INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography ............................................................................i
Course Scope .....................................................................................1
LECTURE GUIDES
LECTURE 1
Reading Other People’s Scriptures ....................................................4
LECTURE 2
Hinduism and the Vedas...................................................................11
LECTURE 3
What Is Heard—Upanishads ............................................................19
LECTURE 4
What Is Remembered—Epics ..........................................................26
LECTURE 5
Laws of Manu and Bhagavad Gita ...................................................33
LECTURE 6
Related Traditions—Sikh Scriptures .................................................40
LECTURE 7
Judaism—People of the Book ..........................................................47
LECTURE 8
Five Books of Torah ..........................................................................54
LECTURE 9
Prophets and Writings ......................................................................61
LECTURE 10
Apocrypha and Dead Sea Scrolls.....................................................68
ii
LECTURE 11
Oral Torah—Mishnah and Talmud ....................................................75
LECTURE 12
Related Traditions—Zoroastrian Scriptures 82
LECTURE 13
The Three Baskets of Buddhism 89
LECTURE 14
Vinaya and Jataka 96
LECTURE 15
Theravada Sutras 103
LECTURE 16
Mahayana Sutras ...........................................................................111
LECTURE 17
Pure Land Buddhism and Zen ........................................................118
LECTURE 18
Tibetan Vajrayana ...........................................................................126
LECTURE 19
Related Traditions—Jain Scriptures ...............................................134
LECTURE 20
Five Confucian Classics .................................................................141
LECTURE 21
Four Books of Neo-Confucianism...................................................149
LECTURE 22
Daoism and the Daodejing .............................................................156
LECTURE 23
The Three Caverns of Daoist Scriptures ........................................163
LECTURE 24
Related Traditions—Shinto and Tenrikyo .......................................170
LECTURE 25
Christian Testaments Old and New ................................................177
LECTURE 26
Gospels and Acts............................................................................184
LECTURE 27
Letters and Apocalypse ..................................................................191
LECTURE 28
Apocryphal Gospels .......................................................................198
LECTURE 29
Related Traditions—Mormon Scriptures.........................................206
LECTURE 30
Islam and Scriptural Recitation .......................................................213
LECTURE 31
Holy Qur’an ....................................................................................220
LECTURE 32
Hadith and Sufism ..........................................................................228
LECTURE 33
Related Traditions—Baha’i Scriptures ............................................235
LECTURE 34
Abandoned Scriptures—Egyptian and Mayan................................243
LECTURE 35
Secular Scripture—U.S. Constitution .............................................250
LECTURE 36
Heavenly Books, Earthly Connections ...........................................257
iv
SUPPLEmENTaL maTERIaL
Recommended Texts and Translations ..........................................264
Bibliography ....................................................................................268
Judaism—People of the Book
Lecture 7
I
n the next few lectures, we’ll explore the contents and origins of the Hebrew Bible and the role it has played in Judaism over the centuries.
We’ll see how the Hebrew Bible is connected to other texts that some Jews have regarded as sacred at different times and places, and we’ll compare it to the scriptures of other religions. But we’ll start in the middle, with the story of one particular copy of the Hebrew Bible: the Aleppo Codex. Many scholars consider this to be the oldest (c. 930 C.E.), most complete, and most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible, even though a large portion of it has been mysteriously missing since the 1940s.
Production of the Aleppo Codex
• The Aleppo Codex was produced in a workshop overseen by one of the great masters of Jewish scripture production, Aaron ben Asher. He was a Masorete, that is, part of a group of scribes and scholars active in the 7th to the 11th centuries and dedicated to preserving the text of the Hebrew Bible as accurately as possible.
• These scholars faced two challenges, the first of which was the inevitability of errors in hand copying and the replication of errors in subsequent copies. The Masoretes came up with various techniques of quality control designed to detect such errors, such as counting the exact number of verses, words, and letters in biblical manuscripts.
• The second challenge was trying to establish the correct pronunciation of the text, which was more difficult than we might assume because Hebrew is written with consonants only. There were centuries of tradition in reading the Hebrew Bible, of course, but the Masoretes tried to fix exact pronunciations by adding marks to indicate vowels, accents, and pauses.
Later History of the Codex
• About a century after it was first created, the Aleppo Codex was bought by the Karaite community at Jerusalem (c. 1050). The Karaites were Jews who rejected the oral Torah of the rabbis (the Talmud), instead focusing exclusively on what was written in the Hebrew Bible. Naturally, they were interested in using the most accurate text possible.
• In 1099, the codex was taken away from Jerusalem as plunder by Christians in the First Crusade and held for ransom. Karaites in Ashkelon borrowed money
from Jews in Egypt The aleppo Codex, now housed in the Shrine of the Book in the Israel museum, has been
to rescue the codex. at the center of an international mystery since the 1940s.
• Eventually, the book ended up in Cairo, in the care of rabbinical Jews, where it became known for its meticulous accuracy. Many scholars, including the great Maimonides, consulted it.
• In the last half of the 14th century, the great-great-great grandson of Maimonides took the codex to Aleppo, Syria, where it remained for 600 years, locked away in the central synagogue. In 1943, concerned Jews in Jerusalem sent a Hebrew University lecturer to Aleppo to gain permission to take the codex to a safer location or, if need be, even to steal it. Unfortunately, he did neither.
• In November 1947, the day after the UN voted to establish the state of Israel, there was rioting in Aleppo, and a mob broke into and burned the synagogue. Someone, however, managed to save part of the codex. It was smuggled out of Syria and taken to Israel
in 1958; today, most of the codex is in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.
• The codex is missing a few pages here and there, and most disappointingly, nearly the entire Torah has been torn out. There is, however, the tantalizing possibility that the missing pages might someday turn up. One page came to light in 1982, and another fragment was identified in 1988.
