Commentary on the Torah Quotes

“25:10. a jubilee: you shall go back, each to his possession. In the law of the jubilee, YHWH commands that every fifty years all property is to return to the original owners. This appears to be an economic program designed to prevent the feudal system, common in the rest of the ancient Near East, from developing in Israel. That is, it functions to prevent the establishment of a class of wealthy landowners at the top of the economic scale and a mass of landless peasants at the bottom. Every Israelite is to be apportioned some land (described in the books of Numbers and Joshua), and the deity commands that in every fiftieth year the system returns to where it started. If an Israelite has lost his ancestral land as a result of debt or calamity, he regains ownership of it in the jubilee year. Land is unalienable. Individuals can suffer difficult times, but there is a divinely decreed limit to their loss, and the nation as a whole can never degenerate into a two-tiered system of the very rich and the very poor.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“10:10. to distinguish. Leviticus is concerned with orderliness. This orderliness is reminiscent of the creation account in Genesis 1. There are key parallels of wording, especially the term for distinction (lēhabdîl). As God creates by making distinctions, expressed in divine speech, in Genesis ("God distinguished between the light and the darkness"), so the function of the priesthood is described in Leviticius as "to distinguish (lēbabdîl) between the holy and the secular, and between the impure and the pure." Here the law is conceived as a reflection in the human realm of the order that was originally pictured in the cosmic realm.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“3:14. the snake. Just a snake, not the devil or Satan as later Christian interpretation pictured. As the curse that follows indicates, the story has to do with the fate of snakes, not with the cosmic role of a devil. There is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“34:6-7. merciful, gracious, slow to anger, kindness, faithfulness, bearing crime and offense and sin. This is possibly the most repeated and quoted formula in the Tanak (Num 14:18-19; Jon 4:2; Joel 2:13; Mic 7:18; Pss 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; 2 Chr 30:9; Neh 9:17,31). The Torah never says what the essence of God is, in contrast to the pagan gods. Baal is the storm wind, Dagon is grain, Shamash is the sun. But what is YHWH? This formula, expressed in the moment of the closest revelation any human has of God in the Bible, is the closest the Torah comes to describing the nature of God. Although humans are not to know what the essence is, they can know what are the marks of the divine personality: mercy, grace. In eight (or nine) different ways we are told of God's compassion. The last line of the formula ("though not making one innocent") conveys that this does not mean that one can just get away with anything; there is still justice. But the formula clearly places the weight on divine mercy over divine justice, and it never mentions divine anger. Those who speak of the "Old Testament God of wrath" focus disproportionately on the episodes of anger in the Bible and somehow lose this crucial passage and the hundreds of times that the divine mercy functions in the Hebrew Bible.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“8:6. fear. Some may find the idea of being afraid of God to be strange or unattractive. But the fact remains that to experience the power of the creator of the universe is fearful. Thus Moses hides his face at the burning bush because he is afraid to look at God. Thus the people are terrified when they hear the divine voice at Sinai. Thus Nadab and Abihu die because of a misstep in closeness to the holy. When one appreciates what is at stake, one can understand why the idea of fear of God—literally, profoundly—is so significant here.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“7:14. blessed. This word in the Torah generally refers to being well off. Here it is explicitly connected with fertility and good health. So when it says that Israel will be more blessed than other peoples if they keep their covenant, it does not mean that Israel will have some special status, but rather it means that God will bless them with well-being.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“7:2. completely destroy. See the comment on Deut 2:34. Many people have been troubled by the idea of commanding the annihilation of the Canaanite residents of the land. The archaeological evidence is that such a destruction never took place. This passage in the Torah was written long after the period of the Israelites' settlement in the land, and so it was ironic that the author of this text conceived of a degree of violence that appears never in fact to have happened, and then people are troubled by this degree of violence in Israel's history.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“5:17. adultery. This is perhaps the most readily broken of the commandments (except for coveting?). It is the commandment that good people break. The temptation is extraordinary. The potential for hurt is substantial. The potential for leading to other behavior, especially lying, is tremendous as well.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“3:8. across the Jordan. This phrase occurs several times in Moses' speech in Deuteronomy. Ibn Ezra hinted at a secret implied by this and several other matters in the Torah, and added, "One who understands should keep silent." But scholars of later centuries no longer kept silent. The issue, presumably, was that the land in question is across the Jordan only from the point of view of someone writing in Israel. Moses, who never set foot in Israel, would not be expected to refer to the place where he was standing as across the Jordan. Of course might say that Moses says this phrase with a future audience in mind, a people settled in Israel. But Ibn Ezra's comments are important as being among the first hints that some of the traditional rabbinic commentators questioned whether Moses wrote the Torah. That question—how the Torah came to exist—has become a central concern of biblical scholarship in the last two centuries.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“2:34. complete destruction. In contexts that do not have to do with war, the Hebrew word ḥerem refers to something that is devoted to God (Lev 27:21,28-29; Num 18:14). In contexts of war, as in this verse, øerem refers to the rule, in divinely commanded wars only, against taking spoils or slaves, but rather destroying all of these and thus dedicating them to the deity. The point: the war is not for profit.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“12:6. in a vision; in a dream. All prophetic experience in the Tanak is understood to be through visions and dreams—except Moses'. The fifteen books of the Hebrew Bible that are named for prophets either identify the prophets' experiences as visions or else leave the form of the experiences undescribed (Ezek 12:27; 40:2; Hos 12:11; Hab 2:2; Mic 3:6). Many begin by identifying the book's contents as the prophet's vision: "The vision of Isaiah" (Isa 1:1, cf. 2 Chr 32:32); "The vision of Obadiah" (Oba 1); "The book of the vision of Nahum" (Nah 1:1); "The words of Amos ... which he envisioned" (Amos 1:1); "The word of YHWH that came to Micah ... which he envisioned" (Mic 1:1); "The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet envisioned" (Hab 1:1).”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“11:25. they prophesied. What exactly do they do? Prophecy in the Bible does not primarily involve prediction. It is not that they are going about telling the future. What is happening that makes it obvious to Moses, Joshua, and apparently everyone that they are doing something that is associated with prophets? Some suggest that they are in some sort of trance, but trance behavior is not generally part of what is pictured in the fifteen books of the prophets in the Tanak or in the cases of prophecy in the Tanak's narrative books. What is typical of prophecy, as opposed to historical narrative, in the Bible is that prophecy is in poetry (or in combinations of poetry and prose). Biblical prophecy has the characteristics of oral formulaic poetry. That is, the prophet composes it on the spot, using lines that he or she has already composed and memorized, and mixing these "formulas" with new lines that occur to him or her spontaneously. When such poems occurred to the ancient poets, the poets must have truly felt inspired. And the people who watched and listened to them must have perceived them to be inspired as well. When we a man spontaneously says:

They'll beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
A nation won't lift a sword against a nation,
and they won't learn anymore.

we can easily imagine him and his audience feeling that it is God moving through him.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“2:32. six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty. Add to this the underage and elderly men, the women of all ages, and the Levites, and the total number of Israelites must approach two million. It has been calculated that by these numbers, marching eight across, when the first Israelites reach Mount Sinai, half of them would still be in Egypt! The extraordinary size of this population is a famous old problem in traditional and critical biblical scholarship. The numbers appear far too high; but they do not appear to be entirely invented either, because what would be the motive for contriving them in all of this tribe-by-tribe detail for the first four chapters of Numbers? Some suggest that the word for "thousand" here means rather a "clan," but that is not correct (see the comment on Num 3:43). One possibility is that these are the numbers from the census that is attributed to King David (2 Samuel 24; see the comment in Exod 30:12). (There are just three censuses in the Tanak, the two censuses of Moses and the census of David.) Coming centuries later, in a period in which Israel is settled in the land, the numbers are more understandable in the Davidic era (though they are questionably high even for that period). In this scenario, the records here would have come from old documents among the archives which would have come to be mixed in with documents that were used as sources for the Torah.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“1:1. wilderness Wilderness emerges through the narrative not only as a setting but also as a theme of considerable significance. The Hebrew title of the book, bêmidbar, "In the Wilderness," which derives from the opening verse ("And YHWH spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai [bêmidbar sînay] ... "), is a better indicator of the book's contents than the Greek title, arithmoi (from which comes the English "Numbers"). It also better captures the pervasive feeling of the book. The wilderness depiction conveys two quite different qualities. On the one hand, the wilderness years constitute a kind of ideal. The peoples life is orderly, protected, close to God. It is a period of incubation, of nurturing. All is provided: food, water, direction. The miraculous is the norm. At the same time, though, the wilderness is depicted as terrible. Conditions are bad. The environment is hostile. There is rebellion from within and fighting with peoples whom they encounter on the way. There are power struggles and fear. And this is pictured as having been almost entirely avoidable, a fate that has come upon the people for having rejected the opportunity to enter the land. Numbers thus expresses pervasively a notion that is only begun in Leviticus, namely that closeness to the divine is both glorious and dangerous.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“Leviticus thus is a design for an organized society of people who help one another, who do not intentionally injure one another, who respect one another's property and relationships, who regularly assemble to celebrate together, who acknowledge their errors and atone for them, who regard life—in humans and in animals—as sacred, who pursue purity in various forms, who respect law, and who are utterly loyal to one God.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“We do a disservice when we interpret ritual matters in terms of ethical justifications. We move ourselves even farther from the appreciation of ritual and the awe before the holy. Similarly, when we say that the Hebrew word qādōš means a neutral kind of "separate" rather than meaning "holy, sacred," we further lose our feeling for holiness. And perhaps we err similarly when we say that Hebrew ḥātā means "to miss the mark" rather than "to sin," to do something wrong that places us in a state that needs to be remedied through atonement and/or sacrifice and/or compensation.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“The ritual and the ethical are two components of religion—and of Leviticus—that do not justify each other, but rather unite and produce mutual support. Indeed, it is instructive that Leviticus, a book that is so fundamentally concerned with distinction, does not make any explicit distinction between its ethical and its ritual laws. Sometimes they are mixed together, but they are never identified as two distinct categories of law.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“26:46. These are the laws and the judgments and the instructions. The present age plainly appears to value the ethical more than the ritual in religion. Some even feel the need to justify ritual by attempting to connect each ritual act to some ethical value: "We keep kosher to remind us to care about animals; we wear fringes to remind us to be kind...." This is misleading. Certainly ritual acts can have consequences in the ethical realm, but that is not their reason for being. If we are to understand Leviticus, we must have an appreciation for what ritual meant in its society intrinsically.