Hebrew Voices #139 – Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

English - February 23, 2022 12:00 - 26 minutes - 38.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 313 ratings
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In this episode of Hebrew Voices, Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021, Bible Scholar Dr. Nehemia Gordon is joined by Rabbi Dr. David Moster and Manuscript Researcher Nelson Calvillo to discuss lectures they attended on the forefront of biblical studies. … Continue reading →

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Hebrew Voices #139 – Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Rabbi Dr. David Moster, who’s the director at the Institute of Biblical Culture, biblicalculture.org, and he teaches online courses in Biblical Hebrew. He has a PhD from Bar Ilan University, and he’s an author of a book - Etrog: How a Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol. Shalom, Rabbi Dr. David Moster.

David: Nice to see you, Nehemia, Dr. Nehemia, it’s great to see you.

Nehemia: Thank you. I’m also here with Nelson Calvillo, who is a manuscript researcher with the Makor Hebrew Foundation. Shalom Nelson.

Nelson: Shalom Nehemia, it is a pleasure to be here with you and Rabbi Dr. David Moster. This is a privilege; I can’t tell you how excited I am.

David: Great.

Nehemia: Today we’re going to talk about the Society of Biblical Literature Conference that all three of us went to in November of 2021, the SBL Conference. It is the largest annual academic conference in biblical studies in the world, as far as I know. David, what do you know about that?

David: Yeah, I think they usually get more than 10,000 people when it’s combined with the AAR, what is that?

Nehemia: American Association of Religion, I want to say, or something like that.

David: Yeah, the American Association of Religion. So together, it’s upwards of 11,000-12,000 people a year.

Nehemia: When I first went, I was overwhelmed. I said, “Okay, I’m going to go to all the lectures.” And then I found out that simultaneously there were dozens of lectures in every slot. And I’m like, “Okay, not only can’t I go to all the lectures; I can’t even go to all the lectures I want to go to that are in my fields of interest.” And you have lectures there on everything from... I mean, I don’t know. Septuagint, to the Tanakh, to textual criticism, to New Testament studies. And if you include the American Academy of Religion, which is combined, you have all kinds of things that I wouldn’t even expect at that sort of conference.

But it is an academic conference, and there are some really powerful lectures that take place there. And I want us to just share with the audience, just kind of like a small taste of the type of things that you can experience at SBL. I’m going to let you go first, David. What are your top picks of the lectures that you heard at the SBL in November 2021?

David: Well, before we even get into that, this was a very special conference, because we’re still in the pandemic and last year’s conference was canceled, so all of it was online.

Nehemia: Yeah, it wasn’t canceled, it was just entirely online.

David: Right, like, the physical conference was gone, but it was all online. And this year, we were kind of halfway there. The conference was about half as big, but the other half was continuing to be online. So it was really nice for me to actually see people like you in person again, because it had been two years since we had seen each other in person. And so, that was, for me, I think, what made the conference so good, just seeing real people again, in the field.

Nehemia: It’s funny, because I was talking to one professor, and he said, “Okay, I’ve got to run now, because I’m going to give a lecture in my hotel room as a virtual lecture, even though I’m physically here,” because that’s just how it turned out. You know, you’re assigned kind of a slot, so his slot was a virtual lecture, mine was in flesh, in person. This was the first lecture I gave at an academic conference as Dr. Nehemia Gordon.

David: That was great news to see. That was a pleasant surprise. I was really happy about that, that you were able to get it done so quickly.

Nehemia: I don’t know that it was so quickly. It felt like it took forever, but... There are people where it drags on for 10 years, and then some people never finish. So yeah, I’m very pleased to be done.

David: Would it be alright if I share my screen?

Nehemia: Please.

David: What I want to do here is I want to read a verse... actually, two verses. The English, I think, is fine for our purposes right now. And so, once we read these verses, I’ll tell you about the lecture I heard about this. So this is Ezekiel 19:10-11. And it says, “Your mother was like a vine in your vineyard, planted by water. It was fruitful and full of branches because it was well watered.”

