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. 

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]

Don’t Mess with Judah

by Eliezer Segal

It’s one of the tensest and most climactic moments of the biblical Joseph saga. Judah has been placed in a hopeless predicament. The viceroy of Egypt Zaphnath Paaneah (who has not yet revealed himself as Joseph) has been accusing Jacob’s sons of espionage and incriminated Benjamin by planting a royal cup among his bags. Furthermore, Judah guaranteed their father Jacob that Benjamin would be returned safely to his home; and pledged that he would substitute himself for his brother if matters should reach that desperate point. In a régime that is absolute and tyrannical, there is not the faintest hope that Benjamin will be found innocent or pardoned.

It is at this point that Judah launches into a lengthy speech before the viceroy. 

What was the purpose of that speech?

In their “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” Tim Rice and Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber accompany the speech with a chorus repeating the word “Grovel!” and that, it would appear, is an accurate understanding of Judah’s intention. Powerless before the viceroy’s authority and with no expectation of persuading him of their innocence, all he can do is throw himself at the mercy of the court and repeat his version of how the innocent brothers were cast into this tragic situation, emphasizing the cruel suffering it would cause to their aged father (“ye will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave”).

Some interpreters discerned in Judah’s words a more subtle strategy, in which he was attempting to argue as compelling a case as he could without openly contradicting his powerful accuser. This was evident in the way he enhanced the pathos of Jacob’s suffering in order to elicit compassion. 

Thus, according to one midrashic comment, Judah hinted that there was something suspicious about the way the ruler singled out for interrogation this particular Hebrew family from among the visitors from many lands who had come to purchase food in Egypt. Furthermore, Judah “reminded” Zaphnath Paaneah that he had expressed a wish to “set mine eyes upon” Benjamin—which seemed to imply a commitment to his personal safety. 

Perhaps no scholar was so appreciative of Judah’s argumentative skills as the fifteenth-century Italian author Rabbi Judah Messer Leon. He was immersed in the ethos of Renaissance humanism which drew inspiration from the masterpieces of ancient Greek and Latin civilizations. In addition to his commitments to philosophy and science, Messer Leon was especially fascinated by the discipline of rhetoric, as professed by Cicero and Aristotle (according to the attributions and interpretations current in his day). Messer Leon’s best-known book, entitled “Nofet Ṣufim” [Honeycomb] was devoted principally to expositions of those works, but from a distinctly Jewish perspective. Whereas the standard non-Jewish treatises culled their examples from Greek and Latin texts, Messer Leon strove to prove that the most perfect examples of rhetorical elegance are to be found in the Hebrew scriptures.

It was in this connection that the Nofet Ṣufim cited Judah’s oration to Joseph as an object lesson in how to apply the techniques of rhetoric to the crafting of a persuasive oration. The speech begins by ingratiating the speaker to his audience, eliciting the listener’s affection and compassion by means of self-deprecation and flattery (for instance, by praising the viceroy as equal to Pharaoh). Judah selected the details of his narrative very carefully so as to anticipate potential questions or arguments (but without disagreeing explicitly). Like all well-crafted lectures, this one concludes with a succinct recapitulation of its main argument. 

By demonstrating the perfect conformity of the Hebrew Bible to classical literary aesthetics, Messer Leon wished to enhance the enjoyment that Jews may derive from reading their holy scriptures.

When you read Judah’s speech through Rashi’s traditional commentary, you get a very different picture of its meaning and of the relationship between the protagonists. Judah is neither grovelling nor restraining himself with tactical caution. Quite the contrary, Rashi understands every word that leaves Judah’s lips as an expression of confident—even threatening—assertiveness.

Thus, when Judah began by saying “Let not thine anger burn against thy servant,” it was not because he was afraid of offending his superior. Just the opposite—he was ordering him to calm down. And when he compared the viceroy to Pharaoh, he was evoking the precedent of that earlier Pharaoh who suffered divine punishment for abducting Sarah. Judah was actually challenging his opponents to a showdown: “If you challenge me, then I’ll kill both you and your boss!”

