Holiness by the Numbers

by Eliezer Segal

The Torah is not very informative about how it chose the date for the holiday that we celebrate as “Rosh Hashanah,” which has no obvious historical or agricultural explanation.

Among the Jewish commentators who tried to deal with this question was the eminent twelfth-century philosopher, poet and grammarian Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra—who was firmly convinced of the scientific validity of mathematical astrology. His observations appear in his commentary to the brief passage in the book of Leviticus that mentions among the holy days of the calendar the annual “day of the sounding of horns”.

He introduces his explanation as a confidential secret: “I shall be giving to you hints of mysteries. If you pay careful attention, then perhaps you might understand them.” 

Ibn Ezra’s exposition is wrapped in obscure mathematical terminology, but the gist of his reasoning seems to go as follows: The principal dates on the Hebrew religious calendar follow an arithmetic logic, coinciding with the beginning, quarter-points and the mid-point (days 1, 7, 15) of the months. Whereas the concluding days of Passover and Sukkot mark the beginnings of the respective fourth quarters of the first and seventh months, the fact that Sukkot has an additional eighth day, while the last day of Passover is the seventh, has esoteric numerological significance. 

There is no question that the Torah treats the beginning of the first month, the one that later came to be called “Nissan,” as the real starting point of the religious year. Interestingly, Ibn Ezra derives its importance not from its being the anniversary of the exodus, as mainly from its association with the construction of the Tabernacle, which was completed at the beginning of that month—and will again be the case for the third Temple according to the prophecies of Ezekiel. 

The dates of the Spring festivals are parallelled in the Fall. Each of those months is the seventh one since its predecessor, an indication of the special metaphysical status that the Torah assigns to the number seven. “Hence Rosh Hashanah is the greatest of them all” by virtue of its identification with the seventh month. 

As it happens, Ibn Ezra was not the first Jewish interpreter to adopt this approach to explaining the Hebrew festival calendar. A strikingly similar theory was professed by Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish philosopher. Philo was strongly influenced by the teachings of the philosophical school known as “neo-Pythagoreanism” which held that the mathematical structure of reality furnishes the basis for a mystical understanding of creation, in accordance with a system called “arithmology.” He reports that he composed a separate treatise to the subject, but that work has not survived. 

To the best of our knowledge, Philo and his writings were not known to Abraham Ibn Ezra or his Jewish contemporaries in the Middle Ages; though they were quite popular among Christian scholars who were strongly attracted to his allegorical method of scriptural interpretation. Nevertheless, it would appear that Ibn Ezra had access to translations of ancient neo-Pythagorean works, and that he applied them independently to the study of Jewish texts, producing results that were remarkably similar to Philo’s.

Thus, when Philo discusses the Sabbath in his commentary to the Ten Commandments, he does not focus on its overt themes as a commemoration of the creation or of the liberation from Egyptian slavery—but rather on the significance of observing it on “the sacred seventh day.” The metaphysical, arithmological quality of this primary numeral is what makes it the appropriate key to understanding the many ethical and social laws that are linked to the seventh year, such as the release of Hebrew bondmen, forgiveness of debts, and allowing the earth to rest on the sabbatical and Jubilee years. Multiplying seven by four gives us twenty-eight, which Philo—not quite accurately—identifies as the total of days in a lunar cycle.

Because the world was created in six days, it was fitting for the creator to praise and sanctify the seventh day. Philo rhapsodizes: “I doubt whether anyone could adequately celebrate the properties of the number seven, for they are beyond all words.” He goes on to show how this magnificent number—including its squares, cubes and other derivatives and combinations—reflects patterns of geometry, astronomy (such as the numbers of known planets and of stars in major constellations), the distribution of equinoxes, lengths of biological gestation, stages of personality development, and much more.

The fact that the Torah commands the observance of the major public festivals at the times of the equinoxes, each of which falls in the seventh month since its predecessor, is thus consistent with the logic of nature and with mathematics. 

The number ten also occupies an honoured position in Philo’s theory of numbers. He enumerates ten holy days in the Hebrew calendar. These include (1) the sabbath, (2) the monthly new moon, (3) Passover and (4) the feast of unleavened bread (which he counts separately), (5) the day of the “sacred sheaf” (when the ‘omer of barley is offered), (6)  the feast of seven sevens (Shavuot, concluding a count of seven weeks); and the holy days of the seventh month: (7) the festival of the sacred moon, or the feast of trumpets; (8) the fast (Yom Kippur) and (9) Tabernacles (Sukkot). The total reaches ten if we accept his assertion that the first festival “is that which anyone will perhaps be astonished to hear called a festival. This festival is every day”!

As a loyal Jew, Philo admired Moses as a prophet, philosopher and lawgiver. But sometimes it seems that his greatest accomplishment lay in the fact that he “always adhered to the principles of numerical science, which he knew by close observation to be a paramount factor in all that exists. Therefore Moses never enacted any law great or small without calling to his aid—and, as it were, accommodating to his enactment—its appropriate number.”

In preparation for the holiday season, maybe we should brush up on our mathematical skills—if only to count our blessings.

My email address is: [email protected]

De-Bugging Titus

by Eliezer Segal

General Titus Caesar Vespasianus led the Roman forces against the Jewish insurrection in Palestine, presided over the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple at the age of 42 in the year 70, and later succeeded his father Vespasian as Emperor. 

Titus’s reign was a short one. According to the historian Dio Cassius, he died a natural death when he was stricken with a fever in the year 81. The biographer Suetonius described how Titus accepted his fate with a blend of tears and fatalistic serenity: “He said that there was no act of his life of which he had cause to repent, save one only.” That enigmatic statement challenged scholars to decipher his meaning. Suetonius guessed that the allusion might be either to an affair he had been having with his sister-in-law, whereas Dio Cassius preferred to explain that he regretted not killing his brother Domitian who was plotting against him and  may have ultimately hastened his death.

