Nadene Goldfoot
Levites' principal roles in the Temple included singing Psalms during Temple services, performing construction and maintenance for the Temple, serving as guards, and performing other services. Levites also served as teachers and judges, maintaining cities of refuge in biblical times.They were to live with tribal members and teach children and adults. They did not receive land of their own as the 11 other tribes did.
The Jewish history is reported by Moses in the Five Books of Moses that open with Genesis and followed with Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which is the Torah, which has been told to the people of the Exodus, and afterwards.
The Torah is the Jews most revered possession, but to most other people, merely a fable. While Jewish tradition holds that all five books were originally written by Moses sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE, leading scholars have rejected Mosaic authorship since the 17th century.
However, The Torah is read every year in a systematic scheme all over the world by Jews, so that people in Holland are reading from the same chapters as the people of the United States, giving us a feeling of uniting on Shabbat. Jews did not wait for the printing press to be invented. They lived it, then heard the history and enacted a special holiday every year of Pesach (Passover) where they also went without bread, and ate matzos instead like the people of the Exodus did, and certain foods are used as props to tell the story of what their ancestor, Moses did. Moses through G-d knew how to keep the history alive!
I understand that the Torah must have been read in the Temple as well to the people by the Levites on Shabbat and other days. That would be one useful place of keeping the Torah with people who could read it.
The tradition of reading the out loud dates back to the time of , who would read the publicly on , , and . According to the Talmud, it was the Scribe who established the practice, which continues today, of reading the also on Monday and Thursday mornings and afternoons. These days were picked because Monday and Thursday were traditionally days that the Jews would go to the nearest towns to shop and trade. Also, this way the people would never go for more than three days without getting spiritual sustenance from the . There were breaks in the practice, but since the period in the 2nd century BCE, public reading has been maintained continuously. It was also in the period that the Jews started reading from the consecutively, reading on afternoon, Monday, and Thursday from the point at which they left off the previous morning.
In the early times, there were two traditions as to how the reading on mornings should proceed. In , the was divided into 155 portions and took three years to read. In the early
19th and 20th centuries, and some congregations followed this triennial cycle but this has been largely abandoned in favor of the annual cycle. In Babylonia, the was split in 54 sections and took one year to read (some portions were read together in non-leap years). The size of the sections vary, containing anywhere between 30 and more than 150 verses. This latter custom became accepted for and most Jews. The only break from the weekly cycle is when is a holiday with a special portion. The is read on and between the shacharit (morning) and mussaf (additional) services and on weekdays at the end of shacharit.
Customs
There are always at least three people on the bimah (raised platform from where the is read). According to the , one should not stand alone to emphasize that gave the through an intermediary. The person on the bimah is also there to correct the reader's pronunciation and "trop" (also called ta'amei hamikra, meaning a series of musical notations that dictate the tune of how the is read), since the scroll has no punctuation or vowels. A gabbai (synagogue official) is also there to call people up to the .
The reader uses a yad (literally, "a hand"), usually a six to eight inch piece of silver fashioned in the shape of a finger, to point to the words of the as he reads them. This is done so the reader does not obstruct the vision of the person honored with the aliyah and does not mar the dignity of the by touching it. In congregations, the is carried inside a large wooden cylinder that stands erect when open, and the parchment is in an upright position when it is read. In congregations, the lies flat.
There are a few passages in the read quickly and in a low voice. These passages, from the sections of B'chukotai and Ki Tavo, list the curses that befall those who do not observe the law.
There was a time when there was no printed Bible in English. There was a time in England when under the Roman Catholic Church, it was illegal to translate the Scriptures into the common language from Latin. There was a time when it was illegal to read those illegal translations in public–or to own one. There were times when people were martyred for doing both. In England, William Tyndale, who became known as the Father of the English printed Bible, was forced to leave England in 1525 because of the wide-spread rumors about his project to prepare an English New Testament. He ended up in Germany near Martin Luther and in 1525, the first English Language New Testament was printed and copies smuggled back into England. Tyndale was finally captured in Belgium and his last words before he was burned at the stake in 1536 for printing common language Bibles were: “Oh Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” This prayer would be answered just three years later when King Henry VIII finally allowed, and even funded, the printing of an English Bible. But before that, Myles Coverdale and John Rogers (who used the name Thomas Matthew) continued the work of Tyndale and moved the English Bible project forward. Coverdale finished the translation of the Old Testament and in 1535 he printed the first complete English language Bible. John Rogers went on to print the second complete English Bible in 1537. What is unique about the work of Rogers is that this is the first Bible completely translated from the original Greek and Hebrew sources. Since it was printed using the alias name Thomas Matthew, it is commonly called the Matthew’s Bible. The significance of this Bible is that it set up the basic content, sources, and format of our present English Bible. Rogers was eventually burned at the stake for his translation work.
King James Bible, 1611. The King James, or Authorised, Version of the Bible remains the most widely published text in the English language. It was the work of around 50 scholars, who were appointed in 1604 by King James (r. 1603–25), and it is dedicated to him.
Tanakh (Tanach) Jewish Bible : The
Additional: Joseph Herman Hertz, (born Sept. 25, 1872, Rebrény, Hung. —died Jan. 14, 1946, London), chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and author of books on Judaism and of influential commentaries on the Bible expressing a fundamentalist viewpoint. He was the editor of my 2 volumed Pentateuch and Haftoras
which are not dated. They contain Hebrew text, English trans-
lation and commentary.
Resources:
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/persecution_persecution/
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