Origins of the Torah
• The sacred text contained in the Aleppo Codex is not the Old Testament. As we will see in a later lecture, early Christians regarded the Jewish scriptures as sacred, and they adopted a Greek translation called the Septuagint as part of their own canon. But there are differences in the number and order of the books in the Septuagint compared to the Hebrew scriptures. Further, some of the “Hebrew” Bible is written in the later language of Aramaic.
• Probably the best name for this sacred text is the one used by Jews themselves: Tanakh, which is an acronym consisting of the first letters of the three major divisions: Torah (the first five books, ascribed to Moses), Nevi’im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings). Together, these constitute a library of Hebrew texts in many different genres, written over a 1,000-year period.
• For a long time, these writings circulated separately, with some books being regarded as authoritative in some communities but not others. Eventually, a core group of documents was recognized by all Jews as sacred, though this worked out differently for each of the three biblical divisions of Tanakh.
• The oldest compositions of the ancient Hebrews were originally passed down orally. Starting around the 10th century B.C.E., perhaps at the court of King David, various oral traditions were combined and recorded. Over the next few centuries, during the time of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., the texts were further revised. By
the time of the Babylonian Conquest in 586 B.C.E., it appears that the Torah as we know it today had taken shape.
• When Judah was conquered and its leading citizens were taken captive to Babylon, it seemed as if the Jews would lose their identity as a distinct people. But the Babylonians were themselves conquered by the Persians in 539 B.C.E., and the new king, Cyrus the Great, agreed to let the Jews return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
• The return did not go smoothly; there was conflict with the Jews who had remained in Judea, and it took two waves of immigration and more than 20 years to rebuild the Temple, which was dedicated in 515 B.C.E. (This is the beginning of the Second Temple period.) In 458 B.C.E, another group of Jews from Babylon returned to Judea under the leadership of Ezra the scribe, and they were joined in 445 by more Jewish immigrants led by Nehemiah.
• Ezra and Nehemiah were appalled at the corruption and laxity they found among their coreligionists in Judea. In an attempt to reform and unify the community, Ezra gathered the people together and read aloud “the book of the Law of Moses.” Modern scholars believe that this “book of the Law” was the Torah. Thereafter, the people began to try to live their lives in accordance with the Torah; thus, Ezra started the transformation of the Jews into “the people of the book.”
Origins of the Prophets and Writings
• If the Torah was canonized around 400 B.C.E., the process took a bit longer for the second section of the Tanakh, the Prophets.
o In Jewish Bibles, there are two subdivisions of this section: the Former Prophets (Joshua through Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12 Minor Prophets).
o It appears that an early version of the history of the Hebrews was written shortly before the Exile and then revised by Jews in Babylon. There were also extensive revisions and additions made to the books of the so-called writing prophets during the Exile, though these books probably circulated separately. Eventually, a standard collection came to be accepted as canonical around 200 B.C.E.
• But the third section of the Tanakh, the Writings, was still openended in the 1st century C.E. Today, the Writings include Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, and the Five Scrolls that are associated with Jewish festivals. This list of works wasn’t agreed on until the 2nd or 3rd century C.E., and even then, it wasn’t decided by a specific leader or a council. Rather, over time, the rabbis gradually came into agreement.
• Earlier Jewish communities, however, had larger collections of sacred texts. By the late Second Temple period, that is, before the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E., many Jews were living far from Judea, across the Roman Empire. Not all of these Roman Jews were fluent in Hebrew or even in Aramaic; thus, they needed translations of their sacred texts. One of the most prominent of these was a Greek rendition called the Septuagint (“the Seventy”).
• A Greek rendition of the remainder of the Hebrew Bible eventually rounded out the Septuagint, but where the Greek Torah and the Prophets had the same books as the Tanakh, the rest of the Septuagint included additional books. The first Christians adopted the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, and that tradition has continued into Catholic Bibles today. Early Protestants, however, relegated biblical books that were in Greek but not Hebrew to a separate section called the Apocrypha, and after some time, they stopped publishing them as part of their Bibles.
• Why weren’t the extra books in the Septuagint accepted by later Jews as scripture? When the rabbis were arguing over which texts belonged in the Writings section of the Tanakh, they had two basic criteria: The books had to be in Hebrew, and they had to be at least as old as Ezra. These criteria eliminated some books for which the Hebrew originals had been lost (or had never existed) and some later books.
o But several Jewish groups in the late Second Temple period thought that even more books should be accepted as scripture. Among these groups was the dissident community of Qumran, producers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
o Other Jews at the time wrote and treasured additional texts, known as pseudepigrapha, none of which was included in the Tanakh.
A Text-Centered Religion
• In many ways, the Jews became “the people of the book” through a series of losses. The ancient Israelites were connected to their God through the land he had promised them, the prophets who spoke in his name, the temple where he received sacrifices, and the kingly line he had established (the Davidic dynasty).
o During the Exile, the Judeans in Babylon lost all four of these connections.
o When the Jews returned to their land, the Davidic kings and the prophets were gone; thus, they compensated by consolidating their national histories and the writings of the prophets, starting with the five books of the Torah that were ascribed to the greatest of the prophets, Moses.
• After the Great Revolt in 66–70, the holy city of Jerusalem was leveled by the Romans, The Second Temple was destroyed, and the dispersion of the Jews was accelerated. The Jews needed something to bind them as a people.
o The rabbis took their lead from Ezra the scribe and created a community that would be centered on a specific text. This innovation would eventually affect most of the world’s population through the influence of Christianity and Islam.
o Once the focus of Jewish identity became the Tanakh, it became more important than ever to carefully define its contents and the exact form the text would take forever after.
Suggested Reading
Coogan, The Old Testament.
Friedman, The Aleppo Codex.
Halbertal, People of the Book.
Rogerson, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible.
Silver, The Story of Scripture.