What is wrong with the above account?

Many Jewish readers will be bothered by one glaring omission. According to the tale told in the Talmud and Midrash, Titus did not die a natural or quick death, but suffered for several years from an agonizing and debilitating sickness. 

The best-known version of this story is found in the Babylonian Talmud, in a version that satisfies our expectation that evildoers should be made to suffer for their crimes: A gnat entered through Titus’s nostril, and  continued to peck at his brain for seven years, allowing only occasional relief from the pain by means of the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer. After his death they opened up his head and found that the gnat had grown to the size of a large bird with a brass beak and iron talons. 

The discrepancies between the talmudic and the non-Jewish accounts of Titus’s death were especially troubling to Rabbi Azariah dei Rossi the sixteenth-century Italian scholar whose Me’or ‘Eynayim built upon his dazzling mastery of Classical languages and literatures. He provided an exhaustive survey of all the known rabbinic versions of the legend of the gnat, including the Talmuds and several collections of homiletic midrash.

Dei Rossi noted that, notwithstanding the minor differences between the texts, they agree about important narrative and thematic features, in that the unrepentant heathen blasphemer is made to suffer horribly for his crimes against God and the holy temple; and divine justice arranged matters such that the world’s most powerful tyrant was struck down by one of nature’s tiniest and least significant creatures.

Rabbi Azariah regarded the numerous disagreements among the Jewish texts as evidence that they should not be trusted as historical fact; for if they did stem from a true event they could not have diverged to such an extent. 

Furthermore, the story of the gnat is medically implausible. Granted that anatomic research confirms that a passage leads from the nostrils to the brain—nevertheless, the cerebral membrane is not capable of supporting a bird-sized growth. Furthermore, the notion of metals like brass or iron growing in an organism is clearly an impossibility. Some modern writers have speculated that the portrayal was inspired by autopsies of brain tumors.

Citing Jeremiah’s advice to “ask ye now among the heathen,” Rabbi Azariah consulted all available Greek and Roman histories and biographies (including Dio Cassius and Suetonius), and confirmed that their most respected authorities were in agreement that Titus died of a fever. 

Dei Rossi reasoned that we ought to accept the consensus of those independent objective testimonies that concurred in contradicting the rabbinic story. Echoing an idea that had been voiced centuries previously by Maimonides, he was concerned that credulous Jews would mistake these legendary tales for attempts at factual history, and thereby discredit our sages and the entire Jewish tradition. It is therefore crucial to recognize those stories for what they were intended—as moral allegories that teach the common people about the inscrutable paths of how divine justice is integrated into the natural order. (Interestingly, even the Maharal of Prague who was adamantly opposed to the Me’or ‘Eynayim, conceded that the gnat story should not be taken literally, and that the rabbis were not interested in conveying simple historical facts.)

Dei Rossi’s concerns had actually been expressed a generation earlier by Rabbi David Gans of Prague in his pioneering historical chronicle the Tzemaḥ David. In contrast to the attitudes of rabbinic literature which painted Titus as a quintessential antisemite, sadistic killer and blasphemer, Gans  generally followed the Roman historians, as well as Josephus Flavius and the author of the medieval Hebrew adaptation of Josephus’s histories known a the Yosippon. In their portrayals Titus came across as quite an admirable figure, a patron and contributor to the arts who ruled his people justly and generously, and regretted the bloodshed he had been forced to inflict. Josephus, who had defected to the Roman camp and became part of Titus’s entourage, insisted that the Jews brought the disaster upon themselves by following extremist leadership. Gans argued that Josephus predated the rabbinic texts, so his assessment should be given preference. 

In noting that none of those historians knew about the Talmud’s tale of the gnat, he cited a theory that the chroniclers excluded the episode intentionally so that Titus would not be blamed for the suffering he inflicted on Israel.

Like Dei Rossi, Rabbi Gans advocated reading the rabbinic account as a fictitious parable. He recommended the approach taken by the commentary Paḥad Yiṣḥak by Rabbi Isaac Chajes of Prague, who allegorically derived the name “Titus” from the Hebrew “ṭiṭ,” meaning “mud,” alluding to one who who is mired in the evil inclination of heathen materialism that will eventually be vanquished by enlightened Torah values (symbolized as Jerusalem) such as humility (a gnat) and freedom (bird).

Regrettably, history provides us with enough literal, physical foes and oppressors that we don’t really need to resort to symbolic readings.

First publication:

• The Alberta Jewish News, July 10, 2024, p. 23.

For Further Reading:

• Baron, Salo W. “Azariah de’ Rossi’s Historical Method.” In History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Adresses, edited by Arthur Hertzberg and Leon A. Feldman, 205–39. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964.
• Eisen, Chaim. “Maharal’s Be’er Ha-Golah and His Revolution in Aggadic Scholarship —in Their Context and on His Terms.” Hakirah 4 (2007): 137–94.
• Neher, André. David Gans, 1541-1613: Disciple Du Maharal, Assistant De Tycho Brahe Et De Jean Kepler. Publications Du Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes Hebraiques de l’Université de Strasbourg; Études Maharaliennes. Paris: Klincksieck, 1974.
• Preuss, Julius. Biblical and Talmudic Medicine. Translated by F. Rosner. Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1993.
• Rosenberg-Wohl, David Michael. “Reconstructing Jewish Identity on the Foundations of Hellenistic History: Azariah de’ Rossi’s Me’or ’Enayim in Late 16th Century Northern Italy.” Ph.D., University of California Berkeley, 2014.
• Rossi, Azariah ben Moses dei. The Light of the Eyes. Edited and translated by Joanna Weinberg. Yale Judaica Series 31. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.
• Roth, Cecil. The Jews in the Renaissance. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959.
• Šedinová, Jiřina. “Non-Jewish Sources in the Chronicle by Davis Gans, ‘Tsemah David.’” Judaica Bohemiae 8, no. 1–2 (1972): 3–15.
• Weinberg, Joanna. “The Beautiful Soul: Azariah de’ Rossi’s Search for Truth.” In Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, edited by David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri, 109–26. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
• Yavetz, Zvi. “Reflections on Titus and Josephus.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, GRBS, 16, no. 4 (1975): 411–32.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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The Letters of the Law

by Eliezer Segal

For many of my contemporaries, the quintessential visual representation of the life of Moses is Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 cinematic epic The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston. 

