Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Numbers 36, The End of the Book of Numbers

Jeremy Rosen - Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Numbers 36, The End of the Book of Numbers

- So ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who are not familiar, this is “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff, a German composer of the last century. And it concerns a group of people called the goliards, who were young nuns and monks in the 12th and 13th century who used to rebel against the authority of their superiors, run wild, have orgies in the forest, behave absolutely crazily. Or actually, one might say like young people nowadays. But nevertheless, they wrote poems in Latin expressing their anti-establishment, fun, corrupt, in certain ways, way of life. And that was put to music by Carl Orff, as I say, last century. And it’s a fascinating collection of music and an indication that all religions have their rebels and their dark side, or not, as the case may be. Anyway, having said that, we now come to today’s ending of the Book of Numbers. So we’re coming to the end of the Book of Numbers and we are going to start at chapter 35. But a word of introduction and of explanation as to what this really is saying, because it seems somewhat out of place. Having gone through everything and prepared for the movement into the land of Canaan, and with all the various problems that have taken place and rebellions and crises over the past years, we end, as we did at the end of last week, with the division between the tribes who were going to stay on the East and those on the West.

And now talking about what’s going to happen when you get there. And the interesting thing is that this apparently is talking about the Levites and the cities of the Levites. And remember that in the inheritance of all the tribes, when they were going to go over to the other side, the Levites were not, the priests were not going to have any territory. All the other tribes would have territory, they would not have any territory whatsoever. So now the Torah comes and it says, “Look, they’ve got to have somewhere to live. Not all the priests are going to be in the Temple in Jerusalem. They’re going to have a role in the community. What is that role going to be and how are they going to live?” And so the Torah talks about cities of the Levites, cities in which they would go to live with their families, would have agricultural land roundabout, so they could till the land and they could function like any normal city. And these cities would also be what we know as cities of refuge. There would be three on the West Bank and three on the East Bank. Now this is the text that we have and that we’re looking at today to describe, chapter 35 and the first verse: And God speaks to Moses, in the plains of Moab on the East Bank, overlooking the River Jordan, opposite Jericho, and gives these last final laws. “Command the children of Israel, that they should give to the Levites as their part of an inheritance cities, towns, to dwell in.” So this is not an inheritance, a tribal inheritance as such, but a place for them to live. “And , and there would be land around about the cities so that they could cultivate, you should give to the Levites.” In verse 3: These cities should be to dwell.

And the area around would be for all their cattle and their property and to what they might need to make a living to function effectively. And, verse 4, the areas that you will give for these cities from the city itself, from the wall of the city outside a thousand, which roughly speaking would be something like a mile around on all sides, as public property to cultivate and to work. Commons, as we used to say in England in the old days. And you should then measure from outside of the city A further 2,000 cubits outside the city, towards the south, to the south, and another 2,000 towards the sea and on the south side, and on the north, 2,000 again. And this will be their property. And now, verse 6: The cities that you are going to give to the Levites, are six cities of refuge, that you will set out for the murderer to go there. And these six primary cities of refuge, you will add 42 towns for the Levites to live in. So they wouldn’t all have to be there. And so, therefore, the cities that you will give, in verse 7, to the Levites, will be 48 towns with the pasture around. But they aren’t necessarily all going to be what we call cities of refuge. Verse 8, and from this that you’re giving to the children of Israel, some of the larger groups maybe need a little bit more. And some who are smaller will have less. Depending on the population will be the size of the towns that they will have. Verse 9: And now he says, “Clarifying what we mean by a city of refuge.” Of course we all know what refuge is.

