'll link here and here.
Lesser Gods
One of the common themes of academic study versus religious study is that academic study puts a lot more emphasis on the writing of the Nevi'im (prophets) than traditional Judaism. And for this third example, we'll look at the relatively obscure prophet Habakuk. This prophet is pretty much at the bottom of the pile of obscure biblical prophets. He doesn't describe anything about who he is, where he's from, when he's writing etc. The name could just as well be a pseudonym; it doesn't appear to have any clear meaning, and isn't a well known name in any prior period.
We can put together some information about Habakuk. He writes about the Chaldeans, so that implies that he's writing in the late 9th century or later, which is the earliest that anyone would be referencing them. Another piece of information is that the chapters do seem structured so that it appears to be the work of a single individual. The book isn't very long (only three chapters) so this isn't surprising, but some short books even have multiple author hypotheses. These don't tell us very much, but it's at least something.
Anyway, let's get to the verse in question. It appears in the third chapter. First we look at Hab 3:3
So we have something very similar to the verse in Deuteronomy from last week, although this time instead of God having along with him his consort Asherah, possibly included by her devotees, here God has in tow the patron deity of the northern city in a clearly subservient role.
Reinforcing the Polytheistic Roots
This post is just one in many ideas that support the hypothesis that Judaism started out as polytheistic and then gradually moved to a religion where their God was the chief god and the only one worth worshipping, until finally ending up in the theological ideas we know today where God is the only god, period. In this last stage those roles previously filled by other gods were now filled by subservient angels and messengers, as well as natural processes without their own agency.
What Shall We Do?
One of the more bizarre but well known stories in the Torah is that of Migdal Bavel (The Tower of Babel). Along with the general strangeness of the story itself, there is some weird descriptions of God's actions which are almost entirely confined to this one brief narrative. Specifically, God appears to talk to other being to discuss the actions. Specifically Gen 11:7 says:
Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'This language is obviously meant to mimic the speech of the people previously (Gen 11:3-4):
3 And they said one to another: 'Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'But still one wonders who exactly is God talking to? Tradition offers several answers, which are actually plausible in my view because of the strangeness of this particular story. Nevertheless, one can maintain the possibility that God is speaking to other divine beings who may or may not have agreed with this course of action.
Edit: zdub rightly points out in the comment that there is another salient example of the plural "we" which appears near the creation of man. Gen 1:26 reads:
And God said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.'
The Divine Council
One of the traditional options for "who is God talking to" in the Migdal Bavel story is that he's talking to a "divine council." In traditional Judaism, this council is made up of entirely subservient beings, angels and the like. The actions of the council are merely a formality. However, perhaps at a point in time this type of council meant something different, with God acting more or less as one of the group of equals. We previously saw one instance that hinted at this type of arrangement, but there might even be a better example. We turn to Psalm 82. Verses 1 and 6 are specifically salient. Here is verse 1 in Hebrew:
אֱלֹהִים, נִצָּב בַּעֲדַת-אֵל; בְּקֶרֶב אֱלֹהִים יִשְׁפֹּט.And my translation:
Elohim stands in the council of El, in the midst of the gods he delivers a judgment.The translation is complicated because of the two different uses of the word Elohim, the first instance is coupled with a singular noun, so it's clearly meant to mean God. The second use doesn't make much sense to translate it the same way, so I use it to refer to other gods. Traditional Judaism would translate this as "angels" or something similar. The next four verses describe the various things that God is judging, specifically for this psalm, God appears to be angry at the other gods for allowing various social ills. Then we get to verse 6-7, where God appears to call out the other members of the divine council. Again here they are in Hebrew first:
ו אֲנִי-אָמַרְתִּי, אֱלֹהִים אַתֶּם; וּבְנֵי עֶלְיוֹן כֻּלְּכֶם.ז אָכֵן, כְּאָדָם תְּמוּתוּן; וּכְאַחַד הַשָּׂרִים תִּפֹּלוּ.and here is my translation:
I (God) said you are gods, all of you are the sons of Elyon. But you will die like a man, like one of the (mortal) rulers, you will fall.After accusing the rest of the Gods for not behaving properly towards the oppressed, he specifically calls out the other gods, and mentions that they are also children of Elyon. And then he pronounces his judgment on them, that those gods will all die and lose their spheres of command. The verse ends with the psalm author encourage Elohim (God) to arise and make his judgment.
Before we go on, we'll note that this Psalm uses the uncommon form of God's name, Elyon. This name of God always seems to pop up in places where it seems to imply some deity other than the God of the Hebrews, someone higher up, older, possibly even aloof. We've seen two other instances of this in the blog of this, which I'll link here and here.
Lesser Gods
One of the common themes of academic study versus religious study is that academic study puts a lot more emphasis on the writing of the Nevi'im (prophets) than traditional Judaism. And for this third example, we'll look at the relatively obscure prophet Habakuk. This prophet is pretty much at the bottom of the pile of obscure biblical prophets. He doesn't describe anything about who he is, where he's from, when he's writing etc. The name could just as well be a pseudonym; it doesn't appear to have any clear meaning, and isn't a well known name in any prior period.
We can put together some information about Habakuk. He writes about the Chaldeans, so that implies that he's writing in the late 9th century or later, which is the earliest that anyone would be referencing them. Another piece of information is that the chapters do seem structured so that it appears to be the work of a single individual. The book isn't very long (only three chapters) so this isn't surprising, but some short books even have multiple author hypotheses. These don't tell us very much, but it's at least something.
Anyway, let's get to the verse in question. It appears in the third chapter. First we look at Hab 3:3
God cometh from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran. Selah His glory covereth the heavens, and the earth is full of His praise.If you read the previous post, this kind of idea should look familiar to you. God is arriving from locations in the south. God is here referred to by the Hebrew Eloha, a somewhat rare form, although in the previous verse, you have the more common tetragrammaton. Verse 5 though is the interesting one. Here it is in Hebrew:
לְפָנָיו, יֵלֶךְ דָּבֶר; וְיֵצֵא רֶשֶׁף, לְרַגְלָיוIf you look at traditional translations for this verse, you'll get something like the JPS translation:
Before him goeth the pestilence (dever), and fiery bolts (reshef) go forth at His feet.The word dever translated as pestilence is not obscure, it is the same verse used for the cattle plague in Egypt. Reshef is considerably more obscure. It is often translated as some kind of fever, although here it is translated as "fiery bolts." However, the insight here is that both dever and reshef are actually the names of other deities. Dever is a bit obscure, but Reshef is not. From tablets of Ebla, we learn about various deities, this includes Dever but more specifically we learn that Reshef was the patron saint of Shechem an important city of the northern kingdom of Israel.
So we have something very similar to the verse in Deuteronomy from last week, although this time instead of God having along with him his consort Asherah, possibly included by her devotees, here God has in tow the patron deity of the northern city in a clearly subservient role.
Reinforcing the Polytheistic Roots
This post is just one in many ideas that support the hypothesis that Judaism started out as polytheistic and then gradually moved to a religion where their God was the chief god and the only one worth worshipping, until finally ending up in the theological ideas we know today where God is the only god, period. In this last stage those roles previously filled by other gods were now filled by subservient angels and messengers, as well as natural processes without their own agency.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
God's Consort in the Torah?
This post is prompted by a discussion from a commenter on the post 2 weeks ago about the loanwords in Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). The commenter linked to this article, which, at the end, disputed the idea that Persian loanwords are a marking of an early text. One of their reasons was the presence of what they determined a Persian loanword of dat in Devarim (Deut. 33:2). My response to the article in general is included in the comments of that blog post. This week I want to talk about this specific verse, and what the possible meaning of it could be.
Tricky Translations
Certain verses in the Torah are hard to translate. This is because they include words that are not known elsewhere, or that make little sense in context. One is often forced to decide whether the text is corrupted and it should actually be read differently, or whether we're dealing with a meaning of a word that is non-standard, or whether the word is a hapax legomenon (a word that only appears once, and thus has a meaning that can only be determined from immediate context.)
There are many words that the Masoretes, (the individuals who standardized pronunciation and grammar, and added all the vowels to the text,) decided should be different than how they were written. These are known as kri/ktiv differences, which literally means spoken/written. Sometimes these involve replacing a letter with another, sometimes they involve changing an entire word. Some of these kri/ktiv's are described in the Talmud, but the Talmud also describes many alternate readings that were not taken up by the Masoretes. There is a kri/ktiv in 33:2 which involves the word dat in question from the preamble.
But without further ado, let's look at the text, first in Hebrew:
If the phrase וְאָתָה מֵרִבְבֹת קֹדֶשׁ is tricky, the next two words, מִימִינוֹ אשדת, are even more problematic and most of the rest of the post will be devoted to them. Before we get there, we need to discuss the last word לָמוֹ which parallels the same word in the first half. We first note, that if we remove מִימִינוֹ אשדת and interpret מֵרִבְבֹת קֹדֶשׁ as some sort of place location, then the verse contains nice symmetry. So consider the following translation highlighting the symmetry.
What exactly is an Eshdat?
The first thing to check is to see if there are any differences in the old versions of the text we have available. The verse does appear in one of the dead sea scrolls (from 50 CE), but I couldn't find any information on it, so I assume it appears the same as in the Masoretic text. The verse also appears in the Samaritan Torah almost identical, but the only change in the Samaritan Torah is that they spell Paran differently. אשדת is unchanged. The Septuagint is more interesting, and we'll get to that later.
For a naive interpretation, you might look at the root אשד which appears only once in Tanakh (Num 21:16) where it implies some geological feature, and most commonly is thought to mean a slope or a ravine. אשדת would be some sort of plural form, although it is a feminine plural for a word that looks masculine. Ignoring the plural issue, perhaps this can be construed to make some sense in the context of the verse, since it does mention place names, but it's a stretch. Unsurprisingly, I know of no translation that takes this approach.
The most common approach in traditional Jewish circles is to follow the Masoretes who themselves follow the interpretation of Raba in Berakhot 62a that it should be read as two words אֵשׁ דָּת, which literally mean "fire law." This interpretation is echoed in the Rishonim, where at very least Rashi and Ibn Ezra understand it as such. But what exactly does this mean. We don't have this kind of concept of a "fiery law" anywhere else in the Tanach. The Rishonim try to give explanations of what it could possibly mean, but they never attempt to justify the explanation in the first place.
There is another problem, with this interpretation. Namely that the word דָּת is a Persian loanword. The authors of the article linked at the top of the post note this and use it as a indication that Persian loanwords appear in the text of the Torah itself. Furthermore, they argue that if you say it can't actually mean דָּת but means something else, because it is early, then you are engaging in a circular argument.
However, I think there are ample reasons to reject this interpretation of אֵשׁ דָּת, a fiery law, without resorting to the loanword argument. And these are the following. A fiery law is not a phrase anywhere in Tanach, even in the derivative forms from this verse (please let me know if I am wrong, this is hard to search for!) I don't just mean the phrase אֵשׁ דָּת but any phrase that is similar in concept. The idea of a fiery law makes no sense in context either. The interpretations imply that he's bringing it with him, but the actual word מִימִינוֹ is better understood as "at his right" or "from his right", one might expect something more like בְּימִינוֹ, in his right hand.
