Bereishit Rabba 51 Supplementary Texts Use with https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/607089

Heaven is like the maidservant of God. When God’s child, Israel, comes along, heaven provides it with bread. When heaven’s own children come along, alluding to the people of Sodom, who worshiped the heavenly bodies, heaven provides them with fire and brimstone.

Vayikra Rabbah and My Life in Midrash

David Stern

Prooftexts, Vol. 21, No. 1, Prooftexts at Twenty (Winter 2001), pp. 23-38 (16 pages)

How does VR deal with this chapter? Typically, it seems almost completely to
ignore the substance of the chapter Ð all the sacri®cial details laid out in verses
3±35. Instead, it limits its comments to verse 2 alone Ð in particular, its opening
phrase, nefesh ki te¶eta, which it ``creatively'' reads not as ``A person, when he sins,''
but as ``A soul, when it sins.'' The obvious di²erence here is between the word's
primary meaning in biblical Hebrew and what it comes to mean in rabbinic Hebrew,
but this semantic change masks a far more radical and far-reaching development Ð
namely, a shift in Jewish anthropology, in the way in which the nature of humanity,
of man, is constructed. In biblical thought, the human is conceived of as a whole
being, uni®ed in nature, intact and without a glimmer of a mind-body split; when
God breathes His spirit into Adam, it is to give life to man's entire body, not to inject
a spiritual dimension into a physical container. By the time of the Rabbis, however,
this construction of man had changed; now, the human was conceived of as being
composed of two distinct parts, a body and a soul, with their respective material and
spiritual dimensions, and which are di²erentiated and, if not opposed in their
essence, at least di²erent.³

t is almost impossible to date precisely the moment when the soul as an
idea was introduced into Jewish thought Ð it probably accompanied the equally
undatable moment when the concept of immortality entered early Jewish
eschatology Ð but virtually all scholars agree that it was one product of the
encounter of early Jewish tradition with Hellenism from which it absorbed the idea.
Our chapter illustrates the impact of that absorption. By assimilating the linguistic
change in the meaning of nefesh, the midrash e²ectively turns Lev. 4:2 from being a
verse that serves as a heading for a series of laws about procedures of atonement for
inadvertent or unwitting transgressions into becoming an occasion for relating
traditions about the soul, the nefesh.
Yet our chapter also illustrates the distinctiveness, even the ambivalence, with
which early Jewish thought assimilated the Greco-Roman notion of the soul. For
even while accepting the idea of the soul as distinct from the body, the Rabbis still
refused to accept the dualism of the soul-body split that characterizes at least some
of its versions in Greco-Roman thought. Thus, in a famous passage in Sifre Devarim
(no. 306), the Rabbis distinguished between the angelic retinue, whose souls and
bodies were all formed from heaven; animals, whose entirety was created from the
earth; and mankind, ``whose soul is from heaven, and body from the earth.''
Therefore, the midrash continues, if man keeps the law and does the will of God, he
will resemble the heavenly creatures; if he does not, he is like the creatures below.
The soul-body split is not, in other words, what unconditionally determines the
nature of man, but mankind's own deeds. Man, it might be said, is forever caught in
a battle between his two ``sources,'' and it is his own choices, his actions, that
determine which one of them will govern his character and his fate. It is a vision of
man not so unlike that of Philo Ð a slightly earlier contemporary of the Rabbis who
has often been used in recent scholarship as a ``more Hellenized'' foil to the ``more
Jewish'' Rabbis.⁴
Further, even when they absorbed the mind-body split from Greco-Roman
sources, the Rabbis used the new anthropology not to absolve the spirit or the soul
of culpability for sinfulness by transferring all blame upon the body, as any good
philosopher would have done; rather, they exploited the dualism to level blame
upon the soul on account of its greater consciousness. This singular perspective
upon the mind-body split emerges in two meshalim that stand at the very center of
our chapter in VR: ⁵

For VR, alas, we have very little evidence about its original function, although I
like to think that this midrashic anthology, like other amoraic midrashim, was ®rst
put together for very pragmatic reasons: not to serve as a record in writing of
sermons or midrashim once delivered and now in danger of being forgotten, but as
source books of traditions Ð some of them perhaps midrashim once used in actual
sermons, other parts undoubtedly the invention or con¯ation of the anthology's
compiler(s) Ð to be used in the future by preachers or teachers in need of material
for sermons or lessons that they had to deliver. The initial compilation of these
midrashim Ð in the ®fth and sixth centuries in Byzantine Palestine Ð seems to
correspond to the period when rabbinic Judaism was consolidating itself as the
``normative'' religion of Jews in the Land of Israel. Doubtless, there were rabbis and
preachers in distant towns and settlements in need of material and without other
sages at hand to whom they could easily turn for help. The existence, even in nascent
or embryonic form, of collections like VR would have been very valuable for such
preachers or teachers who might have found themselves searching rather desper-

ately late Friday night, as their oil lamps were burning down, for lessons to preach or
teach the following morning!

What, then, is the ®rst parable doing in the chapter? As noted
earlier, it is not really clear, but I suspect that the editor was unable not to include the
parable in the chapter. As many scholars have long noted, the motif of the blind and
lame men who are joined together was a motif widely used in ancient literature,
pagan and Christian.⁸ And though the rabbinic mashal is the only text to use the
motif to symbolize the body-soul relationship, the ubiquity of the imagery may
suggest that the parable was so well known that VR's editor could not omit it. On
the other hand, it may have been precisely the Rabbis' innovative application of the
well-known imagery to the body-soul relationship that ®rst made this mashal so
piquant to its audience.

"The Blind Man and the Lame" is a fable that recounts how two individuals collaborate in an effort to overcome their respective disabilities. The theme is first attested in Greek about the first century BCE. Stories with this feature occur in Asia, Europe and North America.

While visual representations were common in Europe from the 16th century, literary fables incorporating the theme only began to emerge during the 18th century and the story was mistakenly claimed to be one of Aesop's Fables.

The adaptation by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian gave rise to the French idiom, "L'union de l'aveugle et le paralytique" ("the union of the blind man and the lame"), used ironically in reference to any unpromising partnership.

Western Asian sources

[edit]

A group of four epigrams in the Greek Anthology concern a blind man and a lame. Plato the Younger states the situation in two wittily contrasting lines:

A blind man carried a lame man on his back,

lending him his feet and borrowing from him his eyes.

