Moses, Continuation Meeting the Amaleks, Living For A Reason

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

Moses had Dan fight with the Amaleks who attacked the last of the marchers of the Exodus that were the slower ones.  It was like animals who attacked herds of others;  they waited for the weak and the babies.                                

The Amaleks were almost always hostile to Israel.  They were nomads wandering between Southern lands and Canaan.  They attacked the Israelites in the desert near Rephidim shortly after the Exodus, slaying the weak and weary. 

Israel regards Amaleks as an eternal foe, the extermination of which was a national mission as told in Exod. 17:  13-16, incompletely carried out later by King Saul in I Sam. 15.  During the period of Judges (12th-11th centuries BCE), the Amaleks penetrated Western Eretz Yisrael at various points and their presence was a standing threat to the peace of the country. Later they invaded Southern Juddea and burned down the town of Ziklag.  King David fought and defeated them heavily with only 400 of them escaping told in I Sam.30l.  In the reign of Hezekiah (720-690 BCE) the tribe of Simeon overwhelmed the Amalekites and settled in their territory.   During Purim we read about the story of Haman, who was the "Agagite" in Esther 3:1 and is regarded as a descendant of Agag, king of Amaleks, as told in 1 Samuel 15:33.  I could easily think of Hamas and Hezbollah of today as their descendants as well. 

Moses and Aaron talked the Pharaoh into letting the Slaves go who agreed after going through 10 plagues and they were prepared to leave and got as far as the Sea, sea of Reeds, but his army was drowning in it.  The 2 million had successfully crossed first.  

After several marches and a severe battle with the Amalekites, Moses led the people to Mt. Horeb in the Sinai wilderness which was Mt. Sinai.  After arriving there, Moses received the TEN COMMANDMENTS by divine revelation.  He then taught the people an entire legal code, expounded the sacrificial practice, gave instructions for the erection of the TABERNACLE and, on the advice of Jethro, organized a judicial system.  There were 613 commandments in all, but we do follow most of them in daily living. 

                            striking the rock to get water

Moses had argued at the beginning of the march with many of the people.  Some had found it a hard way to live and wanted to return to Egypt. They seemed to remember their favorite foods that weren't available on this march.  They forgot the stings of the whips.   His 1st attempt to penetrate Canaan with such a group failed.  Between the 2nd and 39th year of the Exodus, we don't know how they all managed.  In the latter year, he tried to bring into Canaan the new generation that had grown up in the wilderness and successfully fought the Amorites, the Moabites, the Midianites and Bashan---all in Transjordania.                             

 Before his death at age 120, he appointed Joshua as his successor.   He said his good-byes in the form of a public address by summarizing the events of the past 40 years and the main legislation laid down at Sinai.  He blessed the people, gave them guidance for their life in Canaan, and died at a place unknown to posterity, for he didn't want to be worshipped. 

 He taught them that there was only one unseen G-d.  This was a new and unique religion to be observed in its own land.  The basis was complete.  It was and is Monotheism and a loyalty to G-d, the Creator and Father of all.  Israel was to be a holy nation and a model to other people.   Moses gave it form and substance and had been nurture by the patriarchs.  

Traditionally, the entire Pentateuch was written by Moses himself.  There are many legends about him found in Jewish literature.  Remember, he wrote this as the Five Books Of Moses, the father of monotheism.  He taught us how to treat others, how to be moral.  Any author of today trying to screw this aim up got it all wrong. To besmirch his good name is a form of anti-Semitism.  He was not even able to act like todays soldiers in a jungle doing things they would later have PTSD over, as I have found to be happening.  Our Moses expected the best of us, so had to expect the best in himself.   

Then Where Did Moses's Oral Law Go?

Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Moses with his 2nd set of 10 Commandments.
He broke the first set which G-d wrote for him after he saw his people
dancing around the golden calf in their impatience of waiting for him to appear.  

   

RASHI, MOST FAMOUS BIBLICAL COMMENTATOR,
Rabbi Solomon Yitzhak ben Isaac, French rabbinical scholar, born in Troyes, France in 1040, died in 1105.
Studied in the Rhineland and had his own school in Troyes. 

