Starting at the very bottom of yesterday’s daf and continuing through the first half of today’s daf TB Megillah 9 deals whether one may translate the Bible into other languages and still retain its sanctity. “The difference between Torah scrolls, and phylacteries and mezuzot, in terms of the manner in which they are written, is only that Torah scrolls are written in any language, whereas phylacteries (tefillin-gg) and mezuzot are written only in Ashurit, i.e., in Hebrew and using the Hebrew script (which letters are more square in composition as opposed to the ancient Hebrew script-gg).
“Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: Even
with regard to Torah scrolls, the Sages permitted them to be written only
in Greek. Torah scrolls written in any other language do not have the
sanctity of a Torah scroll.” (TB Megillah 8b, Sefaria.org
translation)
Ultimately we learn that the halakha
is according to Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel according to Rabbi Yehuda’s understanding.
Only the Torah retains a special sanctity when translated into Greek. “And our Rabbis (i.e. Rabban Shimon
ben Gamliel-gg) permitted them to be written only in Greek.
And it is taught in another baraita that Rabbi
Yehuda said: Even when our Rabbis permitted Greek, they permitted it only in a
Torah scroll, and not for other books of the Bible, which must be written
only in Hebrew.
“The Gemara continues: And this
was due to the incident of King Ptolemy, as it is taught in a baraita:
There was an incident involving King Ptolemy of Egypt, who assembled
seventy-two Elders from the Sages of Israel, and put them into seventy-two
separate rooms, and did not reveal to them for what purpose he
assembled them, so that they would not coordinate their responses. He
entered and approached each and every one, and said to each of them:
Write for me a translation of the Torah of Moses your teacher. The Holy
One, Blessed be He, placed wisdom in the heart of each and every one, and they
all agreed to one common understanding. Not only did they all
translate the text correctly, they all introduced the same changes into the
translated text.
“(Our daf gives 14 different examples where
they all introduced the same changes into the translated text , but I’m only
going to share two of them-gg) And they wrote for him: God created in the beginning [bereshit], reversing the order of the words in
the first phrase in the Torah that could be misinterpreted as: “Bereshit
created God” (Genesis 1:1). They did so to negate those who believe in the
preexistence of the world and those who maintain that there are two powers in
the world: One is Bereshit, who created the second, God. And they wrote:
I shall make man in image and in likeness, rather than: “Let us make man
in our image and in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), as from there too one could
mistakenly conclude that there are multiple powers and that God has human form.” (Sefaria.org
translation) An expanded Greek
version of the above story is found in the Letter
of Aristeas. (https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1765-aristeas-letter-of)
“Alexandria was also home
to a large community of Jews. The Egyptian city was founded in the fourth
century BCE by Alexander the Great, and the Jews there thrived under
Hellenistic rule. The most famous product of that community may well have been
the third century BCE Greek translation of the Torah, called the Septuagint.
The mythic story of their translation says that the Jewish residents of
Alexandria reached out to the Jerusalem Temple authorities for assistance in
the translation project. By the first century BCE, Alexandria had a highly
Hellenized Jewish population, though they maintained their own separate Jewish
political structure. The city produced the famous turn of the millennium Jewish
philosopher Philo, who wrote an allegorical commentary on the Torah, attempting
to reconcile it with Hellenism. The multivolume work is a fascinating peek into
the mind of a highly educated Jewish leader. Philo relied wholly on the
Septuagint Greek translation, as he apparently had poor command of Hebrew.” (Aphrodite
and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We know
It, Burton Visotzky, page 29)
Lee Levine in his book Judaism
and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? speaks how widespread knowledge
and use of Greek amongst the rabbis.
“Moreover, there were
individuals and groups within rabbinic society whose use of Greek and knowledge
of ‘Greek wisdom’ were well-known. First and foremost in this category were the
Patriarchs and their households. The most striking source in this regard is the
testimony of Rabban Simeon ben Gamliel II, who claimed that the house of his
father, Rabban Gamliel II of Yavneh, boasted 500 students studying Torah and
500 studying Greek (b. Sotah 49b). These numbers cannot be taken literally; a
school of that size would have been an enormous institution for those times.
What may possibly be derived from this source is some sort of parity existed in
the studies conducted at Rabban Gamliel’s Academy; students study Greek
language and wisdom no less than the Torah. The Talmud further explains this
emphasis by claiming that the patriarch needed to train people in order to
maintain contact with the Roman government.
“… Of all the rabbis of
the community, R, Abbahu appears to have been the most acculturated. It was
known to his contemporaries as such. In the above noted tradition concerning
the desirability of Greek education for daughters, he was accused by Simeon bar
Abba of inventing a tradition in order to justify his own preferences: ‘Because
he wants to teach his daughters Greek he ascribes (this tradition) to R. Yoḥanan’ (j. Peah 1.1.15c)” (pages 128-129)
In our rabbinic tradition we can find some ambivalence about the Greek and Greek culture. The two excellent books I quoted, which I recommend if you’re interested in delving deeper into the subject, show the rabbis embrace of everything Greek. Nevertheless, we can see the opposite point of view in the story of the Septuagint. You might think it was a great miracle that every one of the 72 elders separated in different chambers (according to the Letter of Aristeas) translated the Torah exactly the same. The rabbis treated it as a necessary, but terrible miracle. The rabbis saw this translation as a sad event. So sad that the day it was translated, the 8th of Tevet was ordained to be a fast day as well as the 9th and 10th days. Check out Megilat Taanit (that's different from tractate Megillah).
P.S. Torahs written in Greek are no longer sanctified for use in the synagogue. "Permission was also given to write scrolls of the Law in Greek characters but not in those of any other foreign tongue. The ancient Greek script has gone out of use, been corrupted and become obsolete. Hence, at the present day, all three religious articles,—Scroll of the Law, Tephillin and Mezuzah,—are only written in the square Hebrew script." (Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tefillin, 1:19)
No comments:
Post a Comment