Hebrew Voices #131 - Are there 613 Commandments

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Don: When I first started looking at this, I had to know what you thought of the 613 laws as a Jew. I just wondered, “What do you think?” Frankly, the reason I respect your opinion is because of your respect for Torah and, well, let’s just say it like it is, because of your disrespect for what men have done to it.

Don: We’ve been talking about law in order, and law in order is simply this - that the law, when it is dealt with in a proper order, that it is not a threat to the believing Jew, or the Christian, everything falls into the proper place. It’s only when people starting dinking with it that it becomes some kind of a problem, turns into legalism and foolishness and these kinds of things. And so we want to deal with the law in order, and I couldn’t think of a better opportunity, a better person to deal with these things other than my friend, Nehemia. Hey, thanks for being on the show today, and thanks for your patience on getting a late start.

Nehemia: My pleasure.

Don: Okay, good, good, good. You have some experience with the law. It’s been a part of your life from day one, hasn’t it?

Nehemia: Yeah, I was raised as an Orthodox Jew and became a Karaite Jew when I was a teenager, which is a Jew who believes only in strictly the Old Testament and the written Scripture.

Don: Right.

Nehemia: That’s as opposed to many Jews today, who believe also in what’s called the Oral Torah, the Oral Law, which comprises of teachings of the rabbis…

Don: Yes.

Nehemia: …who sanctified it to this body of literature. So, when I was being raised as an Orthodox Jew, I would read what the rabbis said. You know, one rabbi would say something, another rabbi would disagree. And I was fine with that, but then they would say, “Both of these are the words of the living God.” And I went to the teachers and I said, “How could God contradict Himself?” And many times, they contradict what it says in the written Scripture, and I said, “Shouldn’t we throw away the words of men and embrace the word of God?” And I thought I would be praised for this, and I’d get a round of applause for pointing out something everyone had somehow missed.

Don: Yeah, well guess what?

Nehemia: But I was rebuked and I was told, “You mustn’t say that, that’s what those heretics, the Karaites say.” And I said, “Okay, tell me about these Karaites, they sound like they know what they’re talking about.” And I realized that throughout Jewish history - I studied this - that throughout Jewish history there had always been Jews who only believed in the written Scripture, and not in the teachings of the rabbis. Which isn’t to say they didn’t consult the teachings of the rabbis - they sometimes have very wise things to say - but it isn’t to be accepted as binding, like Scripture is.

Don: Now, if you’re wondering who you’re listening to…

Nehemia: The rabbis said something…

Don: I’m sorry, if you’re wondering who you’re listening to, this is Nehemia Gordon. He holds a master’s degree in Biblical Studies, and a bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He’s worked as a translator on the Dead Sea Scrolls, as a researcher, deciphering ancient Hebrew manuscripts. He’s been invited to speak in synagogues and churches around the world. And you know, from the day you and I met - and we’ve spent time in the United States together on different tours and even met in Israel once - from that day, I was impressed with the fact that you don’t fit in your Orthodoxy any more than I fit in mine.

And I was impressed with the fact of how many things you and I agreed on. I thought, “If people would understand, the chances are that their views are likely extreme views, that there is some kind of middle ground, there is some kind of understanding.” I cannot believe that Yehovah, who set the law, the Scriptures, the whole idea of the redemption of mankind on the earth, to split it into a million different directions. We have to understand that there are some things that we could and should come together on.

Nehemia: You know what? You said a really interesting thing, that neither of us really fits perfectly into any box. And I know one thing that was like a defining moment in my life is when I found out there was this historical group, the Karaites - it comes from the Hebrew word “kara”, which is the word for “Scripture”, the Old Testament in the Jewish context. And I realized I was a Karaite, and at the time, my rabbis told me, when I was living in Chicago, they said, “The Karaites have died out,” they told me, “and if you become a Karaite it’ll be the end of you as well. It’ll be a dead end. You’ll be the one and only Karaite, and then when you die, it’ll cease to exist.”

And I said, “I don’t care, because I’m going to follow the word of God, even if I’m the only one.” And that’s what I thought. It was years before I met another Karaite. You know, this is before the internet, and I believed what my rabbis told me, that I was the only one in the world.

And when I met the other Karaites, I found there was a lot of things I agree with them on, and other things I don’t agree on, and I didn’t care. I was going to follow the word of God, even if I was the only one doing it. And that’s really been the motto of my life.

Don: It’s amazing, because Pam is over there in the other studio listening to this right now, and I know that it must have crossed her mind that you told almost the exact same story that happened to she and I.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Don: I mean, because…

Nehemia: That, I didn’t know.

Don: Well, yes because we were Quaker, and I started wanting to believe the Scriptures and exactly what they were saying, and I didn’t think there would be any conflict. And one day, a person walked up to me and leaned over and whispered in my ear. He said, “Barnesville.” Remember that, Pam? And I said, “Barnesville?” He said, “Yeah, Barnesville, Ohio. There are people over there who think like you do.” And I thought, “Wow. I wonder what that is?”

Come to find out there was a Conservative branch of Quakerism, what was it, Pam? 0.02 percent of Quakers? Oh, 0.05. So that was all that was left… in the world, yeah. 0.05 percent was considered Conservative Quakerism. And pretty much it was like, you need to go over there, because they’re all old men, and they’re not going to be around much longer. I mean, it’s almost the same story, it’s amazing.

But I really believe that, you know, when you search for truth, you’ve got to know that not everyone does that. Therefore, you are walking toward the minority instead of the majority.