The three others, who include Leonidas of Alexandria and Antiphilus of Byzantium, comment that by combining in this way the two make a perfect whole.^[1]

A West Asian story based on this trope is found in a pseudo-biblical document, the Apocryphon of Ezekiel, in which the two form a partnership to raid an orchard but claim their innocence by pointing out their disabilities. A variation of the story appears in the Jewish Talmud (Sanhedrin 91)^[2] and yet another is told in Islamic tradition as occurring during the boyhood of Jesus.^[3]

The Apocryphon of Ezekiel is an apocryphal book, written in the style of the Old Testament, as revelations of Ezekiel. It survives only in five fragments^[1] including quotations in writings by Epiphanius, Clement of Rome and Clement of Alexandria, and the Chester Beatty Papyri 185.^[2] It is likely to have been composed c. 50 BC – 50 AD, although some scholars suggest a date closer to 7 AD.

The largest fragment tells of a king who holds a feast to which he invites everyone except two beggars, a blind man and a cripple.^[3] The two are angry and determine to have their revenge: the cripple sits on the blind man's shoulders, and together they damage the king's orchard, but the king discovers what they have done and punishes them both.^[4] The moral of the story, according to the narrator, is that this proves the resurrection of the body, since soul and body must function together.^[5]

“For the dead will rise and those in the graves will rise again,” said the prophet. Lest I pass over in silence the things spoken in his own secret book by the prophet Ezekiel concerning the resurrection, I will lay out these things here. For, speaking enigmatically, he said [the following story] concerning the judgement of the righteous, which the soul and body share, “a certain king made everyone in his kingdom soldiers. He did not have any civilians except just two: one lame man and one blind man. Each one sat by himself and lived by himself. Now when the king put on a wedding for his son, he invited everyone in his kingdom to come, but he despised the two civilians, both the lame man and the blind man. Now these two were very upset and they were thinking about getting even with the king.

Now the king had a royal garden, and from a long way off the blind man started talking to the lame man, saying, “How much more would our crumb of bread been among the crowds of those invited to the revelry? Come now, just as he has done to us, let us repay him.”

And the other one answered, “How?”

He responded, “Let us go into his royal garden and destroy the garden things (i.e., plants) that are in it.

But (the other) said, “And how can I do that, being lame and not able to cause trouble?”

The blind man answer, “And I myself am able to do anything, not being able to see where I am going? But come now, let us be crafty.”

After plucking (long) grass from the neighbor and weaving a rope, he threw it to the blind man. And he said, “Take it and come along the rope to me.”

Now when he had done what was urged, when he arrived, he (the lame man) said, “Come, be my feet and carry me and I will be your eyes, guiding you from above to the right or left.”

Having done this, they went down into the royal garden. Then, finally, regardless of whether they did wrong or even did no wrong, their footprints were visible in the garden.

Now when the revelers left the wedding and went down into the royal garden, they were surprised to find footprints in the royal garden. They reported this to the king, saying “Everyone in your kingdom is a solider and no one is a civilian. How, then, are there civilian footprints in your royal garden?”

And he was amazed. And thus, the parable manifestly speaks of that which is hidden, as speaking in riddles to men, but God is ignorant of nothing.

Now the narrative tells how he summoned the lame man and the blind man and asked the blind man, “You did not go down into my royal garden, did you?”

He answered, “Oh, my lord! You see our handicaps; you know that I do not see where I am walking.”

Then, coming to the lame man, he asked him, “Did you go down into my royal garden?”

Answering he said, “O Lord, are you trying to embitter my soul regarding my handicap?”

What, then, will the just judge do? Having recognized in what manner both were tied together, he sets the lame man on the blind one and interrogates both of them with the whip and they will not be able to deny it. Each will condemn the other, the lame man saying, “And didn’t you pick me up and carry me away?”

And the blind man will say to the lame man, “And you yourself, weren’t you my eyes?”

In this way the body is united with the soul and the soul with the body for the judgment of the common work, and the judgment will be complete concerning both, both the body and the soul, of the works which were done, whether good or evil.

A Blind Man being stopped in a bad piece of road, met with a Lame Man, and entreated him to guide him through the difficulty he had got into. “How can I do that,” replied the Lame Man, “since I am scarce able to drag myself along?–but as you appear to be very strong, if you will carry me, we will seek our fortunes together. It will then be my interest to warn you of anything that may obstruct your way; your feet shall be my feet, and my eyes your eyes.” “With all my heart,” returned the Blind Man; “let us render each other our mutual services.” So taking his lame companion on his back, they, by means of their union, travelled on with safety and pleasure. This shows that it is from our wants and infirmities that almost all the connections of society take their rise.

Jefferys Taylor

Two persons once met in a dangerous place,
When each to the other thus opened his case:
Said one, “Oh! good Christian, do pray be so kind
As to lend me your aid, for you see I am blind.”

Said the other, “Good Christian! ’tis well that you came,
Do help me, I pray, for I’m dreadfully lame!”
“Alas!” said the blind, “what is now to be done?
I can run, but can’t see: you can see, but can’t run.”

But at last added he—”‘Tell you what, honest friend;
I will borrow your eyes, but my legs I will lend;”
So the cripple consented, and got on his back,
And thus both with safety continued their track.

By this fable you see we’ve endeavour’d to show,
What a little good-natured contrivance can do

Astragalus poterium is a synonym for Astragalus arnacantha, a plant in the Fabaceae family.

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Astragalus is said to have many health benefits, including:

• Protecting and supporting the immune system
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Astragalus can be found in capsule, liquid extract, or tea form. Some recommend boiling the astragalus directly into a tea to release its active compounds.

What Is A ‘Bad Thing’?

First we need some definitions, or more accurately some working models. Part of the challenge of addressing the range of issues that fall into a pot marked ‘bad things’ is that the pot is just so huge. The breadth of ills it contains defies investigation and scares us away from saying anything. However finding ways to divvy up different kinds of suffering can seem pernicious. What is the relationship between the loss of a five pound note and the loss of a life? On the one hand it courts absurdity to suggest any kind of connection at all. On the other if we insist on thresholds whereby one person’s loss ‘counts’ as a bad thing while another is told their loss is insufficiently grave we can miss the reality of human suffering. Who are we to hold court over whether someone else’s suffering is worthy of our consideration?

