Welcome to Judaism Demystified, a podcast for the perplexed.
We are joined by Doctor Lawrence H Schiffman.
Dr. Schiffman is a Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New
York University and director of the Global Institute for
Advanced Research in Jewish Studies.
Doctor Schiffman is a specialist in the Dead Sea Scrolls Judaism
in Late Antiquity, The History of Halacha and Talmud.
He has served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and
Professor of Judaic Studies at Yeshiva University.
Dr. Schiffman was featured in the PBS Nova.
Series, documentary, Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls and several
other documentaries. Dr. Schiffman's book From Text
to Tradition, is a journey through the history of the
emergence of rabbinic Judaism in the Second Temple era.
Doctor Schiffman joins us now to talk about the world of early
Judaism. Without further ado, Doctor
Lawrence Shiffman, thank you for joining the Judaism Demystified
podcast. Professor Shiffman, it's an
honor and pleasure to have you on.
Thank you. So for our viewers who may be
unfamiliar, can you provide us with an overview of what the
Dead Sea Scrolls are, the historical context it was
written in, and how their discovery in the mid 20th
century transformed our understanding of Jewish history
and 2nd Temple Judaism? OK, of course the question
itself could be a 45 minute lecture, but we'll try to get it
down into a a shorter answer for this evening.
So what we have to understand is that in the caves and an area
called Qumran, and that is not the ancient name, that's an Arab
name for the area on the shore of the Dead Sea, beginning in
1947 and running through the 19, mid 50s, approximately 900, I
shouldn't say manuscripts that we should say better.
The remnants of what were 900 manuscripts from the Second
Temple period were found. Specifically, these documents
were copied between 225 BCE and around the turn of the era.
We sometimes say the year 0. There is no year zero, right?
But OK, the turn of the era. Now these documents were
collected in the library of some people who had a group of
buildings on the shore of the Dead Sea.
And these individuals represent a sect of Judaism from Second
Temple times. Now most scholars think that
they are the Essenes who are described by Josephus, although
what that word means. But there are many similarities
between Josephus description and what we see with the scrolls
themselves. Now these documents, as I
mentioned, are very fragmentary and after they were discovered
they had to be reassembled into a kind of partial jigsaw puzzle.
Now, I have to say that this is not the case with the first
seven scrolls that were found by the famous Bedouin boy who first
wandered into what we call Cave One in 1947 because those
scrolls were closer to being complete.
And in fact, in the case of what we call the Great Isaiah Scroll,
it's the entire book of Ishayahu of Isaiah from beginning to end.
So those texts were in much better shape.
But then all those discovered afterwards, which are about 900,
are in this fragmentary form. Now we generally believe that
these scrolls were gathered by the sectarian group, but not
that all of them were composed by them, because there were
three types of literature in the collection.
The 1st is all books of Tanakh, except for Esther.
Now that isn't exactly true, because Ezra and Nachemia were
considered one book. There is no nachemia, so he
could say except Esther and nachemia.
But also that's Group One. Group 2 are texts that were
generally read by Jews in the Second Temple period.
They're what the rabbis in the Talmud called sparring kitsonian
external books. That group included some works
we knew before, but not in the original Hebrew or Aramaic, and
some works that we did know partially in Hebrew are in
Aramaic and some other works that we never heard of before.
And that's the second group of texts.
The third group of texts are documents pertaining to a
sectarian group, the one that gathered the library, and they
are replete with the particular views of the group on all kinds
of subjects regarding Second Temple Judaism.
Now I want to say as a summary comment that we have to be very
careful in making the false assumption that all you learn
about when you start to use texts are some strange Jews that
went to the Dead Sea area because they didn't want to live
with their fellow Jews, whether in Yerushalayim or some other
place. We have to avoid that because
since the first part of it is Bible, the second part of it is
the material the Jews are reading all over, the reading
all over. There's so much we can learn
about Second Temple Judaism in general, about virtually every
topic, and even from the sectarian documents.
They will, for example, criticize others for what
they're doing. So we learn all kinds of things
about Second Temple Judaism from these texts.
Now I should say a word about what the scrolls are not before
so to speak, concluding the answer to this rather wide
question, and that is they're not Christian.
They don't mention any Christian figures.
They're pre Christian. They may be they are of value in
understanding the background of Christianity because that's in
Second Temple Judaism. They're also not medieval, a
claim that was once made for the medieval Karaites and the final
false claim. They are not the Library of
Jerusalem or the Jerusalem Temple, some kind of official
Jewish library. They are gathered by a sectarian
group. Fascinating.
And I'm just curious to know what got you interested in this
topic and did that ever affect your religious beliefs or
observance? Well, to start with the question
of what got me interested. It's funny, I was looking for a
topic. I was studying with a very
famous Bible scholar at Brandeis University and as an
undergraduate I was looking for a topic for an honours thesis
and he was an expert on Tahilim Professor Nakhim Sonda.
And he suggested to me the possibility of comparing some of
the poetry in the scrolls to Safer to heal in the book of
Psalms. And that was my first research
on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And then I somehow or another,
after taking a few courses in Graduate School, seemed to might
find myself most interested in this stuff because you were
reading texts and analyzing texts that no one was working
on. But then there was one extra
feature. I realized very early that there
was a lack of, we should say, background on the part of many
of the scholars studying this stuff in terms of understanding
the texts of early Judaism that we already had, the rabbinic
texts or the most of the material mission of Talbot,
etcetera. And so I because I knew that
material or at least knew how to study that material, you can
really never know all of that material unless you're no the
building, Oh no, Ravavaggi, you're safe or somebody with
that kind of of of way of seeing it all at once.
But but but knew how to study it that I could make a very
particular contribution to the field that would be helpful.
And I never was sure at the beginning that it would become
such a big area of interest. And so then you started to have
market forces operating people constantly asking me to do
things like what we're doing right now.
And so I have done a lot of other research, I'll tell you, I
actually just recently said to press a volume in which I
collected together over 40 articles, scholarly articles
that I wrote on non Dead Sea skull topics.
And I've written books that are not Dead Sea skull topics, but I
don't think too many people know about that.
You get a certain reputation as far as I would not say it
affected religious observance, where it really effects you in a
certain way, and especially when you are so close to this.
The actual material as opposed to the discussion is you really
see the continuities of Judaism physically in front of you.
When you, for example, see the excavated mikva out or are you
looking the ritual bath or you're looking at fill in from
that period or actual manuscripts of Tanakh from that
period, you realize the continuity of everything that
we're doing. So I think that that's a very
big area in which it it affects you.
