I just finished reading The Temple Scroll by Jacob Milgrom and want to take this moment to say, Holy crap!
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I need to reverse my saying because some Jews who got that out of their system in the past did not consider it holy. Defecation was a defiling activity in terms of Essene purity strictures. So was sexual intercourse, by the way.
Anyway, back to the Temple Scroll… This document is what is known as rewritten Torah.
That means it takes a bunch of scriptural texts (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in this case) and has its artistically licensed and/or divinely inspired way with them. Other examples include Chronicles and Jubilees. It basically sets out to portray the way the Temple and everything that takes place inside or around it ought to be like according to the perspective of the Essenes. Two of the Temple Scroll’s departures from Rabbinic and (I would assume) normative Judaism’s tradition which really amazed me concern its purity regulations in terms of defecation and sex (two things that obviously should never have anything to do with each other).
The Essenes, in contradistinction with other sects like the Pharisees, believed that the city in which the Temple resided was under the same purity regulations as the temple itself. So if the Essenes took over, no one who was impure could enter or be in Jerusalem. And that means no sex in the city (I’m sure Sarah Jessica Parker doesn’t count). If you called Jerusalem home, you’d have to remain celibate. Even treating yourself to a little one-on-one time would be prohibited. If you wanted or needed a bit of loving, you’d have to leave the city. But then you couldn’t get back in for three days post coitus.
And a man who lies with his wife and has an ejaculation, for three days shall not enter the whole city of the temple in which I shall cause my name to dwell.
11Q19, Col. XLV, line 11-12
In this day and age, very few people give a shit. So maybe they’d fit in fine in Essene Jerusalem, because nobody would be able to poop therein. And on Sabbaths, you’re really out of luck, because the Temple Scroll placed the community toilets 4500 cubits outside Jerusalem, which was 1000 cubits further than an Essense was allowed to walk on the Sabbath (11Q19 46.15). Six days a week, you may release your bowels. But on the seventh, which is holy to YHWH, if you live in Jerusalem, you cannot. Sundays would really be crappy days.
Apart from developing my own personal library in hardcopy, the digital arena has allowed me to amass a considerable electronic corpus of books, articles, and manuscripts (only a few gigabytes) from professional biblical scholarship. A few of my favs include JSTOR (most colleges/universities provide free access even if you already graduated), BiblicalStudies.org.uk (someone loves F.F. Bruce), ETANA, the essential Theology Program (for conservatives), the Biblical Manuscripts Project, the Journal of Biblical Studies, the Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, back issues of Biblical Archaeologist/Near Eastern Archeology, CCEL, Early Jewish and Early Christian Writings, and, of course, early scholastic books can be downloaded straight from Google Books (a lot of translations and other gems are public domain).
Two free caches I recently stumbled on are the Gordon College Bibical eSource web site (click on a scriptural text and it will take you to a page with countless dissertations, articles, books, and even multimedia presentations available in multiple formats) and a horde of articles by Scott Noegel, one of those rare scholars who combines Biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholarship so beautifully. Commence drooling.
If you follow Rabbinic reckoning, the second of the great festivals prescribed by Torah, the Festival/Feast of Weeks/Harvest otherwise called the Day of First-fruits, has now begun! The Mishnah and its Babylonian or Jerusalem Gemarah refer to it as Atzeret (meaning Solemn Assembly). Most Christians call it Pentecost.
Three times in the year you must make a pilgrim feast to me…observe the Feast of Harvest, the first fruits of your labors that you have sown in the field…
Exodus 23:14, 16, NET
You must observe the Feast of Weeks – the first fruits of the harvest of wheat –
Exodus 34:22, NET
You must count for yourselves seven weeks from the day after the Sabbath, from the day you bring the wave offering sheaf; they must be complete weeks. You must count fifty days – until the day after the seventh Sabbath – and then you must present a new grain offering to the Lord. From the places where you live you must bring two loaves of bread for a wave offering; they must be made from two tenths of an ephah of fine wheat flour, baked with yeast, as first fruits to the Lord. Along with the loaves of bread, you must also present seven flawless yearling lambs, one young bull, and two rams. They are to be a burnt offering to the Lord along with their grain offering and drink offerings, a gift of a soothing aroma to the Lord. You must also offer one male goat for a sin offering and two yearling lambs for a peace offering sacrifice, and the priest is to wave them – the two lambs – along with the bread of the first fruits, as a wave offering before the Lord; they will be holy to the Lord for the priest. On this very day you must proclaim an assembly; it is to be a holy assembly for you. You must not do any regular work. This is a perpetual statute in all the places where you live throughout your generations.