So we can imagine a nice grapevine growing off of a brook or a river, a nice image. “Its boughs were strong, fit for ruler’s scepters,” really strong wood. “It reached up to the clouds, it stood out because of its height and its many branches.” And so, here we have a nice image of a grapevine being a mighty, towering figure. The first lecture I want to talk about that I heard was by Tina M. Sherman, from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. And what she said is that anybody who knows anything about grapevines would see this and just scratch their head, like, what is going on?

Because, sure, grapevines can grow taller and whatnot, but the thing is, you don’t want a grapevine by water, because grapes, especially in Israel, get most of their water from dew. They don’t get it mostly from the roots, so they don’t want to be in the water - they get waterlogged and ruined. And then the second thing is that if you don’t have irrigation, which the ancient Israelites didn’t have, at least in the hill country - they may have had it in the low country - but in the hill country, you don’t want your grapevine to grow tall like we do in the valleys and the vineyards of today, because you can’t provide all that water to it, you want your grapevine to be on the ground and low. That’s how you want your grapevine.

And so, what I did, is, even though I don’t have any of the pictures and images that she provided, I went to bibleplaces.com. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an awesome website, and they actually sell a lot of different things in different computer programs like Accordance or Logos. I’m making no money for this plug; I’m just saying they’re really awesome.

But check this out. So these are pictures from the Matson Collection, which is the early 1900s in Israel. And this is an Arab family, and they’re collecting their grapevines. And do you notice, the grapevines are all on the ground? Because you don’t want the water from the dew to start evaporating and have space to leave. You want it to have ground cover so that the dew stays there for the grapes. Let’s look at another picture. This is a more modern thing that we’re used to. You see how the grapevine kind of grows high and then grapes grow off of it? As we kind of see in our own valleys. And here, at the same time from the Matson collection, this is a group of Jewish workers collecting their grapes before irrigation in the land. And what do we see? The grapes are completely on the ground.

So in Israel, basically, what you have is that if you want a good grapevine, what you’re going to want to do is have it low down. And so, what Tina M. Sherman was pointing out is that with this agricultural knowledge, we now better understand this metaphor in Ezekiel. What Yekhezkel is saying is, “This is going to be mind-blowing. You’re going to have these little grapevines that everyone knows shouldn’t be on the river, and shouldn’t be really tall, they are still going to be amazing.” And that, for me, was a great insight into the agriculture of ancient Israel and also two verses in the Tanakh.

Nehemia: Very interesting. I’m going to leave this for a future discussion about whether they didn’t have any kind of irrigation. My understanding is that if you had a spring, you could have that spring fill up a pool, over a period of... sometimes it takes several days, and you can open up a channel that would then flood fields. So they did have something like that, even in the mountains.

David: Yeah, there are two or three verses about that. It’s called “irrigation by the foot”, because you would just take your foot and open the pool.

Nehemia: Exactly. And then an example of that is the waters of Shiloach that would go out into what was called the King’s Gardens in the Kidron Valley. So there were some exceptions where you did have some kind of irrigation.

David: There were some, but most Israelites, at least, that weren’t in the towns, had vineyards, and most of them didn’t have that access.

Nehemia: And the interesting thing is in modern Hebrew there’s a term for unirrigated fields. I don’t know the origin of this term. I wonder if it comes from some medieval or early Rabbinical source, I don’t know. The term is giduley ba’al, or ba’al crops. Ba’al was the god of rain, and so, they’ve now secularized that term and called crops that rely on rain... I mean, it’s horrific, in fact, that they would use that term, because specifically God in the Tanakh, in the Torah… in Deuteronomy He says it’s not like the land of Egypt, where you have water all the time from the Nile, but you rely upon the water from the heavens. Meaning God is supposed to be the source of the water, not Ba’al, so it’s an ironic term.

David: Right. We have those things, too, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Oh, I know. You mean in English.

