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When Judaism Meets Science
Posts Tagged ‘Torah’
When “Written in Stone” is More than a Phrase, and may Even be Evidence: A Gray Granite Pedestal and the Ethnogenesis of Israel
Merneptah Stele – Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Credit: Wikipedia
The Hebrew Bible, thanks in large part to the often literal translation of it in the King James Version, is a source of scores of English idiomatic expressions. We may not know much about biology and history, but we do know, for instance, that a “leopard cannot change its spots” and that there is “nothing new under the Sun.” (See Jer. 13:23; Eccles. 1:9.)
Someday, no doubt, if it hasn’t already, Google will track the frequency with which we use these expressions and determine the rank order of their popularity. Surely high on the list will be “written in stone.” The phrase comes from the Book of Exodus where we are told that Moses ascended Mt. Sinai and received from God two stone tablets which were engraved by God with God’s teachings and commandments. The initial set of tablets was then smashed by Moses when he saw that the Israelites had fashioned an idol, a golden calf, when he was away up the mountain. God then met with Moses a second time, resulting in the production of a second set of stone tablets with the laws. (See Ex.24:12; 31:18; 32:15-19; 34:4; 34:28.)
From these references comes the notion that something written in stone is fixed for all time, immutable. The writing is a statement from and by authority, possibly even sacred, but certainly to be followed without modification. Conversely, something “not written in stone” is a statement of lesser seriousness, one subject to challenge and change. read more
Science and Judaism: Biblical Numbers, Mathematics and Attributed Patriarchal Ages
Credit: Roger Price
The Hebrew Bible is filled with numbers. There are different kinds of numbers — cardinals and ordinals, integers and fractions, even primes. And they are everywhere in the Torah text.
There are numbers for days. (See, e.g., Gen. 1:5, 8, 13.)
There are numbers for life spans. (See, e.g., Gen. 5:5, 8, 11.)
There are numbers for populations, i.e., census numbers. (See, e.g., Ex. 1:5, 12:37; Num. 1:46, 2:32.)
There are numbers for the measurement of quantities. (See, e.g., Ex. 16:22, 36, 29:40.)
And for sizes. (See, e.g., Gen. 6:15.)
There are numbers for the duration of events. (See, e.g., Ex. 12:40, 24:18.)
There are numbers for a host of seemingly mundane things, such as the number of visitors and the number of palm trees. (See, e.g., Gen. 18:2; Ex. 15:27.) read more
Science and Judaism: The Strange Claim of Dr. Schroeder (Part I)
The literal accuracy of the biblical description of the origin of the cosmos and of life itself has been the subject of controversy and reinterpretation for millennia. Even before recent scientific discoveries made the story of a six-day creation simply untenable as fact, many Jewish scholars, among others, readily acknowledged that the opening chapters of the Bible do not reflect a true portrayal of historic creation. (See, Post 10/11/11.)
Today that view has achieved a sort of consensus. With respect to B’reishit (Genesis), the Reform movement’s latest commentary asserts that the Bible “has a great deal to tell about God’s relationship to the world and about human beings and their destiny,” but concedes that the opening chapters are “unscientific, antiquated myths” that may be approached “in the same manner as one approaches poetry.” (Plaut, The Torah, rev. ed. (2005), at 6.) Etz Hayim, the Torah commentary published by the Conservative movement (2001) holds similarly: “The opening chapters of Genesis are not a scientific account of the origins of the universe. The Torah is a book of morality, not cosmology.” (At 3, emphasis supplied.) The Chumash (The Stone Edition)(1993), published as part of the more traditional Art Scroll series, accepts Rashi’s understanding that Torah starts with Creation in order to establish God’s supremacy, but acknowledges that “the Torah is not a history book . . . .” [All year citations are CE, unless otherwise noted.] read more
Science and Judaism: Would That You Were Right, Rabbi Mitelman
Shortly before this blog was launched several months ago, Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman of Beth El Synagogue in Northern Westchester, New York wrote an article for Huffington Post titled Why Judaism Embraces Science. See, www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-geoffrey-a-mitelman/why/can-judaism-embrace-s_b_880003.html. There Mitelman presented three “especially significant” reasons for his thesis.
At the outset, I recognize that Mitelman was writing a brief essay and not an academic paper, let alone an expansive book. And I also recognize that his audience was whoever was reading or may read the HuffPost blog and not a dedicated group of adult learners. Nevertheless, the three bases for Mitelman’s post, even if assumed to be correct, do not compel the conclusion for which they are mustered and they raise more questions than Mitelman answered in his piece. read more