Is the northern and southern Hebrew mem the same?

להבדיל

Pompey the Great put an end to this Jewish independence 77 years later, in 63 BCE.
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This evening, Israel celebrates its 78th anniversary of independence.

Happy Yom Ha‘atzmaut to all who celebrate!
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An independent Jewish state under Hasmonean rule lasted for a continuous period of 77 years.

According to 1 Macc 14:44–45, Simon Thassi the Hasmonean was confirmed as the Jews' political, military, and religious leader on the 18th of Elul in 140 BCE.

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In Deuteronomy, we find Moses instructing the Israelites directly.

As surprising as this may sound, the Pentateuch never presents a stand-alone law; only stories, set in the past, about the giving of legal instructions.

One more thing to note: the narrative voice remains anonymous throughout.

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The Pentateuch contains no freestanding prescriptive laws.

Without exception, all the legal material is couched within narrative frames.

Usually, these narrative frames involve God speaking to Moses (sometimes together with Aaron) and instructing him to convey commands to the Israelites.

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It is only in the early rabbinic literature that we begin to find an explicit expectation that women immerse following childbirth and uterine bleeding.

For an open-access article on Jewish ritual immersion in the longue durée, see: publications.iaa.org.il/atiqot/vol11...
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...waiting a specified amount of time (and in some cases sacrificial offerings), after which the woman is fully pure.

Even texts from the Late Second Temple period still make no mention of immersion (or any other sort of bathing) for women following menstruation or childbirth.
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There is an irony here, though, since—unlike in the case of most other of the Torah’s ritual impurities—the Pentateuch never explicitly calls for ritual bathing following childbirth, menstruation, or abnormal uterine bleeding (zāvâ). All that is required is...
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The reason that married women continue to practice immersion is that, as per Leviticus 18:19, it is forbidden for a male to engage in sexual relations with a female in a state of menstrual impurity. Ritual immersion permits resumption of the intimate marital relationship.
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Observance went into decline starting in the mid-2nd century CE, and by the end of Late Antiquity most of these laws were no longer kept at all.

The main exception is the immersion of married women following menstruation and childbirth, which continues to be practiced even today.
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𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗰 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗪𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻’𝘀 𝗥𝗶𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻

This week’s Torah reading contains the highest concentration of ritual purity rules in the entire Pentateuch.
Almost none of these are kept anymore.
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All of this suggests to me that the Leontopolis community reflects a late relic of Yahwism prior to the emergence of Torah-abiding Judaism.

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Here too, we have a temple whose location contravened the cultic centralization of Deuteronomy. Its priests were rivals to the Hasmonean priestly dynasty, for whom the Torah served as a central rallying point.

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While I think Wellhausen was wrong about Elephantine, it seems to me that his idea of a “fossilized remnant” of Yahwism is quite useful for a different Judean community centered on a YHWH temple in Egypt: the one in Ptolemaic and Early Roman Leontopolis.

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Julius Wellhausen claimed that the Judean community at Elephantine was a “fossilized remnant of unreformed Judaism.” To his mind, most Judeans had adopted the Torah as authoritative law by the late 5th century BCE; since the Elephantine community had not done so, it represents an aberration.

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This is the only depiction of Jesus wearing tefillin that I know about.

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘠𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘊𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘹𝘪𝘰𝘯, Marc Chagall, 1943. Oil on canvas.

He brought these to Heidelberg, where they remain today, and published them shortly thereafter in a monograph. This was the first—and remains one of the few—monographs ever published on the ancient tefillin from the Judean Desert.

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Not long after the war, he was reinstated as a professor, first at the University of Göttingen and later at Heidelberg University.

In 1955, Kuhn obtained four ancient tefillin fragments from Bedouin who had looted them from the Qumran caves.

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The National Socialist fascination with the scientific study of Judaism has left lasting effects on scholarship. My own path has often crossed with that of the SA-uniform-wearing Karl Georg Kuhn (י"ש).

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Amazing Lookalike! Amazing Lookalikes in the world of Academic Biblical Studies

amazinglookalike.wordpress.com

I can assure you that we are not related.

A wonderful new volume of Eretz-Israel has just been published, in honor of Prof. Ronny Reich.

I've put the Table of Contents in the first comment.
There are so many articles in here that I look forward to reading.

😂

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Finally received my volumes 📚

It seems that the menorah enters Jewish consciousness together with the Torah, only under Hasmonean aegis. One more thing the Hasmoneans can take credit for!

Shabbat shalom to all 🕯️🕯️❤️

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Notably, in the book of Ezra there is no mention of a menorah (nor of multiple menorot) among the gold and silver vessels that Cyrus is said to have repatriated to Jerusalem from the spoils taken by Nebuchadnezzar (Ezra 1:7–11; 5:14–15; 6:5).

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And earlier texts that speak of either a single or multiple golden (or silver) lampstands in the Jerusalem Temple (e.g., 1 Kgs 7:49; Jer 52:19; 1 Chr 28:15; 2 Chr 4:7; 13:11; Zech 4:1–7) provide little correspondence with Pentateuchal prescriptions.

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