Despite its title, the film is not primarily about the revelation of the commandments at Mount Sinai. Only a brief segment of the screen time is devoted to the giving of the tablets (carved by spectacular divine fire), Moses’s receiving them, smashing them, and delivering them to the Israelites.

When I first saw the movie in my youth, I was disappointed—as, I suppose were many Jewish viewers—by the fact that the text on the cinematic tablets was not written in the familiar squarish characters that we learned in Hebrew school and in which Jews have been writing and reading for more than two millennia. Instead, it was inscribed in an unfamiliar alphabet similar to the one found on coinage minted by the Hasmoneans and Bar-Kokhba, and still used by the Samaritans.

All this invites questions of why and how DeMille and and his collaborators chose to make use of that particular portrayal of the biblical tablets, and how accurate they were in rendering them for the silver screen.

The background story to this decision inspires immense respect for the persons involved. Prominent among these was Henry S. Noerdlinger, a Swiss-born researcher to whom DeMille assigned the task of verifying the accuracy of this and other historical films. 

We should note that Noerdlinger’s definition of historical accuracy differed considerably from academic standards. Notably, he strove to incorporate narrative additions from later rabbinic, Christian and Muslim traditions; and the opening credits proclaimed proudly that the story was “in accordance with the Ancient texts of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, the Midrash and The Holy Scriptures.” DeMille also speculated that other ancient sources had been “long since destroyed, or perhaps lost like the Dead Sea Scrolls” that were coming to light at that time. Those texts were the sources of numerous plot complications, political and romantic intrigues in the Egyptian court, and other non-scriptural elements that enhanced the movie’s dramatic impact. 

How was the team of filmmakers able to wrestle with arcane details of Hebrew paleography? So insistent was DeMille on giving his film a genuine look that his tablets of the Law were actually carved out of reddish granite rock extracted from the slopes of Mount Sinai (or at least from Jabal Musa, the site that has been identified with that biblical location). Multiple copies of the tablets had to be crafted from various materials for use in diverse lighting situations. In recent years, those props have been fetching prices of $50,000 to $80,000 at auctions.

As regards the choice of alphabet, this was also dictated by DeMille’s desire for historical authenticity. For this purpose he consulted with Prof. Ralph Marcus, a respected expert on Second Temple Judaism. Of the various options from which they could have chosen (and which are in fact quite similar in appearance), Marcus argued for a late Bronze-Age Canaanite script that would likely have been in use in Moses’ time. 

DeMille was very appreciative of Marcus’s contribution to the production and repeatedly consulted him on matters of scholarly accuracy. Marcus soon realized that for a blockbuster that was netting its producers $130 million, he deserved more than the paltry fifty dollars that he was paid. He hesitantly suggested a raise to $250, but received no response before he was felled by a heart attack.

The Talmud preserves divergent opinions regarding the alphabet in which the Torah and the Decalogue had originally been inscribed. While most sages recognized that our square script, known to the Mishnah as “Assyrian,” was introduced in the days of the Babylonian captivity, others (like Rabbi Eleazar ha-Moda‘i) denied that Jews had ever used anything other than our square alphabet. Rabbi Judah the Patriarch held that the original tablets had been inscribed in Assyrian letters, which had subsequently been abandoned until they were re-introduced by Ezra in Babylonia. 

DeMille himself was a practicing Episcopalian Christian, and was presumably unaware that he might have qualified halakhically as Jewish, insofar as his mother Beatrice Samuels was of Jewish birth, though she converted to Christianity before her marriage. (Through her he was second-cousin to Viscount Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine). 

His sentimental attachment to the Jewish people was exemplified when filming an earlier, silent version of “Ten Commandments” in 1923, for which he employed a large number of recent Jewish immigrants to play the Hebrew slaves. At one point, those Jewish extras broke into a chant of the liturgical melodies “Av Ha-Rahamim” [merciful father] and “Sh’ma Yisra’el,” eliciting tears from the director.

If (as I did) you transliterate Marcus’s text into “normal” square Hebrew letters, you will observe that its content is not completely identical to that of our Jewish Bibles. Some of the  differences might stem from the same challenges faced by designers of synagogue Torah arks when they set out to depict the motif of the Ten Commandments, but realize that there is not enough space to display them in their entirety in a readable size (especially the wordier ones at the beginning). A common  solution is to include only the first two words of each commandment, or to substitute single letters of the Hebrew alphabet, used as numbers. The designers for the film seem to take an analogous pragmatic approach; though some also made reference to a scholarly theory that the original commandments given to Moses were formulated concisely, and were expanded in later times. 

Curiously, the text on DeMille’s tablets skips over the prohibition against taking God’s name in vain. It was likely a simple copyist’s omission (in a text that nobody could proofread)—but I wonder whether  DeMille had concerns about his own reputed propensity for cussing and blaspheming on the set.

After all, such violations might not be so grave if the prohibition wasn’t set in stone.

First publication:

• The Alberta Jewish News, June 5, 2024, p. 22.