Rashi acknowledged that these interpretations were not supported by the literal sense of the biblical text, but were found in the Midrash. For the sages of the Midrash, the characters in scriptural narratives are not one-time historical or literary personages but embody recurring concepts and religious values. The figure of Judah, ancestor of the Davidic royal dynasty, symbolized the nation’s pride in its dealings with the other nations of the world. During the era of the Midrash, this would have reflected Jewish pride vis à vis their Roman occupiers. 

These differing attitudes might underlie a second-century rabbinic dispute about our text: “Rabbi Judah says: He approached ready for combat… Rabbi Nehemiah says: He approached him for conciliation… The Rabbis say: He approached in prayer…” Several sages enlarged on Rabbi Judah’s premise, insisting (based on ingenious interpretations of the biblical wording) that Judah and his brothers were physically powerful enough to overpower the Egyptians if Benjamin were not released. 

Rabbi Eleazar concluded that each one of the options might be a valid one, depending on the circumstances. As Rabbi Bahya ben Asher observed: “Judah had in mind all three possibilities… He took the attitude of one who approaches fully armed, prepared for battle, and then declares: “Take your choice: Do you prefer to have recourse to legal adjudication, to conciliation, or to battle?”

The Jewish nation continues to find itself in situations where we must choose between these same options. 

Hopefully, we will find the wisdom to make the correct choices.

• First publication:
  • The Alberta Jewish News, December 19, 2023, p. 15.
• For further reading:
  • Bonfil, Robert. “The ‘Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow’ by Judah Messer Leon: The Rhetorical Dimension of Jewish Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Italy.” Jewish History 6, no. 1/2 (1992): 21–33.
  • Hughes, Aaron W. “Translation and the Invention of Renaissance Jewish Culture: The Case of Judah Messer Leon and Judah Abravanel.” In The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain : Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, edited by Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats, 259–94. BRILL, 2012.
  • Leibowitz, Nehama. Studies in the Book of Genesis in the Context of Ancient and Modern Jewish Bible Commentary. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Dept. for Torah Education and Culture, 1972.
  • Rabinowitz, Isaac, ed. The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow: Sēpher Nopheth Ṣuphim. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
  • Twiss, Paul. “An Overlooked Aspect of Judah’s Speech in Genesis 44:18-34.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 65, no. 3 (September 2022): 457–71.

My email address is: [email protected]

“When the Wicked Greek Empire Arose…”

by Eliezer Segal

The familiar Hanukkah story begins with the emperor Antiochus IV “Epiphanes” outlawing the practice of the Jewish religion and compelling the Jews of his domain to observe heathen rites devoted to Greek deities. 

This narrative is found in the most detailed chronicle of the events, the works known as the Books of Maccabees, and in its general outlines it is consistent with other ancient versions. 

And yet it is precisely that aspect of the story that historians have found baffling. 

Why should Antiochus have wanted to tamper with Judaism in the first place?

If you learned about Hanukkah in a traditional Jewish setting, then this question might strike you as superfluous. Isn’t it obvious that disdain for Jews and Judaism is built into the fabric of gentile culture? Haven’t idolatrous nations always felt threatened by the ethical monotheism that challenges their immoral lifestyles? In these respects there is no difference between Antiochus and all the other malevolent oppressors of history.

In reality, however, the historical context of Hanukkah is quite distinct. The hellenistic régimes that ruled the Mediterranean basin had an admirable record for respecting their subjects’ religious traditions. This was true of the Ptolemaic dynasty centred in Egypt, which governed Judea in the third and second centuries B.C.E.; and more so of the Seleucids, based in Syria, who dominated from the early second century. Antiochus III, father of the Hanukkah villain, actively supported Jewish religious institutions (as a reward for their backing him against his Ptolemaic rivals); he channelled resources for the upkeep of Jerusalem and its temple, and granted the Jews a large measure of political and cultic autonomy.