What options though are left? When we turn to the Septuagint (and the KJV based off of it), we find a very bizarre translation. The Septuagint translates אשדת as meaning something like "angels". At first this looks like a terrible mistranslation, but after thinking about it for a second, you can possibly understand where it's coming from. Could it be that the Torah that the Septuagint was translated off of had a resh instead of a daled, and the word was אשרת, which could perhaps mean, "servants" from the root שרת to serve? This is also a stretch, but it might explain how the Septuagint arrived at its strange choice of translation.
Side note: resh/daled confusion is the most common written typo in Biblical texts. The letters are very similar in form in both ktav ashuri and ktav ivri. There is also precedence for resh/daled errors in the Torah. The one that comes to mind is the Dodanim (Gen 10:4) which is properly written as Rodanim, or people from Rhodes, in Divrei Hayamim (Chronicles).
But I go a step further. I say that the Septuagint translation is on the right track, and the original verse probably had a resh, and read אשרת, but it doesn't mean "angels" rather it means, "his Asherah," or more specifically the royal consort of God. This idea of a southern God with an Asherah is present in the Kuntellet Arjud inscriptions which say "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah," so we have an external source that really lends credence to the association of the god Yahweh with an Asherah.
Now we can make a hypothesis as to how this verse varied over time. The beginning of the verse did not have the two words מִימִינוֹ אשדת, in them. However, they were added into the song (probably only an oral tradition at this stage) by a group of people who probably attached strong importance to worship of Asherah. So this modification, which became canonized in the Biblical text read מִימִינוֹ אשרת, a reading that perhaps remained intact in the Septuagint.
But worship of Asherah fell completely out of favor in later versions of Judaism as exemplified in the reforms of Hizkiyahu (Hezekiah) and Yoshiyahu (Josiah), so perhaps they upheld a version with a copyist error, or maybe there was a "pious" scribe who read this verse and said, "this can't be the right reading, Asherah have been a typo." The change from אשרת to אשדת was made, perhaps with the idea of it meaning "ravine." This change would have to have been earlier than the Samaritan split, which means it's likely Exilic or pre-Exilic.
With the inclusion of the meaning of דָּת as law arriving in the Jewish lexicon from Persian, this allowed the commentators of the Talmudic era, and probably the second temple era, to understand this word entirely differently, as some sort of "fiery law."
As a side note, this idea of the verse possibly meaning Asherah was one of the first things that popped into my head when I read this verse. I did a quick search online and found that lots of other people have had the same idea.
Probably no post next week. We'll see about the week after.
Tricky Translations
Certain verses in the Torah are hard to translate. This is because they include words that are not known elsewhere, or that make little sense in context. One is often forced to decide whether the text is corrupted and it should actually be read differently, or whether we're dealing with a meaning of a word that is non-standard, or whether the word is a hapax legomenon (a word that only appears once, and thus has a meaning that can only be determined from immediate context.)
There are many words that the Masoretes, (the individuals who standardized pronunciation and grammar, and added all the vowels to the text,) decided should be different than how they were written. These are known as kri/ktiv differences, which literally means spoken/written. Sometimes these involve replacing a letter with another, sometimes they involve changing an entire word. Some of these kri/ktiv's are described in the Talmud, but the Talmud also describes many alternate readings that were not taken up by the Masoretes. There is a kri/ktiv in 33:2 which involves the word dat in question from the preamble.
But without further ado, let's look at the text, first in Hebrew:
וַיֹּאמַר, יְהוָה מִסִּינַי בָּא וְזָרַח מִשֵּׂעִיר לָמוֹ--הוֹפִיעַ מֵהַר פָּארָן, וְאָתָה מֵרִבְבֹת קֹדֶשׁ; מִימִינוֹ, אשדת (אֵשׁ דָּת) לָמוֹ.The translation is very tricky. But I'll give my own, leaving some of the more difficult words untranslated for now.
And [Moshe] said: God came from Sinai, he shown forth from Seir to them. He appeared from the mountain of Paran. He came from the myriads kodesh. In his right hand, Eshdat, to them.The first half, up to the mountain of Paran is pretty straightforward. After that it's really tricky. One thing that's clear is that there's is a lot of parallelisms. There appear to be four places where God comes from: Sinai, Seir, the mountain of Paran, and the myriads of Kodesh. That last one seems to fit the pattern of the other three places, the translation is unclear. Personally, I'm inclined to read it as Kadesh not Kodesh, and understand this as a fourth place, which like the first three, appears in the wilderness. As a side note, this verse is one of the supporting verses that indicate that the practice of worshipping YHWH began in the wilderness. See this post for more details.
If the phrase וְאָתָה מֵרִבְבֹת קֹדֶשׁ is tricky, the next two words, מִימִינוֹ אשדת, are even more problematic and most of the rest of the post will be devoted to them. Before we get there, we need to discuss the last word לָמוֹ which parallels the same word in the first half. We first note, that if we remove מִימִינוֹ אשדת and interpret מֵרִבְבֹת קֹדֶשׁ as some sort of place location, then the verse contains nice symmetry. So consider the following translation highlighting the symmetry.
GodNot only is there symmetry, but there's a nice chiasmic structure, much beloved in biblical poetry, where the words with meaning similar to "appear" occur in the middle two phrases and the words similar to "came" occur in the outer two. מִימִינוֹ אשדת breaks the symmetry. With those words, it reads something like:
Came from Sinai
and
Appeared from Seir
- to them
Appeared from Paran
and
Came from Kadesh
- to them
GodNot only does it break the symmetry, but it also interrupts the phrase, "Came from Kadesh to them." So we're left with a puzzle. What in the world does אשדת (eshdat) mean, and how was it so important that it was possibly inserted into the text. As usual, with these types of things, there are lots of possibilities. So let's go through them.
Came from Sinai
and
Appeared from Seir
- to them
Appeared from Paran
and
Came from Kadesh
(at his right Eshdat)
- to them
What exactly is an Eshdat?
The first thing to check is to see if there are any differences in the old versions of the text we have available. The verse does appear in one of the dead sea scrolls (from 50 CE), but I couldn't find any information on it, so I assume it appears the same as in the Masoretic text. The verse also appears in the Samaritan Torah almost identical, but the only change in the Samaritan Torah is that they spell Paran differently. אשדת is unchanged. The Septuagint is more interesting, and we'll get to that later.
For a naive interpretation, you might look at the root אשד which appears only once in Tanakh (Num 21:16) where it implies some geological feature, and most commonly is thought to mean a slope or a ravine. אשדת would be some sort of plural form, although it is a feminine plural for a word that looks masculine. Ignoring the plural issue, perhaps this can be construed to make some sense in the context of the verse, since it does mention place names, but it's a stretch. Unsurprisingly, I know of no translation that takes this approach.
The most common approach in traditional Jewish circles is to follow the Masoretes who themselves follow the interpretation of Raba in Berakhot 62a that it should be read as two words אֵשׁ דָּת, which literally mean "fire law." This interpretation is echoed in the Rishonim, where at very least Rashi and Ibn Ezra understand it as such. But what exactly does this mean. We don't have this kind of concept of a "fiery law" anywhere else in the Tanach. The Rishonim try to give explanations of what it could possibly mean, but they never attempt to justify the explanation in the first place.
There is another problem, with this interpretation. Namely that the word דָּת is a Persian loanword. The authors of the article linked at the top of the post note this and use it as a indication that Persian loanwords appear in the text of the Torah itself. Furthermore, they argue that if you say it can't actually mean דָּת but means something else, because it is early, then you are engaging in a circular argument.
However, I think there are ample reasons to reject this interpretation of אֵשׁ דָּת, a fiery law, without resorting to the loanword argument. And these are the following. A fiery law is not a phrase anywhere in Tanach, even in the derivative forms from this verse (please let me know if I am wrong, this is hard to search for!) I don't just mean the phrase אֵשׁ דָּת but any phrase that is similar in concept. The idea of a fiery law makes no sense in context either. The interpretations imply that he's bringing it with him, but the actual word מִימִינוֹ is better understood as "at his right" or "from his right", one might expect something more like בְּימִינוֹ, in his right hand.
What options though are left? When we turn to the Septuagint (and the KJV based off of it), we find a very bizarre translation. The Septuagint translates אשדת as meaning something like "angels". At first this looks like a terrible mistranslation, but after thinking about it for a second, you can possibly understand where it's coming from. Could it be that the Torah that the Septuagint was translated off of had a resh instead of a daled, and the word was אשרת, which could perhaps mean, "servants" from the root שרת to serve? This is also a stretch, but it might explain how the Septuagint arrived at its strange choice of translation.
Side note: resh/daled confusion is the most common written typo in Biblical texts. The letters are very similar in form in both ktav ashuri and ktav ivri. There is also precedence for resh/daled errors in the Torah. The one that comes to mind is the Dodanim (Gen 10:4) which is properly written as Rodanim, or people from Rhodes, in Divrei Hayamim (Chronicles).
But I go a step further. I say that the Septuagint translation is on the right track, and the original verse probably had a resh, and read אשרת, but it doesn't mean "angels" rather it means, "his Asherah," or more specifically the royal consort of God. This idea of a southern God with an Asherah is present in the Kuntellet Arjud inscriptions which say "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah," so we have an external source that really lends credence to the association of the god Yahweh with an Asherah.
Now we can make a hypothesis as to how this verse varied over time. The beginning of the verse did not have the two words מִימִינוֹ אשדת, in them. However, they were added into the song (probably only an oral tradition at this stage) by a group of people who probably attached strong importance to worship of Asherah. So this modification, which became canonized in the Biblical text read מִימִינוֹ אשרת, a reading that perhaps remained intact in the Septuagint.
But worship of Asherah fell completely out of favor in later versions of Judaism as exemplified in the reforms of Hizkiyahu (Hezekiah) and Yoshiyahu (Josiah), so perhaps they upheld a version with a copyist error, or maybe there was a "pious" scribe who read this verse and said, "this can't be the right reading, Asherah have been a typo." The change from אשרת to אשדת was made, perhaps with the idea of it meaning "ravine." This change would have to have been earlier than the Samaritan split, which means it's likely Exilic or pre-Exilic.
With the inclusion of the meaning of דָּת as law arriving in the Jewish lexicon from Persian, this allowed the commentators of the Talmudic era, and probably the second temple era, to understand this word entirely differently, as some sort of "fiery law."
As a side note, this idea of the verse possibly meaning Asherah was one of the first things that popped into my head when I read this verse. I did a quick search online and found that lots of other people have had the same idea.
Probably no post next week. We'll see about the week after.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Looking for help typesetting/formatting
A while back, someone suggested a skeptic's annotated haggadah would be an interesting project. While I agreed in theory, I also thought that the major roadblock for me would be providing an appropriate layout. After poking around for about 30 minutes this morning, I still think that's the case. But that could also be because I have very limited skills in this area. Laying things out in html is one thing, but doing it in a nice .pdf is another matter.
Therefore, I'm looking for help in this. What I was thinking is a text where (vowelized Hebrew) is on one side and an English translation (which I will rewrite) on the other. Instructions (such as, lift the cup of wine) will be in english and centered. Then there needs to be room for annotations. These could either be along the side, or as footnotes, or whatever. Some of the annotations may be quite long though. To get a feel for what they might look like, this post, has some examples of annotation ideas.
If anyone thinks they can do this, or at least set me up with a template, that would be great. I'm not planning to make any money off of this, so it's an entirely volunteer thing. The ideal format would probably be a LateX template. But I could work with other formats if needed. (I don't actually have access to Microsoft word though, just the free opensource alternatives, so that could make things difficult).