So I think that's a fair answer to that question.
Fantastic. OK.
And second, another question is, among the diverse texts found
within the Dead Sea Scrolls, which do you find most
compelling or significant for understanding the religious and
social dynamics of the Jewish community of the Quran?
Yeah, this is a kind of funny question because there's a
tendency we all have to answer by the material that we work on
now. I published a couple of years
ago after working for 20 years on it with a former student and
now colleague, Professor Andrew Gross of Catholic University of
America in in Washington, DCA. Whole new edition of the Temple
Scroll. Now, I've been in love with the
Temple Scroll since the day it came out.
That's actually, let me see the the third book that I published
on this scroll. And so I would certainly want to
say that this is a very important text, but you can't
fall into that trap of thinking whatever you work on is the most
important. The truth is that every time I
turn to another text and begin to work at it in in depth, I see
that there's tremendous amount of really interesting stuff in
virtually every one of these texts.
But as I say, in a certain sense the Temple schools attracted me
the most. There's a reason for that,
because in 1967, when I was still a student, I had the great
opportunity of meeting Yigal Yadin 'cause he came to Brandeis
to lecture on the scroll they had recovered during the 67 war.
What happened was that in in 1960, someone came to to Yadin
and offered to sell him this scroll and gave him a few
fragments as a sample. Yadin gave the guy a $10,000
deposit. The guy disappeared, never came
back. So at any rate, the 1967 war
came. Yadin by that time realized
where the scroll was. It's possible that he was also
tipped off by Professor Frank Cross of Harvard.
Because Frank Cross was taken, you think there's no excitement
in this field was taken to some type of a dark area under a
bridge in Beirut. And this fellow named we call
Condo, Khalil Iskandar, who during the days when Kamran was
under Jordanian control from 48 to 67, he served as the one who
bought texts from the Bedouin and then sold them to the
Palestinian Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem, now
the Rockefeller. So anyhow, Cross was taken under
some bridge somewhere in Beirut and hustled into a car and a guy
under a blanket try to sell him a text and he said to the guy
into the blanket condo get out from under that silly blanket
and Condo then offered to sell in the manuscript in 19th.
This this took place approximately in May of 67, so
he may have tipped off. Ross may have tipped off Yadin
when the war started and Yadin arranged as a result of this for
Israeli security agents to go to the home of condo in Bethlehem
and to get the scroll. They eventually paid him.
Now Yadin came to Brandeis to lecture about this role.
I mean, this was some exciting story and I was asked to
accompany him back to Providence in the car.
And we were really in luck because you didn't didn't know
how to get to his house. He was a visiting professor and
his daughter drove. They didn't let him drive
because in the army he was the commander of the 48 war of the
entire Israeli armed forces and he couldn't drive.
He kept on cracking up army cars, so he never drove
thereafter. And he didn't know how to get to
his house. Remember, there was a time
before, not only before your phone, but before GPS, right?
No ways, nothing. Right.
He didn't know how to go. So we drove around for two hours
and I got to meet you Go. Hell yeah then.
So this really excited me, this row.
I thought maybe I do it for my dissertation, but he dragged on
publishing it and it didn't come out until the early 70s.
So I didn't do my dissertation on it.
I did my dissertation on other halachic texts, texts of Jewish
law from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the minute this text was
available, I started working on it.
And interestingly, some of the things that I still write are
about that text, even though the the new edition is out.
So it never it never. Somehow that text never stops
interesting me. And one of the things that that
text sort of gave birth to indirectly in my work is that
there's another text which came to light only at a conference in
1984 in Yerushalayim. And that text is the one we call
MMT, abbreviated Mitsat Masaya Torah.
Some decisions or laws of the Torah because of my assay in the
Tombodushalmi means a halachic decision.
So anyway, this text is a set is a is a group of 22 laws in the
form of a letter from the founders of the Dead Sea Scrolls
sect to the Jerusalem high priests telling them why they
seceded and why they are not going to agree with them as to
22 laws. And these laws are all about
sacrifices and tumor, batara, purity and impurity.
And when you examine them you find out that they take the view
that in the Mishnah is that of it's two kids, the Sadducees.
Remember the Sadducees were the sect of high priests in Second
Temple times and some of the aristocracy that competed with
the Pharisees, the Prussian were the forerunners in the Talmudic
rabbis. So I jumped into working on this
text also like crazy. It's another one of my favorites
and ended up publishing quite a bit.
But what's really interesting is that this text agreed a lot with
this other one, the Temple Squaw called the Ilana Mikdash and
together we're able to put together tremendous amount of
material pertaining to the halakhic Jewish law views of the
Sadducees. And that is an amazing discovery
for Second Temple Judaism in general.
WAVY. I'm talking about some
characters who assembled some manuscripts at the Dead Sea.
So that's what I said. We don't want to study the
characters, we want to study second type of Judaism and these
guys have been of great help in learning about it.
What do we know about the Sadducees?
What do we know about their beliefs, their ideas?
Their. Well, you know too much because
Josephus talks a little about it and and the Gomorrah has some.
So first of all, on the what Josephus tells us, he tells us,
you see, we have to understand something.
It's a problem here. Before we even go on, a lot of
Sadducees were very Hellenized, but other Sadducees were really
pious calling him and so it seems that some pious calling
him found in the Dead Sea Scroll sect after the Maccabean revolt.
Now therefore, we have to differentiate between them and
the ones that were Hellenized. Josephus talks a lot about the
Hellenized. He talks about how they believe
basically the Epicurean idea that God isn't involved in the
world once he created it. They he talks about the fact
that they basically take literalist interpretations of
the Torah, apparently more literalist.
He says they don't believe in a world to come.
Now when we take a look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and we compare
them to some of the material in rabbinic literature, we start to
understand a little bit more about the pious Sadducees.
We're very strict on laws of purity and impurity.
Who disagreed with the practices of the Prussian, the Pharisees
about some minor what looked like minor elements of how to do
the ritual. But they even disagree on some
more important questions on how to do the ritual and the beta
Makashi the temple. So at any rate, we start to
understand that we don't know that much from Josephus.
We know some halachic opinions in rabbinic literature.
Just for example, in rabbinic literature we know that they
observed Shavuot on Sunday only on Sunday because they began to
count the Omer mean Muqarada Shabbat for the day after the
Sabbath, which was understood by them to mean Shabbat Shabbat.
Whereas the Prussian and this is the counting of the Omer by all
Jews who count, the Omer counted the Omer from the day after the
first day of passoc which they understood to be the quote
Shabbat meaning like a festival. At any rate, when we go to the
densey scrolls and this is at the temple scroll and it's in
this MMT text and it's in about 25 other texts, we have calendar
texts that give their calendar and believe it or not, how do
you have Shabbat always on a Sunday?
You have a calendar which uses solar months and if you have a
calendar of 364 days, and I know this is hard to follow quickly,
and you have days of 30/30/31 30303031 and you have four of
them, a calendar of 300 and 6491 * 4, you end up with a situation
in which you can have Shabbat have have Shabuot come out every
single year on a on a Sunday. But by the way, they start the
calendar of the old mayor not on the 1st Saturday night of
Colomboyt Pasa. They started on the 1st Saturday
night after the last day of PASSOC.
And it looks from looking at this that this sectarian
calendar was a second Temple competing calendar which the
Sadducees held to. So this is how we start to learn
more and more about the Sadducees by looking at some of
the Jewish law type and practices of the Dead Sea Scroll
sect. But there are some people who
mistakenly think that, oh, if that's the case, they must be
the Sadducees. No, what emerges is there were
two trends of Halaqah of Jewish law in Second Temple times the
one of the Pharisees, the one of the Sadducees.
The Pharisees is the one that the Rabbi's follow.
The one we follow, the Sadducees went out of use eventually, but
I can tell you it was followed by the Dead Sea Sectarians as
well. It was followed by the medieval
Karaites. And until to to this day there
are car rides and they follow certain of these laws and it's
followed what's followed and and some level is by the Samaritans
who are the kutim known from the Gomorrah and who still exist
until today. Samaritans.
There are two major communities of Samaritans, one one near
Hague Museum in Sham and the other one in Cologne.
Till today in Israel, but. I'm just curious to know why
people let's say equate. They kind of consider the karats
to be the spiritual heirs of the Sadducees.
When I I see the Sadducees as as, as you mentioned, they're
literalists and karats seem to be metaphoric about certain.
Yeah, You see, this is one of the things we learned from the
Scrolls. Because if it's true that the
Sadducee method is shared by the Scrolls, when you look at the
way the scrolls interpret the Tanakh, you see, especially the
Torah, that it's closer to literal but not really literal.
And I'm going to give you a kind of Lahav deal comparison.
So people say that evangelical Christians are fundamentalists,
which means that they interpret the Bible literally.
Do you think there's any fundament, any evangelical who
thinks God has an arm? So what do we mean they
interpret the Bible literally? It's an overstatement.
What's made by about evangelicals?
An overstatement made about this about about the the the
Sadducees. But the reason why Sadducees and
Karaites are considered to perhaps have some continuity
comes from several things. Number one, there are some Dead
Sea Squaw's texts, especially the one originally called
Fragments of its Sanukite work, now known as the Damascus
Document, that somehow found its way in two manuscripts into the
Cairo Ganesa. And the only way to explain that
is if somebody was reading this text, the car rights seem to be
a logical group for it. The second reason is that the
CAR rights themselves make the claim that they go back to the
Sadducees and have many things that are parallel to either
Sadducee halakha or Dead Sea Scrolls halakha.
So one of the possibilities is that certain of these practices
survived underground. They weren't observable, but in
the end they came out of ground when the Karai movement began to
coalesce. And the history of the Karai
movement itself is very complicated.
But when it began to coalesce that it absorbs some of these
traditions that had been underground, that you don't see
in rabbinic literature, but that existed among some groups of
Jews. And the other possibility that's
been suggested is that there are some claims of discovery of
scrolls in ancient times and early medieval time, that maybe
some documents that had been hidden somewhere from Ron or
elsewhere may have found their way to some of these groups.
But when you also take the fact that the Samaritans are in this
thing too, it does look like the Samaritans and the Sadducees.
They do share a lot of things which are found also in the
scrolls. A lot of ideas of specific
Holocaust. Let me ask you, when you look at
the Pharisees back then, what do you glean when in regards to
tradition? How do you understand, based on
all the research that you've been doing on it?
What? How?
How would you understand rabbinic tradition?
Well, you see, The thing is like this.
What happens when you study the whole Second Temple period and
in fact the history of rabbinic material as a historical set of
of documents, you come to realize that the story is more
complex than the way it's usually told.
Let me put it that way, and one very good example is this.
We've learned from the sectarian material that in Second Temple
times, when the beginnings of the mission are taking place,
there was a competing group about whom we knew only some
nasty remarks about them or why they were wrong.
Now we start to understand not just by the Dead Sea Scroll sect
itself, but some of the material in the scrolls.
We start to have a much wider understanding of the
intellectual religious ferment that was going on in second
several times. And we therefore start to
realize that there wasn't just one group and a couple of
schleppers that were being excommunicated, but that there
really was a competition in this in this period.
And then if you go back and you reread even many rabbinic texts,
you'll realize that this is we just, we didn't understand that,
but it's it's clear from the text that that was the case.
So that's a big difference between, let's call it the
simplistic way of seeing the tradition as if it's the only
way and assuming that it just continuously goes with no
competition to realizing that there was competition, which
essentially was, you could say, defeated by what we consider to
be the authoritative tradition. But the other views did exist
and you start to understand much more what was going on in the
period, as I say, from an intellectual and religious point
of view. Now, I think it would be
difficult to maintain an academic approach as an Orthodox
Jew if you didn't believe that the approach, that one was the
right one. That's a very important point.
And and what what things have you seen that supports that for
you? You mean that that the right
one? Yeah.
OK. So first of all, in many of
these arguments that are going back and forth, you can see
sometimes that the evidence of the Tanakh is in favor of the
rabbinic view. Now, this will get into some
very small technicalities about some of these things that are
being discussed, but you sometimes can tell that that's
the case. Then there's another thing.
If you step back and think about it, why is it the why is it that
the point of view of the Prussian and the Rabbis survived
and the other point of view did not?
So part of that answer is in the inability to use the combination
of interpretation and the notion of Torres Che Balpe to allow
Judaism to deal with all the ongoing challenges that it faced
in different times and places. And if you take a look, for
example, at the history of Kara ISM, you see that sometimes they
had no choice but to simply back down from major positions
because their system does not allow them to deal with these
things. And part of the greatness of the
system that emerges from the Gomorrah and then from as it
goes on through the years until today, is the ability to deal
with these situations and to know how to handle a whole
variety of things that come up that no one ever could have
imagined in those days. So when I say it, it looks like
it's correct, both from an interpretive point of view and
also from the fact that it's a successful way for Judaism to
develop over the ages and to maintain itself in ways that
could not have been done with the other systems, as you see
when you watch what that system did in terms of the Samaritans
and the and the car rides. Interestingly the the Rambam in
his in his understanding of torch palpet to my limited
understanding. Interestingly, he he sees the
adaptability of Torres Valper as central.
