Tanach Thoughts

In a previous post  I discussed some possible Egyptian influences on the Tribe of Yehudah. One of the names mentioned was one Ashchur (אשחור) of the tribe. As it turns out, in some of the documents recovered from the Jewish military settlement in the Elephantine, a man named Aschur (אסחור) is mentioned! I saw this in the book "The Ten Tribes" by Alter Walner. He states there that the man was an Egyptian who eventually married one of the possibly more prominent Jewish women of the settlement (there were also non-Jews stationed there) and in later documents, his name was changed to "Natan", so perhaps he converted. I was a bit skeptical to his Egyptian status, though. True, his full name is Aschur ben Tzacha, not really a Jewish name, but the ending of the Alef in Tzacha made me think that perhaps Tzacha was the Aramaic shortening of Tzachyah, much like Ezra is the shortening of Azaryah. As to why he had two names, perhaps it was like other figures who had more than o...

 A couple of years ago I set out on an endeavor to write my first-ever serious Torani essay, with the guidance of a friend from yeshiva. The result was a well-received (by the yeshiva and family) essay examining the often taken-for-granted story of the battle between David and Goliath. I called it (in Hebrew): David and Goliath: The True Story. Yep, dramatic. I think it was a good essay. The first section dealt with understanding the basic pshat of the text, which I think was commonly misunderstood by most people for, I guess, centuries now. The second section dealt with the question on how the commentators saw the story. The third part came to reconcile the different views and create one coherent understanding of the story. In any case, a question popped up yesterday on the Judaism stackexchange site, Mi Yodeya which tied directly into the first part of the essay. As such, I essentially rewrote the first part in English, so I thought I'd post it here, too: Shmuel I 17:38-39 : וַיּ...

 At the end of ma'ariv on erev Simchat Torah, an idea popped into my mind: Was it possible that there was a connection between the name Amos and the Egyptian "mos" names? I vowed to bli neder check what names like Thutmose and Ahmose meant in Egyptian on motzei chag. Then I lucked out: A few pages into where I had left off in Werner Keller's The Bible As History, he wrote that the word Mos/Ms in Egyptian means son or teen. Then something hit me. I remembered Rabbi Dr. Izaak Rapaport zt"l's essay on the Hebrew word "Shem".  In it he reached the conclusion that the word Shem originally meant "son" or "offspring". In other words, yes, as Rabbi Ahron Marcus put it multiple times in Barzilai, this is a word that the Egyptians borrowed from paleo-Hebrew and flipped it. Shem/SM became MS! That the Tribe of Yehudah in particular and Yisrael in general may have been influenced by Egyptian culture isn't such a big secret: Egyptian infl...

 When filling out the Tribe of Yehudah section in my family tree project, one thing in particular caught my eye: the fairly significant number of people of the tribe who were named either after clothes, types of cloths or had names that were connected to the color white: Saraf, descendant of Shelah - possibly a reference to white-hot flames. Salma/Salmon (2) - a type of clothing. Nefeg? son of David - possibly from root pag, faded. Sheshan son of Yish'i - from Shesh, a type of Egyptian white cloth. Chur son of Kalev ben Chetzron - white, royalty. Shoval son of Kalev ben Chur - the piece of cloth that trails at the back of the clothing. Rekem of Chevron - possibly from Rikma, embroidery or lace. Charan? son of Kalev ben Chetzron - probably from the root char which means anger, in particular, raging white-hot. Related as such to Chur. Yair son of Seguv - he will light, from or, light. Ashchur son of Kalev ben Chur - possibly even named after Chur, in any case, clearly from the root o...

 After finishing Divrei Hayamim for the first time (and going through certain chapters several more times after that), I sat back and realized that of all of the tens and hundreds of thousands of people from the two and a half tribes from ever haYarden, we only have a handful of names. We have tribal leaders from the time of the desert, we have some later shoftim and assistants of David and Shlomo, we have a speculated king from Gad (Menachem) and we have some tribal leaders from other generations. That's about it. It comes down to maybe 100 names. Two and a half tribes cut down to about ten minyans. That's sad. After comparing the list to that of Judea - Yehudah, Levi and Binyamin - I thought, man, why don't we have a Chronicles version for the 10 Lost Tribes? But that's actually not true. We had  one, or at least commonly believed to have had one. But like the Lost Tribes, it got lost. It's only ever mentioned in the Tanach, not actually inserted into it. It was c...

 On the first night of Rosh Hashanah 5781, a friend who shares my fascination with Tanach gave me as a gift an old copy of Werner Keller's The Bible As History translated into Hebrew. Later that night I skimmed the book. The first page that opened up had the following picture on the bottom: For some reason, I was captivated (and I knew the book was definitely a keeper, if for nothing else but having access to this picture :)). I still can't quite explain why it interests me so much. Some about how it never occurred to me that the styling of the Ark could be Egyptian  of all things. Don't get me wrong, I think Egyptian wings are awesome, but there's always a feeling that if the Mishkan was merely a copy & paste of a classical Egyptian temple, then what's the point? Therefore, it was a head-scratcher for a couple of weeks: Who would draw an Egyptian-style Ark and why? Nobody is credited in the book, at least not in my edition. Finally, earlier this evening, I goog...

 For about 2.5 months now I've been working nearly non-stop on what is probably one of my most ambitious and crazy ideas ever: creating a family tree for all of the people of Israel mentioned in the Tanach, from the twelve sons of Yaakov all the way down to the last generation of people of the 2nd Temple era mentioned in Ezra, Nechemiah and Chronicles. I would say that about 98% of the names mentioned in the Tanach are now in the tree document I've made. The next phase is working out all of the kinks of calculating who lived when, because the Tanach isn't always 100% clear on that (although, as a friend of mine put it: was it written in a chaotic, confusing manner, or do you simply not understand how the order works?) Right now I'm focusing on the 2nd Temple era. It seems that all agree that Yeshua/Yehoshua the Kohen Hagadol was indeed the direct grandson of the former Kohen Hagadol S'raya, son of S'raya's son Yotzadak/Yehotzadak. However, there are disagree...