38
In short the answer is Yes.
Maimonides (also know as the Rambam) codifies 13 principles which are basic to Judaism. These principles are pretty much universally accepted as binding in all Orthodox forms of Judaism. Principle number 8 is, "The belief in the divine origin of the Torah." Principle number 9 is, "The belief in the immutability of the Torah."
...
35
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 [...
34
Do Jewish people have a collection of books which are the equivalent of the Christian Old Testament?
The Jewish scriptures are called the "Tanach", which is traditionally divided into 24 separate books.
It is hard to say exactly how it measures up to the Christian Old Testament, since there are different versions as to what is included in the Old Testament depending on what sect of Christianity one belongs to. Here is an excellent chart which shows the ...
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 ...
24
עתניאל בן קנז ועכסה בת כלב
— see
Judges 1:13
EDIT:
I found some more:
יואש מלך יהודה ויהועדן - See Kings II 14:2
אחז מלך יהודה ואבי בת-זכריה - See Kings II 18:2
חזקיהו מלך יהודה וחפצי-בה - See Kings II 21:1
מנשה מלך יהודה ומשלמת בת חרוץ - See Kings II 21:19
22
There are the following others:
אביהיל and אבישור (I Chron. 2:29)
מעכה and מכיר (ibid. 7:16)
שלחו אותם and שחרים (ibid. 8:8, according to Radak, Metzudos and Malbim)
יהושבעת and יהוידע (II Chron. 22:11)
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 ...
19
According to Radak (Yehoshua 1:1), this is grammatically proper for "ben" to become "bin" when it and the following word are small and connected together in speech.
Other examples where "ben" becomes "bin":
דִּבְרֵי אָגוּר בִּן יָקֶה הַמַּשָּׂא (Mishlei 30:1)
וְהָיָה אִם בִּן הַכּוֹת הָרָשָׁע (Devarim 25:2)
שֶׁבִּן לַיְלָה הָיָה וּבִן לַיְלָה אָבָד (Yonah ...
18
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 ...
17
Abarbanel offers two possible approaches:
1) "לא יסור שבט" does not mean the monarchy, but rather that Yehuda will always be inherently greater and more deserving of respect and leadership than the other tribes.
2) "לא יסור שבט" means that the tribe of Yehuda will be punished continuously throughout their exile (שבט as in "שבט אפי"), referring to the galus ...
17
There is a commandment in the Torah for each person to write for themselves a sefer torah, though most people nowadays rely on their contribution to the writing of a communal Torah at their synagogues.
Besides for this, there is a Rabbinically enacted obligation for the community to have a weekly Torah reading, and each person is individually obligated to ...
17
The Hebrew Bible is most commonly referred to as "Tanach", which is a transliteration of a 3-letter Hebrew acronym for the 3 parts it contains: (ת) T orah, (נ) N'vi'im, (כ) K'suvim.
17
See this summary on Wikipedia.
The first five books of the Bible -- Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy -- form the "Torah" (like would be in a Torah scroll). The text of these is, as far as I know, identical between Jewish and Christian Bibles (though there will certainly be differences in translation; studying the original Hebrew is extremely ...
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
Yehoshua is always referred to in Tanach as Bin Nun. In Nechemia 8:17 he is referred to as יֵשׁוּעַ בִּן-נוּן.
The only other case in Tanach where a person is called Bin is in Mishlei 30:1 דִּבְרֵי אָגוּר בִּן יָקֶה. However Rashi cites the Midrash that Shlomo is called Agur, meaning the one who gathered this information, "Bin" meaning not son here but that ...
16
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 ...
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
...
15
The JPS 1917 translation is public domain. It can be found at http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0.htm among other places.
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
There are no restrictions on having your own copy of the bible and it is common in almost all Jewish homes.
The term "bible" in English, in a Jewish context, refers either to
The Torah, a.k.a. the Pentateuch, also known as the Five Books of Moses.
The Tanakh, which adds the books of the prophets and additional "Writings", known to Christians collectively ...
14
When you speak of the Neviim and Kesuvim of being factually accurate, you are likely referring to the historical accounts of what is written in those sections of the Tanach, most of which take place in the historical books of the Neviim.
The classical commentators (of course, I cannot speak for all of them) understand the books of the Neviim to have been ...
14
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 ...
14
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/...
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