A small child who loses a year’s collection of pocket money en route to the shops to buy the toy of his dreams might have only lost a small sum, but the loss would be felt more dearly than a millionaire who lost several hundred times that amount. Moreover our own experience of our loss varies over time, maturity and even the simple passage of time can transform what, in one moment seems a bad thing into something far less pernicious. As an eight year old child I remember well the day my parents threatened to leave me behind as they headed out with my brother to what was supposed to be MY birthday celebration theatre trip. I remember wailing furiously against their perceived injustice of it all. Of course I have long since forgotten what I did to deserve such a threat and that screaming sense of injustice has passed. My parents may even have been right. What I felt so clearly then, that this was a very bad thing, might have been a good thing in disguise, but I could never see that at the time.

Even that most ultimate ‘bad thing’ – death –challenges us to create different standards of ‘bad things.’ As a Jew I hold every human life to be infinitely precious. But also, I know, that not every death is the same. Some deaths are utterly and uncontrollably awful and some deaths come as a release. But who has the audacity to proscribe either to a fatally ill human being or a mourning family whether they should see their loss as one or other kind of bad thing?

The working models that drive this book make no pretense to objectivity. They are constructed purely on the basis of subjective experience. Similarly I make no claim for their philosophical rigour, they are merely the way I approach this subject.

Bad Things

A bad thing is any thing which seems bad at the time, even if subsequently the cloud reveals a silver lining. A person walks along the street, stubs their toe on a paving stone and squeals in pain. This is a bad thing even if, looking down at the offending masonry they see an abandoned twenty pound note nestling in the crack they tripped over. Fortunately, many of the bad things that happen to us are equally unchallenging, even if they are not so clearly followed by a good thing. My bicycle was recently stolen, it cost me money and inconvenience, but I don’t feel emotionally disturbed by the loss. Indeed the temptation is to ignore the loss, consider it not really a bad thing at all. I could just move on. But I believe it is important to recognise any bad thing for what it is. There is, claims the Biblical sage Kohelet;

A time for being born and a time for dying.

A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted,

A time for tearing down and a time for building up,

A time for weeping and a time for dancing.

(Ecclesiastes 3)

Moving on, refusing or refraining to recognise and respond to the bad things that confront us in our life dulls our senses, we become blind to the extraordinary miracles that infuse our every day and our every breath. Moreover when we go through life training ourselves not to pay attention to some bad things we are in danger of losing the sense of holy indignation we should feel when confronted by something truly appalling. If our first response to a bad thing is, ‘it can’t be that bad, it’s probably nothing to worry about,’ how are supposed notice those bad things which are worth responding to, whether it be for our own emotional health, our friends or family or for the sake of the world? Just moving on, seems like a particularly poor form of pedagogy, training ourselves away from inquiring, away from observing, until we become unable to learn at all.

I’m in good company claiming such an expansive conception of ‘bad things.’ The Rabbis of ancient times held that Jews had to make blessings even on the occurrence of a bad thing. What if, they asked, a farmer’s ground flooded but this loss promised a better harvest in the season to come? Nonetheless, comes the answer, make the blessing on the bad thing.

This is not a book about transcending the bad things in our lives. Nor will it promise ways to eliminate bad things from our futures. A focus of this book will be looking at responses to bad things, but it will never pretend those things we face in our life are not ‘bad.’

We have been discussing relatively benign examples of ‘bad things,’ the sorts of woe one probably doesn’t need a book to address, but this is not really a book about tripping over paving slabs, even if we don’t discover lost treasures as we stumble. We have more disturbing problems to face. It would be wonderful if only all bad things were benign and un-troubling, sadly, this is not the case. Bad things often lead to suffering.

Suffering

Suffering is experienced when a bad thing leads to the existential response, ‘why is this happening?’ A person who does not feel existentially challenged by the bad things they experience is not, for our current purposes, suffering. They may face great struggles. They may even be unable to cope with the woes. They certainly deserve and need our support and comfort, but they are in a very different place to those who have been provoked and are challenging.

The moment, metaphorical or otherwise, when we hang our head or lift up our eyes and ask is the moment we begin to suffer. It is at this point that the pain we perceive threatens, in the words of Clifford Geertz, ‘to break in upon man; at the limit of his capacities.’[1] When the question, ‘Why?’ barges its way, bidden or otherwise, into our pain we are in danger of being overrun. For Geertz a particular challenge posed by suffering is the challenge to our powers of analysis. Our pain jars us, we can’t look away rather we are drawn into trying to contextualise and comprehend. Our brains are one huge array of interconnecting neurons furiously looking for patterns in the world and when we suffer we lose, temporarily or otherwise, the ability to recognise those patterns. It can lead to a deep disquiet, or worse. Our inability to comprehend even a singular event scuttles everything. This is a central understanding behind the later work of the philosopher of the Holocaust Emil Fackenheim. For Fackenheim a ‘single event of inexplicable horror has the power to make everything inexplicable, including the most explicable events.’[2] When we can’t understand why a child dies we can’t understand why we have to pay for the milk in the shops, we can’t understand why the choice between two different television channels can reduce us to tears. Suffering, like an over-flooded river, bursts through the frameworks erected to allow us to make sense of our lives. When we can’t contextualise any single event, we are in danger of losing every context. Suffering and responding to suffering are the major foci of this book.

Evil

There may be times when a person is unable to hold their suffering. We may find our defenses so severely breached that we can find no context for our suffering in a world created by a good and all-powerful God. In less religious language there are moments when the only explanation we can grasp is that there is some outside malevolent force ripping through our lives. This is what we shall understand as evil. Evil is experienced when a person who is suffering can find no answer that satisfies their challenge other than the presence of evil. Evil is the last-chance saloon of our approach; the net to catch us when all else fails.

We should be wary of turning to claim our suffering has been bought on by evil. When we can find contexts for our suffering without resorting to evil we can become stronger, we can rebuild as better people. Evil, on the other hand, threatens at the deepest place, our entire moral framework.

Not all bad things lead to suffering. Not all suffering results in a person perceiving evil. But all perceptions of evil are driven by suffering and all suffering comes from the experience of one or more bad things.

Got a question for Philologos? Ask him directly at philologos@mosaicmagazine.com.

Not everyone is fond of the passage in the Passover Haggadah in which three early rabbis—Yosi the Galilean, Eliezer, and Akiva—compete by means of rudimentary algebra to see who can inflict more plagues on the Egyptians at the Red Sea. Yosi, observing that the book of Exodus tells us that the ten plagues in Egypt proper were the “finger of God” but that His “great hand” was at work at the sea, turns this into the five-fingered equation 1/10=5/x, in which x, the number of punishments meted out at the Red Sea, equals 50. Eliezer, claiming that there were not ten but 40 plagues in Egypt proper, gives us 200 as the correct value for x, and Akiva then outdoes him by proposing 50 plagues in Egypt and a value for x of 250.

