Purposes and pitfalls of repeated rituals

The chapter of Judaism Reclaimed which relates to parashat Tetzaveh exploresa number of activities, such as lighting the menorah and daily korbanot, with which the daily Mishkan workload was scheduled to start and conclude. Several of these activities attract the description 'tamid', which means ‘constant’; a term which sits uncomfortably with the reality that these activities were performed only once or twice a day, in the morning and evening. This difficulty is highlighted by the observation of Rashi, at the start of our parashah, that regular daily events can attract the term tamideven if they are not continuous. Why should this be?

One explanation of Rashi's statement is that the use of the term tamid to describe regular but non-constant activities provides us with a fundamental insight into how the dynamics of these cyclical events are viewed from the Torah's perspective. The opening and closing ceremonies of the Mishkan’s daily routine were not intended merely to supply an element of solemnity or grandeur. Rather, they contextualise and grant legitimacy to everything that happens during the span of time that passes between them. By validating the various offerings that were brought throughout the day, the opening and closing activities can be seen to exert a constant influence and thereby justify the Torah's description of them as tamid.

The burnt Tamid offerings, which open and close the daily sacrifices, are explained by Rabbi S. R. Hirsch as representing Judaism's delicate balance between the interests of the nation and the individual. In order for an individual's private korban to be valid, it must be offered in the time-space between these two public Temidim. This symbolises that, while Judaism provides space for individual expressions of worship, such expressions must acknowledge and respect the boundaries set by the Community.

R’ Hirsch cites Talmudic sources which describe how the Sadducees could not accept the public spirit of the Tamid offering, leading them to reject the notion that it is an obligatory national offering. The Sadducees, he continues, maintained that Jews can connect themselves to God only through the written letter of the Torah which is equally accessible to all, and that each individual is empowered to interpret and reject aspects of the Torah as he sees fit. This approach was mirrored by their rejection of the entire concept that halachah, as determined by the Sages, could regulate the efforts of an individual who is seeking to draw close to God through a korban.

Even though the Temidim were offered only twice daily, the description of 'constant' was thus justified by the crucial context they provided for all of the intervening private korbanot. The principle that the subjective religious expression of individuals must accord with the values of the Nation of God, to whom the Torah and its teachings were entrusted.

The menorah's light is understood in both midrashic and kabbalistic literature to represent the 'illumination' provided by the Torah's wisdom. Through the daily kindling of the Menorah, the Torah emphasises that the korban rituals are beneficial only when they are performed in a way that is consistent with the Torah's spirit and teachings.

Rituals, when practised without a proper understanding of their meaning and significance, have an unfortunate tendency to be stripped of their profound spiritual meaning. While it is true that the performance of all mitzvotis enhanced through a deeper understanding of their underlying meaning, awareness of the purpose and function of korbanot is particularly crucial. This is seen from the fact that manner of offering korbanot was repeatedly singled out for criticism by the prophets, who protested that the korban was being reduced to a superstitious ritual that was merely intended to appease God and persuade Him to ignore their sins. In view of this very real risk – that the korban may ultimately distance people from God rather than drawing them close - we can understand why the daily Mishkan service required the constant influence of the Menorah’s light to provide an essential context. An ongoing illuminating reminder for the entire sacrificial service.

The chapter proceeds to discuss the concept of ‘tamid’as it applies to other concepts in Judaism including the ‘constant commandments’ (mitzvot temidiyot), the obligation of Torah study and God’s ‘constant’ renewal of the world.

First posted on Facebook 5 March 2020, here.

A tenuous tale of two Tabernacles

By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips

After several weeks of lengthy elaborations on details of Mishkan construction, one could be forgiven for assuming that all details of God’s desert residence had now been unambiguously resolved. This is certainly not the case however according to Dr. Jaeyoung Jeon, a senior researcher at the University of Lausanne's Institute for Biblical Studies, writing on TheTorah.com (here). Dr. Jeon claims that two free-standing tales of tabernacle-tents can be identified in the Torah: a priestly version focused on rituals and sacrifices, and the Tent of Meeting at which Moshe received divine communications.