Nehemia: Well, in the Tanakh, the Old Testament, it talks about the “sheirit”, the remnant, how God’s going to gather in a remnant. And so, the numbers argument never impressed me. If we’re going to follow numbers, then we should all be Catholics or Hindus, because those are the two biggest religions in the world. If we’re not going to go by the numbers argument…

Don: Bruce just said that. Bruce just said that the other day. He said, “You know, if numbers are a part of it, then if that shows God’s blessing, so to speak, then we should all be Catholic.” No, I don’t understand why people even try to make the argument, “How come everybody don’t believe that then?” What is that?

Nehemia: Well, it’s actually a very common argument, because you look at the tactics that they use in commercial advertising, one of the things they’ll say is, “More dentists chew this gum. More people prefer this coffee.” And so, that’s an argument that people make with all kinds of things, but if you think about it logically, it doesn’t really prove anything.

Don: No.

Nehemia: You know, there are times in history when people did all kinds of stupid things, where they took radioactive chemicals. We’ve got the thing going on in Japan now, where they’re terrified of the radiation. Well, when they first discovered radium, which is one of the most radioactive elements, they used to put it on as a face cream, because people didn’t know it was dangerous. And they advertised, “More people put on radium face cream, and look how good they look,” until they died a year later. People do all kinds of stupid things, and there’s a billion-plus people who walk around worshipping cows in India. Now, if it was dogs, we might have something to talk about, because I’m a dog person.

Don: Yeah, I know.

Nehemia: But you know, come on, they’re worshipping cows, so numbers really don’t prove anything. What it does prove, actually, is people don’t think about their faith.

Don: No.

Nehemia: People just blindly follow what they’ve been told to do, and don’t think about, “Does this make sense? Am I really having a genuine relationship with the Creator of the universe?” They just end up blindly following what they’ve been told to do, and they end up having a relationship, from my perspective, with the commandments of men rather than with the word of God.

Don: Yes, yes. Now, in our experience over here on the Christian side of the argument, the Lord, Yehovah, has, I think recently, at least in my experience, opened a door to the Gentiles that it seems like they’re having to walk through that door by way of the Sabbath. Tell me what you feel about that.

Nehemia: Well, look, I’ve studied history, and that’s the perspective I’m coming from. And in history, I see this is something that actually happened repeatedly. If you went back a few hundred years to the Russian Empire, there were entire villages of Russian Orthodox Christians who gave up the Russian Orthodox Church, they were accused of being Judaizers. But what they were doing, essentially, is saying, “We want to actually go back to Scripture. There’s this whole reformation going on, sola scriptura, let’s actually go and see what it says.” And they were horribly persecuted by the Russian Orthodox Church, and this is something that happened in almost every period throughout the world.

I mentioned the one in Russia because now many of those Gentiles - they’re called Subbotniks from the word “Sabbath”, if that answers your question. Many of the Subbotniks have actually immigrated to Israel. And the reason they were allowed to immigrate to Israel, even though by all accounts they’re not Jews, is that many of them were murdered in the Holocaust, and when they founded Israel they said, “Israel will be a safe haven for Jews throughout the world who have been persecuted,” and they folded in the Subbotnik group as well. They said, “Now, look, you guys were persecuted as Jews. The Nazis thought you were Jews, that’s good enough for us.”

Don: Wow.

Nehemia: There’s a large community of them over in Beit Shemesh, which is a city about 30 minutes here from Jerusalem. There was actually a minister of the government, Rafael Eitan, whose mother was a Subbotnik.

Don: Well, what has happened among us, and I consider myself to be Messianic - although I don’t have many Messianic brethren who would confirm that - but what has happened among us who have embraced the gift of the Sabbath, we’ve become fascinated with the other laws that we have neglected to this point. And so, in that interest, we start examining these things, and who better to go to than Orthodox Judaism? Well, the problem is, they start spoon-feeding some of the most ridiculous stuff to folks, and they feel like they are safe there because they’ve come back to their roots.

And so they start getting some really bad information, and most of it comes from Oral Torah, and from opinions of people that cannot be backed up by Scripture. And then, no doubt, over a period of time, you don’t have to be into it very long, you find out, “Oh, my goodness. There’s not 10 laws, there are 613 laws.”

Now, when I first started looking at this, I had to know what you thought of the 613 laws as a Jew. I just wondered, what do you think? Frankly, the reason I respect your opinion is because of your respect for Torah and well, let’s just say it like it is, because of your disrespect for what men have done to it. So, speak to the 613.

Nehemia: Okay. So, this idea of 613 commandments is actually something that I was taught very young. I mean, definitely before I could drink or drive, I must have been seven or eight years old, maybe earlier. One of my earliest memories is being taught about the 613 commandments as a fact, and I remember studying when I was a child in school, we were studying in the Book of Genesis in chapter 32 verse 5. There, Jacob is meeting with Esav, Esau, his brother. He’s been away for about 20 years. He’s been over in Aramea, in what today is Iraq, living with Laban. And when he introduces himself to Esav, to Esau, he says, “Thus says your servant, Jacob, ‘I have lived with Laban and been delayed until now.’” And the way any normal person would read that is, he’s just giving over the facts. But when the rabbis looked at this, they said, “Okay, there’s a hidden message here.” And the hidden message is in the word “I lived”. In Hebrew, “I lived” is one single word, the word “garti.”

And what they did is, they took that word and they said, “What’s the numerological value of the word ‘garti’, ‘I lived’”? And that’s actually an idea that comes from Greek, it’s called “gematria”. In Hebrew, it’s called “gematria”. Now, gematria is not actually an authentic Hebrew word. Gematria is simply the Hebrew form of the word “geometry”, which was the Greek word for, essentially, “mathematics”.

Don: Right.