David: What’s the third month of the year?

Nehemia: You mean in English? March, which is from Mars. Yeah, for sure. And the famous example is the word “panic”, which comes from the god Pan. And so, there are Haredim, ultra-orthodox Jews, who say you’re not allowed to say the word “panica”, which is the Hebrew form of panic. It comes directly from some European language, English or German or something. So there are Jews who refuse to say the word “panica”, and I assume those Jews won’t say giduley ba’al, but maybe they do, I don’t know. Or maybe they don’t work in fields.

David: For those of you who are planning to go to Israel, if you go to Jerusalem, outside of Jerusalem is a park called Sataf.

Nehemia: Oh, what an amazing place.

David: It’s an amazing place. Israelis are invited to rent land and grow trees on sdeh ba’al, without irrigation, just from the water of the rain. And you can see people doing it today. It’s just a fascinating place.

Nehemia: Yeah, Sataf’s an amazing place… I did a video there. I think I did a video about the name of God silver rounds, and I did it sitting in front of the Spring of Sataf. There’s actually a spring there too, as well. And a pool.

David: Yeah, that pool is amazing.

Nehemia: Nelson, share with us one of your favorite lectures from the SBL.

Nelson: So... does your lecture count? That’s my first question.

Nehemia: I’m going to say yes, because I’m very unbiased here. Sure, if that was one of your favorite lectures, tell the audience about my lecture.

Nelson: Well, I’ll say this first. I will say this is my first time at SBL. You, Nehemia, had really hyped it up for me, I was really excited for it. You have talked to me about it in the past, I’ve heard Keith Johnson also talk about going to SBL with you in the past. So I was excited for this, I was really excited to get the chance to listen right up front to scholars in these various fields who have committed pretty much their lives to the research within these fields.

And this being my first time at SBL, it was pretty interesting for me, because I didn’t get, I would say, the normal experience. Being in the middle of Covid, there was this hybrid approach to it with in-person sessions, online sessions, and even then, I felt a little overwhelmed at all of the different things I got to experience and got to listen to. And there are so many other things online that I wish I would have gotten a chance to listen to. And don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure I saw that SBL was keeping all of the online sessions available until, I think, like January, so I’m hoping that’s true.

Nehemia: I didn’t know they recorded them, so that’s interesting.

David: Some of them they did.

Nelson: According to the website, some of them, yeah. So I’m hoping I can go back and find some of those that I got to miss out on. So, going to your lecture was really interesting, because your lecture fell under the field of the Masoretic studies. There was a gentleman who went before you, who is a scholar at the University of Cambridge, and he was talking about Masoretic notes within a number of the manuscripts that have the Song of Moses, and that hit home for me, because you and I had just done some research on the Song of Moses. So your presentation, was... let’s be honest, it’s hard to fit all of your research into a 30-minute...

Nehemia: Yeah, you only have 30 minutes, I think including discussion, if I remember correctly.

Nelson: That’s true.

Nehemia: Yeah, so it’s really like 20-25 minutes or something.

Nelson: Exactly. You get 25 minutes maybe, and then you get five minutes for questions and answers, discussions. So being able to listen to your presentation was really, really amazing in the sense that you even brought some stuff that I had not even really read before or seen before. Or even if I did, I kind of glossed over it. So when you have that small window, you’re sort of forced to really focus on some of the more key and important points within your research, so being able to listen to you and listen to some of those very specific points, especially the thing that you wrote about the Aleppo Codex, and the morphing, the changing of the letters in order to fix a mistake with the Tetragrammaton.

