Bel and the serpent are two episodes involving the biblical prophet Daniel and Cyrus, the king of Persia, who became king of Babylon as well. Scholars suppose the stories were composed around the second or first century BCE. In the story, one of the idols worshipped by the Babylonians was Bel, a statue that [...]
The story of Susanna was most likely composed around the early first century BCE. It appears in the Greek translation of the bible called the Septuagint. However, the text commonly used is that of Theodotion because it is a little fuller than the Septuagint text and has 64 verses. Theodotion was a Greek Jew who [...]
T There are remarkable similarities between the biblical story of the flood and the more ancient version of Gilgamesh. The Babylonian epic Gilgamesh was written on twelve tablets around 2000 BCE and has survived in several versions. It was discovered in 1839 among the ruins of a buried library in the excavated ancient city Nineveh. [...]
Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman of New York University’s “From Text to Tradition: A history of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism”[1] is an excellent comprehensive and readable history of Judaism during a span of over a thousand years. It tells how and why Judaism accepted the hegemony and authority of the Babylonian Talmud over that [...]
One of the many critics made against Jews is that the Hebrew Bible is filled with aggression, dysfunctional families, murders, rapes, and other horrors. The claim is that this is bad; it harms children who are led to copy what they read. But it appears that the opposite is true. The Austrian Bruno Bettelheim [...]
[ Imagine you are a forty-year old who was severely injured in an automobile crash and suffered amnesia that wiped out thirteen years of your life, two periods: ages 10-12 and 21-30. Then after enduring the dark space in your memory, sometimes agonizingly, you stumble on several trunks in your attic. You open the trunks [...]
As my Dad was a Renaissance man, Mom — born in 1908, two years after Dad — was a Renaissance woman. Unlike most women of her age, she had an extensive Judaic education, attended a teachers’ training school in Hunter College, and obtained a teaching diploma. Among her siblings were community leaders and educators, including [...]
Koren Publishers’ “The Steinsaltz Humash: Humash Translation and Commentary” by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz is excellent. The word “Humash” means “five” and refers to the Five Books of Moses which is in this volume in clear Hebrew text in the beautiful Koren font, with a completely new modern English translation that is faithful to the [...]
While the idea presented in Samuel J. Levine’s book Was Yosef on the Spectrum, that the biblical Joseph, son of Jacob, was autistic, having Asperger’s Syndrome, may bother some people who prefer to think that Israel’s ancient leaders had no imperfection,[1] they will still find much to learn and much to appreciate in this [...]
Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein’s book “God versus gods: Judaism in the Age of Idolatry" (Mosaica Press, 2018), which is found on Amazon at https://amzn.to/2NO4jLy is filled with information on every page about Jewish history, ideology, God, idols, superstition, and mistakes made by the ancients. There are seven chapters on the history of monotheism in 276 pages, many [...]
As I mentioned in my review of Miriam & Other Stories, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, who changed his name to Micha Joseph bin Gorion, was bothered his entire life with ideas and practices in Judaism which turned him into a scoffer, an attitude that is reflected in his stories in Miriam and sometimes in this book [...]
This new 1452-page siddur, which includes 106 additional pages of essays, edited in chief by Rabbi Basil Herring, shows why it is beneficial to have more than one version of the siddur. This new version, with weekday, shabbat, yom tov prayers, and a host of additional sections, offers much that is not in many [...]
Many people are mistakenly convinced that the Jewish holiday of Chanukah celebrates the victory of the Jewish religion over Hellenism and that the enemy was Greece. Neither supposed fact is true. The Jews in Judea, Egypt and other countries of the diaspora had a longstanding favorable relationship with the Greeks and Hellenism well before [...]
The extraordinary and astonishing episode of Jacob wrestling an angel at the Wadi Jabbok raises many questions and an assortment of conflicting answers. The text The wrestling episode is related in Genesis 32:25–33. Jacob had reached the Wadi Jabbok on his return home after an absence from Canaan of some twenty years. He [...]