Our Jewish tradition is that THE ORAL LAW was given to Moses along with THE WRITTEN LAW which has been handed down to us in the form of THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES together as a set on Mt. Sinai.  Since early times onward, this  oral law consisted of interpretation and analysis of the Written Law.  How to understand Moses's Law was given orally to the Priesthood, the Cohens and this was handed down orally from generation to generation.  Have you ever played Telephone with a group of children sitting in a circle and whispering a message that goes around and comes back to the original person?  Often it has changed a little.  This is what might have happened to our Oral Law as it remained in an Oral State.  At least they had the basis of what they were talking about to keep them grounded;  the Written Law.  They could not stray too far.  
                                                          

During the 2nd Temple period when Cyrus allowed any Jews of Babylon to return from their kidnapped attack by the previous rulers of Persia, the ancient oral tradition was upheld by the Pharisees and supported by the majority of the populace.   Not surprisingly, it wasn't recognized by other sects such as the Sadducees and the Essenes.  The reason for this was because they had developed their own traditions regarding the interpretation of the Written Law.  
                                                       

                                                  

Sadducees had been a cult developed from the 2nd Temple period, probably by Zadok the high priest whose descendants served in the same office until 163 BCE.  They were well-connected priests and prominent aristocrats, with influence in political and economic life.  For them, the Jewish religion was primarily the Temple cult without any abstract faith.   

Their opposition were the Pharisees and differed from them in the nature of their religious outlook and way of life.  According to the Sadducees, people and groups of people must aspire to well-being in their world without expecting recompense in the world to come.  They didn't believe in a future world.  in resurrection, or the immortality of the soul.  They also rejected the existence of angels and spirits.  I'd say they were more in tune with people of today's generation.  They only recognized the Written Law of Moses which led them to choose severe decisions in giving out penalties.  Their interpretation of the law of Lex Talionis was taken literally rather than in the sense of monetary compensation, the stand the Pharisees took.  So, Sadducees handed down stern with no- giving -in decrees to a law while the Pharisees were more lenient.  
                                                      

There was the WATER DRAWING FESTIVAL where this was put to the test.  This Festival of water-libation  which would have been the act of drinking water, took place at the end of the 1st day of the Feast of Tabernacles. "Sukkot or Succot, literally Feast of Booths, is commonly translated to English as Feast of Tabernacles, sometimes also as Feast of the Ingathering is a biblical Jewish holiday celebrated on the 15th day of the month of Tishrei." Tishrei usually falls in September.  
                                                                       

Street Painting in Afula, Israel 

Orthodox Jews pray 3 times a day.  Our Orthodox
soldiers do it while on duty at the time expected.  With
Jews, what's noticed the most is not the color of one's skin but their
observance and knowledge of Judaism.  Serving in the IDF
is not a choice, but an expectation.  He might be one of the
Ethiopians or a Masai bearing the Cohen gene.  

 Advocated  by the Pharisees, it was not acknowledged by the Sadducees since it had no authority in the Pentateuch (Five Books of Moses).  The crowds did celebrate with it with enthusiastic observance which makes me wonder if anything was added to the water., or if it were also used as a sacrifice to G-d and not just to quench everyone's thirst.  Water-libation or the word, libation has held these other definitions at different times.   The ceremonies were elaborately described in the Mishnah under Sukkah  5.  It fell into abeyance with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE but has been revived in an altered form in modern Israel.  
                                                        

Sects such as the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes disappeared after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, but the Pharisaic view had won national acceptance and the Oral Law was studied in the many Academies that were springing up.  The way the classes were taught differed;  in some places it was taught as a commentary on the relevant section of the Written law.  In others, it was in a systematic and topical arrangement.  Each teacher gave his own interpretation and the Sanhedrin was sometimes called upon to to decide between conflicting opinions.  The majority view was accepted in practice, but those views rejected continued to be taught theoretically.  In time, individuals recorded privately parts of the Oral Law which they feared might be forgotten.  That's diligence for you.  
                                                     

A complete outline, known as the MISHNAH which included earlier versions, was compiled by Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi (135 to 220 CE)  and became the basis for study.  The discussion of these laws, however, remained oral and was only recorded several centuries later as the TALMUD (GEMARA)
                                                       

After the redaction of the Talmud, study centered around the written text, still known as the ORAL LAW because its roots lie in the oral tradition.  During the Gaonic Period, the Karaites, a Jewish sect,  rejected the ORAL LAW in the 8th century in and around Persia and denied the validity of the Talmud. They would not accept the discipline of the Babylonian gaonate (rabbis).  The Arabs had conquered Persia in  640 and the Umayyad dynasty fell in 750.  There was an urge to see social justice and asceticism.  The most ancient Karaite document preserved in the Sepher ha Mitzvot of ANAN BEN DAVID was written in the 760s.  He interpreted the Bible literally and tried to deduce a code of life without reference to the ORAL LAW.     
                                                       