Questions to Consider
1. What are the three major divisions of Jewish scripture, and why is the Hebrew Bible often called the Tanakh?
2. How did Jews ensure the accurate transmission of their sacred texts?
Five Books of Torah
Lecture 8
it critically.
Influences of the Torah
the foundations of Western civilization. missionaries was also a subtle influence of the Torah. expected to find a coherent set of causes and effects underlying the natural world, they didn’t look for one.
• In addition to its historical significance, the Torah also serves as a source of guidance and comfort for large numbers of people, despite the fact that the world is quite different today than it was 2,500 years ago. One reason this ancient text remains relevant is that its meaning and application have been continuously debated and reevaluated.
Contents of the Torah
• The book of Genesis opens with 11 chapters about the early history of the world and humanity. In chapter 12, however, the focus shifts to the story of one particular family, starting with Abraham and extending to his descendants, the Hebrews or Israelites (named after Abraham’s grandson, Israel).
o God chooses Abraham and promises him land, numerous offspring, fame, and a key role in human history. He makes a covenant with Abraham and, in return, requires circumcision of the male members of the clan as a sign of that covenant.
o There are complications along the way—barrenness, political conflict, family squabbles, and a test of Abraham’s faithfulness—but God makes good on his promises to Abraham, his son Isaac, his grandson Jacob (renamed Israel), and Israel’s 12 sons.
• In Exodus, we read that the Israelites were reduced to slavery in Egypt and that God appointed Moses to rescue them. Leading the people through the desert to Mount Sinai, Moses received commandments from God—not only the Ten Commandments but also laws regarding personal injuries, property rights, festivals, and so on. At Sinai, God makes a new, conditional covenant with his people: He will bless and protect them as long as they keep his commandments and worship only him.
• Leviticus consists almost entirely of religious regulations for the Israelites: instructions concerning offerings and sacrifices, the ordination of priests, festivals, permissible foods, and how to deal with sin.
• Numbers gets its name from a census of the Israelites in its first chapters. God had intended to give them the Promised Land of Canaan (later called Judea or Palestine) shortly after the revelation at Sinai, but they rebelled when they learned they would have to fight to take possession of it.
o God then condemned the Israelites to wander for 40 years in the wilderness, until every adult had died except Caleb and Joshua. Not even Moses makes it into the Promised Land.
o Still, God keeps his people alive by providing the miraculous food manna, and he blesses them so that their clothes and sandals don’t wear out (Deut. 29:5). There are stories of travels, apostasy, warfare, divine healing, and even a talking donkey.
• The last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy (“Second Law”) consists of three speeches given by Moses to the Israelites on the plains of Moab shortly before his death and their long-awaited entry into the Promised Land. Moses reaffirms the covenant, reiterates its requirements, and pronounces blessings and curses upon the people, depending on their faithfulness.
• The God of the ancient Israelites seems similar in many ways to the gods of other nations at the time, yet there were important differences, as well, highlighted in the term ethical monotheism. The Hebrew God insisted that his people worship him alone, and he cared not just about rituals and sacrifices but also about how the Israelites treated one another.
Religious Perspectives
• For more than 2,000 years, Jews assumed that the Torah was revealed by God to Moses, who then wrote it all down. As we saw in the last lecture, the Masoretes developed one standard form of
the text between 600 and 1000 C.E. The Torah was divided into 54 weekly sections to be read over the course of a year in Sabbath services. In the 2nd century B.C.E., Antiochus Epiphanes, an antiSemitic ruler, banned the public reading of the Torah, and Jews substituted 54 selections from the Prophets. Today, both are chanted every week in synagogue.
• The most prized possession in any synagogue is the Torah scroll. Even today, these scrolls must be handwritten to exacting specifications. When the members of the congregation hear the words of the Torah, it is as if they, too, were at Sinai or on the plains of Moab, receiving and renewing the covenant given to their ancestors.
• The Torah was not only encountered in ritual and worship, but it was also studied intensely. The main messages of covenant and ethical monotheism came through clearly, but the rabbis also noticed gaps, redundancies, and contradictions, which they sought to explain and harmonize in quite sophisticated ways.
o The Torah depicts God as righteous and compassionate, yet he can also be difficult to understand. His commandment to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is a famous and troubling example. Further, God’s commandments sometimes make perfect sense, while at other times, the regulations seem arbitrary.
o In their Torah study, the rabbis were particularly concerned with the application of its precepts. The point was to live in accordance with the laws of Moses to sustain the covenant.
• Christians, who adopted the Torah as part of their own sacred text, saw the law of Moses as superseded in Christ; thus, they mostly ignore the regulations of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, or they apply them selectively, focusing on the Ten Commandments. Christians often criticize the hundreds of detailed rules as overly legalistic or ritualized, yet from a Jewish perspective, the effort required to live in accordance with Torah is a way to make one’s whole life sacred.
• Debates about how best to adapt an ancient text to the modern world still continue among both Jews and Christians. The stories told in the Torah are still inspiring to many, but perhaps we need to read those narratives in different ways in light of contemporary notions of gender roles, racial equality, democracy, science, and religious pluralism.
Scholarly Perspectives
• At about the time of the Enlightenment, scholars of ancient languages and documents began to apply the methods they used in studying these other ancient texts to the Bible. From this perspective, the redundancies and repetitions found in the Bible could be seen as clues to the origins of the text.
o These scholars noticed, for instance, that some passages referred to God as Elohim, rendered into English as “God,” while others used the name Yahweh, written with the consonants YHWH and usually translated as “Lord.” Some passages differed in other ways related to characteristic vocabulary and themes.
o It occurred to scholars that the Torah might not have been written all at once by Moses but might be a composite of different sources assembled over time. This view may challenge traditional assumptions, but it is not necessarily dismissive of the Torah as scripture. In fact, many anomalies in the Bible start to make sense when we recognize that the text came into being through a long and complicated process.
