The Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9)

The following article was obtained through BibleOdyssey.org and written by Jan Christian Gertz

Together with Solomon’s temple, the tower of Babel may be the best-known building in the Hebrew Bible. The notion of a tower reaching toward heaven is deeply inscribed in our cultural memory. As a result, readers often overlook the fact that Gen 11:1-9 reports little about the actual tower. For example, the story only implies that the workers stopped building the tower. The tower’s destruction, though often read into the story, is never stated. Instead of being the central interest of the story, the tower functions as a symbolic motif.

The people who built the tower of Babel were driven by fundamental human concerns. They preferred settlement to the uncertainties of dispersion, uniformity to diversity, fame and power to obscurity and weakness. But in the account in Gen 11:1-9, God denies their preferences. At the center of the story is humanity’s transition from speaking one language and living in one location to speaking several languages and living in multiple locations across the world.

What is God’s problem with the tower? 

The standard answer is that the project of building a tower reaching the heavens is a symbol of humanity’s arrogant pursuit of fame and power—ideas closely linked in the ancient Near East. It is true that God expresses some concern about safeguarding the line between the human and divine spheres, perhaps even suggesting that the people pose some kind of threat to the divine realm (Gen 11:6, Job 42:2). The tower, then, is a symbol of humanity’s ability and propensity to cross boundaries and of God’s endeavor to check such behavior.

The tower itself, however, is a minor motif—something mentioned twice and only in passing (see Gen 11:4-5). The narrative’s conclusion focuses on the real issue at hand: God’s dissolution of humanity’s linguistic unity, an act that results in dispersion and that reflects the historical experience of the Israelites in the exilic and postexilic periods. The story ends with an etiology (an origin story) connecting the name of the city with the confusion (balal) of languages and identifying the city as the origin point for the dispersion of humanity (Gen 11:9).

How and when was the tower of Babel story written? 
Scholars often assume that the story of the tower of Babel was stitched together from different sources or that it underwent stages of literary development. As evidence, they point to subtle tensions, apparent repetitions, and the seemingly large number of motifs. Since none of the individual elements are superfluous, however, such reconstructions are hardly convincing. Literary and historical analysis may suggest that a poem mocking Babel was the core tradition of the story.

The story of the tower of Babel concludes the biblical primeval narrative (Gen 1-11), whose origin is often explained by assuming a combination of two previously independent sources. Here, our story is generally attributed to the earlier source. But as the story meshes well with the genealogies of the second, later source, this argument is questionable. Additionally, the Babel story seems to have in view the stories about Abraham and Sarah, both of whom are from Mesopotamia (see Gen 11:31). All this would seem to suggest that Gen 11:1-9 was composed after the strands of the primeval history and the ancestral narrative were combined, which likely happened fairly late (sixth century B.C.E.). Even so, the age of a story whose author we do not know remains difficult to determine. Gen 11:1-9 is a myth set in primeval times, but this setting indicates neither that the text was written at the same time the “events” occurred nor that it is later.

Here, the tower can help us. Because the story mentions Babel and is also set in the land of Shinar (Gen 11:2), scholars argue that the text’s author was thinking of the ziggurat Etemenanki, which is located in ancient Babylon. The imagery of a building reaching the heavens supports this suggestion (Gen 11:4). If this is correct, then Gen 11:3 provides further evidence for the time of writing: the oldest ziggurat was originally built with mud bricks. Only at the latest building stage, in the seventh century B.C.E., did it receive a sheathing of fired bricks. It is also possible that the notion of an “unfinished” tower is connected with the extensive damage done by the Persian king Xerxes (518–465 B.C.E.) to religious buildings in Babylon. All things considered, the tower of Babel story is likely a postexilic addition to the primeval history.

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The tower of Babel, probably a postexilic addition to the primeval history, is a symbol of the human ability and propensity to cross boundaries and of God’s endeavor to halt such behavior.

Did you know…? 