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“26.33. scatter among the nations. Among the worst curses was the curse of exile: for a people to be driven off their land and scattered around the world. This possibility was a reality in the ancient Near East, where exile was a horrifying fate. This curse would come to pass for Israel later in the Tanak, when they would come to know exile at the hands of the Assyrians; and it would come to pass for Judah still later at the hands of the Babylonians. But they would also come to know the blessing of return.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“26.11. my soul. Does God have a soul? This is the only place in the Torah that refers to the deity's nepeš (although a related verbal form, wayyinnāpaš, ocurs in Exod 31:17). Elsewhere, the word refers to the living quality in humans and animals and is associated with breath. It is usually understood to mean soul, person, being, and life. It might possibly help us to understand what is meant by creation in the image of God, but that seems unlikely since animals are said to have a nepeš there as well, but they are not said to be in the divien image (Gen 1:24-27). We must be cautious in using the word's occurrences here to conclude anything about the Torah's conception of God, because both of these occurrences are in the phrase "my soul will scorn." This phrase may simply have been a known expression.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“25:25,35,39. when your brother will be low. Meaning: when your fellow Israelite will be so poor that he has difficulty holding onto his land. It has long been noted that the three times that this phrase occurs in this chapter reflect three stages of increasing hardship. In the first, the person has to sell his land. In the second, he has both lost his land and is without money. And in the third, he himself is sold (or sells himself) into servitude. And at each stage, the man's fellow Israelite is commanded to help him. If he has to sell his land, one must redeem it for him and then give it back to him in the jubilee year. If he is without money, one must lend him money without any charge or interest. And if he is sold, one must not treat him as a slave.

Here the units of laws convey the specific requirements while the arrangement conveys the basic principle, namely, that as one's brother's need increases, so does one's responsibility to help him. Further, one must thus help one's fellow as a matter of law. This chapter never speaks of charity, nor does it appeal to one's feelings of compassion or generosity. An unfortunate Israelite need not feel degraded to be poor nor ashamed to be pitied. Economic suffering is rather treated as a reality of life, which one is required by law to remedy. The poor man thus can know that his brother is helping him because the system requires brothers to help one another and that, if the shoe were on the other foot, he would do the same for his brother. This is not to say that the text denies or discourages feelings of compassion, but only that the fulfillment of the law is not made dependent upon the presence or absence of such feelings.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“24:20 an eye for an eye. Perhaps the most perplexing of the ethical laws is the principle of justice expressed in the formulation "an eye for an eye" It has frequently been cited as evidence of the stern character of YHWH, but that is a misunderstanding. In its context in Leviticus it applies solely to human justice. YHWH Himself frequently follows a more relenting course than that, from the golden calf event to a series of reprieves for seemingly undeserving individuals and communities in subsequent books of the Tanakh. As for the meaning of this formulation for human justice, we must read it in its context, where the basic principle appears to be that punishment should correspond to the crime and never exceed it”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“19:18. love your neighbor as yourself. Also translated as "companion" or "fellow," the word (Hebrew rea') means a member of one's own group, a peer. In some contexts that will mean one's fellow human being. In others it will mean a friend or neighbor. (Thus, in Gen 38:12,20 it refers to Judah's "friend," who is an Adullamite.) In others it will mean a fellow member of a particular community. Some understand "Love your neighbor as yourself" as applying only to one's fellow Israelites. Even if one takes that view of this commandment, one must acknowledge that in this same chapter there is also the commandment to love the alien, the foreigner, as oneself as well (19:34). The people of Israel are thus commanded to love all human beings, not just their own people, no matter how one understands the term. And this is extraordinary.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“19.2. be holy. What is meant here by being holy? The chapter that begins with this statement stands out because, perhaps more than any other in the Torah, it merges major commandments with so many different sorts. It includes most of the Ten Commandments, sacrifices, justice, caring for the poor and the infirm, treatment of women, of the elderly, food, magic, loving one's neighbor as oneself, loving an alien as oneself. If one had to choose only one chapter out of the Torah to make known, it might well be this one.

