Judaism and Its Bible

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Frederick E. Greenspahn describes the extraordinary two-and-a-half-millennia journey of a people and its book that has changed the world.

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Institution: Florida Atlantic University

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Discovering Misconceptions About Judaism

00:00:00 - I was invited to participate in a seminar held at Harvard University, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to ex, there was a professor there who was working on a book on the concept of scripture in world religions. And he'd invited people with expertise in various traditions. So I was there, on behalf of Judaism, as it were. And what I discovered over the course of the summer was that people don't know very much about Judaism. there was somebody there for Hinduism, somebody

00:00:36 - I was there as the Jew. But I discovered over the summer that people really had a lot of misconceptions about Judaism, and particularly in this case, its conception of the Bible, which echoed something I read later by the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, who spoke of Judaism as the unknown religion of our time, which is surprising since everybody thinks of Judaism and Christianity together.

00:01:08 - to go out on adventure to the north end of Boston, which is a heavily, Italian neighborhood. And it turned out that although we were there just as sight sees, it was the day of a festival, a festival called The Festival of Ill Bambino. Bambino is obviously the baby. And while we were there, there was a parade and they were carrying on a platform, a little baby doll,

Exploring the Function of Scripture in Judaism

00:01:39 - And as it came by, all the people rushed over to kiss it. And as that was taking place, it reminded me of an experience I've seen many times at Jewish synagogues where during the course of religious service, the Taurus world, which is the first five books of the Bible, is taken out and paraded around, and the congregants, the worshipers rush over to kiss it. And so what dawned on me suddenly was something

00:02:10 - which is when you compare religions don't compare things based on their shape. Let's say the, the Torah with the Christian scriptures or the, the Muslim Quran look at their function. And what I realized at that moment was that the Torah in Judaism functions much like Christ in Christianity, even though obviously one is a book and the other is a person.

00:02:40 - after that experience, I realized somebody needed to explain how the Bible functions in Judaism. And fortunately, I was in a religious studies department, and so I had colleagues who were Christians and Muslims and Buddhists. And as we talked, I began to work on how to frame this book in a way that would explain the role of scripture in Judaism initially for a non-Jewish audience. But what I realized is that Jews didn't think about it either.

Exploring the Role and Significance of the Bible in Jewish Tradition

00:03:11 - and so we study ancient books. Now, I was trying to look at the whole spectrum of Jewish history, which spans obviously several thousand years from my experience in Boston. It was clear the first topic I was going to have to explore was the ritual function of the Bible, how Jews physically treat the Bible when they read it, what they do with it, and secondly, the importance of the Bible. How is it regarded? Just what do people think about it?

00:03:44 - but how do they actually think about it? And that then led to a series of other topics. First, how did the Bible come to be? Because obviously, the books of the Bible were never written with the intention that they would be in a collection used bound in one volume and used in the way that it's used. So the process of canonization, which took almost a thousand years. Thirdly, how did Jews understand the Bible? How have they interpreted it over centuries?

00:04:18 - What do people think? What do Jews think the Bible is? and finally, the very complicated relationship that the Bible has within Jewish thought to rabbinic traditions, because Judaism, as we know, it was shaped by the rabbis who came into existence after the Bible was completed. I went into this business with the assumption that the Bible was at the center of Judaism. that's what I think most Jews would say,

The Evolution of Jewish Thought: From Scripture to Rabbinic Tradition

00:04:49 - But in fact, it's far more complicated because although Judaism says it comes from the Bible, in fact, it was shaped not by the Bible, by, by a later group called the Rabbis. The rabbis came into existence after the Bible. All the books of the Bible were completed. And in fact, there were a series of debates within Judaism over its history as to the role of scripture. The rabbis are an outgrowth

00:05:20 - And we know that the Pharisees were one party in contest with another party called the Sades who represented the priestly leaders. The rabbis, interestingly enough, compiled their teachings into a collection called the Talmud, and that is very much what Judaism is based on. But while the Talmud quotes the Bible all the time, it frequently suggests teachings

00:05:49 - Just to give one obvious example, the holiday of Passover, according to the Bible, what you're supposed to do on Passover is sacrifice a lamb. Jews obviously don't do that. Instead, what they do is they gather with their family and friends around the table, and they read from a book called The Ha, which quotes the Bible, but which is something very different. and so the Judaism is that it exists today,

