We establish elsewhere on this site that one of the most brilliant and logical men of whom we know, Sir Isaac Newton, bowed before the ultimate logic and brilliance of the Talmud.
The Talmud is not at all part of the scriptural writings. It is the compendium of 1000 years of Rabbinic debates. Set down about 1500 years ago on almost every subject – not the original Old Testament – the ‘Torah’.
Newton could not resist it. He could not ignore the truth. Maynard Keynes, was a British aristocratic academic and renown economist. He purchased and decoded a chest full of Newton’s secret writings – sealed for nearly two centuries. Keynes was an upper-crust, anti-Semitic, twisted character but surprisingly he felt that had to admit what he had found.
Worse than Newton’s secret absorption in the forbidden alchemy, Keynes concluded in a lecture: ‘Very early in life Newton abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity….“He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides. He arrived at this conclusion, not on so-to-speak rational or skeptical grounds, but entirely on the interpretation of ancient authority. He was persuaded that the revealed documents give no support to the Trinitarian doctrines which were due to late falsifications.…”
Would You Ignore Newton?
If the most brilliant Newton can be so described, are you justified in ignoring it? Newton could have so easily adopted the atheism being discussed in the coffee houses of 1660. He believed in nothing that he could not prove to himself. And he very definitely proved Real Judaism to himself. This is a serious problem for every honest atheist – and studiously ignored by every honest atheist. But we have discussed this elsewhere. Nonetheless, remember that Newton is the invisible atom bomb that explodes secularism.
So let’s pretend he did not exist – except – what exactly is this ‘Talmud’ that so fascinated him?
The Power of the Talmud in Preserving Judaism
What is the power of this encyclopaedic text that alone preserved Judaism for two millennia? We need to know more about it before ignorantly dismissing it as some Dark Age mumbo-jumbo. It is a central part of our evidence. Here we shall concentrate on its history. In another blog, we delve into its real secrets and power. It is certain that, without the Talmud, we would have all but disappeared.
Our intellectual certainty which is united with our irrefutable knowledge of Sinai to create our absolute trust and indeed ‘faith’ in the Deity are melded by the Talmud. Without the Talmud, the Torah seems to be teeming with contradictions and fantasy. With it we establish its probity and reconcile the problems encountered through ignorance. After only perhaps only two or three generations of a family not studying the Talmud, they have usually lost Real Judaism. Your great-great grandfather certainly studied it, or you would not be reading this. Your father may have bothered. Every Real Judaism community revolves around daily immersion in this fascinating and exciting study. Every night all your ancestors for century after century went to their local study hall. They studied it or listened to others expounding on it.
Consequences of The Truth of The Talmud
For the Jew uneducated in the innumerable subtleties of his heritage, the bottom line is really very simple – but rather brutal:
‘There was Sinai; everything flows from that because of the irrefutable unbroken chain of witnesses in your family. The Law of Probability, archaeology, history and reason force us to accept this. Thus any other question is irrelevant. We must, in judicial logic, accept our human testimony of the Deity and one obviously cannot question Divine wisdom. He created everything, therefore He defines what is ‘good’. If there are things we do not understand, that we think are unjust or too painful and utterly horrific, then it for us to accept that and that very knowledgeable acceptance itself is our strength.
Thus who are we to complain or expect better? Now this, in essence, is the truth. Like Job, dealt with in another blog, we may feel that our minds should be extended to their absolute limits. Of course, in understanding as much as we can. Then we can fully appreciate the universe we inhabit and its purpose.
Facing And Living Up to The Uncomfortable Truths
And yes, of course, the real problem with this is that it is all fine in theory. Until I cannot go to the match on Saturday afternoon. Or, I must not stay married to my non-Jewish spouse. I cannot live the libertarian liberal hypocrisy of doing good rather than being good. That is why we were actually shown Sinai. That was not theory or theology. That was fact. Witnessed fact. That is the heart of the matter.
Uncomfortable. irrefutable and almost unacceptable – unless you are brutally honest with yourself.
It is the Talmud which provides all the innumerable answers which establish the above. Everything stems from this cryptic text.
