The Bible Quiz for Adults, חידון התנ”ך למבוגרים, was held yesterday in Israel. As many in Israel are speaking about women in the public space, it is worthwhile to look closely at the first and second place winners. The first place winner is on the left and the second place winner is on right. The picture is from this report at Ynet. (hat tip)

Prof. Israel Knohl was interviewed by Dov Elbaum on his program Sod ha-Luaḥ ha-Ivri. The entire program can be found here. The interview is in Hebrew, but here is a summary of Knohl’s ideas.

Knohl tries to minimize the importance of miracles in Judaism and the Bible, intentionally using the post-Biblical phrase “עולם כמנהגו נוהג”, the world pursues its own course. He contrasts two different covenants in the Bible, the revelation at Mt. Sinai that was filled with miracles, and the one found in Joshua 24, one that was not accentuated by miracles.

Knohl calls for a minimizing of the role that the miracle of the oil should play in our understanding of Hanukkah, and calls for a greater bond with the real life actions of the Maccabees, identifying with their “of this world” lives. He sees a danger in the overuse of miracles in Jewish belief and the attribution of this or that action to God. See this recent post by Jeffrey Woolf on the need to rethink what was the most important miracle of Hanukkah.

Anyone familiar with the philosophies of David Hartman and Yeshayahu Leibowitz can see their influence on Knohl. I remember once hearing David Hartman saying that maybe the most important thing that the rabbis of the Talmud did was to move our relationship with God beyond the “God loves me, God loves me not” attitude found in some parts of the Bible. I emphasize some, because Knohl also spoke about the multi-vocality of the Biblical canon.

Knohl relates the following story about Yeshayahu Leibowitz. After the Yom Kippur War, a soldier can to him and said that it was a miracle that he was alive. God saved him from the burning tank while all of his fellow soldiers died. Leibowitz responded and said that he should also thank God that the other soldiers are dead. If it’s a miracle that you’re alive, it’s a miracle that they’re dead.

Knohl doesn’t deny that this approach to Judaism has deep roots in the Bible and post-Biblical Judaism, it’s just that he can’t belief such things.

One of the questions that troubled many commentators was “What was the sin of the animals?” Shavit brought the following midrash.
Genesis Rabbah 28:8:

R. ‘Azariah said in R. Judah’s name: All acted corruptly in the generation of the Flood: the dog [copulated] with the wolf, the fowl with the peacock; hence it is written, For all flesh had corrupted their way, etc. (Gen. VI, 12). R. Julian [Lulianus] b. Tiberius said in R. Isaac’s name: Even the earth acted lewdly; wheat was sown and it produced pseudo-wheat, for the pseudo-wheat we now find came from the age of the deluge. (trans. Soncino)

I looked in James Kugel’s The Bible As It Was
and found the following soures that addressed the same question: (p. 118)

In the first place, just as when a king is killed in battle, his military forces are also struck down together with him, so [God] decided now that when the human race was to be destroyed like a king, other beasts should be destroyed together with it…Second, just as when the head is cut off, no one blames nature if the various other parts of the body also die together with it, so also no one will now condemn [this]…Third, the beasts were not made for their own sake, but for the service and needs and honor of man. It is right that when those are taken away for whose sake they [the beasts] were made, they too should be deprived of life. (Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis 2:9)

And they began to sin with birds, and with animals, and with reptiles. (1 Enoch 7:5)

And lawlessness increased on the earth and all flesh corrupted its way, alike men and cattle and beasts and birds and everything that walks the earth-all of them corrupted their ways and their orders. (Jubiless 5:2)

Here is a video of Shuli Natan singing the song. I assume that this video was made before the Six-Day War because the lyrics are the original ones that weren’t changed to reflect the liberation of the Old City. Also, I would think that if it was after the war some of the background pictures would reflect this.

Here is a video of her singing the song from 2002.

But what is “Jerusalem of Gold”? The bible scholar Shalom Paul solved the riddle in the late 1960′s. The following is from an article that was originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Paul’s struggle to decode the Jerusalem of Gold began in the late 1960s with an ancient cuneiform document from the Canaanite city-state of Ugarit, whose ancient Semitic language shares common roots with Hebrew. This ancient bit of bookkeeping, circa 1400 BCE, includes an inventory of the trousseau of one Queen Aatmilku, with the unique Sumerian phrase uru k -gi in her catalogue of jewelry. Translated, the phrase reads “one city of gold,” with a listed weight of 215 shekels – the equivalent of 10 pounds.