The story of the tower of Babel describes the diversity of languages and people.

The tower of Babel is only mentioned in Gen 11:4-5.

Some scholars dispute the identification of the tower mentioned in Gen 11:1-9 with the ziggurat Etemenanki because the Hebrew word migdal can describe every form of tower and the expression “city and tower” could also refer to the city and its acropolis. However, as the story is located in Babylon, the identification with Etemenanki is reasonable.

The use of fired bricks and bitumen for mortar was unknown in ancient Israel and introduces local Babylonian building techniques and color into the story.

The literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the postexilic period is the most plausible setting for an author to write such a story.

How OLD Are the Religions?

The following article was posted by Reed Hall on Beliefnet.com

In a previous series of blog entries, I addressed a common basic question: How MANY religions are there?

In my immediately preceding blog entries, I addressed a follow-up question: How BIG are the religions?

In this blog entry, I’d like to round out this preliminary overview of the global religious landscape by addressing another follow-up question: How OLD are the religions?  

For the major world religions, the simple answer is: pretty old. Most of them are 2000+ years old.

This bar graph presents the relative ages (in years) of each of the major world faiths. Hinduism is the oldest, with roots stretching back some 4000 years, or more; Sikhism is the youngest, being only about 500 years old.

As the chart indicates, among the very oldest religions are Hinduism, Judaism, and (possibly) Zoroastrianism. The roots of Hinduism stretch back at least to India’s Vedic era, and perhaps even further back, into pre-Vedic times (2000 BC, or earlier). The roots of Judaism stretch back to the time of the patriarch Abraham, traditionally dated at around 1800 BC. The precise age of Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Persia, remains a matter of some controversy; conflicting dates suggested for the era of its founding prophet Zoroaster range from the 18th to the 6th centuries BC.

A number of major religions seem to have all gotten their start, in different places around the globe, at roughly the same time: the 6th century BC. Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and possibly Zoroastrianism (if one favors a later rather than an earlier date for Zoroaster) were each born in that religiously creative century. The Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, is also traditionally attributed to a 6th-century-BC sage known as Lao Tzu, but more recently scholars have suggested a somewhat later date for its composition.

Christianity, of course, is right at about 2000 years old, having gotten started with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (and his apostles, such as Paul) during the 1st century AD. Indeed, our Western (Gregorian, Christian) calendar revolves around the presumed date of the birth of Christ as the axis point which divides all of time and history into two eras, referred to as B.C. (“Before Christ”) and A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “In the Year of the Lord”).

As religions go, then, Christianity (at only 2000 years of age) is one of the younger ones. And Islam is even younger still (by about 600 years). Although Muslims point out that the Arabic term islam merely means “submission” to the will of God, and further holds that Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses were among the first such “submitters,” Islam as a distinctive religious movement did not appear on the scene until the prophet Muhammad established it in Arabia in the 7th century AD, making Islam in this sense some 1400 years old.

The precise origin of Shinto, the indigenous traditional religion of Japan, is a bit hazy to date with precision; many place its origins at somewhere roughly around perhaps the 8th century AD (or at least that is when written records pertaining to Shinto beliefs and practices first appeared in Japan).

Sikhism, the youngest of the world’s major faiths, was founded in India by Guru Nanak right around 1500 AD.

So, that’s it, at least as far as the major religions are concerned. But what about some of the other, perhaps smaller but nevertheless well-known religions — religions such as Baha’i, Christian Science, Mormonism, Rastafarianism, Scientology, Wicca, or the Unification Church? How old are they?

For them, the simple answer is: not very old. All of those aforementioned faiths are not only far smaller than the major faiths, but also far younger, each of them having been born as recently as the 19th or 20th centuries.