According to Dr. Jeon the distinguishing features of the priestly tent, whose construction was a national project, include its elaborate and intricate design as well as its central location for national sacrifice. Moshe’s tent, by contrast, was a simple tent pitched by Moshe alone at the edge of the camp. Instead of sacrificial ritual, Moshe’s tent was a place of prophetic encounter at which God communicated with Moshe and, by extension, the nation that he led. While the ‘’priestly tent’’ is depicted as a permanent resting place for God’s Presence, God must ‘’descend’’ in a pillar of cloud to appear at Moshe’s abode.

Most importantly, writes Dr. Jeon, the Torah’s accounts of events at ‘’Moshe’s tent” do not directly relate to their surrounding narratives. This, he claims, is evidence that the verses containing those accounts were later additions to the Torah’s text by an anti-priesthood school of scribes looking to challenge priestly control of religion in the early second Temple era.

Setting aside the author’s far-fetched claims of inter-scribal strife, this article on TheTorah.com is a perfect exhibit of the extent to which many academic source-critics are prepared to ignore far simpler ways of resolving the text internally. Rather than seeking to read and understand the text in its own terms, they let their pre-conceived (and often academically disputed) hypotheses propel them towards the creation of convoluted contradictions that compel them to carve up verses and passages to fit their arguments.

There are two obvious flaws in Dr. Jeon’s thesis. First of all, it ignores a verse (Exodus 38:8) in which both tents are described:

“And he made the washstand of copper and its base of copper from the mirrors of the women who had set up the legions, who congregated at the entrance of the tent of meeting”.

Which group of scribes, according to Dr. Jeon’s hypothesis, might have been responsible for referencing Moshe’s tent in the context of the construction of the priestly tabernacle?

Furthermore, while Dr. Jeon claims that “Exodus 33 is not directly related to the Golden Calf episode which it ostensibly continues”, an overview of the dynamics surrounding God’s communications with Moshe in the desert shows that the moving of Moshe’s tent plays an integral part in the narrative surrounding the construction of the Tabernacle.

In the initial months following the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, none of God’s communications with Moshe appear to relate to any particular area or tent within the camp. It is only in the aftermath of the sin of the Golden Calf that God warns (Exodus 33:3) “I will not go up in your midst since you are a stiff necked people, lest I destroy you on the way”. Immediately following God’s disclosure that He will no longer be entering the camp “Moshe took the tent and pitched it for himself outside the camp, distancing [it] from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting, and it would be that anyone seeking the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp”.

Thus Moshe’s pitching of his tent outside the camp is a direct reaction to the fall-out from the Golden Calf sin. Moshe then prays that God will once again enter the camp and be amongst the people – a prayer that God appears to accept (33:15-17).

It is only months later however – in the second year following the Exodus – that the Tabernacle is constructed and God is once again willing to “reside” in the midst of the camp and communicate with Moshe there:

“And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst.” [Exodus 25:8]

“I will arrange My meetings with you there, and I will speak with you from atop the ark cover from between the two cherubim that are upon the Ark of the Testimony, all that I will command you unto the children of Israel.” [Exodus 25:22]

And immediately following the Tabernacle’s inauguration ceremony:

“When Moses would come into the Tent of Meeting to speak with Him, he would hear the voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the covering which was over the Ark of Testimony, and He spoke to him.” [Numbers 7:89]

From this point onwards, Moshe no longer appears to have a personal tent of any significance. The proposed distinctions between “Moshe’s tent” and the “Priestly tent” by Dr. Jeon become ever weaker and ignore considerable counter-indications from within the text itself that there is one single tabernacle where all these events take place.

Crucially it is Moshe alone and unaided who finally erects the “Priestly tent” in the closing sections of Exodus 40, and it is also Moshe who performs a high proportion of the sacrifices at its inauguration ceremony. This is a strong challenge to any hypothesis that seeks to identify Moshe and his tent as representing “lay leaders” in opposition to the exclusive and elite priestly caste.

While it is true that certain events highlighted by Dr. Jeon (Miriam and Aharon’s rebuke, the appointment of 70 elders, and the appointment of Yehoshua) do describe God descending or appearing in a cloud, this does not contradict the notion that God’s presence was ever-present in the Tabernacle. As the verses (above and elsewhere) make clear, God’s Presence resided within the Holy of Holies “between the two cherubim above the covering which was over the Ark of Testimony”. The events in which God descended in a cloud however took place at the “entrance of the tent” or “surrounding the tent” – which were not the regular places for prophetic communication.