Email if interested (email can be found under the contact section.)
Therefore, I'm looking for help in this. What I was thinking is a text where (vowelized Hebrew) is on one side and an English translation (which I will rewrite) on the other. Instructions (such as, lift the cup of wine) will be in english and centered. Then there needs to be room for annotations. These could either be along the side, or as footnotes, or whatever. Some of the annotations may be quite long though. To get a feel for what they might look like, this post, has some examples of annotation ideas.
If anyone thinks they can do this, or at least set me up with a template, that would be great. I'm not planning to make any money off of this, so it's an entirely volunteer thing. The ideal format would probably be a LateX template. But I could work with other formats if needed. (I don't actually have access to Microsoft word though, just the free opensource alternatives, so that could make things difficult).
Email if interested (email can be found under the contact section.)
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
It's Because of the Book
This is a post I wrote on the exjew subreddit a while ago. I figured I might as well share it here, edited slightly, since not too many people frequent that place.
We often hear stories of parents or friends that were living a comfortable conservative or reform lifestyle, and then, after a trip to Aish or a visit by Chabad, they take a hard turn to Orthodoxy, often of a serious fundamentalist variety. Often the parents or friends are left wondering why? They thought they had provided a comfortable and socially conscious approach to religion. Why had their kids chosen such an intolerant form of the religion. We had an article posted recently and there are tons of similar stories. Every single one a victim of pretty much standard missionary tactics.
The reason why they are so easily victimized is because of the book, specifically in this case the Torah.
The problem arises because while less-fundamentalist versions of Judaism don't necessarily follow the Torah, they still venerate it. They still believe that it was God's divine gift. And they teach this to the kids. The book is important.
Now when the kids grow up, they start looking around and they find some people who actually take the book seriously. Perhaps they say, "If it's God's gift to humanity, then, shouldn't we be taking it seriously?" Because they don't necessarily have the tools (Hebrew) to examine it themselves, they're susceptible to cherry-picked verses and explanations. They can be presented with a very fundamentalist viewpoint, modernized by out-of-context quotes and sketchy interpretations. And they eat it up. They eat it up, because they have been taught their whole life that the book is the key.
And yes, this is the exact same thing that happens in "radical Islam" recruitment. It's why moderate Islam is inherently unstable, just like conservative Jewry, continually losing people to the left (secularism) or the right (fundamentalism). It's why moderate Islamist are continually fighting and uphill and losing battle against the fundamentalists. Part of me wonders if the only difference between Judaism and Islam in this regard is the size and the relative power they wield. If Judaism had the number of adherents of Islam, would it be guilty of the same sorts of atrocities? As Einstein said,
We often hear stories of parents or friends that were living a comfortable conservative or reform lifestyle, and then, after a trip to Aish or a visit by Chabad, they take a hard turn to Orthodoxy, often of a serious fundamentalist variety. Often the parents or friends are left wondering why? They thought they had provided a comfortable and socially conscious approach to religion. Why had their kids chosen such an intolerant form of the religion. We had an article posted recently and there are tons of similar stories. Every single one a victim of pretty much standard missionary tactics.
The reason why they are so easily victimized is because of the book, specifically in this case the Torah.
The problem arises because while less-fundamentalist versions of Judaism don't necessarily follow the Torah, they still venerate it. They still believe that it was God's divine gift. And they teach this to the kids. The book is important.
Now when the kids grow up, they start looking around and they find some people who actually take the book seriously. Perhaps they say, "If it's God's gift to humanity, then, shouldn't we be taking it seriously?" Because they don't necessarily have the tools (Hebrew) to examine it themselves, they're susceptible to cherry-picked verses and explanations. They can be presented with a very fundamentalist viewpoint, modernized by out-of-context quotes and sketchy interpretations. And they eat it up. They eat it up, because they have been taught their whole life that the book is the key.
And yes, this is the exact same thing that happens in "radical Islam" recruitment. It's why moderate Islam is inherently unstable, just like conservative Jewry, continually losing people to the left (secularism) or the right (fundamentalism). It's why moderate Islamist are continually fighting and uphill and losing battle against the fundamentalists. Part of me wonders if the only difference between Judaism and Islam in this regard is the size and the relative power they wield. If Judaism had the number of adherents of Islam, would it be guilty of the same sorts of atrocities? As Einstein said,
As far as my experience goes, they [the Jewish People] are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Vort: Loanwords in Kohelet and Pseudepigrapha
Sticking with the "authorship" theme there are a few books of the Tanach that very clearly have author attributions that are not likely at all. Rather, they very much seem like they were written by much later individuals but attributed to an earlier important personage. These fall into the genre of writing called, "pseudepigrapha" which means works that are attributed to another, usually mythical or historical, person.
Why Pseudepigrapha?
It's fairly easy to understand why authors would attribute works to someone other than themselves. Mainly, by attributing the work to a well known individual, be it Moshe or Avraham or whoever, then it becomes more likely that the work will receive attention. We see this happen all the time with religious writings. The entire book of Mormon is attributed to mythical individuals. The Zohar, "discovered" in the Middle Ages, is attributed to Moshe. In fact, there are tons of works from 200-400 CE that were attributed to other individuals. You can see a list here. Most of these were rejected from the Biblical canon but some made it in.
Kohelet Claimed Authorship
Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) doesn't have an explicity claim of the author. However, two sentences in the first paragraph are used to give the usual attribution to Shlomo (Solomon) (Eccl 1:1,12)
Persian Loanwords
The reason Kohelet cannot be written at the time of Shlomo is that it includes words that would not have been known to anyone at the time. The words are Pardes (cognate with English Paradise) which literally means garden and appears in 2:5 and Pitgam which means decree and appears in 8:11. Pitgam also appears several times in the book of Esther, set in Persia.
Jews living in Israel had absolutely no contact with Persia until the Babylonian exile. They knew of the empire to the east of the Assyrians and Babylonians, which was the Median empire until the conquest of Cyrus in 550 BCE. However, there is no strong influence of Persian culture until the conquest of Babylon and the next few centuries when the Persians controlled Israel. It's during this period that we start seeing the strong influence of Persian culture on Judaism.
For Hizkiyahu or Shlomo to have used Pardes or Pitgam would be akin to a Jew during the Persian period using the word Sanhedrin or Afikomen which are derived from Greek, or like a Jew in the 1st century using the word Shvitz or Schlepp. In other words, the loanwords provide markers for the earliest possible date of the work, and in this case we can very confidently date Kohelet to the Exilic period at earliest.
Why Pseudepigrapha?
It's fairly easy to understand why authors would attribute works to someone other than themselves. Mainly, by attributing the work to a well known individual, be it Moshe or Avraham or whoever, then it becomes more likely that the work will receive attention. We see this happen all the time with religious writings. The entire book of Mormon is attributed to mythical individuals. The Zohar, "discovered" in the Middle Ages, is attributed to Moshe. In fact, there are tons of works from 200-400 CE that were attributed to other individuals. You can see a list here. Most of these were rejected from the Biblical canon but some made it in.
Kohelet Claimed Authorship
Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) doesn't have an explicity claim of the author. However, two sentences in the first paragraph are used to give the usual attribution to Shlomo (Solomon) (Eccl 1:1,12)
1 The words of Koheleth, the son of David, king in Jerusalem....,12 I Koheleth have been king over Israel in JerusalemNow, it is entirely possible to interpret "son of David" as descendent of David and therefore Kohelet could have been written by a later individual. Indeed this is the opinion of the Gemara in Bava Batra 15b which attributes the book to the time Hizkiyahu (Hezekiah). Of course both of these are impossible and we'll see why now.
Persian Loanwords
The reason Kohelet cannot be written at the time of Shlomo is that it includes words that would not have been known to anyone at the time. The words are Pardes (cognate with English Paradise) which literally means garden and appears in 2:5 and Pitgam which means decree and appears in 8:11. Pitgam also appears several times in the book of Esther, set in Persia.
Jews living in Israel had absolutely no contact with Persia until the Babylonian exile. They knew of the empire to the east of the Assyrians and Babylonians, which was the Median empire until the conquest of Cyrus in 550 BCE. However, there is no strong influence of Persian culture until the conquest of Babylon and the next few centuries when the Persians controlled Israel. It's during this period that we start seeing the strong influence of Persian culture on Judaism.
For Hizkiyahu or Shlomo to have used Pardes or Pitgam would be akin to a Jew during the Persian period using the word Sanhedrin or Afikomen which are derived from Greek, or like a Jew in the 1st century using the word Shvitz or Schlepp. In other words, the loanwords provide markers for the earliest possible date of the work, and in this case we can very confidently date Kohelet to the Exilic period at earliest.
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Does the Torah say that Moshe wrote it?
It is well known that Orthodoxy believes that the books from Bereishit (Genesis) to Devarim (Exodus) were written by Moshe (Moses). It is also well known that modern academic theory believes they were written by multiple different authors, or in some minority opinions, a single author drawing from multiple sources, and assembled into a final text sometime long after the time of Moshe, most likely after the Babylonian Exile. Throughout the blog I've provided some evidence to support the multiple authorship idea. (here, here, here, and here for a few places). However, today I'll ask something different. Namely, I'm asking what the Torah itself says about its authorship, which is an entirely different question that who actually wrote it. In other words, if someone was to pick up the Torah not knowing anything about it, who would they think the author was. To me it seems clear that the Torah claims that some sections were written (or spoken at least) by Moshe but other sections were clearly not.
Again, remember that we are not concerned with who actually wrote what. What we are concerned with is what the Torah is saying about who wrote it, if anything.
Let's take a look.
Sections that indicate non-Mosaic authorship
The first section, and the most obvious section to indicate non-Mosaic authorship is the very end which describes the death of Moshe, and the succession of Yehoshua (Joshua). This difficulty stretches all the way back to the Talmud where Rabbis offer several resolutions. One resolution is that Yehoshua actually wrote these verses. The other option is that Moshe wrote it through some sort of prophecy. However, given that there's no indication of specialness of that section in the text, the simple reading implies that this was not written by Moshe.
There are indeed some other sections that point to non-Mosaic authorship. For example, at the beginning of Devarim, it says (Deut. 1:1)
Similarly, Gen 36:31
Even the medieval scholar Abraham Ibn Ezra indicates a few verses that he thinks were added later. He points out that the sections marked in bold (Gen 12:6)
Sections that the Torah claims Moshe wrote
There are lots of places in the Torah were Moshe writes something, usually what is previously discussed. Here are the six places where Moshe is commanded to write something.
The next section is:
Next we have:
The fourth indication of Moshe writing stuff appears a few books later.
Finally, at the end of Devarim we have two mentions. The first
But wait, there's more. The previous verse specifically mentions something written in the "sefer torat moshe" the book of the Torah of Moshe, specficially a commandment not to make an altar of cut stones. This is a specific reference to something that Moshe says in Devarim. In fact, this whole section was commanded in Devarim.
There is another mention of Moshe writing that occurs in between the last two sections.
Writing in the third person
Summing up so far, we have a bunch of sections that are explicitly attributed to Moshe, although it's not clear where and on what he wrote them. Nevertheless there is a clear case to be made that the text of Moshe's speech in Devarim was claimed to have been transcribed, by him, into a Torah.
