Judaism
77 findings, grouped by tradition.
Judaism34
- Star of DavidScholem showed in 1949 that neither the Zohar nor Isaac Luria mentions it; the name Shield of David first marks the figure in a Spanish manuscript of the early 1300s.
- CovenantIn 1954 George Mendenhall compared the Sinai covenant with Hittite vassal treaties of the second millennium BCE. In 1963 Meredith Kline argued that Deuteronomy as a whole follows that treaty form.
- The Ten CommandmentsMishnah Tamid 5:1 has Temple priests reciting the Decalogue with the Shema, as does the second-century BCE Nash Papyrus. The Talmud says the daily reading was dropped over heretics' claims.
- The SabbathIn 167 BCE, says 1 Maccabees 2, a thousand people who would not fight on the sabbath were slain. Mattathias and his friends then decreed they would fight attackers on that day.
- TkhinesA woman's name on a tkhine proves little: nineteenth-century maskilim wrote tkhines under female names, real or invented, so scholars long doubted every female attribution.
- The ExodusEgypt’s only known mention of Israel, Merneptah’s stele of about 1208 BCE, found by Petrie in 1896, places a people already in Canaan: “Israel is laid waste”.
- Kashrut and Keeping KosherThe Torah's one meat-and-milk rule, against seething a kid in its mother's milk, appears three times; the Mishnah (c. 200 CE, Chullin 8:1) extends it to fowl.
- The Golden CalfThe Mishnah, about 200 CE, rules that the calf's second account is read in synagogue but not translated. The Talmud identifies it as Aaron's excuse (Megillah 25b).
- The Burning BushWilliam Tyndale's Pentateuch of 1530 renders God's answer at Exodus 3:14 as 'I wilbe what I wilbe'; the King James Bible of 1611 chose 'I AM THAT I AM'.
- The Ark of the Covenant2 Kings 25, listing what the Babylonians carried off around 586 BCE, never names the Ark. The rabbis of Yoma 53b disputed whether it went to Babylon or was hidden in its place.
- The ShemaThe Nash Papyrus, second century BCE, puts the Shema after the Ten Commandments, as the Temple priests recited them. The Talmud says the Commandments were dropped because of heretics.
- MitzvahThe Talmud gives only the total. Maimonides' Sefer ha-Mitzvot (1167-1179) charged that earlier lists all followed the Halakhot Gedolot, and set out its own count under fourteen principles.
- The TabernacleJulius Wellhausen (1883) held that the Priestly writer projected Solomon's Temple into the wilderness: 'the tabernacle is the copy, not the prototype'.
- Circumcision (Brit Milah)A health rationale is itself ancient and Jewish. Philo of Alexandria, in the first century CE, gave as circumcision's first reasons that it prevented 'carbuncle' and secured cleanliness, before turning to its symbolic meanings.
- Jacob's LadderSullam, 'ladder', occurs only here in the Bible; if it is cognate with Akkadian simmiltu, 'staircase', it meant steps or a stairway ramp, as Sarna (1989) and Peleg (2023) note.
- The Tree of Life in EdenKarl Budde (1883) saw that Genesis 3 knows one tree in the garden's midst. John Skinner (1910) judged the tree of life of 3:22-24 'not from the hand of the chief narrator'.
- Choose LifeVerse 16 has no 'if' in the Hebrew. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the third century BCE, reads "If thou wilt hearken to the commands of the Lord thy God", and the NRSV of 1989 follows it.
- Creation of LightWhere the Hebrew calls the earth tohu va-vohu, 'unformed and void', the Septuagint, made at Alexandria in the third century BCE, has aoratos kai akataskeuastos, 'invisible and unwrought'. Philo of Alexandria, reading the Greek in the first century CE, made day one an invisible earth and an incorporeal light, the model of the sun.
- The Burning BushThe Septuagint, made at Alexandria in the third century BCE, renders ehyeh asher ehyeh as egō eimi ho ōn, 'I am the one who is'. Aquila, a convert to Judaism under Hadrian, and Theodotion, also called a proselyte, used the future: 'I will be [who] I will be', as one manuscript, Codex 64, records.
- The Holy VisionThe threefold holy is not in every ancient copy. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, whose hand Frank Moore Cross dated to about 150–125 BCE, has 'holy' only twice. Norman Walker opened the argument over it in New Testament Studies in 1958–59. The Masoretic text has three.
- The Divine ShepherdWhere the Hebrew says 'my cup is saturation' (kosi revayah), the Greek Psalter has 'your cup, inebriating, as the strongest'. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage until his death in 258, argued from the Latin of that line that the Lord's cup must hold wine, since 'water cannot inebriate anybody'.