Nehemia: So, based on this Greek idea that you can take letters and make them have equivalent values of numbers, the gematria of the word “I lived” is 613. And the rabbis understood Jacob’s statement to Esav to say that, “When I was with Laban, I kept all of the 613 commandments.” And this is actually a core doctrine in Rabbinical Judaism, one of probably the big differences with the Karaite approach, the rabbis say that the forefathers going all the way back to Noah, and according to one opinion, all the way back to Adam, had all 613 commandments – meaning, everything a Jew is required to do today, all of the forefathers knew that.

Don: They’re insisting that…

Nehemia: It goes all the way back to Adam.

Don: They’re insisting that our ancient fathers… you see, I’ve heard this…

Nehemia: They had the same commandments as we do. Whereas Karaites look at it as having a gradual what’s called a progressive revelation, which is that first, God revealed to Noah very basic commandments, and not the Seven Laws of Noah that are in the Oral Law.

Don: Did Noah eat pig meat?

Nehemia: As far as I know, he did, yeah, because what God commanded him not to do is not to eat blood, and not to murder. He was allowed to eat meat, as long as he didn’t eat blood. So as far as I know, he did eat pig meat. There’s no commandment against it, certainly that we know of.

Don: All right, so you’ve heard this, that is going through the Messianic…

Nehemia: Oh, this is a core doctrine of Rabbinical Judaism, that all the revelation happened in the beginning, including the Oral Law.

Don: Oh, boy.

Nehemia: And the biblical approach, the Karaite approach as I see it, at least, and as it’s been understood historically, is that there was a progressive revelation. First, God gave certain commandments to Noah, and then He gave more commandments to Abraham, then to Isaac, and Jacob. And finally, the culmination of all the prophets, the seal of the prophets, was Moses, through whom He revealed all of the commandments.

Now, the idea that there are 613 commandments, that number, again, that comes from this gematria, this Greek breakdown of the word into a numerological value of 613. But the Torah - nowhere in the Bible does it ever say there’s 613 commandments. And in fact, it never counts them. That’s significant. I think if God wants to give us a number, He would have… Look, He tells us for the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Words, actually, He says, “These are the 10 words I’m revealing to you at Sinai.” And He has that number, 10. But for 613, He never says that. And, you know, the way I look at it is really, this is Greek influence on Judaism.

Don: Yeah.

Nehemia: The rabbis who were teaching these things 2,000 years ago lived under Hellenistic influence. And the fact that they use a Greek word, “gematria”, to describe this type of analysis of a word, breaking it down into numbers, tells you that there’s a Greek influence there, the fact that they’re using a Greek word.

It’s something the Greeks did, and we know the Greeks did it. They took the writings of Homer, which the Greeks considered to be sacred writings, and they said, “Look, Homer - this is divine revelation, but it describes things that are irrational to us. It describes the gods sitting up on top of Mount Olympus and getting drunk and having these festivals. That doesn’t make sense to us, as Greeks.” This is what the Greeks said.

And so they looked at the writings of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and they said, “Okay, it must have a deeper meaning.” And then they started to use things like gematria and say, “Well, it didn’t really mean that there were gods up on Mount Olympus. What it meant is the value of this certain word has some deeper, ethical teaching.” And that’s where the rabbis then were influenced and got these ideas. They said, “Look, if there are deeper meanings in the Iliad and the Odyssey, surely there are deeper meanings in our Torah, which is the deepest thing in the world.”

Don: All right, now there are supposed to be like four stages of depth in the Torah. Is it four?

Nehemia: That’s the idea… Yeah - the four stages of meaning, or four levels…

Don: Yes.

Nehemia: …of meaning, what’s called “Pardes - Peshat, Remez, Drash, Sod”, is actually a relatively late concept that doesn’t appear... And you can look this up in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, Encyclopaedia Judaica, it’ll tell you that it doesn’t appear until the time of the Zohar, which is a book that was published in Spain in the 1290s by a rabbi named Moses de Leon. Now, he claimed this book was written 1,000 years earlier by a rabbi named Shimon bar Yochai, but the book is unknown until the 1290s and there it mentions for the first time the four levels of meaning.

Don: Right.

Nehemia: Now, what you do have in earlier writings is two levels of meaning, the peshat, which is the plain meaning, and that means the meaning based on the language and the context. What do the words mean, and what does it…?

Don: Right, what does it say?

Nehemia: What’s that?

Don: Just, what does it say?

Nehemia: What does it say in its context, using common sense? And that isn’t always the same as a literal meaning. If it says, “Circumcise the foreskin of your heart,” well, that’s not meant to be taken literally, where you cut your heart open - that’s a figure of speech. So you have to use common sense and understand it based on the language and the context, using common sense. And if it says, “Judah is a lion,” well, Judah’s not literally a lion. That’s just a symbol.

Don: Right.

Nehemia: That’s the peshat, what’s called the plain meaning. And then, the other level of meaning that the rabbis talk about, and this in the earliest Rabbinical writings, way before 1290, is drash. Drash is a term that in Rabbinical literature - it actually means other things in the Bible, in the Tanakh it just means “to seek God”. But in the writings of the rabbis, drash or midrash means to “interpret a deeper meaning of Scripture,” and for that purpose you can ignore the language and the context. The language and the context are not binding. And that’s how they come up with all kinds of strange things, like “Do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” and the drash is to mean, “Don’t eat milk and meat together.”

Don: How that Scripture destroys cheeseburgers I’ll never figure out.

Nehemia: I’ll tell you what, that’s true.

Don: I remember when I first saw you, as a matter of fact, I guess it was in Orlando. You were speaking there, and you got into that and said, “I’m a Hebrew scholar. I know the language. I know what’s going on here. I’ve seen this in so many different documents and parchments and literature of antiquity. And here’s what I believe it means.”