Nehemia: Let me share an image of this that was part of my lecture, which was called Correcting Omissions of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts. I actually had the opportunity in January of 2020 to examine the Aleppo Codex directly using a 50x microscope. And one of the instances I found in which God’s name was written incorrectly and then corrected, was in 2 Samuel chapter 12, verse 15, and there the scribe originally wrote, “yihiyeh”, “he will be”, which in the context is completely nonsensical, and it’s obviously supposed to be Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. And what the scribe did, as you can see here in the image from the microscope, is that the second Yud - there’s only supposed to be one Yud - he originally wrote a second Yud, and that second Yud he then drew over the letter Vav, superimposing it over the Yud. So this is what we call reshaping letters. We knew this was done in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and now we can see it was done in the Tanakh, and it was not only with regular letters, but a letter of God’s name. Pretty cool.

David: You pointed out that according to some Jewish legal codes, that wasn’t good.

Nehemia: Well, you definitely wouldn’t be allowed to do that in a Torah scroll. It wouldn’t be considered kosher in a Torah scroll. But the Aleppo Codex isn’t a Torah scroll, it’s a codex. And look, one of the things I showed in my PhD dissertation is that not only did they reshape a letter of God’s name, but contrary to what I was previously told and thought, they erased the actual letters of God’s name in the Aleppo Codex. This is an important point I think I’ve shared before, but I was originally told by a scholar who spent years examining the manuscripts, or the actual Aleppo Codex, that they never erased a vowel or accent of God’s name. That’s what I was told. And I said, “I wish I could check that for myself.” Well, as part of my dissertation work, I was able to check it for myself, and I saw not only did they erase the accents of vowels of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey; there are five instances I found where they erased the actual letters in toto, completely, which tells you that this is probably not your typical Rabbinical scribe. David, why wouldn’t a Rabbinical scribe erase God’s name?

David: Well, the second commandment would be not to take God’s name in vain, which would include erasing.

Nehemia: Well, they derive it from Deuteronomy 12:4 where it talks about destroying… in 12:3 it says, “Destroy the places where the pagan gods put their names,” I’m paraphrasing, obviously, and it says, “Don’t do so to the Lord your God,” to Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, your God. And in the context there, what it means is don’t worship God the way the pagans worship their gods. But the rabbis took this to mean don’t erase God’s name the way you erase the names of the pagan gods.

And so, they took this to mean you’re not allowed to raise a single letter of God’s name, and the scribes of the Aleppo Codex... I say “scribes” because there were two scribes - Shlomo Ben Buya’ah and Aharon Ben Asher. As far as I can tell, both of them erased, although it’s hard to know which one, sometimes. But for sure Aharon Ben Asher, and it seems also Shlomo Ben Buya’ah, erased the actual letters of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

David: Wow! You didn’t say that in the talk.

Nehemia: No, because my talk this year in SBL was about correcting omissions, not about correcting extraneous instances or erasing. That was a talk I gave at SBL in 2018 in Helsinki.

David: Just for context, so that our listeners can know what you just said, can you please tell us about Ben Asher and how important he was?

Nehemia: Aharon Ben Asher is called Master of the Scribes, and Maimonides famously said that when he sat down to determine what are the rules for writing a Torah scroll, he based it on the manuscript of Ben Asher, which today we call the Aleppo Codex. Back then it hadn’t reached Aleppo yet. First it was in Tiberius, then it was in Jerusalem, and then it was in Cairo, or Fustat, and then eventually arrived in Aleppo, and now Jerusalem. And a third of it is missing; who knows where that is.

So in the 12th century, Maimonides said that historically people have gone to the Aleppo Codex to check their Bibles against it. And so, I decided if that was done for hundreds of years, I’m going to base my Bible on that as well, my Torah. Even though it’s not a Torah scroll, he’ll base the rules of writing a Torah scroll on the Aleppo Codex. And that was pretty much accepted... at least in theory, it’s been accepted until modern times. In practice, nobody writes a Torah scroll based on the Aleppo Codex, because we’re missing the Torah portion.

But for example, there are many Yemenite codices that say, “This was checked against the manuscript of Ben Asher.” Whether it really was or not, you know, that’s a different question. But for the last 1,000 years, it’s been considered the definitive authoritative text of the Bible.

