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Few biblical phrases have been as thoroughly parodied as the “goring ox.”  In fact, the entire ox-thing that the Bible has going is, for many, an ongoing source of amusement and puzzlement.  Why does such a great, lofty, and divine text spend so much time talking about oxen and other barnyard animals?  Most everywhere you turn in the Bible, when they are not being slaughtered, these animals are wandering about, falling into pits, digging up your neighbor’s garden, or trampling to death unsuspecting pedestrians.

One such passage deals with the latter case.  According to Exodus 21:28-30 (NRSV translation):

When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall not be liable.  If the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not restrained it, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and the owner also shall be put to death.  If a ransom is imposed on the owner, then the owner shall pay whatever is imposed for the redemption of the victim’s life.

This is a relatively common-sense approach to the case of a goring ox.  If the owner took proper precautionary measures, the goring ox is killed but the owner has no further liability for the damage (i.e., death) caused by the ox.  If the owner did have reason to think that the ox would gore, though, and did not take proper precautions, then he is liable for any damage that it causes.

The rule seems relatively clear and is cited, basically verbatim, in the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q251, fr. 8).  And yet, this issue is at the center of one of the Mishnah’s list of key issues that divided Pharisees and Sadducees:

The Sadducees say: We accuse you, Pharisees!  An ox or donkey that causes damage – [the owner] is liable [to pay damages].  But a slave or female slave [causes damage] – [the owner] is exempt [from paying damages]. (Mishnah Yadaim 4:7, my translation).

The Pharisee position here seems peculiar; it seems to directly contradict biblical law.  Some commentators explain that the Pharisees are here relying on a slightly later biblical passage, Exodus 21:35-36, that speaks of an ox that hurts the neighbor’s ox.  This is not impossible, but this latter biblical passage does not use this language of liability, as one might expect.

I was wondering if it might be possible that the reason that the Pharisaic position here seems to contradict the Bible is that it actually does.  Either these Pharisees knew the rule and rejected it, or they did not know that this biblical rule existed.  The Sadducees, and the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, on the other hand, gave more legal or normative authority to texts that they thought were divine.  Hence both the disagreement between the Sadducees and Pharisees and the citation of the verse in Dead Sea Scroll collection of laws.

Any thoughts?

 

Seventh-century BCE Judah is not typically thought of as a hotbed of feminism.  If the Hebrew Bible is to be believed, women were very much on the economic, social, religious, and legal margins of this society.  The texts portray a society largely created by and maintained for men.

It turns out, however, that these texts do not tell the whole story.  For seventh-century BCE Jerusalem, as for virtually all pre-modern societies, evidence for the non-male elite is sorely lacking; we often cannot know how the 90% lived.  Yet every once in rare while a small window into their lives will emerge from the ground.  For Jerusalem prior to the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE, this window often takes the form of a tiny lump of clay that somebody has stamped with his – or her – seal.  The seals themselves rarely survive, but we already have an impressive number of stamps that were often used to mark ownership and validate legal documents that have long since crumbled to dust.

Not long ago I happened to stumble across the publication of one of these seal impressions, or bullae, that was made by a woman.  It was the first time I had encountered a seal impression of an Israelite woman, and I was unsure what to make of it.  What kind of woman in this society would own a seal?  In a wealthy family, would both a husband and wife possess a seal, or are we necessarily dealing with single (or widowed) women?  Does possession of a seal, which often belonged to scribes, imply literacy, and if so, how would a woman at this time have been educated?

I don’t think that we have an answer to these questions, but now I have discovered some further evidence that suggests that women were far more involved in public roles in the Kingdom of Judah than the biblical texts would lead us to suspect.  The following excerpts come from a publication of a seal that belonged to a woman named Hannah, and can be found in Nahum Avigad, “A Note on an Impression from a Woman’s Seal,” Israel Exploration Journal 37 (1987): 18-19:

We know from archaeological evidence that Israelite women in the biblical period owned seals.  A dozen or so of them have been found, and it has been inferred from this evidence that Israelite women had the right to sign legal documents, a fact which is not apparent from the biblical sources.

[This seal] proves that Hannah, the owner of this seal, was involved in a business enterprise.  She stamped jars which apparently contained some liquid merchandise such as oil, wine, or the like.  She probably acted in the capacity of a private estate owner marking the container of her products with her name, or else as a functionary in the service of some other estate.

Was Hannah a seventh-century BCE Gluckel of Hameln, that is, a woman who against expectations can be found running a business and fully able to look out after her own affairs, thank you very much?  We are very unlikely to discover the answer to this question.  We can, however, be reasonably confident that Hannah was not the only Judahite woman involved in commerce in her time and that our understanding of Judahite society must include room for her and her sisters.