A careful reading of the text also demonstrates that these events at “Moshe’s tent” are not described as taking place outside the Israelite encampment as Dr. Jeon claims. When the Torah seeks to signify people exiting the entire encampment it employs the phrase “יצא אל/מחוץ למחנה” as can be seen repeatedly in Leviticus 13-14, Numbers 5, 15, and regarding Miriam’s leprosy in Numbers 12). This too is the phrase used to describe Moshe removing his tent from the camp in the aftermath of the sin of the Golden Calf in Exodus 33. This phraseology is to be contrasted with the language used in the episode of the 70 elders and God’s rebuke of Aharon and Miriam (Numbers 11 and 12) where they are described merely as “יצאו”, going out to the tent, while Eldad and Meidad remain in the camp. This terminology indicates, as Ibn Ezra writes, that the people are being described as leaving the main Israelite camp and entering the area of the Mishkan (Machane Shekhinah) rather than departing from the entire encampment.

It is not merely the text of the Torah itself that invalidates the theory of Dr. Jeon. His claims that the verses describing Moshe’s tent are very late additions are disputed from within academic source criticism too. Rival biblical scholars theorise that the supposed "E" [Elohist] source is the one of the oldest sources—preceding other parts of the Torah by hundreds of years. Additionally, a further group of scholars argue that there never was an independent "E" source at all. Yet other scholars, such as Gary Rendsburg, are of the opinion that all narrative portions of the Pentateuch are from a single author, which would undermine Dr. Jeon’s claims.

In short, what we see here is scholarly willingness to ignore the simple flow of the narrative in Exodus 33 in order to isolate the descriptions of Moshe’s tent from the surrounding narrative and frame the passage as a contradiction between texts authored by rival scribal groups. Rather than examine possible ways of understanding the text that avoid claims of contradiction, the author ignores inconvenient verses that challenge his ideas and proceeds to construct outlandish theories, unsupported by evidence or credibility, which relate these verses to supposed power-struggles in the early second temple era.

First posted on Facebook 14 March 2021, here.

What was the mysticism of the Talmudic sages?

This week’s daf yomi curriculum covers the second chapter of Chagigah – a chapter which lies at the epicentre of rabbinic mysticism. Jewish mysticism is strongly associated in popular thought with kabbalistic texts, innumerable combinations of God’s names, attempts to manipulate the world by use of such names, amulets and secretive rites. This week provides an opportunity to pause and reflect on what the Talmudic tradition – itself an interpretation of earlier prophetic texts – has to say about Jewish mysticism.

What then is contained in what the Talmud labels “mysteries of the Torah”?

The first point to recognise is that these mysteries are almost exclusively focused on the content of Maasei Bereishit and Merkava – the biblical passages relating God’s creation of the world and the dynamics of the heavenly forces, which probe the elusive interface between the physical and spiritual domains. Rather than secretive rites and complex combinations of divine names and force-fields of spiritual energy, we read of great individuals meditating and attempting to grow their knowledge in the orchard of “Pardes” (incidentally, Pardes – a Persian loan-word related to paradise – had not yet been construed to refer to multiple secret meanings of the Torah’s text).

A second point, which is particularly striking to the modern Jew whose bookshelves, shiurim and even social media feed is frequently trespassed upon by claimed divine secrets, kabbalistic charms, and influential passages to recite, is that true Jewish mysticism is the subject of a strict prohibition. It can only be transmitted to specifically qualified individuals, and even then only its “chapter headings” may be disclosed.

In the first section of Moreh Nevuchim, Rambam offers guidance to those seeking to relate to a metaphysical God but find themselves constrained by the limitations of human language and thought categories which naturally relate to the physical realm. He teaches that the process of improving one’s comprehension of God involves a lengthy training of the mind to negate the physicality introduced by human language. By doing this, one gradually enables the mind to transcend the limitations of human thought which otherwise anchor the mind in physicality and cause a person to perceive God through the lens of human attributes and activity.