Those of us who know English history from Thomas Becket, who when he was pursued by the king, ran to the Canterbury Cathedral and held onto the altar. And apparently in those days that was refuge and you couldn’t pull anybody off the altar. But the soldiers of Henry pulled him off and murdered him there. So the idea of refuge in a church is derived from refuge here in the cities of the Levites. Now, of course, we’ve got to have to explain what refuge means and how it works. So now we’re clarifying, how does this actually work? And you should provide these cities, in verse 11, they should be refuge, and the murderer can run there if , if he kills somebody unintentionally. So we are dealing now with what we would call manslaughter. Now, there’s a lot that needs to be clarified here. First of all, there is no system in biblical Judaism of prison, as we understand it, as a penal system. The only time a word like keeps somebody pending a decision, is as a temporary holding place, but not as a punishment as such. Prison is not a punishment. And, of course, one of the critiques we have of the current prison system, penal system, is that it deprives fathers of children, children of fathers, husbands of wives, wives of husbands, that people gather together in these enclosed areas where criminals train a new generation, where they are certainly, as a general rule, not in a position to, shall we say, live a semi-normal life and to avoid the influence of bad people around them. So the Torah does not have a penal system, but it has instead this system that there are cities where people can go to find refuge. And there they will be judged. And if the judgement is a punishment, that punishment will be carried out. And if not, they will be able to live there. And we’re not going to discuss how long they’re living there, but they’re going to live there with their families. So they will be en famille, with their families, earning a living using their trade, benefiting society in a creative, positive way. So this whole system is such a contrast to the penal system that we have today. Of course, the numbers might have been fewer, but nevertheless that’s the issue and that’s what we have to deal. And now we have the mention of a redeemer in verse 12.

And these cities should be as a kind of a refuge, safety, from the goel, from the redeemer. Now the goel haddam, the redeemer, is like the Italian tradition of a family vendetta. Not only there but in other countries in the world: you kill one of my family, I’m going to kill one of your family. This guy killed somebody, I’m going to kill him as the redeemer. The Torah, as understood and certainly by the time of the Talmud, but as understood even before that, was that the role of the redeemer was not actually to murder the person in revenge. The role of the redeemer was to see that justice was done and to ensure that the justice was done. On the other hand, in historical terms, the role of the redeemer was to try to kill or see that the guy was dealt with. Maybe strung up on a tree or something. And so the Torah establishes the fact that anybody, whether a murderer or innocent or manslaughter, can get to the cities of refuge in order to avoid any individuals trying to take the law into their own hands. And there, they would be either dealt with or protected. So the Torah saying here, so that the murderer does not die, until the person is actually judged. So the Torah is saying, there is the redeemer running after this guy, but at the same time the Torah is saying quite explicitly, the murderer should not die and should not be killed before he stands and gets a fair trial.

So these are the six specific cities of the Levite cities. Not all of Levite cities, but six ones that have to be set aside. And in verse 14: these three cities of refuge should be on the East Bank of the River Jordan, three. And then in the land of Canaan, there should be three. Three, three. Which raises a very interesting question. If on the East Bank there only two and a half tribes, and on the West Bank there were all the others, how come it’s three on one side and three on the other? There should be a heck of a lot more on the West Bank, where the majority of the tribes were, than on the East Bank. And there are various explanations given for this discrepancy. One of them is that the two and a half tribes living on the East Bank are more vulnerable to the tribes, the non-Jewish tribes around them, ‘cause they’re surrounded more on that side without the River Jordan intervening. That because of that, they have to be on their guard much more. And because of that, like a gun culture, there are going to be more deaths. And because there are going to be more deaths in that area than there are in the other area, that’s why they have an equal number of cities of refuge. The other explanation that’s given is that they were also farther from the moral centre, the main religious centre of the West Bank, and therefore they were less religious. And also as we know in due course, they’re going to assimilate and be assimilated much more quickly. Either way, these are the cities of refuge. And so in verse 15, the text goes on to say: This applies not only to the children of Israel, but any non-Jew who is living amongst them has the same right, civil rights, the same right to go to the cities of refuge and look for protection and stay there even though they’re not citizens and not what we would call nowadays converts, but anybody who is living in that area.

And these six cities should be as a refuge where anybody who kills somebody, as in innocents, those are the people who are going to stay there, as opposed to those who are going to be judged and found guilty. And we’re going to draw a distinction. So now already we have a distinction that is important. 'Cause if you remember in the Ten Commandments, in the Aseret Hadibrot, the Torah simply said, “Do not kill.” And doesn’t specify in any way any distinction between manslaughter, accidental killing, intentional killing. And this is where we are now coming to clarify, verse 16. Let’s give a situation where, as a result of a metal tool, somebody is killed, and the person dies, by our standards, this is intentional murder. He has a murderous weapon in his hand. He’s used this murderous weapon, and therefore he’s worthy of the death penalty. Of course, remember going through the Torah, the death penalty can only be carried out when there are two witnesses, and in addition to two witnesses who are not relatives in any way, who’ve actually seen something. We don’t accept circumstantial evidence. It has to be seen. And in addition to that, there have to be two other witnesses who know that this person was warned. So he clearly kills with metallic, then he is guilty. And if it’s with a stone that somebody is killed, that also is a case, a stone smashing on somebody’s head, of intentional murder, or sometimes even with a wooden weapon.