The Bible and prayers mention angels, but Jews differed in the past and still do today on the existence of angels. Should we interpret these allusions symbolically, and deny the existence of angels? Or, should we take these references literally, and insist that not only do angels exist but that they are involved in and [...]
“Miriam & Other Stories,”[1] is a splendid collection of stories by Ukrainian-born Micha Josef Berdichevsky (1865-1921). [2] He was a journalist, a scholar with a PhD, a writer of fiction, and a collector of Jewish legends which he published in a book called “Mimekor Yisrael,” From an Israel Source.[3] He wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, [...]
“Random Harvest and Other Novellas,” by Haim Nachman Bialik ((1873-1934) contains six tales which vary in length from two being about 20 pages to two being close to 90. The book has an informative introduction of 18 pages about Bialik who many consider the greatest Hebrew poet in the past six hundred years, and each [...]
Jack Riemer, a rabbi, is one of the best clergymen of all religions in delivering sermons. Clergy can learn from his speeches, and congregants can enjoy listening to them or reading what he writes. It is a shame that other clergy lack his skill because sermons can be a great teaching tool. I think that [...]
There are free short books written in easy to read English that contain significant history that can be obtained from “Hourly History” every Friday. The books can be read in their entirety in an hour. This past Friday, on November 2, 2018, for example, the free books were: Babylon, Anne Frank, Spartacus and the Slave [...]
On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sent a historic letter to a leading British Jewish citizen Lord Rothschild that publicized British support of a Jewish homeland. This was the first national recognition of the Jewish right to Israel since the destruction of Israel in 70 CE by the Romans. The letter [...]
Too many people, including rabbis and scholars, focus on just two of Maimonides’ books to help them decide Maimonides’ frame of mind: his philosophical Guide of the Perplexed and his code of law which he called Mishneh Torah, which means the Second Torah. Focusing [...]
Amos Oz (born in 1939) is the author of many books and the winner of multiple awards. Many consider him to be Israel’s most famous living author. He is a proponent of the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and is outspoken on the subject. He considers religion irrational. He just published a book [...]
The Bible has many obscure matters. In my forthcoming book “Mysteries of Judaism III,” I will give many examples of the obscurities and how some people have used the obscurities to disparage women. The following is a short version of what will appear in the 2019 book. These examples focus on women. Eve [...]
The thrust of Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 influential book “Fear and Trembling” is long reflections on Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac, a story told in Genesis 22.[1] Kierkegaard concludes from his analysis that Abraham represents the prototype of faith, for he showed faith when he was willing to obey God’s command to [...]
There are multiple examples of additions by mystics to the siddur and machzor and to the practices concerning how and when the prayers are said. The following are a few examples. Additions to the Shema The several sections from the Torah which the siddur and machzor call the Shema are recited in the [...]
Contrary to what most people think, the siddur and machzor are not books containing a single view of Judaism. Additionally, much of what is in it are not prayers seeking help. The siddur and machzor are anthologies of diverse, even conflicting views, composed and collected and inserted into the collections by various people during [...]
The great scholar Arnold Ehrlich (1848-1919) authored Mikra Kipheshuto, “The Bible Literally,” in three Hebrew volumes.[1] His ideas are frequently unconventional, even untraditional – for example, he denied that Kings David and Solomon ever existed – yet his ideas are generally very intelligent and thought provoking. The following are [...]
Scholars have recognized long ago that the Bible has “wisdom books,” books that contain philosophy. They are Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes (also called Qohelet), and Ben Sira (also called Sirach and Ecclesiasticus) and the [...]
In the September 9, 2018 “thetorah.com,” Dr. Rabbi Zev Farber[1] offers a very thoughtful essay “Does YHWH Remit Punishment.” He asks does God inflict punishment even after a person repents. He cites several Torah statements that seem to indicate that even after people repent, they and their innocent descendants are punished for several generations. [...]
In his 1919 superb novel Demian, the 1946 Nobel Prize winning author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) suggested, despite the biblical text clearly stating that Cain criminally murdered his brother Abel, that it is possible to interpret the biblical story of Genesis 4 hinting that Abel was the brother who acted improperly. The 1919 novel Hesse’s [...]