It is sometimes wrongly claimed that Rambam’s negative theology effectively prevents any meaningful relationship with God and largely removes Him from the religious experience. As discussed in a previous post however (linked below), Rambam understands that true Jewish mysticism begins where negative theology leaves off. Having trained the mind to relate to God in a proper manner, one is ready to begin one’s journey into the “Pardes” of meditating upon Maaseh Bereishit and Merkava. At this stage, the mind can start to fathom and conceptualise the Creation and nature of divine interaction with the physical world.

This is the sort of mysticism which must not be communicated because –as Rabbi Jose Faur describes in his Homo Mysticus – its true content transcends human language. It cannot effectively be transmitted. Only oblique hints and chapter headings can be shared by the initiated (and Chagigah dwells upon Tannaitic masters examining their students to see if they are ready to start exploring these areas of the Torah).

Finally, Rambam’s own interpretation of the Ma’aseh Merkavah, apparently through the lens of Aristotelian metaphysics is the subject of pointed comments and criticism. As I argue in Judaism Reclaimed, however, insufficient attention is paid to his introductory comments, where he expresses extreme caution concerning his approach:

“regarding these matters I followed conjecture and supposition; no divine revelation has come to me to teach me that the intention in the matter in question is such and such, nor did I receive what I believe in these matters from a teacher … it is possible that they are different and something else is intended.”

It would seem that Rambam was engaging in a genuine attempt to fathom and give meaning to these texts in the spirit of the prevailing ideas of his era. He was approaching this task with humility and trepidation, well aware of the possibility that his interpretations, and the premises upon which they were based, may not represent the true meaning of God’s word. Perhaps most significantly, he was not claiming his understanding to represent any secret transmitted code. In the spirit of negative theology, it may be far easier to assert what Jewish mysticism is not than what it genuinely does consist of.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/JudaismReclaimed/permalink/2945031085726048/

First posted to Facebook 23 February 2022, here.

Those who live by the sword: the ideology of Amalek

The shocking news coming out of Ukraine in recent days has prompted me to bring forward a post that I had been planning for parashat Zachor, when we recall the need to stamp out any memory of Amalek and their ideology. How does the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek present itself in the current era?

Judaism Reclaimed approaches the subject mindful of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s teaching in Kol Dodi Dofek, that the Torah’s treatment of Amalek refers not only to those biologically descended from the nation which attacked the Jews in the desert. It also encompasses an ideology of evil. While the command to destroy individuals from that nation has not been practically applicable for most of Jewish history, there remains a powerful principle to confront and “blot out” the evil ideology that Amalek represented.

In terms of defining what Amalek’s beliefs consisted off, we turn to the comments of Rabbi S. R. Hirsch:

“Amalek alone did not fear God. Amalek alone was heir to that spirit that chooses the sword as its lot, seeks renown in laurels of blood, and strives to realise the ambition of “Let us make for ourselves a name” with which Nimrod began world history. This ambition is realised by destroying the welfare of nations and the happiness of men.

This seeking renown by the force of arms is the first and last enemy of human happiness and Divine Kingship on earth…Amalek’s glory-seeking sword knows no rest as long as one free man’s heart keeps beating and pays no homage to it; as long as one modest abode and happy home remains standing whose residents do not tremble before its might.”

Judaism Reclaimed discusses a more recent example of how this Amalekite ideology has presented itself in more recent times.

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf drew heavily upon Nietzsche’s theory of a ‘master race’ (ubermensch) whose rightful ‘heroic’ status was being compromised by the ‘slave morality’ of those who idealise acts of kindness and mercy towards others (identified as Jews and those influenced by ‘Jewish morality’). Hitler built further upon Nietzsche’s principle, identifying Germans as a frustrated Aryan master race which, possessed with master morality, would dominate the world. It was, he claimed, the Jews’ perpetuation of the slave morality to serve the weak (spread via the church, democracy and western civilization) that compromised the master race’s entitlement to dominate humanity.

The politicisation of this appropriation of Nietzsche’s philosophy earmarked the Jews as the primary enemy of Nazi Germany, and as a target for elimination in a warped attempt to influence Darwinian natural selection. Hitler’s political theory of the entitlement of the powerful to dominate the weak strongly resembles the ideology attributed by Rav Hirsch to Amalek and why Amalek is deemed an eternal ideological opponent of the Jews.