And it’s interesting to note that in, for example, the Crusades, and most mediaeval wars in Europe, other than the knights who were armed, the vast majority of the peasants who were forced to fight for their lords only had wooden weapons. They had no metal weapons. They had their sticks, they had their staffs, they had their spears, but only made out of wood. But in these situations, goel hadam, the redeemer, has the right to kill the person. If he meets him somewhere in the fields, he can kill him. Now this is another example of where the Torah and the the Talmud, in a sense, re-understands and reinterprets a biblical law. Just as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth does not mean literally you take a tooth out and you don’t take an eye out, here the redeemer does not have the right to kill. That can only be done through a judicial system. But he has, if you like, moral obligation to see that justice is carried out. And. So if somebody. And this really should belong in the earlier sentence, if somebody pushes somebody, for example, over a cliff, or, in a sense, lies in wait for him. Or in verse 21, he is known to hate this guy, so there is a motive, and he punches him to death, then, again, the murderer is the one who should die. And again the redeemer, if he meets this person, can carry out the law or see that the law is carried out. And similarly, somebody, in verse 22, is lying in wait and jumps out at somebody, or, again, throws an object at him, and it’s unintentional, then he does not count as a murderer. So somebody is pushing somebody, not because he wants to push him off a cliff, but either there was a crowd, and one was pushing somebody else, somebody pushed somebody else and accidentally fell off, or he was trying to gain his balance and grab hold of somebody, and that resulted, either way then anything that is unintentional is in a different situation. And so going back to talking about a metallic object. What happens if there is a stone weapon, he didn’t see the guy. In a sense, he was on a building with stones and building things up and a brick fell, and it fell on somebody. It wasn’t intentional. He was never an enemy, I never wanted to do him any harm.

So all of them, all these guys, intentional, unintentional, they are judged by the community, by the legal system, and judged between the two positions. The goel hadam is, if you like, the prosecutor, the community, which is the defender, according to the laws of the Torah. And in verse 25: And the community, the judicial system, saves the murderer, the manslaughter guy, from the goel hadam, for the prosecutor, who wants to find him guilty and shove him in jail. And so the community then brings him back from the court to the city of refuge, which implies that they may have to go up to the court, the supreme court in Jerusalem, if there was a case that warranted it. And then after the judgement , and it’s confirmed that it was unintentional, they take him back. And here’s an interesting thing. And he should wait with his family in this city of refuge until the high priest dies who is anointed with oil. Now there’s a whole lot of discussion about what this means and why it should be. In fact, the the Talmud says that the custom was that the people who were there, who were in the city of refuge, would go and give presents to the mother of the high priest as if to show, look, we don’t wish him harm, we don’t want him to die tomorrow so that we’ll be left free. So don’t think we think that way. We realise that this is just an arbitrary decision, and also it’s a decision that could mean that within the year they might be freed if the Kohen Gadol died very, very quickly. But essentially this was saying that the death of the high priest is an atonement. This phrase, that somebody’s death is an atonement, is reflected in this idea that the death of somebody brings the pain to the community, we atone, and this in a sense completes the sentence of the man slaughterer. We now go on to 26. But if the murderer, and here we are using the term murderer to apply to somebody who could be intentional, could be accidental, but this is the actual murderer who has run in, guilty man, run into the city of refuge. He is there, he’s hiding there, he’s not been brought to court yet or has not been sentenced yet. And if during this time he goes out of the city, of the borders of the city where he is, and the redeemer or the prosecutor finds him there outside, then he can be considered to be, that if he does kill him at that stage, in law done.