Now, tell us what it means, “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Nehemia: Okay, it means, as it says, “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Don: Right.

Nehemia: Now, it doesn’t take a great scholar to understand what that means. What the rabbis will do is try to confuse you. And look, I don’t want this all to be about putting down the rabbis, because there are important things you can learn from the rabbis. The difference, the way I see it, between the rabbis and Scripture is that when Scripture says something, I accept it as fact. I don’t need confirmation for something Scripture says. The rabbis - if they come and tell me, “Well, the meaning of this word is X, Y, Z,” I need to go check that out and verify it. I can’t take their word for it. And a lot of times, I find out what they’re saying isn’t true.

Don: Yes.

Nehemia: And common sense tells me it’s not true. There’s actually a tradition they teach - and this happened about 30 years before Jesus was born - this is in the Oral Law. It says, “A Gentile came to two rabbis. First, he came to a rabbi named Shammai and he said, ‘I want to be a Jew. Teach me the Torah, but only the Written Torah, not the Oral Torah.’” And Shammai was a very impatient man. It says in the Oral Torah that Shammai took a builder’s staff - because he was a builder by profession - a rabbi isn’t a profession, it’s a vocation. He took his builder’s staff and he beat the Gentile, chasing him away. The Gentile then went to Hillel, who was the other leading rabbi at the time and he said, “Teach me the Written Torah but not the Oral Torah.” And Hillel said, “All right. Today, we’ll have our first lesson.” He said, “Repeat after me…” Let’s do it, Don. Aleph.

Don: Aleph.

Nehemia: Bet.

Don: Bet.

Nehemia: Gimmel.

Don: Gimmel.

Nehemia: Okay, so those are the first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And then he said, “Okay, come back tomorrow for the next lesson.” And he says to the Gentile, “Repeat after me. Gimmel…”

Don: Gimmel.

Nehemia: Go ahead and do it. Bet.

Don: Bet.

Nehemia: Aleph.

Don: Aleph.

Nehemia: So the story goes that the Gentile heard this and he was very perplexed. He went to the rabbi and he said, “Yesterday, you told me Aleph, Bet, Gimmel. Today, you’re telling me, Gimmel, Bet, Aleph. I can see that they’re the opposite, what’s going on here?” And Hillel says to him, “If you’re dependent on me for understanding the words, then you have to accept my explanation of the words, as well.”

Don: Wow.

Nehemia: Now, that will work with a Gentile who doesn’t know any Hebrew. And this is at a time when translations of the Bible weren’t generally available. And so, if you didn’t listen to the rabbis, at least to their translation of the words, you might not know what it said.

Don: Wow.

Nehemia: The way I look at that is, that’ll work just on the most superficial level when you’re starting out. But once you get that grounding and you can understand the words - and having a master’s degree in Biblical Studies, I think I understand the words better than most rabbis, at least linguistically - I don’t buy that anymore, and you shouldn’t buy that anymore, either.

Now that the Bible’s been translated into so many languages and there are research tools where you can take something like e-Sword and see what the Hebrew word is, and maybe you’re not going to be an expert in Hebrew for doing that, but you can at least see that “Oh, he’s switched it from Aleph, Bet, Gimmel to Gimmel, Bet, Aleph.” And if he tells you, “It says, ‘Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk,’” the kid really means… meat and milk means any milk, not just of the mother, well, you can see that’s not the case.

Don: Right.

Nehemia: Common sense tells you that’s not what it says. Now, one thing that I do know that the average person might not know is that they’ve found these texts at Ras Shamra, a place in Syria, in ancient times it was called Ugarit. It was a Canaanite city, and they have the Canaanite equivalent of the Bible. What I mean by that is, there are all these stories about the creation of the world, and mainly the thing they focus on is Ba’al, who is the son of the creator of the world, how he actually fought his brothers and sisters to become the master of the earth. He cast one of his brothers down into the netherworld, which became Sheol, his brother named death, and he cast his other brother into the sea, and that became the god of the seas. But he was the master of the earth and controlled the rain. So they talk about Ba’al, and they also talk about sacrifices that were brought to his wife, Easter, or Ashtoreth. And one of the sacrifices…

Don: I’ve heard of her.

Nehemia: Yeah, she’s familiar. She’s around even to this day, in Western religions, but she was one of the main goddesses of the Canaanites, mentioned at Ras Shamra. They would bring these sacrifices of a kid boiled in its mother’s milk. So when the Torah tells you three times, “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” it’s not about here’s what you should eat and what you should not eat, because it doesn’t say anything about eating. What it says is, you shouldn’t boil it. And why shouldn’t you boil it? Because that’s what the pagans used to do as fertility sacrifices to their goddess.

Don: Yeah.

Nehemia: And the principle there behind the commandment, whenever I look at a commandment I say, “Here’s the peshat, the plain meaning in the context.” But I also ask myself, “What’s the principle here? What’s the spirit of the commandment?” And the spirit of the commandment when it comes to “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” is “don’t participate in pagan fertility rites, or any pagan rites whatsoever.” I mean, that’s the message here. You know, in the New Testament, I know you guys have this thing about not eating an animal sacrificed to an idol.

Don: Well, some people do.

Nehemia: Okay, I mean, I know it’s in the New Testament, it talks about what the Gentiles absolutely have to keep, and that’s something that I think everybody in the New Testament agreed upon, that a Gentile mustn’t eat something sacrificed to an idol.

Don: You know, Paul actually is teaching - you may even be a little bit insulted about being compared to the Apostle Paul, I don’t know how you feel about it.