Analyzing at the most basic level, Paul realized a crown, unlike a bangle or earring, might feasibly weigh 10 pounds and was not yet mentioned in the queen’s trousseau. The tradition of crowns extends beyond medieval European monarchies. In ancient cultures and theologies, they adorn the heads of goddesses and queens in sculpture and story.

The phrase “city of gold” resonates with anyone familiar with the Talmud, the corpus of ancient Rabbinic literature that expounds upon the Torah with commentary and legend. This opulent symbol of wealth figures in many stories. The Talmud implies it is customary for brides to wear one. It declares that only a wealthy woman is permitted to flaunt one in public. It also relates how Rabbi Akiva presented his wife with a “city of gold” as recompense for selling her hair to subsidize his Torah study. The identification of this article of jewelry becomes apparent from a variant version of this text, which substitutes the reading “crown of gold” for “city of gold.” This same crown bears another name in rabbinic literature: “Jerusalem of gold,” since, according to the rabbis, the term “city” referred to their city par excellence, Jerusalem.

But Paul was at a loss to explain why the crown was described as a “city.” Did it relate to the crown’s appearance? It took a bold stroke of luck to connect the dots.

One of Paul’s colleagues, a linguistic scholar, had casually mentioned the corrupted Greek term for “city of gold” used in the Talmud, whose Hebrew text had absorbed several “loan words” from the era’s prevailing Hellenism. The word was a variant compound of “krisos,” or gold, and “kastellion,” or castle.

In a flash of insight, Paul understood that the crown was designed to resemble a citadel or fortress, sculpted into turreted segments to evoke the ramparts that bordered ancient cities. A city was in fact defined by its surrounding walls.

Racking his brain, Paul recalled the frescoes at the Dura Europus synagogue, in Syria, which depict Queen Esther with a turreted crown on her head. Once he began to search, he found ample evidence. A similar crown adorns the heads of Hittite female deities on the rock sanctuary of Yazilikaya, Turkey, dating from about 1200 BCE; of an Elamite queen depicted within an eighth-century relief in Iran; and of two prominent Assyrian women in the same era.

The motif of the turreted crown had even entered the vocabulary of Greek and Roman art. The mythical Greek goddess Tyche, patron deity of cities, is perpetually rendered with a turreted crown. The missing epigraphical link between the occurrence of this phrase in the Ugaritic text and its reappearance in Talmudic sources appears in an Aramaic tablet from neo-Assyrian times. In recording the sale of a slave, it declares that anyone contesting the case must give a “city of gold” to Nikkal, wife of the moon god Sahar.

The following is a restatement of Paul’s findings (pp. 205-206).

Yom Yerushalayim Sameaḥ.

Zameret blasted the use of “Tanach Ram” – a translation of the Bible into modern Hebrew. “This is a disaster of Biblical proportions,” he said about the publication. “There’s an unequivocal order [to schools] not to use those books. We see this rewriting of the Bible one of the greatest disasters to Bible studies,” he said.

Zameret cited Education Ministry Director General Shimshon Shoshani as saying “bring me principals [whose schools use Tanach Ram] and we’ll hang them in the city square.”

The publisher responded:

“If Shoshani really said that, the path to burning books is very short,” said Tanach Ram publisher Rafi Mozes.

“I don’t understand why the ministry sees our project as a disaster. For every verse in the Bible we provide a paraphrase to contemporary Hebrew. We’re trying to mediate between the Biblical text and today’s Hebrew,” he said.

Tanach Ram writer Avraham Ahuvia said “anyone can say whatever they want. According to the feedback I hear from the schools, the Education Ministry’s claim is incorrect.”

“The series is proving itself and is a lifeline to tens of thousands of students. Some schools bought the books for their library and of course the students buy them,” a person involved with the Ram publication said.

Wilson Ray Huhn (University of Akron – School of Law) has posted A Higher Law: Abraham Lincolns Use of Biblical Imagery on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article describes Lincoln’s use of biblical imagery in seven of his works: the Peoria Address, the House Divided Speech, his Address at Chicago, his Speech at Lewistown, the Word Fitly Spoken fragment, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural. Lincoln uses biblical imagery to express the depth of his own conviction, the stature of the founders of this country, the timeless and universal nature of the principles of the Declaration, and the magnitude of our moral obligation to defend those principles. Lincoln persuaded the American people to embrace the standard ‘all men are created equal’ and to make it part of our fundamental law. This goal was formally accomplished as a matter of law in 1868 when the Equal Protection Clause was added to the Constitution as part of the Fourteenth Amendment, but it is approached in fact only through our constant application of this ideal to our society and in our daily lives. The principle of equality is a higher law, but it need not exceed our grasp. As Lincoln called upon us – ‘let it be as nearly reached as we can.’

(Via Legal Theory Blog.)

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