There is no blood guilt. Now the question there is, what exactly does it mean, no blood guilt? It can mean several things. It can mean he’s not guilty of anything. And yet we’ve already said that the law has to take priority. So again, this is understood as meaning that the role of the prosecutor continues long after the trial. That the trial does not necessarily end the situation. Because very often the trial might be, if you like, might find somebody innocent on a technicality or something, and therefore they have the right to say that although the technicality means you are not guilty, all the indications are that you really shouldn’t be set free and we have the right to keep you here. And you know this applies to lots of things in the penal system. So for example, in the case of the eye for an eye in the tooth for a tooth, where we decide that it is financial compensation, or where we decide, for example, that somebody might be guilty of a capital offence. Nevertheless, despite all that we will do whatever we can to avoid taking a life. And so by the time we come to the Talmud phrase I’ve mentioned before, famous phrase of Rabbi Akiva who says, any beth din that would put anybody to death in 70 years would be considered to be a bloody beth din. We do whatever we can do to avoid carrying out the death penalty. Ideally we don’t, and we haven’t for 2,000 years. Verse 29: And this is part of your legal system. For all future generations, wherever you live. Where somebody kills somebody and there are witnesses, then their witnesses can convict. However, only one witness cannot convict. So look at that, 'cause in our society, one witness would be enough, but here they’re saying, “No. Unless there are two witnesses, we can’t put somebody to death.”

So when you add these things up together and understand in the total context, you realise that this is far more liberal than most systems today of penal punishment. And meanwhile, there’s one other thing we have to say. The other thing is this, you can’t buy your way out of trouble. Again, something which is so common in the world in which we live. You cannot accept a ransom for somebody who has killed. He’s a bad guy if he’s killed somebody. So even though it says he should die, he deserves to die. Again, only one witness isn’t good enough. Nevertheless, you can’t buy your way out of trouble. And similarly, somebody who’s fled of manslaughter, not of innocence, and goes and stays in the city of refuge, he cannot return home until the priest dies. And we end with this kind of general statement: Do not corrupt or pollute the land that you are coming to, 'cause blood, violence destroys the country, destroys the culture. And the community that that allows blood to be spilt has no atonement. Except by the person who carried out the crime. He has to, if you like, put things right with the Almighty. Verse 34, and don’t corrupt the Earth, the land by which you live. 'cause I, God, am living amongst you. I’m living in and with the children of Israel. And if you kill, you are betraying me, says God. That’s a very powerful message. Now, just before we end the book, we come back to the postscript on the daughters of Zelophehad. If you remember, the daughters of Zelophehad appeared before Moses while he was allocating territory, and the territory was being allocated according to tribes, and according to the males in the tribes.

And the daughters of Zelophehad came to Moses and said, “Look, our father died with no sons. Here we are the daughters. Are you telling us that we can’t maintain the memory of our father? 'Cause if we don’t have any tribal land, his memory will disappear.” And Moses thought about it and he took advice from the Almighty, and as a result he said, “Yes, you may indeed inherit.” Now then there was a problem, because if they inherit the land that belonged to their father in Manasseh, and then they go and marry somebody in a different tribe, they will be taking with them part of the heritage, part of the territory of Manasseh. So the children of Manasseh have a problem of their own, which they now come and present to Moses. And Moses then says, “Yes, you’ve got a case.” So here we have an interesting example of you’d think that all the laws were given clearly on Mount Sinai and there’s no question. And yet new situations arise all the time when new decisions have to be taken. And here is the big example of two decisions taken to modify law in the light of plea being made by people to the, um. Sorry. To the authorities. So chapter 35. And God speaks to Moses in the plains of Moab by the River Jordan. And he says, Oh sorry, I’ve gone to 35, I’ve gone back. My mistake, we should be 36. How did I go back to there? Ah because the phone went off and it distracted me. That’s what it was. I apologise. Okay, chapter 36, verse 1. And the heads of the tribes, of the tribes of the families of Gilead ben Machir ben Manasseh, the family of one of the major guys in the tribe of Manasseh, who which was, one of the tribes of Joseph. Joseph was divided into two.

