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Torah "repudiated by mainstream Jewish tradition"

Latest comment: 8 years ago25 comments4 people in discussion

@Jytdog: Where does the cited source that these texts were "repudiated by mainstream Jewish tradition"? There's also a much better developed discussion of this topic at Judaism_and_warfare#Jewish_responses where nothing close to this phrasing appears. For the classical rabbinical commentators discussed in this passage, the Torah was the literal word of God, so to suggest that they "repudiated" some of it is absurd. It's OR and should be corrected. Eperoton (talk) 21:27, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

You have not even looked at the footnote (if you had, you would have mentioned it). Do not waste other editors time criticizing content when you have not engaged with the source. Jytdog (talk) 21:42, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
@Jytdog: Huh? My edit description clearly said "closer to source". Not only did I read the footnote, I've tracked down the surrounding context in the book. On what do you base your drive-by reverts and baseless accusations? Eperoton (talk) 21:56, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
The quote says: "Now, had there been any inclination to generalize the law [of extermination], it would have been easy for the talmudic sages to [do so]. But in fact the sages left the ancient herem law as they found it: applying to seven extinct nations." That is direct support. Jytdog (talk) 22:00, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Regardless of whether your modern interpretation is that the rabbinic commentators regarded the bible as the inviolable and unchangeable word of God, they likely didn't hold that belief. Did you read the source? It says:
But in fact the sages left the ancient ḥerem law as they found it: applying to seven extinct nations, while radically meliorating other terms of the obsolete law. The rabbis adjusted its meaning to their moral sentiment. Since Deuteronomy expressly grounds the ḥerem in the warning "lest you learn their evil ways and they cause you to sin to the Lord," the rabbis concluded, reasonably enough, that if the Canaanites reformed they should be allowed to remain. The moral sensibility of postbiblical Judaism cancelled the indiscriminate, inevitable application of the ḥerem (which is the plain sense of Scripture); it did not justify it by political or military reasons of public security or living-space.[1]
You may quibble about the wording, but Greenberg is clearly saying that the rabbis rejected the plain instruction of the bible. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 22:01, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
That's what I'm doing, quibbling with the wording. Interpretation is not repudiation. This discussion is not a NPOV summary of what we have in Judaism_and_warfare#Jewish_responses, but let's start with this source. Eperoton (talk) 22:10, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
I don't see a major difference between this sentence of WP content and that section; everybody cited there made it clear that herem had no application - no place - in their time. It is indeed stunningly consistent. Jytdog (talk) 22:26, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
That would be a passable, if oversimiplifying summary. It's also pretty much what my wording said. However, it is not "repudiation" of the texts. Show me one source which uses this word. Eperoton (talk) 22:48, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
"repudiated" is a pretty decent summary of "has no application in our time." -- unlike much of the rest of Torah which was/is taken as having direct application "today" even though it was equally embedded in the biblical narrative... as Greenberg points out elegantly in the quoted passage. The leaving-in-the-past needs to be put in the context of everything they brought-to-the-present; this is what "repudiated" does, that " interpreted as restricted to their historical context in Rabbinical commentaries" does not. Not "bizarre" but rather truly NPOV. Jytdog (talk) 23:36, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
We don't seem to be speaking the same language as regards the meaning of "repudiated", so please show me sources that use this word. If you can't, we'll stick with the terminology used by the cited sources. Eperoton (talk) 00:05, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
We paraphrase, we don't parrot. If you would like to phrase it differently, in a way that captures the sense that many other things were taken up, while this specific thing was left behind, I am all ears. Your original phrasing provided no context. Jytdog (talk) 02:16, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

Well, if we're coming up with new phrasing — and I've just noticed that it resembles the phrasing in the lead of Judaism and warfare — there's no reason to limit ourselves to this one source. There are two issues to consider here: the attitude of mainstream Judaism towards the herem texts, and the notion that "violence is only permissible in the service of self-defense", and the lead in the other articles states it. I have sources that I happened to be reading for another discussion and another one I've looked up now. See also the Erlich paper cited in Judaism and warfare. They agree that "indiscriminate, inevitable application of the ḥerem" (per Greenberg) was ruled by rabbinical commentators, but they differ from Greenberg in some details. One also should not equate rabbinical commentators with the pre-modern tradition, as the passage on Maimonides shows (I'm not even going to touch modern interpretations for now, some of which, by the way, can indeed be said to "repudiate" those texts). I'll let you and Malik Shabazz look this over and see if there's agreement that we have NPOV issues to fix.

  1. The rabbis labor, of course, under the burden of the biblical command to exterminate the Amalekites and the seven Canaanite nations. They cannot explicitly repudiate the command [...], but they do succeed first in limiting it and then in permanently bracketing it, so that it has no present or future application. p. 106 Michael Walzer, War, Peace, and Jewish Tradition [2]
  2. Secular Jews commonly assume that the "Jewish tradition" allows only defensive wars, but the evidence for this is scant. The more common rabbinic strategy is to retain the broad category of permitted war but to make the wars that fall within this category very difficult to fight. p. 101 Michael Walzer, War, Peace, and Jewish Tradition [3]
  3. The rabbis' exegetical management of scripture succeeded in keeping divinely sanctioned war out of the repertoire of rabbinic Judaism aside from the realm of fantasy. [...] Why they did so appears simple enough: too dangerous. It was too terribly dangerous for a community with no hope of gaining power over its enemies in "real time" to contemplate actually going to war. p. 80. Reuven Firestone. Judaism on Violence and Reconciliation [4]
  4. The conquest of the Promised Land by the Israelites is taken by the Bible to require the total elimination of the seven Canaanite nations living there (Deut. 20.16–17). Nevertheless, according to one rabbinic view, this unconditionally mandated war was confined to the time of the conquest of the land by Joshua and his army. [...] the very troubling moral question of the commandment to exterminate a whole people on ostensibly racial grounds, no doubt bothered the Rabbis, who were frequently concerned that Judaism itself should not appear to have norms that seem to be generally immoral. [...] Thus one influential rabbinic text asserted that Joshua offered the Canaanite nations peace terms just as he was to offer peace terms to non-Canaanite peoples with whom the people of Israel were to come into conflict (Deut. 20.10–11). Only if any of these peoples refused these terms was relentless war to be waged against them. [...] Understanding the judgment against the Canaanites to be contingent upon their moral choice made the commandment to destroy them conditional as well. In effect, even more so than was the case with their moral judgment of the Amalekites, the Rabbis eliminated any real difference between the seven Canaanite nations and the other nations of the world. All peoples were to be judged by moral, not racial, criteria. The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 4 pp. 650-651
  5. Maimonides’s war of religion rests more explicitly on a second factor that justifies the extension of the frontiers of the kingdom: that the virtuous are in an ongoing state of war with the wicked. Amalek, the perennial enemy to the Jews, represents this force at the outset of the book (1:1–2), at the end of which stands “the wicked heathen who are called wolves and leopards” (12:1). In the face of the Crusades, jurists across the Islamic world justified a vigorous frontier warfare in similar defensive terms, some also, like Maimonides, viewing expansionist initiatives as optional rather than obligatory.18 Maimonides preferred the argument that an offensive war that punished wrongdoers was sanctioned,19 a point that was also a feature of Islamic jurisprudence and political philosophy alike—and absent from the rabbinic tradition. George R. Wilkes. Religious War in the Works of Maimonides. In: Just Wars, Holy Wars, and Jihads: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Encounters and Exchanges, Oxford

Eperoton (talk) 04:24, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

You are going way into the weeds. Every religious tradition has ways of repudiating content in their sacred texts that is offensive later; you are just demonstrating all the ways that this was repudiated. Not a single authority you discuss there said that what happened in that narrative was applicable in their own time. Not one. We do not dance around religious sensibilities in WP. Greenberg nailed it. Jytdog (talk) 06:39, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
If you're clinging to your personal usage of "repudiated" that is not based on any source even after I cited a source that expressely contradicted it (first quote above), it's hard to see how we can have a policy-based discussion. What religious sensibilities? And what on earth does "Greenberg nailed it" mean? Have you even looked at WP:NPOV? At this point, I'm looking for help from other editors, starting with Malik Shabazz. Eperoton (talk) 12:14, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
No, the word "repudiate" in English means exactly this. Nothing personal about that, or any of this. I have asked you to propose alternative language if you don't like the word, but you have not so far. Very happy to have other editors weigh in and happy to consider other phrasings. Jytdog (talk) 14:48, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

I posted a note about this discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Judaism, and Debresser made a great suggestion which I'm copying here:

I agree with Jytdog that the source is reliable and speaks for itself. On the other hand, the truth is with Eperoton. Perhaps a compromise text could be "these interpretations of the Biblical texts have been repudiated by mainstream Jewish tradition"? After all, it is not a direct quote, so we are at leisure to paraphrase. Debresser (talk) 14:39, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

Jytdog, do you agree with that proposal? Eperoton (talk) 14:51, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

The content is about the biblical texts and the commands there; it is unclear what intepretations Debresser was referring to. We ~could~ flip the order of sentences and then "these interpretations" would make sense, but this still does not follow NPOV in that it limits the repudiation to just these very modern interpretations. The repudiation goes way, way back. At some point, Eperoton, it would be great if you addressed that - I have raised it several times in answer to you and you have not responded to it. Not a single authority applies that to their own time, but of course applies many other commands/implied commands in the biblical narrative to their own time. This has been left to rot, for a very long time. Jytdog (talk) 16:02, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
Upon closer inspection, I agree with your first concern, though my concern is broader than that. The proposal implies interpretations that "justify offensive war", per first half of the sentence, but this would be WP:SYNTH, since there's no relationship between the sources cited for the two parts of the sentence, and, as can be seen from the sources I quoted above, the attitude of classical Judaism to offensive war is much more complex than that. The contrast between rabbinic treatment of verses related to war (not just these verses) and those related to other subjects is indeed notable, and it is also highlighted by Firestone in more detail on the same page I cited above. I don't see how using the word "repudiation" would reflect any of that. This is a complex subject which is not adequately treated in the two articles, and we can't fix that by tweaking a single sentence. This isn't my primary editing interest, but this article needs urgent attention, so I will try to work on that. Debresser vouched for your reputation as a constructive editor, so I trust that we will get over the initial disconnect. I'll look over the sources in the coming days and come up with other proposals. Eperoton (talk) 16:27, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing out the broader notion of "offensive war". This was apparently really focused on the narrative and commands related to the conquoring narrative (see the quote in the citation for the first sentence in the paragraph). Would you be more comfortable if this content were limited to that? Jytdog (talk) 16:33, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
You seem to objecting to the notion that the Jewish tradition repudiated anything in the Hebrew Bible. I cannot fathom why - every religious tradition does this with offensive passages in their sacred texts. But if the clarity of the word disturbs you I would be OK with something like (taking up my own suggestion to narrow this):

While the biblical narrative about the conquest of Canaan and the related commands ascribed to Yahweh have had a deep influence on Western culture,[16] mainstream Jewish traditions throughout history have treated these texts as purely historical or highly conditioned, and in either case not relevant to contemporary life.[17] However, some strains of radical Zionism promote aggressive war and justify them with biblical texts.[18][19]