At any rate, Antiochus IV’s aggressive religious persecution marked a radical departure from any previous imperial policy, and it is not explained satisfactorily by the ancient historians.

It has been suggested that Antiochus’s eccentric personality is enough to account for his anti-Jewish policies without having to seek any deeper reasons. In ways that call to mind the bizarre antics of Roman emperors like Caligula or Nero, he had a reputation for mingling among the commoners and bestowing elaborate gifts on complete strangers. 

There are some scholars who see Antiochus’s persecution of Judaism as a natural outgrowth of the ideology of hellenism which was driven by a missionary urge to civilize the barbarian peoples. Unlike other subject nations, the Jews did not possess a pantheon of gods that could be conveniently grafted onto the Greek pantheon. That fact would have vexed Antiochus.

Some scholars have proposed that economics furnished the main motive for Antiochus’ strange policy. Pressures on the royal treasury were exacerbated by debts to Rome, by a lengthy military campaign by the Seleucids against their Ptolemaic rivals, and by Antiochus’ own extravagant lifestyle. This impelled him to support factions in the Jewish community who were ready to tolerate his pilfering of sacred treasures of the Jerusalem temple, and to ruthlessly suppress traditionalists who resisted such sacrilege.

Antiochus might even have absorbed some of his attitudes during a period that he spent as a political hostage in Rome, where he could have observed Roman policies like the outlawing of certain religious cults or the forcing of hellenism on some ethnic minorities.

One hypothesis goes so far as to suggest that the whole story of Antiochus’s persecutions should be treated with skepticism, because the Hasmonean propagandists who composed the books of Maccabees  might simply have been recycling a standard motif of Babylonian royal propaganda that liked to depict the current monarch as the restorers of the ancestral religion that had been suppressed by their predecessors.  

One of the most popular theories was formulated eloquently by the eminent twentieth-century historian Elias Bickerman. He insisted that the impetus for Antiochus’ suppression of traditional Judaism is not to be sought in Seleucid ideological or political interests, but rather, the king was drawn into the sectarian infighting of Jewish factions in Jerusalem. There were influential groups, led by prominent members of the priesthood, who were determined to modernize their religion so as to integrate better with the cosmopolitan hellenistic culture that defined civilization for much of the world. Their radical ideology aroused so much opposition among the Jewish traditionalists that its proponents had to solicit support from the Seleucid government.

The preceding scenario finds strong support in the narratives of the books of Maccabees and in the biblical book of Daniel, which reflects the concerns of traditionalists on the eve of the Hasmonean revolt. 

Howsoever we might choose to assess the merits of Bickerman’s theory, it has been called into question for another reason: the historian was accused of anachronistically imposing his personal perspectives on the historical facts. In particular, his descriptions of the assimilationist forces in ancient Jerusalem seemed significantly shaped by the experiences of the radical Jewish reformers in Germany (as well as of Jewish communists in Russia) who had sought futilely to gain acceptance by abandoning Jewish beliefs and practices. The fragmented Jewish communities were therefore unable to offer effective resistance to the rising Nazi party.  

It did not help Bickerman’s credibility that a very similar equation of ancient hellenists with modern reformers had been proposed by a prominent nineteenth-century theological apologist for Jewish orthodoxy, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.

Academic scholars tend to be very suspicious of attempts to view the events of the past through contemporary lenses. Nevertheless, there is no denying that human nature remains constant over the ages; so it does not seem inherently implausible that internal communal discord could render us vulnerable to attacks from our enemies. Recent experiences confirm, of course, that  irrational hatred of Jews and Judaism is indeed a persistent historical phenomenon.

Bickerman’s enthusiastic praises for the Maccabean resistance to oppression, in a work published in 1937, offered encouragement to Jews suffering under the Nazi persecutions.

So too, we might find legitimate encouragement in the historical lesson of a united Jewish nation successfully combating the onslaughts of our haters and oppressors.

• First publication:
• The Alberta Jewish News, November 22, 2023, p. 38.
• For further reading:
• Baumgarten, Albert I. Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews A Twentieth Century Tale. 1st ed. Vol. 131. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010.
• ———. “Elias Bickerman on the Hellenizing Reformers: A Case Study of an Unconvincing Case.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 2 (2007): 149–79.
• Bickerman, E. J. The God of the Maccabees: Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt. Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity, v. 32. Leiden: Brill, 1979.
• Cohen, Shaye J D. “Elias J Bickerman: An Appreciation.” The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 16 (1984): 1–3.
• Gruen, Erich S. “15. Hellenism and Persecution: Antiochus IV and the Jews.” In The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism: Essays on Early Jewish Literature and History, 333–58. Deuterocanonic and Cognate Literature Studies. De Gruyter, 2016.
• Heinemann, Isaak. “Wer veranlaßte den Glaubenszwang der Makkabäerzeit?” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 82 (N. F. 46), no. 3 (1938): 145–72. [German]
• Himmelfarb, Martha. “Elias Bickerman on Judaism and Hellenism: Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians.” In The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, 199–211. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Momigliano, Arnaldo. “The Hellenistic Discovery of Judaism.” In Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, 74–96. Cambridge University Press, 1975. 
• Rappaport, Uriel. “Elias Bickerman — Historian of Hellenization and Antiochus’ Religious Persecutions.” Cathedra: For the History of Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv, no. 149 (2013): 143–52.
• Schwartz, Daniel R. “Hitler and Antiochus, Hellenists and Rabbinerdoktoren: On Isaak Heinemann’s Response to Elias Bickermann, 1938.” In Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J. D. Cohen, edited by Michael L. Satlow, 611–29. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018.
• Tcherikover, Victor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. Translated by Shimon Applebaum. Peabody, MS: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999.Weitzman, Steven. “Plotting Antiochus’s Persecution.” Journal of Biblical Literature 123, no. 2 (2004): 219–34.

My email address is: [email protected]

Need for the Needy

by Eliezer Segal

I have long been bothered by the passage in Deuteronomy that declares “the poor shall never cease out of the land.” Back in the days when my youthful idealism was more uncompromising, I really did expect that Jewish tradition, if implemented fully, should produce a utopian society that entirely eradicates poverty, hunger, homelessness and exploitation. 

And indeed the Torah is not lacking in texts that seem to promote a very radical economic program. This is not confined to its repeated exhortations to donate generously to the poor and not to abandon the widows, orphans and strangers.. There are specific regulations about cancellation of debts, restoration of ancestral property to families who were pressured to sell it, and generous severance packages for those unfortunates who are forced into personal servitude. In light of all this, one might legitimately imagine that a Torah-based society would ultimately stamp out poverty altogether.

To further complicate the matter, another verse seems to envision the exact opposite scenario: “There shall be no poor among you.”

An intriguing solution to this contradiction was suggested many years ago by a Muslim imam of my acquaintance who allowed me—I was still at an early stage of my career—to benefit from his community’s charity [zakat] fund earmarked for the Muslim poor. When I protested that I did not really qualify as “poor,” he argued that the definition of poverty might have to be revised in the context of Canadian affluence. Indeed, perhaps poverty should be defined in relation to the general economic level of the society.

The sixteenth-century preacher Rabbi Ephraim Solomon Luntschitz did actually understand that poverty can be eliminated (allowing for some rare exceptions) in the land of Israel if the society governs itself in accordance with the divine plan. However, in diaspora communities (whose disobedience is demonstrated by the very fact of their failure to return to their homeland), poverty will indeed persist. It was in this context (explained Rabbi Ephraim), that the Torah was admonishing the residents of the holy land to give priority to the needs of their own community and not be overly considerate in distributing charity to poor Jews from abroad. This is quite a remarkable opinion, coming from somebody who often criticized the stinginess of the wealthy in his own diaspora community. 

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in nineteenth-century Germany took a similar approach, asserting that economic imbalances are the natural byproduct of human diversity, but that the divine laws that govern Jewish society in our homeland can eliminate or minimize them.  

A midrash cited by Rashi said that the Torah is placing two options before us: if Israel carries out God’s will by implementing the social measures set out in the Torah (especially the amnesty on debts in the sabbatical and jubilee years), then there will be no poor among us, and hence no need to observe the laws of charity. If however, the nation does not live up to those ideals, then poverty will remain a fixture of communal life that will have to be dealt with through philanthropy or by regulating the treatment of debtors. As pointed out by Ibn Ezra and Bahya, in a society that is completely equitable and affluent, nobody will need to borrow, and hence the laws regulating the treatment of debtors would become irrelevant.

According to the twelfth-century French commentator Rabbi Joseph Bekhor-Shor, the Torah’s assertion that “there shall be no poor among you” was not a categorical prediction, but only a general observation; (and our ancient sages recognized that such generalizations often have exceptions). What the Torah meant is that you should not automatically assume that particular poor persons are being penalized for their moral or religious failings. Quite the contrary—perhaps this homeless beggar is really a righteous saint who is being allowed to serve out the penalty for his few sins in his lifetime, so that he may enter the next world with a completely clean slate. Don’t try to second-guess the Creator’s plans, but just fulfill your obligation to treat the poor compassionately. 

An extraordinary story appears in the Christian Gospels: A woman carrying a precious alabaster vial of expensive perfume burst into a dinner in which Jesus was participating, shattered the container and poured its contents onto his head. The observers were indignant at her wastefulness, protesting that the price of the perfume could have been used for the support of the poor. But Jesus retorted that they should leave her alone, “for you will always have the poor with you, and you can help them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me.” 

Jesus then insisted that “wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” And yet this episode (which seems central to their claim that Jesus was “the anointed one [Mashiaḥ]”) is almost never quoted by Christian writers. That might have something to do with how it conflicts with the widespread (but questionable) image of Jesus as a champion of the poor.

In one of his novels, S. Y. Agnon wrote about a city in which all the Jews were affluent, so there were no poor persons upon whom to bestow charity. When Rabbi Anshel, a needy vagrant, passed through there, they rejoiced because he provided them with an occasion to perform a cherished mitzvah; and upon his departure, they felt deprived of the opportunity. Therefore they established a “Rabbi Anshel fund.” They all hung charity boxes in their homes for Rabbi Anshel, who would return every year to collect his donations.

If we ever do achieve an ideal society in which everybody can live in comfortable affluence, I might consent to forgo the privilege of performing that particular precept. 

In any case, I expect that there will always be a few impecunious scholars and newspaper columnists around, who would benefit from the community’s generosity.

First Publication:

• Alberta Jewish News, October 25, 2023, p. 22.

For further reading:

• Ben-Sasson, H. H. “Wealth and Poverty in the Teaching of the Preacher Reb Ephraim of Lenczyca.” Zion 19, no. 3/4 (1954): 142–66. [Hebrew]
• Chertok, Ted. “Person, Family and Community: The Individual and the Collective in Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Biblical Commentary.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2011): 402–20.
• Hornsby, Teresa J. “21. Anointing Traditions.” In The Historical Jesus in Context, 339–42. Princeton Readings in Religions. Princeton University Press, 2009. 
• Nachshoni, Yehudah. Studies in the Weekly Parashah: The Classical Interpretations of Major Topics and Themes in the Torah. Translated by Schmuel Himelstein. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 5 vols. ArtScroll Judaica Classics. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 1988.
• Sagiv, Yonatan. Indebted: Capitalism and Religion in the Writings of S. Y. Agnon. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press/University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.
• Segal, Eliezer. “Rabbi Eleazar’s Perutah.” Journal of Religion 85, no. 1 (January 2005): 25–42.
• Urbach, E. E. “Political and Social Tendencies in Talmudic Concepts of Charity.” Zion 16, no. 3–4 (1951): 1–27. [Hebrew]

My email address is: [email protected]