Hebrew Bible

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Progress for American Jews? Tis the season for lots and lots of Hanukkah junk

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Progress for American Jews? Tis the season for lots and lots of Hanukkah junk

It's hard to do justice to ancient holy days in throw-pillow slogans.

Consider the Zazzle item offering a menorah with an un-orthodox number of candles, along with: "Imagine if your cellphone was at 10% but lasted 8 days. Now you understand Hanukkah."

Maybe not. Or how about the Bed, Bath & Beyond pillow stating: "Why is this night different from all other nights? Happy Hanukkah."

Actually, that's the most famous question from rites during a Passover Seder dinner.

"There's no quality control with any of this stuff. No one's being careful with decisions about what's good and what's bad," said journalist Mira Fox of the Forward, a progressive Jewish website. "The point is to sell stuff. It doesn't need to be good stuff. It's just stuff.

"Basically, it's a lot of people saying, 'We can find a way to sell stuff to Jews during the holidays, along with selling lots of stuff to everybody else.' "

Hanukkah began rather early this year, starting at sundown this past Sunday (November 28) and extending for eight days. This placed the "Festival of Lights" closer to Thanksgiving -- near the start of the merchandizing frenzy known as The Holidays.

The story at the heart of this home-centered season dates to 165 B.C., when Jews, led by the Maccabee family, defeated Greek and Syrian oppressors. When the victors reentered their temple, only one container of ritually pure oil could be found for its eternal flame. Tradition says this one-day supply burned for eight days. Thus, Jews light menorah candles during Hanukkah, one on the first night, increasing to eight.

"It's not a biblical holiday. Hanukkah is not in the Hebrew Bible. … God is not a huge part of this story," said Fox. "Honestly, I don't think a lot of people understand what this holiday is about."

That's certainly true in the American marketplace.


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What can modern people (journalists even) know about biblical figures like Joshua?

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What can modern people (journalists even) know about biblical figures like Joshua?

THE QUESTION (as raised by The New York Times):

What can we know about biblical figures, for instance Joshua?

THE ANSWER:

How do we know what we know, or think we know, or can know, or might know?

“Epistemology” is the branch of philosophy that ponders such matters. It may seem odd, but philosophers even ponder if there’s any basis for believing that anything we remember from before one second ago actually happened!

Back to earth, how do we assess what can be known about people and events from long ago that we ourselves did not witness? One approach is the ideology known as “logical positivism,’ which rules out supernatural claims in advance by definition and thus wipes out many assertions by the great world religions. That’s a simple method, but other philosophers say it’s far too simple.

Well, then, what can we know about the past, whether religious or not? The answer is almost entirely written records that have been passed down to us. This is obviously central with the biblical faiths of Judaism and Christianity, which center heavily upon historical narratives.

Which is why The Religion Guy continues to ponder eight words The New York Times found fit to print in a recent feature about Muslims in Iraq tending what they believe is the tomb of Joshua. Israelis say instead that the ancient patriarch is buried 20 miles north of Jerusalem.

Both claimed locations invite skepticism. But the influential newspaper went much further, informing readers: “There is no historical evidence Joshua actually existed.”

This is not a particularly prudent thing to say in the Muslim world, where Joshua is revered as an actual prophet of God in the line that culminated with the Prophet Muhammad, had no doubt Joshua existed, this according to authoritative hadith texts. Joshua is also referred to in the Quran, though not by name (18:60). The earlier Jewish and Christian Scriptures depict Joshua as an actual person.

In effect, the Times writer and copy editors tell us the Jewish Bible contains nothing that should count as historical evidence. Think about that. Liberal university professors will often teach that a particular Bible section has flawed evidence, or mixes fact with myth, or even is pure fiction. But they do not dismiss all evidence that the Bible records.


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'The Bible Code': What was that all about, other than a headline-grabbing pseudo-mystery?

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THE QUESTIONS:

What was “The Bible Code”? Was it valid? Did it prove anything about God, or the scriptures or world events?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Time for a nostalgic look back at “The Bible Code” sensation, upon the death last month of journalist Michael Drosnin — who scored big with his 1997 best-seller of that title and two sequels that inspired imitators, though Hollywood’s film version never got off the ground.

Drosnin’s titillating claim was that the Hebrew Bible’s text contained secretly coded, uncanny predictions of phenomena across the subsequent thousands of years that could only be revealed through modern computers. The fad has not totally died out. Inevitably, we even got the 2015 pamphlet “Donald Trump in the Bible Code: New Testament Echoes of America’s Future Leader.”

Some thought Drosnin’s book meant the biblical God not only inspired the Bible but cleverly knitted in hidden messages for contemporary humanity. Yet, as The New York Times obituary noted, Drosnin himself was a devoted atheist from his days at Hebrew school in New York City.

All quite diverting.

But as we’ll see, experts both scientific and religious deemed the whole business to be bogus.

