Intersections: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Mat 6:34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Another well-recognized phrase that we think was first heard in the Sermon on the Mount? Think again.

Here is one of the greatest medieval Jewish sage’s comment on Exodus 4:14: Rashi explains that the import of the word eh-heh-yeh – I Shall Be – is as follows, "I shall be with them in this sorrow as I shall be with them in other sorrows." According to the Midrash, Moshe responds with "An evil in its own time is enough."

Please note that I am not saying that Jesus was laying a false claim to originality in any of these instances. Rather it is that he was reminding his students of precepts they should be recognizing. This, I think, puts it in a perspective that is even more instructive than the traditional Christian one.

Intersections: Parables and their purpose

Matthew 22:1-14  And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables, and said, The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding …So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests.  And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast [him] into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few [are] chosen.

Johanan b. Zakkai illustrates the necessity of daily conversion and of constant readiness to appear before God in heaven by the following parable: "A king invited his servants to a banquet without stating the exact time at which it would be given. Those who were wise remembered that all things are ever ready in the palace of a king, and they arrayed themselves and sat by the palace gate awaiting the call to enter, while those who were foolish continued their customary occupations, saying, ‘A banquet requires great preparation.’ When the king suddenly called his servants to the banquet, those who were wise appeared in clean raiment and well adorned, while those who were foolish came in soiled and ordinary garments. The king took pleasure in seeing those who were wise, but was full of anger at those who were foolish, saying that those who had come prepared for the banquet should sit down and eat and drink, but that those who had not properly arrayed themselves should stand and look on" (Shab. 153a).

Matthew 13:10-11  And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.

Ezekiel 20:49  Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! they say of me, Doth he not speak parables?

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One of the first things I noticed in reading Everyman’s Talmud was that it has long been a common rabbinical practice to teach in parables; it wasn’t just something that Jesus invented during the time of his earthly ministry. That misconception is quite understandable, consistent with the traditional Christian interpretation of Matthew 13, but it’s obviously not quite correct. Never mind that the Hebrew prophets who came before either the rabbis or Jesus also taught in parables, as the example from the book of Ezekiel shows.

My personal outlook is that Jesus, being the living Word & wisdom personified, did it a little differently, and more effectively, but even saying that much to my more tradition-bound fellow believers got me some funny looks. We’re just not used to this stuff yet.

And, just to balance things out, I should note that The Jewish Encyclopedia takes a competing viewpoint, conceding that parables were used both by their rabbis and by Jesus, but theirs were better. We all have our preferences.

Intersections: Replacement theology, Talmud style

Or not, actually. But I was amazed to read just this morning that there was a sort of anticipation – and refutation – of the phenomenon years before. Stone Chumash cites Pesachim 87a as the source of this commentary on the Book of the Hosea (Haftarah Bamidbar):

God told Hosea that Israel had sinned, to which the prophet replied, “All the world is Yours. [If they are unworthy] exchange them for another nation.”

God responded by commanding him to marry a harlot and have children with her, even though he knew she was unfaithful. Chapter 1 of Hosea relates that he had three children from this marriage and, at God’s command, named them as follows:

Stone runs through the story of the names of the children, the second and third being Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi. These verses are some of the key Scriptures used to say that God has replaced Israel with the Church. But Stone goes on the relate:

…for the Jews had forfeited their claim to chosenness. Then, after the three children were born, God ordered Hosea to send his family away. Hosea pleaded that he could not part with the children!

God then said: “Your wife is a harlot whose children may not even be yours but the product of adultery, yet you say that you cannot abandon them. Israel is the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – how dare you say I should exchange it for another nation!”

I really don’t understand any longer how the church theologians who have wanted to go with the first premise have so completely missed the second and more important one, unless it’s through some sort of willfulness.

Intersections: Oral Law as the source?

One of the things that occurred to me early on is that the coincidences between NT writings (or other Christian teachings) and Talmud (or other rabbinical teachings) make complete sense if they are both elucidations of the same underlying tradition. And could it be that the underlying tradition for both is the Oral Law?

(Don’t expect me to explain here what the Oral Law is – that sort of thing is beyond the scope of these short “intersections” posts. You’ll also notice if you read these posts that I don’t necessarily start or end them neatly packaged as a post ought to be, since they are mostly just musings on various points.)

This thought is just foreign enough to my mind (my experience with Christianity as relationship rather than religious formality has been in a Protestant stream, not the Roman one which openly acknowledges the validity of the Oral Law) that I’m just keeping an eye out for it for now.

Intersection: Beginning and End

Revelation 4:8  And each one of the four living creatures had six wings about him, and within being full of eyes. And they had no rest day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God, the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.

My first encounter with Mesorah publications was through the Artscroll Siddur. I had picked it up in a bookstore more or less on a whim, having no idea yet what a siddur is – a prayer book, basically. So naturally I started at the beginning. On the first page following the front matter I found this:

The Names of God

The Four-Letter Name of God [Y-H-V-H {transliterated}] indicates that God is timeless and infinite, since the letters of this Name are those of the words Hayah Hoveh Veyheyeh, He was, He is, and He will be…

Of course the connection between Revelation 4 and Isaiah 6 is easily recognizable, but I’d never seen the Three Part Name in the Hebrew Scriptures (maybe it’s there & I haven’t seen it). It instantly struck me that when Jesus appeared to John on Patmos, John did not recognize his friend and rabbi until he identified himself as “the First and the Last.”