For whoever feels that ten plagues were quite enough, this is unedifying.

Eliezer and Akiva rely for their equations on the 49th verse of the 78th Psalm, which is a poetic retelling of the Exodus story. The books of the Bible were not written with punctuation (which, as many a bar-mitzvah knows, is part of what makes reading aloud from a Torah scroll so difficult), and a reasonable English version of 78:49’s original unpunctuated version would be, “He [God] let loose upon them [the Egyptians] His fierce anger [ḥaron apo] wrath [evrah] and indignation [va-za’am] and trouble [v’tsarah] a company of evil angels [mishlaḥat malakhei ra’im].”

Eliezer arrives at 40 plagues in Egypt proper by multiplying the ten plagues by the fourfold enumeration in this verse of “wrath,” “indignation,” “trouble,” and “a company of evil angels.” Akiva, for his part, makes it fivefold by adding “His fierce anger.” Using modern punctuation, in other words, Eliezer would have written the verse, “And He let loose upon them His fierce anger: wrath, and indignation, and trouble, a company of evil angels,” treating wrath, indignation, trouble, and evil angels as fierce anger’s four expressions. Akiva would have put a comma instead of a colon after “fierce anger,” converting it into the first of a series of five.

Eliezer and Akiva did not, of course, know about colons and commas. Yet a rabbinic system of punctuating the Bible did develop in talmudic times in the form of the Masoretic ta’amey ha-mikra, the cantillation or chant signs that were codified in Palestine and Babylonia between the 7th and 10th centuries. Although we tend to think of these signs as musical instructions, they also serve a grammatical and syntactical purpose and are often analogous, in the way they break up sentences, to our modern punctuation marks. While the codification of these signs took place many centuries after Eliezer and Akiva’s algebraic dispute, it is worth asking whether they throw any light on it.

There are several dozen cantillation signs, some extremely common, others occurring rarely. Classifying them in terms of the power relations of their day, the Masoretes, the textual scholars who developed them, divided them into several groups. The most powerful were the “emperors,” signs that marked, like our periods, the ends of sentences or, like our colons and semicolons, full stops within them. After them came the “kings,” which separated phrases from each other as do our commas and dashes, followed by “ministers” or “subordinates,” which separated words within phrases. There were also “servants,” which linked words within a single phrase to indicate that they were closer to each other than to other words in the same phrase.

How do the Masoretespunctuate Psalms 78:49? They start by giving “He let loose upon them,” Hebrew y’shalaḥ bam, a cantillation sign called pashta, a minister that separates this verb and its pronoun from the direct-object nouns that follow it. Ḥaron apo, “His fierce anger,” receives a munaḥ, which is a servant, followed by a r’vi’i, a minister—the first sign to show that these two Hebrew words are closely linked, the second to set them apart from the next words. Evrah, wrath, and va-za’am, “and indignation,” both have a munaḥ again, while v’tsarah, “and trouble,” takes an etnaḥta, an emperor that creates a mid-sentence stop. Finally, the phrase mishlaḥat malakhey ra’im, “a company of evil angels,” concludes with the emperor of a sof-pasuk, an end-of-sentence stop.

What happens when we translate these cantillation signs into our own punctuation marks? Surprisingly, we get a result that agrees fully neither with Eliezer nor with Akiva. It reads, “And He let loose upon them his fierce anger, wrath and indignation and trouble: a company of evil angels.” In essence, this is a sentence with four elements: “And He let loose upon them,” “His fierce anger,” “wrath and indignation and trouble,” and “a company of evil angels.” Its second element, “fierce anger,” can be understood either as the first of a series that continues with “wrath and indignation and trouble,” or as a generalization of which “wrath and indignation and trouble” are three specific cases. The sentence’s fourth element, on the other hand, “a company of evil angels,” is clearly not part of the series at all. It is a summation of it, telling us that the elements taken together are like a company of evil angels sent to afflict the Egyptians.

According to the Masoretes’ punctuation, therefore, the ten plagues could have been either tripled or quadrupled at the Red Sea, not quadrupled or quintupled. If Akiva is right that “His fierce anger” is on a par with “wrath and indignation and trouble,” we have a series with four elements. If Eliezer is right that it includes them, we have a series with three. In either case, “a company of evil angels” does not belong to the count.

That the Masoretes were probably right about Psalms 78:49 is borne out by the parallelistic structure of the entire chapter. Parallelism is a basic technique of biblical poetry whereby the second half of each line repeats or amplifies the first in different language. Thus, 78:47-48, which describe the plague of hail, read: “He destroyed their vines with hail; and their sycamore trees with frost. He gave up their cattle also to the hail; and cast their flocks to hot thunderbolts.” The words following the semicolon—the ethnaḥta of the Masoretes—rephrase the plague described by the words preceding it. “A company of evil angels” is similar.

At most, then, there were only 200 plagues at the Red Sea—and possibly, some of you will be happy to hear, as few as 150.

A happy Passover to all!

Book of Yashar

51 Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah and upon all these cities brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.

52 And he overthrew these cities, all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground; and Ado the wife of Lot looked back to see the destruction of the cities, for her compassion was moved on account of her daughters who remained in Sodom, for they did not go with her.

53 And when she looked back she became a pillar of salt, and it is yet in that place unto this day.

54 And the oxen which stood in that place daily licked up the salt to the extremities of their feet, and in the morning it would spring forth afresh, and they again licked it up unto this day.

Lot's Wife

Anna Akhmatova (Odessa / St Petersburg / Leningrad)

1889 –

1966

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,

over a black mountain, in his giant track,

while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:

"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,

the square where once you sang,

the spinning-shed, at the empty windows

set in the tall house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman?

Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Lot's Wife Poem by Wislawa Szymborska

2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator, and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature

They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now--every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.