For further reading:

• Birnbaum, Salomo A. The Hebrew Scripts. Leiden: Brill, 1971.
• Bowman, John, and Shmarjahu Talmon. “Samaritan Decalogue Inscriptions.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 33, no. 2 (1951): 211–36.
• Higham, Charles. Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Scribner, 1973.
• Joselit, Jenna Weissman. Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Noerdlinger, Henry S. Moses and Egypt: The Documentation to the Motion Picture the Ten Commandments. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1956.
• Rodrigues, Nuno Simöes. “Josephus as Source of the Egyptian Sequences in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956).” In How Pharaohs Became Media Stars: Ancient Egypt and Popular Culture, edited by Fernández Pichel Abraham I. and Fernández Pichel, 110–35. Archaeopress Egyptology 48. Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology, 2023. 
• Soloveichik, Meir Y. “When Moses Went Through DeMille.” Commentary, New York, 2023.
• Vorderstrasse, Tasha. “Written in Stone: Cecil B. DeMille & the OI’s Hollywood Legacy.” News & Notes 243, no. 243 (Autumn 2019): 18–19.

My email address is: [email protected]

On Native Soil

by Eliezer Segal

According to the stereotypical version of Jewish history as taught in many Hebrew schools and sermons, the Jewish population in the land of Israel came to its end around the year 70 C.E. when the Romans suppressed the “great rebellion,” destroyed the Jerusalem temple and exiled the populace from its ancestral territory. That narrative sometimes gets modified a bit by pushing the date ahead two generations to the Bar-Kokhba revolt in 132-135, after which the holy land was effectively emptied of its Jewish inhabitants until modern times.

There are many problems with this storyline. For one thing, the Romans did not have a policy of expelling vanquished populations. True, many Jews were captured as slaves to be sold in Rome, and much of the land in Judea was confiscated, precipitating a significant northward migration to the Galilee. Nevertheless, this supposed Jewish wilderness somehow managed to produce a rich variety of religious literatures, and archeologists continue to unearth remains of synagogues, ritual baths and other indicators of vigorous Jewish life during the Roman and Byzantine eras. 

A more extensive decline in the Jewish population was occasioned in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when Crusader armies perpetrated massacres and expulsions of Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere. This situation demonstrates that there were still sizable pockets of indigenous Jews who suffered as victims of slaughter and enslavement. 

After the victory of the Muslims, the sultan Saladin invited the Jews to return to Jerusalem, Ashkelon and other localities, and the Jewish presence became more stable. 

Linguistic research has noted that the local Arabic dialects contain many words, including agricultural terminology, that are not found in other branches of the language, but are attested in ancient Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic. This suggests that a significant proportion of the Palestinian Arab population were descended from Jewish peasants who converted to the dominant culture and its religion.

However, because that community has left us scant documentation about its activities during the medieval era, a rough picture must be pieced together from  later times, from the fifteenth century, when the local Jews encountered outsiders, including pilgrims and immigrants from Europe—and especially refugees from Spain and Portugal who arrived in considerable numbers fleeing the Inquisition.   

In a detailed description of life in the holy land published by French priest Eugène Roger in 1664, the author contrasted the Jews who were native to the “Orient” with their coreligionists who immigrated from Spain, Germany and Italy. He explained that the former group traces its ancestry to families “who have been preserved from all antiquity.” They often feel hostility towards the new arrivals who have no substantial roots in the local society, but came only to fulfil religious obligations, to die and be buried in the promised land. 

In one of his responsa, the fifteenth-century Austrian authority Rabbi Israel Isserlein dealt with a person who wanted to renege on a vow to move to Jerusalem on account of the reports he heard about their inhospitable attitudes—apparently referring to those Jewish natives. The natives were especially disdainful of refugees from Spain, regarding whom they raised doubts that perhaps they should be classified as half-Christians. After all, before escaping from Iberia, they had observed all the practices of good Catholics, including baptism, confession and communion; while transgressing the sabbath, dietary rules and other prohibitions of the Torah. Yet from Roger’s perspective as an outside observer, there were no substantial divergences between the natives and the immigrants in matters of religious practice or belief.

In his description of their economic activities, he seems to be projecting the stereotypical categories of European society. He insists that no Jews are directly involved in farming or possess real property, but that most earn their livelihoods as moneylenders or second-hand clothes dealers. A few are physicians or tax farmers, and not one of them owns a house or estate.

It was not until the indigenous Jews had to be distinguished from other Jewish communities that they began to be designated by a special name. Under the Ottoman empire they were usually called “Musta‘rabin,” those who act like Arabs, since they adopted the Arabic language and lifestyles. Roger noted that they spoke Arabic among themselves, even though they employed a Spanish dialect to communicate with the Sephardic immigrants. Some referred  to them as “Moriscos.” They constituted the “elders” who represented the Jewish community before the government. 

Rabbi Obadiah Bertinoro, who immigrated from Italy to Jerusalem in the late fifteenth century, had to grapple with the poverty caused by inequitable distribution of the tax burden under “the elders, the inhabitants of the land,” apparently referring to the same indigenous oligarchy. On the other hand, he praised them for their simple faith that was (unlike that of their coreligionists from Spain and North Africa) uncorrupted by the heresy of rationalist philosophy.

By the early sixteenth century, as the indigenous leadership was outnumbered by the wave of Sephardic immigrants, Israel of Perugia assured his readers that there was really no truth to the reports of animosity between the Musta‘rabin and other Jews: “Behold I declare to you that great love prevails among them all, whether Sephardim or Musta‘rabin. There is no outcry in the streets.” 

The persistence of an indigenous Jewish sector in Israel was of especial interest to Isaac ben-Zvi, the scholar who became Israel’s second president. He was persuaded that the Jewish peasants of Peki’in in the Galilee, the only remnant of the Musta‘rabin to survive into the twentieth century in their original localities, were descended in an unbroken chain from the ancient Judeans. Subsequent archeological discoveries of stones from the Roman and Byzantine eras, decorated with ancient inscriptions and imagery from the Jerusalem Temple, confirm the truth of their tradition.

