38
In the Haftorah of Parshas Ki Sisa (Malachim Aleph 18:20-39) when Eliyahu is on Har HaCarmel and he is waiting for the priests of Baal, he watches them as they pray to their god to rain fire upon their sacrifice. When none is forthcoming, Eliyahu tells them (18:27)
"Call with a loud voice, for he is a god. [Perhaps] he is talking or he is pursuing [...
30
Either what was posted on that forum is about half-correct, or your understanding of what was said was about half-correct. Traditional Judaism does believe that "[H]oly texts are the revealed word of the divine and thus cannot ever be contradicted by modern research, philosophy or belief systems." It is not true "[t]hat it is understood that the scripture ...
30
The KJV may give the general sense of a translation in many cases. However, it has a definite Christian bend and does not always follow the Jewish traditions in translation. I will illustrate this phenomenon with a few examples.
Isaiah 7:14 (see here):
MT:
לָ֠כֵן יִתֵּ֨ן אֲדֹנָ֥י ה֛וּא לָכֶ֖ם א֑וֹת הִנֵּ֣ה הָעַלְמָ֗ה הָרָה֙
וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת בֵּ֔ן וְקָרָ֥את ...
25
Didn't Moshe Rabbeinu get divorced from Zipporah? See Rashi Bamidar 12:1, על אודות האשה: על אדות גירושיה. Sounds like he divorced her. I don't think this shittah is universal though. Still looking for more sources.
Tosafos in Yevomos 62:a dichsiv says that possibly he wrote her a Get.
Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer (chapter 30) brings down the following story that ...
25
I agree with the answer Daniel gave, but I would clarify things slightly differently.
1) Orthodox Judaism believes that the Torah is the literal Word of G-d. This is one of the Thirteen Principles of Faith as brought down by Maimonides:
"We do not know exactly how the Torah was transmitted to Moses. But
when it was transmitted, Moses merely wrote it ...
23
In Tanach there are only four:
Aviv = first month = Nissan (Ex. 13:4, et al)
Ziv = second month = Iyar (I Kings 6:1)
Eisanim = seventh month = Tishrei (ibid. 8:2)
Bul = eighth month = (Mar)cheshvan (ibid. 6:38)
In a letter from the era of the first Beis Hamikdash found in Arad, there is mention (according to some reconstructions) of ירח צח, "the month ...
21
The Sefer Eicha was destroyed by King Yehoyakim who threw it into a fire and rewritten by Yirmiyahu at the command of Hashem.
Yirmiyahu 36:23
23: And it came to pass, when Jehudi read three or four verses, he rent it
with a scribe's razor, and cast [it] onto the fire which was on the
brazier until the entire roll was consumed on the fire that was on ...
20
The only divorce I can find in Tanach al pi peshat is Avraham's divorcing Hagar. The verse (Genesis 21:10) says:
גָּרֵשׁ הָאָמָה הַזֹּאת, וְאֶת-בְּנָהּ
Cast out this bondwoman and her son.
The word used is גרש which is the word used for divorce generally in Tanach (eg. Leviticus 22:13) and it seems to be the peshat here because we never hear of Hagar ...
20
I did some calculations and came up with the top 5 for each sefer in Tanach, along with the top twenty overall. I also provided my list of top 10 for Torah and Tehillim for comparison with AvnerMil's. For the Tanach source, i used Mechon Mamre's niqqudless Tanach.
The code is available here on GitHub Gists. Comes with a README explaining how to run it.
Top ...
20
[Gen] The world comes to be.
[Exo] A nation goes free,
[Lev] and learns about service divine.
[Num] They wander and gripe.
[Deu] For Canaan they're ripe;
[Jos] they conquer it and land assign.
[Jug] They sin and repent,
[Sam] a king they are sent,
[Kng] and others follow in his wake.
[Jer] They hear they'll be gone,
[Ezk] but will come back anon,
[Isa] for ...
19
Although many good answers exist here already, I want to provide somewhat of a more comprehensive response (as best as I can) by putting all the answers I know of in one place.
There are three overall ways to answer the question "why do we associate Shavuos with Matan Torah if that is not how it is presented in Tanakh?" One can respond either (I) by saying ...
17
According to Maimonides (Hil. Melachim 6:4), the obligation to kill Amalek only applies to those Amalekite communities that refuse to accept the terms demanded by the Jewish king (including the acceptance of the seven Noahide laws). Those communities that accept these terms are not to be harmed, even Amalekites. (As the Kesef Mishneh puts it, by accepting ...
17
I think the most complete indexing book of that kind is
תורה הכתובה והמסורה
by אהרן הימן.
It's published by דביר in three volumes.
It goes through the whole Bible verse by verse, giving for each verse a list of locations in Talmud and Midrash where the verse is mentioned in some way.
It's available on HebrewBooks:
vol 1 (torah)
vol 2 (nevi'im)
vol 3 (...
17
There is no description in the Torah (and to the best of my knowledge in the rest of TaNa"KH) as to how to correctly slaughter an animal.
In fact, R. Yehuda HaLevi (Kuzari, 3:35) brings this as a proof to the truth of the Oral Law. How can the written Torah demands slaughter without giving any details? It must be that there exists a parallel, oral tradition ...