What precisely is this ‘Talmud’? Well, the word means ‘learning’ [in Aramaic ‘Gemara’] and that is at the root of Real Judaism.
Real Judaism’s Real Secret
We have discussed our claim, and proven most annoyingly beyond reasonable doubt, that, first, the ‘Torah’ – the Written Law – and secondly – the Oral Law explaining every detail within it, both were given to the Jewish people as they stood collectively watching and listening at Mount Sinai. The Torah was written at that moment.
The Oral Law was not to be written down and was orally transmitted for 1500 years. Then, in extremis, as Rome exterminated Jewish life, the briefest summary of the laws was written down as the ‘Mishnah’. In the centuries following that, a very full, encyclopaedic work of millions of words – the Talmud – was also set down. It captured the entire gamut of Jewish knowledge and academic methodology.
This is our secret weapon. Again, it is the reason why you are sitting there – still with the title ‘Jew’. If your great grandfather had not studied it, you would have almost certainly assimilated and not call yourself a Jew.
The Written Law – The Torah
It’s because this is a point of common confusion and because the Talmud is generally unknown. That’s why we must clearly distinguish the ‘Torah’ from the ‘Talmud’. The Torah – the written Hebrew Old Testament – as given at Sinai. It was a scroll handwritten by Moses – covering from Genesis up to and including Sinai with some other passages. The rest was added by Moses, by the end of the 40 years in the Wilderness. Similarly all the later Books from the periods of the Judges, Kings and Prophets were set down as they happened. As you have learnt to your annoyance, the text can be verified – letter by letter – back some 3000 years. In each and every historic and modern Torah scroll, its 304,805 letters are identical. There are three pieces of absolute proof of this which we have discussed.
The Samaritans verify the Text.
First, the entirely non-Jewish Samaritans (Shomronim) – called in the Talmud the ‘Kuttim’ – were settled in the forsaken north of Israel by the Assyrians after the latter had dragged off the Ten Tribes in 555 BCE. We must add that they claim that they came much earlier with Joshua – as one of the tribes and set up their temple in about 900 BCE at Gerizim. But its deepest rock foundations can be dated only to 555 BCE. Thus all agree they have been there at least 2500 years. And of course they may well have been in Israel before that. They have always had since then the Torah – almost identical with ours – as their holy book.
They claim fervently that were part of the Jews who came in with Joshua. Only they however are the true keepers of the Jewish religion. Joshua and his followers, notably the high priest Eli, all went off on a false path. . The actual scrolls they have had throughout two and a half millennia are almost identical to those the Jews have always used. Originally the Torah also was in proto-Hebrew called Ivri -𐤀𐤁𐤂. This is discussed at length in the Talmud. We changed to our ‘modern’ script – ג ב א – on returning from Babylon about 2300 years ago. The Samaritan keep using that script until today. This proves conclusively the text and original script of the Torah word for word. And you can believe the Sarmatians – they are not Jewish.
The Samaritans: Masters of Tradition
They scorned this together with all Babylonian Rabbinical decisions and still use remember – even to this week – precisely that ancient proto-Hebrew called Ivri -𐤀𐤁𐤂- which archaeology has finally agreed we all used in that era. #
Within less than a century from that Assyrian demolition of the northern kingdom, the Babylonians destroyed the southern kingdom of Judea. All Jews had been displaced or killed. The Samaritans in the north then claimed not to be Jews and were left in peace with the whole land open to them. The Jews were exiled to Babylon carrying with us the Torah which we also wrote in that proto-Hebrew script. The entire land was now ethnically cleansed of Jews.
Birth of The Modern Hebrew Script
The Babylonian royal house allowed the Jews to return 50 years later and, to celebrate this we changed the script used for holy books. In c. 350 BCE the Jews chose and their leader Ezra decreed the replacement of proto-Hebrew (the commonplace – 𐤀𐤁𐤂- Ivri) by the ‘superior’ script originally used for the original Torah at Sinai. This we have used to this day – ג ב א -and it name is ‘Ashuris’ meaning superior. Vitally, however, as above, the Samaritans did not change their script. Yet even 2500 years later, except for the script, their scrolls today are almost identical to ours except for small but significant differences reflecting the Samaritans’ beliefs and their Book of Joshua.