They came with a plea before Moses and the elders and the heads of families, and they said this, verse 2: My God commanded my lord, you, to divide the land of Canaan, and also the West Bank, amongst the children of the East Bank, the children of Israel. And at the same time you also agreed to give the inheritance of Zelophehad, our brother, one of our tribe, to his daughters. Now if one of the tribes, they marry one of them, and they take their property with them, the amount of inheritance given to the tribe of Manasseh will be removed to whoever they marry in that tribe. And then we will lose part of our tribal territory. And even when the children of Israel then have the Jubilee, where after 50 years everything returns to the original tribal structure, their territory, having married into another tribe, will go to them. And once again. It will reduce our amount of property. So Moses listened to that. He didn’t have to ask anybody else. It sounded reasonable. In verse 5, with God’s approval. So he did go back to check with God, he approved, and he said, the tribe of Joseph, and Manasseh is one of them, says, “It is right, they are right, just as we said that the daughters of Zelophehad were right.” And so my solution is this, 6: This is what God commands the daughters of Zelophehad. And he says. “You choose your husbands. Wives, women have the right to choose their husbands once they are adults. You choose.” But, here’s the , the but.

You may only marry into the tribe of your father’s tribe of Manasseh. So we have seriously restricted who these women can marry, and the inheritance should not, therefore, be transferred from one tribe to another. One should stick with the family tradition. And any woman who inherits property because there’s no male should stick to the tribe in order that people should have their tribal territory together and it will not go off to some other tribe. Verse 16, this is what Moses was commanded by God, and this is what the daughters of daughter of Zelophehad did and the daughters of Zelophehad: Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Noah. And you’ll note as you track back to the earlier references, the order of the girls changed. Was one the order of the girls in terms of age, and this is in terms of achievement? We don’t know, but they’re different order. They married their cousins. They married their cousins and it seems they were happy with that, 'cause they could marry at anybody else in the tribe, but they chose their cousins, and they stepped there. The issue of tribal inheritance was very, very powerful in the early era of the Jewish people, where the tribes were all coming together, and when they had their tribal territory, and yet it didn’t work. The tribal system didn’t work for several reasons. The tribes fought amongst themselves. At one stage the tribe of Benjamin was almost completely destroyed because there was a battle between Benjamin and the other tribes. These are things that, please God, we will come to when we look at the Book of Judges and we see the history developing over time. And then of course the tribes split into two kingdoms at war with each other. And with that the whole question of tribal territory began to disappear and weaken. And the 10 northern tribes were taken off and dissipated even though many of them rejoined the Babylonians after. But the main Babylonian exile was of just Judah and Benjamin. And that’s from where we get our name, the Jews, Judeans, from Judea.

So the tribal system was an appropriate system at this early stage both in terms of, so to speak, with a small D, democratic attitudes, but also because it gave sense of people of belonging to something instead of being part of a much bigger group with no interaction Keeping things in families, in clans, in tribes was an important way of building up the nation, combining overall governance and individual loyalty. But clearly individual loyalty initially was the most important thing. The form of government, as we are going to see, is going to change from era to era. There’s no set model, although people like to think of the kingdom of David as it, but it wasn’t in practise. And this indicates the importance of tribalism that no longer exists in the same way that sacrifices no longer exist. There are people who think that when the Messiah comes he’s going to reconstitute the tribes. I think that’s going to be a big problem, but we’ll deal with that if it ever happens. And so now we come to the last line of Book of Bamidbar. The are the commandments. Mitzvoth, so what we would call ritual commandments. Mishpatim, or what we would call civil law. That God commanded to Moses, through him to the children of Israel. On the plains of Moab. By the River Jordan, at Jericho. Now if you remember, when we ended the Book of Leviticus, the Book of Leviticus ended with a similar statement. It went, these are the commands.

That God commanded Moshe. Same phrase. But instead of by Jericho, it said, on Mount Sinai. And there is a tradition that all laws were given by God to Moses on Sinai. But if that’s so, here you clearly have a contradiction. Laws were given in stages, and this stage is at the end of 40 years, which is one of the reasons why even the Talmud has a problem with the authorization and the origin, And the Talmud in the tractate of Gittin says that there’s an argument whether the Torah was given. That’s to say sealed in one go, in one place, in one document, or in scrolls in stages over 40 years. So that position is entrenched in the Talmud, and this, in a sense, reflects that. Now, as you know, when we come to the end of a book, we always have, we stand up at the end of the reading, and we say, be strong, be strong. And if you are strong, we will be strong. And at this particular moment, as we are facing so much hatred and such a challenge, I wish this to us and to all of Israel, let’s be strong, and we will survive. So now we go back to the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Shelly asks, “Would it be correct to say that Torah doesn’t want the Levites to have.” Oh, we’ve left the meeting. No, we haven’t left the meeting. Where are the questions? Question and answer, here we are.