16
You mentioned this verse in passing, but as far as I can tell, it provides complete and convincing proof that G-d is known by multiple names.
Exodus 6:2-3, from Mechon Mamre:
וַיְדַבֵּר אֱלֹהִים, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה; וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו, אֲנִי יְהוָה.
וָאֵרָא, אֶל-אַבְרָהָם אֶל-יִצְחָק וְאֶל-יַעֲקֹב--בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי; וּשְׁמִי יְהוָה, לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם
...
answered May 30 '12 at 15:05
Hod - Monica's Army
20.2k5 gold badges83 silver badges142 bronze badges
16
As mentioned by @WAF, R' David Zvi Hoffman wrote a response to bible criticism in the early 1900's which is available on Daat.co.il.
Umberto Cassuto, while not strictly orthodox, published a book in reply to the DH in 1941. There are some notes on it here, and a new edition is available online here: http://www.shalempress.co.il/download/Products/...
16
Harry Orlinsky, editor-in-chief of the NJPS, in a 1990 essay pointed to the example of three texts in the KJV as being faulty and showing Christian bias: Genesis 1:1-3, Psalm 2:12, and Isaiah 7:14. The Isaiah 7:14 text has been discussed in the first post above and the one following, so only a discussion of the other two texts needs to be done.
Genesis 1:1-...
15
All three books (Iyov Mishlei and Tehillim) are written in a complex poetic style. The separate trop represents the shift from prose to poetry and may have been sung in a more songful manner than the regular prose trop. A proof to this distinction lies in Iyov, whose first, second and final chapters are written in prose and have regular trop.
EDIT: The ...
15
In his commentary to I Kings 6:7:
ומקבות" - דלוט"א בלשון רוסיא"
Although it seems quite likely that this is a later interpolation; it doesn't appear in early prints of Rashi.
In several places, though, Rashi refers to לשון כנען, which was a popular term at the time for the Slavic languages (based on the equation of "Slav" with "slave" and the ...
15
The Talmud (Megillah 14a) writes:
הרבה נביאים עמדו להם לישראל, כפלים כיוצאי מצרים, אלא, נבואה שהוצרכה לדורות - נכתבה, ושלא הוצרכה - לא נכתבה.
Many prophets arose for the Jews: more than twice the number of Jews in the Exodus [1200000, but this language is likely meant to be understood as a really, really big number]. However, those prophesies which ...
14
Very conveniently, the answer lies plainly in one verse. VaYikra (Leviticus) 19:17 states, "Do not hate your brother in your heart; you surely must rebuke your neighbor, but you must not bear sin because of him." (My own translation)
Rashi there states: "but You shall not bear a sin on his account: I.e., [in the course of your rebuking your fellow,] do not ...
14
Mishne Berurah (238, Shaar HaTziyun 1) writes that the Midrash (Pirkei d'Rebbi Eliezer 46 and Tanchumah Parsha Ki Sisa 36) writes that Moshe Rabenu was taught the Written Torah during the day and the Oral Torah at night. From this Midrash the Ba'er Hetev (2) (and Arizal [ed]) concludes that one should not learn the written Torah at night.
The Pri Megadim ...
14
Textual indicators abound for the eternal and immutable nature of the Torah. Besides examples provided in other answers, here are a couple more examples:
Even all that the LORD hath commanded you by the hand of Moses, from the day that the LORD gave commandment, and onward throughout your generations (B'midbar 15:23).
And thou shalt keep His statutes,...
14
The question as currently phrased is asked by, among others, R. Yosef Albo in Sefer HaIkarim 3:23 (which is why I'm unsure as to why it still has a negative score). Since I don't have a better way of doing this, I'm going to just paste here what I wrote to this similar question, with a couple of variations.
1. Idiomatic Expressions
Some differences between ...
14
Scrolls found in Ketef Hinnom contain the priestly blessing (of Numbers ch. 6) as preserved from the First Temple Era (700-650 BCE)
The Isaiah scroll found in Qumran: "has been carbon-14 dated at least four times, giving calibrated date ranges between 335-324 BC and 202-107 BC; there have also been numerous paleographic and scribal dating studies placing ...
13
To summarize (and perhaps embellish) Prof. Yaakov Elman's The Rebirth of Omnisignificant Biblical Exegesis in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, which addresses all this at length, Hazal seemed to assume that every word in the Torah was deliberate, meaningful, and not mere stylistic flourish. However, in response to Karaism, Rav Saadya Gaon greatly ...
13
First, I would suggest you read a bit about the history of the biblical text, its redaction, etc. It's important to understand the role played by the Masoretes in the making of the Masoretic texts which are used today, such as the Aleppo Codex.
What is the source (talmudic or otherwise) for this concept?
Traditionally, there were a number of different ...
13
There is an excellent book by Yehuda Radday and Athalya Brenner, entitled On Humor and the Comic in the Hebrew Bible (JSOTS Series; Continuum International Publishing Group, 1990). I don't have a copy on hand, so I cannot provide you with the relevant page numbers, but the sorts of issues that they explore are whether or not, and to what extent, Jonah is a ...
13
I suggest Ishei Hatanach / Encyclopedia Of Biblical Personalities
Anthologized from the Talmud, Midrash, and Rabbinic writings by Yishai Chasidah. It's an Artscroll product.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
