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Hi
@paarsurrey
Clear said : " Instead of prophetic revelation as a source of religion, the Rabbis and leaders of Rabbinic Judaism” created “a set of specific rules and operate within specific parameters” which they created from their personal interpretations and opinions. "
@paarsurrey said : A wonderful point of our friend @Clear , can one please elaborate?:
Why did the Judaism people resort to adopting to the inferior " Rabbinic Judaism" and or condescending to it by leaving the truthful "Prophetic Religion" based on Word of Revelation, please?
I think this is a complicated issue without a single answer and we are getting to the edges of my historical interest.
I do think that there are multiple processes at work. However, perhaps I can speculate a bit on the role this current issue of changing the meaning of the Biblical text played in the apostasy of the Rabbis as they abandoned "Prophetic Judaism", and created "Rabbinic Judaism" as well as rejected "Messianic Judaism" (The Judaism that accepted the Messiah Jesus).
1) HYPERSPIRITUALIZATION – HYPERMETAPHORIZATION OF THE BIBILCAL TEXT
Jewish Rabbis were not priests, but they were teachers and theologians who developed Jewish doctrines and then passed these doctrines which they created, onto the Jewish populace for popular consumption.
However, the tendency for these teachers was to spiritualize almost EVERYTHING. In the Talmud, there is spiritualization of almost every verse, and often down to individual letters
INSIDE OF INDIVIDUAL WORDS. I’ll give examples of several types.
For example : Genesis 1:22 says of the water creatures and fowl,
“God blessed them, saying “Be fruitful and multiply…”.
A) One Rabbinic teaching regarding the words “
God blessed them” is :
“these creatures needed a special blessing because so many are intentionally reduced in number – hunted down and eaten. The land animals that were created on the sixth day needed such a blessing, too, but God did not confer one on them so as not to include the serpent, which was destined to be cursed.”
1) Such speculations regarding God’s intent on word choice do not come from any biblical text but is simply a speculation representing personal opinion of one or more influential rabbis.
2) There is no evidence that such discrete traditions existed before this dominant, Rabbinic Judaism created such teaching . Thus, such opinions and traditions are not even necessarily representative of the earliest Judaic traditions, but rather these personal speculations simply represent the type of Judaism that dominated after the loss of the Temple and the collapse of the Priestly order of Sadducees, and the subsequent domination of one or more types of Pharisaic Judaism.
Because such Rabbinic speculations are personal additions to biblical traditions, They often simply represent the rabbi s’ personal speculation on minutiae.
B) For example, consider the next four words in vs 22 are :
“Be fruitful and multiply” .
The rabbis interpretation in the printed Talmud is that
“Had the verse not added “and multiply”, each creature would produce only one offspring.”
Thus, the rabbi felt that God had to add the word “multiply”, since, as this tradition says the word
multiply “adds multiple births to the blessing, so each would bring forth many.”.
Such discrete assignment to meanings of words is quite arbitrary and dependent upon the opinion of the rabbi.
Why does this tradition indicate God has to add “multiple”, otherwise, births will all be single?
Because the rabbi (The great Rashi this case) interpreted it in this way.
Often such Talmudic traditions are created, not because they actually exist in Torah or Tanakh (Hebrew bible), but because the Rabbis wished to combat competing theologies of the time.
For example, regarding Gen 1:26 :
“Let us make man in our Image, after our Likeness”.
the Targum Yonasan paraphrases the Talmud (midrash) thusly :
“When Moses wrote the Torah and came to this verse (let us make), which is in the plural and implies that there is more than one Creator, he said : “Sovereign of the Universe! Why do you thus furnish a pretext for heretics to maintain that there is a plurality of divinities?” “Write!” God replied. “Whoever wishes to err will err… “
Again, such a tradition clearly does not originate inside the tanakhs' (Hebrew bible) text, but was created to answer to a theological need of its day.
Such
hyperspeculation and creation of inauthentic textual traditions are not merely abundant at the level of words, but rabbinic speculation and spiritualizing and imbibing of meaning is frequent on the level of putting meaning into individual
LETTERS!
Even if they had to re-arrange letters to create theological meaning!
For example, consider Hebrew Genesis 2:4 :
“These are the products of the heaven and the earth when they were created…”
The Midrash says :
“The letters of this word can be rearranged to spell באבהם, meaning that God created the world for the sake of Abraham (Midrash). Such transparent attempts to CREATE obscure and mysterious and secret “meanings” where none really, and truly exists becomes typical of rabbinic literature.
For example,
Rabbi Avie Gold says of this same verse
“it may be that the letter ה of this word is small to symbolize that Abraham’s name Abraham had an ה added to it”.
Such attempts to create spiritual meanings (even in individual letters) rather than to simply take the text at face value comes to characterize Rabbinic thought and actions. Reading the Talmud (mishna) feels as though the rabbis are trying to outdo each other in speculations and symbolism instead of authentic spirituality.
The addition of such speculations to Jewish theology creates a whole different biblical tradition. It is improper
addition to theology that is taking place.
For example, in Genesis 4:8 says : “
…Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.”
This specific text does not tell us HOW Abel is killed.
Yet the rabbinic tradition is as follows :
Gen 4:10 “…The voice of your brothers blood cries out to me…”(Literally “bloods”) The word is in the plural…
” this teaches that he bled from many wounds. Not knowing which organs were vital to life, Cain stabbed him all over.” (Rashi: Sanhedrin 37a)
Where in the biblical text does such elaboration and discrete detail regarding Cains knowledge and motive and intent and actions exist? Though such speculations are common, they are not particularly accurate in terms of building our concept and models as to what actually happened in this story.
The creation of such silly speculations becomes part of the rabbinic creation of Judaic theology. It creates a very different virtual version of biblical stories. Entire textual traditions that didn’t ever really happen create a virtual “bible” that never existed.
As another example : the Hebrew text of
Genesis 49:5 says : “”…For in their rage [Simeon and Levis’] they murdered people and at their whim they hamstrung an ox.”
Rashi tell us that this means that
“Simeon and Levi sought to disable Joseph, who is figuratively likened to an Ox; (see Deut 33:17)” while Ramban “interprets ox literally, as a reference to the livestock of Shechem. “ In this virtual bible, “Not only did they kill the men of Shechem, they destroyed its cattle”.
Both of these virtual Jewish bibles that tell us incredibly different stories than the literal bible does, and it exists
outside of the biblical text.
“DO NOT ADD OR TAKE AWAY FROM IT”
This sort of systematic adding to and taking away from the biblical narrative was happening among a people who had already
been told, not to do this very thing : Deut 12:32 tells the Jews regarding the Torah,
"....do not add to it or take away from it.".
To the degree that there rabbis created a theology that no longer followed the intent of the biblical text, to that degree a separate and inconsistent religion was created. And, just as they created very strange and unusual traditions surrounding the concept of a hermaphrodite adam, they created a tradition surrounding a spiritualized God who did not have an image after which Adam was created.
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