Leviticus 23:15-21, NET
Also, on the day of the first fruits, when you bring a new grain offering to the Lord during your Feast of Weeks, you are to have a holy assembly. You must do no ordinary work. But you must offer as the burnt offering, as a sweet aroma to the Lord, two young bulls, one ram, seven lambs one year old, with their grain offering of finely ground flour mixed with olive oil: three-tenths of an ephah for each bull, two-tenths for the one ram, with one-tenth for each of the seven lambs, as well as one male goat to make an atonement for you. You are to offer them with their drink offerings in addition to the continual burnt offering and its grain offering – they must be unblemished.
Numbers 2826-31, NET
You must count seven weeks; you must begin to count them from the time you begin to harvest the standing grain. Then you are to celebrate the Festival of Weeks before the Lord your God with the voluntary offering that you will bring, in proportion to how he has blessed you. You shall rejoice before him – you, your son, your daughter, your male and female slaves, the Levites in your villages, the resident foreigners, the orphans, and the widows among you – in the place where the Lord chooses to locate his name.
Deuteronomy16:9-12, NET
When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you occupy it and live in it, you must take the first of all the ground’s produce you harvest from the land the Lord your God is giving you, place it in a basket, and go to the place where he chooses to locate his name. You must go to the priest in office at that time and say to him, I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord promised to our ancestors to give us.
The priest will then take the basket from you and set it before the altar of the Lord your God. Then you must affirm before the Lord your God, A wandering Aramean was my ancestor, and he went down to Egypt and lived there as a foreigner with a household few in number, but there he became a great, powerful, and numerous people. But the Egyptians mistreated and oppressed us, forcing us to do burdensome labor. So we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and he heard us and saw our humiliation, toil, and oppression. Therefore the Lord brought us out of Egypt with tremendous strength and power, as well as with great awe-inspiring signs and wonders. Then he brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now, look! I have brought the first of the ground’s produce that you, Lord, have given me.
Then you must set it down before the Lord your God and worship before him. You will celebrate all the good things that the Lord your God has given you and your family, along with the Levites and the resident foreigners among you.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
The Rabbis limit what produce and agriculture specifically apply to The Festival to that elucidated in Deuteronomy 8:8:
First-fruits may be brought only from the seven kinds…
Mishnah, Bikkurim 1:3
For the Lord your God is bringing you to a good land…a land of wheat[1], barley[2], vines[3], fig[4] trees, and pomegranates[5], of olive[6] trees and honey[7]…
Deuteronomy 8:7-8
This limitation was not entirely followed. Some augmented that produce with others not enumerated (Mishnah, Bikkurim 3:9-10).
The Oral Law gives us a glimpse into how the people set apart their produce:
How do they set apart the First-fruits? When a man goes down to his field and sees [for the first time] a ripe fig or a ripe cluster of grapes or a ripe pomegranate, he binds it round with reed-grass and says, Lo, these are First-fruits.
Mishnah, Bikkurim 3:1
I was thinking about the idea of original sin and total depravity the other day… I also started thinking about the foundations of my system of government, framed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Then I started wondering if maybe there could be a major disconnect between the basic foundational principles of my nation and its system of government and original sin or one of the basic tenets of Calvinism.
Original sin and total depravity seem to resonate with Hobbes when he spoke of the natural state of humanity. Obviously, Hobbes disagreed with Augustine and Calvin in that those men believed there was something called Goodness existing as a supreme moral objective measurement outside of and apart from humanity. However, there does seem to be a parallel in terms of the outworking of original sin, total depravity, and Hobbes’ conceptions. For just as natural humanity cannot or does not tend toward any good according to Hobbes, so the idea behind original sin or total depravity seems to be that humanity naturally cannot or does not tend toward goodness either.