• In addition, as scholars deciphered long-lost languages and archaeologists unearthed ancient artifacts, it became easier to understand the Torah in its original historical context. Its narratives could be compared to other creation stories, flood narratives, and national epics.
• By the late 20th century, scholars had arrived at a conception of the Torah as a combination of four basic sources.
o The first is J, which stands for the Yahwist. This scribe, working in the 10th century B.C.E., uses the term Yahweh, called the sacred mountain Sinai, and portrays God in a somewhat anthropomorphic fashion as a deity who communicates directly with humans.
o The second source is E, the Elohist, who uses the term Elohim for God, refers to the sacred mountain as Horeb, and most often shows God working through dreams and angels. This source is dated to the 8th century B.C.E.
o At some point, the J and E sources were combined and augmented by D, the Deuteronomist. This source, dated from the late 7th century, is mostly concerned with the book of Deuteronomy, with its emphasis on centralizing worship
and sacrifice at the Jerusalem Temple.
o Finally, P, the priestly source, was a product of the Exile in the 6th century and is characterized by an interest in order, boundaries, priests, and the tabernacle. Parts of P are interspersed throughout the first five books of the Torah.
• In recent decades, this neat scheme has been disputed. Perhaps E was an oral tradition rather than a written document. Perhaps the four major sources were the products of different scribal
a mezuzah is a piece of handwritten parchment with verses from Deuteronomy 6 and 11, rolled up and placed in a small case, and affixed to the doorpost of a Jewish home.
schools rather than individuals. The various strands of the Torah have proven difficult to disentangle and to date, but nearly all scholars now accept that the text had a long and complicated editorial history.
• The insights of the historical-critical method have been challenging for some believers because they complicate the traditional story, but scholarship has helped us to understand the text more clearly than ever before. And reading the Torah as carefully as possible, with all the scholarly tools available, can be seen as an act of devotion.
Suggested Reading
Alter, trans., The Five Books of Moses.
Berlin and Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible.
Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch.
Coogan, ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible.
Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
Jewish Publication Society, JPS Torah Commentary.
Robinson, Essential Judaism.
Questions to Consider
1. What are the main genres contained in the Torah?
2. Why did this collection of books become the most sacred part of Jewish scripture, and what are its origins, according to scholars?
Prophets and Writings
Lecture 9
T
here is a tremendous variety of material in the Prophets and the Writings, from histories of ancient Israel to the words of the prophets, from wisdom literature to charming narratives, from philosophical disputations to ancient hymns. Regardless of your religious background, you already know some of these texts because they constitute one of the foundations of Western culture; still, you may be surprised at how gritty or earthy some of these writings are. At the center of all of them is the God of Israel, a terrifying and unpredictable being, yet one who is nevertheless devoted to his people Israel and to all of humankind.
Overview of the Prophets and Writings
• As mentioned earlier, the Hebrew Bible is similar but not identical to the Christian Old Testament. Christians have a few extra books (at least in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions) because their versions were originally derived from the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Masoretic text. In the 4th century, there was a turn toward Hebrew by Catholics following the example of Jerome, but Orthodox Christians have continued to use the Septuagint.
• Another noticeable difference is in the arrangement of the books. The Torah ends with Moses on the plains of Moab, giving his last words to the Israelites before they move into the Promised Land. o In Christian Bibles, the Torah is followed by a series of historical books, then poetical and wisdom books, and ending with the Prophets.
o In the Tanakh, the order is somewhat different. Joshua is regarded as the first book of the Former Prophets (Joshua through Kings). Next come the Latter Prophets and then the Writings.
• The Christian ordering puts emphasis on genres, but the Jewish arrangement makes more sense in terms of the canonization of these particular documents. As we have seen, the Writings were the last books to be accepted as canonical, and some of them were among the last to be written.
The Prophets
• The Prophets section begins with Joshua and what appears to be a strikingly successful conquest of the Promised Land by the Israelites. In Judges, however, we discover that the Israelites are not well organized, and a good deal of fighting takes place with other ethnic groups still left in the land and even between different tribes of Israel.
• The books of Samuel and Kings narrate the rise and fall of the monarchy, starting with Saul and moving to David and Solomon. The united kingdom lasts only three generations, and after the death of Solomon, the Israelites split into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.
o Israel has a tumultuous history, replete with coups and assassinations as different families vie for power. In 722 B.C.E., the Israelites are conquered by the Assyrians.
o Judah, on the other hand, is ruled by a single dynasty, the house of David. But in 586 B.C.E., it, too, succumbs to foreign invasion, when the Babylonians take over and exile many of the most prominent and wealthy Jews to Babylon. At this point, the Jews have lost their land, their nation, their monarchy, and their temple, all because, according to the biblical historians, they have been unfaithful to the covenant.
• The Prophets section of the Tanakh continues with the writings of the Latter Prophets, all of whom spell out in detail what was expected of the Israelites by God and where they fell short.
o It begins with the 8th-century-B.C.E. prophet Isaiah (probably more than one author, writing over about two centuries), then moves to Jeremiah (writing at the time of the fall of Judah),
and Ezekiel (writing from Babylon during the Exile). The 12 Minor Prophets come in roughly chronological order, from Hosea in the 8th century to Malachi in the 5th.
o Frequently writing in poetic form, the prophets combine condemnations of wickedness and idolatry with promises of hope and national restoration—that God will not forget his wayward people, even in exile.
• In the Prophets, we see the work of a number of writers and later editors trying to make sense of the political and social catastrophe of Jewish history.
o Since the 1940s, scholars have referred to the sequence of books from Joshua to Kings as the Deuteronomistic History because they narrate the story of the Israelites using the language and theology of the book of Deuteronomy. Israel’s disregard of God’s commands brought on the curses pronounced by Moses at Moab. God is faithful to his promises, even if Israel was not.
o The writings of the Prophets reinforce this message, but they also hold out hope that God will still have mercy on his people—that someday he will gather them together again and usher in the messianic age of peace, good will, and prosperity.
