[Avodah] Ta'am of eating matzah

[Michael Makovi]

> 1. How do you know the Code of Hammurabi came first? Maybe Torah came first,
> and it was not they who influenced us (if only to prompt a response), but we
> who influenced them?   For all we know, the Torah laws being taught in the
> yeshiva of Shem v'Ever may have been widely known (and changed, and
> distorted, with the passage of time) by the various Semitic peoples of the
> Middle East.  The Avos knew and kept the Torah long before it was given on
> Sinai.
>
> R' Toby Katz

I think archaeological evidence clearly establishes that Hammurabi was
roughly contemporaneous with Avraham Avinu. Even if this is
inaccurate, it is long before the Torah.

However, your idea that Hammurabi is based on Shem v'Ever does carry
weight - Rav Kook (Edar Hayakar, pp. 42-43; translated in Ben Zion
Bokser, The Essential Writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, pp. 48-49)makes
*exactly* this claim.

However, Rav Kook then goes on, in the same writing, to speculate that
just as prophesy is given in accordance with the recipient's nature,
so too the Torah could have been given in terms of then-present idioms
and cultural elements, etc. He tweaks this argument, however: it is
not merely stam that prophesy is given in terms that its recipient is
familiar with; rather, there is more: "[W]hatever educational elements
there were before the giving of the Torah, which gained a following
among the [Jewish] people and the world, if they only had a basis in
morality and it was possible to raise them to a high moral level - the
Torah retained them. In a more enlightened outlook, this is the sure
foundation for the acknowledgment of a good cultural element deep in
the nature of man." (translation of Bokser, ibid.) (My note: Is Rav
Kook alluding to derech eretz kadmah laTorah?)

Rav Hertz makes a somewhat similar argument to Rav Kook's: After
showing numerous parallels between the Torah and Hammurabi, and noting
that many seem to be deliberate contrasts, while others are explicable
as merely having common Semitic background (as opposed to direct
inheritance from Hammurabi to the Torah, which, if true, would cause
us to expect Babylonian loan-words), Rav Hertz writes (page 406):

"The resemblances in the two codes are due to the common usage of the
Semitic ancestors of both Babylonians and Hebrews. This common element
was in Babylon developed into the Code of Hammurabi; but in Israel it
was, under Divine Providence, sifted and transmuted in such a way as
to include love of stranger, protection of slave, the Ten
Commandments, and the law, 'Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself'
(Leviticus XIX, 18, 34)."

I can only wonder, however, if "[t]his common element" is Shem v'Ever
as R' Toby might have it.

> 2. Did Hirsch really advocate learning "Canaanite, Egyptian, Babylonian, and
> Roman culture and history"?  Did he really say, "we cannot understand the
> Torah's moral laws without knowing what they are polemicizing against?"  Do
> you happen to remember where he says this? It's not totally impossible but
> doesn't sound exactly like him.
>
> R' Toby Katz

Trumath Tzvi, page XVII:

How, asked Samson Raphael Hirsch, can we understand the sublime word
pictures of world history painted by the prophets without an adequate
knowledge of contemporary secular history? The Jewish youth who knows
from his historical studies [the contempt for human life shown by the
ancient Egyptians,] the social oppression and moral degeneration in
Rome of old, the oppression and licentiousness of [ancient Greek
society], understands and appreciates a thousand times better the
sublime and divine character of the Sinaitic law. And as to the study
of nature which is so necessary for the understanding of Jewish
religious thought and practical religious life, the Talmud reproaches
those who fail to undertake it with the words of Isaiah (5:12): "And
the doing of God they do not contemplate and the work of His hands
they do not see" (Shabbath 75a).

footnote: I. Grunfeld, Three Generations: The Influence of Samson
Raphael Hirsch on Jewish Life and Thought (London: 1958), pp. 15-16.

> The Torah lists many forbidden sexual relationships, and says that the
> Canaanites did these things and that's why they deserved to lose their land,
> and we had better not do what the Canaanites did lest we get kicked out,
> too, c'v.  But aside from the information that the Torah and Nevi'im
> themselves provide about the types of immorality that the Canaanites engaged
> in, does anyone seriously suggest that we should study Canaanite religions
> and social practices in depth, from Canaanite sources, in order to fully
> understand what the Torah forbids and why?
>
>  R' Toby Katz

Maybe we don't all need to study it in-depth, but certainly it seems
we should have a basic knowledge of more or less what was going on
then. We don't all need a crystal-clear picture, but certainly the
kind of knowledge one can get from a Hertz chumash plus visits to the
history museum, along with a first-edition (not second-edition)
Soncino Tanach or a Daat Mikra, couldn't hurt. And maybe a few of us
*should* study it in-depth...because Rav Hertz and the Daat Mikra-ists
did do so, I can rely on their digests.

Mikha'el Makovi