The Founding Fathers, however, did not follow Hobbes. Their opposing position (after John Locke) was not only that human nature had an absolute moral authority, but this morality was part and parcel of the nature of humanity itself so that humanity naturally knew right from wrong apart from any kind of law or government and did, in fact, tend toward or attain goodness. And because moral goodness was something we can know and something we can put into place naturally, government therefore does not provide us with the methods or means to become good (goodness doesn’t begin with law).
This stood in contrast to Hobbes, who’s conception of humanity’s nature meant that government or law was the reason for morality, virtue, or goodness. The logical end of the two sides is that under Hobbes and so it seems under original sin or total depravity, one must give up their natural rights, their natural morals, or their natural human condition in exchange for that goodness, freedom, or right that are granted from a Sovereign, whereas for the Founders, the Sovereign made goodness inherent and inalienable
to the nature of humankind so that in forming government or law, humanity didn’t give up freedom or right in exchange for goodness, but rather to better protect, secure, and prosper the goodness already present.
I am therefore left to ponder whether or not those who hold to the dogmas of either original sin or total depravity are fundamentally opposed to the very principle on which the government of the United States is established.
It may be a surprise for some to learn that in ancient Hebraic texts, Yeshua was neither the first nor last to be called the Son of God (or even the first-born Son of God). It appears that the collected tribes of Jacob, Israel herself, was the first to gain this distinction.
Thus says YHWH, Israel is my Son, my first-born.
Exodus 4:22
Referring back to this event, a prophet says in the name of YHWH:
When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my Son.
Hosea 11:1
In Joseph and Aseneth, a Jewish romance and missionary novel dated sometime, perhaps, in the first century of the common era, Joseph is referred to three times as the Son of God—twice by his bride-to-be (Aseneth) and once by Pharaoh.
And how will Joseph, the Son of God, regard me, for I have spoken evil of him? …I spoke evil of him and did not know that Joseph is the Son of God.
Joseph and Aseneth 6:2, 6
And Pharaoh was astonished at her beauty and said, “The Lord will bless you [Aseneth], the God of Joseph, who has chosen you to be his bride, for he [Joseph] is the first-born Son of God…
Joseph and Aseneth 21:3
This is by no means a complete listing of such occurrences, but it serves to show that this term has been abused in some theological circles by injecting it with all sorts of meanings incompatible with its ancient usage. Son of God
no more refers to divinity or third person of the Trinity when speaking of Yeshua than it does when descriptive of the nation of Israel or Joseph. As it has been noted by many others, Son of God
is a functional title, not the ontological description of a person’s being.
The Date of the Tower of Babel and Some Theological Implications by Paul Seely.
Overall, it was a fun and stimulating read, especially since it veered off into areas that while outside my familiarity or expertise, are nevertheless interesting subject matters (such as Creationism and the Natural Sciences). I could have done without Seely’s repeated tendentious impulse to remain faithful to the historical interpretation of the church,
which is nothing more than an appeal to authority—a logical fallacy that should not appear in a critical, scientific analysis. But I did very much appreciate both the archaeological examination of the Tower of Babel according to narrative evidence as well as the discussion of accommodation of scriptural texts to the concepts, world-views, and thought-forms of their days. Apparently, Creationists are want to approach biblical texts as if they were trying to teach astronomy or some such anachronism and I appreciate Seely setting the matter straight.
Unfortunately, the end was about as ironic and question-begging as it could get. Consider his own analysis of the situation:
One cannot date the tower of Babel early enough to fit all of the archaeological and anthropological data without implicitly espousing a methodology which favors bare possibility over probability; and such a methodology is antithetical to serious scholarship.
ibid, p. 28
And yet Seely’s way of dealing with the contradiction between the archaeological evidence and the biblical narrative is to propose a philosophy that could possibly explain the situation without giving us any historical or archaeological evidence to think there is a probability of his conclusion. Behold his summary statement:
In summary, in order to avoid obstacles to communication which might become stumbling blocks, and to respect the divine decision to delegate to humankind the responsibility for the discovery of natural knowledge, Scripture is accommodated in Gen 11:1-9 [the Babel narrative]…to the limited geographical and anthropological knowledge available at the time.
ibid, p. 38
Exactly what time
is Seely referring to? To what context is the tower of babel narrative being accommodated? Exactly what is the anthropological conception of the original hearers
of the Tower of Babel narrative and exactly who are they? Seely makes no mention of any of this in the entire essay. We are given no evidence and no reason whatsoever to believe that the original authors or hearers in whatever unmentioned historical period and geographical location believed all languages originated from a mother tongue in Babylon. The bare possibility of accommodation to such a context is all we are given. His essay is thus self-refuting, claiming to represent serious scholarship while utilizing the very method he says is antithetical to it.