Right. Its core.
Right. This is stated more clearly by
Ravi Yosef Albow and the safer, IE Karim.
But that's right. That is right.
Now there are some people who turn around and say, well, that
proves that you, you know, you can just decide whatever you
want. But no, there's this tremendous
idea of a balance kind of conservative along with the
ability to adapt to new circumstances.
And and and there are certain like you could call the rules of
the game of how this proceeds in a way that it's maintains itself
essentially, you know, in an unending way.
And that is really an amazing fact.
So to some extent the what you could call the the victory or
the winner or whatever it is, is because the system is right.
It was a system that allows Judaism to continue with its
basic principles and its basic ideas in a permanent way, while
at the same time dealing with the new circumstances.
And by the way, the interesting thing is, but you're not
supposed to come around and say, let's change this, let's change
this that we don't do. So this is the interesting
thing, even though we know that if you look at things we are
doing, they're not the same as they used to be done.
And some of these are almost unimportant things, but
nonetheless you see things being different than they were.
There's it's almost like like you said, there's a, there's
like a a balance that's that's that's coming through.
That's right. And we maintain that balance.
And we know how to maintain that balance by appealing to our
textual traditions and and making use of them to assure
that. Fantastic.
Thank you. By the way, is there in terms of
do we see anything in these texts or show that the show
anything specific that shows like how the rabbi's did draw
from existing traditions? No, because you see, we have to
remember these people oppose our tradition.
Now this is the thing that's part of his, maybe almost partly
yours. I say they oppose our tradition,
but they agree with it all over the place.
What do I mean? This is an opposing group that
leaves Jerusalem, leaves the mainstay, where they leave these
people to separate because they believe that no one else is
properly observing the total. They think I've had affiliates
in other places, but this is where their main center
apparently was. So what happens is that they
give us information about things that pertain to the continuity
of the rabbis, but they're they're constantly criticizing
the Pharisees. Now, while they criticize the
Pharisees, they do a lot of the same stuff.
Because one of the things that we forget very often in Judaism
is that there's certain basic fundamentals that are going to
say fundamental no matter what. So you get, you know, just I'll
give you a funny example. So they, they criticize the
Prussian all the time. The first law of Shabbat they
have is that Shabbat starts when the sun is distant from the
horizon by its own diameter. And that's about 45 minutes
before Shabbat. Now, how do they know that law?
Because they quote the prasuk, right?
Shamor at Yoma Shabbat. Look at show now, keep the
Sabbath to sanctify it. If you look up that prasuk and
see how it's treated by Khazal, you'll see, guess what, all the
people who think that we're obligated in a Torah to add time
at the beginning of Shabbat, that will give us a little extra
of what we call to Sepa Shabbat addition to Shabbat.
They quote the same thing. Now, I that's an example of the
exact same Shabbat law, but if you'll keep going in Shabbat
laws, you'll find Shabbat laws where this group is stricter and
you'll see that in in the number of places.
To put it in. A funny example, you're not
allowed to make a salad on Shabbat, and I'm not talking
about chopping little pieces like the discussion of Israeli
salad, you know, like it's all got to be done before, not just
that you have to cook before. Everything has to be prepared
before, so in some cases they're stricter and yet at the same
time some things are basically the same.
Interesting. OK.
And you go to the next question. You also find that I've heard
some people theorize that, like when when the Sadisan movement
kind of collapsed, you see remnants of their or sympathetic
Rabbas, let's say in the in the rabbinic tradition.
Oh, that's Rabbi Elias a Shammati.
That they rabbi. There's one Rabbi that is
identified in the Gomorrah as having been right, not a
Sadducee but a Shamaite. Right Now the better question is
where the Shamaites come in this.
So I would like to suggest that if you take a look at the whole
history here, what you can see is that there is a set of, you
could almost call it a process of elimination because if you go
back into the Second Temple period and we're really talking
about the period post the Maccabean revolt, which was 168
to 164 BCE and we're really talking about the period after
152 because in 152, that's when Yonatan, the Hasmonean,
establishes the Hasmonean basically rule because people
don't realize this. But after the Maccabean revolt,
Yehuda and his followers were kicked out of the Bait of
Macdosh, kicked out of Jerusalem.
He was killed in battle in 160. So it's only in 152 when Yonatan
is able to take control that the period of the Kashmora, even
Nasmonian empire begins. Now once you hit that period,
that's where Josephus says there are three sects and he mentions
the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes.
Again, a lot of people think the Essenes are the Dead Sea sect.
Now basically at that point there are two general trends in
Jewish law and practice. The one that we later call
Pharisaic and we call Saducin. Now what happens is that when
you get to the destruction of the temple, the Saducin loses
its power base, the temple, and basically stops functioning.
But the question is among the Prussian there then takes place
in inner debate. Beit Hillel, Mechamma now now
Bait Shammai, takes the position of the stricter ones.
That is to say that even though there was a fundamental
difference, because the Sadducees don't really accept
the idea of Torre Shabbat or a law, and that doesn't exist with
the Shammaites, they do accept it.
Nonetheless, the Shammaites end up arguing for stricter view
than the one of the of the Bait Hill that wins out.
Well, the Shammaites basically die out and the view of Bate
Hillel goes forward as the normative, more lenient view.
So it happens twice that the system knocks out the stricter
people 'cause it's still given many cases was stricter those
who are faithful to halakha, not the Hellenized ones who weren't.
It knocks that out and then still again has to knock out
what you could call not really a survival of the Sadducees.
What a group that ends up taking what we would we would call the
the strict review and when that gets knocked out 'cause we
follow Beit Chamoy in very few things, the view of the Beit
Hill Ale becomes the normative view that underlies the
missioner, even when the other view is continuing to be sighted
and even when of course there always are stricter views
rendered than the ones that get accepted.
But that's another matter because of the inner debate,
which is just a debate of people who are running with the Hillel
view and and the Shama view is mostly finished off.
So that process takes place in the inner history of of Judaism
in this period. Brilliant.
So I want to actually discuss the variance in the text between
the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic tradition.
What does this tell us, let's say, about the development of
the Biblical Canon. So we have to go back, take a
step before the answering your direct question to explain that
there were approximately 250 biblical manuscripts in the Dead
Sea Scrolls. As we mentioned before, there's
some pieces of everything in the Bible, X in the in the Tanakh,
except for Esther and except for nachemia.