Debates on Biblical Authority in Judaism

00:06:23 - but differ from it frequently. So over the centuries, there have been several debates as groups have emerged who said, wait a second. We're not doing what the Bible says. We should do what the Bible says. In the medieval medieval period, there was a group called the Karaite who said, let's go back to the Bible. They lost, the rabbis won. In the last century, there have been two groups which wanted

00:06:52 - The first were what came to be reformed Judaism, which claimed it was based on the Bible. And the second was Zionism, which taught that we should go back to the land of Israel, then Palestine, because that's what the Bible says. And so there's been this sort of tension within Judaism, do we follow the Bible or do we follow the teaching of the rabbis, which are embodied in the Talmud?

00:07:23 - and it was fascinating to explore. There's a joke that if you go to a yeshiva, an orthodox school, like a seminary, and you say to the students, where does it say, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, which is the first sentence in the Book of Genesis. The answer the students will tell you is what page and the Talmud that comes from, because the Talmud quotes it. So there's this tension between the Bible and the Talmud between rabbinic teachings

Hebrew Heritage: Jewish Approaches to Bible Translation

00:07:57 - and has become very fascinating to watch. Judaism from the beginning to the present day emphasizes the original Hebrew. So if you go into any synagogue when the Torah is being read, they will read it in Hebrew, and they're very proud of that. And that's in contrast to Christianity, which has always relied on translations and indeed has translated the Bible into a, a host of different languages.

00:08:28 - of the Bible, ironically, a Jewish translation into Greek, which Jews proceeded to disown once Christianity adopted it at the same time. However, what I discovered is that Jews have indeed translated, the Bible into a, a host of languages and sometimes done it many different times. So there are many Greek translations, many Arabic Jewish Translations, many English translations,

00:09:01 - And what these translations often do is in the first place try to make the Bible accessible to Jews who can't understand the Hebrew, which has been the case since the beginning. But secondly, sometimes in response to Christianity, make sure that the translation incorporates Jewish understandings of the Bible. And as I've already mentioned, that frequently is based on how the rabbis interpreted it.

Shavuot and the Challenges of Translation in Judaism

00:09:31 - that's been a pervasive issue, there's a holiday called Shavuot in Judaism, which takes seven week, takes place seven weeks according to the Bible after Passover, the Bible says that you are to count those seven weeks, 49 days from the Shabbat in Passover. That's the Hebrew word. And so the rabbis taught that the word Shabbat doesn't in

00:10:02 - It rather means a day of rest, which would be the first day of Passover. And as a result of that, since Passover always starts on the same date, the holiday of Shavuot in Jewish tradition always ends up on the seven, same date, 7 49 days after Passover begins. Well, that creates a problem for translators. When you're translating the passage in Leviticus about observing Shavuot.

00:10:32 - Normally that means Sabbath, but many Jewish translations don't translate it that way. They translate it as the day of rest or the day of the holiday. And so throughout the Bible, when Jews have translated the Bible, there's been this tension between do we translate it literally or do we translate it the way we meaning? The rabbis understood it. And you can see that time and time again, particularly in passages which have been

Translation Tensions: Virgin or Young Woman?

00:11:05 - The most famous example is the passage in Isaiah, which says that an Alma will bear a child. Christianity understood that to mean a virgin. So Jews have had to say, do we translate that as a virgin or do we translate that as a young woman? And that's been a bone of contention between biblical scholars for centuries. There's even one Spanish translation of the Bible, which produced three different editions, one

00:11:37 - another, translated as a young woman will conceive, and a third doesn't even translate. It just writes it in, in Spanish letters, our regular Latin script, and Alma will conceive. So there's this huge tension in Judaism about how to translate the Bible, which turned out to be a fascinating phenomenon. Judaism puts the Bible upfront, even though much of what Jews do is actually based on the Talmud

00:12:06 - to sort of bridge that gap. And so the rabbis in particular were very concerned to rely on the Bible to always find a biblical basis for what they were doing. And so they developed a variety of methods of interpretation as by the way, have Christians in their own treatment of scripture and frankly Muslims in their treatment of scripture of their scripture, the the Quran and the Rabbis grouped these translations into four

Fourfold Interpretation of Biblical Texts in Judaism

00:12:38 - and they remembered it by the acronym of the word Pardes, which means orchard. So Pardes has four consonants, p, r, d, and S. And there are in Jewish tradition four ways of translating, of interpreting rather the Bible. The P stands for paat, the literal straightforward translation, interpretation. The RA stands for rees, which means an allegorical interpretation.

