Harel13

@RabbiKaii thanks, if you find anything I'd be happy to hear.

@RabbiKaii any opinion perhaps on the first question I asked here: judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/141831/… ?

@RabbiKaii I think that one potential troll shouldn't make us suspicious of all members, particularly long timers.

Thanks.

Can a staffer merge the tags parashat-vezot-habracha and vzot-ha-braka?

Moadim lesimacha. Does someone happen to have Yoel Elitzur's Places in the Parasha (English edition) and could possibly look something up for me?

judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/114099/…, judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/141081/…, judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/139927/…, judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/108874/… (note number of down votes).

@IsaacMoses sorry, I forgot to get back to you. Busy couple of weeks...I don't remember which exact question prompted this line of thought, but here are some examples from recent years: judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/141603/…, judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/138410/…, judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/114578/…,

I'll add that when I joined such questions usually stayed between 0-2 upvotes on average and usually weren't voted on for closing, to my knowledge. Something seems to have changed in the last couple of years. Perhaps new members with voting privileges?

There are several Meta Qs that deal with this, but the exact policy isn't clear to me. Could someone clarify whether such Qs are indeed on topic, and if so, is there anything to be done with regards to downvotes and close votes (for the time being I usually vote to leave open)?

When I joined this site I was under the impression that the site was supposed to also be a place for questions regarding heterodox forms of Judaism. I myself am staunchly Orthodox but heterodoxy has fascinated me for years and I enjoy having a webspace to ask questions on the topic.

I've been troubled as of late by questions about non-Rabbinic or non-Orthodox movements consistently being downvoted to oblivion, as well as receiving many close votes, particularly "Comparative Religion" votes, which makes me a bit mad.

As for rabbis, the term is of course a later one. The prophets, judges, Levites, Kohanim and sometimes kings were considered the religious leaders, and indeed midrashim state that such people led the courts of their times. Even if you completely disregard later sources, there are explicit and implicit mentions of such individuals holding such roles in society in Tanach.

Because the default life of the average person in any civilized, organized society included following the law. There was no need to mention what was obvious to all. With that said, there are occasional references to following particular commandments (e.g., Arei Miklat, not punishing sons for the sins of their fathers, land ownership rights, Pesach, and more). These are all mentioned because they had relevance to their particular contexts.

@AlBerko I don't agree. The Tanach does not describe Bnei Yisrael consistently sinning. What it does is often describe periods when they sinned. The Torah, on the other hand, is a work of law. How many ancient texts are there that describe the public following the law on a regular basis? I would guess that next to none, if any at all.

That no one looked for deeper meanings in religious texts? Much of archeology is, like it or not, dedicated to interpreting perceived symbolism in material finds. Would you say that no such deeper meanings existed, and that the pre-Hellenistic ancients weren't interested in those?

@AlBerko I don't know what you mean by you believing that "the Torah does not lie", but do you really think that the Greeks and Romans invented legal discourse? That no one before them argued about the interpretation of laws?

@AlBerko what's your point?

These arguments, of course, can work both ways. One could suppose that with all of the Judahite pillar figurines, the Judahites preferred to study Canaanite and Assyrian and Egyptian mythology. But we have no exceptional evidence for that either!

or they mostly studied orally, or they did write, but on materials that were hardly preserved in the Israeli climate.

Did the ancient Israelites not philosophize? Did they not tell stories? They probably did, because we do have the Tanach, and we have a little bit of extra-biblical traditions in Chazal that we have no idea where they came from. So that means that we've either not found the big libraries which were the likely foundation of study (entirely possible, and I pray for the day we might stumble upon such a thing),

b. How did the ancients study? In Mesopotamia we have libraries chock-full of cuneiform tablets, and in Egypt we have masses of papyri. In Israel we've found very few of either. Mostly we have ostraca, and of those, most are for trade and military issues. Very, very few are defined as perhaps part of a genre of Nevuah or related to law.

@AlBerko I have theories, but I don't have novel chiddushim about every topic. But let's stop and think for a moment. What would evidence of Torah study look like? a. We don't know what ancient batei midrash looked like. So how capable are we of calling one building a house and the other something else?

