Tuesday, May 17, 2011

The Bible Revisited

A Guest Post by @Azigra

Many are familiar with the the ancient Jewish sects the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Long forgotten, however, is another ancient group known as the Haraidesees. Why history choose to forget them is a debate amongst scholars. While their memory may have been lost their scrolls and artifacts have survived.

Recently, Dr. @azigra, a foremost expert in Hebrew manuscripts happened upon a clay pot under the ruins of a first century synagogue in modern day Lebanon. Inside was a scroll containing the Bible text used by the Haraidesses. The differences are subtle, but it answers the long held question about the Jewishness of the Bible.


The Bible was successfully incorporated into other faiths since there isn't anything particularly Jewish about it or the people described therein. The Talmud, on the other hand, is essentially Jewish through and through, and therefore over its 2,000 year history never made it into the Universal realm. This scroll, perhaps the original version written by the hand of Moses at Sinai, places the people and events in a thoroughly Jewish light.

What follows is one chapter translated by Edward Cullen, Chair of Semitic Studies at Cambridge.

God created the beginning, the heavens and the earth. And God created man in His image; with a beard and the body of an undeveloped child he  created him. And the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and He breathed into his nostrils the soul of Yid, and man became a living soul. Now the Lord God took the man, and He placed him in the Garden of Eden to spend his days and nights toiling in the fields of Torah. And the Lord God commanded man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.  But of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat of it, for the tree's mashgiach is a Lubavitcher, and on the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die." And the Lord God said, "It is not good that man is alone; I shall make him a helpmate opposite him." And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon man, and he slept, and He took one of his sides, and He closed the flesh in its place. And the Lord God built the side that He had taken from man into a gabbai to carry his cane, open his car door, and write his kvitels. And the Lord God also built from the side that He had taken from man into a woman, and He brought her to man.  And woman asked Lord God, "why have thou made a shidduch for me with a man named Adam? Is he modern or something?" Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall eat in different rooms from each other on Shabbos. 

Now they were both naked, the man and his wife, but they were not ashamed for they did not subscribe to the Yated. 

Now the blogger was cunning, more than all the writers on the internet that the Lord God had made, and it said to the woman, "Did God indeed say, 'You shall not eat of any of the trees of the garden? what kind of rational explanation do you have?'" And the woman said to the blogger, "Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat. But of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, God said, "It has a bad hechsher, you shall not eat of it, nor walk near it because of ma’ras eyin.'" And the blogger said to the woman, "You will surely not die, I saw R. Moshe Chodoh eating in a Chabad house in Vilnius a few summers ago." And the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was desirable to make one wise; so she took of its fruit, and she ate, and she gave also to her husband with her, but he didn't  eat for he didn't know whether it was a wheat stalk or a grape, both requiring different blessings. And yet the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed long black coats and the woman shaved her hair to make of it a wig to cover her hair. And the Lord God called to man, and He said to him, "Why were you late to davening today?" And he said, "I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I am naked; so I hid." And He said, "I see you read this week’s Hamodia; Have you also eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" And the man said, "The woman, who You gave to be with me she has bina yeseira and gave me of the tree; so I ate." And to man He said, "Because you listened to your wife and you ate from the tree from which I commanded you saying, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed be the ground for your sake; with toil shall you sit in yeshiva all the days of your life. With the sweat of your wife's brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, for you were taken from there, for dust you are, and to dust you will return." And the man named his wife Chava, in honor of his  grandmother who emigrated from the shtetl of Meshibez to Gan Eden several decades earlier; and He drove the man out. Now the man knew his wife Eve [was in the kitchen cooking dinner], and she conceived [an idea to put a key in the bread] and Cain starting hanging around, and she said, "I have acquired a man with the Lord." And she continued to [cook food] when Abel started to hang around too, and Abel was a kollel type and Cain was an earner-learner.

And it came to pass when man commenced to multiply upon the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them. And the Lord saw that the evil of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of his heart was only evil all the time. And the Lord regretted that He thought to create gentiles, and He became grieved in His heart. And the Lord said, "I will blot out man, whom I created, from upon the face of the earth, from man to cattle to creeping thing, to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord for he donated money to Kupat Ha'ir. And God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth has become full of robbery because of them, and behold I am destroying them from the earth. Hire an Italian contractor to make for you an ark, because you can't build one with a kitchen knife, made of gopher wood; he shall make the ark with compartments, and he shall caulk it both inside and outside with pitch. And of all living things of all flesh except for dinosaurs, two of each you shall bring into the ark to preserve alive with you; they shall be male and female. And Noah did; according to all that God had commanded him, so he did. And Noah went in and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him into the ark because of the bone and stone aging solution that had flooded the land. And the solution was upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. And the solution prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days creating fossils upon the entire earth. And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the glove compartment and sent a dove our from the window of the ark that he had made. And in the second month, on the twenty seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. And God said: "This is the sign of the covenant, which I am placing between Me and between you, and between every living soul that is with you, for everlasting generations. Light that reflects upon entering the surface of a raindrop causing a spectrum of light to appear in the sky, I have placed in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between Myself and the earth.

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