A couple of months ago, I sat down with an Israeli journalist to talk about my work.  It turned out that she was primarily interested in the issue of when and how “Judaism” as we more or less know it today emerged from the Israelite religion of the Bible.  In the scholarly circles in which I travel, there is a loose consensus that this occurred during the “Restoration” period, beginning around 520 BCE with the building of the second temple in Jerusalem.  This reformed worship of the God of Israel continued with some hiccups until the rabbinic period, when the rabbis shifted the former emphasis on sacrifice to Torah.  I related this narrative to her and tried to tie it in to some of my more recent work.  The interview was recently published online in Hebrew on Ynet here.  I don’t know if it will be translated into English, but it does a nice job summarizing (in slightly sensationalistic form) this scholarly narrative.

I was stunned to watch this piece gather comments.  Over the week it was published, according to the YNet page, the article received 565 comments; 67 Facebook comments; and 1,200 “likes.”  The pace of comments has now slowed to a trickle.  Much more interesting than the number of comments, though, is what they said.

Somewhere close to 90% of these comments excoriate me for ripping down Judaism.  Maybe the tone of these comments is best captured in the one liner, “This is absolute heresy.  The professor is a bad man.”  These comments do not mention that at the end of the article I strongly separate the historical conclusions from issues of applied religion.  If they made it to the end, I guess that they either did not understand what I was trying to convey or did not care.

Nor did the end of the article register with another 5% of the commenters who used the article to show either (1) that today’s rabbis are evil and that Judaism in Israel must be reformed, or, more extremely, (2) that Judaism itself is a bad and modern religion.    The other 5% of the comments offered  reflective thoughts that more seriously engaged the issues raised in the article.

In my own reading of the comments, I was struck by the ease with which people read this article through the lens of their own worldviews.  Most of these readers approached this article with their own convictions firmly in place; their engagement with it was on the level of whether it confirmed or denied these convictions.  If the latter, then its arguments and its author must be explained, put into the right cognitive “box,” and safely stored away.

I am not observing anything new.  I see this kind of approach to new data and opinions all the time in the press; on partisan cable channels; on my Facebook page; and in my classroom.  Psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman have discussed the cognitive mechanisms that lead to such responses.  Watching it happen to me, though, in real time, was a a bit of a shock.  The vast bulk of the comments said much more about the commenters than they did about the article or the ideas presented therein.

There was another take-away for me.  I don’t think that an interview like this would have attracted very much notice if done in English in the U.S., even within the Jewish community.  One reason, I think, is that in the U.S. “public square” we talk and think about religion very differently than they do in Israel.  We have developed a civic discourse that to some extent bifurcates discussions that are consequential to religious communities from those that are about them.  This, in turn, has allowed us to discuss religion in a way that does not immediately escalate into verbal brawling; it has perhaps injected enough critical distance to take the potential edge out of these types of discussions.

And that makes me wonder:  If, in Israel, the more serious public discussions about religion and its relationship to the state had a tad less of an edge, might they also be a bit more productive?

Tonight begins Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that usually leaves me both unsettled and confused.

Watching my children learn about the Holocaust from slick, well-designed and age-appropriate curricula has made me aware of just how raw and scattershot my own Holocaust education was.  Holocaust education was a battering experience.  I remember being constantly exposed to artifacts of the horror of it all with, it seems to me in retrospect, the primary goal of causing horror and pain.  There were live and (a little later) videotaped survivor testimonies and lampshades made of flesh, endless pictures of doomed children and corpses.  First-person literary accounts and art and music composed by the doomed.  Having recently revisited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem I was reminded of the old complex, before it was remodeled in a kinder, gentler, way that gave thought to developing a story and educating.  The old Yad Vashem was just a blindly thrown roundhouse punch.

The thing was, it connected.  The Holocaust pains me.  It evokes in me a diffuse emotional horror.  I feel for my people, and those grotesque images play through my mind.  I feel compelled to seek a connection.

And there’s the problem.  I never had an organic, real connection to the Holocaust.  My family, on both sides, came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and did not stay in close contact with relatives in Europe.  My family, I was always told, knew of no relatives who actually suffered.  We were unscathed.  I feel a need to connect, but that is perhaps only because I lack an immediate connection.  It leave me with a fissure somewhere in my emotional response.

But it is not just this lack of personal connection that causes a certain sense of distance.  For many, the Holocaust has been profitable.  Politically, some have tried to use it to justify the unjustifiable.  Many others have achieved fame or made good livings off it.  While my children’s curricula are well-done (I wish that they existed when I was young), they leave me cynically wondering how many people must have profited through them.  I sometimes feel that the pain that was so carefully created is now being exploited for the personal benefit of others, even as the last Holocaust survivors sometimes struggle to put food on their tables.  My point here is not to condemn but just to note that I struggle with balancing my appreciation of this work with that of its material reality.