JWA

This disturbing tale is reminiscent of other folktales or myths with a “don’t-look-back-or-everything-will-be-lost” motif, which here adds drama to the narrative line. This motif appears in Hittite rituals, Babylonian charms, and elsewhere—but perhaps most notably in the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. (Orpheus is told not to look back as he leads his wife Eurydice out of Hades; but he does, and she remains there forever.) In addition to using this folkloristic motif, the story of Lot’s wife and her transformation into a salt pillar has an etiological function. An etiology explains the origins of something, often a strange natural phenomenon; in this case it provides an explanation for the striking salt formations along the Dead Sea, appropriately called Sea of Salt in Hebrew.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jewish-moneylending/

General histories of the Middle Ages, and even more specialized ones such as those on medieval commerce, say two things about Jews: they were “usurers” and they engaged in the slave trade. One of the oldest Christian accusations against Jews in the medieval period was, indeed, that of usury. If by “usury” we accept the Canon Law definition of any profit whatever, then Jews were of course usurers; but the modern understanding of the term is rather the taking of excessive interest, and to avoid that argument, and the pejorative connotations of the term, “moneylending” is preferred in this article.

Biblical law forbids taking or giving interest to “your brother” (a fellow Jew), whether money or food or “any thing.” The Talmud interpreted this very strictly, so much so that even greeting someone from whom you have borrowed, if such greeting had not previously been the custom, is forbidden. [For Biblical law regarding moneylending, see, for example, Exodus 22:24, Deuteronomy 23:20-21, Leviticus 25:35-37.]

The Bible further permitted lending money on interest to a “stranger”, but prohibited it to a fellow Jew (“your brother”). The Talmud observes that even the borrower transgresses the commandment if he borrows on interest…

Originally, the medieval rabbinical attitude toward lending money on interest to Gentiles was very conservative, restricting it to scholars (not only as a means of income but because it was felt that they would be cautious about such loans and limit the interest charged) or to cases where it was absolutely necessary for livelihood.

Moneylending Yielded High Profits for Little Risk

Ultimately, however, the potential of great profits and the widespread demand for moneylending made it universal among Jews. Mordecai B. Hillel of Germany (b. 1298) wrote that there is no profit in any form of commerce like that to be made in lending money. Ibn Adret in Spain observed that it has become permitted for everyone to charge interest on loans to Gentiles, “and now all have made themselves ‘sages’ in this respect, adding that he heard in the name of Rashi, that this is because taxes have constantly been increased and there is no longer any limit to “because of livelihood” (i.e. in order to meet their tax burden, Jews had no alternative.)

As noted elsewhere, fanciful theories have been advanced as fact with regard to Jews either having been “forced,” or voluntarily choosing to abandon landholding, and with no alternative choosing moneylending as a livelihood. Not one scrap of evidence has ever been produced to support such theories, and in fact there is no evidence. Undoubtedly the above statement by authoritative rabbis are correct: the ever increasing tax burdens, on the one hand, and the relatively large profits to be made with virtually no risk, on the other, encouraged Jews to engage in moneylending on ever larger scales.

Christian Moneylending: Ignored Laws, High Interest

Another factor that has sometimes been suggested, the lack of alternative availability of lenders owing to church prohibitions on usury, ignores reality in favor of theory. While it is true that canon law, beginning in the late twelfth century and throughout the thirteenth, placed absolute prohibitions and harsh penalties on Christian lending on interest, it is also true that these measures were frequently ignored in practice even by churches, monasteries, bishops and the popes themselves.

Italian merchants were present in France and Germany and ever ready to lend money, charging such rates of interest as the market would allow. It has frequently been pointed out that the rates of interest charged by Jews never approached the rates charged by Christian lenders, including Church authorities…

Strange Relationships

Just as Jews lent money to Christians, so they also frequently borrowed money from them, also on interest. Indicative of this strange and often uncertain relationship that existed between Jews and Christians is an interesting responsum concerning a Jew who had borrowed money from a Christian and asked a Jewish friend to give him the money to repay the debt. Then some other Christians came and robbed the houses of the Jews (the question was whether the debtor was not required to return the money that his friend had given him, since it would anyway have been stolen, had he not given it to him: the answer was. that h e was obligated to repay it.).

However piously Church officials protested against “usury;” they were themselves quite willing to borrow money from Jews. Already in the ninth century we hear of priests selling church vessels to Jews, and later such object were frequently given as pledges for loans, in spite of the protests of the cantonists and civil law…Jews also had to be careful about taking surety objects that later could be claimed to have been stolen (although at times laws protected Jews against such charges) or “bloodstained garments” that could be suspicious.

It was certainly prudent and necessary to have some form of security, in the way of pledges, for loans to Christians, since it was often easy enough for the borrower simply not to repay the loans…Eventually it became necessary for civil authorities, and particularly the kings, to enact measures protecting the moneylending privileges of the Jews and to ensure that they were repaid.

Did Jews Actually Charge Exorbitant Interest?

There is not doubt that some Jews, at least, charged what today would be considered exorbitant rates of interest. There is the report, for example, of the abbey of Saint-Benigne in Dijon (France), which in 1196 borrowed 1700 livres (pounds) from a Jew at the rate of 65 percent. For eleven years the abbey could not pay anything on the loan so that the debt had grown to 9825 livres. In Marseilles, the abbey of Saint-Victor in 1185 owed 80,000 sous to the Jews of the city and granted them some property, which would have included churches in payment. To avoid this “scandal” of Jews owning churches, the bishop of Antibes assumed the debt himself.

On the other hand, it must be realized that these rates of interest were annual, and rarely did loans to individuals, at least, remain unpaid for as long as a year…As we have seen, though, in some cases the debtors made few or no payments for years, and then complained bitterly about the high interest.

Reprinted with permission from Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (Routledge).

Alter

1. al-tashchet. Evidently, this is still another musical term, the meaning of which has been lost. The medieval Hebrew commentator David Kimchi ingeniously links it with David's rebuke to his men when they came upon Saul sleeping in their cave: 'al-tashhiheitu, "do him no violence." The tie-in of the superscription with an episode in David's life seems to be an after-the-fact editorial maneuver. The poem is a general psalm of supplication, turning into a thanksgiving psalm at the end, as many others do.

Did Lot Get His Just Desserts? Trauma, Revenge, and Re-enactment in Genesis 19.30-38

Kirsi Cobb

Abstract

In Genesis 19.30-38, Lot’s daughters commit incest with their father to save his seed. Earlier in Genesis 19.6-8, Lot offered his daughters to be raped by the men of Sodom to save the honour of his male guests. Reading these stories together, in the latter, we observe an inverted world where victims become perpetrators and vice versa. If read through trauma theory, the inversion could imply that the daughters’ rape of Lot was motivated by revenge; however, traumatic re-enactment, where the daughters repeat their earlier trauma but also invert it, could also suit the textual evidence. Verses 30–38 could be read as an attempt to master previous trauma through repetition, where the recurring descriptions of design and act of rape are central to the interpretation of the narrative. This reading does not lessen the horror of the passage but rather adds to our understanding of trauma in Genesis 19.30–38.