The story in brief: The traditional Jewish practice of “gematria” assigns a number to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet to calculate the numerical value of a word. A variation originated with Orthodox Rabbi Michael Weissmandel, who moved from Eastern Europe to the U.S. following the Nazi Holocaust and died in 1957. He looked for patterns through Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) counted by hand, for instance seeing what a word produced by every 50th letter in a text might show.

Intrigued by this, Eliyahu Rips of Israel’s Hebrew University worked with two fellow mathematicians to manipulate the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis into lines of various lengths. They reported discovering the names of 32 leading rabbis across Jewish history located on the grid near their dates of birth, death, or both.

After a major scientific journal rejected the trio’s article about this, it was accepted in 1994 by the respected, peer-reviewed Statistical Science as “a challenging puzzle” for discussion.


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Really old debate is back: Does the Old Testament belong in Christian Bibles?

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Really old debate is back: Does the Old Testament belong in Christian Bibles?

NORMAN’S QUESTION:

Do the Old and New Testaments belong together?

(Commenting from a stance critical toward Christians, Norman adds that ignorance of history underlies their “comfortable view that the Bible is one and that there is no problem between the Old and New Testaments.”)

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

This classic and complex theme is erupting anew thanks to a U.S. Protestant megachurch pastor cited below. Also, churches have long faced strife over the authority and interpretation of the Old Testament due to the now-disputed teaching (that was carried over into the New Testament) against homosexual relations.

In this “Religion Q & A” item (your new postings via the Website always welcome!!), Norman accurately calls attention to some history. The status of the Old Testament became a pressing issue the church needed to decide in the 2nd Century A.D. Marcion of Pontus, among others, drew a radical distinction between what he saw as the problematic Yahweh of the Old Testament versus the loving God and Father of Jesus Christ in writings that were to form the New Testament.

The church declared Marcion a heretic and consolidated for all time that the Old Testament is part of its Bible alongside the New Testament books, authoritative Scripture for Christians as well as Jews.

Norman further observes that influential 20th Century liberal Protestant thinkers in Germany such as Adolf von Harnack and Rudolf Bultmann echoed Marcion by downplaying the spiritual worth of the Old Testament. He says they “unknowingly contributed to the rise” of the so-called German Christians with their “non- and anti-Jewish” version of the faith. This movement pretty much gained control over Protestantism and accommodated the blatantly anti-Semitic Nazi rulers. Theologians like “neo-orthodox” titan Karl Barth courageously defied this unbiblical heresy in the great Theological Declaration of Barmen (1934).


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An issue lurking in some news stories: In Old Testament, was God guilty of 'genocide'?

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An issue lurking in some news stories: In Old Testament, was God guilty of 'genocide'?

The Religion Guy poses this complex historical question himself instead of the customary answer to an item posted via “Send Your Questions In” -- new submissions very much welcomed.

There’s been important debate on this issue recently, and a new book proposes sweeping reinterpretation of the Old Testament depiction of Israel’s “Conquest” of the Holy Land under Joshua. More on that below.

Richard Dawkins, a fervent foe of religion, indicts the biblical God for inciting “genocide” in the Bible’s conquest passages and verses like Deuteronomy 20:16-18 that direct believers to wipe out neighboring populations. Many U.S. Jews and Christians frankly admit this material is troubling.

Let’s begin with three standard Jewish commentaries on those Deuteronomy verses.

“Pentateuch & Haftorahs,” a classic Orthodox compilation by J.H. Hertz, Britain’s longtime chief rabbi, observes that Joshua informed Canaanites before the invasion so they could flee bloodshed, offered peace to all, and only waged combat if they insisted on it. (That was relatively humane for violent times 3,000 years ago.)

The quest for a homeland, the commentary observes, is part of all human history including most European nations. Israel added to that the “ethical justification” of countering Canaan’s “depravity,” for instance human sacrifice. Moreover, “the whole moral and spiritual future of mankind was involved.”


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Why do Jewish and Christian Bibles put the books in a different order?

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Why do Jewish and Christian Bibles put the books in a different order?

GORDON’S QUESTION:

Why is there a different order of the books of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish and Christian editions?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

As we’ll see, there’s revived debate about this. For starters, one key fact is that the contrasting lists did not result from conflict between Judaism and Christianity but rather the varied sequences used by Jews.

Overview: The Jewish Bible and Protestant Old Testament have the same contents, but list the books in different order. Catholicism’s ordering is similar to Protestants’ but its “canon” (recognized Scriptures) includes “deuterocanonical” books not found in the Jewish and Protestant Bibles, while the Orthodox add further deuterocanonical materials.

Jews organized the biblical books into categories in this order: (1) Law, or Torah, the first five books with specially revered status. (2) Prophets or Nevi’im, a confusing label since this sections begins with books of history, followed by prophets ending with Malachi. (3) Writings or Kethuyim, a variegated collection dominated by the Psalms, including books accepted as Jewish Scripture later than the Law and Prophets. The initials T, N, and K produce the acronym Tanakh that Jews use for the Bible.