However, we also have sections which strongly apply a non-Mosaic author. These include the preamble to the speech of Devarim which has an implied author who is currently residing inside Israel. A modern day reader would probably think that Moshe wrote down his speech in Devarim, and then a later author compiled it and included the preamble and the description of him compiling it.
But perhaps we're applying modern day writing to biblical styles. So let's expand the original question and instead of considering a modern day reader, let's consider someone reading the text ~2500 years ago. Someone who was familiar with the composition types of the time. What would they make of the authorship.
When I was pondering this, the first question that came to my mind was, "is it typical for biblical authors to write about themselves in the third person?" All of the Torah is written in third person. Similarly, all of the historical books (Yehoshua through Melachim (Kings)) are third person. However, when we deal with the prophets, we see something more interesting.
Many prophets start out by identifying themselves as the author in the third person, and then later switching to first person. I'll provide some examples.
Amos intro: 3rd-person
What can we make from this? Well, in my opinion it indicates that you would expect some first person statements, especially in the intro to prophetic sections. Furthermore, the introduction sections always indicate the correct time and place of the prophet. For example, the Yishayahu introduction is written in third person, and mentions that he was a prophet spanning the reign of four kings.
In contrast, the Torah never has any first person introductions. It's always, "God spoke to Moshe saying." Again, the exception is Devarim, in which there are intros that begin with, "and then God spoke to me." Devarim is most similar to the prophetic writings in that it has a third person intro and then moves into first person. However, unlike Yishayahu or any of the other prophets, the intro has a marker that indicates a later date of composition in that it mentions, "the other side of the Jordan."
And what about the rest of the Torah? It seems from the text itself that only a select few sections are attributed directly to Moshe. Certainly the entire book of Bereishit is not explicitly attributed to him. Neither are all the third person narratives. Furthermore, the composition style is more different from that in the prophetic works with explicit claimed authorship that both a 500 BCE reader and a modern day one would probably make the reasonable conclusion that the Torah was written by an anonymous third person author, just like many other books.
More interesting perhaps is what the implications are for the third person narratives and other sections in the prophets. Were these written by the prophets themselves or were they recorded by other people? Would we expect the prophets to have written about themselves in the third or first person? At this point it's hard to say for sure, but the fact that the prophets sometimes write in first and sometimes in third lends me to believe that some of these sections were not penned by them, but added into the books by later editors who assembled the scrolls.
Again, remember that we are not concerned with who actually wrote what. What we are concerned with is what the Torah is saying about who wrote it, if anything.
Let's take a look.
Sections that indicate non-Mosaic authorship
The first section, and the most obvious section to indicate non-Mosaic authorship is the very end which describes the death of Moshe, and the succession of Yehoshua (Joshua). This difficulty stretches all the way back to the Talmud where Rabbis offer several resolutions. One resolution is that Yehoshua actually wrote these verses. The other option is that Moshe wrote it through some sort of prophecy. However, given that there's no indication of specialness of that section in the text, the simple reading implies that this was not written by Moshe.
There are indeed some other sections that point to non-Mosaic authorship. For example, at the beginning of Devarim, it says (Deut. 1:1)
These are the words which Moses spoke unto all Israel beyond the JordanThe implication "beyond the Jordan" indicates that the author, and the supposed audience, are both located on the other side of the river, which couldn't be Moshe since he never crossed the Jordan river.
Similarly, Gen 36:31
And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.The verse indicates that the author is living at a time after a king of Israel existed.
Even the medieval scholar Abraham Ibn Ezra indicates a few verses that he thinks were added later. He points out that the sections marked in bold (Gen 12:6)
And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Shechem, unto the terebinth of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land.and (Deut 3:11)
For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the Rephaim; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.-seem to have been added by someone later. Although Ibn Ezra says the vast majority of the Torah was written by Moshe, he does allow for some verses to be different. It's clear from these texts that the author of these sections, even if they were added later, obviously was not under the impression that Moshe wrote it all, since he himself wouldn't have added these parenthetical asides.
Sections that the Torah claims Moshe wrote
There are lots of places in the Torah were Moshe writes something, usually what is previously discussed. Here are the six places where Moshe is commanded to write something.
And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Write this for a memorial in the book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' (Exod 17:14)This is referring to the battle with Amalek which happened previously. It's not clear what the memorial is. Also it should be noted, that in the original vowelless Hebrew, "the book" and "a book" are indistinguishable. The vowels were only fully agreed upon much later, long after the standard Jewish approach was that Moshe wrote everything.
The next section is:
And Moses wrote all the words of the LORD, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the mount, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. (Exod 24:4)The indication is that "all these words" represent the chapters 21-23, which is a litany of mostly civil laws, in many cases similar to the code of Hammurabi.
Next we have:
27 And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Write thou these words, for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.' 28 And he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten words (Exod 34: 27-28).Here the specification is that Moshe wrote the ten commandments. Note that these are not the ten commandments we are more familiar with, but the earlier set that is mentioned in the preceding verses. Also, this verse is describing Moshe writing these commandments on the tablets and not necessarily in the text we have. It's not clear at all from context that Moshe wrote down the words we just read, they could have been someone else copying the text off of the tablets that Moshe wrote.
The fourth indication of Moshe writing stuff appears a few books later.
1 These are the stages of the children of Israel, by which they went forth out of the land of Egypt by their hosts under the hand of Moses and Aaron. 2 And Moses wrote their goings forth, stage by stage, by the commandment of the LORD; and these are their stages at their goings forth (Num 33:1-2).Where, here the implication is that Moshe wrote the following verses, which winds up being the list of encampment sites in the wilderness. Or at least he is claimed to have recorded the encampment sites, even if he didn't write the verses describing them.
Finally, at the end of Devarim we have two mentions. The first
And Moses wrote this law (Torah), and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi, that bore the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and unto all the elders of Israel (Deut. 31:9).is the only time we have Moshe writing something referred to as a Torah. However, it's obvious from context that what's being implied is the majority of the book of Devarim, which are supposedly the words of Moshe. This section continues later in the chapter:
24 And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law (Torah) in a book, until they were finished, 25 that Moses commanded the Levites, that bore the ark of the covenant of the LORD, saying: 26 'Take this book of the law (Sefer Torah), and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee (Deut 31:24-26).I've argued in a previous post, that this Sefer Torah is none other than the Sefer Torah that was found in the time of Yoshiyahu (Josiah). There is yet another indication that this Torah that Moshe is said to have written is not the full five books as we know it, but rather some smaller version. The verses in question are from Yehoshua (Josh 8:30-32).
30 Then Joshua built an altar unto the LORD, the God of Israel, in mount Ebal, 31 as Moses the servant of the LORD commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, an altar of unhewn stones, upon which no man had lifted up any iron; and they offered thereon burnt-offerings unto the LORD, and sacrificed peace-offerings. 32 And he wrote there upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he wrote before the children of Israel.It's unlikely that Yehoshua inscribed the entire Torah onto an altar as it would make a prodigious project (and would likely not fit on any altar of reasonable size anyway.) The word used in this section is Mishne Torah which is translated here as a "copy of the Torah" but can mean a second Torah. The second half of the sentence "which he wrote before the children of Israel" could either be a repetitive clause referring to Yehoshua currently doing the writing, but that seems redundant. More likely the reference here is to Moshe and it's saying that Yehoshua wrote down exactly what Moshe wrote before the children of Israel, which we just read about in Deut 31:24. So the simple conclusion is that Yehoshua wrote Devarim or at least some section of Devarim down.
But wait, there's more. The previous verse specifically mentions something written in the "sefer torat moshe" the book of the Torah of Moshe, specficially a commandment not to make an altar of cut stones. This is a specific reference to something that Moshe says in Devarim. In fact, this whole section was commanded in Devarim.
2 And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over the Jordan unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, that thou shalt set thee up great stones, and plaster them with plaster. 3 And thou shalt write upon them all the words of this law (Torah), when thou art passed over; that thou mayest go in unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of thy fathers, hath promised thee. 4 And it shall be when ye are passed over the Jordan, that ye shall set up these stones, which I command you this day, in mount Ebal, and thou shalt plaster them with plaster. 5 And there shalt thou build an altar unto the LORD thy God, an altar of stones; thou shalt lift up no iron tool upon them. 6 Thou shalt build the altar of the LORD thy God of unhewn stones; and thou shalt offer burnt-offerings thereon unto the LORD thy God. 7 And thou shalt sacrifice peace-offerings, and shalt eat there; and thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God.Do the words of the Torah include this instruction to write the words of the Torah in this specific instance. Seems strange. What exactly is being referred to as the words of the Torah. Something else it seems.
There is another mention of Moshe writing that occurs in between the last two sections.
So Moses wrote this song the same day, and taught it the children of Israel (Deut. 31:22).The song is most likely the song Ha'azinu which comprises the next chapter. From context it would seem that this song was not part of the "Torah" that Moshe wrote, but a separate composition.
Writing in the third person
Summing up so far, we have a bunch of sections that are explicitly attributed to Moshe, although it's not clear where and on what he wrote them. Nevertheless there is a clear case to be made that the text of Moshe's speech in Devarim was claimed to have been transcribed, by him, into a Torah.
However, we also have sections which strongly apply a non-Mosaic author. These include the preamble to the speech of Devarim which has an implied author who is currently residing inside Israel. A modern day reader would probably think that Moshe wrote down his speech in Devarim, and then a later author compiled it and included the preamble and the description of him compiling it.
But perhaps we're applying modern day writing to biblical styles. So let's expand the original question and instead of considering a modern day reader, let's consider someone reading the text ~2500 years ago. Someone who was familiar with the composition types of the time. What would they make of the authorship.
When I was pondering this, the first question that came to my mind was, "is it typical for biblical authors to write about themselves in the third person?" All of the Torah is written in third person. Similarly, all of the historical books (Yehoshua through Melachim (Kings)) are third person. However, when we deal with the prophets, we see something more interesting.
Many prophets start out by identifying themselves as the author in the third person, and then later switching to first person. I'll provide some examples.
Amos intro: 3rd-person
1 The words of Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the earthquake. 2 And he said: the LORD roareth from Zion, and uttereth His voice from Jerusalem; and the pastures of the shepherds shall mourn, and the top of Carmel shall wither (Amos 1:1-2).Amos continuation: 1st person
Hear ye this word which I take up for a lamentation over you, O house of Israel (Amos 5:1)
Thus the Lord GOD showed me; and, behold, He formed locusts in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth; and, lo, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings. (Amos 7:1)Hoshea intro: 3rd- person
The word of the LORD that came unto Hosea the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel (Hosea 1:1).Hoshea continuation: 1st person
And the LORD said unto me: 'Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend and an adulteress, even as the LORD loveth the children of Israel, though they turn unto other gods, and love cakes of raisins (Hosea 3:1).Yishayahu intro: 3rd person
The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah (Isaiah 1:1).Yishayahu continuation: 1st person
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple (Isaiah 6:1).And so on. One finds similar patterns in all of the prophets. Now, it should be noted that there are places where some of the prophets (but not all) switch back to third person. This happens in many of the "narrative" sections that appear throughout some of the prophets. For example Chapter 37 of Yishayahu. In fact, Yishayahu often switches between 1st and 3rd person intros into paragraphs. The same occurs in Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah). Yirmiyahu might be a special case since it's suggested that the text was written by his scribe Baruch ben Neriah. Interestingly Yehezkel (Ezekiel) sticks to first person entirely after the introduction.