• It is striking that the Jews believed God’s personality and will could be ascertained through the study of history, and this perspective continued with Christians and Muslims. By contrast, there was never quite the same emphasis in India on the accurate recording of the reigns of specific kings, and as a result, the history of early India is much more difficult to recover.
The Writings
• If the Prophets section tends to be focused on the political and religious history of Israel, the Writings are more diverse and broadreaching. The Writings include the stories of Job and Ruth, who were foreigners rather than Hebrews, and Proverbs, which offers universal wisdom that crosses religious and ethnic boundaries.
• The Writings also include books that seem to break all rules. The Song of Songs is erotic love poetry; the author of Ecclesiastes wonders if life is pointless; and after the famous tale of the lion’s den, the book of Daniel veers into strange apocalyptic prophecies. The Psalms praise God and his creation, yet they also express frustration and bewilderment at his inaction. And Job offers one of the most powerful theological explorations in world literature, asking why God allows the righteous to suffer while the evil prosper.
• The Hebrew Bible is a sacred text in conversation with itself, and it’s a striking reminder that religious faith is not necessarily opposed to doubt and questioning. Indeed, another take on the challenge of how different religions and cultures can get along is the Hebrew Bible’s implicit suggestion that one should be wary of people who claim to have all the answers. The Tanakh may be a closed canon, but the reticence of biblical narratives and the abundance of prophetic perspectives can lead to deeper analysis and more fervent seeking.
• The Writings conclude with some historical books—EzraNehemiah and Chronicles—that narrate the story of Israel down to about 400 B.C.E. The Tanakh ends on a note of hope: In the last verses of Chronicles, the Persian king Cyrus fulfills a prophecy of Jeremiah by charging the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
Themes in the Prophets and Writings
• Obviously, there is a great deal of material here, written over many centuries and incorporating different genres and perspectives, but we can identify at least four themes. The first of these is ethical monotheism, a radical idea in the ancient world but one that becomes emphatic in the Prophets.
o References in the Torah might be seen as henotheism, that is, the worship of a single god while accepting the existence of other deities. Thus, Israel should worship only Yahweh, even if other nations have their own gods.
o Isaiah, however, stresses that there is only one God in the universe and that any others are fakes or figments of human imagination. This one universal God cares not just about receiving offerings of meat and grain but about how we treat one another, particularly the most vulnerable among us. There are elements of social justice in most major religions, but the declarations along these lines of the prophets are particularly powerful.
• A second theme concerns the mission and destiny of Israel. At first, Yahweh seems similar to a tribal God, concerned mostly with his own people, and the Former Prophets constitutes a national history. But the Prophets once again expands that vision and argues that even though God has his chosen people, that people has been chosen as a means to bless the entire world. Isaiah, for example, quotes God as saying, “I will also make you a light of nations, That My salvation may reach the ends of the earth’” (Isa. 49:6, Jewish Publication Society Tanakh).
• A third theme is God’s faithfulness and loving kindness. In numerous places in the Hebrew Bible, God seems like a vengeful destroyer of the wicked,
yet it is also clear that he is a compassionate, merciful deity, a loving father figure Ruth makes a brave promise to stand by her mother-in-law, Naomi, but the two women have no food and no means of support.
who enters into covenantal relations with his children and has their best interests at heart, even when they do not reciprocate his devotion. The prophet Hosea captures this idea in a beautiful verse in which God speaks of Israel as a parent might speak of a toddler.
• A final theme in the last two sections of the Tanakh is a deep sense of humanity, seen in the stories of Job and Ruth.
o Job is a lengthy philosophical examination, in poetry, of one of the most difficult questions in religion: If God is loving and powerful, why do bad things happen to good people? In the end, God speaks out of whirlwind, but he doesn’t explain why he has taken everything from Job. For his part, Job ultimately acknowledges his limited perspective compared with God’s majesty and power. Even if clear-cut answers are not forthcoming, it still makes sense to trust God.
o On the other end of the spectrum is the story of Ruth, a tale of kindness and grace that is short and simple yet profoundly moving. The story of Ruth’s self-sacrifice for her mother-inlaw, Naomi, is one in which terrible misfortunes are overcome and barriers of nationality, ethnicity, class, and generations are transcended—all through kindness.
Suggested Reading
Alter and Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible.
Brettler, How to Read the Bible.
Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures.
Harris and Platzner, The Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible.
Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.
Rosenberg, ed., Congregation.
Questions to Consider
1. What are some of the most important stories and themes in the last two sections of the Hebrew Bible?
2. Why did it take longer for theses writings to be accepted as scripture?
apocrypha and Dead Sea Scrolls
Lecture 10
O
ne of the more colorful figures in 1st-century Judaism was a historian named Josephus, who wrote several books in Greek to explain and defend Judaism to a Gentile audience. In one of them, he described the Jewish scriptures as containing 22 books and said that no one would venture “to alter a syllable.” Of course, we know that the Tanakh today has 24 books, that many versions of Jewish scriptures were circulating in the 1st century, and that the gradual process of canonization was still underway in the time of Josephus. In this lecture, we’ll discuss two collections of sacred texts that didn’t make it into the Hebrew Bible: the Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
• The Apocrypha are the books in the Greek Septuagint that weren’t included in the later Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. They were considered scripture by Greek-speaking Jews in the Roman Empire and by Christians at least until the time of Martin Luther. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians still include the Apocrypha in their Bibles, but Protestants and Jews today regard these texts as extracanonical.
• The major works in the Apocrypha are Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also known as Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and expanded versions of Esther and Daniel. All date from the Hellenistic period, that is, the 4th through 1st centuries B.C.E.
o The book of Tobit is about a God-fearing Jew living in Nineveh, who becomes blind and prays to die. At the same time, a young woman named Sarah also prays to die because each of her seven husbands has been killed by an evil demon on their wedding night. But God sends an angel in disguise to accompany Tobit’s son Tobias on a journey, during which he catches a magic fish whose entrails can be used to both drive away demons and cure blindness. Tobias marries Sarah and returns home to heal his father.
o The Book of Judith is supposedly set during the time that Nebuchadnezzar was king of Assyria, although Nebuchadnezzar was, in fact, a Babylonian ruler. It tells the story of the pious and beautiful widow Judith, who, when her town was besieged by the Assyrians, devised a plan to win the trust of the Assyrian commander and cut off his head. When the Assyrian soldiers saw their leader’s headless body, they fled in panic.
o The Wisdom of Solomon consists of moral exhortations, praise of wisdom (personified as a woman), and a retelling of the Exodus story. Sirach offers proverbs and advice for living happily and ethically. Baruch is a reflection on the meaning of the Babylonian Conquest, supposedly written in the early 6th century, although it’s actually a later work.
o The books of Esther and Daniel are expanded with additional stories that, in the case of Esther, make the tale more explicitly religions, and for Daniel, add some colorful details about his life, including the story of his rescue of Susanna, a woman falsely accused of adultery.
o The book of 1 Maccabees is a historical account of the years 175 to 135 B.C.E., when Jews under the leadership of the Maccabee brothers revolted against their Seleucid overlord, Antiochus IV. The Jews defeated their oppressors and rededicated the Temple in an eight-day celebration, which was memorialized as Hanukkah. The Jews succeeded in establishing an independent kingdom, which lasted for a century, until they were conquered by the Romans in 63 B.C.E.
o The book of 2 Maccabees is a more explicitly religious retelling of the early events of 1 Maccabees. It is also the only book in
the Old Testament, aside from Daniel, that speaks directly of a resurrection, a controversial doctrine among 1st-century Jews.
• The pseudepigrapha (“false writings”) were texts written in the late centuries B.C.E. or early centuries C.E. and attributed to major figures from the Bible, such as Enoch or Moses. There are dozens of such works. Although some Jews at the time seem to have accepted them as sacred texts, they fell out of favor and, like the Apocrypha, were preserved by Christians.
o One example is 1 Enoch, which tells of visions that Enoch had about the end of times, along with a great deal of lore about angels and astronomy.
o Another prominent book of the pseudepigrapha is Jubilees, an extensive rewriting of Genesis and Exodus that emphasizes calendar issues, the rules of ritual purity, and the importance of the Torah.
• Scholars learned more about the Apocrypha when the genizah (“book repository”) at the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo was discovered in 1896. Some pages of text found in the synagogue made their way to Solomon Schechter, a professor of Jewish studies at Cambridge. Recognizing their value, he arranged for an expedition and discovered that the genizah contained more than 200,000 manuscript fragments, dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries.
o The genizah yielded a treasure trove of biblical and rabbinical manuscripts, as well as new sources about medieval Jewish life.
o Schechter was particularly interested in a few lines in Hebrew of the apocryphal book of Sirach, a book scholars thought had survived only in Greek. Schechter also noticed several large fragments of a previously unknown text that he hypothesized had been written by an early Jewish dissident group. He was later proven right about this text, which he called the Zadokite Document.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
• The traditional story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they were found by a Bedouin boy near the ruins of Qumran in 1947. Eventually, fragments of nearly 900 manuscripts were discovered in 11 caves at Qumran, dating from the 3rd century B.C.E. to the 1st century C.E., when the documents were apparently hidden to preserve them from the Romans during the Great Revolt. There is still debate about who exactly wrote these documents, but the best guess is a community of Essenes living at Qumran.
• According to Josephus, the Essenes were Jews who were critical of the authorities at Jerusalem and had gone into the desert to live in devotion, asceticism, and celibacy until the end of the world, which they expected to come soon. Josephus reported that they lived in communal settings without money or personal property, ate common meals, performed daily ritual baths, refused to participate in temple sacrifices at Jerusalem, and observed strict Sabbath restrictions.
aside from a nearly complete scroll of Isaiah and half a dozen other large scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found mostly in pieces—some 25,000 fragments in all.
• The Zadokite Document described a similar sort of community that had been founded by a mysterious “preacher of righteousness” who urged his followers to avoid the “three nets of Belial”: fornication, riches, and profanation of the temple. Several longer copies of this same text were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and because it mentions the city of Damascus several times, it has been renamed the Damascus Document.
• Other distinctive texts from the Qumran community include the Community Rule, which sets forth procedures for those who wish to join and for a governing council; the Temple Scroll, which provides a blueprint for how the Temple should be rebuilt and how its rituals should be carried out; and the War Scroll, which summarizes the coming 40-year conflict between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness.” The Copper Scroll purports to reveal the locations of some 60 places in the land where treasures were buried.
• About two-thirds of the nearly 900 scrolls that were hidden by the members of the Qumran community were writings that were specific to their particular type of Judaism or other similar movements, but 222 were copies of books from the Bible, with another 10 scrolls from the Apocrypha and several dozen from the pseudepigrapha.
Comparing the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible
• Biblical scholars faced a monumental task in piecing together and deciphering the scrolls, but it was incredibly exciting to work with copies of biblical texts that were 1,000 years older than what they had previously had access to. Scholars had long compared the Hebrew Bible with the Greek Septuagint, guessing at what the underlying Hebrew might have been, but the Dead Sea Scrolls predated even the Septuagint by centuries.
• Further, because the scrolls were in Hebrew, scholars didn’t have to wonder about the accuracy of the translation, and they found that the Masoretes had generally been correct in preserving these sacred texts; most of the differences were minor.