With ordering, the chief issue is where to fit Chronicles (or 1 and 2 Chronicles) and whether it properly concludes the Hebrew Bible. Chronicles, which repeats much of the history covered in the colorful Samuel (or 1 and 2 Samuel) and Kings (or 1 and 2 Kings) was compiled round 400 B.C.E., many centuries after the events.

Unlike Samuel and Kings, the Harper Study Bible observes, Chronicles omits most “references to the defects and the sins of David and Solomon,” emphasizes “the Temple and the Davidic line,” virtually ignores the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and warns and encourages future generations.


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Attention New York Times copy desk: It's time to buy more reference Bibles (and use them)

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Truth be told, the Bible is a very complicated book. It also doesn't help that there are many different versions of it.

Why bring this up? Well, it's time to look at another error about the Bible found in a story published in The New York Times. Another error? Click here for some background.

This one isn't quite as spectacular as the famous case in which the Gray Lady published a piece on tourism in Jerusalem that originally contained this rather infamous sentence:

 "Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty."

That one still amazes me, every time that I read it. This error led to a piece at The Federalist by M.Z. "GetReligionista emerita" Hemingway with this memorable headline: "Will Someone Explain Christianity To The New York Times?"

That error was rather low-hanging fruit, as these things go. Surely there are professionals at the copy desk of the world's most powerful newspaper who have heard that millions and millions of traditional Christians believe in the Resurrection of Jesus?

This time around we are dealing with something that is more complicated. To be honest, if I was reading really fast I might have missed this one myself, and my own Christian tradition's version of the Bible is linked to this error.

So what do we have here? Well, it's a nice, friendly piece about some very bright New Yorkers, with this headline: "Testament to Their Marriage: Couple Compete in Worldwide Bible Contest." Try to spot the error as you read this overture, in context:

A question in the lightning round seemed to make Yair Shahak think twice.
The question was, “Who struck the Philistines until his hand grew tired and stuck to the sword?”


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Dry bones transformed and other visions: What do Jews believe about life after death?

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Dry bones transformed and other visions: What do Jews believe about life after death?

NORMAN’S QUESTION:

The Hebrew Bible makes no mention of an afterlife. When did this belief come into being among the Israelites, and why?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

This is an appropriate follow-up to our December 1 answer to Paula concerning “what does Christianity say happens to believers after death?”

True, the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (or for Christians the Old Testament) has no explicit and detailed concept of the afterlife such as we have in the New Testament. This whole topic has been considerably more central and developed in Christianity than in Judaism. However, Jewish authors offer a more complex scenario than that Jewish Scripture “makes no mention of an afterlife.” They observe that while most biblical references are vague, we see an evolution in belief. Some particulars:

Frequent references in Genesis, followed by the Psalms and the prophets, say that the dead abide in a shadowy state called sheol. Such passages as Ecclesiastes 9:5, Job 14:21, and Psalm 88:11-12 indicate that this involves no conscious existence.

On the other hand, the Bible depicts forms of life beyond death in Genesis 5:24 (Enoch taken directly to God), 2 Kings 2:11 (the same with Elijah), 1 Samuel 2:6 (God “brings down to sheol and raises up”), Psalm 49:15 (“God will ransom my soul from the power of sheol, for he will receive me”), and Saul’s notable conversation with the deceased Samuel in 1 Samuel 28.

Also, sages interpreted the prophet Ezekiel’s “dry bones” vision in chapter 37 as depicting a communal afterlife for Israel, and the Talmud saw Isaiah 60:21 (“they shall possess the land forever”) in terms of bodily resurrection.


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Was the Bible's Abraham a real person or only a fictional character?

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Was the Bible's Abraham a real person or only a fictional character?

MARK’S QUESTION:

Liberal biblical scholars say Abraham never lived and was a literary invention of “priestly” writers in exile in Babylon. Since we have no archaeological data on him, how do we know he really lived?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The patriarch Abraham is all-important as the revered founding forefather and exemplar of faith in the one God, this not only for Jews and Christians but Muslims, whose Quran parallels some of the biblical account on him in Genesis 11–25. Islam believes Abraham was a prophet in the line that concluded with Muhammad. He is also Muhammad’s ancestor, just as the New Testament lists Abraham in the genealogy of Jesus.

For Orthodox Judaism, traditional Christianity, and the entirety of Islam, it’s unthinkable that Abraham would have been a fictional character. The stakes are high for the Bible, which presents the Abraham material in extensive narrative history, not obvious mythology. Even scholars who see Genesis 1-10 as mythological may think actual history begins with the patriarchs while, as Mark states, liberal religious and secular scholars question his existence.

In pondering such questions, the archaeologist’s well-worn maxim is that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Yes, no texts about Abraham apart from the Bible survived. The “Aburahana” in Egyptian texts from 1900 BC(E) is thought to be someone else. But that doesn’t prove he never lived. Remains from such a long-ago epoch are necessarily scattershot, even for grand potentates with court scribes much less Abraham, a relatively obscure figure during his lifetime and a semi-nomad who moved among locations.


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