These are important ideas to keep in mind as we monitor current world events and contemplate the commandment to blot of the memory of Amalek that we read in a couple of weeks.

First posted to Facebook 27 February 2022, here.

Is belief in the Torah's divinity irrational?

By Rabbi Professor Sam Lebens

“Do you really believe in all of that Judaism stuff? But you’re so clever!” I’m never quite sure if this is a compliment or an insult. But it’s a question I’ve been asked. To save me from the accusation of lying to others, people must think that I’m engaged in some sort of compartmentalization.

The religious scientist, when in the laboratory, puts nothing down to super-natural causes. Every phenomenon requires a natural explanation. And yet, the same religious scientist, when outside of the laboratory is willing to believe in miracles. Once again, the only explanation is that the religious intellectual must have erected an internal iron curtain between their religious persona, which they occupy in the synagogue and at home, and their worldly persona, which they occupy the rest of the time.

Professor Solomon Schimmel writes (https://www.thetorah.com/.../my-personal-struggle-with...):

For years, I have been studying Orthodox Judaism and exploring the question of how it is that modern, highly educated people can make unreasonable faith claims. Specifically, how is it that Modern Orthodox Jews, in the face of overwhelming evidence and logical arguments, believe that God revealed the entirety of the Pentateuch, word for word, to Moses at Sinai and/or in the wilderness?

Let’s examine his example: belief that God revealed the entirety of the Pentateuch to Moses. James Kugel, a leading contemporary Biblical scholar, claims that his discipline stands upon a number of assumptions; assumptions which are owed to Spinoza. According to these assumptions:

1. Scripture is to be understood on its own terms, rather than through the interpretative lenses of any particular church or religious tradition.

2. We have to make efforts to understand the language of the Bible and its own world of ideas, without imposing later conceptions upon it.

3. Consequently, we should assume that scripture means just what scripture says, even when its plain meaning contradicts contemporary values, mores, and conceptions, unless internal textual considerations force upon us a figurative interpretation.

4. To understand the meaning of scripture, we first of all have to investigate how the books were put together. We have to construct biographies for the authors, based upon knowledge of their writings and their historical context, and understand their words in light of these biographies.

5. In considering the words of the prophets, one must recognize that they frequently contradict one another. Hermeneutics of reconciliation are to be eschewed in favor of recognizing the multiple conflicting voices beneath the surface

But Orthodox Judaism rejects many of these assumptions. We think that the Torah is properly interpreted by the Rabbinic tradition; that God speaks to us through these texts; that God may have meant to communicate things to this generation through the same words that communicated other things to earlier generations; and that the words of the prophets are all true. It follows that their words must admit of a reconciliatory reading.

As Kugel sees it, what separates Orthodox interpretations of the Bible and contemporary academic scholarship is just:

the set of unwritten instructions that guide them in reading the biblical text. Accept the one’s, and the other’s interpretations appear irrelevant at best, at worst a willful and foolish hiding from the obvious. It is thanks to this crucial difference in assumptions that these two groups can read exactly the same words and perceive two quite different messages.

Perhaps an analogy will be helpful.

Meticulous scholarship has led some theorists to suggest that ‘William Shakespeare’ was merely a pseudonym for Sir Henry Neville. Detailed study of Neville’s biography renders his life a compelling fit for having authored the works attributed to Shakespeare. Neville’s handwritten notes, found in the books of his extensive library match exactly what we’d expect to be find in the books of a playwright conducting research so as to write Shakespeare’s plays. Notwithstanding this evidence, and this meticulous scholarship, the vast majority of Shakespeare scholars remain resolutely unconvinced.

A key proponent of the Neville theory, John Casson, told the Guardian newspaper: “There are no letters from William of Stratford. His parents were illiterate, his daughters were illiterate: how do you become the greatest writer ever when your family are illiterate?”

Can you hear the prejudice in those words? The son of illiterate parents simply couldn’t have authored such majestic work. Accordingly, noted Shakespeare expert, Brian Vickers put the theory down to:

snobbery, and ignorance… They are unaware that the Elizabethan grammar school was an intense crash course in reading and writing Latin verse, prose, and plays – the bigger schools often acted plays by Terence in the original … Above all, he had a great imagination, and didn’t need to have been to Venice to write The Merchant of Venice, or Othello. What’s most dispiriting about these anti-Stratfordians is their denial of Shakespeare’s creative imagination.