The same obstinacy that appeared as a snobbish lack of hospitality toward later pilgrims and immigrants was a quality that enabled the Musta‘rabin to cling tenaciously to their ancestral soil, and thereby reinforce the Jewish title to the land of Israel.

My email address is: [email protected]

Hurray for the Hyksos

by Eliezer Segal

In every generation, some people are determined to deny the reality of Jewish nationhood. 

In the first century C.E., an Egyptian named Apion stood at the head of the anti-Jewish faction in Alexandria, lobbying the emperor Caligula to outlaw Judaism. Central to Apion’s case was the claim that the Jews had no tangible historical roots, but were a recent invention and consequently should be denied the rights that are extended to established ethnic or political communities.

The Jewish historian Josephus Flavius devoted a special treatise, “Against Apion,” to the refutation of Apion’s calumnies. He was particularly interested in providing evidence that the nation of Israel was of great antiquity and was mentioned in early non-Jewish sources. 

There were several authors whose fascinating works have only survived by virtue of being quoted in Against Apion. One such figure was an Egyptian priest named Manetho who composed a detailed history of his people based on Egyptian sacred texts that he translated into Greek. Josephus made extensive —albeit selective— use of Manetho’s chronicle the “Aegyptiaca.” 

In truth, it is not entirely clear that Manetho mentioned the Hebrews or Jews at all in his history (which has not survived in its complete original form). What he did mention was an obscure northwestern Semitic nation called the Hyksos who invaded Egypt in the nineteenth century B.C.E. and according to his narrative, began an occupation that was marked by widespread slaughter and destruction of temples. Afterwards the Hyksos expanded into Judaea where they built the city of Jerusalem as a bulwark against Assyria.

Another passage cited from Manetho spoke of the Egyptian king Amenophis who wished to be vouchsafed communication from the gods, and for that reason was required to purge the homeland of lepers and impure persons. For that purpose, he enslaved eighty thousand people, forced them to labour in stone quarries, and relocated them to the former Hyksos capital city.

A leader of this slave community emerged in the guise of Osarsiph, an ex-priest who instituted a new and blasphemous religion that rejected the traditional Egyptian gods, permitted the consumption of sheep and cattle (which were eschewed by pious Egyptians), and discouraged interaction with outsiders. Not surprisingly, Osarsiph was equated with the Moses of the Bible —though not all scholars agree that this crucial identification was proposed by Manetho himself. The Egyptian tradition also tells of Osarsiph making contact with the Hyksos contingent in Jerusalem.

Josephus found it convenient to accept Manetho’s accounts as proof that Moses, his people and his religion were around in very early times. Of course, this also raised some difficulties, in that there were elements in the Egyptian tales about evicted lepers that clearly conflicted with the Jewish memory of our miraculous exodus, and were quite embarrassing to our national pride. 

Josephus, while confessing to his own ignorance of the Egyptian language, proposed an etymology of the word “Hyksos” as “shepherd kings,” though he personally preferred “captive shepherds.”  (Remember that the biblical story stresses that “all shepherds are abominable to Egyptians.”)  Modern Egyptologists favour something more like “chieftains of the hill-country,” or “from foreign lands.” This title referred to the leaders of the people, not to the entire ethnic group.  

Manetho’s depiction of the Hyksos as brutal foreign invaders has not received much scholarly support in more recent studies. Archeological evidence suggests that they were more likely a migrating tribe who gradually infiltrated Egyptian society, adopting the language and artistic norms of the majority culture to the point that their religion and architectural styles blended Semitic with Egyptian elements. Some of their prominent leaders rose to positions of power in the Egyptian government. Eventually they were driven out by Pharaoh Ahmose I in the sixteenth century B.C.E. 

Contrary to Manetho’s claim that they ruled Egypt for five centuries, the royal chronology indicates that the Hyksos dynasty consisted of only six rulers whose combined reigns spanned a single century.

In any case, Josephus found Manetho’s records to be very useful from two perspectives. In the first place, they proved that “the so-called Shepherds, our ancestors” left Egypt and settled in “our land” in what the Greeks considered the remote past. Secondly, they showed that the Hyksos / Israelites were not native Egyptians, but had arrived there from elsewhere, thereby confirming the biblical story. 

As for all those elements that did not dovetail with the Jewish version, especially the accusation that the Jews were descended from lepers who were expelled from Egypt—well, Josephus dismisses them and claims that Manetho must have gathered them from questionable legends, not from trustworthy documents.

The archeological evidence indicates that the period of Hyksos rule in Egypt was generally one of prosperity. And yet after their overthrow, they were vilified as despised foreigners, and the memories of their social assimilation and economic contributions were suppressed. This recalls the Bible’s account of that ungrateful “new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.”

Notwithstanding all the contradictions between Manetho and the Torah, Josephus’s approach continues to attract adherents. For instance, a recent study claims to trace the historical “DNA” of the Jewish people back to three basic ethnic components, one of which consisted of a mixture of local Canaanites and Hyksos refugees. The author argues that it was the collective memories of this group that eventually evolved into the biblical stories about the Hebrew lad Joseph rising to influence in the Egyptian royal court, the enslavement of the Hebrews, and their exodus to the promised land. 

Against this theory, however, others note that the sequence of the biblical story about Joseph and his family’s migrations to Egypt is entirely different from that of the Hyksos’ rise to Egyptian leadership; and that neither Joseph nor any other Israelite ever became an actual ruler of Egypt.

Well, if nothing else, this suggests another topic for animated discussion about the Exodus to keep us conversing all night, like those ancient sages in the Haggadah. 

My email address is: [email protected]

Royal Flush

by Eliezer Segal

The following scene appears in a crude illustration in a manuscript Hebrew prayer book from early fourteenth-century Germany:

A Jew attired in a crown and regal robes is riding atop a noble steed and carrying the recognizable cone-shaped hat worn by medieval European Jews. Walking before him and holding the horse’s reins is a very unhappy moustached man. 