Q: “Would it be correct to say that the Torah doesn’t want the Levites to have the same kind of wealth and political power the priests of Egypt had?”

A: I think that’s absolutely right, Shelly. Remember that Joseph, when he nationalised the land of Egypt and handed it over to Pharaoh during the great famine, didn’t touch the Levites, the priests of Egypt, 'cause they were so powerful, and the priests very often removed kings if they didn’t like what they were doing. So certainly this was the intent originally that the priests and the Levites would not become rich, own vast amounts of land. They lived in cities that were commonly owned, not by any one individual, although there were opportunities to buy and sell certain properties within cities and outside. But nevertheless, this was clearly the original intention, and this is another reason for the fall of the priests. Because the priests ended up, both in the first commonwealth and in the second, in becoming corrupt, concerned with power, concerned with money, and trying to exert their influence on the basis of the free tithes they were getting, the free taxation that came to them. And they were an utter disaster. Murderous as well as being highly and very, very materialist. Three cities on the East, two and a half, three cities on the West, nine and a half, significance of that? Well, you asked that at the beginning, we’ve answered that. So let’s go on to the next one.

Q: Justice then and today from a Torah perspective, do they differ?

A: Well, yes they do, as I’ve mentioned, they differ. First of all, we don’t have a penal system that they had then. Secondly, you can only convict on two witnesses, and actually be real witnesses, not circumstantial evidence. And at the same time that the judicial system was a judicial system that tried to avoid anything dramatic and certainly putting people to death. But use that as, in a sense, as a kind of a disincentive, as a kind of avoidance, a kind of warning people off violence as a distraction. Would contemporary parallel verse 16 to metal and stone, anybody using a gun would be subject to greater punishment because they had a gun? Well, absolutely. Somebody having a gun is going to be considered to have much greater responsibility, because generally the Talmud regards human beings. I mean, there’s a difference in the Talmud between what’s called. That’s of animals, the difference between an animal that never did any harm in the past and an animal that does a lot of harm and has gored and caused problems. And the same thing with humans. Humans are always considered. That’s because they were always considered having a potential to do danger, and therefore we have to take extra special care to avoid anything happening. And that would certainly apply in having possessions of guns. And that’s one of the reasons why that until recently Israel was very reluctant to allow citizens to have guns. But given the situation we find ourselves in today, it’s hardly surprising that they’re relaxing the law.

Q: Janet: is the murderous perpetrator always referred to as a man? Do the laws always apply to women who killed?

A: Exactly the same. Most of these statements of is a man, is a person, and that includes women. In civil matters, women and men are the same and have the same laws. Eichmann was executed in Israel. Eichmann was. And this was a tremendous debate, and in fact my father was very unpopular because he disapproved of putting Eichmann to trial. And indeed, if you were to look on YouTube, you’ll be able to find if you look up Kopul Rosen and Eichmann, you’ll find a recording of him debating several issues of the Eichmann trial. And he believed he should not have been put to death. I disagree with him on that for various reasons, not least of which because I think, had he lived, he would’ve been turned into a kind of a hero by the fascists and people would have wanted to go to his grave or make something of him. And it was quite exceptional circumstances, and I think that was the only fit one under those conditions. But technically speaking, according to Jewish law, there is a case to be made out that he shouldn’t have been executed. And this was a decision not taken by Jewish law but taken by Israeli civil law. But it still remains a fact that in Israeli civil law there is no death penalty. People are campaigning for it now, but there is no death penalty in Israel.

Q: Joseph, hi, Joseph: How are the judges selected and who or is the assembly?