When ancient Israel used the genre of a national history in order to provide the country with a national identity (Mullen 1993), rather than to recreate a past reality out of an interest in ‘history’, this is in accordance with a long tradition. It was only in ancient Israel, however, that this practice developed into a fully fledged national history-writing.
The History of Ancient Israel: What Directions Should We Take?, Barstad
I appreciate that this quotation tries to sever Israel’s history-writing from a positivistic historiography (as if anyone at any time in any place merely wrote the facts of history without being framed and guided by some kind of personal or cultural narrative, world-view, and sociological perspective). However, I find it problematic in a great many respects.
Firstly, writing, reading, and reception of Israel’s history-writings
would only matter to an elite and closed social group (the scribes) that couldn’t account for more than five percent of total population. While the scribes could influence the general populace in terms of religious devotion and such, the texts themselves could in no way redefine and substitute an ideal national vision for the realities of tribal identities, traditional blood ties, and folkloric culture.
Secondly, even if there was political motivation by the scribes to reconstruct Israelite history in order to give it a national identity it didn’t have, the idea that even a powerful political entity could cause an entire people to accept a history they never knew and which contradicted their own knowledge, experiences, stories, traditions, and cultural identities is absolutely ridiculous—especially among a people which was defined by its social structures and did not resemble our Modern and Post-Modern self-defining individualism.
Thirdly, this method of history-making which is claimed of ancient Israel is anachronistic, arising only in present times, and cannot therefore be applied to the ancient world.
Fourth and finally, any argument that seeks to say a nation-state or people operated and thought in such a way radically disassociated from the entire culture and world in which they exist so that they stand unique and alone not only betrays a complete lack of historical understanding, but smacks of Modern evolutionary triumphalism.
I find it interesting that the primary focus and thought in a great deal of Protestantism today is theology and that, for the most part, if the historical process is any concern at all, it only appears and disappears when called on by the processes and initiatives already worked out in the philosophical and theological realms of the mind. For instance, how often have you heard a Protestant ask what is historical study?
or what part does history play in my theology?
Chances are, you haven’t. Chances are, the only thing you’ll get when you bring up history and faith is a nice discussion of the history of other Christians’ theologies and philosophies. And woe be the one who thinks to veer away from this historical
faith. It’s as if history
has been removed from the sphere of the world and become only a sphere of the mind—and even, perhaps, only the sphere of the regenerate
mind. Why is that? I stumbled onto an eloquent description that seems to sum up the situation:
…the necessary truths of an aesthetically shaped reason were a more reliable path to true religion than the contingent truths of history.
Setting the Scene: A Brief Outline of Histories of Israel, Rogerson
Could it be Protestantism in general has so moved away from and lost the historical foundation of its faith that the only thing left to make sense of it is a philosophical/theological construction? Did people start thinking that history probably denied or refuted what they believed and that, therefore, they had to retreat into a faith that had nothing to do with it? What is this Christianity that takes the trinity, the hypostatic union, justification, atonement, original sin, predestination, free will, etc, and makes many or most of these mental concepts to be the highest and most essential thing of faith?
I believe history is the foundation of faith and that no amount of sophisticated theological theory will provide an answer about or a way to move forward in one’s faith as well as a good understanding of history. History is the realm in which YHWH works. And it is by history that he is known.
(I speak solely in terms of Protestantism since I belong to this grouping and not another.)
In specifically New Testament terms, my top favorites are:
- Matthew
- John
- 1 Peter
- Hebrews
- 1 John
In terms of the Hebrew Bible, my top favorites are:
- Genesis
- Exodus
- 1 Samuel
- 2 Samuel
- Ezekiel
- Isaiah
- Psalms
Favorite associated extra-biblical texts are:
- 1 Enoch
- Odes of Solomon
- The War Scroll
Sometimes I get into one of those moods… And when I do, strange things happen. Like this quiz I created: What Rabbinic School Do You Belong To?. Check it out and see which side of the great Jewish debate you stand on.