Detail from the Leipzig Mahzor, early thirteenth century Germany, currently housed in the library of Leipzig University.

Of course, these figures are Mordecai and Haman, and the image represents the episode in the Megillah where the villain was commanded to bestow royal honours on his Jewish arch-enemy.

Behind the procession we see a tower, from the top of which emerges the upper body of a lady. In her hands is a vessel, and from that vessel flows a dirty brown liquid that spills onto Haman’s head.

Readers who are familiar with the Talmud’s retelling of the Esther story will recognize the incident that is being portrayed in this illustration. The Talmud says,

As Haman was leading Mordecai along the street of Haman’s residence, he spotted his daughter standing on the roof. She assumed that the one riding must be her father and the one walking before him must be Mordecai. So she picked up a chamber pot and cast it onto her father’s head. But then he gazed upward, and she realized it was her father. She fell from the roof to the ground and died.

Some of the traditional commentators found this scenario very implausible. Thus, the Maharal of Prague objected that even if her intention had been to target Mordecai, the daughter must have realized how difficult it is to aim with precision, and that Haman was almost certain to suffer from collateral splashing of the human waste. We must therefore imagine that the villain was situated at an improbably great distance in front of Mordecai’s steed.  

Similar questions bothered the Ben Ish Hai of Baghdad: Is it really conceivable that a daughter would not recognize her own father’s voice when he was marching through the streets proclaiming loudly, “Thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honour”? The rabbi was therefore forced to introduce some additional details into the story: as Haman’s route took him through several winding streets to make his announcement, his throat became parched and his voice was altered beyond recognition, even by his daughter. It was also necessary to take additional liberties with the plot in order to explain why she did not identify her father’s face. In his embarrassment at his predicament, Haman deliberately bent his head downwards to avoid visual recognition, so that his daughter did not actually see his face. 

Nor, adds the Ben Ish Hai, could she recognize Mordecai as the figure mounted on the horse. After all, Mordecai had become weakened from three days of continual fasting, rendering him unable to hold his head straight or stand with erect posture. He was bent over and clung with both his arms to the horse’s flanks. It was for these reasons that Haman’s daughter was unable to observe his face clearly from the roof.

Ultimately, Maharal resigned himself to the premise that this kind of incident cannot be subjected to normal standards of rational analysis. It was all part of a divine strategy to bring about Haman’s miserable and humiliating downfall; and the Almighty was perfectly capable of making his daughter disregard the risks attached to her action.  

Rabbi Enoch Zundel Ben Joseph, a prominent nineteenth-century commentator on rabbinic homiletical works, linked this story to a detail found in the Targum (Aramaic translation) of Esther: Haman had entered his daughter in the competition for the new queen of Persia, but she had to withdraw from the pageant when she was supernaturally afflicted with halitosis and repulsive bowel and bladder ailments. Therefore, at the decisive moment when she emptied the chamber pot onto her father’s head, it was filled with particularly disgusting contents. 

The Talmud found an allusion to this incident in the Bible’s precise wording when narrating Haman’s actions following his honouring of Mordecai: “Haman hastened to his house mourning, and having his head covered.” 

This was not the only instance where this motif occurred. The Talmud contains anecdotes about rabbis whose heads were assailed by the discards of careless sweepers and moppers, and they interpreted the mishaps as designed to ensure their humility, citing the words of the Psalmist, “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill.” 

The insulting implications of such acts were similar for the Greek and Roman contemporaries of the talmudic sages.  It was common for crowds to demonstrate their disdain for political opponents by hurling garbage at them in a manner analogous to the modern use of rotten tomatoes. The Athenian orator Demosthenes once prosecuted a drunken soldier who would, among other abuses, empty chamber pots onto his victims. 

Though gags about chamber pots might be expected in bawdy comedies, they even show up in works by serious tragedians. In a lost play by Aeschylus, Odysseus justifies his killing of one of Penelope’s unwelcome suitors by declaring that he “once threw in my direction an object designed to make me a laughing-stock, the evil-smelling chamber pot… wafting over me an odour very unlike that of perfume-jars.” Identical expressions appear in the surviving fragments of a drama by Sophocles when describing a rowdy gathering of brawling Achaean soldiers en route to the Trojan war. 

Vulgar scatological mockery of tyrannical villains like Haman can be an effective means of spiritual resistance. As Mel Brooks said about his crude mockery of the twentieth century’s incarnation of Haman in his movies “To Be or Not to Be” and “The Producers”:

There’s only one way to get even—you have to bring him down with ridicule if you can make people laugh at him, you’re one up on him.

In a similar spirit, this year several Israeli bakeries have been advertising “Sinwar ears” as a replacement for the traditional “Haman’s ears” [hamentaschen].

My email address is: [email protected]

Footprints in the Ashes

by Eliezer Segal

Literary historians and just-plain fans of mystery fiction occasionally raise the question “What was the first detective story?” The correct answer depends somewhat on how you define the genre (for example, whether it has to involve a crime or a detective). The proposed candidates are almost invariably nineteenth-century European or American authors, such as E. A. Poe or Wilkie Collins. Those with wider horizons might include a tale from the Thousand and One Nights. Others expand the category to allow just about any story that involves solving a puzzle.

A popular candidate is the biblical Daniel who exposed the fraudulent cult of Bel.

What’s this? You don’t recall that episode from your reading of the Jewish scriptures? Well, the truth is that the story is not found in the editions of the Bible that were accepted by Jewish tradition. It was however included in some other ancient versions. The original Hebrew or Aramaic text has not survived, but it found its way into Greek translations that were preserved by Christian communities. There are two known versions of the Greek text; one of which is part of the complete Greek Bible from Alexandria (the “Septuagint”), and a slightly different one preserved by the second-century Jewish translator Theodotion.

In Christian churches, the Greek books and sections that were excluded from the Hebrew canon are often placed under a separate classification as “Apocrypha.” This story, which appears in the Greek Bibles as a concluding chapter of the book of Daniel, gets separate billing as “Bel and the Dragon.”

The story takes place during the reign of King Cyrus of Persia. The pagan priests maintained a temple into which were daily heaped enormous quantities of grain, meat and wine for the god Bel to consume, thereby proving to everyone that Bel was a powerful deity —everyone, that is, except Cyrus’s trusted Jewish counselor Daniel. Daniel laughingly dismissed the notion, arguing that Bel was nothing more than an inanimate statue of clay and bronze. 

The pagan priests challenged Daniel to a test. The temple’s only entrance would be sealed after the food was deposited. If in the morning the food was gone, then that would prove conclusively that Bel was real, and the unbeliever Daniel would be put to death. Otherwise the priests would be executed.

That night Daniel, observed only by the king, scattered ashes on the temple’s floor. When the temple was opened in the morning, the food was all gone, and everyone rushed to judge Daniel. He, however, called their attention to footprints in the ashes, which proved that the supposedly sealed chamber had been entered by a large contingent of humans, identified as the cult’s seventy priests and their families. These people had been sustaining themselves sumptuously from ostensiblly religious contributions of grain, meat and wine. The enraged king had the priests and their families executed, and authorized Daniel to destroy the idol and its temple.

The motif of a Hebrew monotheist unmasking the hoax behind the worship of graven images is familiar to many of us from the midrashic account of young Abram’s undermining his father’s idol business. After destroying all the statues in the shop, he accused the largest of them of causing the destruction in an argument over the distribution of offerings. This elicited an admission by his father that the idols were nothing more than inanimate objects. 

There is an earlier episode in the Greek Daniel that also has a detective-like ring to it, the story that appears in Apocrypha collections as “Susanna and the Elders.” It tells of the virtuous lady of that name who resisted the advances of some dirty old men who subsequently accused her falsely of adultery in an attempt to blackmail her for sexual favours. Just as she was about to be condemned to death on the fabricated charge, their nefarious plot was exposed by young Daniel when, under his cross-examination, the elders gave differing identifications of the tree where the supposed dalliance had occurred.

The Mishnah, to illustrate the need for intensive interrogation of witnesses in capital trials, contains the cryptic statement: “there was a case in which Ben Zakkai interrogated the witnesses regarding the stems of figs.” The Talmud identified this mysterious “Ben Zakkai” as the renowned Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai; and explained that the case arose while he was still a student before receiving his rabbinic ordination. Rabban Yohanan lived during the generation of the temple’s destruction, centuries later than the biblical Daniel; and scholars disagree whether there is any real connection between the two stories.

The trick of detecting intruders by sprinkling ashes on the floor makes an appearance in the Talmud—not for purposes of exposing human charlatans, but rather in order to reveal the presence of nocturnal demons. “One who wishes to know them should surround his bed with powdery ashes, and in the morning he will see something resembling rooster footprints.” This was probably similar to the function of the many Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls that have been discovered in Babylonia, which were placed upside-down in order to capture hostile demons. 

The Apocryphal story about Daniel and the pagan priests did eventually find its way back to “normative” Jewish literature, apparently with assistance from Babylonian or Syrian Christian teachers who helped adapt it from their Syriac Bible for the benefit of Jewish scholars. A version of that text appears in the collection Bereshit Rabbati by the eleventh-century Rabbi Moses ha-Darshan of Narbonne, and it found its way into several medieval Jewish compendia . In that guise it was cited as an ancient midrash by the erudite Dominican Raymond Martini in his Pugio Fidei (“dagger of the faith”), an anti-Jewish polemical treatise that attests  to the compiler’s extraordinary mastery of Jewish religious literature, including valuable quotations from books that have otherwise been lost.

The precise details of the story’s wanderings from ancient Greek Bibles through the dust of later ages are not entirely clear, and will undoubtedly benefit from additional scholarly sleuthing.

• First Publication:
• The Alberta Jewish News, February 14, 2024, p. 21.
• For further reading:
• Alhassen, Leyla Ozgur. “A Semantic and Thematic Analysis of the Story of Ibrāhīm in the Qur’ān: Family, Parents and Ancestors.” Religion & Literature 49, no. 3 (2017): 49–76.
• Bonfil, R. “The Nature of Judaism in Raymundus Martini’s ‘Pugio Fidei.’” Tarbiz 40, no. 3 (1971): 360–75. [Hebrew]
• Brüll, N. “Das apokryphische Susanna-Buch.” Jahrbücher für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 3 (1877): 1–69.
• Frankel, Zacharias. “Eine Alexandrinische Liebesgeschichte.” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 17, no. 12 (1868): 441–49.
• Golinkin, David, Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, and Freek Van Der Steen. “Chapter Five. Susanna And The Singular History Of Singular Witnesses.” In Essays on Halakhah in the New Testament, 89–110. Jewish and Christian Perspectives 16. Brill, 2008. 
• Liebermann, Saul. Shkiin. 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1970. [Hebrew]
• Mandel, Paul. “The Call of Abraham: A Midrash Revisited.” Prooftexts 14, no. 3 (1994): 267–84.
• Manekin-Bamberger, Avigail. “Who Were the Jewish ‘Magicians’ Behind the Aramaic Incantation Bowls?” Journal of Jewish Studies 71, no. 2 (October 1, 2020): 235–54.
• Sosis, Richard. “The Last Talmudic Demon? The Role of Ritual in Cultural Transmission.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375, no. 1805 (August 17, 2020): 1–7.
• Stadel, Christian. “The Judaeo-Syriac Version of Bel and the Dragon: An Edition with Linguistic Comments.” Mediterranean Language Review 23 (2016): 1–31.
• Trotter, Jonathan R. “Another Stage in the Redactional History of the Bel Story (Dan 14:1-22): The Evidence of Polemic against Foreign Priests and the Focus on Daniel in the Old Greek.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 44, no. 4/5 (2013): 481–96.

My email address is: [email protected]

Interactive Teaching Materials

“A Page of Talmud” Image Map site:

•  The Gemara (Babylonian Talmud)

Related sites for classic Rabbinic works:

• The Mishnah

• The Mikra’ot Gedolot (Rabbinic Bible) and its commentaries

Codes of Jewish Law:

• Maimonides’ “Mishneh Torah”

• Rabbi Jacob ben Asher’s “Arba’ah Turim”

• Rabbi Joseph Caro’s “Shulhan ‘Arukh”

Jewish Religious Streams

Kabbalah

•  The Ten Sefirot of the Kabbalah

Orthodoxy

• Varieties of Orthodox Judaism:

Under the Apple Tree

by Eliezer Segal

The apple is not mentioned in the Torah, nor does it figure among the fruits in which the holy land took special pride. It does, however, appear quite frequently in later books of the Bible—although its identification as the Hebrew “tapuaḥ” is not completely certain. 

At any rate, in the sensuous poetry of Song of Songs, the female speaker praises her beau admiringly:

As an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men.

With great delight, I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

Why should an apple tree be a fitting metaphor for a lover? 

The sages of the Midrash identified a number of specific botanical features that distinguish it from other trees in the forest. 

Thus, Rabbi Yosé ben Zimra noted that it does not provide much shade. Possibly, he was referring to a feature that allows it, during periods of extreme heat and dryness, to turn its leaves downwards to protect the fruit from intense sunlight. Some varieties even shed their leaves in the summer. When this happens, people will avoid the apple trees in favour of species that offer more substantial protection. 

This fact provided the ancient Jewish preachers with a convenient segue to an edifying parable. According to the standard midrashic premise, the male and female lovers in the Song of Songs symbolize respectively God and the people of Israel; and the romantic relationship between the two sides expressed itself in the turbulent events of Jewish history. 

Rabbi Yosé applied the image of the pleasing apple tree to a familiar tradition about how the Almighty offered the Torah to the heathen nations of the world, but they rejected it because it did not offer them the immediate satisfaction of tangible “shade.” Only the people of Israel, recognizing the true beauty of the tree and the appetizing flavour of its fruit, chose faithfully to linger in the metaphoric shade of the apple tree, rather than other trees that do not bear fruit. 

Another unusual characteristic of the apple tree was observed by some rabbis (though in fact, this claim does not seem to fit the known botanical facts): Whereas most trees flower before they grow their leaves, the apple tree reverses that sequence. This reversal could parallel the famous tradition about how the Israelites at Sinai declared first “We will obey” (the Torah’s commandments), and only afterwards “We will hear” (the details of its contents).

Furthermore, the rabbis calculated that the ripening of an apple tree lasts fifty days culminating in the month of Sivan, which coincides with the timespan between the Exodus and the revelation at Mount Sinai.

The medieval Jewish philosophers proposed a novel way of understanding the imagery of the Song of Songs. The allegory refers not (or, at least: not only) to the history of Israel, but to the intellectual love of God that was cultivated through metaphysical contemplation. Thinkers like Maimonides held that the highest level of human perfection is achieved by refining one’s mind to a state where it can conceive of a deity that transcends space and time. The exceptional minds who reach that level, through a lifetime of scientific and metaphysical study, may become receptive to revelations from the “absolute intelligence,” the realm of metaphysical being that was equated with the biblical angels. 

Maimonides’ like-minded contemporary Joseph Ibn Aknin composed a detailed Arabic exposition on the Song of Songs. In his allegorical interpretation, the poem personifies the absolute intelligence as the male lover eager to unite with the female beloved, equated with the human rational soul. However, the course of metaphysical love does not run smooth, owing to humans’ physical constitution which constantly distracts us from our spiritual vocation.

Ibn Aknin explained that apple trees have several specific features that inspired the Bible to liken the rational mind to an apple tree. For example, the intangible quality its fragrance is comparable to the sublime abstraction of metaphysical ideas, and its delicious flavour evokes the balanced moderation that is essential to philosophical and ethical discipline. 

Furthermore, in medieval times, apples were known for their numerous medicinal and health benefits. In this respect, Ibn Aknin argued that they are comparable to the healing effects of philosophical study on the health of the soul. They can eliminate spiritual ailments and restore intellectual balance. The bestowing of such precious benefits is surely analogous to the gifts that a passionate suitor would bestow upon his lovely sweetheart. In these respects, the apple tree is manifestly superior to all those lesser trees in the “forest” who are out for nothing more than a superficial good time as they pursue their fruitless desires and impulses.

The image of the apple as a model for allegorical teaching was also central to Maimonides’ explanation of the different layers of scriptural interpretation. His discussion focused on a passage in the book of Proverbs that says, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in images of silver.” He understood this simile as referring to a molded figurine of an apple crafted in gold and encased in a network or filigree of silver. Onlookers can only view the precious metal object that stands in its centre through the gaps in the mesh, so observers standing at a distance will think the object they are viewing is silver, and even those who study it from up close will only see disconnected pointillist dots. 

This, says Maimonides, illustrates the profound genius of biblical parables and prophetic imagery. Whereas most normal readers will read them at a perfectly coherent “silver” level, teaching about straightforward moral or social subjects, a select few can penetrate the outer wrapping to grasp the sublime spiritual teaching that is the ultimate core of Jewish spiritual life.

But let us not forget that the literal, physical apple is also a tasty and nutritious fruit that grows on delightfully attractive trees.

Take a bite and enjoy one. It’s good for you.

My email address is: [email protected]