Graybill, Rhiannon. Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (p. 173). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

My reading will also put pressure on how we frame harm in the Bathsheba story. To this end, I take up the question of whether Bathsheba is best described as a victim, and David as a sexual predator. This model of predation is suggested both by the biblical text (via Nathan’s parable in 2 Sam 12) and by many feminist readers. However, I argue that just as “consent” is an inadequate framework for reading the rape stories of Dinah, Tamar,

and Lot’s daughters, so too is “predation” (or any model organized around immutable, perverted, and recidivistic “predators” and innocent “victims”) both insufficient and ill suited for describing the forms of sexual and nonsexual harm in this text. In place of predation, I will employ the category of peremption to describe the harm of the Bathsheba story. I adopt this term from Joseph J. Fischel and his analysis of adolescent sexuality in Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent. For Fischel, “peremption” identifies the “uncontrolled disqualification of possibility”—in particular, the disqualification of certain forms of sex, sexuality, and sexual subjectivity.5 The root of the word, the Latin perimere, means to utterly kill or destroy; in the U.S. legal system, a “peremptory challenge” is a type of objection that requires no explanation. With respect to sexual harm, “peremption” describes the way that certain future possibilities, including possible forms of sexual subjectivity and being in the world, are peremptorily foreclosed. Fischel uses the term with specific reference to adolescent sexual subjectivity. In contrast, my focus here, as throughout Texts after Terror, is on women, in this case Bathsheba. In reading the Bathsheba story, replacing a model of David as sexual predator with one of Bathsheba as perempted lets us explore female embodiment and subjectivity, as well as the forms of harm Bathsheba experiences, without collapsing these into an essentializing and flattening narrative of victimization.

so in imagining the possibilities of an after to biblical sexual violence, I have found myself turning to another work of alternative futures and feminist possibilities: Joanna Russ’s 1975 novel The Female Man...

With her four heroines, Russ deconstructs what we expect of a novel, a narrator, and a feminist intervention. The novel is alternately angry, funny, perplexing, gleeful, and ambivalent, all at once. There is plenty of violence and misogyny, as well as more everyday scenes of hostility, including a painfully accurate description of tweed-wearing

misogynists at an academic cocktail party. But there is also pleasure and possibility, which unfold without denying the pain that both precede it and persist into the present moment. Instead of a polite retelling or a modest reimagining, Russ appropriates the figure of Jael, and the biblical story of her deadly strike against Sisera (Judg 4–5), and uses her to imagine a different sort of story entirely. It is this spirit that has animated the readings that fill this book, as I have convened my own encounters that span women and worlds. And in the spirit of Russ’s novel, I have suggested that feminist readings of biblical stories, even rape stories, should be angry, funny, perplexing, queer, and ambivalent, all at once. This is doubly true, I submit, when the stories are rape stories, or stories that involve sexual exploitation, sexual violence, or sexualized misogyny. We can do more than simply feel sadness about rape stories,

whether biblical or contemporary. Russ’s novel opens onto questions of the what else and the what after: what else we might do with biblical rape stories, and what comes after—after rape, after misogyny, after great pain. This after, like the rape stories that precede and create it, is often fuzzy, messy, or icky, or some mixture of all three. Some biblical rape stories have endings that are erased entirely, or left too fuzzy in the text for us to read: Dinah’s silence, Nineveh’s destruction. Others are messy—the rape stories of Bathsheba and Tamar that leave their mark on the house of David, the entangled legacies of Sarah and Hagar. Or icky—incest, violence, exposure, devastation; Lot’s daughters and Daughter Zion forced to go on, in spite of their suffering. But we can also notice other details, other ways of reading. In this spirit, Texts after Terror has sketched out tactics for reading that

help open up rape stories (and stories of all kinds) in new ways: refusing to claim a position of innocence, resisting paranoia and paranoid reading, following the traces of sticky affect, and reading with and through literature.

Sexual Offences Act 2003

1Rape

(1)A person (A) commits an offence if—

(a)he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis,

(b)B does not consent to the penetration, and

(c)A does not reasonably believe that B consents.

https://d-nb.info/1174303360/34

Can a Woman Rape a Man and Why Does It Matter? Natasha McKeever1 © The Author(s) 2018 Abstract Under current UK legislation, only a man can commit rape. This paper argues that this is an unjustifed double standard that reinforces problematic gendered stereo‑ types about male and female sexuality. I frst reject three potential justifcations for making penile penetration a condition of rape: (1) it is physically impossible for a woman to rape a man; (2) it is a more serious ofence to forcibly penetrate someone than to force them to penetrate you; (3) rape is a gendered crime. I argue that, as these justifcations fail, a woman having sex with a man without his consent ought to be considered rape. I then explain some further reasons that this matters. I argue that, not only is it unjust, it is also both a cause and a consequence of harmful ste‑ reotypes and prejudices about male and female sexuality: (1) men are ‘always up for sex’; (2) women’s sexual purity is more important than men’s; (3) sex is something men do to women. Therefore, I suggest that, if rape law were made gender neutral, these stereotypes would be undermined and this might make some (albeit small) dif‑ ference to the problematic ways that sexual relations are sometimes viewed between men and women more generally.

The Legal Definition and Process, Punishment and Treatment, Incidence, and Rationale for the Offense of Incest in England and Wales are Discussed.

Abstract

Currently, it is an offense in England and Wales for a man to have sexual intercourse with a woman who he knows to be his granddaughter, daughter, sister, or mother. It is also an offense for a woman 16 years of age or over to permit her grandfather, father, brother, or son to have sexual intercourse with her by consent. Incest is punishable by imprisonment not exceeding 7 years; however, if the incest is with a girl under 13 years of age, imprisonment may be for life.

The punishment for attempted incest is imprisonment not exceeding 2 years. No prosecutions for incest may be initiated without the approval of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Of 57 cases of father-daughter incest, non-custodial sentences were imposed in only 9 percent of the cases. In 12 cases of brother-sister incest, imprisonment was imposed in only 4 cases. Treatment for the offender is rarely available even when clearly appropriate.

Criminal statistics for England and Wales show that about 300 cases of incest are reported each year; about half come to trial. In 1908, the Government took the view that incest was not rare and that society had an interest in prohibiting it on genetic grounds. The genetic rationale for the offense was repeated in 1974 by an Appellate Court, even though the medical evidence for genetic damage from incest is slight. The protection offered to children by the law is reasonable, and incest should be retained as a separate criminal offense. However, it should be restricted to the relationships of father and daughter, grandfather and granddaughter, and brother and sister where either brother or sister is under 18 years of age. Footnotes are provided.

Sexual Offences Act 1956

10Incest by a man

(1)It is an offence for a man to have sexual intercourse with a woman whom he knows to be his grand-daughter, daughter, sister or mother.

(2)In the foregoing subsection " sister " includes half-sister, and for the purposes of that subsection any expression importing a relationship between two people shall be taken to apply notwithstanding that the relationship is not traced through lawful wedlock.

11Incest by a woman

(1)It is an offence for a woman of the age of sixteen or over to permit a man whom she knows to be her grandfather, father, brother or son to have sexual intercourse with her by her consent.

(2)In the foregoing subsection " brother" includes half-brother, and for the purposes of that subsection any expression importing a relationship between two people shall be taken to apply notwithstanding that the relationship is not traced through lawful wedlock.

Incestual Duplication by Female Sex Offenders: Lot’s Daughters (Genesis 19:30–38) as Challenge to Typologies and Violent Family-Systems

Ellen De Doncker¹

https://jibs.hcommons.org/2023/08/22/incestual-duplication-by-female-sex-offenders-lots-daughters-genesis-1930-38-as-challenge-to-typologies-and-violent-family-systems/#_ftn9

Stereotypes about women also underly the myth that men could not be raped, especially not by female offenders. In the essentialist, gender-stereotyped view, women are defined by “sensitivity, dependence, passivity, emotionality, quietness, innocence, grace, caring and purity.”^[8] In this view, female sexuality is associated with sensuality at best, and passivity more generally; its connection with any sort of violence is absent. How could a passive, dependent woman rape a strong, independent man? Except for (sensual) manipulation – as a wholly different motive and approach from male perpetrators – women, in the essentialist understanding, cannot rape men, it is unnatural to them.^[9] It then seems that “real women” cannot rape men, and that “real men” cannot be raped by women.

At the same time, while not justifying the lack of research on male victims of sexual abuse, the majority of victims of sexual abuse being female also plays a role in the discrepancy in which victims are focused on, male victims being largely left aside. In academic research on sexual violence, a similar discrepancy is to be observed. Bell hooks comments on this lack of research about male sexual victims:

It lends credibility to stereotypes that suggest men are violent, women are not; men are abusers, women are victims. … It allows us to overlook or ignore the extent to which women exert coercive authority over others or act violently. The fact that women may not commit violent acts as often as men does not negate the reality of female violence.^[10]

This discrepancy is not only harmful for male victims and the way they are (not) presented in the media, but plays on a larger scale, too, a negative role in lending credibility to gender stereotypes such as men being invulnerable.

The same duality, stressing female vulnerability in primarily addressing women as victims of sexual abuse (or men as victims only of other men), occurs as well in studies on the treatment of sexual violence within the Bible, where the issue of female perpetrators and male victims constitutes a topic that has hitherto received only little attention in biblical studies. From the end of the 20^th century onward, attention to the theme of sexual violence grew and led to important publications, from text-critical, feminist, and cultural theorist readings.^[18] However, despite the growing attention to the issue of sexual violence within biblical studies, the first book addressing specifically the case of sexual violence against men in the Bible appeared on in 2021.^[19] Accordingly, biblical research appears to mirror those broader societal ideas and reluctancies regarding female-on-male sexual violence.

First, some positive portrayals. Benno Jacobs (1934), in a fairly restricted understanding of womanhood as preserving procreation, states that the sexual violence of the daughters “derives from the utmost heroism” because they “do not act out of lust but in order to fulfil their womanly destiny and preserve their lineage.”^[30] Another less limited and more recent positive appraisal of Lot’s daughters is given by Carden Michael, who speaks of the sexual violence as “poetic justice,” an act of revenge after Lot offered up his daughters. From a theological perspective, Michael also recalls that important figures (Ruth and Namaah) will come from the sons of both daughters, thus “initiating the line of the Messiah.”^[31] While on a theological level this positive appraisal might be correct, on a moral level, it seems difficult to characterise this violent act as something purely positive. Moreover, the view of the daughters’ sexual violence as revenge could be difficult to hold, as there is no textual indication for revenge as a motive behind their violent act, and within the cultural, patriarchal rights of the father, with the daughters being fully submitted to him, they might not even have felt the need for revenge.^[32] Rhiannon Graybill views the daughters’ violence in a rather positive light, though still “fuzzy, messy, icky,” referring to the daughters’ belief that they are the sole survivors of the apocalyptic events at Sodom and Gomora, which might have pushed them to carry out this violent act, as revenge and as self-preservation.^[33]

The negative appraisal of the daughters of Lot as sex offenders goes together with a negative appraisal of the seeming neutrality of the story. In fact, the positive appraisal of Lot’s daughters obfuscates their violence, because their intention stands at the foreground and seems to largely excuse their behaviour. But, there is serious sexual violence at play: they rape their father. Greenough comments:

What we have here is a narrator, and subsequent interpreters, who share a reluctance in naming the event by what is described: an act of sexual assault against a man. Being unable to name it as sexual abuse further perpetuates the myths around sexual violence against men: namely, that men cannot be sexually abused, and that girls and women cannot be perpetrators of sexual violence. Moreover, Lot’s story speaks back to the myth around male rape that the presence of an erection or ejaculation implies consent. Lot is narrated as being unaware of both of his assaults, and therefore unable to consent.^[34]

The negative appraisal of Lot’s daughters strives to rectify the too glorious stance of a positive appraisal, but perhaps does not take the damaged state in which the daughters find themselves seriously.

A more nuanced analysis could combine attention for the daughters’ lived trauma and a negative response to the sexual violence towards their father. This would underline the difficulty of evaluating Lot’s daughters and their actions. Cobb writes:

All these women acted under impossible circumstances and made impossible decisions to gain at least a sliver of agency. To understand their actions apart from trauma would do them injustice; however, this does not mean that any of these women are necessarily without guilt. Rather, it means that making ethical evaluations of the characters becomes complex as decisions made in circumstances with limited or no agency remain exceedingly problematic.^[35]

It is precisely this last view, combining attention for the lived abuse of the daughters and their active violence as abusers, that will be used in this paper, to come to a nuanced understanding of the role of the daughters and, in a next step, confront these findings to current thinking. I prefer this view to the polarised negative or positive appraisal, since it already announces and raises questions to one of the themes I will explore later: the difficult binary of victim–abuser.

https://www.sofer.co.uk/oddities

There are some 15 words in the Tanach which are nakud (dotted). Some say they were inserted to call
attention to some important homiletical teaching in connection with the words, but the most likely explanation is that they indicate that the words or letters were doubtful and are to be deleted. For example, Emmanuel Tov explains these are cancellation dots, but instead of removing the elements they draw attention to, the dots themselves were ‘codified’. Presumably when Elijah comes and resolves the various scribal disagreements that have sprung up. Apparently Elijah will ask ‘why have you written these words’ Ezra the scribe will reply ‘I have placed dots over them’ and if he says ‘you have written them correctly’ then he will remove the dots! (Avot d’Rabbi Natan 30b).

10 of these appear in the Torah mostly in Genesis or Numbers, though the last being in Deuteronomy being the most extravagant with no less than 11 dots over three consecutive words. You can see pictures in the video and the PDF download.


3. Gen. 19:33 - uv’kumah (and he [Lot] was not aware of her lying down and of her getting up) has one dot over the second vav. The Ba’al Haturim says this is to teach us that Lot’s daughter lay with her father before vav i.e. six hours of the night had passed and thus he was sleeping soundly when she got up. And he was not aware of when his youngest daughter arose but he was when his eldest did. (ARN 34:4), but the Talmud (Nazir 23a) and B'reshit Rabbah 51:8 say that the dotted vav indicates that he was unaware of her lying down but was aware in reality of her getting up, but acted as if he did not. With this in mind he should have not have let his daughters ply him with drink a second night, but he did. I'm a bit circumspect about this entry in my book above - as it is also for children!

UP TO HERE

• Galen, as cited in Nutton, V. (2004). Ancient Medicine.
• Laqueur, T. (1990). Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.

Hippocratic and Galenic Medicine: In ancient Greece, influential medical theories proposed by Hippocrates and Galen suggested that conception depended on the mutual emission of "seed" from both partners. They believed a woman might not emit her seed during her first sexual experience due to inexperience or discomfort. This misunderstanding of reproductive physiology perpetuated the myth.

Jewish Encyclopedia

GALEN (GALENUS CLAUDIUS):

By: Richard Gottheil, Isaac Broydé

His Philosophy Criticized by Maimonides.

Greek physician and philosopher; born at Pergamus, Mysia, about 131; died about 200. Eclipsed by those of Aristotle, Galen's philosophical works were not held in high esteem by the Jews. Maimonides cites them only when they are in accordance with his own views, as, for instance, with regard to the impossibility of proving the eternity of matter ("Moreh Nebukim," ii. 15). Once he severely criticizes Galen, declaring that outside the field of medicine he is no authority ("Pirḳe Mosheh," xxv.), this stricture being called forth by the following utterance by Galen concerning the Mosaic conception of the omnipotence of God: "The difference between the Greek philosophers and Moses is this: In order that matter may be put in order it suffices for Moses that God should wish matter to be arranged. He believes that everything is possible with God, even the conversion of ashes into a horse or an ox; while we believe that there exist things with which, being naturally impossible, God does not interfere; He chooses only the best between possibilities" ("De Substantia Facultatis Naturæ," ed. Kuhn, iv. 760). Falaquera also shows slight respect for Galen's philosophy, affirming that in his later years the great physician wrote a work betraying ignorance of physics ("Mebaḳḳesh," p. 33).

But if in the domain of philosophy Galen's authority was contested, he reigned supreme in the field of medicine. Maimonides himself helped largely to propagate Galen's medical works by publishing a summary of sixteen of them, which were, so to speak, canonized by the Alexandrian school and by the Arabs. Maimonides was followed by many other Jewish physicians who paraphrased or translated Galen's works from Arabic versions (chiefly made by Ḥunain ibn Isḥaḳ) and from the Latin. These paraphrases and translations, the greater part of which are still extant in manuscript in various European libraries, are as follows:

Encyclopedia Britanica

The status and influence of the Targums became assured after the Second Temple was destroyed in ad 70, when synagogues replaced the Temple as houses of worship. For it was in the synagogue that the practice of reading from the Old Testament became widely observed, along with the custom of providing these readings with a translation into Aramaic. When Scripture was read aloud in the synagogue, it was translated aloud by a meturgeman, or professional interpreter (hence the name Targum), for the benefit of the congregation. The translator tried to reproduce the original text as closely as possible, but since his object was to give an intelligible rendering of the biblical text, the Targums eventually took on the character of paraphrase and commentary, leaving literal translation behind. To prevent misconceptions, a meturgeman expanded and explained what was obscure, adjusted the incidents of the past to the ideas of later times, emphasized the moral lessons to be learned from the biblical narratives, and adapted the rules and regulations of the Scriptures to the conditions and requirements of the current age. The method by which the text was thus utilized as a vehicle for conveying homiletic discourses, traditional sayings, legends, and allegories is abundantly illustrated by the later Targums, as opposed to the more literal translations of the earlier Targums.

Encyclopedia Britanica

The status and influence of the Targums became assured after the Second Temple was destroyed in ad 70, when synagogues replaced the Temple as houses of worship. For it was in the synagogue that the practice of reading from the Old Testament became widely observed, along with the custom of providing these readings with a translation into Aramaic. When Scripture was read aloud in the synagogue, it was translated aloud by a meturgeman, or professional interpreter (hence the name Targum), for the benefit of the congregation. The translator tried to reproduce the original text as closely as possible, but since his object was to give an intelligible rendering of the biblical text, the Targums eventually took on the character of paraphrase and commentary, leaving literal translation behind. To prevent misconceptions, a meturgeman expanded and explained what was obscure, adjusted the incidents of the past to the ideas of later times, emphasized the moral lessons to be learned from the biblical narratives, and adapted the rules and regulations of the Scriptures to the conditions and requirements of the current age. The method by which the text was thus utilized as a vehicle for conveying homiletic discourses, traditional sayings, legends, and allegories is abundantly illustrated by the later Targums, as opposed to the more literal translations of the earlier Targums.

Intensive action¶

Intensive action means that the verbal action is strengthened in some way.