You can go and scrutinize these, hand-copied in for 2500 years, in their centers in Tel Aviv and Gerizim today as we have described. They proudly have proclaimed all their differences from our Torah throughout and so endorse both the existence and contents of our ‘wrong’ version. Thus they prove the antiquity of the Torah as well as its original script and contents.
The Yemenite Jews verify Everything.
Secondly, the Yemenite Jews have exactly the same Text as all other Jews – except for eight insignificant silent vowel letters – yet their original scrolls dated from King Solomon’s time, three centuries before the Samaritans’, and predate the Dead Sea scrolls by 1000 years. Astonishingly, they use today, perfect to the letter, the Torah we all share. This is unique in any culture. We know that they were cut off from the mainstream for millennia, and resisted any attempt to sway them from their most minute traditions – which are the most ancient and authentic of any. After Ezra’s initiation of today’s modern Ashuris block script – ג ב א , the Yemenites’ Torah Ivri scrolls, like those of the rest of the Jews, were gradually replaced by those in today’s script.
Yemenite Jews Prove The Authenticy of The Talmud
Scrolls often last for several centuries so this took a few hundred years, but they were willing to follow the Jews in the Holy Land to that extent. But they did not trust others’ scrolls of the Torah – albeit identical with their own. So, vitally these new Yemenite scrolls were based on only their own ancient Ivri ones, not any others. Only the script was changed from to ג ב א and still only eight silent vowels of 304,805 letters differ from all other scrolls around the world.
That is simply ‘impossible’!
Thus they prove the antiquity and perfection of the Torah’s text and the Oral Law’s central and continuous role. Their earliest version must have been also identical to ours to produce the same words now written in the ‘new’ script.
This is totally astonishing and explained only by their using precisely the same excruciatingly accurate copying and scribal methods as we describe above. These all were learnt – guess where – from the unwritten Oral Law which became the Talmud. As we explained, in Yemen this was never written down and they did not have the written version – Talmud. They lived the Oral Law and they learnt it verbally from Solomon’s reign till moving en masse in 1950 to the Holy Land, 2700 years!!
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Thirdly, as also discussed above, the Dead Sea Scrolls comprise texts in both proto-Hebrew and modern script covering the entire Old Testament and are, again astonishingly, identical except for glitches and sections reflecting the idiosyncratic messianic cult who hid them. In over 3000 years of being copied by hand, nothing has changed in a text that lengthy! This is practically impossible – yet here we have three bodies of evidence as to the accuracy of transmission to the letter with ocular proof for 2000 years and near certainty for 3000 years.
The Juristic Approach of Judaism
Now, it certainly is not my role to comment on other religions. Further, the pure and unsullied faith of the Christian does not rest upon such textual exactitude and transcends the ‘cold legalistic approach’ which the ‘obdurate Hebrews relish’. However, it is interesting that a Christian document even 1500 years younger than the Torah has no hint of such accuracy!
May I quote ‘The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible’? “A study of 150 Greek [manuscripts] of the Gospel of Luke has revealed more than 30,000 different readings… It is safe to say that there is not one sentence in the New Testament in which the [manuscript] is wholly uniform. Modern Christian scholarship discuss over 200,000 contradictory variants in existing manuscripts of the New Testament, representing about 400 variant readings which cause doubt about textual meaning.” Some forty or more of these are of great significance to beliefs and traditions. This is despite the Vatican’s 1500 year iron control over editing and versions since 355 CE.
The Torah’s Impossible Accuracy.
Think about that for a moment. 200,000 contradictory variants compared to nine spelling changes that do not affect the meaning or pronunciation!
This is staggering and, frankly, unbelievable. Yet you can check it yourself. You will begin to appreciate that every scroll was indeed written with the most meticulous perusal of each quill/reed stroke and not one letter was added or subtracted. You also will begin to appreciate that across the entire Jewish world – today; a generation ago; ten generations ago; one hundred generations ago – every scroll was written with the same accuracy. That fact alone should make you ponder. Your former religion is not a trivial, superstitious security blanket created by a power hungry oligarchy – sometime in the Dark Ages. For most purposes, today we are in the dark.