@AlBerko however, educational reforms were already instituted in the time of Yehoshafat and Chizkiyahu. Remnants of these systems certainly could have been around Yoshiayahu's time, so not necessarily necessary to start a completely new system.

@AlBerko I don't think he does. He talks about the Israelite ethos, Israelite cultic markers, etc. Like I said, he's more like Adler than you may think. He talks the talk (the academic talk, that is). But he's on the other side of the aisle on these issues.

@AlBerko I don't recall that he discusses cult there, but I believe that he does include discussion of ethnic markers (been a little while since I read it). He also very recently published an article on Israelite cult dismissing the notion that there were masses of local public cultic sites in Israel prior to various cultic reforms. I have it scanned if you'd like a copy.

@AlBerko Well, I comend you for being aware of both sides of the argument. Faust isn't the sort of person I would describe as "an institutional attempt to justify the legend", even if he is also from a dati background. And he's since written much more on the topic.

@AlBerko have you ever read some of Avraham Faust's writings on ethnic identity in Iron Age Israeli sites?

To people who may read the comments section, I wouldn't put too much weight on Yonatan Adler's views. He's a good archeologist, and yes, he comes from a dati background, but when he gets down to the historical explanations of his findings, he's the sort of person who shoots the arrow and draws the target. Don't let the kippa fool you. Cf. for example the almost complete lack of non-kosher animal bones in Israelite sites.

"מה אהבתי תורתך, כל היום היא שיחתי"? (David, Tehillim 119:97)

@AlBerko I actually have a lot, but sadly I don't have time to write down all of them. Some have to do with Jewish and Jewish-Christian sects too.

@AlBerko I don't have a very well-developed opinion on them, but as I said, right now I'm leaning to them being sectarians, although I'm open to arguments in favor of their being mainstream.

@AlBerko your claims are equally or even less substantiable. I'm familiar enough with where your views have gone in recent years. I, however, disagree and tend to put more trust in our sources.

@AlBerko several Chazalic sources which I'm sure you're familiar with. Some of those sources as well as later ones identify them with figures from the books of Ezra, Nechemiah, Chaggai, Zechariah and Malachi. What else do you have in mind?

I don't mean they were sectarians, but quite the opposite.

They I meant Chassidim Rishonim. It's the gist of what I wrote in that old paper.

@AlBerko your views on the role of the DSS people are also debatable. I stated my own opinion on the matter. I don't mind debating the issue but the first paragraph of my answer is the main point and that answered my own question.

My current thoughts, based on the theory I developed a few years ago, is that they are equatable to שיירי כנסת הגדולה, of whom the most famous is Shimon Ha'tzaddik (but a couple of other names are also found in our sources), and were students of Anshei Knesset Hagedolah and the last prophets.

If you're interested in an opinion that these authors were mainstream, you can see for example Neil Asher Silberman's The Hidden Scrolls (although his view is interspersed with explaining the politics surrounding the research of the scrolls).

there are many arguments to support that these were fringe groups and indeed quite a few of their materials differ greatly from what we know of the sages. It's speculative on my part, but I feel that it's unlikely that the sages would have quoted something from a fringe sect in such a positive matter.

In short, the quote first appears in Sifrei Devarim, which is a tannaitic midrash from the school of Rabbi Akiva. This means the materials that compose it were authored not long after the destruction of the temple. In other words, there's a pretty good chance that these sages were familiar with the DSS sect(s). While there are arguments that these groups' ideology did not contradict that of the sages and may have even been part of the same circle,

@shmosel thanks for the straightforward explanation and links.

Oh brother. Ciao.

Did Hashem go to university?

Did the Rebbe ever explain why it was right for him to go to academia but not anyone else?

Didn't the Rebbe himself study in university?

Welcome to Mi Yodeya, by the way. Great to have you with us.

Pure claptrap, like the rest of Shahak's book.

@TurkHill I stipulated that option with my opening "if such a text ever existed".

If such a text ever existed (and the sages didn't simply base their discussions on oral tradition), then either it hasn't been found yet in archeological excavations or it didn't survive. Multiple extra-biblical texts are mentioned in Tanach but they haven't survived. On the other, an otherwise unknown text concerning some kind of vision by Bilam was discovered last century in Deir Alla (biblical Sukkot) in Jordan, the text is dated to the Iron II period.