Nehemia: I don’t know how to respond to that.

Don: But actually, he preaches this. Nehemia, do you believe that Adam kept the Feast of Tabernacles?

Nehemia: No, I think that’s utterly ridiculous. I mean, Adam keeping Tabernacles and all kinds of whacky things like that. I mean, look, you can say whatever you want, believe whatever you want, but I like to stick with the Scriptural facts. I’m like the guy in… what was that 1950 television program where he says, “Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts.”

Don: Yeah, Dragnet.

Nehemia: Dragnet, right. Now, once you establish the facts, then we can look for applications, and there could be some really exciting applications when you combine the information with the inspiration. First, you’ve got to tack down the information. Don’t go to the inspiration and say, “Okay, based on that, I’m going to figure out what the information is.” That’s called the tail wagging the dog, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a picture of my dog, she don’t got a tail.

Don: I have seen a picture of that dog.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, Georgia doesn’t have a tail. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. Make sure the dog wags the tail, and first figure out what is the peshat, the plain meaning. Then if you want to talk about a deeper meaning, or an application, or a spiritual significance of it - that’s a matter of faith. I have no problem with that, of how you work that out.

Don: I’ve said so many times that you can believe anything you want to believe. We’re busting these bad boys that are out here teaching people ridiculous doctrines such as the rapture, and just a host of other things. And you know, I tell people all the time, “Look, you can believe that when you die you go to Mars. But don’t tell people that the Bible says that. That is just two different things.”

Nehemia: Right. And you know, there’s this tradition - and here again, I’m emphasizing “tradition” - of reading the Torah every week in the synagogue, and the section they actually read this week talks about the two sons of Aaron, that they come and they bring the strange fire before God, when the Tabernacle’s being dedicated. And it says, “The fire came down and burnt them up on the spot.” And I think the moral of that story, the lesson there, is don’t go doing things God didn’t command you to do and saying that he did.

He gives you very specific commandments, and I feel like there are enough commandments in the Torah that we don’t have to make up new ones.

Don: I agree.

Nehemia: The actual way of numbering them, of 613, if you look at different lists of different rabbis, everybody’s got their own list of what the 613 are. You know, the rabbis figured out through gematria the number, but it was only hundreds of years later that somebody came along and said, “Okay, well what are those 613?” And there are many different lists and each rabbi has a different list. And the problem, I think, when you do that, is you start to - I think, and I’m hesitant to use this word - but you start to legalize the Torah. What they do is, they’ll say, “Okay, it says to rest on the seventh day and do no manner of work.” Well, that’s two commandments, right? One is a positive commandment and one is a negative commandment.

Don: Why do they do that, Nehemia?

Nehemia: Go ahead.

Don: Why did they do that? I’ve been reading the 613, and I’m thinking, “It’s superfluous. It’s not necessary. Why are they adding this on?”

Nehemia: I’ll tell you why they did it. This is a profound realization I had a number of years ago when I was in Eilat, Israel’s most southerly city.

Don: Eilat.

Nehemia: It’s the southern end of Israel. And in Eilat there’s an underwater observatory, it’s a really, really cool thing. It’s essentially, you walk down these stairs or take the elevator and you’re looking out onto the sea, into a coral reef. And most places in the world - if you know anything about coral reefs - you have to take a boat 100 miles or even more off the shore. Here, you literally walk into this building just down the shore, and you’re looking out onto a coral reef.

I noticed that they had these beautiful fish. I mean, I was blown away with how beautiful the fish are, and I saw two different types of people who were appreciating the fish. On the wall, every once in a while, there’d be a column. You have really thick glass to keep the water out, because it’s under water, and there would be these big columns, and on the columns, there were the names of different fish with the pictures of what that type of fish was.

And I noticed there were two ways people were enjoying these fish. One is what I was doing is, I was looking out and just enjoying this combination of all these different fish. That’s a beautiful one, and that’s a beautiful one. And then, I saw there were other people who would look at the picture of the fish on the wall and try to identify it, and it has the little Latin name there, what the Latin name was, and what the Hebrew name was, what the English name was.

And I realized that this was a really big difference between a Hebrew approach and a Greek approach. The Hebrew approach is to enjoy the collage… you know, we have this word in archaeology, the “assemblage”. I mean, everything together, I’m looking at it and I’m enjoying the forest. Other people, what they want to do is, they want to look at the forest and say, “That’s a conifer, and that’s a cedar.” And they’re enjoying identifying things like that. And I think that’s the approach the rabbis ended up taking. The Torah is very specific when it comes to certain types of commandments, like look at the first seven chapters of Leviticus - excruciating details about certain types of sacrifices.

Don: Yes.

Nehemia: So there, the Torah does have detailed information. But for other things, it doesn’t do that. It doesn’t define things in that precise of a way, and the rabbis were always uncomfortable with that. You know, in the writings of the Middle Ages, the Karaites jokingly referred to the rabbis as the masters of… the Karaites were called, “masters of Scripture” - that was the medieval name, and they called the rabbis the “masters of measurement”.

Don: Masters of measurement?

Nehemia: Masters of measurement - because the rabbis always said, “We need to have a measurement for everything, a precise definition.” If it says, “seven days you will eat unleavened bread,” the Torah doesn’t tell us how much unleavened bread, so we need a legal definition of how much unleavened bread. And you might think, “What do I need that for?” Well, my father who was a diabetic and had suffered from diabetes for many years isn’t supposed to be eating really any unleavened bread, it’s not good for him, it can cause all kinds of medical problems. But he eats the minimum requirement…

Don: The prescribed…

Nehemia: …according to the Oral Law.

Don: Yeah, like medicine.