David: So Nelson, I would like to add to this. Not even the exact details that Nehemia was saying during his talk, but just the fact that I had no idea that Nehemia has held or turned the pages of arguably the two most important Bibles in the world. Of the Hebrew Bible, for sure. The Aleppo Codex and Leningrad, which is complete, even though Aleppo is not complete. So Nehemia, this was amazing to hear that you were working with these texts using the microscopes you were using, and really finding new things in these ancient texts. That, for me, was mind-blowing.

Nehemia: And I could add to that, Sassoon 1053 and the Damascus Crown, that I’ve also been able to examine, which is four of the six key Bible manuscripts. There are two more, and we’re working on that. If Covid hadn’t happened, I’d probably have the fifth but, you know, that wasn’t God’s plan.

So David, I want you to jump in now and tell us your second pick for your SBL lectures that you heard.

David: All right. My second pick was by Ariel Feldman from Bright Divinity School. And what Ariel Feldman did, which was really interesting - let me just share my screen here – is, he was analyzing the tefillin, the phylacteries from Qumran.

Nehemia: Let’s stop there for a second. Tell us what phylacteries are.

David: The only way to know what phylacteries are is if you know what the Hebrew word tefillin are, because no one knows what they are, right? Tefillin are basically two boxes made of leather, and they have leather straps. One goes over the head, and one goes over the arm, which is symbolically the place of the heart. So the head and the heart is where the tefillin go, and inside the tefillin are different texts. And what’s really interesting is that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in those caves, they found these types of texts. Let me show you. This is what a tefillin from Qumran, a phylactery, is going to look like.

Nehemia: Wow.

David: It almost looks today like a piece of jerky. An old piece of… if you would touch this, it would crack in a second. This is real leather from 2,000 years ago, so it’s very old.

Nehemia: I’m going to throw you a softball. How do we know that these are phylacteries, and not just a scroll of the Bible?

David: What happened was that you kind of look what’s inside, and tefillin have inside them these scrolls, so the scrolls were actually found inside the tefillin, and they just happen to be the same texts that are used in modern tefillin, for the most part. Many of the same texts that are used in modern tefillin... For example, I could go get off my shelf my own pair of tefillin.

Nehemia: Can you do that?

David: Yeah, I can show my tefillin.

Nehemia: Bring your tefillin. Let’s see your tefillin.

David: Okay, I’m going to come back with my tefillin, one second.

Nehemia: For those who aren’t familiar, the tefillin or phylacteries, as David explained, are little devices that Orthodox Jews, and apparently the people at Qumran as well, they put one on their head and one on their arm, and they wear it during prayer. There are actually some people who walk around all day with them. It’s based on four passages in the Torah that I take to be metaphorical, but it says, “You will write it upon...” Well, no, it says, “to bind it upon... ukshartem le’ot al yadekha”, this is in the Shema, “you will bind it as a sign upon your hand,” uletotafot ben einekha”, “and as a frontlet between your eyes.” And totafot probably means something like headband, based on the way it’s used in ancient Hebrew. So a headband between your eyes, meaning a strip like this, and that’s exactly where they put the tefillin. Not literally between your eyes, but on your forehead.

In the New Testament, of course, in Matthew 23, it talks about the Pharisees. I think he says that they make their tefillin broad, or something like this. But the big surprise from Qumran is that the tefillin weren’t unique to the Pharisees; that you have the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I take to be Essenes, some people call them Sadducees, I find that unlikely. But the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the people, at least, who put the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves, they had these phylacteries. So show us your phylacteries, David.

Nehemia: For more reactions to the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature Conference in San Antonio with Rabbi Dr. David Moster, please log in to the Support Team Studies section at nehemiaswall.com. You can also listen to the lecture I gave at the conference, on how scribes corrected omissions of God’s name in medieval Hebrew Bible manuscripts in the same Support Team Study section at nehemiaswall.com.

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The post Hebrew Voices #139 – Society of Biblical Literature Reactions 2021 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.