What can we make from this? Well, in my opinion it indicates that you would expect some first person statements, especially in the intro to prophetic sections. Furthermore, the introduction sections always indicate the correct time and place of the prophet. For example, the Yishayahu introduction is written in third person, and mentions that he was a prophet spanning the reign of four kings.
In contrast, the Torah never has any first person introductions. It's always, "God spoke to Moshe saying." Again, the exception is Devarim, in which there are intros that begin with, "and then God spoke to me." Devarim is most similar to the prophetic writings in that it has a third person intro and then moves into first person. However, unlike Yishayahu or any of the other prophets, the intro has a marker that indicates a later date of composition in that it mentions, "the other side of the Jordan."
And what about the rest of the Torah? It seems from the text itself that only a select few sections are attributed directly to Moshe. Certainly the entire book of Bereishit is not explicitly attributed to him. Neither are all the third person narratives. Furthermore, the composition style is more different from that in the prophetic works with explicit claimed authorship that both a 500 BCE reader and a modern day one would probably make the reasonable conclusion that the Torah was written by an anonymous third person author, just like many other books.
More interesting perhaps is what the implications are for the third person narratives and other sections in the prophets. Were these written by the prophets themselves or were they recorded by other people? Would we expect the prophets to have written about themselves in the third or first person? At this point it's hard to say for sure, but the fact that the prophets sometimes write in first and sometimes in third lends me to believe that some of these sections were not penned by them, but added into the books by later editors who assembled the scrolls.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Modern Orthodoxy will disappear in another generation
And now for something a little different. I did mention that I had some topics unrelated to Biblical Criticism that I wanted to discuss and this is one of them. I have a bold prediction that Modern Orthodoxy, at least as the form of Judaism I grew up with, is probably going to vanish in the next 20-30 years, roughly one generation from now. Or at very least it will go a steep decline with members leaving either to the right or to the left.
What is Modern Orthodoxy
Modern Orthodoxy is form of religion essentially founded by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. There are two ways to view it which are non-contradicting, so both exist.
The first is the idea of Torah u'Maddah which essentially means Torah and science. The goal here is to seek harmonization between what we learn through Torah and what we learn through scientific methods. Standard Modern Orthodoxy accepts notions like the big bang, a 4 billion year old earth, and evolutionary theory and harmonizes the contradicting Torah passages by explaining them allegorically. One of the premier ideas along this line is an adaptation of the Rambam's concept of miracles as being purely natural events that occur at opportune times. The Hebrew term for this would be Hashgacha Pratit. Therefore, a common Modern Orthodox tactic is to search for natural phenomena that can explain the biblical miracles. This explanation for the red sea splitting is a good example.
The second aspect of Modern Orthodoxy is more social, and deals with the religious Jew in the modern world. Whereas many of the Hassidic communities that migrated into the US sought to develop their own isolated environments, Modern Orthodoxy permits interaction with the world as a whole. You can work in secular companies with non-Jewish co-workers. You can go to sporting events, amusement parks, movies. TV and radio are perfectly acceptable forms of entertainment, and so on. However, the important part is to continue following Halacha. So you go to the amusement park or baseball stadium, but you don't eat any of the non-kosher food.
The Challenge
To me, the major challenge to Modern Orthodoxy is regarding the second aspect, that of the Jew in the modern world. While I do think that the scientific challenges to Judaism are serious, I think it's easier to rationalize them. However, I do see very strong social challenges that are already here or will arrive shortly that look to upset the idea of the religious Jew in the modern world. Let's take a look at some of them.
Modern Orthodoxy was so successful in the late 20th century (and early 21st) because there was a very strong alignment between the morals of religious Judaism and the American society it was a part of. One example of such an alignment is the practice of circumcision. Between about 1950 and 1970, circumcision rates in the US were somewhere between 70 and 80% peaking in 1965. In 1991 this had dropped to 62% and in 2006 to 56%, with drops occurring across all regions (see here for more info.) With circumcision rates so high, moral arguments against the practice were almost non-existent. It's only very recently, and in regions where rates are low (like Europe, and the western US) where moral arguments against circumcision have started to appear.
Another moral area with a very recent and very pronounced change in national outlook is in the area of treatment of homosexuals, both regarding sexual behavior and recognition of marriage. The change occurred over a single generation, with homosexual marriage finding only 27% support in 1996 and over 50% just 15 years later. The practice was legalized in the US in 2015 with a Supreme Court decision. Modern Orthodoxy, of course, cannot sanction homosexual marriage, so here too there is a strong rift between Halacha and societal norms.
There are various other areas that are not yet problematic for Modern Orthodoxy but that look like they could be in the next twenty years or so. These include the treatment of animals with regard to Halachically valid slaughtering techniques. And the role of women as Rabbis, something that currently is splitting the community, as it split the conservative community in the 80s and 90s.
In my mind these challenges represent a fundamental difference between how a religious Jew will interact with the world in the year 2030 vs how one did in the year 1990. In 2030, views condemning homosexual marriage will be bigoted (they already are). Orthodox Jews will carry that baggage with them as they interact with the world.
What Will Happen
I predict that the exact same thing that happened with Conservative Judaism in the 90s will happen to Modern Orthodox Judaism in the 2020, and maybe a bit before. Conservative Judaism was vibrant in the 80s and 90s but then it sort of fell apart. Adherents either went to the left, towards Reform or to the right towards Modern Orthodoxy. To put it simply, Conservative Judaism, an attempt to compromise between the modernization of Reform Judaism with the traditionalism of Orthodoxy was unstable. People that valued the modernism part pushed for egalitarian minyans, relaxation of Kashrut requirements, recognition of homosexual unions and so on. The more traditional members balked at that, and were willing to sacrifice some of the modernity they were used to for a religion they felt was more "authentic."
The same thing will happen to Modern Orthodoxy. The people that value the morals of western society, will be more willing to sacrifice religious precepts to fit in with society. They will become similar to the Conservatives of the 90s, which will continue to drift left because, as we found out, Conservatism is unstable. On the other hand, the people who want to maintain traditional Judaism, will no longer be able to integrate with society as cleanly as they did previously. The morals of Orthodox Judaism no longer align with the morals of the society they live in. The result will be isolation into more and more closed communities, where you don't need to be confronted with external opinions that criticize your moral values.
We can already see this in play today among my peers (people who grew up in the 90s). The standard path for a Modern Orthodox youngster involves growing up in a community where all the family friends are MO, attending Yeshiva through high school where they only interact with other MO kids, a year in Yeshivah in Israel that caters to MO students, and finally 4 years at either YU/Stern or a university with a large enough Jewish population that they are surrounded by people like them. Hopefully that is shortly followed by marriage into the MO community. Until this point they've essentially grown up in a closed environment. The idea of a Jew in the modern world has been eliminated. It is instead the story of a Jew in a sheltered world.
As the moral gulf between Orthodoxy and the moral center of the US continues to widen, the tendency to shelter youngsters from that world will grow. Then before you know it, Modern Orthodoxy has been replaced by plain old Orthodoxy.
What is Modern Orthodoxy
Modern Orthodoxy is form of religion essentially founded by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. There are two ways to view it which are non-contradicting, so both exist.
The first is the idea of Torah u'Maddah which essentially means Torah and science. The goal here is to seek harmonization between what we learn through Torah and what we learn through scientific methods. Standard Modern Orthodoxy accepts notions like the big bang, a 4 billion year old earth, and evolutionary theory and harmonizes the contradicting Torah passages by explaining them allegorically. One of the premier ideas along this line is an adaptation of the Rambam's concept of miracles as being purely natural events that occur at opportune times. The Hebrew term for this would be Hashgacha Pratit. Therefore, a common Modern Orthodox tactic is to search for natural phenomena that can explain the biblical miracles. This explanation for the red sea splitting is a good example.
The second aspect of Modern Orthodoxy is more social, and deals with the religious Jew in the modern world. Whereas many of the Hassidic communities that migrated into the US sought to develop their own isolated environments, Modern Orthodoxy permits interaction with the world as a whole. You can work in secular companies with non-Jewish co-workers. You can go to sporting events, amusement parks, movies. TV and radio are perfectly acceptable forms of entertainment, and so on. However, the important part is to continue following Halacha. So you go to the amusement park or baseball stadium, but you don't eat any of the non-kosher food.
The Challenge
To me, the major challenge to Modern Orthodoxy is regarding the second aspect, that of the Jew in the modern world. While I do think that the scientific challenges to Judaism are serious, I think it's easier to rationalize them. However, I do see very strong social challenges that are already here or will arrive shortly that look to upset the idea of the religious Jew in the modern world. Let's take a look at some of them.
Modern Orthodoxy was so successful in the late 20th century (and early 21st) because there was a very strong alignment between the morals of religious Judaism and the American society it was a part of. One example of such an alignment is the practice of circumcision. Between about 1950 and 1970, circumcision rates in the US were somewhere between 70 and 80% peaking in 1965. In 1991 this had dropped to 62% and in 2006 to 56%, with drops occurring across all regions (see here for more info.) With circumcision rates so high, moral arguments against the practice were almost non-existent. It's only very recently, and in regions where rates are low (like Europe, and the western US) where moral arguments against circumcision have started to appear.
Another moral area with a very recent and very pronounced change in national outlook is in the area of treatment of homosexuals, both regarding sexual behavior and recognition of marriage. The change occurred over a single generation, with homosexual marriage finding only 27% support in 1996 and over 50% just 15 years later. The practice was legalized in the US in 2015 with a Supreme Court decision. Modern Orthodoxy, of course, cannot sanction homosexual marriage, so here too there is a strong rift between Halacha and societal norms.
There are various other areas that are not yet problematic for Modern Orthodoxy but that look like they could be in the next twenty years or so. These include the treatment of animals with regard to Halachically valid slaughtering techniques. And the role of women as Rabbis, something that currently is splitting the community, as it split the conservative community in the 80s and 90s.
In my mind these challenges represent a fundamental difference between how a religious Jew will interact with the world in the year 2030 vs how one did in the year 1990. In 2030, views condemning homosexual marriage will be bigoted (they already are). Orthodox Jews will carry that baggage with them as they interact with the world.
What Will Happen
I predict that the exact same thing that happened with Conservative Judaism in the 90s will happen to Modern Orthodox Judaism in the 2020, and maybe a bit before. Conservative Judaism was vibrant in the 80s and 90s but then it sort of fell apart. Adherents either went to the left, towards Reform or to the right towards Modern Orthodoxy. To put it simply, Conservative Judaism, an attempt to compromise between the modernization of Reform Judaism with the traditionalism of Orthodoxy was unstable. People that valued the modernism part pushed for egalitarian minyans, relaxation of Kashrut requirements, recognition of homosexual unions and so on. The more traditional members balked at that, and were willing to sacrifice some of the modernity they were used to for a religion they felt was more "authentic."
The same thing will happen to Modern Orthodoxy. The people that value the morals of western society, will be more willing to sacrifice religious precepts to fit in with society. They will become similar to the Conservatives of the 90s, which will continue to drift left because, as we found out, Conservatism is unstable. On the other hand, the people who want to maintain traditional Judaism, will no longer be able to integrate with society as cleanly as they did previously. The morals of Orthodox Judaism no longer align with the morals of the society they live in. The result will be isolation into more and more closed communities, where you don't need to be confronted with external opinions that criticize your moral values.
