January 4, 2010

• No,it's not the same bible

   

  Tanakh and Old Testament: Why They Might As Well Be Different Documents Even Though They’re Basically the Same Document

   

  
   If you’re Christian and you’ve tried to engage someone Jewish in a conversation about scripture looking for some common ground, chances are you’ve found the experience frustrating – you’re trying to talk about the Old Testament (which we call Tanakh) and you know that the Old Testament is Jewish scripture as well as Christian, but somehow the conclusions you draw seem to be foreign to the person you’re talking to. This actually isn’t surprising; I’m writing this to explain why. I’m not writing this for Jews because we (I’m Jewish) have less reason to engage Christians in such conversations than the other way around, the reason being that we aren’t evangelical. That’s why there are so few of us. We aren’t evangelical because:

   

  1. We don’t believe in original sin so we aren’t worried about salvation.
  2. We don’t believe that being Christian will keep you out of heaven, so converting you to Judaism won’t save you from anything other than an extra set of responsibilities. We pay very little attention to the afterlife to begin with; it really doesn’t motivate us. (Also, we don’t believe in Satan, at least not in the form you do.)
  3. Having been a minority for a couple of millennia, being evangelical could get us killed by the majority populations so, if the first two reasons weren’t enough, we avoided being evangelical for survival.

   

   If the purposes of your conversation with us are evangelical, be aware that, for historical reasons and due to our relatively tiny population, we view evangelism as extremely threatening. How benign your intentions are (or how benign you view them as being) is beside the point. You may view the addition of Christianity to our beliefs as an augmentation of Judaism; we view it as an attack on our faith and, as such, an example of anti-Semitism, and we will typically react with extreme hostility. Understand also that, in our experience, most (though by no means all) of the people who start such conversations with us have evangelism in mind, so we approach such conversations with suspicion and caution. If evangelism is not your intention, please make that clear at the outset. The conversation will be far easier and quite a bit more pleasant. (Also, never ask someone Jewish a question that starts with “Why don’t you believe.” It’s logically nonsensical and assumes our beliefs are less valid than yours which, even though we understand you think that – it’s inevitable to favor one’s own beliefs – is still really rude.)

   

   So much for the caveats. There are basically four reasons we approach Tanakh/Old Testament very differently. The first is:

   

  1. Language. No serious Jewish biblical scholarship is done using anything other than original sources which are all in Hebrew or Aramaic (which is linguistically related to Hebrew and uses the same alphabet). Aside from the obvious difficulties of translating an ancient language into a modern one, there are two other difficulties:

   

   a. Roots. Hebrew words typically have three-letter roots, and those roots have their own translations and connotations. A Hebrew reader will get these, but they aren’t always easy to get into translation.

   

   b. Lack of vowels. Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) is written without vowels. This means that some words can be more than one word, depending on what vowels you plug in. We have to take all possible translations into account, so you not only have to get the subtleties of multiple connotations into translation, you have to get simultaneous alternate meanings into translation, which is basically impossible. The way we do it is when providing an English translation in temple (Reform Judaism) or synagogue (any other branch of Judaism), the translated text literally takes up less space on the page than the footnotes do. (See Gunther Plaut)

   

   If you’re using the King James version, you have a third translation issue:

   

   c. Translation from Jacobean English into Modern English. The King James bible has a reputation as an excellent translation into English,although many words are mistranslated,past,present and future tence is changed in a few places, and the order of the books isn't the same, but it was done into Jacobean English. The meanings of some words in English have shifted in the centuries between that translation and the present, and some readers aren’t aware that they have to worry about English to English translation to get to the original meanings.

   

  2. The Oral Law. We believe that Moses was given two sets of laws on Mt. Sinai: one that he wrote down (Torah) and one that he didn’t. The Oral Law was to help with the written law and also to remain more fluid so it could adapt to change over time better. The Oral Law was included in commentary and in legal decisions. Eventually, during the Roman occupation, the Oral Law was in danger of disappearing because the Romans were prohibiting Jewish religious education, so a famous rabbi wrote it down to preserve it. What he wrote is now called the Mishnah and includes the law itself plus commentary by rabbis about it and Torah and Haftorah (Old Testament scripture after the first five books). Because Christianity doesn’t recognize the Oral Law, there’s a big difference in how we approach Tanakh.

   

  3. Further commentary. Over the nearly two millennia since the Mishnah was codified, rabbis have continued to write commentaries on the Torah itself, the Haftorah, and the Oral Law. As was true in the Mishnah, commentaries include expert minority opinion, so we can trace arguments and see where consensus was reached and where it wasn’t. Essentially, every detail was questioned to death and still is, right down to arguments over single letters in words. Judaism is heavily based on study and this is how. The combination of Oral Law and commentary is called the Talmud.

   

  So, Jews read Tanakh in a different language, influenced by Oral Law, and through a rabbinic lens. Points 2 and 3 have to do with our lens; point 4 has to do with yours.

   

  4. Supporting Jesus with the Old Testament. Jesus’ life is the central event in Christianity and many Christians view the Old Testament as a sort of preamble to Jesus, giving him a framework and proving his inevitability. Adam and Eve are important because they give you the source for Original Sin which you need in order for Jesus’ salvation to be necessary. Abraham and the Binding of Isaac story is important to you but you draw the exact opposite conclusion from ours – we view the story as God’s telling us that, unlike the surrounding pagans, human sacrifice is forever off limits; many of you view it as a preview of a later father’s sacrifice of a son. For some of you, the giants of the Old Testament are Daniel and Isaiah because their predictions can be interpreted as predicting Jesus. Daniel and Isaiah are considerably more peripheral to us (Isaiah perhaps less so), but we also view Isaiah differently  - we view him as a flowery writer rich in imagery and metaphor while you view him as a sort of biblical Nostradamus.Isaiah is also one of the books that is mistranslated and tences changed in your bible.

   

  In conclusion, don’t be surprised by how different Jewish and Christian conclusions are from what looks like the same source text.

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