Matter of Interpretation

Although there exists a multiplicity of interpretations for every passage of the Bible, some are considered acceptable within mainstream Judaism, and some are decidedly "outside the pale." Thus, when Orthodox Jews talk about "Torah," they mean not so much the literal Five Books of Moses as they do the corpus of Jewish scripture as understood by the traditional Rabbinic sources, or at least, in a way not openly conflicting with them. For example, someone who reads the following passage:

When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.

-Deuteronomy 25:11-12 (King James Version)

and concludes that it means what it says, would be shunned as a heretic (as the Sadducees were).

Conversely, doubting that adultery should be punished by stoning, as in Deuteronomy 22

²³ If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, ²⁴ you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man's wife. You must purge the evil from among you.

would likely be lumped together with the Christians

Fish or Fowl

One of the most conspicuous aspects of the Kosher rules is the prohibition against mixing meat and milk. The source is a single cryptic statement, repeated three times in the Torah -
"Don't cook a kid (goat) in its mothers milk" (Exodus 3:19 and 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21). The modern understanding is to forbid the Israelites from emulating the ancient pagan fertility ritual that consisted of literally boiling a kid goat in it's own mother's milk. This may be compared to other specific injunctions against local superstitions, for example, the necromancy of "ov and yedoni" et cetera. Of course, if this was the extent of the prohabition as it was practiced today, it would hardly be noticible at all, since few contemperary farmers (at least, in Western countries) are trying increase thier crop yields with animal sacrifice. However, today's Orthodox Jews scrupulously avoid cheeseburgers, own at least two complete sets of dishes, and partronize separate resturants for meat and milk. So how did this happen?

First of all, the Torah prohabition was intrepreted much more broadly by the Talmudic Rabbis:
*Not only a "kid," that is, a young goat or sheep, but any mammal
*Not just it's mother's milk, but the milk of any animal (even of another species)
*Not just for ritual purposes, but for any reason
*Written three times means "Don't cook it, Don't eat it if they were cooked together , Don't benefit from it" (Notice that these are not disjoint catagories!)

So far, this was taken by traditional commentators to be the "original meaning" of the verse. During the Talmudic period, a large number of additonal "Fences" were added as Rabbic Enactments:

*Not only mammals, but even fowl (which don't give milk)
*Any mixture of milk and meat, even if not cooked at all
*Must have separate pots, dishes, and utensils for milk and meat
*Must wait some time period (1,3,5, or 6 hours) after eating meat before eating milk

So a large part of the Kosher rules are based enitrely on one statement, its expansive interpretation, and hugely expansive added safeguards, when a simple reading seems to imply that one one particular pagan practice was to be outlawed.

Why did this happen? Why so many protections for one rule, compared to almost any other commandment? This may relate to the whole point of food taboos in general, an enforced separation from other groups. Sociallizing with outsiders is severely limited if eating together is not possible. This is explicitly stated when it comes to enactments like Bishuil Achum and Stam Yanam, and the result is the same for other Kosher rules).
Another explanation for why it seemed plausible to have so many safeguards is that avoiding "tainted" or even questionable food is very adaptive from an evolutionary perspective, so humans are automatically conscious of the possibility of contamination.

For more see wikipedia article

Splitting Doublets

Like many Jewish day school students, my formal instruction in the Pentateuch began in third grade with Genesis 12. I still remember our class in which we started with G-d's command to Abraham (then called Abram), "Lech Lecha," to leave his homeland and go to the land of Canaan, making him the first patriarch of the chosen people. Even at a young age, I think most students understood on some level the import of this call, taking Abraham from the cradle of humanity that was Mesopotamia ("Ur of the Chaldeans") and starting him and his descendant on the path towards their spiritual destiny:

"1: Now G-d said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee 2: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make they name great; and be thou a blessing"

Imagine my surprise later in life when I actually read the two verses immediately preceding these in Gen. 11!

31: And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. 32: And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran.

