Tanach Thoughts

Long time no see... Life has been incredibly busy and is still a bit busy, but at least I have time for making a post on occasion. Here's an interesting thought about the Girgeshites. The Girgeshites (הגרגשי) were one of the seven Canaanite nations. According to Yerushalmi Sheviit 6:1 : "For Rebbi Samuel bar Naḥman said, Joshua sent three orders to the Land of Israel before they entered the Land: Those who want to evacuate should evacuate, those who want to make peace should make peace, those who want to go to war should go to war. The Girgasites evacuated, believed in the Holy One, praised be He, and went to Africa." Famously, Procopius also brought a version of this tradition in his work The History of Wars, IV : " In that country there dwelt very populous tribes, the Gergesites and the Jebusites and some others with other names by which they are called in the history of the Hebrews.  Now when these nations saw that the invading general was an irresistible prodigy...

One of my interests is researching idolatrous practices mentioned in Tanach and later Jewish sources. For the last three years or so, I've been conducting an on-and-off search for the possible identity of a deity hinted at in this section of the Talmud, tractate  Bava Metzia 86b : "The Gemara continues its analysis of the verse: “Let now a little water be fetched and wash your feet” ( Genesis 18:4 ). Rabbi Yannai, son of Rabbi Yishmael, said that the guests said to Abraham: Are you suspicious that we are  Arabs who bow to the dust of their feet ?" It is reasonable to conclude that the sages were aware of an Arabian pagan cult that practiced some form of dust worship. Last year I discovered that one of my professors shares this interest in researching idolatry and even wrote his doctorate on idol worship mentioned in Talmudic literature, although he was focused on particular pagan religions (Greece, Rome, and a couple of others) and didn't analyze this quote. But I did...

This is an interesting idea I came across some time last year: In Beresheet Rabbah 36:3 it says: "Instead " To plant a vineyard "; from where did he acquire it? Rabbi Abba son of Kahana said: "He gathered to him planting vine shoots and saplings of figs, and cuttings of olives" The grapevine were taken to make wine, and it seems to me pretty obvious that Noach wanted to drown out his sorrows with wine, and knew he would need this ahead of time. But why fig saplings? Rabbi Yishai Zargeri wrote in his book Bigdei Yesha (בגדי ישע), pp . 67-68 (my translation): "And it seems to me that the explanation is that we find that Noach prepared sacrifices when he exited the ark, and to light the fire he needed wood, and since all of the trees were soaked with water it wasn't relevant to light the fire from them, and so Noach needed to bring with him trees into the ark. And it says in the mishna in masechet Tamid ( p. 29a ) that wood from all the trees were fit fo...

Been a little while since I've made a post on name-meanings, but I had this realization recently. For some time this last semester, I had been looking into the topic of apocryphal Enochic literature, because I had been thinking about doing a project on it for one of my courses. Eventually I switched to a different topic (if you're curious, it's about the Nesiut (patriarchy) of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai) , but having already delved pretty deeply into the subject, I realized recently that the topic might serve to explain the meaning of two ancient Tanachic names. I say ancient because chronologically-speaking, these people are some of the oldest in Tanach. Irad: Irad was none other than Kayin (Cain)'s grandson, son of his son Chanoch (the first, less-famous Enoch): "וַיִּוָּלֵד לַחֲנוֹךְ אֶת  עִירָד   וְעִירָד  יָלַד אֶת מְחוּיָאֵל וּמְחִיָּיאֵל יָלַד אֶת מְתוּשָׁאֵל וּמְתוּשָׁאֵל יָלַד אֶת לָמֶךְ." "To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad begot Mehujael, and Meh...

So, life got in the way (more on that in a future post) and I was not able to create the second post until now. Apologies to anyone who may have been waiting. To recap, the destruction of Shiloh and the apparent subsequent removal of the Tabernacle from there are never explicitly mentioned in the Book of Shmuel. We only have some later hints to this in Yirmiyahu and Tehillim. That question is: This seems to have been a moment of great tragedy to Am Yisrael, according to the two instances in which the event is hinted at. Why then was this not recounted explicitly? Last time I offered my own idea. This time I'll offer up an idea by Rabbi Eitan Shandorfi in his book "הדר הנביאים" - "Hadar Ha'Nevi'im" (the Splendor of the Prophets). Rabbi Shandorfi dedicated an entire chapter of his book to discussing the matter. He finally concluded that the primary purpose of the Tabernacle was to serve as a dwelling for the Holy Ark of the Covenant. No Ark in the Tabernac...