The strange mixing of so many different kinds of commandments may convey that every commandment is important. Even if we are naturally inclined to regard some commandments as more important than others, and some commandments as most important of all, this tapestry presses us to see what is important and valuable in every commandment, even commandments that one may question.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“18.22. you shall not lie with a male like lying with a woman. Why is male homosexuality explicitly forbidden in the Torah but not female? Some would surmise that it is because women are controlled in a patriarchal Israelite society; and so a woman would simply have no choice but to marry a man. But this is not an adequate explanation, because there would still be opportunities for female homosexual liaisons. Some would say that the concern is the seed, which is understood to come from the male, and therefore is "wasted" in another male. But the text calls homosexuality "an offensive thing" (in older translations: "an abomination"), which certainly sounds like an abhorrence of the act, and not just a concern with the practical matter of reproduction. The reason may rather be because the Torah comes from a world in which there is polygamy. A man can have sex with his two wives simultaneously. That this is understood to be permissible is implied by the fact that the law in v. 18 above forbids it only with sisters (see the comment). Or, even if the above case means marriage and not simultaneous sex, then simultaneous sex still is not forbidden anywhere in the Torah. If simultaneous sex with one's two (or more) wives is practiced, it would be difficult to allow this while forbidding female homosexuality. (At minimum, it could require a number of laws specifying what sort of contact is permissible and under what circumstances.)

In the present state of knowledge concerning homosexuality, it is difficult to justify its prohibition in the Torah. All of the movements in Judaism (and other religions) are currently contending with this issue. Its resolution ultimately must lie in the law of Deuteronomy that states that, for difficult matters of the law, people must turn to the authorities of their age, to those who are competent to judge, and those judges must decide (Deut 17:8-9).

In my own view, the present understanding of the nature of homosexuality indicates that it is not an "offensive thing" (also translated "abomination") as described in this verse. The Hebrew term for "offensive thing" (tô'ēbāh) is understood to be a relative term, which varies according to human perceptions. For example, in Genesis, Joseph tells his brothers that "any shepherd is an offensive thing to Egypt" (46:34); but, obviously, it is not an offensive thing to the Israelites. In light of the evidence at present, homosexuality cannot be said to be unnatural, nor is it an illness. Its prohibition in this verse explicitly applies only so long as it is perceived to be offensive, and therefore the current state of the evidence suggests that the period in which this commandment was binding has come to an end.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“4:3. the anointed priest. Hebrew hakkōhēn hammāšîaḥ. This is the first occurence of the word māšîaḥ, meaning "anointed" and commonly translated elsewhere in the Tanakh as "Messiah." In the Torah māšîaḥalways refers to the high priest and not, as it later came to mean, the king.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“Sacrifice is the only mechanism for forgiveness in the book of Leviticus. There is no suggestion in Leviticus that repentance alone can bring forgiveness for violations of the laws, no indication that one can appeal to YHWH's mercy. His grace, or His kindness for atonement. Indeed, the words "repentance" (šûb), "mercy" (raḥǎmîm), "grace" (ḥēn), and "kindness" (ḥesed) do not occur in Leviticus.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“1:1. the words that Moses spoke. In developing from a man of actions to a man of words, Moses imitates God. The Tanak depicts God as becoming more and more hidden over the course of history. In the first books of the Bible God apperas to humans, is seen and heard at Sinai, makes His presence known through miracles, angels, and the column of cloud and fire. But these visible signs of divine action in history disappear from the story one by one. And by the last books of the Tanak, there are no angels or miracles. The words of "YHWH appeared to" and "YHWH spoke to" do not occur to anyone. Instead, the priest Ezra reads the Torah aloud to the people. In the place of the acts of God there is the word of God. When the Torah pictures Moses ending his life in words, he imitates and prefigures the transformation of the human experience of God that will occur in the Bible.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“1:1. Moses. In the Hebrew Bible's picture of human history, Moses is the first great man—and the first great leader.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“21:2. Hebrew slave. In biblical narrative the term "Hebrew" is used to identify Israelites only when speaking among foreigners. It is not the standard term for the people, which is rather "Israelite" at first, and "Jew" later.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah