Blog/December 2009/Dec 11th
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Dec 11th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!
This shabbat is also chanukkah, the celebration of the victory a small group of Jews who remained true to Torah, over the much larger number of Hellenized Jews and the Greeks themselves. It also happens to be Sarah's birthday; but since it falls on shabbat, her real celebration will be Saturday night. Last week I told you how old my sister is -- Sarah is turning… exactly six-fifteenths her aunt's age.
I came across a very interesting book (in PDF format -- the original was published in the 1930s) this week, which shows a number of relationships between Hebrew and ancient Egyptian. It makes a strong case for Joseph's story (yes, from this week's Torah portion) being true based on the strong correlation between the descriptions of Egyptian court life in the Torah and those from various archaeological sources. Essentially, his thesis is that only someone who knew the royal Egyptian court intimately could have written the stories in the Torah and gotten the details correct.
That is interesting to me, because our tradition holds that there are layers of meaning embedded in the Torah, and that not all that meaning is apparent to readers in each generation. This is a case in point: the generation which left Egypt may have been familiar with the details of court life in Egypt, but surely the generations after would have no idea of the literal accuracy of the text! So we see later commentators coming up with interesting, often forced reconciliations of various statements... and only now, thousands of years later, can we view the text and understand that the odd phraseology and descriptions are meant as a subtle hint that the Author knew what was going on in Egypt! As I was thinking all that, I read some other article about coincidences in Torah. Interesting stuff.
Important news:
- In case you were worried that sufganiyot are too healthy, now you can get vodka-filled sufganiyot
- Israel was rated most expensive on the IKEA Billy Index. But not to worry, we're cheapest on the Melech Hafalafel Index
- Those fun-loving Swedes are at it again! What will they think of next?
Not nice news:
Shameful lack of spine:
Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!
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