- A Time for EverythingIts first word for time, zeman, is late Hebrew: elsewhere in the Bible only in Nehemiah and Esther, and in the Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra. Vocabulary found, as Hugo Grotius put it in 1644, nowhere but in Daniel, Ezra and the Aramaic translators persuaded him that Solomon did not write the book.
- Holy Sophia at CreationProverbs 8:22 became a central proof-text of the fourth-century Arian controversy. The Greek read 'The Lord created me', which Arius's party took to make the Son a creature. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria from 328, answered that 'created' referred to the human body the Word assumed.
- The Ten CommandmentsThe Decalogue was once said daily with the Shema: Mishnah Tamid 5:1 has Temple priests recite both. Both Talmuds say this was dropped because of heretics, who, the Jerusalem Talmud adds, would claim only these came from Sinai. F. C. Burkitt in 1903 conjectured that the Nash Papyrus, Decalogue then Shema, preserved that daily worship.
- Mount Up With Wings as EaglesFriedländer’s 1873 Ibn Ezra translation preserves Samuel’s death as an analogy for Isaiah’s divided authorship.
- NoahThe ark’s animals are not uniformly pairs: Genesis specifies seven pairs of clean animals, compared with one pair of unclean animals.
- AbrahamGenesis changes both partners’ names: Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah within the same covenant account.
- SarahAbraham also laughs when promised a child in old age. Genesis does not give Sarah a monopoly on laughter.
- MosesDeuteronomy ends Moses’s life outside the promised land and says the place of his burial is unknown.
- MiriamMicah names Miriam alongside Moses and Aaron among the leaders God sent before Israel.
- David, King of IsraelNathan confronts David over taking Uriah’s wife and arranging his death. Biblical kingship does not place its ruler beyond criticism.
- SolomonThe famous judgement never divides the baby. Solomon orders the child spared after the mother offers to surrender him.
- ElijahThe fiery chariot separates Elijah from Elisha. The text says Elijah rises in a whirlwind; it never says he rides the chariot.
- EnochGenesis assigns Enoch 365 years within its genealogy. That is a lifespan in the narrative, not a dated historical attestation.
Kabbalah25
- Tree of LifeThe ten-circle Tree is younger than Kabbalah's first texts. The earliest manuscripts, of the late thirteenth century, carry other diagrams; the familiar tree emerged in the fourteenth.
- HamsaThe number counts as much as the hand: in 1914 Edward Westermarck recorded that Moroccans 'look upon the number five as a charm against the evil eye'.
- Metatron's CubeThe five-solids claim goes back to Drunvalo Melchizedek's Flower of Life workshops (1985-94, printed 1998). He says angels told him 'They're all in there', and that finding the dodecahedron took him over twenty years.
- Merkaba‘Merkavah’ is Hebrew for ‘chariot’, not Drunvalo Melchizedek’s ‘light, spirit, body’. The star-tetrahedron link is modern; Kepler named the figure stella octangula in 1619.
- The ZoharScholem gave the Zohar to Moses de León, 1281–86, and defended the act: pseudepigraphy "is far removed from forgery". Liebes argued in 1993 for a circle of authors.
- Sefer YetzirahIts sefirot are not yet a Tree: at 1:14 they are breath, water, fire and the six directions. Chajes (2022) gives tree parchments seven hundred years.
- The GolemThe Prague golem's earliest known printing is an 1834 footnote in a German novel, 225 years after Judah Loew died. Its best-known plot is Yudl Rosenberg's, 1909.
- ShekhinahHer exile with Israel is already Talmudic (Megillah 29a). The Zohar of 1280s Castile added her exile from her husband, a rupture inside God.
- Yehuda AshlagIn a 1927 letter Ashlag said he had added nothing to Isaac Luria's writings. His followers, Zvi Leshem noted in 2020, split into factions from Haredi to the Kabbalah Centre.
- The Seventy-Two NamesGenesis Rabbah 44:19, of the early fifth century, already promises Israel's redemption through seventy-two letters, but counts them in Deuteronomy 4:34, not Exodus 14.
- GevurahGershom Scholem noted in 1941 that the Zohar's doctrine of evil as judgement torn loose from mercy has a remarkable parallel in Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). Boehme's dark principle of wrath in God stirred Christian mystics.
- Hokhmat ha-TzerufHe named it but did not invent it: he studied Sefer Yetsirah in Barcelona around 1270. He warned that misplacing one letter could cripple the practitioner.
- Joseph Karo and the Maggid MesharimThe maggid promised Karo a martyr's death; he died at Safed in 1575. The Jewish Encyclopedia (1902) cited this unkept promise against Cassel's 1888 claim of forgery.