- how is that? Jytdog (talk) 18:37, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
I'm ok with this as a makeshift solution. We can come back to it after I (hopefully with help from others) rework the body of Judaism and warfare to reflect the greater complexity found in the sources. I'm equally baffled by our "repudiation controversy". There's a fundamental difference between repudiating a text and repudiating some interpretation of it. For example, James Kugel discusses at length in How to Read the Bible the various intellectual maneuvers which classical Jewish commentators employed to deal with passages that they could not accept at face value (e.g., due to internal contradictions) without giving up their belief in the scripture as infallible. This is what Walzer refers to in the quote above when he says that they "cannot explicitly repudiate the command". In the Islamic context, which I'm better familiar with, Jonathan A.C. Brown has a great book (Misquoting Muhammad) largely devoted to the epistemological chasm between this traditional interpretive approach to scripture and modern historicist attitudes, which may include "repudiating" parts of it, as some modern Jewish commentators do when they refer to these biblical narratives as "genocide". There's also a difference between repudiating an interpretation and not taking it up. I don't know how this works in Judaism, but I can tell you that in the Islamic tradition scripture is generally reinterpreted not by explicitly repudiating a classical exegetical authority, but rather by holding up other classical views as normative and letting the undesirable interpretations fall by the wayside. I'm going off on a tangent here, but I hope this clarifies my strenuous opposition to the current phrasing. Eperoton (talk) 20:05, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
Yeah i thought that was where you were coming from. We don't have to go through the contortions that in-bubble people do when we talk about something. They repudiated these texts. But whatever, if the above content is good enough for you i will implement it. Jytdog (talk) 20:21, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
btw I appreciate very much your desire to keep this article in WP:SYNC with the main Judaism and warfare article cited there. WP often falls out of SYNC with itself; I started working on SYNCing all this stuff a while back and got distracted. So thanks for that work. Jytdog (talk) 20:42, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
I think today's edits by Debresser and Jytdog have resulted in a big improvement by clarifying which biblical texts the Wikipedia article was referring to and the manner in which they were repudiated. And like Jytdog, I would like to thank Eperoton for the difficult work of trying to keep related Wikipedia articles internally consistent. I would encourage Eperoton to continue to be bold in fixing things that don't seem right to him, including improving the wording of this article. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 02:46, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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7, 70 or never

Latest comment: 7 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion

Regarding this edit. I think it is not a good edit, for several reasons. I think it is too verbose. I think it fails to represent to three opinions as equal, and instead stresses the first over the other two. I think the reference tag is for references, not for representing a third opinion. Debresser (talk) 10:29, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

I may be mistaken, but the Talmud seems clear to me: seven years. One rabbi (I'm sorry I can't be more specific, and my paraphrase may not be precise, but I don't have access to the source at the moment) says seventy. Two rabbis say that if they were on the Sanhedrin, nobody would ever be put to death, and one rabbi says that would increase the bloodshed in Israel (meaning among Jews, I think).
To give equal weight to the opinion of the Talmud (seven years) and that of the dissenting rabbi (seventy years) seems inappropriate to me, as does mentioning only the one alternative viewpoint. If the result is too verbose, and I acknowledged that was an issue in my edit summary, maybe the seventy years also belongs in the footnote. Regarding the information I put in the footnote, you're right -- I should have used an explanatory footnote (they include information and typically appear above the footnotes). — MShabazz Talk/Stalk 12:00, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
Your recollection is correct. All these statements are part of the mishnah, and deciding what relative weight they should get involves some interpretation of the primary source. Here's how they're covered in the cited Judaica article:
Similarly, the passage in Mishnah Makkot 1:10: "A Sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years is called a murderous one. R. Eleazar ben Azariah says 'Or even once in 70 years.' R. Tarfon and R. Akiva said, 'If we had been in the Sanhedrin no death sentence would ever have been passed'; Rabban Simeon b. Gamaliel said: 'If so, they would have multiplied murderers in Israel.'" Instructive though this is, it is merely an academic discussion, the right of imposing capital punishment having been taken from the Sanhedrin by the Romans a century before, "40 years before the Destruction of the Temple" (Sanh. 41a; TJ, Sanh. 1:18a). The rabbis agreed that with the destruction of the Temple the Sanhedrin was precluded from inflicting capital punishment (see above). The Talmud actually asks whether the statement of Eleazar b. Azariah was one of censure or reflected the fact of the rarity of death sentences, and leaves the question undecided, as it does for the question as to how R. Tarfon and R. Akiva would have prevented the death verdict being passed (but see Makk. 7a). In Practice in the Talmud. Louis Isaac Rabinowitz
This refers to the statement in the Mishnah (Mak. 1:10; Mak. 7a) that a Sanhedrin that kills (gives the death penalty) once in seven years (R. Eleazer b. Azariah said: once in 70 years) is called "bloody" (ḥovlanit, the term "ḥovel" generally implying a type of injury in which there is blood). In the State of Israel. Menachem Elon