We can already see this in play today among my peers (people who grew up in the 90s). The standard path for a Modern Orthodox youngster involves growing up in a community where all the family friends are MO, attending Yeshiva through high school where they only interact with other MO kids, a year in Yeshivah in Israel that caters to MO students, and finally 4 years at either YU/Stern or a university with a large enough Jewish population that they are surrounded by people like them. Hopefully that is shortly followed by marriage into the MO community. Until this point they've essentially grown up in a closed environment. The idea of a Jew in the modern world has been eliminated. It is instead the story of a Jew in a sheltered world.
As the moral gulf between Orthodoxy and the moral center of the US continues to widen, the tendency to shelter youngsters from that world will grow. Then before you know it, Modern Orthodoxy has been replaced by plain old Orthodoxy.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Vort: Did David actually kill Shaul?
This week follows on a bit from last week. To me, the book of Shmuel (Samuel) is one of the most interesting books from a historical perspective. The book is set in that area between things we know have a solid historical backing (later monarchies), and things that clearly belong to the world of myth and legend (Joshua and prior). Specifically, there is no doubt that there were kings of Judah who traced their lineage to the house of David. The Tel Dan Stele provides us with proof of that. But the Tanach indicates that the accession of David to the throne, and the succession of his son Shlomo (Solomon) after him were not clean. Therefore, we are left with a historical account, written by the eventual winners, in which they justify their right to the monarchy. First let's summarize the biblical story.
A Checkered History
Here, is a very quick runthrough of the major events of the book of Shmuel regarding the transition of the monarchy from Shaul to David.
It is obvious from the text of the Tanach that there was some real questions surrounding the legitimacy of the Davidic line. The authors of the text try to head this off at every possible place. They assure us several times that Shmuel took the kingdom away from Shaul because of his leniency regarding Amalek. They indicate in several places that Shaul recognized David's right to the throne, even though he never took action to transfer the kingship, and his surviving children didn't seem to get the message either and actively opposed David in armed conflict. They assure us that David wasn't in the Philistine army that killed Shaul even though he was a mercenary for them at the time. Furthermore, there were two occasions where he could have killed Shaul but didn't, so he almost certainly didn't kill Shaul during the battle. He even avenges Shaul's death! When David killed Ish-Boshet it was because David was the rightful heir to the throne and Ish-Boshet was the usurper, despite being the heir apparent. And everyone sure was relieved and unanimously supported David when he accepted the kingship over everyone.
If you read between the propaganda lines, you get a different story. Here David is a conspirator against the crown, who signs on with the Israelite's enemies and even goes to war with them against Israel in the battle where Shaul is killed. He then murders the king's descendents and captures the kingship for himself. Now, we can read every story in the book of Shmuel is an attempt of supporters of David to paper over the seedy side, casting everything in the best of light for David and the worst of light for Shaul. For example, Shaul is responsible for the Edomite slaughter of the priests of Nob. He's also not a real prophet, but a madman who strips naked and blabbers and is prone to fits of anger.
You can't get rid of everything though, invent a fake history out of thin air. Presumably when these accounts were written, people still remembered that there were open hostilities between David and Shaul. This is why the result is propaganda and not fiction. There are real events underlying this, they've just been distorted to favor one side explicitly. And in many cases it's obvious because, unlike modern authors, biblical authors aren't really all that subtle with their allegiances. Just read the doublet stories again in 1 Sam 24 and 26 and see what I mean.
So did David actually kill Shaul? No one knows. But it sure as hell looks suspicious, and it almost definitely looked suspicious to the ancient Israelites. It was so suspicious that the author(s) of Shmuel really go way over the top in attempting to prove that he didn't.
A Checkered History
Here, is a very quick runthrough of the major events of the book of Shmuel regarding the transition of the monarchy from Shaul to David.
- Shmuel is approached by the people to appoint a king (1 Sam 8)
- Shmuel appoints Shaul as king (1 Sam 9-12)
- Shaul and his son Yonathan (Jonathan) fight against the Plishtim (Philistines) (1 Sam 13-14)
- Shaul fights with Amalek, has mercy on the king, and Shmuel says he will lose the kingship because of this (1 Sam 15)
- Shmuel secretly anoints David as king (1 Sam 16:1-13)
- David is appointed as a harp player for Shaul (1 Sam 16:14-23)
- David slays Galyat (Goliath) (1 Sam 17-18:5) Note that in this episode Shaul does not know who David is. A contradiction I discussed here.
- Shaul becomes jealous of David and tries to kill him (1 Sam 18:6-20:42)
- David escapes, winds up in Gath where he pretends to be crazy (1 Sam 21)
- Shaul orders the slaughter of the priests of Nob at the hands of an Edomite because they helped David escape (1 Sam 22)
- Shaul continues to chase David (1 Sam 23)
- David has the opportunity to kill Shaul but does not, moved by this, Shaul essentially agrees that David should be the king and asks that his descendents are not killed (1 Sam 24)
- David seduces the married woman Avigayil. Then her husband Nabal (who is evil mind you) conveniently dies (for unrelated reasons) so that David can marry her himself (1 Sam 25)
- A doublet of the story in 1 Sam 24. David has the opportunity to kill Shaul, but does not. And Shaul recognizes David as the true king (1 Sam 26)
- Despite the previous chapter ending with peace between David and Shaul, this one starts with David fearing for his life so much so that he goes and becomes a mercenary for the Israelite's arch-nemesis, the Plishtim! David only kills non-Judahites though, and lies to the Philistine king about it. (1 Sam 27-28:2)
- Shmuel dies and Shaul confronts a prophetess to speak to the dead. Shmuel confirms that Shaul is no longer king (1 Sam 28:3-25)
- The Plishtim go to fight the Israelites. But David does not go with them, and instead goes to fight the Amalekites (1 Sam 29-30)
- The Plishtim defeat the Israelites and kill Shaul (1 Sam 31)
- David learns of the deaths of Shaul and Yonatan and heartfully laments their passing (2 Sam 1)
- There is a civil war between David and Shaul's son Ish-Boshet won by David (actually, the rival's name is Ish-Baal but changed to Ish Boshet because it was embarrassing that Shaul named a child after Ba'al.) (2 Sam 2-4)
- Everyone happily accepts David as the king over all of Judah and Israel (2 Sam 5-rest of book)
- Later, after David's death there is a succession crisis and another civil war, with eventually Shlomo (of questionable birth) defeating Adoniyah and capturing the monarchy.
- After the death of Shlomo the north secedes from the south under Yerav'am (Jeroboam)
It is obvious from the text of the Tanach that there was some real questions surrounding the legitimacy of the Davidic line. The authors of the text try to head this off at every possible place. They assure us several times that Shmuel took the kingdom away from Shaul because of his leniency regarding Amalek. They indicate in several places that Shaul recognized David's right to the throne, even though he never took action to transfer the kingship, and his surviving children didn't seem to get the message either and actively opposed David in armed conflict. They assure us that David wasn't in the Philistine army that killed Shaul even though he was a mercenary for them at the time. Furthermore, there were two occasions where he could have killed Shaul but didn't, so he almost certainly didn't kill Shaul during the battle. He even avenges Shaul's death! When David killed Ish-Boshet it was because David was the rightful heir to the throne and Ish-Boshet was the usurper, despite being the heir apparent. And everyone sure was relieved and unanimously supported David when he accepted the kingship over everyone.
If you read between the propaganda lines, you get a different story. Here David is a conspirator against the crown, who signs on with the Israelite's enemies and even goes to war with them against Israel in the battle where Shaul is killed. He then murders the king's descendents and captures the kingship for himself. Now, we can read every story in the book of Shmuel is an attempt of supporters of David to paper over the seedy side, casting everything in the best of light for David and the worst of light for Shaul. For example, Shaul is responsible for the Edomite slaughter of the priests of Nob. He's also not a real prophet, but a madman who strips naked and blabbers and is prone to fits of anger.
You can't get rid of everything though, invent a fake history out of thin air. Presumably when these accounts were written, people still remembered that there were open hostilities between David and Shaul. This is why the result is propaganda and not fiction. There are real events underlying this, they've just been distorted to favor one side explicitly. And in many cases it's obvious because, unlike modern authors, biblical authors aren't really all that subtle with their allegiances. Just read the doublet stories again in 1 Sam 24 and 26 and see what I mean.
So did David actually kill Shaul? No one knows. But it sure as hell looks suspicious, and it almost definitely looked suspicious to the ancient Israelites. It was so suspicious that the author(s) of Shmuel really go way over the top in attempting to prove that he didn't.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Vort: Switching Shmuel and Shaul
So, if you grew up in a religious environment you'll be familiar with the word "vort" which is Yiddish simply for word. These tend to be short insights into some manner of Judaism. I will coopt the language to provide some fairly short insights from Academia. Some of these, like this one, are parts of larger topics. But we'll keep them short and sweet.
Birth of Shmuel
The book of Shmuel (Samuel) begins with a very common biblical motif. A woman can't give birth, she makes a deal with God that she'll devote the child to him, and God causes her to give birth to a son (always a son). Children that were born in this way include Shimshon (Samson), arguably Yitzchak (Isaac) and here, Shmuel.
The story goes that Shmuel's mother Hannah promised her son to God if she could have one. God acquiesced, and she gave birth to Shmuel. However, the naming of the child is very bizarre. As with many biblical characters, Shmuel is given an etiological reason for the name. The verse in question is 1 Sam 1:20
The Old Switcheroo
The naming discrepancy has caused people to wonder if maybe there was a switch between the naming of two individuals. In other words, maybe the original story was about someone else, but was later sloppily switched to Shmuel. Is there an obvious candidate, someone around the same time period who's name would fit better there? Of course. What if it originally read:
Why they did this is a question for another week (probably next week in fact).
Birth of Shmuel
The book of Shmuel (Samuel) begins with a very common biblical motif. A woman can't give birth, she makes a deal with God that she'll devote the child to him, and God causes her to give birth to a son (always a son). Children that were born in this way include Shimshon (Samson), arguably Yitzchak (Isaac) and here, Shmuel.
The story goes that Shmuel's mother Hannah promised her son to God if she could have one. God acquiesced, and she gave birth to Shmuel. However, the naming of the child is very bizarre. As with many biblical characters, Shmuel is given an etiological reason for the name. The verse in question is 1 Sam 1:20
And it came to pass, when the time was come about, that Hannah conceived, and bore a son; and she called his name Samuel: 'because I have asked him of the LORD.'And here it is in Hebrew
וַיְהִי לִתְקֻפוֹת הַיָּמִים, וַתַּהַר חַנָּה וַתֵּלֶד בֵּן; וַתִּקְרָא אֶת-שְׁמוֹ שְׁמוּאֵל, כִּי מֵיְהוָה שְׁאִלְתִּיו.The reason why this is strange is that the name and the etiological reason don't match up at all. Shmuel means the name of "El", it has nothing at all to do with the word, to ask sha'al. Traditional commentators noticed this discrepancy, but they don't offer any amazing resolutions. For example, Rashi says (my translation) "Shmuel: In the name of El and in the name of the deed he is called, because he was asked from God." where Rashi is using the wordplay Al Shem to explain where the name Shmuel comes from. Al Shem literally means in the name of, but figuratively is an idiom for because. So he translates it as "because of El." Of course you need to add the word Al for that to make sense, and still it seems fairly weak.
