Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Dates of Ezra and Nehemiah

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dates of Ezra and Nehemiah
  • Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 09:31:20 +0200

Shoshanna,

The point is, that Hazal were not prophets, and they did not have a direct line to God. They preserved an oral tradition, which THEY admitted was getting confused - that's why the "oral" Torah was committed to writing! In any case, their tradition, what they had the authority to transmit, was in the realm of law, ethics and faith. History was NOT what their forte. They preserved those stories that they thought were useful in getting their messages across. In cases where they were missing facts, they used "midrash" to fill in the gaps. They did not have independent knowledge of events that happened 1000 years before their time.

But we, today, do have SOME of that knowledge, since we have uncovered and read millions of the inscriptions written by the people living those events. Reconstructing the past has been a slow process that has taken 150 years of study, and yes, there are still some gaps and disagreements. But the general picture is clear. So we can now COMPARE Hazal's traditions, those preserved by classical historians like Herodotus and even Josephus (who were also often wrong), and the original source material, which Hazal did not know.

Now none of this demeans Hazal in any way. They were unsurpassed at what they did, with the resources they had. But what they did was NOT to record HISTORY in the way in which modern scholars study history. They were playing a different game by different rules. It is possible to say, that this is all that matters - that if an event was not worth recording for Hazal, or if they found no message to be understood in an event, then there is no reason for us to waist our time on it either. That is fine. You can claim that if Hazal played tennis, then that's the only game worth playing. But you cannot enter a basketball court and try to make everyone play by tennis rules.

Yigal Levin


----- Original Message ----- From: "Shoshanna Walker" <rosewalk AT concentric.net>
To: "b-hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 4:30 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dates of Ezra and Nehemiah


I quoted Rashi, and not R' Yose's "scheme"

There is much more detail of chazal, of which kings reigned when, and
that wasn't the issue when you discredited Rashi - now you are just
adding another issue to your reluctance to trust chazal.

In any case, this list has been laboring over this for weeks, because
of the reluctance to give OUR chazal any credit for knowing OUR
history - but you go around circles and circles with no answer, just
because you want to believe that other sources besides chazal, know
better - and if you have such detailed accounts from - where? - about
which kings ruled and in which order - then WHY ARE YOU STILL
DEBATING THIS AFTER 2 - 3 WEEKS? Does the number 7 refer to weeks
or days or years or sets of 7 years, you can't even come to a
consensus that Daniel's prophecy relates to the FUTURE and not to
the past - give me a break - when it is all laid out very lucidly by
chazal.

Shoshanna




On 9/18/06, Shoshanna Walker wrote:
As I recall, the whole basis of discrediting Rashi, and the counting
of events from the year of creation, is that first Temple was
destroyed - according to secular sources - in 586 BC, while Seder
Olam, and Rashi, says it was 422 BC (as computed from the time of
creation of the world) - and my question, is - what are the sources
for saying that it was 586 BC?? Who had better records than
Chazal????

Seder Olam quotes R' Yose in b. Avoda Zara. Rashi probably also
depends on this tractate. We do not know what records R' Yose
had. You may believe that HZ"L, including R' Yose, had better
records that we just don't have anymore. However, we do have
detailed records from Babylonian, Persian, and Greek sources and
periods, from the times that the events happened, and not a thousand
years later, that include detailed accounts of which kings ruled
and in what order, and which years were intercalated, all of which
allow us to be able to date Jerusalem's fall as it is described in
Babylonian sources. The "whole basis" however is not simply the
fall of the first Temple but the length and description of the Persian
period which is ridiculously short in R' Yose's scheme.

Yitzhak Sapir
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page