  Jews have practiced a reading of the law publicly ever since Moses gave them to the people.  This is reading from the 5 Books of Moses which are:  Genesis (Bereishis), Exodus (Shemos), Leviticus (Veyikra), Numbers (Bamidbar) and Deuteronomy (Devarim).  The public place is in the synagogue and is one of the most ancient portions of the service.  The reading is declared obligatory right in Deut. 31:10 and the bible refers to Josiah's and Ezra's public reading in II Kings.  Ancient tradition has the readings also on Sabbaths, festivals and the New Moon to Moses;  on Mondays and Thursdays and at the afternoon service on Sabbaths to Ezra.  The Mishnah and Talmud mention the Reading of Law on the days which are still customary.  Readings are also held on Hanukkah, Purim, and fast-days.  The complete 5 Books of Moses is read on Sabbaths in the course of one year, ending on Shemini Atzeret (Simha Torah) which was decided with the ancient Babylonian rite.  It is divided into 54 sections.  In Palestine, the reading of the 5 Books took 3 years, a cycle still extant in the 12th century and revived in some congregations.  I would say that RASHI understood and wrote down the Oral Law interpretation par excellence.  
                                                   

A Levite reading every morning first thing
in USA (Daniel Eskow) 

It's the custom for Cohens to come to the bimah and read aloud first, then Levites.  Men know what they are.  After the Levites, any Israelites may read.  If the Sabbath is used for a Bar Mitzvah Ceremony, the boy will do all the reading.  Usually there is a luncheon afterwords, or dessert for celebration.  It's his birthday of 13 years being celebrated.  The customary -I'm a man, is heard.  If needed, any bar-mitzvahed male would be ready to lead the congregation.  
                                                  

Kabbalah is an outgrowth in the 1600s of further reading and
understanding.  It is the mystical religious stream in Judaism.  Originally, Kabbalah referred to the Oral tradition which was transmitted alongside the Written Law, but in the 12th century was adopted by mystics to mean the continuity of their mystical tradition from early times.  Such interpretations was practiced a great deal in Safed (Tzfat), Israel.  It's made a comeback in our own generation.  

Resource:  gotquestions ask org.
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

How Moses Became the Author of the Torah and More Than You Asked About

Nadene Goldfoot                                    
Moses, the adopted son of the Egyptian princess, was biologically a Levite, son of Amram and Jochebed of the tribe of Levi.  The 12 sons of Jacob had entered Canaan and had gone into Egypt during a drought.  This was after Joseph, the 11th, son of Rachel and Jacob, had become an advisor to the Pharoah and had a very high position.  The tribe of Joseph begat Manasseh and Ephraim.  Ironically, Joseph's brother, Levi begat  Kohath, who begat Amram,  and his son was Moses.  So Moses was a great grand nephew  of Joseph.  Joseph lived during the Hyksos domination of Egypt (18th-16th century BCE).  The Hyksos, or foreign rulers, were thought to be Semitic chieftains from Syria and Canaan, which allowed Joseph to be in a high position.

The 12 tribes were feared as they grew in numbers and forced to become slaves for the government, used in building projects. The present curator of the Museum in Cairo has said that they weren't slaves, contradicting the ancient writing of Moses.  This is because they seem to have found evidence of bakeries and such near pyramids.  If a people are kept from leaving and must toil for someone, receiving no wages for it, they are deemed slaves.  The same thing happened to the Blacks in the USA.  Of course the owners profit more if the slaves are well fed.  If  Black slaves in the USA were not ever well fed, you can imagine that 4,000 years earlier  the 12 tribes of Jacob weren't either many a time.

 Moses must have realized when an adult that he looked like these Israelites by his features and skin coloring, though most everyone probably were of the same tanned skin from the hot sun.  Finally he found out the truth.  He alone was mortified and angered by an overseer's cruelty in whipping a slave as he, a Prince, had walked by.  Something within him stiffened at such a plight.  At the time he didn't know of his origins.  That he possessed a few different genes from the Royal House sets him apart both physically,  emotionally and mentally.  His own older brother Aaron, he found out, was one of the slaves.

The language of the slaves was Hebrew.  This along with Moabite and Phoenician languages all belong to the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages.  The Tel el Amarna Letters prove that Hebrew was spoken in our Holy Land before the Israelite conquest by Joshua.  Moses was an educated Prince and was capable of writing in Hebrew.  Biblical Hebrew was used before the exile by the Assyrians (922 BCE) and was a standardized literary language with distinct idioms for prose and poetry with a rich vocabulary.  It also borrowed many words from surrounding languages.