The Old Switcheroo
The naming discrepancy has caused people to wonder if maybe there was a switch between the naming of two individuals. In other words, maybe the original story was about someone else, but was later sloppily switched to Shmuel. Is there an obvious candidate, someone around the same time period who's name would fit better there? Of course. What if it originally read:
וַיְהִי לִתְקֻפוֹת הַיָּמִים, וַתַּהַר חַנָּה וַתֵּלֶד בֵּן; וַתִּקְרָא אֶת-שְׁמוֹ שָׁאוּל, כִּי מֵיְהוָה שְׁאִלְתִּיו.If you switch Shmuel with Shaul (Saul) then the wordplay is exact. "Shaul" literally means "asked for" and the name fits the birth story perfectly. Shaul is in my mind one of the more interesting characters in the Tanach, not so much because of the stories about him, but because of how he ended up on the bad side of the Biblical propaganda machine. Here, the argument, is that they literally crossed his name out of the birth story and wrote in Shmuel.
Why they did this is a question for another week (probably next week in fact).
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Radiocarbon Dating
For something a little different, I decided a post on radiocarbon dating might be appropriate. Since I put a lot of stock in the information gleaned from radiocarbon dating, I figure it's worthwhile to describe a little bit how it's done, and more importantly, to describe the various sources of error in it. Constraining error is one of the key issues with any scientific measurement, and radiocarbon is no exception. One particular point I will make is that the error will depend a lot on specifics to each measurement (time and location). So there are periods and locations where the result has extremely large errors, and other measurements that are more trustworthy.
How it Works
The physics of radioactive dating is pretty straightforward. Carbon-14 (6 protons 8 neutrons) is a radioactive isotope with a halflife of approximately 5700 years. The characteristic decay is "beta decay" which means (roughly) that one of the neutrons in the nucleus decays into a proton and an electron. The resulting nucleus is Nitrogen-14 (7 protons 7 neutrons). The energy from the emission goes partly to the nucleus and partly to the electron that was created. Because of conservation of momentum, much more of the energy goes to the electron and it gets ejected from the atom. These ejected electrons are called "beta particles" and you can monitor the decays by detection of them.
As with all radioactive decays the density of C-14 at any time can be modeled with an exponential equation. The characteristic time for the exponential, the half-life, indicates how long it takes for half of the C-14 atoms to undergo beta decay. So if you know how many C-14 atoms are around at the beginning, you can predict how many will be there at any point in time in the future (provided of course that there are enough of them that the statistical argument makes sense.) Similarly, if you know how many there were at at the beginning, and you know how many there are now, you can predict how long ago the "beginning" was. Finally, if you know the current concentration and you know exactly how long ago you wish to measure, you can use it to determine the original concentration at that time. This last calculation will be important later.
Willard Libby proposed using the concentrations of C-14 in organic material as a means of dating a substance. C-14 is constantly being created in the upper atmosphere from interactions between high energy photons from the sun and atmospheric molecules. While an organism is alive it is constantly exchanging its carbon atoms with those in the atmosphere, so the C-14 concentration in any living being is similar to the global concentration at that time. This is because chemically isotopes behave (almost) exactly the same, so the organism does not distinguish between C-14, C-13 or C-12. After it dies, it stops incorporating carbon from the atmosphere. If we know the global concentration at the time it died (more on that later) and we can measure the concentration now, then we can calculate the date that it stopped exchanging carbon with the environment as described above. Therefore, radiocarbon analysis of the C-14 content in organic material can be used to determine the death date of organic material. For this result Libby won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Now we will discuss some of the details along with the various sources of error that arise.
Carbon-14 Measurement Errors
The first error that we will look at comes from the difficulty in actually measuring the C-14 content in a sample. As with any scientific measurement there is an associated error bar. There are several ways to look for the C-14 content. One is to look for the decay by measuring the emitted beta particles. A more popular method (due to better accuracy) is to convert the entire material to a gas and run it through a charge-mass spectrometer, that can distinguish between isotopes of carbon. You can read about the various techniques here.
Both these results will have errors based on the limitations of the actual measurement technique and due to statistical problems. The statistical error is generally small compared to the measurement error. You can reduce the error by comparing results from different samples and different techniques/laboratories. But you can never make it zero.
Finding Appropriate Material
Finding appropriate organic material can be difficult. The best material (at least for the Ancient Near East region) appears to be stuff like burnt seeds and stuff like olive pits which can be found in fire pits and cooking areas. Stuff like structural wood tends to be a bad choice since it's always possible that the wood is old, having been used for a previous structure, and using it will make the date appear older than it really is.
One common form of systematic error arises from improper association of a sample with a specific archaeological stratum. In other words, you find some burnt olive pits and think they belong to the city, but it turns out they are just the remains from hundreds of years later when some nomads made a makeshift camp in the ruins. Obviously, the more samples you have, the less likely you are to make an error like this. Yet there can be systematic errors due to associating some result with an incorrect archaeological stratum.
This error is entirely in the domain of the archaeologists, and it's impossible to handicap it without being involved in the actual excavation, or by scanning the detailed reports. Nevertheless, when you see large discrepancies in dates between archaeologists, chances are that the reason is because they are arguing over which stratum belongs to which set of measurements.
Constraining Initial C-14 Fraction
Libby assumed that the C-14 fraction in the atmosphere was a constant. It turns out this is not true. It can vary slightly. However, slight variations can mean big differences with regard to dating, so it's important to figure out how much carbon was in the background atmosphere at all the possible dates that the organism may have died.
The way this is done is primarily through "dendrochronology" The idea here is that you can use trees as a method of determining the C-14 concentration at any time in the past. The inner rings of a tree are not living anymore, so they do not exchange carbon. Therefore, you can cut down a long lived tree and get information on the global C-14 concentration for each year that the tree was alive, just by comparing the carbon at each ring. You know the current concentration, and you know the time, so you can get the initial concentration. Then if you have trees that died a long time ago, but were preserved, you can find overlaps with known trees. With enough work we can build a database going back thousands of years. Indeed the carbon calibration curves we have go back around 40-50 thousand years. These curves are constantly being refined, but they are pretty robust for the area in question for Biblical archaeology.
I said "global" concentration above, but that's not entirely correct. Global here means a sizeable region surrounding the area in question. There are indeed separate calibration curves for the northern and southern hemispheres, and even more local curves for time periods closer to the present (where Biblical results fall.)
Errors from Calibration Curves
While the calibration curves are pretty robust, the fact that the initial concentration varies slightly can increase or decrease the error for a given measurement. It is probably best to use an example, so here's a typical plot that you might see (taken from here).
This plot is a little busy, so let's look at the details of what's going on. The y-axis shows the amount of C-14 that was detected in the unit BP (what exactly that is doesn't matter). The red bell shape indicates the actual measurement amount (around 3000 BP) and the error associated with it, (here probably around +/- 80 BP). The x-axis represents the dates in years BCE. The thick blue line that goes through the plot indicates the calibration curve. From this curve you can calculate the date for any given amount of BP measurement. Except not so fast. Even if you exactly knew that you had 3000 BP, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between about 1260 and 1230 BCE, since the line at 3000 intersects the blue curve twice. So, because we have measurement errors in the amount of carbon, and because the blue curve is so "wiggly" what we wind up with is a probability distribution function which is pretty complicated looking (gray region). The results on the top right summarize the plot results. You have an 8.2% probability of being between 1375 and 1340 BCE (the bump on the far left), a 87.2% probability of being between 1320 and 1129 BCE, and about a 5% probability of being somewhere else.
This plot looks about typical for results I have seen but quoted results dates tend to have errors that are smaller errors +/- 150 years. How?
"Wiggle Matching" and Bayesian Analysis
So the way to do better, as before, is by using multiple measurements. However, here what you're using are multiple measurements from different strata. To use the above example again. Let's say you find some sample that produces exactly 3000 BP. As we noted above, you can't distinguish between 1260 and 1230 BCE. But let's say you dig a bit deeper, and somewhere below you find something else that also produces exactly 3000 BP. You know that the deeper one must be older. So you can say that the deeper one is 1260 BCE and the shallower one is 1230 BCE.
"Wiggle matching" takes multiple results from as many strata as can be found and attempts to match the "wiggles" in the calibration curve as best as possible. This is essentially another massive probability calculation and it is usually done by computer codes. If you have a lot of samples from a given site, you can usually constrain the results far better than with a single sample.
But archaeologists can go even further. If you can make estimates on things like how far apart in time different strata were, or if you know from Egyptian or Assyrian chronologies when cities were destroyed (or claimed to be destroyed) then you can put those assumptions into the model as well. This can produce very accurate estimates (less than 50 years error), even for results where the error in the C-14 measurements are large. But they depend on the assumptions you put into the model and your confidence in them. These models are "Bayesian" in that they attempt to determine the probability that a given set of date measurements could produce the actual results.
This is another area where you can have significant disagreement between archaeologists. They might disagree greatly between what assumptions are made. Here, we laymen are in a better position to evaluate the results, since all good archaeologists will state what assumptions, if any, are input into their models. Again though, these only show up in technical papers.
An Example: What I Found About the United Monarchy Debate
A while back I read a collection of essays in "The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating" edited by Levy and Highman, and first published in 2005. As such the results are about 10 years out of date, but that is the extent of my knowledge. The articles were highly technical, and I actually needed to learn about the topics in this post before I could properly appreciate the arguments. There were both detailed excavation reports and tons of results from radiocarbon analysis, similar to the plot I showed above.
The current main point of contention between archaeologists today (or at least in 2005) is whether or not there ever existed a united monarchy under Shlomo (Solomon). On one side is the "conventional chronology" championed first by Dever and now by Amihai Mazar which states that there indeed was such a united monarchy. The alternate view is the "low chronology" offered by Finkelstein which suggests that it never existed. At the heart of the debate are the dating of various monumental structures, specifically city gates, in various cities like Gezer and Hazor. The conventional chronology dates these to around 950 BCE which puts them in the time period of Shlomo. The low chronology dates these to about 880 BCE and attributes them to the reign of the northern kings Omri and Ahab who were the first kings to garner international attention.
As we've noted above, a difference of less than 100 years is typically too small for radiocarbon analysis to distinguish, but each of these sites have many strata, and the articles record some of the most comprehensive attempts at carbon dating analysis to date. Nevertheless, from my perspective the results were inconclusive. Here are where the two sides differed.
1) The main source of disagreement is determining which stratum the monumental structures belong to. You can't date the structure itself, it's not organic, so you have to tie it to some organic material. As far as I know this is unresolved with Finkelstein continuing to insist it's dated to a later structure, and Mazar insisting it's an earlier structure.
2) Another source of disagreement was on the treatment of an outlier radiocarbon result. Various organic material were sent to several different labs, and one produced a date different than the others. From my memory, Finkelstein included these results in his models, but Mazar considered them an outlier and did not include them. As you can imagine this made a big difference on the results of each group's Bayesian analysis. Both groups stress the need for repeated measurements.
3) The disagreement includes anthropological models as well, specifically with regard to the appearance of specific pottery types that appear to have spread from the Philistine cities. Finkelstein thinks that it took a long time for this pottery to spread, Mazar says it spread quicker.
As you can see, when you start dealing with the details of these analyses, you very quickly get into the weeds. As a layman who is not involved in the measurements, I think it is absolutely impossible to determine who has the better argument. As such, I put the existence of the united monarchy as an unknown, and will wait until a consensus is reached on the matter.
Well Then, What Can We Know for Sure?
While the dating of monumental gates is still under question, other conclusions from archaeologists have reached a higher level of consensus. For example, the city of Yericho (Jericho) has a strong consensus that it was destroyed long before Yehoshua (Joshua) could possibly have arrived. Similarly with the city of Ai. There are fringe opinions otherwise, but overall there is very little academic debate on these matters anymore. Indeed Yericho, is a good example of carbon dating resolving a contradiction between archaeologists. As it provided enough resolution to confirm the early date proposed by Kathleen Kenyon instead of the later date proposed by Bryant Wood. You will still see apologetic answers using Bryant Wood's analysis, but this is disingenuous, and you should be able to recognize it as such.
There are other similar events which we can date, such as the destruction of major cities. Destructions tend to be easier to date because a lot of stuff tends to get burned and buried. These include sites like Ugarit and Hattusa which aren't mentioned in Biblical texts but belong to the period prior to their composition.
All in all, it pays to be cognizant of the claims being made, the associated error, and whether there's a consensus or a disagreement between the people that are closest to the measurement.
How it Works
The physics of radioactive dating is pretty straightforward. Carbon-14 (6 protons 8 neutrons) is a radioactive isotope with a halflife of approximately 5700 years. The characteristic decay is "beta decay" which means (roughly) that one of the neutrons in the nucleus decays into a proton and an electron. The resulting nucleus is Nitrogen-14 (7 protons 7 neutrons). The energy from the emission goes partly to the nucleus and partly to the electron that was created. Because of conservation of momentum, much more of the energy goes to the electron and it gets ejected from the atom. These ejected electrons are called "beta particles" and you can monitor the decays by detection of them.
As with all radioactive decays the density of C-14 at any time can be modeled with an exponential equation. The characteristic time for the exponential, the half-life, indicates how long it takes for half of the C-14 atoms to undergo beta decay. So if you know how many C-14 atoms are around at the beginning, you can predict how many will be there at any point in time in the future (provided of course that there are enough of them that the statistical argument makes sense.) Similarly, if you know how many there were at at the beginning, and you know how many there are now, you can predict how long ago the "beginning" was. Finally, if you know the current concentration and you know exactly how long ago you wish to measure, you can use it to determine the original concentration at that time. This last calculation will be important later.
Willard Libby proposed using the concentrations of C-14 in organic material as a means of dating a substance. C-14 is constantly being created in the upper atmosphere from interactions between high energy photons from the sun and atmospheric molecules. While an organism is alive it is constantly exchanging its carbon atoms with those in the atmosphere, so the C-14 concentration in any living being is similar to the global concentration at that time. This is because chemically isotopes behave (almost) exactly the same, so the organism does not distinguish between C-14, C-13 or C-12. After it dies, it stops incorporating carbon from the atmosphere. If we know the global concentration at the time it died (more on that later) and we can measure the concentration now, then we can calculate the date that it stopped exchanging carbon with the environment as described above. Therefore, radiocarbon analysis of the C-14 content in organic material can be used to determine the death date of organic material. For this result Libby won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Now we will discuss some of the details along with the various sources of error that arise.
Carbon-14 Measurement Errors
The first error that we will look at comes from the difficulty in actually measuring the C-14 content in a sample. As with any scientific measurement there is an associated error bar. There are several ways to look for the C-14 content. One is to look for the decay by measuring the emitted beta particles. A more popular method (due to better accuracy) is to convert the entire material to a gas and run it through a charge-mass spectrometer, that can distinguish between isotopes of carbon. You can read about the various techniques here.
Both these results will have errors based on the limitations of the actual measurement technique and due to statistical problems. The statistical error is generally small compared to the measurement error. You can reduce the error by comparing results from different samples and different techniques/laboratories. But you can never make it zero.
Finding Appropriate Material
Finding appropriate organic material can be difficult. The best material (at least for the Ancient Near East region) appears to be stuff like burnt seeds and stuff like olive pits which can be found in fire pits and cooking areas. Stuff like structural wood tends to be a bad choice since it's always possible that the wood is old, having been used for a previous structure, and using it will make the date appear older than it really is.
One common form of systematic error arises from improper association of a sample with a specific archaeological stratum. In other words, you find some burnt olive pits and think they belong to the city, but it turns out they are just the remains from hundreds of years later when some nomads made a makeshift camp in the ruins. Obviously, the more samples you have, the less likely you are to make an error like this. Yet there can be systematic errors due to associating some result with an incorrect archaeological stratum.
This error is entirely in the domain of the archaeologists, and it's impossible to handicap it without being involved in the actual excavation, or by scanning the detailed reports. Nevertheless, when you see large discrepancies in dates between archaeologists, chances are that the reason is because they are arguing over which stratum belongs to which set of measurements.
Constraining Initial C-14 Fraction
Libby assumed that the C-14 fraction in the atmosphere was a constant. It turns out this is not true. It can vary slightly. However, slight variations can mean big differences with regard to dating, so it's important to figure out how much carbon was in the background atmosphere at all the possible dates that the organism may have died.
The way this is done is primarily through "dendrochronology" The idea here is that you can use trees as a method of determining the C-14 concentration at any time in the past. The inner rings of a tree are not living anymore, so they do not exchange carbon. Therefore, you can cut down a long lived tree and get information on the global C-14 concentration for each year that the tree was alive, just by comparing the carbon at each ring. You know the current concentration, and you know the time, so you can get the initial concentration. Then if you have trees that died a long time ago, but were preserved, you can find overlaps with known trees. With enough work we can build a database going back thousands of years. Indeed the carbon calibration curves we have go back around 40-50 thousand years. These curves are constantly being refined, but they are pretty robust for the area in question for Biblical archaeology.
I said "global" concentration above, but that's not entirely correct. Global here means a sizeable region surrounding the area in question. There are indeed separate calibration curves for the northern and southern hemispheres, and even more local curves for time periods closer to the present (where Biblical results fall.)
Errors from Calibration Curves
While the calibration curves are pretty robust, the fact that the initial concentration varies slightly can increase or decrease the error for a given measurement. It is probably best to use an example, so here's a typical plot that you might see (taken from here).
This plot looks about typical for results I have seen but quoted results dates tend to have errors that are smaller errors +/- 150 years. How?
"Wiggle Matching" and Bayesian Analysis
So the way to do better, as before, is by using multiple measurements. However, here what you're using are multiple measurements from different strata. To use the above example again. Let's say you find some sample that produces exactly 3000 BP. As we noted above, you can't distinguish between 1260 and 1230 BCE. But let's say you dig a bit deeper, and somewhere below you find something else that also produces exactly 3000 BP. You know that the deeper one must be older. So you can say that the deeper one is 1260 BCE and the shallower one is 1230 BCE.
"Wiggle matching" takes multiple results from as many strata as can be found and attempts to match the "wiggles" in the calibration curve as best as possible. This is essentially another massive probability calculation and it is usually done by computer codes. If you have a lot of samples from a given site, you can usually constrain the results far better than with a single sample.
But archaeologists can go even further. If you can make estimates on things like how far apart in time different strata were, or if you know from Egyptian or Assyrian chronologies when cities were destroyed (or claimed to be destroyed) then you can put those assumptions into the model as well. This can produce very accurate estimates (less than 50 years error), even for results where the error in the C-14 measurements are large. But they depend on the assumptions you put into the model and your confidence in them. These models are "Bayesian" in that they attempt to determine the probability that a given set of date measurements could produce the actual results.
This is another area where you can have significant disagreement between archaeologists. They might disagree greatly between what assumptions are made. Here, we laymen are in a better position to evaluate the results, since all good archaeologists will state what assumptions, if any, are input into their models. Again though, these only show up in technical papers.
An Example: What I Found About the United Monarchy Debate
A while back I read a collection of essays in "The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating" edited by Levy and Highman, and first published in 2005. As such the results are about 10 years out of date, but that is the extent of my knowledge. The articles were highly technical, and I actually needed to learn about the topics in this post before I could properly appreciate the arguments. There were both detailed excavation reports and tons of results from radiocarbon analysis, similar to the plot I showed above.
The current main point of contention between archaeologists today (or at least in 2005) is whether or not there ever existed a united monarchy under Shlomo (Solomon). On one side is the "conventional chronology" championed first by Dever and now by Amihai Mazar which states that there indeed was such a united monarchy. The alternate view is the "low chronology" offered by Finkelstein which suggests that it never existed. At the heart of the debate are the dating of various monumental structures, specifically city gates, in various cities like Gezer and Hazor. The conventional chronology dates these to around 950 BCE which puts them in the time period of Shlomo. The low chronology dates these to about 880 BCE and attributes them to the reign of the northern kings Omri and Ahab who were the first kings to garner international attention.
As we've noted above, a difference of less than 100 years is typically too small for radiocarbon analysis to distinguish, but each of these sites have many strata, and the articles record some of the most comprehensive attempts at carbon dating analysis to date. Nevertheless, from my perspective the results were inconclusive. Here are where the two sides differed.
1) The main source of disagreement is determining which stratum the monumental structures belong to. You can't date the structure itself, it's not organic, so you have to tie it to some organic material. As far as I know this is unresolved with Finkelstein continuing to insist it's dated to a later structure, and Mazar insisting it's an earlier structure.
2) Another source of disagreement was on the treatment of an outlier radiocarbon result. Various organic material were sent to several different labs, and one produced a date different than the others. From my memory, Finkelstein included these results in his models, but Mazar considered them an outlier and did not include them. As you can imagine this made a big difference on the results of each group's Bayesian analysis. Both groups stress the need for repeated measurements.
3) The disagreement includes anthropological models as well, specifically with regard to the appearance of specific pottery types that appear to have spread from the Philistine cities. Finkelstein thinks that it took a long time for this pottery to spread, Mazar says it spread quicker.
As you can see, when you start dealing with the details of these analyses, you very quickly get into the weeds. As a layman who is not involved in the measurements, I think it is absolutely impossible to determine who has the better argument. As such, I put the existence of the united monarchy as an unknown, and will wait until a consensus is reached on the matter.
Well Then, What Can We Know for Sure?
While the dating of monumental gates is still under question, other conclusions from archaeologists have reached a higher level of consensus. For example, the city of Yericho (Jericho) has a strong consensus that it was destroyed long before Yehoshua (Joshua) could possibly have arrived. Similarly with the city of Ai. There are fringe opinions otherwise, but overall there is very little academic debate on these matters anymore. Indeed Yericho, is a good example of carbon dating resolving a contradiction between archaeologists. As it provided enough resolution to confirm the early date proposed by Kathleen Kenyon instead of the later date proposed by Bryant Wood. You will still see apologetic answers using Bryant Wood's analysis, but this is disingenuous, and you should be able to recognize it as such.
There are other similar events which we can date, such as the destruction of major cities. Destructions tend to be easier to date because a lot of stuff tends to get burned and buried. These include sites like Ugarit and Hattusa which aren't mentioned in Biblical texts but belong to the period prior to their composition.
All in all, it pays to be cognizant of the claims being made, the associated error, and whether there's a consensus or a disagreement between the people that are closest to the measurement.
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