Now when we look, and this is especially the case with the
Torah, when we look at these manuscripts, we see that the
manuscripts come in different types.
And there is one type which occupies quite a number of
manuscripts, probably something like 30%, which are very, very
much almost exactly like ours. There is a, for example, a
manuscript of Vallecra which is written in the old script which
is almost letter for letter R Vallecra, a few of us and your
spelling issues and stuff like that.
It's basically the same text. There is what we call Isaiah B
from the original 7 found by the Bedouin boy with his famous goat
in cave one of Qumran. Now, not Isaiah A, which is in
the middle of the shrine of the book of the Israel Museum.
They call us safer. But Isaiah B Isaiah B is a proto
Masoretic text almost same as ours.
So many, many ones are like that.
Then there are a couple of other types of texts.
There were a small number of texts that look, they have
variations that look like variations of the Greek Bible.
They prove that the variations of the Greek Bible come from a
using a biblical text that was a little different from ours, or
that some of those variations come from that we call those
Septuagintal texts because the Septuagint is the name of the
Greek Bible, derived from the idea that 70 scholars wrote the
translation. Now then we have a few texts
that we call Proto Samaritan because like the later Samaritan
Torah, they have what we call harmonistic variants.
That's where when you're let's say relating something in smote,
but they're sukim about it in Devarim, you schlep those two
come in and copy them in here and then the second time you
schlep the smoked sukim into into Devarim and it's we call
those harmonistic texts. Now, so far I accounted for the
30% Fertile Pharisaic, and maybe between the two things I just
mentioned, another thirty, another 30%.
But there's 40% of something else. 40% are texts.
About 40% are texts that we call them mixed texts.
I mean, they don't follow anyone, particularly their loose
texts when compared to the the the Masoretic text.
Now the question comes, how do these texts relate one to
another? So now I'm going to tell you
what I think about this. I'm not claiming everyone thinks
this. If you examine the majority of
these, what we call the mixed text, or you examine the proto
Samaritan type text, what you find out in all these texts is
that they're ultimately based on a text that's very much like the
Masoretic Text. So it seems that at some point,
as the text was being handed down, two things were happening.
One was that the Proto Masoretic Text.
We call it proto because there's no vowels and there's no.
Trump there's no Tommy and Mccraw, no cancellation marks.
So that's what we call it Proto Masoretic.
In the Proto Masoretic Text when it was being passed down, it was
going through a standardization process and at the same time
there were other texts floating around and it seems that there
was tendency of some scribes or or passers down of the text to
expand texts ought to in some cases write texts.
And this is another matter in a different dialect of Hebrew
because Isaiah A is in a different dialect of Hebrew and
these coexisted with the authoritative type text and in
some extent they're based on it and represent adaptations of it.
Now when we go from Quran where this situation obtains, to
Masada and the Barkova caves where we have texts of the
Bible, less manuscripts what we have texted the Bible.
Guess what, They're all proto Masoretic.
So what is apparent is that between the period in which the
Dead Sea Scrolls materials were gathered, admittedly by a group
of sectarian Jews, where they at least were tolerating the
variety of versions besides what we would consider to be the
authoritative Masoretic text. Besides that, right, they had
these other ones. But the minute we get to the
period a little later, Masada remember Qumran is destroyed in
the year 68 CE, but the texts are gathered earlier, Masada is
destroyed in 73 CE, both of course destroyed by the Romans.
Now when we get to the Marcopa caves 1:32 to 5:00 again beside
of the Marcopa Caves only proto Masoretic Text.
And this indeed is the period in which it seems that the leaders
of the time of him, teachers of the Mishnah, perhaps on in
cooperation with Ko on him in the Beta Mikdash managed to
standardize that the Proto Masoretic is the authoritative
correct text. Now one other point I want to
make. I mentioned the Beta Mikdash
because there are some texts of the Gomorrah that hinted the
fact that they were official correctors of Bible texts in the
Beta Mikdash, Maggie Sparim as they call, and that they made
sure that the Bible text gradually got standardized to
the authoritative proto Masoretic.
Once we hit the period of Mark Hockbart 132 to 5.
Now we're still before the editing, the missioner.
There's only one kind of text, and it is the authoritative one,
and that is what seems to have happened now.
The argument I'm making, though, is that the Proto Masoretic is
the earliest form of the text. And let me explain that argument
for a second. If you take a look at the Hebrew
of the Masoretic Text, and even if you do, what's do it, forget
a Qumran manuscript, you could open up your regular Tanakh and
do it. And you compare that to ancient
inscriptions that we have from the First Temple period, you
will find out that the First Temple Hebrew in the Tanakh is
the First Temple Hebrew of the inscriptions with just a bit
more standardization of of spelling.
And when we look at the highly expansive use of above and Yud
in some of these other types of Bible manuscripts where excess,
excess vowel letters, we can see that what's happened is that
those are expanded texts and that the Proto Masoretic
represents the earlier form of First Temple Hebrew.
Of course there are some books written in Second Temple Hebrew
and they tend to be moving away from the the nature of the of
the way in which the the style is when compared to 1st Temple
style. But they they were also Proto
Masoretic well. What about like texts, for
example, in the Chemia, there's, you know, kind of a switching
off between Hebrew and Aramaic, yes.
So what do they make? What do you make of that?
Well, that's because they're almost everything in Aramaic in
the biblical books. Ezra nephemia.
It's documents. They copy documents.
And Aramaic was the language on which all those documents were
written. So that's what's mostly going on
there. Of course, Aramaic replaces
Hebrew as the main language of the Jews in the Persian period.
That is to say after the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus
the Great, 540 BCE, right? It used to be, if you talked
about this in Great Neck, everybody knew it from high
school. But now everybody went to high
school in Great Neck. They don't know it anymore, but
it used to be again, about the audience and the people all knew
the history of Iran from ancient times on.
But OK now. So at any rate, right?
Once that happens, Aramaic becomes the standard
international language and the language of most of the Jews
have become the spoken language. And then when the Maccabean
revolt claim, we have a big revival of Hebrew.
And that revival of Hebrew is unfortunately pushed away.
By the time you get to the time of the mission, already
everyone's talking Aramaic. You know that the the students
of Rabihuddah Nasi who edited the missioner there was a a a
woman who was a housekeeper in his home who came from the South
of the country, from the area of Judea as opposed to the Galilee.
And the students of Rabihuddah Nasi asked her what certain
Hebrew words meant. Because they didn't know as much
Hebrew. Shinu because she came from the
South, because Aramaic and the Galilee game D language.
So there's an up and down between Hebrew and Aramaic over
a number of periods of time. I'm curious about the, you know,
it seems to me that the Samaritan texts kind of like
fill in the blanks. That's what people consider it
to be later. Some people.
But the fact that they maintained the paleo Hebrew
script versus. Yeah.
Well, there's some paleo Hebrew used what the Gowara calls
Kitabi 3IN in the Dead Sea Scrolls 2.
There are, I don't know, maybe 1520.
There's a beautiful manuscript of smoke that's again almost
complete in paleo Hebrew, but the Samaritans maintained it
because the Samaritans try to maintain First Temple tradition.
Now we the the Gomorrah tells us, and it seems to be true,
that the the script we call today, Kitavashuri, is really
Aramaic, Aramaic script. And it was acquired by the Jews
during the Persian period and especially by those who lived in
Mesopotamia, that is today's Iraq.
And they brought it back to Erich Israel with them with the
period of the return. And that was the end of the old
Hebrew script that no longer got used.
And one of the reasons for this is that the old Hebrew script is
made to chisel into stone. If you just picture, you know if
anybody saw the movie The 10 Commandments, which is actually
rather funny if you see it now, yeah, it's humorous to watch it,
but at any rate, right? If you see the 10 Commandments,
you see Joshua chiseling in stone.
That's what he apparently did in Egypt before he became Moses's
assistant. So anyhow, you see the the the
image there of chiseling in stone, and the Hebrew letters of
the Old Hebrew are made for that.
The Aramaic language is made to be written with a brush or a pen
on whatever writing material you're using and not on stone,
on skin or papyrus. And that's why it it beat out
the old Hebrew, you know, very, very quickly.
Really enlightening stuff, and one thing that I feel like
people are probably very interested in is the next
question. Ben.
See You wanna get into #6? Sure, the scrolls contain
apocalyptic and messianic texts that seem to reflect the beliefs
and expectations of the Qumran community.
How do these beliefs compare with other Jewish and early
Christian Messianic expectations of the time?
OK, So what we have to do to understand this question is to
realize that there are two systems of messianism in the
Qumran sectarian materials. And then there's another one
more in the some of the non sectarian texts.
Now the one that's in some of the non sectarian texts we can
deal with very quickly. I call it non messianic
messianism. It talks about a period of
redemption, it talks about a period of perfection, of the
world of peace etcetera. But there is no Messiah figure.
That's a a an approach which did not get accepted in in in
Judaism or Christianity, although to some extent it's
maintained in modern times by some liberal Protestants and
some reformed Jews. But if there's no continuity it
it died in antiquity. It came back for obvious reasons
because it's easy to believe in as a kind of an ideal but it it
gets away from divine involvement.
But the points of view that the Qumran sectarians hold and then
other non sectarian documents hold fall in in in Basically
there were there were two types you have shared by Qumran and
everybody else under the sun including Christianity.
And every group of Jews that existed with the possible
exception of those Sadducees that were highly Hellenized is
the regular old Davidic Messiah. That's the common one.
It's held in numerous Qumran script, the text where there's
one Messiah and it's the son of David.
It is the basis of the Christian attempt to tie Jesus to the
Davidic house in providing a a genealogy for him.
And it is the view that ended up in rabbinic Judaism as the main
point of view of Jewish messianism.
Now the other point of view is that there are two Bashiq him,
one Mashiach, 1 Messiah of Aharon of Aaron, a priestly
Messiah, and one a Messiah of Israel.
According to this scheme, the most important thing is the
temple, whereas according to the David alone scheme, the most
important thing is the Kingdom. So if the most important thing
is the temple, there's a messianic Kohen who is the main
mashiach and that main mashiach has along with him a kind of you
could call him Messianic Executive director.
The first handles all of the non ritual religious parts of
running the society that would be the Messiah of Israel.
Now this point of view may be on the coins of Barkov because the
barkova coins many of them have on one side Shimon Barkov Barkov
by Nassi Israel even though his real name was Barkov.
Sibos we now know but Chilbakova the son of the star the Prince
of Israel. And then I'll see you.
In your case scale book of Ezekiel was the king.
And on the other side you flip over El Azar ha Kohan, the name
of a high priest. So that is a similar to two
Messiah concept now. L Azar.
Important Christianity. To them, what?
You're saying that he was expected to be a messianic
figure? I'm not saying he was accepted
by anybody. What I'm saying is whoever put
him on the coin may have considered that Jewish
messianism requires 2 figures. So that they're going along the
lines, they're going along the lines of this specific
understanding of Messiah. Yeah, the two Messiah 2 Messiah
idea. By the way, if you look at the
introduction in the Ashkenazic Sidor, I don't remember whether
as far as I'm also say this, the introduction to burkana mazon
and abrit milah, there's a whole poem because no della shimkha,
it's OK. And I it looks like you don't
say it OK. And if you look at that, it has
a Machiach Ben David and a Cohen who is a who who, who, who is
messianic in character. The Cohen will come back to the
end of days as opposed to the Cohen who just had Cohen.
It's a it's an eschatological idea of the Cohen.
So this idea of a Cohen is an eschatological figure.
It has a little bit of a place here or there in Judy.
And now we have to get the Christianity.
So I mentioned before, Christianity is basically based
on the idea that Jesus would be from the House of David and
therefore would be entitled to be a Messiah.
Of course, every Jewish kid hears, wait a minute, how could
this be? If Joseph right, was not his
farther, then how can you trace through Joseph?
I don't have an answer to that. OK, that's what they did.
They traced through Joseph, who's not supposed to be his
natural biological father. They traced through him the
claim that Yeshu Jesus is in reality a Davidic descendant to
legitimate him. Now when we go further with
this, if you actually read all of the Christian texts, you'll
find that the priestly Messiah idea comes in there also,
because in the Epistle to Hebrews, Jesus is both the
priest and the sacrifice, and there's a whole description
there of temple practice according to that view.
So what turns out in Christianity is that there are
sort of echoes of the two Messiah concept also in the way
in which he's pictured. Now I have to take you back to
another manner pertaining to Messianism.
There are two trends in Judaism regarding the messianic era.
There is one which we call utopian and the other
catastrophic. Now, the Utopian Messianism is
the one that became almost normative in the aftermath of
the period of Kabbalah and Spot, because that's the one that
takes the concept of ticon, of improvement and turns it into
the basic basis of how to achieve, how to achieve
redemption. Now that concept existed in
antiquity too. It means the following.