So Abraham was not even in his homeland then! This is an example of what Biblical scholars call a "doublet," the same basic story retold with the details slightly different. Abraham goes from Mespotamia to Canaan, but the circumstance are very different. Instead of a Divine call, in the first version Abraham is just following his father. Genesis is full of examples of doublets [see earlier post]. What surprised me, however, is how many doublets written together end up get split into different Parshas (Weekly Torah Portions). Since the topic is the same, rightfully they should not be broken up this way. But it usually happens that the first one is relegated to the end of a Parsha to be mostly overlooked, while the second, which starts the next week's reading, becomes famous and talked about in Sermons constantly. Another example is the foretelling of the birth of Issac:

^{Gen 17:6} And I will bless her [Sarah], and moreover I will give thee a son of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be [a mother of] nations; kings of peoples shall be of her. ¹⁷ Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?...¹⁹ And God said, Nay, but Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his seed after him...²¹ But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year...

^{Gen 18:1} And G-d appeared unto him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;² and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood over against him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself to the earth,... ⁹ And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent.¹⁰ And he said, I will certainly return unto thee when the season cometh round; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard in the tent door, which was behind him. ¹¹ Now Abraham and Sarah were old, [and] well stricken in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.¹² And Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? ¹³ And G-d said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, who am old? ¹⁴ Is anything too hard for G-d? At the set time I will return unto thee, when the season cometh round, and Sarah shall have a son.

Here the elements are very similar. A prediction is made that Sarah will have a son. Someone laughs (which is how Isaac gets his name, since it is related to the Hebrew word for laughter) since Abraham and Sarah are both advanced in age, then G-d affirms the promise. But the second story, which leads off the Parasha "Va'yera," is MUCH more famous than the narrative with Abraham alone. While it is possible to read the stories consecutively, it makes more sense to say that they both came from the same source - analogous to the duplication and subsequent mutation of a gene.

Religion as evolutionary adaptation

The existence of religion, at first, seems to be a quandary. How can feeling the urge to preform costly rituals and maintain conterfactual beliefs possibly be adaptive from an evolutionary perspective? Besides the ablity for religion to be a repository for the transmitted knowledge of a group, its remarkable power to organize people should not be overlooked. Think of any church group as an example. Organized religion creates an automatic circle of trusted allies and strongly deters defection to other groups. That many if not all of the beliefs that together constitute a religion are couterfactual, and the rituals considered bizarre by unbelievers, is actually essential to prove one's loyalty to the group and prevent changing allegiances. I would call this"incompatible counterfactual belief systems" or "Their god is not our god." The following article from Science also highlights the importance of the belief in "morally concerned deities" to enforce social cooperation when this could not be easily accomplished any other way.

From the journal Science:
"The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality"

By Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff

ABSTRACT: We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/322/5898/58

Documentary Hypothesis

Textual analysis is an inexact science. This is why I highly doubt that the Documentary Hypothesis (DH) will ever be definitively proven, barring surprising new archaeological discoveries of the earlier texts. In fact, there are many competing versions of DH explaining the details of the compilation of the text, each with some advantages and deficiencies. However, there are a multitude of questions that DH in general explains even if we will never know the exact chain of development. As an illustration, consider the multitude of "doublets" in the Bible. These are stories that are appear two (or more) times in the Pentateuch but differ in some important details, or consist of two different narrative strands woven together. A partial list includes:

Creation
Abraham/Isaac Journey to Egypt/Gerar
Hagar Vision
Esau's Wives
The Ten Commandments
Inaugurating the Tabernacle
Moses Striking the Rock
The Death of Aaron

See Also: http://www.2think.org/hundredsheep/bible/dh.shtml

Believers almost always reject the documentary hypothesis because of it replaces infallible Divine authorship of the Bible and a cadre of human writers sometimes working at cross purposes. Religious Judaism is especially incompatible, since the Talmud often makes important scriptural exegetical derivations based on a single extra word or letter. They say that claiming multiple authors for the Bible is based on gross speculation, and there a degree of truth to that. Proponents of DH often have to invoke the actions of a later "redactor" to fix inconsistencies in particular theory. However, traditional authorities themselves often have to rely on strained ad hoc explanations to resolve contradictions and doublets in the Bible. It seems to me that the only way to believe that the Bible is the product of a single author is to start with that assumption and find a way to justify it with a creative reading of the text. In other words, an unbiased observer starting without a preference for either the Documentary Hypothesis or the Traditional explanation would likely conclude that although there is conclusive evidence for any one documentary theory, the premise is much more sound than belief sole author.

What about Viruses?

I recently attended a lecture on viruses and it never ceases to amaze me how successful these little snippets of genetic material have become at self-replication. In fact, making copies is basically all they do. Viruses exist solely to reproduce. They are little more than a protein coat holding rouge bits of DNA or RNA with just enough instructions to hijack a cell and cause to be make more protein coats and copies of the code. As things that aren't generally considered to be alive, these pesky little guys are amazing case studies for evolution and natural selection.
I bring this up because proponents of Intelligent Design originally tried to make the case that ID should be considered a "Science" on equal footing with evolution. It was not a "religion," they claimed, because the "Designer" could be any intelligent being/deity/cosmic force. Of course, the Cristian God was identified as the "Designer" much more often than Zeus or an anomalous probability wave. The Dover decision made clear that this was nothing more than a sham, and the recent movie Expelled doesn't even try to mask the connection. But even before the pro-ID bunch abandoned all semblance of "non-denominational" Intelligent Design, there was, and is, a huge logical problem. If a "Designer" is necessary for life to have come into being, how could viruses exist unless he/she/they/it also made them? And for that matter, what about genetic diseases or birth defects? A "Designer" intelligent and powerful enough to make all life could certainly have done a better job or at least left our the worst disease causing germs. There is a need for something of a "theology" about why things sometimes don't work, be it Pandora's box or Eve's Fruit or some other creation myth. The only alternatives are to say that either the "Designer" harbors come malicious intent or has some secert plan beyond the ken of mere mortals. Only the latter is acceptable to most adherents, but even this is a "theology" in its own fashio. The truth is there can be no coherent theory of Intelligent Design without making claims regarding the "Designer(s)," which is why it was correct identified as religion, not science.

History of Xmas from the Wall Street Journal Website

I think that everyone really needs a winter solstice holiday, regardless of one's belief, or lack thereof, in supernatural deities. It's a time when we can all look past the gloomy darkness of winter and celebrate the days getting longer again. The suns starts to climb higher in the sky and we anticipate the renewal of the Earth in the coming springtime. This visceral reason to mark the occasion makes it not very surprising that the Winter Solstice has been celebrated almost universally throughout vastly different cultures and eras. Of course, in ancient times this was put in terms of gods, spirits, and assorted other religiously significant entities being "reborn" or "resurrected" et cetera. What may be surprising to some is how many of the "modern" Christmas rituals are taken from earlier Solstice holidays, as detailed by John Gordan from the Wall Street Journal online.