Nehemia: In the Oral Law, it says the minimum required every day of the seven days is the size of an olive. However, the original Oral Law didn’t tell us how big that was - whether it was a Syrian olive or a Judean olive. And then, they actually have this discussion in the Oral Law, I kid you not. My father will take the biggest chunk of matza, of unleavened bread you’ve ever seen, the size of three or four slices of bread, and he’ll munch that down and he’ll say, “That’s the olive according to the Oral Law.”

And the point is that they’ve lost the picture of the forest, because they’re focusing so much on the trees, and I think that’s what this kind of trying to break the commandments down into 613… I understand people are trying to get a handle on it, but I think they’re losing the forest for the trees.

Don: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Nehemia: Now, if you take every commandment and study them, but to say, “Okay, we have to define them more, got to come up with 613 to fit that number,” you end up missing the point, I’d say.

Don: I saw that there were clear commandments - I thought they were very, very clear, much better candidates for commandments than some of the ones they used.

Nehemia: So you could come up with your own list.

Don: Yeah, you sure could.

Nehemia: Why not?

Don: Why not? Let me ask you something about the unleavened bread, because we’re coming up on unleavened bread. There are some in some camps and some in others that feel differently about that particular commandment you’re talking about, about should we eat… the Bible says, “Seven days thou shall eat unleavened bread,” or “shalt thou eat unleavened bread”, and myself, when I read that, I hear that if you put bread in your mouth, it had better be unleavened. Some people say that the commandment is that you do that every day for seven days. And I was wondering how that pans out, in your understanding?

Nehemia: So here’s an example where you need to look at… you know, I talked about the context in the verse and in the chapter and in the broader context of Scripture. But you also have to look at the historical context, and here’s a place where the modern reader has lost the historical context, because we think, “Okay, I can have a meal, and there won’t be any bread in it, so then I haven’t eaten any leavened bread, nor unleavened bread. I could go all day like that. And that’s low carb, so that’s actually healthy.”

But the reality is that really, up until a couple of hundred years ago, what people ate was bread. And then, with the bread they would have various side dishes. Maybe it was a holiday and they would have meat, or if they were very wealthy, maybe they had meat every day. But even for the king, bread was his main dish, and it was things that went with bread. And then, you had bread in various forms, there was pasta, which is, essentially, a form of bread. That was certainly the case in the Western world, and I guess in the East, where you had rice, it was a different situation. But in the Middle East and in Europe and most of the world, bread is what people ate… like, that’s what they ate.

So the notion that we would go a day without eating bread is utterly ridiculous. It would be like if the Torah said, “Drink water for seven days,” and I say, “I’m going to drink wine instead.” I mean, that’s what people ate, they ate bread. Now, does that mean that every day I have to take a piece of matza and eat it?

Don: In order to comply with the law?

Nehemia: The way I look at it, that’s the type of thing that you could figure out for yourself, and decide for yourself. I don’t want to define that for people.

Don: Now, you can’t be making any friends with that kind of an attitude. I mean, if you say that, even over here, we have our share of legalistic people, too, and even on this side… Well, then, they’re going to listen… and they’ll do anything they want to do.

Nehemia: You mean, and have a personal relationship with the Creator instead of a relationship with an intermediary?

Don: Right, right.

Nehemia: Sounds good to me.

Don: Right.

Nehemia: That makes a lot of sense to me. You know, I mean, essentially what ends up happening is, when we have all these legal definitions, you end up with the rabbi being the intermediary between you and God and I don’t feel like I need any intermediaries. I want to go directly to God.

Don: There you go.

Nehemia: I think that’s the message, and that’s what I see.

Don: Right, yeah.

Nehemia: One of the things I promised that I would talk about to my readers on Facebook, this is how you can find me on Facebook, Nehemia Gordon, N-E-H-E-M-I-A G-O-R-D-O-N. And one of the things I said I’d talk about, and we talked about before yesterday, was that I shaved my head and I now have a goatee. I used to have a lot of hair all over the place. And a lot of people who have seen my new look say, “What’s going on here, Nehemia? We have the commandments in Leviticus, and the way the rabbis teach is, you’re not allowed to shave your beard.” And I used to observe this - I’m mocking it, but I didn’t know any better then, I didn’t know about it.

What they teach is, allowed to shave your beard with an electric razor but not with a shaver, because an electric razor…

Don: Explain why.

Nehemia: It’s a bunch of little scissors, that’s what they explain. And I forget the exact type, but you’re allowed to use Remington, but you’re not allowed to use Norelco, or vice versa, I think. I mean, it’s hard to say that with a straight face, but this is what I was taught, growing up, that you’re allowed Norelco and not Remington, or whichever one it was. But anyway, a little over 10 years ago, I sat down and I studied this and I tried to figure out what is God actually commanding us here?

And what I realized is there are four commandments in the same passage, actually in a two-verse section over in Leviticus - I believe it’s Leviticus 19 - and what those are, are essentially four mourning practices. If you look in the context of the Bible, there are four things that people did for mourning. They would rip the hair out of their heads. They would rip out the hair from their beards. They would gash themselves, cut themselves, and they would tattoo the name of the dead person on themselves. And what the Torah is telling us is…

Don: Don’t do that.

Nehemia: Don’t observe those four mourning practices for the dead. And it actually says “for the dead” in that passage…

Don: Yeah. Yeah, it does. It does.

Nehemia: …which I’d read 1,000 times and somehow never noticed, because that verse is concerned if I’m using a Remington or a Norelco.

Don: “Print no marks in thy flesh for the dead.”