The other day I received an email from my mother.  She was doing some genealogical research and stumbled on a “page of testimony” in the online Yad Vashem database.  The page concerned a woman who bore her (Yiddish) name.  Feige, according to the unsteady, block Hebrew script of her sister-in-law, was simply “exterminated by the Nazis.”  It happened in Poland in 1943, the year my mother was born, and it dovetailed with a family memory that her name was changed at the last minute in response to a recent death.

Feige was a 26 year old single seamstress.  That much is clear.  Most everything else about the page of testimony, though, is odd.  She bears her mother’s last name (my grandfather’s), but her father appears to have a different last name.  Her sister-in-law, a survivor who must have been married to her brother, bears yet another set of names.  Each of these anomalies, of course, can be explained.  Most puzzling to me, however, is how word of the death of yet another obscure, poor Jew in Poland would have made it back to the U.S. so quickly.

When the Yom Hashoah siren sounds here in Jerusalem-commencing a moment of national silence-I will try to put aside the mind-numbing data and larger abstract and theological issues raised by the Shoah.  I will try to ignore the voices around me that will use the Holocaust to score points and I will try to suppress what I know will be my cynical response to them.  I will, instead, try to focus on Feige, this simple, almost forgotten seamstress, my distant relative, who died for no good reason.

 

This month, for the first time in a while, the group Women of the Wall managed to pray at the Western Wall without any serious incidents (here is a news report of the gathering).  The group’s goal, in addition to simply conducting a meaningful prayer service at the Western Wall, is to advocate for equal treatment of men and women at the site.  While there are many issues in play here (e.g., currently women are discouraged from singing “too loudly” at the Wall and prohibited from reading from a Torah scroll), one of the real hot-button issues has been the right for women to wear a tallit, or prayer-shawl, particularly those that look “manly.”

According to the rabbi who sets the rules at the Wall (and whose decisions are enforced by the regular Israel police force), one of the primary reasons why women are not allowed to wear masculine-looking prayer shawls at the Wall is that women are not allowed to wear any “man’s garment” (e.g., pants) from the Torah:

A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)

The reason behind this stricture is hardly obvious.  Why should such an activity be forbidden?  The Bible itself doesn’t tell us and it mystified Jews even in antiquity.  In the first century BCE-CE, the Jewish philosopher Philo wrote:

So earnestly and carefully does the law desire to train and exercise the soul to manly courage that it lays down rules even about the kind of garment which should be worn.  It strictly forbids a man to assume a woman’s garb, in order that no trace, no merest shadow of the female, should attach to him to spoil his masculinity….  In the same way he trained the woman to decency of adornment and forbade her to assume the dress of a man, with the further object of guarding against the mannish-woman as much as the womanish-man.  He knew that as in buildings, if one of the foundation stones is removed, the rest will not remain as they were. (Philo, On the Virtues, 18, 21, translation Loeb Classical Library)

For Philo, then, the purpose of the law is to instill in its followers a sense of gender difference.  Dress is one of a complex of behaviors that define the “natural” gender roles decreed by God.

Writing several decades later, though, the Jewish historian Josephus understood the intention behind the law quite differently.  As he pithily relates it:

Beware, above all in battle,, that no woman assume the accoutrements of a man nor a man the apparel of a woman” (Josephus Antiquities 4.301, translation Loeb Classical Library)

For Josephus, the purpose of the law appears to be practical: it is so that in battle men and women would not be confused with each other.  Thus confusion might lead especially to the killing of women, but also for men would serve as a kind of unfair disguise.

The rabbis, though, have yet another interpretation:

Here is the heart of the matter:  A woman should not dress like a man and then go among the men, and a man should not ornament himself like a woman and then go among the women.

Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov says: How do we know that a woman a woman should not put on battle clothes and go forth to war?  Because it is written, “a woman shall not wear a man’s clothing…” (Sifre Deuteronomy 226)

For the anonymous writers, the reason for the prohibition is the fear of promiscuity. Were it not for this prohibition we could expect women to sneak into places where men congregate and vice-versa, a situation that would inevitably lead to illicit relations.

I suspect that the rabbi of the Western Wall is not seriously concerned that women who wear tallitot will use them to slip into the men’s section undectected so that they can cavort with them.  Nor, of course, is there any concern for battle.  So that, curiously, leave Philo’s rationale that improper dress can destroy personal virtue.  (A side thought: I wonder how the authorities would respond to a man who attempts to pray there in a “feminine” tallit.)

However the prohibition is justified today, though, it is intriguing to note that our puzzlement over it is nothing new.