This will be a two-post series on the subject of the destruction of Shiloh. More precisely, on the destruction of the Tabernacle at Shiloh. The Tabernacle at Shiloh was constructed already in the days of Yehoshua ( idem. 18:1 ). There it remained until mysteriously disappearing circa the Israelite-Plishtite War in Shmuel 1:4:1-22 . After this war, we do not hear of people coming to the Tabernacle at Shiloh. Instead they go to places such as Nov and Giv'on. The reason was only reported centuries later, in Yirmiyahu 26:1-6  where Hashem tells Yirmiyahu to pass on a prophecy that if the people of the Kingdom of Yehudah do not fix their ways, the Temple will be destroyed just like the Tabernacle in Shiloh (similarly mentioned in ibid. 7:13-15 ). Subsequently, people get angry at Yirmiyahu for having the gall to threaten them with a destruction on par of that of Shiloh ( ibid. 8-9 ). Wait, destroyed? When did that happen?! Actually, this was hinted at already in a Tehillim chapter writt...

This idea was suggested by my Tanach chavruta (study-buddy) and I think it is an amazing idea. We are currently studying Esther at a snail's pace. We had previously concluded (this might be the subject of a future post; for now, take my word for it) that Achashverosh was reluctant to wipe out an entire nation from his empire, and was only convinced because of two things: 1. Haman's claim that these people were treacherous anarchists and a danger to the delicate balance and security of the empire. 2. More importantly, the promise of 10000 bars of silver. In light of this, we wondered: Why would Achashverosh join Haman in celebration via feast? Haman was celebrating his potential victory over the Jews. But what did Achashverosh have to celebrate? Money? Nu. He knew the money was coming out of a deal he was not 100% comfortable with. Then my chavruta suggested this: Practically every time feasting is mentioned in Esther, it is in relation to the closing of a deal: 1. A grand feast...

A few days ago I was privileged enough to hear a fascinating short TED-sized lecture by one of the doctorate students in my department at university. This student, a rabbi in his profession, spoke about his doctoral thesis which just recently he handed in to the university's review board and was pending a verdict from them. The thesis, which I won't discuss at length here for a number of reasons, the main being that it's still pending a verdict from the board (and the others being that for the most part, it's not Tanach-related), focused on the Mishmarot Kehunah of the Second Temple Era and later. The Mishmarot Kehunah were the divisions of priests that served at set times year-round. Each division served for about two weeks every year and everyone served together on Chol Hamo'ed. Now, I came up to him after the lecture and asked him a question on one aspect of his theory: Per his theory, the four priestly families that came during Shivat Tzion and recreated the pr...

Long time no see guys. In-between balancing school and homework, ideas for posts have been little to practically non-existent. But earlier this week I finally thought up of something that is blog-worthy, in my humble opinion (and since I run this blog, that humble opinion is what goes around here... ;)) The first word in the post's title was not really my choice: Last night I told over my new idea to a friend from university and he said: "Hmm. Interesting conspiracy theory..." Personally, I would have gone just with "theory", and I told him that. He proceeded to explain why he thought it was a conspiracy theory, but let's not get into that (he also believes it's wrong to term "Biblical archeology" with any word that has anything to do with the Tanach, AKA the Bible...we won't get into that either today). About a month ago, the archeology department had a field trip to Mt. Gerizzim, and after that we went to meet some of the leaders of the S...

 A quick thought I had last night, before getting on to part 2 of the Barak/Devorah posts: I've been troubled in recent months as I realized that I was moving away from my old comfort zone of favoring both P'shat and Drash in understanding Tanach, and moving towards almost an entirely P'shat mentality, grounded in archeological findings and word etymologies, among other things. I was bothered by this because it felt like I was beginning to see the aRDeS part of PaRDeS (P'shat, Remez, Drash and Sod) as meaningless, which I know it's not. But in a sense, it felt like I no longer saw any point in these aspects. Well, I'm still making my through this forest, but I wanted to share a thought I had last night: I was listening to a class on the story of Palti ben Laish and Michal. The question is an oldy: How could Palti marry a married woman (it doesn't say that David divorced Michal) and how could David take back Michal, after all, a man cannot take back his wife ...