Baha’i was founded by Baha’u’llah in Persia in the mid-to-late 1800s. Christian Science was founded in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy in the late 1800s. Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith in western New York in the early 1800s. Rastafarianism was founded in Jamaica around 1930. Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard in New Jersey in 1953. Wicca is a modern revival or reconstruction of ancient European forms of indigenous paganism, whose varying traditions began to emerge in Britain in the early to mid-1900s. And the Unification Church was founded in South Korea by Sun Myung Moon in 1954.

Most of today’s well-known “alternative” religions are of far more recent vintage than the larger, longer-established faiths — which count their own ages in terms of many centuries, even millennia, rather than in mere decades (or at most a couple of centuries).

However, it is perhaps also wise to remember that even the largest and longest-enduring major religions of today must have also started out at one time as small, young “minority religions” themselves, during their own early formative eras.

Is Satan the Father of Cain?

Multiple narratives are featured on the internet with a common question, "Is Satan the father of Cain?". It has produced a series of commentaries and debates on this particular subject throughout cyberspace. Most scholars agree the theory of Satan siring Cain stems from extra-canonical texts, such as the Zohar and the Book of Enoch.

According to Hank Hanegraaff (aka: Bible Answer Man), his theory of Satan being Cain's father extends to his research of William Branham on the subject:

“Here is what really happened in the Garden of Eden. The Word says that Eve was beguiled by the serpent. She was actually seduced by the serpent….He was so close to being human that his seed could, and did mingle with that of the woman and cause her to conceive. When this happened, God cursed the serpent.” — William Branham

Branham (1909–65), a proponent of Oneness theology, taught the so-called serpent seed interpretation of Genesis 3, with adherents of this view often citing Genesis 3:15 in support of their position: “And I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (ESV).

The crux of the serpent seed view is that Eve and Satan engaged in sexual relations. Consequently, sin is viewed as sexual in nature, as opposed to the traditional interpretation of the fall as sin being disobedience to God. In addition to Branham, other serpent seed interpretations of Genesis 3:15 are found in the teachings of the Christian Identity movement, as well as, for instance, in the teachings of Arnold Murray (1929–2014) of Shepherd’s Chapel and also the Unification Church.

The Identity movement’s serpent seed interpretation clearly leads to racism, as one expert explains: “As early as the mid-1940s, Identity preachers were building a new doctrine: the Serpent Seed theory. It is a fairly simple and straightforward belief: Jews are the physical descendants of a sexual union between ‘Mother Eve’ and ‘the serpent’ (Gen. 3). The serpent is variously identified as either Satan, or a demonic representative of Satan. As such, Jews are literally ‘Children of the Devil.’ Most Identity believers claim the serpent was a physical manifestation of Satan himself.” Furthermore, Identity teachers add that Cain is the offspring of a union of the serpent and Eve, while Abel is said to be the result of the union of Adam and Eve.

Even if the serpent seed doctrine does not overtly lead to racism, the interpretation remains problematic and unwarranted.

For further reading, please visit the link: Did Eve Have Sex With Satan (Bible Answer Man)

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Another similar view comes from the website, Sefaria: A Living Library of Jewish Texts. This particular text comes from the Midrash: The Legend of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909) - Volume 1:3.

THE BIRTH OF CAIN - There were ten generations from Adam to Noah, to show how long-suffering is the Lord, for all the generations provoked Him unto wrath, until He brought the deluge upon them. By reason of their impiousness God changed His plan of calling one thousand generations into being between the creation of the world and the revelation of the law at Mount Sinai; nine hundred and seventy-four He suppressed before the flood. Wickedness came into the world with the first being born of woman, Cain, the oldest son of Adam. When God bestowed Paradise upon the first pair of mankind, He warned them particularly against carnal intercourse with each other. But after the fall of Eve, Satan, in the guise of the serpent, approached her, and the fruit of their union was Cain, the ancestor of all the impious generations that were rebellious toward God, and rose up against Him. 