A: Well, that’s an excellent question. The Torah does not explain who the judges are, but the Torah does talk about the 70 elders. The 70 elders who were first of all suggested by Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, and then reiterated later on. And they were chosen from the different tribes, and they were, in a sense, the trained authorities, and they became what were called judges later on. Each tribe had its judge. Some judges were more universal, accepted by others, and others were not. The system of judges ended with the appointment of the king. But this system of the 70 was later resuscitated by Ezra in Babylon, on the return from Babylon, as the beginning of what we call the Sanhedrin. So the Sanhedrin was in fact a self-perpetuating oligarchy. They appointed their members, they did it on a democratic basis, but on the basis of knowledge, and obviously, as the Torah says, the judges have to be above corruption, they have to not be able to take bribes, they’ve got to be absolutely perfect examples. And anyone convicted of that, of any of those crimes, would be thrown out.

Q: How did these laws compare with contemporary civilizations?

A: Well, the truth of the matter is that not until Roman law do you begin to have a system of judiciary which is in a sense comparable, but not entirely the same. But it is Roman law, the basis of Western law today, although there have been plenty of modifications, but this was quite remarkably different to any other record we have of any other legal system at that time. Remember that in Egypt, for example, they didn’t have a legal system as such. They had what was called Ma'at, which is common sense. And judges made up their own decisions according to common sense at that time.

Q: Estelle: I understand no woman can be a witness even if she were the mother of the victim, saw the crime. Is this correct?

A: On one level, it is correct, and it is correct because, at that stage, women were not expected to appear in court to be questioned by a strange man. And it was a matter of preserving their dignity and preserving their innocence. And as we know, we have seen women who have tried to bring a rapist to court humiliated in the court and destroyed. And so there’s some good reason to think this wasn’t such a bad idea, but that didn’t mean to say that their evidence or what they saw would not be taken into account. So this is, in one sense, an anomaly. I think it is something that, if you like, this is another example of something that should be publicly declared to be no longer operable, because, anyway, the fact is that we now live under the law of the land. And under the law of the land, which we are obliged to adhere to, women and men are the same. So this does remain, if you like, an anomaly from the past. I’m sorry it was. I wish they’d have been, if you like, more aware of the importance of equality of sexes. But that was then, and thank God we are now in a different world, although we’ve still got a long way to go.

Israel says, “Given your comments about the verse in Vayikra and Devarim, what is the basis of the belief that not only when the Ten Commandments.” We’re still okay, aren’t we? We haven’t stopped recording, I hope. Anyway.

• [Host] Yeah, we’re good.

• We are good. Good, good. Just checking. Still got a little bit to go, but we’re okay.

Q: What is the basis of the belief that not only were the Ten Commandments given at Mount Sinai, but the entire Torah was given to Moses. If the Torah was divinely inspired over a longer period of time, does that raise the question about legitimacy and integrity of the Torah?

A: Well no, I don’t think it does raise the question of integrity of the Torah, but we don’t know exactly what the inspiration was. Because remember that Moses comes down from the mountain just with two tablets of stone. He doesn’t come down with everything written in text. And therefore, whatever the inspiration was, the inspiration was on Mount Sinai. The nature of that inspiration is not clear. And as we know, the Torah has three different versions of exactly what happened on Mount Sinai. So we can only speculate. The only thing we can be certain about is that for thousands of years, this is our text, and we believe it was inspired, however you want to use that word. Whether it is human inspiration, divine inspiration, whatever it is, that becomes a matter of individual decision and individual faith. But the, if you like, the simple cliche is that the Torah was given to Moses on Sinai. That’s the origin of it. And even things that were not specified could have been implied in the text. And that’s why there will always at some stage have been an oral law that explains and clarifies the written law, but how and what it was, again, developed over time. And the oral law that was written down by Judah the Prince in 200 of the Common Era was certainly not the same oral law that was written down at the time, or wasn’t written down, and was kept oral, but there at the time of Moses. So thank you, Israel. Why was tribal power decreased? It was decreased, I believe, for two reasons. One of them circumstantial: As the tribes were destroyed and as the tribes were sent into exile, the whole structure, both of the land and of the people, ended. And also I believe because it was no longer seen to be the way to go forward under the conditions that existed in Babylon.

So thank you, everybody. And I won’t see you next week because it is Shavuot. And so I wish you all happy Shavuot, and see you the week after.