• It soon became clear that the biblical books did not have a fixed form in the 1st century. Some copies seemed to be the ancestors of the Masoretic text, while others appeared to be more like the Hebrew originals of the Septuagint. For instance, the Greek version of Jeremiah is about 13 percent shorter than the Masoretic version. Of the six Hebrew copies recovered from the caves, we can determine from the surviving fragments that several are of the longer Masoretic type and one is clearly related to the shorter Septuagint version.
• Readings from the Dead Sea Scrolls are frequently incorporated in footnotes to modern translations of the Bible, such as the New International Version (NIV) or New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
o For example, at Isaiah 53:11, the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh (NJPS) has “Out of his anguish he shall see it,” while the NRSV reads: “Out of his anguish he shall see light.”
o The difference is that the word light appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls version of Isaiah, but not in the Masoretic text. Such variants may seem inconsequential to some, but many believers feel that every word in a sacred text is important.
• In the century or two after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, when the rabbis were still debating which books belonged in the Writings section of the Tanakh, they developed the notion of “texts that defile the hands.” This was their working definition of canon; a book belonged in the Hebrew Bible if coming into contact with it made people ritually impure, forcing them to wash their hands afterward. o This concept is counterintuitive. How could something sacred make someone unclean? The idea may be related to the famous story in 2 Samuel of an Israelite who reached out to steady the Ark of the Covenant when it was being transported and looked like it might topple. Despite his good intentions, he was struck dead on the spot. Some objects can be so awesomely holy that they become dangerous to ordinary mortals.
o Today, when the Torah Scroll is read in a synagogue, the reader follows along in the text with a yad, or Torah pointer, so that he or she doesn’t actually touch the scroll. Perhaps this tradition is for the reader’s protection as much as for that of the Torah Scroll.
Suggested Reading
Attridge, ed., Harper Collins Study Bible.
Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.
Collins, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography.
Coogan, ed.. The New Oxford Annotated Bible.
Hoffman and Cole, Sacred Trash.
The Israel Museum, The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls (http://dss.collections/imj. org.il/).
Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah.
Rogerson and Lieu, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies.
VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today.
Vermes, trans., The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.
Questions to Consider
1. Why were the books of the Apocrypha excluded from the Hebrew Bible, even though some Jews anciently regarded them as scripture (and Catholics still do to this day)?
2. What is the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for biblical scholarship?
Oral Torah—mishnah and Talmud
Lecture 11
T
he process by which Jews became “the people of the book” began after the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586
B.C.E. and reached its culmination a few centuries after the Romans leveled the Second Temple in 70 C.E. In the absence of kings, prophets, and priests, a new group arose to help Jews scattered around the world fashion a new identity and preserve their traditions. These were the rabbis, or teachers of Torah. Unlike the priesthood or kingship, the position of rabbi was not a hereditary one; it came through individual effort and study. In this lecture, we’ll explore the results of that study found in the Mishnah and the Talmud.
Philosophical Groups among the Jews
• The historian Josephus described three philosophical groups or parties among the Jews in the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E.: the Essenes, who rejected the authority of the Temple priesthood and withdrew from society to practice purity and asceticism; the Sadducees, the wealthy, aristocratic priestly authorities associated with the Temple; and the Pharisees, who were devoted to the study and application of the Mosaic Law. Josephus tells us that the Pharisees were better liked than the Sadducees, who were seen as collaborators with the Romans.
• One of the main points of contention between the Pharisees and the Sadducees was the Torah.
o The Pharisees claimed that when God had given Moses his five books at Mount Sinai, he had also revealed to Moses an oral Torah of explanations and interpretations, which was passed down to later generations.
o This was, the Pharisees claimed, the origin of their distinctive beliefs and interpretations, such as their belief in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead.
• Only one author from the Second Temple period— the apostle Paul—explicitly states, “I was a Pharisee.” Nevertheless, from what we can piece together about their beliefs from later sources, the Pharisees were sometimes strict, but they could also be humanely lenient.
• After the Great Revolt of 66–70 C.E., when the Essenes were wiped out and the Temple (the power base of the Sadducees) was destroyed, the Pharisees, led by rabbis, became dominant. Their emphasis on studying Torah became even more pronounced after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 C.E.).
The Pharisees claimed that the oral Torah God had given moses at mount Sinai had been passed down by word of mouth through generations until it reached them.
o Some had seen Simon bar Kokhba as a messiah who would restore Jewish independence, but the rebellion was brutally suppressed, the dispersal of Jews from the Holy Land was accelerated, and the rabbis began to regard apocalypticism and political aspirations as dead ends.
o Judaism became a text-centered religion, with a focus on adherence to the moral and ritual requirements of the law.
The Mishnah
• The rabbis looked to the Torah, both written and oral, as the key to the survival of Judaism, but there were concerns about the accuracy and transmission of the oral Torah. Thus, about 200 C.E., Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi (“Judah the Patriarch”) wrote down the first part of the oral Torah, the Mishnah (“repetition” or “oral instruction”). It’s not exactly a law code but more a collection of legal judgments, some attributed to specific rabbis; frequently, more than one opinion is recorded.
• The Mishnah is a fairly lengthy book, organized into six parts or orders: (1) Seeds—agriculture and prayers; (2) Appointed Seasons—Sabbath, festivals, and fast days; (3) Women—marriage, divorce, and vows; (4) Damages—business relations, law courts, and punishments; (5) Holy Things—dietary laws, the temple, and sacrifices; and (6) Purities—ritual purity and purification. Each of the six orders has between 7 and 12 subsections called tractates, for a total of 63.
• The judgments are terse and orderly, as if designed for memorization or teaching. The first paragraph, for example, concerns rules for reciting the daily evening prayer, the Shema. The passage also includes an argument between the followers of two great rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, about whether people had to lie down to say the evening prayer.
• The Mishnah is, obviously, an unusual law code. Multiple opinions are offered, often with none being pronounced correct. Rabbis quote scripture, cite precedents from defunct temple practices, offer varying perspectives, and tell stories. Rather than simply providing the correct answer, the Mishnah is a tool for teaching students how to think through difficult issues and arrive at reasonable opinions themselves.