Cain's descent from Satan, who is the angel Samael, was revealed in his seraphic appearance. At his birth, the exclamation was wrung from Eve, "I have gotten a man through an angel of the Lord." Adam was not in the company of Eve during the time of her pregnancy with Cain. After she had succumbed a second time to the temptations of Satan, and permitted herself to be interrupted in her penance, she left her husband and journeyed westward, because she feared her presence might continue to bring him misery. Adam remained in the east. When the days of Eve to be delivered were fulfilled, and she began to feel the pangs of travailing, she prayed to God for help. But He hearkened not unto her supplications. "Who will carry the report to my lord Adam?" she asked herself. "Ye luminaries in the sky, I beg you, tell it to my master Adam when ye return to the east!" In that self same hour, Adam cried out: "The lamentation of Eve has pierced to my ear! Mayhap the serpent has again assaulted her," and he hastened to his wife. Finding her in grievous pain, he besought God in her behalf, and twelve angels appeared, together with two heavenly powers. All these took up their post to right of her and to left of her, while Michael, also standing on her right side, passed his hand over her, from her face downward to her breast, and said to her, "Be thou blessed, Eve, for the sake of Adam. Because of his solicitations and his prayers I was sent to grant thee our assistance. Make ready to give birth to thy child!" Immediately her son was born, a radiant figure. A little while and the babe stood upon his feet, ran off, and returned holding in his hands a stalk of straw, which he gave to his mother. For this reason he was named Cain, the Hebrew word for stalk of straw.

For further reading, please visit the link:  Legends of the Jews (3:1)

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While there are those that contend Satan is the father of Cain, biblical scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser passionately disagrees. In his article, Was Cain Fathered by the Devil? No, Wait — Extraterrestrials (2008), he put forth his theory in the following excerpt: 

Here’s the truth about this particular web gem. I’ll unpack each point briefly.

1. Genesis 4:1 was NOT found among the textual remains of the Hebrew Bible among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is important to realize that much of the biblical material from Qumran is partial and fragmentary. Only the book of Isaiah can be said to be virtually complete (99% of it was found at Qumran). There are portions and scraps of every other OT book except Esther. Genesis 4:1, the account of Can’s birth, is not in the Dead Sea Scroll material. Therefore, the Dead Sea scrolls don’t preserve this weird view of Cain’s lineage. Readers can check on what I’m saying through two relatively inexpensive sources: 

David L. Washburn, A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Sbl – Text-Critical Studies, 2) (Sbl – Text-Critical Studies, 2) 

Martin Abegg, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English (Harper, 1999). 

2. Since we already know the name doesn’t occur in the biblical scrolls (the point above), I thought I’d look for it among the other scrolls material – sometimes the other material has commentaries on the biblical material. A computer search for “Sammael” (or the alternate spelling Samael) yields ZERO occurrences in the non-biblical texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is more proof that this “account” is not only absent in the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls; it isn’t present in the scrolls that covered other subjects besides copying and commenting on the Hebrew Bible. You can watch a video of me doing this search so you know I’m not making it up. (Turn your speakers up and use high speed – it’s 29 MB).

3. I knew that I wouldn’t find the name Sammael or Samael in any of the scrolls. The name does occur among the Pseudepigrapha. The video I made above includes this search and its results. Sorry, no sex between the serpent / Sammael and Eve. Boring, I know. Outside the name Sammael/Samael, and some pseudepigraphic material (4 Maccabees 18:8) the serpent gets blamed for all sexual sin, but that’s a lot different than fathering Cain.