- Meron and the Lag BaOmer HillulaThat he died on Lag BaOmer rests on a misprint: the 1785 Korets Peri Etz Hayyim reads 'died' where the 1782 first edition reads 'rejoiced' (Eliezer Brodt, 2011).
- The IlanotIlanot were drawn for over 600 years, yet the Encyclopaedia Judaica never mentioned them; J. H. Chajes's Haifa Ilanot Project, the first to study them, has catalogued over 700.
- The Emden-Eybeschütz Amulet ControversySid Leiman and Simon Schwarzfuchs showed in 2006 that a notarised 1751 copy of five Metz amulets, found in the Moselle archives, supports Emden's reading.
- Kavvanot and YichudimEzekiel Landau's Noda bi-Yehudah (Prague, 1776) called the newly printed le-shem yichud formula 'an evil sickness for our generation'.
- Tikkun OlamThe Mishnah, edited around 200 CE, already uses the phrase as a legal ground: Hillel's prozbul was enacted 'for the repair of the world'.
- Sefer ha-HezyonotIts first printing, Shivhei R. Hayyim Vital (1826), was abridged and censored. The full text, from Vital's autograph, appeared only in 1954, ed. A. Z. Aescoly.
- Yaakov Emden's Mitpachat SefarimEmden was not the first doubter: Elijah Delmedigo had denied Simeon bar Yoḥai's authorship in the fifteenth century, and the Jewish Encyclopedia found Emden's objections largely borrowed from Jean Morin (1669).
- Isaac of AcreHis Zohar report, printed in Zacuto's Sefer Yuhasin in 1566, was cut from the 1580 edition and stayed out until Filipowski restored it in 1857.
- The Fivefold SoulGenesis Rabbah 14:9 gives the soul five names. Earlier Kabbalah ranked only three levels; Gershom Scholem shows the sixteenth-century Lurianic school made chayah and yechidah two higher ones.
- The QliphothMathers' Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) already gave the demons ten degrees answering the Sephiroth 'in inverse ratio', under Samael: the averse tree predates the twentieth century.
- The DybbukThe Safed accounts say 'evil spirit', not dybbuk. Sara Zfatman found the word first at Speyer in 1715; An-sky's play of 1920 then came to define the concept.
- Tikkunei ha-ZoharGershom Scholem in 1941 judged the Tikkunim a deliberate imitation of the Zohar, written about 1300 by an author who 'knows vastly less Aramaic' than his predecessor.
Modern Kabbalah6
- Aryeh KaplanKaplan's Sefer Yetzirah of 1990 turned Eleazar of Worms' early 13th-century directions for prayer into a wordless meditation on infinite space. Alan Brill showed this in 2018.
- Gershom ScholemIn lectures given in 1938 and printed in 1941, Scholem credited the Zohar to Moses de León, following Graetz. Twenty years earlier he had inclined to see it as a compilation of older writings.
- The Kabbalah CentreIt began in New York in 1965 as Philip Berg's National Institute for Research of Kabbalah, a small Orthodox circle of Jewish men. By the 1990s it addressed non-Jews too.
- The Red StringThe earliest rabbinic ruling is a ban: the Tosefta (Shabbat 7:1), of about 200 CE, lists a red thread tied on the finger among the 'ways of the Amorites'.
- Major Trends in Jewish MysticismScholem held that only 'in extremely rare cases' did ecstasy signify actual union with God. Moshe Idel's Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) argued otherwise.
- The Nineteenth-Century Rejection of KabbalahGeorge Kohler (2019) calls that neglect largely Scholem's invention: Adolf Jellinek published five books on Kabbalah in the early 1850s, and Graetz two chapters in 1863.
Hasidism2
- Nachman of BreslovThe Uman pilgrimage is not post-Soviet. His disciple Nathan began it in 1811, a few kept it secretly under Soviet rule, and it reopened in 1989, before the USSR fell.
- UmanUnder Soviet rule only a handful of Hasidim risked the journey; in 1988, as restrictions eased, 250 foreign Jews were allowed to stay in Uman for Rosh Hashanah.
Jewish Mysticism2
Judaism / Christianity2
- Ha-Satan: The Accuser Becomes the Devil2 Samuel 24:1 has God incite David's census; the later retelling in 1 Chronicles 21:1 gives it to satan. Lucifer is Isaiah 14:12's taunt at Babylon's king; Origen read it as the devil.
- GabrielDaniel and Luke call Gabriel a manlike figure or an angel. Eastern Orthodox devotion honours him as an archangel.
Greek / Jewish / medieval1
Jewish Magic1
Judaism / Christianity / Islam1
Kabbalah / Hellenistic1
Merkavah Mysticism1
Moroccan Kabbalah1