It's utopian because we build a perfect society, and the further
and further we get in that process, eventually Mashiach
comes to lead us in completing it.
That's the utopian idea, the catastrophic idea, we could also
call it, by the way, the naturalistic idea.
The catastrophic idea is that the world gets so bad that God
asked, there's an explosion and everything is going to be
destroyed. So God sends a figure to redeem
us. But in the process there's a
mass of war, and in that massive war, the evil doers eventually
get destroyed. That's the norm in the Dead Sea
Scrolls. That's why you have the scroll
of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.
And that scroll has been mentioned several times by
Netanyahu in some of his speeches.
And that particular type of approach, the the catastrophe
leading to the ultimate redemption is the basically the
main one of the sectarians of Quran.
Even though it's the main one of the sectarians of Quran, it's
very obvious that some of the other texts that they preserve
that are from what I call Group 2, texts that are just general
Jewish texts, preserve the other idea that there will be a better
and better time and eventually redemption will come because we
will deserve it in a certain way.
This is the argument of the Rabbis, whether the redemption
will come to a world that is completely innocent and
guiltless or one that is completely guilty.
Because if you're completely guilty, you better have a quick
redemption before the whole world explodes.
And if you're completely righteous, you get a redemption
because you deserve it. So those two concepts exist in
the scrolls, but the sectarians themselves adhere to the
catastrophic one. Now by the way, this is
compromised in the Rambam because the Rambam assumes that
there would still be a war at the end of days because of the
need to obliterate a minority of bad people in order to have the
naturalistic type of event or messianic era that he expects.
So I I have a question about the Sons of Darkness versus the Sons
of Light. Who?
Who did they believe? Do we know who they believed
were? Oh yeah, just read the text.
They tell you it's everybody but us.
This is the problem with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
As an example for contemporary Judaism.
There are some things they believe that are opposite.
One thing they believe is absolute predestination.
Absolute predestination. God makes every decision for
you. Now that is not a normal Jewish
belief. Normal Jewish belief is that God
for knows what we will do. I call us a fool.
We are. We're shooting it to Nah.
But we have choice. We make free choice.
Now the other thing though that they believe that is not a sort
of like in character of Judaism is to believe that everybody but
them is an evil doer and to be destroyed.
So if you look at the text, it describes wars with all the
nations around until they are finally victorious against all
of them. And then it includes the fact
that all Jews who don't join them will be destroyed.
And then at the end, they're going to March up to
Yerushalayim and run the Temple according to their views.
So this gets to sort of what you might call the dark side of the
Sons of Light because there are parts of their approach in as a
result of their extreme sectarianism which are not ones
that Judaism wants to you know put into practice in any way, in
any way at all. So I mean the, the, the no
matter what Messianic point of view you take in Judaism, the
idea is that the the non Jews who are good people are all
going to still be around in the end of the day.
So they can come up to the temple as it's right, the nice
people stay with us. Right.
So here the idea, everybody. What else is no good?
That's what you see there. That's the meeting.
Yeah, it's a negative type of messiness, and you might say
it's. Almost an angry messiness.
Yeah, yeah. But you see, what's interesting
is if you go through that very same text, I just have to tell
you it doesn't happen what they say.
This is very funny. They make it out in the text
that all the Night Nations are going to be destroyed.
Whoever wrote this text compiled it from some other documents.
And one of the things that he put into this, this scroll of
the War of the Sons against the Sons of Darkness are apparently
pre-existing beautiful poems. And he has the most beautiful
poem about all the nations coming up to worship God in the
end of days. What do you mean?
You just told me they're supposed to be killed because
they're all no good, and he got him coming up to worship God.
What's going on? So apparently they either they
weren't happy with that idea themselves, or they compromise.
I don't know. But you see, the poems have the
other type of vision. The more you talk about it, the
more I understand what you mean by the development part of
Judaism, how things things develop, you know and it's it's
extremely necessary because as you see so many strange ideas
and things and that just just creep in and.
Well, in fact as if that if you look at the in the Talmud in
Sanhedrin, you see that sometime in the second or third century
you start to get there, the discussion of the Messianic era
and you see that a lot of these kind of apocalyptic ideas start
to be mentioned by Kazal that weren't mentioned earlier.
And we don't know why they mentioned at that time, but many
of them seem to be aspects of the heritage of Second Temple
times. A famous example that we can't
solve is the Mashiach Ben Yosef. It looks like something that
must be a Second Temple idea, but we don't have any text
wrenching Mashiach Ben Yosef, the idea that there's a
predecessor Mashiach who gets killed in battle.
And then again, we also know that the very same ideas in the
end of the Byzantine period before the Muslim conquest.
So we're talking now really about the five hundreds and
early 6 hundreds. Quite a number of texts were
composed, some of which continue to be composed after the Muslim
conquest, which talk about catastrophic war, and which
assume a Great War in which somebody is going to defeat the
Romans. Now the Romans were the main
enemy that the war scroll thought it would have to fight,
because apparently the scroll was written sometime either
around or before the Romans came to Erich Israel.
In 63 BCE they conquered it. We can't mix that up with the
destruction struction is in CE right?
70 CE the temple was destroyed. 63 BCE the Romans first
conquered Erich Israel. So at any rate, the seems the
Dead Sea sectarians in the war scroll expected the Romans to be
the main protagonists, the enemy, and they have a term for
them. Kitim, because the Kitty own is
on, is an island on Crete. So the part of Crete a city and
Crete. I'm sorry, City and Crete.
And they assumed that the Romans would be coming from the Aegean
somehow. But at any rate, what is really
interesting to see is that the very same ideas of major battles
involving Roman armies, Roman now being Byzantium against
somebody in this case being the Arabs, was understood to perhaps
be a harbinger of the end of Days.
And so texts that look like the War scroll were being written in
that era in the five hundreds and early 6 hundreds of CE.
Eye opening stuff and I actually wanted to mention that and you
you've discussed this on on other podcasts that I heard you
on is that besides obviously what we learned about messianism
at the time and and even Christianity, one thing that
that people don't know or at least Jewish people don't know
usually is that you know by studying certain Christian texts
we discover a lot of practices of of Jews at the time like for
example the first time a maftier is is mentioned.
Is it right? Is correct me if I'm wrong,
Jesus? Mafti Yeah is mentioned in.
It doesn't mean it's the first maftier, it is the first mention
or another example they always give, which is a funny example
is you ask the question who is the first Jew that we know was
named. That is Britt Mila.
It doesn't mean he's the first one to be named as Brit Mila but
it's done on the Baptist and and the reality is that to to the
New Testament in general is a very important source for
certain things about the history of Judaism.