Hebrew letters went through some changes as time went by, so one can date something by the shape of the letters.  Writing was done on sheepskin or as with Moses, finding himself on top of a mountain, carved his 10 Commandments in stone.  After approaching his people when he came down the mountain and being angered by them, he threw down his tablets, which he had written as he was being dictated to by G-d and they broke.  He was able to rewrite them from memory and teach them to the awaiting people.  Of course we have never had a chance to view these tablets as they were later stolen.  After being kept in the Ark of the Covenant for so long, and then in the Temple that King Solomon had built, they were taken after one of the forays of our many enemies.  Many wanted them; even the Nazis who thought they would gain power with their ownership.

Besides the shapes of the letters, pre-exilic Hebrew writing was done with consonants only, having no vowels.  Later, the consonant yod was used to make the sound of i and sometimes e.  The consonant vav was used to make the sound of u and o.

Since Moses kept writing throughout the 40 years, it should be easy to date the writing attributed to him.  We find the 10 commandments first in Exodus 20: 2-14.  They are again repeated but with slight variations in Deuteronomy 5:6-18, which is the last book Moses wrote.  It's not surprising that a 40 year span and reaching the age of 120 would cause Moses to vary his essay on the commandments.  I myself have done the very same thing  within a span of 3 years.  I was researching a subject and found my own post on google.    The point of my writing was a little different, so I used information from the past with with a different emphasis in the latter.

                                                                   
Our Torah, or Pentateuch is known as the "Written Law."  Moses was at Sinai when he received it along with a detailed oral exposition of the Torah and its commandments.  The whole Pentateuch is read on Sabbaths in the synagogues  in one year with complies with an ancient Babylonian rite.  Naturally, some scrolls get very old and have to be given a burial.  New ones are written by a trained scribe called a Sopher who must follow carefully prescribed regulations.  If he makes one mistake, the whole thing is thrown away and he must start over.  Time may march on, but it's not going to change one letter of the Pentateuch.  We can rely on reading a copy of the original copy.

Scientist Isaac Newton (1642-1727) tried to find a code in the Bible, but at a time without computers, didn't get very far.  He wrote a book he believed unlocked the prophecies contained in Daniel and Revelation, two Bible books he viewed as intertwined.  He was a mathematician.  Newton discovered the binomial theorem, the method of fluxions (calculus), the law of gravitation and the composite nature of light—all before the age of 30. The foundations of modern astronomy and physics are still largely based on theories Newton first presented more than 300 years ago.  And he was a Christian believer  who studied the Bible daily and believed that God created everything, including the Bible. He believed that the Bible was true in every respect.

One amazing feature of the Pentateuch has been found by a mathematician in Israel, Dr. Eliyahu Rips .  He took the Pentateuch as written in Hebrew, and by using his mathematical theory,   put it in the computer.  Then he ran a format to try to see if it contained codes.  Many people have tried to do this, using the English translation before.  Rips found the Kennedy assassinations, the Oklahoma city bombing, the election of Bill Clinton, everything from WWII to Watergate, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, and from the Moon landing to the collision of a comet with Jupiter.  The Code procedure predicted that Barack Obama would be President a year before his election, and it warns that he must prevent a nearly certain nuclear terror attack.  The bible Code reveals that Al Qaeda may already have nuclear weapons.  It even named Osama bin Laden's hide-out.  

Writer Michael Drosnin was so excited by Rips' finds that he wound up writing three books about it;  The Bible Code,  Bible Code II-the countdown, and Bible Code III-saving the world.  Rips believes in the teaching that Moses was directed by G-d to write the Pentateuch. In the late seventies, Rips began looking with the help of a computer for codes in the Torah. In 1994, Rips, together with Doron Witzum and Yoav Rosenberg, published a seminal article in the journal Statistical Science, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", which claimed the discovery of encoded messages in the Hebrew text of Genesis. This, in turn, was the inspiration for the 1997 book The Bible Code by journalist Michael  Drosnin. While Rips originally claimed that he agreed with Drosnin's findings, he later distanced himself from his interpretations.

The 5 Books of Moses, written so long ago around 1200 BCE, nevertheless are awesome.  Written by a man who was inspired somehow, either by sound or some special vibrations emanating from G-d, have lasted in the original form for over 3,000 years.  Without the 10 Commandments he gave us, what a mess our world would be in; no doubt worse than now.  Possibly that's because it's still a challenge for many of us to follow 10 simple commandments.

Resource: http://www.google.com/images?q=Hebrew+letters,+history&rlz=1B3RNFA_en___US482&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Tanach-torah/prophets/writings: Stone Edition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos#Origins_of_the_Hyksos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliyahu_Rips
http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php?PageID=74
Bible Codes I, II, and III.