The Talmud: The Unwritten Living Oral Law
The Torah was dictated to and written down by Moses. However, as we have stated at the same time he was given a massive body of unwritten knowledge vital to its application. This is the ‘Oral Law’ and it was passed down verbally from Sinai to Moses, Moses to Joshua and then down the chain of named and identified leaders and elders until literally today. The application of this information and the methods of analyzing it and applying it, were also recorded, orally. The chain of overlapping scholars and leaders has no breaks. We have the names and details of the transmitters and recipients for every generation in every land and usually these men were also renowned for their leadership and literary works. Often non-Jewish records mention them – as many were well-known in the secular world.
The Talmud: Writing That Wasn’t Meant to Be Written
This unwritten Oral law, as we have learnt, was finally set down in the face of the danger of the Christian Roman annihilation of all the scholars and Sages who had preserved it as above. A large proportion fled to Babylon out of reach of the bloodstained claws of those who wished to save their souls. Here they wrote for posterity that which had never been systematically committed to writing. This written form is called the Talmud. This alone really has preserved Real Judaism; therefore please forgive my spending a little more time describing it. It is vital to appreciate that the Talmud is the absolutely central reason that you today are still called ‘Jewish’, or perhaps just of Jewish heritage.
How come you probably have not even heard of the Talmud? Surely it is really just some Jewish book of fables or other nonsense from the Dark Ages? Sorry, we never had any Dark Ages – and, as you have read, it is four times older than that. The written Torah is often a succinct and cryptic text – a set of brief formulaic hints – because we always had all the background information fully explained orally. Sometimes all that is written in the Torah is the equivalent of a text message reading – ‘Meet in the usual place, at the usual time. Bring it. Use password number 4.’
The Talmud: The Torah’s Code-Breaker
Unless the writer has given you an oral explanation and the background, you could make up a million different ridiculous and incorrect fantasies as to the meaning – precisely as the Bible Critics and those ignorant of the Talmud do. This is not obscurantism attempting to keep the Torah out of reach – but a simple truth. The non-Jewish world of Biblical ‘scholarship’ thus has no key, no code breaker. They go to the wrong meeting places, at the wrong times, without bringing ‘it’ and without any passwords. But – they are the Bible experts and must be right. Right? Yet it is the Oral Law that explains all that is cryptic in the Written Torah and without it, the Torah seems – as you find it – incomprehensible and contradictory.
Without the Talmud, ridiculous nonsense like Wellhausen’s and the Bible Critics’ work can be spawned, fostered and fester. But every Jew was familiar with our Oral Law because it was the central core of each Jew’s life. Jews lived it daily for nearly 2000 years before it was committed to parchment.
The Human Data Banks Before AI
As described earlier, different sections of this were committed to memory by different teams of scholars within an academic centre. Thus the entire contents would be collectively available from these different human ‘data banks’ who continuously compared and meticulously checked each word and detail. This orally-held treasury was revered as the decoder and algorithm for the Torah. The men who memorized sections of it were aware that they were a living archive and these ‘living reference books’ would sit amongst other academics and quote short passages which were then expounded on and debated to examine every nuance, every discrepancy, every disagreement and ruling.
Thus, constant revision and expertise preserved the Oral Law perfectly because of this very simple method. It was impossible for any one person to change even one word because hundreds of others had also learnt that very section, amongst others, off by heart. If there were valid disagreements then they would also be remembered as divergent opinions. Only when the most brilliant mind with a perfect memory cannot be answered do the Talmud’s debates rest.
A Brief Look At Talmudic Debates
Define sunset, darkness, the transfer of heat. Why are there phases of the moon? How and why does its lit side alter its course across the sky during year? Why is the revolving earth orbiting at an incline? Is a flame ‘attached’ to a wick? Why are we here? Why is the world one of suffering? Can you prove the Deity without Sinai? What is proof? How is doubt defined? What is reasonable? And frankly, what is ‘fun’? Why are all human systems based on self-gratification and power? Why do billions of creatures made by a loving Creator live and die in indescribable agony? You may notice the questions have not changed – you just missed the answers.