Eperoton (talk) 14:18, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

So we have "Tana kama" 7, R. Eleazar ben Azariah 70, R. Tarfon and R. Akiva never. That means that here are 3 opinions, which should be treated equally. By the way, in my Mishnah it is Makkot 1:11. And it is the Mishnah, not the Talmud. Debresser (talk) 14:37, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
I think we should certainly quote the full passage in a footnote, and there are some ways to make the statement more precise: Mishnah rather than Talmud, and a sanhedrin rather than just any (e.g., Roman) court (though some sources do use the more general term). For the rest, I'm still not sure where secondary sources would take us. There's clearly some disagreement on interpretation, as per the Judaica discussion above. Another way to summarize it is as in the chapter by Arnold Enker in The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law, which takes seven years as the part "everyone seems to agree" on. There's an interesting further discussion there (I can share the full chapter), including using an additional source: "When homicides increased substantially, the Sanhedrin left its Temple quarters in order to deny itself judicial competence and transferred the task to the secular civil authority. [... The rabbis'] ability to influence behavior was moral, based on religious faith, not on the coercive power of the death penalty." There's disagreement, context and nuance here which should go into the main article. Eperoton (talk) 16:56, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
Thank you both for your thoughtful replies.
Debresser, I'm afraid I don't know what the significance of Tana kama is, but I was under the impression that an unattributed statement was considered the rabbis' opinion and statements attributed to specific rabbis were considered alternative, worthy, but not necessarily widely accepted opinions. It has been a long time since I studied Talmud in an organized setting, so my recollection may be incorrect.
Until tonight, I had always thought that Eleazar ben Azariah was expressing his opinion that "once in 70 years" made a Sanhedrin a bloody court, but Eperoton's message makes me wonder if he was just correcting the first speaker (who said "once in seven years"). (I guess it's a question of who judged the Sanhedrin to be a bloody or murderous court: was it the rabbis of the Talmudic era or was there public opinion on the subject during the existence of the Sanhedrin?)
Getting back to the article, I agree that the full passage, which demonstrates that at least as far back as the early Rabbinic period, there was a variety of Jewish opinion regarding state violence, is sufficiently interesting to be included in an explanatory footnote. I guess the question is what the article should say about the mishnah: Is there an opinion, or are there three opinions of equal weight? — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 00:52, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
According to the Judaica quote (Debresser didn't like my original block quote format, so I've italicized it now to make clear it's not my own words), the Gemara commentators asked themselves similar questions. It seems that the other opinion (or actually two) would be hard to incorporate into a single sentence. I would propose a phrasing that follows the other Judaica quote: "The Mishnah states that a sanhedrin that executes one person in seven years — or seventy years, according to Eleazar ben Azariah) — is considered bloodthirsty." Eperoton (talk) 01:29, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
I think your proposal is a good one. Thank you, Eperoton.
Debresser's point about the block quotes is probably a good one—on a talk page, where replies are typically indicated by the level of indentation, some other indicator (such as italic text or color) is more helpful than block quotes to indicate a quotation. But thank you very much for the research you've done. It's been very helpful. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 02:28, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
That proposal has one minus. That is does not reflect the opinions of R. Tarfon and R. Akiva. However, I see no way to devise a short and simple phrase to reflect their opinions as well. Any ideas? Perhaps "The Mishnah states that a sanhedrin that executes one person in seven years — or seventy years, according to Eleazar ben Azariah), or at all according to Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva — is considered bloodthirsty."Debresser (talk) 09:28, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
I don't see a way either. It's difficult to present the other two opinions compactly. R. Tarfon and R. Akiva aren't making a statement about bloodthirstiness, but rather about what would have happened if they had been on the Sanhedrin. As Rabinowitz points out, it's not clear what they had in mind (by which I believe he means that they wouldn't have been able to simply "veto" those decisions, since they didn't require unanimity). Further, as Enker points out, for some reason Simeon b. Gamaliel seems to be objecting only to the third opinion, and not to the first two. I'll add this whole passage with discussion to Capital and corporal punishment in Judaism when I have time. Eperoton (talk) 12:33, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
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