Nehemia: Yeah, so it’ll… what’s the cultural context here? And the cultural context is to rip out your hair for the dead. And there’s actually certain purification practices where people are commanded to shave their head, and they’re commanded to shave their beard. So why would they command us to do something that’s otherwise forbidden? It doesn’t make any sense.

Don: We have people that are absolutely in… who have come to a faith in God, and their look at their body and they see tattoos on there that they’ve put on, you know, in years prior, and they weep and they feel terrible about this. They say, “What shall I do? Should I have these tattoos removed? Because the Bible is just explicit.” And I think, “How explicit is it?”

Nehemia: It’s explicit in its context, and otherwise, you end up doing strange things like not eating cheeseburgers, because some rabbi told you, not the historical context of what it’s commanding. And you know, there’s actually a verse in Isaiah 44 where if you say, “Tattoos are forbidden,” the verse doesn’t make any sense. It’s in Isaiah 44 verse 5, and it says, “One shall say before Yehovah, and this one could be called in the name of Jacob, and this will write on his hand for Yehovah. The name of Israel he should be called.” So, it’s talking of an end-times prophesy in Isaiah 44 and it’s saying people are going to tattoo Yehovah on their arms.

Don: Wow.

Nehemia: And Hebrew slaves, they would write the name of the master on their hands, saying, “We are going to be slaves to Yehovah. He’s going to be the only master we have.” And I can understand why that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, because they want to be our masters.

Don: Oh, sure.

Nehemia: But that prophesy makes no sense if you understand Leviticus 19 as saying, “You’re not allowed to have any kind of tattoo.” Now look, there are types of tattoos that I wouldn’t want to have. I don’t have any tattoos, but I wouldn’t say it would be forbidden, not because they’re tattoos but there’s all kinds of pagan symbols people will tattoo on themselves, and all kinds of… how do I put it delicately? Things of questionable moral character people tattoo on themselves. So, that I would recommend avoiding. But to say we’re forbidden to have any kind of tattoo - that requires, I think, preconception when you’re reading the commandments.

Don: Well, there are many things that are not necessarily sin that are dumb. Don’t do that.

Nehemia: That’s right. And I’m not saying go put a bunch of… There was this girl in England who had a tattoo artist put black stars all over herself. And when she went home, her father started beating her, and she said, “Oh, no. I fell asleep, and he did it without my permission.” And actually, they arrested the poor tattoo guy until finally she confessed. But you know, there’s just something that’s stupid to do, I don’t know why she wanted to do that. But to say that it’s forbidden to have any kind of tattoos, everything is permissible if it’s a good idea.

If you look strictly speaking according to Scripture, it’s permissible to eat hemlock, which is a plant that grows, because it’s a green herb, okay? It doesn’t mean you should eat everything that’s a green herb. I can think of another green herb that’s definitely a bad idea to eat.

Don: Yeah, I’m thinking...

Nehemia: Right.

Don: No, I really think that a lot of the fences that we’ve built… You know, I think that one of the most perfect examples is the Sabbath day’s journey. People who don’t understand what we’re doing, and understand our faith, when you tell them that you keep the Sabbath, they say, “Well, do you travel on the Sabbath?” “Well, yeah. We don’t like to, but if it happens that we go for a drive…” “Yeah, but you can’t do that.” “Why?” “Because you’re not supposed to travel any further than a Sabbath day’s journey.” Now, Nehemia, give me the Scriptural basis for that idea.

Nehemia: The Sabbath day journey, that’s a phrase that you don’t find in Scripture, but what it does say is…

Don: Now, wait a minute, hold on now, I can’t let you say that.

Nehemia: It doesn’t say it in the Old Testament.

Don: There you go.

Nehemia: In the Book of Acts, the phrase, “Sabbath day’s journey,” I’m of course, Jewish. So, when I say Scripture I mean…

Don: Right. Yeah, I’m thinking.

Nehemia: Where did they get it in the Book of Acts? Something the rabbis talk about, and actually they find it in the Dead Sea Scrolls - this was a concept that all the Jews had. And the place they got it from is actually in Exodus 16 when God gives the manna or the mon, and He says, “You should collect them for six days…”

Don: Let the men come out.

Nehemia: …”and on the seventh, they don’t collect it, and collect a double portion on Friday, on the sixth day.”

Don: “Let no man go out of his tent.”

Nehemia: Well, okay. So, the people went out to collect it on Shabbat and there was none in the fields on Shabbat, and God got upset. He said, “I told you not to collect, and you went looking for it, and it wasn’t there. But you shouldn’t have even gone looking for it.” And then He says, “Now, each man should sit in his place and don’t go out of your place.”

Now, how does that apply today, or how did it apply in ancient times, once they got into the land? That was in the desert. The application that most people understood is that you had these cities, and most people, up until 200 years ago, when the United States was founded as a nation, 98 percent of human beings were farmers. You had two percent of the human population that were potters and smiths and bankers…

Don: Merchants.

Nehemia: …and a lot of my ancestors were those things, because they weren’t allowed to be farmers in Europe, as Jews. But 98 percent of human beings were farmers, and that’s what it required in order to feed people before mechanization. So, when 98 percent of the people are farmers, if God says, “Don’t go out of your place,” now think about what’s the equivalent of the manna, of collecting the manna? That’s your weekly task, that’s your work. Well, that’s going out into the fields if you’re a farmer. And so that’s how the command was understood. You had the cities. You know, in the US especially, you have people living on these little farms, and the next neighbor might be 10 miles away, or a mile away, or something.

