Truth and Peace

It's so gratifying to find an author who speaks your language, who addresses the topics you want addressed and poses the questions you want asked. That's been my experience reading Jacob Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus. And his section on pure/impure animals is no exception. Non-kosher animals and food taboos A line of thought occurred to me about the "kosher signs" - e.g. split hooves and rumination for quadrupeds - that maybe these signs were chosen after the fact. Perhaps there was a long-standing tradition about what animals the early Israelites would eat, and which ones they found detestable, i.e. had a taboo against. (Sheep, goat and bovine domestication, after all, go back roughly 10,000 years, and pig domestication nearly 13,000 years.) And only later did the Priestly school devise a rule to fit the existing taboo, in effect painting a target around a set of previously shot arrows. My sense is that our drive to offer "explanations" oft...

Sacrificial altar, Tel Be'er Sheva, 8th C. B.C.E. The question in the title seems like a reasonable line of inquiry. But in fact it's misleadingly simplistic. Here's why: 1. There are different categories of "reasons." a) The theoretical/historical "reason behind" something. b) The reason people typically cite when asked. c) People's actual internal motivations for doing it. Sacrifices aren't like say, lightbulbs. With the lightbub, the reason for inventing it, the reason people give for using it, and the actual motivation for turning it on, are all one and the same - being able to see in the dark without a candle. When it comes to sacrifices however, the theoretical or historical reason they exist (e.g. the belief that success requires sacrifice to the god) might have little to do with what the offerer in Temple times might give as the reason (e.g. the desire to serve God), and what the person "says" may not really express ...

I recently discovered the Anchor Yale Bible series, and from the tiny fraction of it I've read thus far (some Exodus, some Leviticus), it's already become my new favorite commentary on the Torah. The Leviticus section is written by Jacob Milgrom, the late (d. 2010) Bible scholar and long-time head of the Near Eastern Studies department at U.C. Berkeley. He devoted much of his academic career to studying Biblical purity laws and the sacrificial system, and many of his findings and conclusions are distilled within this masterpiece on Leviticus, a monster 2,700-page work in three volumes (the bibliography alone is 60 pages, just to give you an idea), which combines Biblical scholarship with traditional rabbinic/Talmudic material and classical Medieval Torah commentaries. To say the work is dense is an understatement. It goes through every word of the Masoretic Text, followed by longer commentaries on selected topics. So what I'd like to do, as we foray into the third bo...