The Talmud
• Of course, the conversations continued, with rabbis and students debating the meaning of the Mishnah, particularly in academies in Palestine and Babylonia. Out of those debates came the Talmud— also considered part of the oral Torah—which includes learned disputations, detailed legal analyses, folktales, stories of famous teachers, aphorisms, scriptural interpretation, and much more.
o The oral traditions in Palestine were edited and written down about 400 C.E. in what is commonly referred to as the Jerusalem Talmud (“teaching” or “learning”).
o The discussions in Babylonia were similarly put into writing about 100 years later. The Babylonian Talmud, about three times longer than the Jerusalem version, has long been considered more eloquent, subtle, and complete. It is second only to the Tanakh in the library of the sacred texts of Judaism.
• The Talmud is a massive work that reproduces the Mishnah in Hebrew and adds a commentary in Aramaic called the Gemara. This commentary is an edited transcript of the debates of the rabbis and their students as they investigated, explained, and elaborated on the Mishnah and the principles they deduced from its rulings. Since early modern times, the Talmud has been printed with multiple commentaries surrounding the Mishnah and Gemara on each page.
• There are many great stories in the Talmud, but what we usually see on display is detailed legal reasoning, often backed up by quotations from the Tanakh.
o In long, complicated arguments, with frequent digressions, the rabbis work their way through all aspects of Jewish life and lore with an astonishing level of psychological and philosophical nuance.
o Different scriptural interpretations and legal rulings from several generations are set side by side and given equal weight. When there was a practical need, one could be chosen as more authoritative (usually by consensus), but dissenting opinions were preserved for possible reevaluation and use in future debates.
• It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Talmud in Judaism. Students can spend their entire lives exploring its contents, and indeed, Orthodox Jews probably spend more time with the Talmud than with the Tanakh. But the Talmud is not just another commentary; it’s Torah, the oral counterpart to the written Torah given to Moses at Sinai. Many Jews believe that, even today, Talmud study should be done aloud with a partner, reading in turns and discussing its meaning line by line.
• Although rabbis were not prophets, the oral Torah provided access to continuing revelation. The will of God in new eras and situations could be ascertained through the discussions of the rabbis in the Talmud—and this was God’s preferred mode of communication. One of the most famous stories in the Talmud has God laughing when the rabbis point out that even he can’t intervene in the system of the two Torahs and the proper procedures for their interpretation.
• The idea of a sacred oral text might remind us of the Hindu Vedas, but there are important differences. The Vedas were used primarily in rituals, where they were valued more for their sacred sounds than their meaning, and they always remained the possession of priests. The Talmud, in contrast, didn’t have a role in public worship services, its meaning was endlessly investigated and debated, and Jews from all walks of life were encouraged to study it.
• Today, tens of thousands of Jews all over the world participate in the Daf Yomi program (“page of the day”), which was started in Poland in the 1920s. The idea is that one can read through the entire Talmud in 7.5 years, reading one page (two sides) every day. The specified page for the day is the same for everyone, and there are celebrations at the end of each cycle.
Judaism’s Sacred Texts
• The sacred texts of Judaism, in order of authority and holiness, are the Torah (Pentateuch), the Tanakh, and the Talmud (including the Mishnah), but the library of Judaism includes much more. There is an extensive supplement to the Mishnah called the Tosefta that predates the Talmud. There are rather free commentaries on the Tanakh called Midrash that were written by rabbinic sages before the year 1000. From the medieval period, there are voluminous commentaries to the Hebrew Bible, as well as works of Jewish philosophy and attempts to codify the rulings of the Talmud.
• But in the midst of all this learning and study, there were also Jews who were looking for more direct ways to connect with God through mystical practices. Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah, is a huge, fascinating topic. Its masterpiece is the Zohar (“Book of Splendor”), a text that many Jews have considered sacred. Indeed, from about 1500 to 1800, the Zohar was regarded by some as a source of doctrine and revelation almost equal in authority to the Torah and the Talmud.
• The Zohar first appeared in 13th-century Spain, published by Rabbi Moses De León, who claimed that he had found an ancient Aramaic text dating back to the 2nd-century Palestinian master Simeon ben Yohai and his disciples. The Zohar is composed of several separate treatises, including spiritual commentary and mystical stories. Modern scholars have determined that it was probably written by Moses De León, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of many for this remarkable text.
• When Jews use the term Torah, they sometimes have in mind the Five Books of Moses, which they regard as the most authoritative part of the Tanakh. But just as often, Torah refers to both the written and oral traditions that were thought to have been received by Moses, particularly as the latter were embodied in the discussions in the Talmud.
• There are several forms of Judaism in the world today—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionism—that differ in their degree of observance of traditional rules and their engagement with the modern world, but they all come out of rabbinical Judaism and its concern for the oral Law.
o It is interesting to imagine how different Judaism would be today if it had not closed its canon with the Tanakh and, instead, had continued to produce new scriptures of equal or greater authority.
o Certainly, the tradition of textual analysis, interpretation, and commentary was decisive in creating a community of close readers and tireless debaters, who expressed their devotion to God through study.
Suggested Reading
Alexander, ed. and trans., Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism.
Bokser, ed. and trans., The Talmud: Selected Writings.
Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud.
Giller, Reading the Zohar.
Holtz, Back to the Sources.
Jacob, The Talmudic Argument.
Matt, trans., Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment.
Neusner, Making God’s Word Work.
———, trans., The Mishnah: A New Translation.
Scholem, ed., Zohar: The Book of Splendor.
Solomon, ed. and trans., The Talmud: A Selection.
Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud.
Questions to Consider
1. How did rabbinical Judaism become the dominant form of the religion after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple?
2. How does the Talmud combine creativity and tradition?
3. What is the Zohar?