4. Some rabbinic material does have the devil fathering Cain. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan has this idea. This translation, though, does NOT have the variant that includes Samael. The other Targums do not have this reading. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is dated by Aramaists at roughly the sixth century A.D., or between 1500-2000 years AFTER Genesis was written (the date range depends on when one thinks Genesis was written). The Talmud relates a story that Yonatan ben Uziel, a student of Hillel (roughly contemporary with Jesus), fashioned an Aramaic translation of the Prophets. That translation is considered by some to be Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. However, the story makes no mention of any translation by him of the Torah, and so it cannot be argued that Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of Genesis 4:1 is as old as Jesus’ day. The sixth century A.D. is all the evidence allows. Targums can be very elastic translations, adding material quite freely with no Hebrew manuscript evidence at all. Everyone who does Aramaic knows this about the Targums - they can play pretty fast and loose with the text of the Bible; they INSERT all kinds of things into the translation, without regard to any prior textual manuscript history for support. IN plain language, the Targums often add made up material to the biblical text. Having Samael in Genesis 4:1 is a classic example – it was added at least 1500 years after the fact, and no other prior ancient Jewish material supports it.

To read this article in its entirety, visit this link: Was Cain Fathered by the Devil? No, Wait — Extraterrestrials

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It would seem the debate about "Satan being the father of Cain" will continue among the scholars and theologians with no common consensus being reached on this subject. But, it does leave one wondering ... Who's ? Right.

The Return of Paganism

Maybe there actually is a genuinely post-Christian future for America.

By Ross Douthat, Opinion Columnist

Dec. 12, 2018

Here are some generally agreed-upon facts about religious trends in the United States. Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since the 1960s. Lots of people who once would have been lukewarm Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers now identify as having “no religion” or being “spiritual but not religious.” The mainline-Protestant establishment is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back.

What kind of general religious reality should be discerned from all these facts, though, is much more uncertain, and there are various plausible stories about what early-21st century Americans increasingly believe. The simplest of these is the secularization story — in which modern societies inevitably put away religious ideas as they advance in wealth and science and reason, and the decline of institutional religion is just a predictable feature of a general late-modern turn away from supernatural belief.

A Brooklyn bookstore gathered witches, Wiccans and local residents to perform a hex ritual.
(Photo Credit: Emily Molli/NurPhoto, via Getty Images)

But the secularization narrative is insufficient, because even with America’s churches in decline, the religious impulse has hardly disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40 percent of Americans answered with an emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if “a profound religious experience or awakening” had redirected their lives; that number had doubled since the 1960s, when institutional religion was more vigorous. A recent Pew survey on secularization likewise found increases in the share of Americans who have regular feelings of “spiritual peace and well-being.” And the resilience of religious impulses and rhetoric in contemporary political movements, even (or especially) on the officially secular left, is an obvious feature of our politics.

So perhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about the fragmentation and personalization of Christianity — to describe America as a nation of Christian heretics, if you will, in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs. These figures cobble together pieces of the old orthodoxies, take out the inconvenient bits and pitch them to mass audiences that want part of the old-time religion but nothing too unsettling or challenging or ascetic. The result is a nation where Protestant awakenings have given way to post-Protestant wokeness, where Reinhold Niebuhr and Fulton Sheen have ceded pulpits to Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey, where the prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism rule the right and a social gospel denuded of theological content rules the left.

I wrote a whole book on this theme, but in the years since it came out I’ve wondered if it, too, was incomplete. There has to come a point at which a heresy becomes simply post-Christian, a moment when you should just believe people who claim they have left the biblical world-picture behind, a context where the new spiritualities add up to a new religion.

Which is why lately I’ve become interested in books and arguments that suggest that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely post-Christian future for America — and that the term “paganism” might be reasonably revived to describe the new American religion, currently struggling to be born.

A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac.” Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what’s actually happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.

What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.

This paganism is not materialist or atheistic; it allows for belief in spiritual and supernatural realities. It even accepts the possibility of an afterlife. But it is deliberately agnostic about final things, what awaits beyond the shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the idea that there exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we should aspire. Instead, it sees the purpose of religion and spirituality as more therapeutic, a means of seeking harmony with nature and happiness in the everyday — while unlike atheism, it insists that this everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly hope to be at home.