FROM WSJ.com
COMMENTARY
A Brief History of Christmas
By JOHN STEELE GORDON
December 21, 2007; Page A19
Christmas famously "comes but once a year." In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Jingle Bells" is quite another.
But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused. Religious Christians condemn taking "the Christ out of Christmas," while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of "A Christmas Carol."
A little history can clear things up.
The Christmas of parties and presents is far older than the Nativity. Most ancient cultures celebrated the winter solstice, when the sun reaches its lowest point and begins to climb once more in the sky. In ancient Rome, this festival was called the Saturnalia and ran from Dec. 17 to Dec. 24. During that week, no work was done, and the time was spent in parties, games, gift giving and decorating the houses with evergreens. (Sound familiar?) It was, needless to say, a very popular holiday.
In its earliest days, Christianity did not celebrate the Nativity at all. Only two of the four Gospels even mention it. Instead, the Church calendar was centered on Easter, still by far the most important day in the Christian year. The Last Supper was a Seder, celebrating Passover, which falls on the day of the full moon in the first month of spring in the Hebrew calendar. So in A.D. 325, the Council of Nicea decided that Easter should fall on the Sunday following the first full moon of spring. That's why Easter and its associated days, such as Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, are "moveable feasts," moving about the calendar at the whim of the moon.
It is a mark of how late Christmas came to the Christian calendar that it is not a moveable feast, but a fixed one, determined by the solar calendar established by Julius Caesar and still in use today (although slightly tweaked in the 16th century).
By the time of the Council of Nicea, the Christian Church was making converts by the thousands and, in hopes of still more converts, in 354 Pope Liberius decided to add the Nativity to the church calendar. He also decided to celebrate it on Dec. 25. It was, frankly, a marketing ploy with a little political savvy thrown in.
History does not tell us exactly when in the year Christ was born, but according to the Gospel of St. Luke, "shepherds were abiding in the field and keeping watch over their flocks by night." This would imply a date in the spring or summer when the flocks were up in the hills and needed to be guarded. In winter they were kept safely in corrals.
So Dec. 25 must have been chosen for other reasons. It is hard to escape the idea that by making Christmas fall immediately after the Saturnalia, the Pope invited converts to still enjoy the fun and games of the ancient holiday and just call it Christmas. Also, Dec. 25 was the day of the sun god, Sol Invictus, associated with the emperor. By using that date, the church tied itself to the imperial system.
By the high Middle Ages, Christmas was a rowdy, bawdy time, often inside the church as well as outside it. In France, many parishes celebrated the Feast of the Ass, supposedly honoring the donkey that had brought Mary to Bethlehem. Donkeys were brought into the church and the mass ended with priests and parishioners alike making donkey noises. In the so-called Feast of Fools, the lower clergy would elect a "bishop of fools" to temporarily run the diocese and make fun of church ceremonial and discipline. With this sort of thing going on inside the church to celebrate the Nativity, one can easily imagine the drunken and sexual revelries going on outside it to celebrate what was in all but name the Saturnalia.
With the Reformation, Protestants tried to rid the church of practices unknown in its earliest days and get back to Christian roots. Most Protestant sects abolished priestly celibacy (and often the priesthood itself), the cult of the Virgin Mary, relics, confession and . . . Christmas.
In the English-speaking world, Christmas was abolished in Scotland in 1563 and in England after the Puritans took power in the 1640s. It returned with the Restoration in 1660, but the celebrations never regained their medieval and Elizabethan abandon.
There was still no Christmas in Puritan New England, where Dec. 25 was just another working day. In the South, where the Church of England predominated, Christmas was celebrated as in England. In the middle colonies, matters were mixed. In polyglot New York, the Dutch Reformed Church did not celebrate Christmas. The Anglicans and Catholics did.
It was New York and its early 19th century literary establishment that created the modern American form of the old Saturnalia. It was a much more family -- and especially child -- centered holiday than the community-wide celebrations of earlier times.
St. Nicolas is the patron saint of New York (the first church built in the city was named for him), and Washington Irving wrote in his "Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York" how Sinterklaes, soon anglicized to Santa Claus, rode through the sky in a horse and wagon and went down chimneys to deliver presents to children.
The writer George Pintard added the idea that only good children got presents, and a book dating to 1821 changed the horse and wagon to reindeer and sleigh. Clement Clarke Moore in 1823 made the number of reindeer eight and gave them their names. Moore's famous poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," is entirely secular. It is about "visions of sugar plums" with nary a wise man or a Christ child in sight. In 1828, the American Ambassador Joel Roberts Poinsett, brought the poinsettia back from Mexico. It became associated with Christmas because that's the time of year when it blooms.
In the 1840s, Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol," which does not even mention the religious holiday (the word church appears in the story just twice, in passing, the word Nativity never). Prince Albert introduced the German custom of the Christmas tree to the English-speaking world.
In the 1860s, the great American cartoonist Thomas Nast set the modern image of Santa Claus as a jolly, bearded fat man in a fur-trimmed cap. (The color red became standard only in the 20th century, thanks to Coca-Cola ads showing Santa Claus that way.)
Merchants began to emphasize Christmas, decorating stores and pushing the idea of Christmas presents for reasons having nothing whatever to do with religion, except, perhaps, the worship of mammon.
With the increased mobility provided by railroads and increasing immigration from Europe, people who celebrated Christmas began settling near those who did not. It was not long before the children of the latter began putting pressure on their parents to celebrate Christmas as well. "The O'Reilly kids down the street are getting presents, why aren't we?!" is not an argument parents have much defense against.
By the middle of the 19th century, most Protestant churches were, once again, celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday. The reason, again, had more to do with marketing than theology: They were afraid of losing congregants to other Christmas-celebrating denominations.
In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill making the secular Christmas a civil holiday because its celebration had become universal in this country. It is now celebrated in countries all over the world, including many where Christians are few, such as Japan.
So for those worried about the First Amendment, there's a very easy way to distinguish between the two Christmases. If it isn't mentioned in the Gospels of Luke and Mark, then it is not part of the Christian holiday. Or we could just change the name of the secular holiday back to what it was 2000 years ago.
Merry Saturnalia, everyone!
Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).