If you resolutely assume from the outset that x is false, then you’re almost bound to find ‘compelling evidence’ that x is false. Likewise: if you assume that God wasn’t the principle author of the Pentateuch, then certain textual anomalies are bound to take on a different light than they would if you assumed that God was the author. But the anomalies in question really don’t serve as compelling evidence that God was not the author, unless you’re already assuming that God was not the author (just as the evidence for Neville only becomes salient on the assumption that it couldn’t have been Shakespeare who wrote those plays).

Spinoza’s assumptions are attractive to Biblical Scholars. They want their discipline to approximate the standards of a natural science. Even the most religious of scientists tend to adopt a stance that is sometimes called methodological naturalism. According to this stance, it is always inappropriate to appeal to the acts of God in coming to a scientific theory. Even if God exists, we should keep him out of the laboratory.

Methodological naturalism is not compartmentalization. God created a world that abides by natural laws. Science progresses as we try to discover what those laws and regularities are without any appeal to super-natural processes beyond the empirical data. But why come to this chaotic world with the assumption that its many varied phenomena should yield to one set of laws? Why think that the basic principles that govern the development of a fetus should govern also the birth of distance galaxies? Science operates in the hope that unifying laws will be found. But that faith is blind, unless you believe that the universe itself, with all of its varied phenomena, is the creation of a law loving God. In this way, theism can serve as excellent scaffolding for making sense of the sciences. But, scaffolding holds a building up from the outside. God is not welcome in the laboratory itself.

That’s well and good for the sciences. But if the question is whether or not God was involved in writing the Torah, then using a discipline that adopts a methodological naturalism is to beg the question. Methodological naturalism rules out any theories that use God to explain phenomena. So you can guarantee, before you start your investigation into who wrote the Bible, that methodological naturalism won’t discover a Divine author. But its failure to find a Divine author is not evidence that God wasn’t involved. It’s not a finding. It’s not a conclusion. It’s just an assumption. You don’t need to be a fundamentalist, or manifest a pathological compartmentalization, or show disrespect to the academy, to recognize the logical fallacy of petitio principia (i.e., of begging the question). If anything, it is the scholars who raise these accusations who show a basic disregard for the philosophy of science.

Samuel Lebens is associate Professor in the philosophy department at the University of Haifa, he is also an Orthodox Rabbi and Jewish educator. He is the author of The Principles of Judaism (Oxford University Press), and has a forthcoming book, The Guide to the Jewish Undecided, which is set to be published by Maggid in 2022.

First posted to Facebook 19 December 2021, here.

The Mishkan: a mishmash of misguided theories

By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips

As with other areas of academic interest in the Torah, the Mishkan (Tabernacle) has provided fertile ground over the years for those who seek to dispute traditional belief in biblical accounts of the Exodus and the Jews' subsequent journey through the Wilderness. While traditionalists are often portrayed as primitive and closed-minded for remaining loyal to their received texts, it is eye-opening to see the progression that these academic accounts have gone through over the years.

In the early days of source criticism, Julius Wellhausen confronted believers with a theory that the Tabernacle had never existed. The academic world of that era embraced the notion that the entire account was simply a retrojection of worship in the temple used to explain how the Israelites offered sacrifices in the desert. Wellhausen’s position is still upheld by some today, as Benjamin Sommer summarises: “many modern scholars contend that the priestly tabernacle is a fiction invented by priests in the exilic era to represent Solomon’s temple”.

Nevertheless, this theory has been increasingly challenged in recent decades, as scholars have started to identify specific parallels between the Mishkan and older shrines from the Ancient Near East. Sommer cites sources to show that several details of the Tabernacle’s structure and operation recall large tent sanctuaries used by Northwest Semites in the Late Bronze Age.

He adds “in some respects the tabernacle’s plan is closer to that of a genuine ancient Semitic tent shrine than to Solomon’s temple”. Sommer notes that just like the Tabernacle, these ancient Semitic shrines held “the presence of the god…traveled through the desert, and were made of red leather (as opposed to the usual black tent of Semitic nomads).” Furthermore “the use of acacia wood rather than olive or oak for building the ark and various elements of the tabernacle calls a desert setting to mind, because it comes from a tree common in the deserts south and southwest of Canaan”. This evidence led other scholars such as Richard Elliot Friedman to concede that “the Tabernacle probably was housed in the Shiloh structure. And then it was housed in the first Temple”.