In popular religious practice there isn’t always a clean line between this “immanent” religion and the transcendent alternative offered by Christianity and Judaism. But clearly religious cultures can tend toward one option or the other, and you can build a plausible case for a “pagan” (by Smith’s definition) tradition in Western and American religion, which in his account takes two major forms.

First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club; he notes that we even have an explicit framing of this tradition as paganism, in the former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman’s rich 2016 work “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.”

Hundreds of druids, pagans and revelers gathered in June at the Avebury Neolithic henge monument in England for sunset and sunrise during the summer solstice. (Photo Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse. This immanent civic religion, Smith argues, is gradually replacing the more biblical form of civil religion that stamped American history down to the Protestant-Catholic-Jew 1950s. Whether in the social-justice theology of contemporary progressive politics or the transhumanist projects of Silicon Valley, we are watching attempts to revive a religion of this-world, a new-model paganism, to “reclaim the city that Christianity wrested away from it centuries ago.”

These descriptions are debatable, but suppose Smith is right. Is the combination of intellectual pantheism and a this-world-focused civil religion enough to declare the rebirth of paganism as a faith unto itself, rather than just a cultural tendency within a still-Christian order?

It seems to me that the answer is not quite, because this new religion would lack a clear cultic aspect, a set of popular devotions, a practice of ritual and prayer of the kind that the paganism of antiquity offered in abundance. And that absence points to the essential weakness of a purely intellectualized pantheism: It invites its adherents to commune with a universe that offers suffering and misery in abundance, which means that it has a strong appeal to the privileged but a much weaker appeal to people who need not only sense of wonder from their spiritual lives but also, well, help.

However, there are forms of modern paganism that do promise this help, that do offer ritual and observance, augury and prayer, that do promise that in some form gods or spirits really might exist and might offer succor or help if appropriately invoked. I have in mind the countless New Age practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise. Its adherents may not all be equally convinced of the realities that they’re trying to appeal to and manipulate (I don’t know how many of the witches who publicly hexed Brett Kavanaugh really expected it to work), but their numbers are growing rapidly; there may soon be more witches in the United States than members of the United Church of Christ.

What ancient paganism did successfully was to unite this kind of popular supernaturalism with its own forms of highbrow pantheism and civil-religiosity. Thus the elites of ancient Rome might reject the myths about their pantheon of deities as just crude stories, but they would join enthusiastically in public rituals that assumed that gods or spirits could be appealed to, propitiated, honored, worshiped.

To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America, that’s what would have to happen again — the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they discern.

It seems like we’re some distance from that happening — from the intellectuals whom Smith describes as pagan actually donning druidic robes, or from Jeff Bezos playing pontifex maximus for a post-Christian civic cult. The 1970s, when a D.C. establishment figure like Sally Quinn was hexing her enemies, were a high-water mark for those kinds of experiments among elites. Now, occasional experiments in woke witchcraft and astrology notwithstanding, there’s a more elite embarrassment about the popular side of post-Christian spirituality.

That embarrassment may not last forever; perhaps a prophet of a new harmonized paganism is waiting in the wings. Until then, those of us who still believe in a divine that made the universe rather than just pervading it — and who have a certain fear of what more immanent spirits have to offer us — should be able to recognize the outlines of a possible successor to our world-picture, while taking comfort that it is not yet fully formed.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The NY Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, 

“To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.”

You can follow him on Twitter: @DouthatNYT

Easter and Passover have more in common than you think

The following article comes from the website America Magazine - The Jesuit Review and written by Rabbi Daniel F. Polish.

Photo by Mari Helin-Tuominen on Unsplash

Last year a friend who is a Greek Orthodox priest told me he was overwhelmed by his preparations for Pascha. I was perplexed. For serious Jews, “overwhelming preparation” is the phrase that characterizes the holiday of Pesach (called Passover in English). Pesach is the spring festival that celebrates the exodus of our ancestors from Egypt. Jews observe it by fulfilling the biblical injunction to abstain from leavened wheat products and other leavened food and instead eat unleavened bread and matzo products for seven days.