Defending The Authenticity of the Talmud
Yet who says that the Oral Law really is so ancient and authoritative? What of that unwritten period of 1500 years from Sinai to Babylon – 1312 BCE to 342 BCE? Come on. Be realistic. It must – just must – have changed and become adulterated. Whole communities were often wiped out. People must have changed details. Chinese whispers really happen – you can do it at home. Chinese whispers: Jewish whispers – anyway who understands Aramaic? Well – no. Simply – no.
There were always surviving communities with human ‘libraries’ – just because of our early dispersal around the Mediterranean. Also, there were innumerable private notes and scrolls recording decisions and debates. The stunning accuracy of the Torah also reflects on the Talmud. We are a people who excel at perfect copying and never change even one letter. So, let’s again ask our enemies. Yes, yes, one is indeed spoilt for choice! But we’ll ask some of the oldest – our enemies for 2500 years – whom we have already met.
A Definitive Proof of The Talmud From Our Worst Enemies.
Back to the Samaritans – but this time to endorse the Talmud, not just the written Torah. As mentioned in Book One, the Samaritans insist they have the accurate version of the Torah. They agree about the Oral Law from Sinai. They state it was indeed given at Sinai, it was indeed not written down but that we wrote it down – incorrectly in Babylon. One does not claim to have the correct version of something that does not exist – especially when its very existence challenges your religious claims. The matters they contest are specifics of Oral Law going back 2500 years.
However the details of these specific matters appear nowhere and could not be known of until written down in the Talmud – 1500 years after the Samaritans rejected them. How could they have known about them so far back if they were a later invention? They lived entirely separately as our enemies from the first and would never have imitated us later. How did they know about all this material which does later appear in the Talmud, again 1500 years before it was written down? You begin to see the problem. Perhaps it was Dr Who? Or perhaps – just perhaps – the Oral Law really is that old and really existed at that time?
You decide!
The Endorsement From Yemen
As agreed, I cannot use Jewish sources as any authority, so remember the Samaritans are proudly not Jewish. Secondly, none Jews aver the living testimony of the incredible Yemenite Jews, The Yemenites powerfully endorse the age and contents of the Oral Law as written in Babylon. This is because they never actually had any written version of it. They simply lived it observing innumerable detailed laws and customs which appear absolutely no where else. Observing these daily 1500 years before they were written down. They lived isolated in the Yemen for a millennium and a half before its writing.
They had scarcely any contact with the 350 BCE to 300 CE Babylonian academic community who collated the purely oral tradition into the written Talmud. There was no threat from Rome in Yemen and no need to write down the oral law before all its human databanks and experts were perhaps exterminated.
Yet they, to this day have innumerable details of their daily lives that accord with the Oral Law and unwritten traditions captured only in the Talmud concluded finally about 200 – 300 CE. Indeed, they follow many ancient alternative opinions quoted nowhere else but in the Talmud. How could they have known its contents and especially the innumerable details of daily life when these were only set down 1000 years after they had left to be isolated in Yemen? And note they follow many opinions not accepted at the end of the Talmudic debates in Babylon- proving that they did not simply learn of these later.
The Fiercely Proud, And Independent Yemenites
They do precisely the opposite of the majority opinions which would have been passed on to them from Babylon. No. they obviously had the original Oral Law as known and followed in King Solomon’s reign around 840 BCE and worked from that.
They are the fiercely proud and knowledgeable authentic Jews and even Maimonides adopted some of their customs and their prayer book when he discovered them in the 12th century. They were practically lost to the world for 2000 years and certainly would not have adopted odd practices piecemeal as they learnt of them from travellers.
The Living Oral Law That Gives Life
Again, from where did all their practices come – both those identical with ours and any differences reflecting opinions Talmudic debates? I detailed many earlier. Yes, the unwritten living Oral Law really is that ancient and that authoritative. The Talmud lives today and unchanged it gives us life.
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