Famed archaeologist, Kenneth Kitchen, shows that the Torah’s detailed account of the Tabernacle’s structure exhibits a number of parallels between the Tabernacle and other movable shrines that predate 1200 BCE. He writes of “large tents over wooden frames set in socketed bases were used for both ritual and royal purposes at Mari, still half a millennium before any Moses.” He also describes how divine houses in Ugarit myths from this time period draw not only upon similar themes, but even their terms to describe building materials are identical to those of the Torah (qerashim, ohel, mishkan).

Kitchen offers further detailed evidence supporting the antiquity of the Tabernacle, showing parallels of gods dwelling in Tabernacles, two levels of ritual priests similar to the Cohanim and Levites, consecration rituals for both high priests and sanctuaries lasting for days, wagons to transport these structures, the shape and style of the ark itself, and silver trumpets to assemble people and signal a march to war.

He then concludes: “Thus the old nineteenth-century dogmas must be abandoned in the face of those facts. There is no reason whatsoever to deny that the tabernacle and temple building accounts run true to form, and would normally be considered as records of actual work done. Thus, for the Sinai tabernacle, in retrospect, we possess a considerable—and growing—amount of valuable comparative data (much of it very old, and much, contemporary; far less, of later date) that favor the hypothesis that a small but well-decorated dismountable tent shrine (based on usages of its time) accompanied the Hebrew from Sinai to Canaan, its rituals being of appropriate modesty in extent and format.”

While the building materials of the Mishkan can therefore be seen to reflect those of an era which significantly pre-dates scholarly theories and estimates, the particular structure and layout of the Mishkan may contain an even more specific and significant theme.

One of the most significant recent developments in the traditional response to biblical criticism has been the work of Rabbi Dr Joshua Berman, who emphasizes the need to evaluate the Torah in the context of parallel literature from the Ancient Near East. In Ani Ma’amin, Berman shows how various key biblical features appear to have been deliberately formulated in a way that mirrors and, in crucial ways, departs from the religious, military and cultural writings of ancient Egypt.

Dr. Joshua Berman goes into great detail explaining how Ramesses II’s military camp at Kadesh “constitutes the closest parallel to the Tabernacle—including the Temple of Solomon—known to date”. As can be seen from the attached diagram, the layout and proportions of the Mishkan are identical to the military camp of Rameses II – believed by many to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus. In a recent post we showed how the Song of Sea could be seen as a deliberate appropriation of Rameses’ victory celebration over the Hittites – ironically replacing Rameses with the God of the Bible. Here too we can see the Torah’s subtle symbolism working to glorify God in place of the deified Egyptian monarch.

Berman adds that just like the four camps of Israelites in the desert: “Egypt’s four army divisions at Kadesh would have camped on the four sides of Ramesses’s tent compound”. In Richard Elliot Friedman’s words “its size, shape, proportions, surrounding courtyard, golden winged accoutrements, Eastern orientation, and arrangement of outer and inner rooms are a match”.

Berman concludes that the Egyptian parallel is far more convincing than previous scholarly attempts to view the Tabernacle in the context of Canaanite or Assyrian shrines: “Neo-Assyrian camps are routinely depicted as oval in shape, and feature no throne tent of any kind”. Had the Torah been written during the Neo-Assyrian or Babylonian exiles, which at one point represented the academic consensus, we would have expected any Israelite writer to have been influenced by the designs of these cultures’ temples rather than express intimate knowledge of Egyptian and Ugaritic religious and military structures from centuries earlier.

• Kenneth Kitchen, “On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2006)
• Richard Elliot Friedman, “Who Wrote the Bible” (1987)
• Richard Elliot Friedman, “The Exodus” (2017)
• Joshua Berman, “Inconsistency in the Torah” (2017); Ani Ma'amin (2020)
• Benjamin Sommer “The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel” (2011)
• James Kugel “How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (2007)

First posted on Facebook 3 March 2022, here.