More than a little energy is devoted to purging the house of all leavening and bringing the certifiably uncontaminated Pesach tableware out of storage. Those who invite family and friends to observe the Seder—the ritual meal shared on the first two nights of the holiday—also devote a great deal of effort to preparation for those events. Pesach continues to exercise a hold on even the most alienated Jews. It is a compelling holiday. But preparations can be overwhelming.

The confluence of the terms Pascha and Pesach got me thinking about the two holidays.

Why was my Greek Orthodox friend preparing for a Jewish holiday? And why a month late? Of course, it quickly dawned on me that my friend was not referring to my Pesach but was employing the name by which Eastern Orthodox Christians refer to the holiday that Catholics call Easter and that more often than not falls long after I have resumed my normal dietary routine.

Still, the confluence of the terms Pascha and Pesach got me thinking about the two holidays. To the casual observer, they could not be more disparate. Each celebrates the fundamental historical moment in their respective traditions: for Christians the death and resurrection of Jesus; for Jews the moment a runaway band of slaves became the people Israel. But the two are, in fact, intertwined.

The relationship of the holidays goes back to the very origins of Easter. The Gospels state that the events of Jesus’ passion occurred during the observance of Pesach. Historical understanding suggests that he must have come to Jerusalem, as all Jews of his time did, in response to the mandate to appear at the Temple in Jerusalem on each of the three pilgrimage festivals—of which Pesach is the most prominent.

It has become commonplace to assume that the Last Supper, described in all four Gospels, may well have been a Pesach Seder.

In fact, in more recent years it has become commonplace to assume that the Last Supper, described in all four Gospels, may well have been a Pesach Seder. (It is a possibility that seems to have eluded Leonardo da Vinci, in whose famed fresco of the Last Supper Jesus is depicted holding a loaf of bread. If the Last Supper was, indeed, a Seder, Jesus would have been holding a piece of matzo.)

Then there is the simple reality of the calendar. In most years the celebrations of Easter and Pesach are close together. And that is no accident. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., which established so many of the patterns of the Catholic Church, it was decided that Easter should be celebrated at the very time of Jesus’ Passion. It was determined that the observance should take place on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. The Jewish calendar has Pesach falling on the 14th day of the month of Nissan—a full moon date at the start of spring.

Liberation

There are deeper, underlying commonalities that join the two holidays. The theology of each, in its own way, celebrates liberation. For Jews the liberation from Egyptian slavery is the central event in the Bible. For Christians the resurrection of Jesus is similarly central to the faith and promises the liberation of humanity from sin and death.

Both holidays are joined at their core in finding us rejoicing in the defeat of death and the gift of life restored.

This theme of liberation expresses aspirations in both traditions that can only be called messianic. In Easter, of course, the messianic theme is clear and explicit. In the Jewish celebration it is more hidden but present. The story of the ancient liberation is treated in the Seder as a prefiguration of the great liberation at the end of historical time. This is expressed by the repeated references in the Haggadah—the liturgical text employed in the Seder—to the prophet Elijah, who according to Jewish tradition will be sent to announce the arrival of the messiah. And the theme of the final salvation is sounded in the very last words of the Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem,” an expression of hope for the arrival of a messiah who would bring the scattered people home once again, just as they were brought home from Egyptian bondage.

Rebirth

Both holidays are also celebrations of rebirth. The theme of rebirth in the resurrection of Jesus is explicit. For Jews the moment of liberation of the Israelites and their return to their ancestral land represent the rebirth of a people made moribund by the oppressions of slavery.

Rebirth is also the human undertone that joins both these festivals in the most profound way. One dimension, perhaps underappreciated, of both holidays is the human reaction to the rebirth of nature that is the very essence of spring. One might see in the death and resurrection of Jesus an echo of the death and resurrection of the natural world—a casting off of the shroud of winter’s snows. For Jews, the celebration of spring is articulated in the biblical injunctions that established Pesach and is made explicit in the Haggadah. The parsley and egg that the Haggadah requires on the Seder plate are placed there to remind us of spring and its promise of life renewed.