00:13:10 - a holi interpretation. And the s for so stands for indicates the mystical or secret translation, interpretation rather. And according to Jewish tradition, the Bible ha all these translations are valid. The Bible doesn't have just one meaning, it has many meanings. And so each passage in the Bible can be understood in a host of different ways. And to demonstrate that I chose one, one story,

00:13:41 - I wanted a short but important story, and I still chose the story in Genesis about Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac. My mistake was in thinking that would be simple, and it turned out to be very elaborate. There are numerous interpretations of that passage, and indeed Christianity has relied on that passage. So it became where it's understood as a foreshadowing of God the Father, allowing the Son Jesus to be sacrificed. And so it turned out to be a far more rich,

Interpretations and Sacrifices: The Complex Role of the Bible in Modern Judaism

00:14:15 - that has come into the modern age where in Israel and in America during the Vietnam War, that passage was understood, is exemplifying parents' willingness to sacrifice their children for cause that the parents believe in, but not always the children. What has happened is the rabbis have had to rely on the Bible and sort of find biblical justifications for what whatever they're doing. And they've been able to do that in a variety of ways.

00:14:45 - if somebody harms you, you should, you should pay them back by eye for an eye in a tooth, for a tooth. And the rabbis explained That as meaning, not literally you knock out somebody's eye, but rather you give them the value of that eye. So it's a financial comp, compensation. Other movements then said, we're gonna go back and translate and understand the Bible, literally. And sometimes they rejected it and sometimes they, they said, no, no,

00:15:14 - And so the Bible has become, as I said, this bone of contention sometimes within Judaism. And if you go listen to two different rabbis, you can hear them interpret the Bible, same passage in two different ways, which gets back to the rabbinic teaching. The Bible has a multitude of, of meanings, and sometimes they claim it has seven meanings. Sometimes they claim it has hundreds of meanings, and in the end of the day, they're always going back to the Bible and you have movements which said, no,

Exploring Jewish Diversity and Biblical Interpretation

00:15:48 - We'll go back to the Bible. And other groups said, no. And so you get this diversity, which has always been a characteristic of Judaism, but always, everybody claims they are interpreting the Bible. They're relying on the same scripture. I went into this seminar at Harvard 40 years ago thinking it would be very straightforward and simple thinking. I was well-trained. It took me decades to write this book. But what I learned is that Judaism is a very rich tradition,

00:16:19 - when I went into the field of biblical studies, it was dominated by the notion that we study the biblical period, what took place two thou two to 3000 years ago. So we studied the ancient languages, we studied the history of what happened in Ancient Israel. We studied the theology that is taught by the Bible, but in fact, the Bible has a very rich history.

00:16:48 - of the books in the Bible were written to be in the Bible. They were written at different times by different people, over a period of a thousand years. And so the first thing one has to understand is who decided that there should be a Bible and who decided which books should be in it? And that is a very complicated question that took a thousand years to play out. There's a debate in the Talmud about what is the order of biblical books?

Understanding the Complexity of Biblical Traditions

00:17:20 - They didn't have the technology to put the book, the several books of the Bible into one binding. They only had scrolls. So each book had to be written on a separate scroll. So what does it mean to say what order are the books in that technology came into play over, around the year 1000 from around the year 1000 to around the year 1500 ce. And so how did this collection come into existence?

00:17:52 - issues about the text all kind the way the Bible is used evolved. So the Bible has a very rich history. Judaism has a very rich history, and its relationship to the Bible is complicated and exciting. And that's something that I discovered again in that seminar at Harvard was not known by non-Jews. The man leading that seminar who's an expert on comparative religion, didn't know much of what I was saying. He didn't know that Jews carry around the Taurus squirrel

00:18:24 - But I, on the other hand, didn't think of that as an important act until I went to the north end of Boston and saw a ceremony with ill bambino. And so both Jews and non-Jews, I don't think appreciate how rich the Jewish tradition about the Bible is. And as I learned that in the process of putting this book together, I would hope Jews and non-Jews alike can come to appreciate the richness of the Jewish tradition

Exploring the Richness of Jewish Traditions and Scripture

00:18:51 -

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Judaism and Its Bible

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