So what the Artscroll rabbi wrote, and what John wrote, are essentially the same. Consider the implications.

Where Talmud & New Testament Intersect

If it sounds surprising to you that there is any place where the Christian New Testament* and the Jewish Talmud are on the same page, so to speak, it did to me at first, too. But now, the more I study, the more I discover there are a great many places where both the Jewish sages and the Christian writers appear to be saying the same things, and often from a similar perspective.

My first exposure to this phenomenon was through Dr. A. Cohen’s Everyman’s Talmud, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1949. Dr. Cohen writes from an educated Conservative Jewish perspective, not from a Christian or Messianic Jewish one. So when I saw the sayings of Jesus reflected over and over again in rabbinical parables and precepts, I began to realize that there was a lot more in common between the two supposedly divergent streams of teaching than I had previously considered or ever heard. And I got some pretty strange looks whenever I mentioned it to my fellow Christian believers.

And I’m not just talking here about the well-known fact that many different cultures have some form or another of “the golden rule.” That’s just basic human social sense. The correspondence between Gospel precepts and parables and their Talmudic counterparts are more detailed, and sometimes very much out of synch with common social wisdom. You may have read Matthew 5:28, “I say to you that whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” but you may not have read this in the Talmud: "He that looks upon a woman’s heel,  is as if he looked upon her belly:  and he that looks upon her belly,  is as if he lay with her."

Or Luke 24:5  “And as they were afraid, and bowed their faces down to the earth, they said to them, Why do you seek the living among the dead?” is very much like this rabbinical quote found in Cohen: “a person who lost his son went to inquire for him in a cemetery …is it the way to inquire for the dead among the living or the dead? Surely it is always the practice of the living to attend to the needs of the dead, not vice versa!”

Luke 8:18,  “Therefore be careful how you hear. For whoever has, to him shall be given; and whoever has not, from him shall be taken even that which he seems to have,”  is not much different from this: “God’s measure is not like the measure of flesh and blood.  The measure of flesh and blood is this:  ‘An empty vessel is receptive,  but a full one can take in no more.  But God’s measure is this,  The full vessel is receptive of more,  but the empty vessel receives nothing;  according as it is said,  If hearing thou wilt hear;  that is,  If thou hearest thou shalt hear;  if thou dost not hear,  thou shalt not hear.”

Those are just a few instances of what I began to run into. I started bookmarking them as I came to them, but the book began filling with slips of paper citing Gospel verses where they matched the Talmudic reading under discussion. Too much to be mere coincidence. This got me to wondering if perhaps the sages, since they historically followed Jesus and the apostles, were maybe just copy-catting, but then I considered that it seemed more likely that both Jesus and the sages followed the same stream, which ultimately comes from the same source: the Torah.

Which makes complete sense, if we dare allow ourselves to go there in our minds. Another one of the books I mention on my Resources page lays it all out rather clearly: that Jesus was (and therefore still is) a Jewish Rabbi of the first order, in love with the Torah, perfectly diligent to keep every one of its precepts and statutes and judgments with all of his heart and soul and strength. Like no other, before or since. Yet isn’t it his desire for us that we follow his example?

So began a delightful journey over the past several months, looking into contemporary Jewish theological literature and Biblical commentary, not necessarily digging for parallels and correspondences, but keeping an eye out for them, all the while drinking in the richness of the wisdom of men who had been studying the Scriptures for hundreds of years before Martin Luther was even a twinkle in Daddy Luther’s eye.

I’ve become especially fond of the Stone Editions of the Pentateuch (Chumash) and Hebrew Scriptures (Tanach) from Artscroll Mesorah. I began keeping a handwritten journal of choice nuggets as I came across them, and even that is now filling up so much as to be hard to keep track of. I’ve shared a few of these things with friends, and I still get some odd looks, but not as many, and not quite so odd. So I’m going to try to follow along here, as much as is practical. Partly so I can come here myself and use the web browser ‘find’ function to look up something I’d noted earlier, and partly to share. If no one else comes here, that’s OK; I’ll still find this method useful for my own purposes. But if anyone does wander this way, maybe they’ll be blessed, or at least piqued to poke around the powerful principles which tend to pile up where the Talmud and New Testament meet.

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(*Just to mention it here, one of the important principles I learned in Gruber’s book Copernicus and the Jews – see my Resources page – is that the use of the term New Testament to refer to the Scriptures written after the close of the Hebrew canon is, if you’ll pardon my saying, completely unscriptural. Gruber thoroughly explains this in his chapter Dr. Frankenstein’s Neighborhood Bible Club. I’d love to spend some time with you quoting and summarizing, but I’ll restrain myself here, and bow to common usage, in order to be understood without having to go over the matter every time I post. A similar deference I’ll make is with respect to the use of the term “Christian.” Gruber also spends a chapter on this, but simply put, it’s not at all clear from “New Testament” Scripture that the early disciples ever thought of themselves by that term, and certainly not primarily. Interesting stuff, really, once you get into it, but not necessary at this point. Also please note my use of the term Talmud is in the most general sense. I refer the interested reader to Dr. Cohen’s book for a very good explanation of what that entails.)