In the Middle East, that was never the case. If you didn’t live in a walled city, then basically, you were open to attack by bandits. And that’s always been the case in this part of the world. Now they’re terrorists, not bandits, but that’s pretty much always been the case. So, you don’t have that in Israel, and even modern Israel, but in ancient Israel, people lived in… sometimes they were walled villages, or around villages was the walled city. And the way this was understood, the commandment of staying in your place, was “don’t go out of your walled village to the next city”, or into the fields, because if you’re going into the fields, that’s where your work takes place.

Now, if you were a potter, what that meant is, don’t go sit in the pottery shop and even if you’re not doing the work in the pottery shop, don’t even go into the pottery shop. Rest on the Sabbath. And now, where do you get the Sabbath day’s journey? And there’s actually a debate between different Jewish groups. In the Dead Sea Scrolls they talk about 3,000 cubits, and the rabbis talked about 2,000 cubits. In the Book of Acts, it doesn’t say. It just says, “A Sabbath day’s journey”. It doesn’t say how many cubits.

Where they got that is actually from a passage in the Book of Numbers where it describes that around each city was an area where the animals lived, and then 2,000 or 3,000 cubits - and that difference of numbers actually appears in the Book of Numbers, based on different types of cities, a Levitical city versus the Israelite city - beyond the 2,000 or 3,000 cubits is where the fields were considered to have begun. They didn’t begin immediately outside the city, and you had to go feed the animals, even on Shabbat, because they’re going to die if you don’t.

So, what they understood it to mean, “sit in your place,” is you can go to the areas of animals, but don’t go into the fields where you do the labor. Now, how does that apply today? And I guess this is the sort of thing where I would say each person needs to work that out for themselves, but what it means to me is, I’m not going to go to my place of work, whether that’s an office building, or, you know, a lot of people I know, even in the Orthodox world that I grew up in, would go window shopping on Shabbat. You know, they’d go for a nice walk, and they’d go to the mall and they’d go window shopping. And they’d say, “But we’re not spending any money, it’s okay.” So, to me, that isn’t within the spirit of what’s been commanded in Exodus 16.

You know, in Exodus 16, the modern application, the spirit of that, the principle of that, is wherever your place of business is, or where business is done. And I think that definitely applies to window shopping in a mall.

Don: Right, right. Now, I know that there’s a lot of controversy… I know that when you and I were on the road doing different tours of the country, you and I were able to spend Sabbath together, because we pretty much saw it the same way. Other people were willing to go places and do things and hold meetings and stuff, and poor old Nehemia and Don felt like that was not a day to do those things. And so we were able to enjoy our time together, but many people, even today, will take me to task about “Sabbath is supposed to be a time of congregating. And the Bible says…” and they quote where it says that these are “convocations”. Now, you explain a lot clearer than I can about that word, convocation, and its relation to “proclamation”. Explain why you don’t pretty much go what we’ll call, for the sake of the argument, the “normal way” pertaining to keeping the Sabbath day.

Nehemia: Before I get to that, it’s really interesting, because what I’ll hear from a lot of Christians is that the law has been done away with, it doesn’t apply to us. We don’t have to follow the commandments. But then, when it comes to church, they’ll say, “You’ve got to come to church because it says that the Sabbath is to be a day of convocation.”

Don: Yes.

Nehemia: So, it’s kind of strange. The reason that’s strange to me is I’ve never heard any Jew say that. I’ve never heard any Jew say that there’s a commandment to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath. What they’ll say is that “the rabbis ordained this for us”, they might say, or they’ll say it’s a “tradition”, and it makes sense. People worked from sunrise to sunset, people worked in the fields six days a week, and the only time they could come together to hear Scripture read… you know, a lot of them were illiterate, they had to hear it read to them… the only time they had for that was on the Sabbath, and I don’t think there was anything wrong that. In that context, I think that’s a good thing to do.

But to say that it’s a commandment to specifically come on this day of the week and not another day of the week, I’ve never heard a Jewish source say that, which is very interesting that Christians do say that, and they revert to the Old Testament for that.

So look, Leviticus 23 verse 2, it says, “Speak unto the children…” this is the King James Version. “Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them concerning the feasts of the LORD.” Of course, when it says “LORD” in capital letters, it’s “Yehovah” in Hebrew. It says, “Concerning the feasts of the LORD which you shall proclaim to be holy convocations.” Now, “convocations” in English means a gathering. So these are these holy gatherings, and you’re to proclaim them. In Hebrew, what it says is, “These are the appointed times of Yehovah which you shall proclaim them as holy proclamations.” That’s what it says.

Don: Yes.

Nehemia: So these are days that we are to proclaim to be holy. The commandment to actually gather on them - I don’t see that anywhere in Scripture. Now, if you want to gather on Shabbat with your community, I’m not against that.

Don: Well, of course not.

Nehemia: What I’m saying is, don’t tell me there is a commandment and I’m required to do that.

Don: Right.

Nehemia: You know, when I was growing up Orthodox, we had so many activities on Friday night and Saturday, and for Shabbat, that we used to say - we were half joking but it was true - we would say, “We need Sunday to get over Shabbat.” We used to say that when I was growing up, the Shabbat was so exhausting, we would start out with the Friday evening prayer and then go to the Friday evening meal, which dragged on for hours. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Jewish festive meal. And in the morning, we would have the Shabbat morning prayers for two hours, and then we would go to the Shabbat lunch meal, then there was a Shabbat afternoon event, like a gathering. And then there was a Shabbat late afternoon, what they call the third meal, the third festive meal. At the end of that, afterwards if you were Chassidic especially, then you would have the Saturday night celebration, post-Shabbat celebration. So by the end of all that, you were dead. I mean, you needed Sunday to rest.

Don: Well, I’ll tell you, this has really been fun. Thank you so much for being a part of the show, Nehemia. It’s just way too short, to tell you the truth.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!