And just as give one example beyond the kind of things we're
talking about right now, when you get to the book of Acts and
they describe the apostles going all over the area of Turkey and
Greece and eventually reaching Rome and some of the aisles,
This is some of the earliest evidence we have for the Jewish
communities because they always go to the synagogues and it's
the earliest information we have of synagogues in those places.
And then there's a lot, a lot, a lot of other things are not
understood about the manner in which these texts provide
information about Jewish history.
And as I say, some, some religious practices, but some
other things as well. So before we go, I just want to
know, what do you think? Do you think that these texts
today are relevant to the modern reader?
The modern? I'll tell you, there's some very
interesting ways in which they're relevant.
First of all, I mean, you can compare ideas like messianic
ideas with, well, what are we should we believe today as Jews?
But remember, one important thing, The Dead Sea Scrolls
don't have religious authority for us.
They're historical texts. They don't have religious
authority for anyone because they're not part of the Direct
Line of tradition of Jewish texts.
Now, this is not the only type of text that has this problem,
but it's stronger than, you know, the the Captain Sofaire,
excuse me, the Khazan. The Khazanish did not want
people to use track dates of the Meiri that weren't known in
earlier times on the grounds that they're not a direct part
of the tradition. But it's fairly obvious that the
Meiri fits right into the tradition of the rabbis of the
Middle Ages. It's obvious that these texts do
not fit into the straight misorah of the Prussian and the
rabbis of the Talmud. So that being the case, these
are really, for us historical texts.
So the relevance is a we can learn a tremendous amount about
our complex history. And some of the things that we
learned about our complex history will be relevant today
because we need to consider some of the same same issues
sometimes. And I don't mean, you know,
we're not going to reconsider our calendar.
What I mean to say by that is that we can take lessons from
these texts about what happens when certain extreme positions
are allowed to overcome other positions.
We can see in these texts. There are some texts that are
very beautiful ideas, poetry. That's inspiring and things like
this that we can gain by studying these texts, but they
don't have a place in the authoritative authority system.
Now, there's one other really interesting fact about these
texts. And actually I gave for the
second time a lecture about this only yesterday.
Yeah. And it wasn't yesterday.
It was day before. Sorry.
And it was the the role that they've played in Jewish
Christian relations. And this is because these
scrolls have reminded many Christians about the extent to
which Christianity is rooted in early Judaism.
And that notion has been a help in the history of Jewish
Christian relations and the improvement that started after
the Holocaust, partly because of the Holocaust.
But the scrolls are quoted every once in a while in works that
are arguing or Christians to give up anti-Semitism and to
take more positive views of Jews and Jews, of Jews and Judaism.
And this has happened. There is some particular places
that's quite prominent, for example in a work that the
Catholic Church issued regarding Jewish interpretation of the
Bible and how it should be respected, and the Dead Sea
Scrolls are mentioned explicitly there.
So what's happened is that the Scrolls have had certain
positive effects on the Christian move away from
anti-Semitism among those who have made that move, and that's
it been a a very positive thing. Do they?
Do they feel the same way about, let's say the Book of Enoch and
Books in the Apocrypha? Is that Is that something of?
Well, this is very Now you're opening up a big question.
Here's why, Because those books are actually First of all, there
is Enoch in the scrolls. OK, second of all 12 books that
are the Apocrypha are in the Catholic Bible.
This is a humorous fact. Every Catholic has the books of
Maccabees telling the Franca story in their Bible.
So imagine if we had the Christmas story in our Bible,
right they have in the Bible. Now the question when we talk
about these changes in Christianity, moving away from
positions that were anti-Semitic, which has
certainly been done officially by the Catholic Church, it's
certainly obviously been done unofficially in the evangelical
groups that love Israel and love Jews.
And it's been done in certain ways even by the liberal
Protestants that are not our greatest fans.
But of course, the Catholic Church did it officially in the
60s. Now the point I want to make is
that this was part of a trend that starts already much
earlier, to see the history of Judaism and therefore the
background of Christianity as available in documents like
Apocrypha and some of these other documents.
Then that was starting before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
Then came the Holocaust, which is a very big reason to do this,
because many Christians realize that the the Holocaust did have
a background in Christian anti-Semitism, even if it wasn't
the direct cause 'cause. And then the scrolls came and
waved the gigantic flag about the significance of placing
Christianity's origins in the context of inner Jewish debate
and Jewish discussion. And then one of the big
conclusions of that was that classical Christian
anti-Semitism was not a very good idea and it began to be
rejected by church after church in official documents.
And the scrolls have a role there.
I don't want to overestimate that role, but they have a role
in making that happen. Although sadly the Holocaust is
probably the the biggest factor here and and certainly for the
Vatican in in wanting to make sure that they could not harbor
concepts that could lead to violence of that and destruction
of that nature and and and you know physical annihilation of
Jews. So they they move squarely away
from it. But the scrolls are there in
that story in AI don't know what we want to say, what we ought to
call it. Not the leading role but a role.
But the whole rediscovery of Second Temple Judaism starts at
a renaissance run through the Reformation for the non Jews,
Jews, thoughts in the red and Renaissance for them.
It starts in the Reformation and it, the scrolls and what's going
on today and archaeology and all this have completely, you know,
brought this to the surface. So is that why the I forget
which Pope it was in the previous century tried to kind
of backtrack and say that we made a mistake when when it came
to scapegoating the Jews and Judas as the?
Yeah, well this is from the 60s when this started.
Pope John Paul the 23rd followed by he passed away in the middle
and the job was finished by Pope Paul the the, the 6th.
And these physicians you know have been taken very formally by
the Catholic Church and other churches followed in many ways,
either formally or informally. Now, I mean, we still have
problems with certain groups. Much of those problems are about
Israel and and those problems remain.
But the classical anti-Semitism has for the most part been
removed. Yeah, I mean, I think to me the
biggest, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like the biggest source of
anti-Semitism is the Deocide, right?
The. Yeah, but no one believes that
anymore, right? That's the point, because the
New Testament actually doesn't say it.
The crazy part? The New Testament says that the
Romans killed them. Exactly, exactly.
That's a strange the whole thing was strange.
Amazing. Well, we really wanna thank you.
This was so. OK, an.
Eye opening and thank you for making the time.
It was, really. OK.
So we'll say good night and thank you gentlemen.
Thank you Let. Me know when it's posted
etcetera of. Course, of course.
OK. Thank you very much.
Good night. Very much.
I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Sure. OK.
Good night. Good night.
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