Pesach (or Passover) and Pascha (or Easter), beneath their manifest historical and theological content, can be seen as the human reaction to the liberation from the harsh confinement of winter to the verdant restoration of life and promise that all of us feel as we experience the bursting buds and radiant colors, the soft air and beautiful scents that mark the beginning of the new season. And more, both holidays are joined at their core in finding us rejoicing in the defeat of death and the gift of life restored.

Moshiach: An Introduction and Explanation

The following article was obtained from the website, https://www.chabad.org.

Maimonides

Two of the most fundamental tenets of the Jewish faith – as listed by Maimonides among the Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith – are the belief in the ultimate redemption, an awaited era of world peace, prosperity and wisdom, and the belief that the dead will be resurrected at that time. The Messianic Era will be ushered in by a Jewish leader generally referred to as the Moshiach (messiah: Hebrew for "the anointed one"), a righteous scion of King David. He will rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and gather the Jewish people from all corners of the earth and return them to the Promised Land.

So it's going to happen—that's what we believe. But why is this important today? Why is the coming of Moshiach so central to the Jewish belief system? At that time, "delicacies will be commonplace like dirt." All the nations will "beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore" (Micah 4:3). Humankind will be preoccupied with only one pursuit: the study of G‑dly wisdom. "The earth shall be filled with knowledge of G‑d as water covers the seabed" (Isaiah 11:9).

Okay, so it's going to happen—that's what we believe. But why is this important today? Why is the coming of Moshiach so central to the Jewish belief system?

Because the Torah teaches us that there is purpose to our world. And the Messianic Era is the actualization of that idea.

There are those who maintain that this crass physical world is merely a strategic challenge; one that the soul must battle and transcend en route to a heavenly paradise. According to this line of thinking, the physical and mundane has no intrinsic worth, it retains no value whatsoever once its function has been fully served—it is a means to a spiritual end.

While Jewish belief also speaks of the soul's reward in the hereafter, earned through its toil in the course of life's journey, it sees the refinement of the physical and the infusion of holiness and purpose into the mundane as the paramount objective. It is the sanctification of the human body and the world at large that constitutes the very purpose of its creation.

From the dawn of time, G‑d envisioned for Himself a "dwelling place" right here on Planet Earth. And He put us here to fashion this home. To transform darkness into light.

The curtain will be ripped aside, and all flesh will perceive G‑d. And soon the day will come when G‑d's glory will be revealed in this nether-realm, and we will enjoy the fruits of our millennia-long work, the end-product of our labor of love.

The curtain will be ripped aside, and all flesh will perceive G‑d. It will be the culmination of the master plan.

The belief in Moshiach has sustained our nation throughout a 2,000 year exile fraught with pogroms, expulsions and persecution—our ancestors' firm belief in a better time to come, and their trust that they would be resurrected to witness that day. And today, finally, we stand at the threshold of redemption. One more good deed by one more person may be all that's needed to seal the deal.

The Messianic Era

What will it be like? What to expect? What will be different, and what will be the same? The following topics listed below are good resources for answering the above questions:

Resurrection of the Dead	Conflict
Reincarnation	The Twelve Tribes
Lubavitcher Rebbe	Physicality and Spirituality
Mishneh Torah (Rambam)	Three Weeks
The Future	Freedom of Choice
Parshah	Nature and the Miraculous
Kabbalah & Chassidism	Tanya
Miracles	Authority
Atzmut (the essence of G-d)	Moses
Torah	Splitting of the Sea
Torah Study during Messanic Era	Redemption, Yearning, Anticipation
Mitzvah	War
Holy Temple	Shemot
Israel	Makif & Penimi; Sovev & Memalle
Soul	Dwelling for G-d in Physical World