I posted a couple of months ago on a lecture given by Rabbi Eric Levy at this year's YCT's Yemei Iyun in Tanakh and thought I would share another great quote from him at the same conference. Speaking on "Job: How Does One Understand God's Ways?", Levy responds to a question about the difficulty of the language in the book of Job (or Iyov (איוב), in Hebrew), saying "The language of Iyov is unbelievably difficult." He then provides an example:
That happens actually quite a few times in Iyov, where, for instance, הנותן לשכוי בינה, so לשכוי everybody just assumes means the rooster, but, in Iyov, it’s clearly not. לשכוי is like the heart or another part of the body. So, with Iyov, you just sort of have to use context, because the words he’s plucking….
And then he goes onto an excursus on language use:
Poets always use the most ancient forms of language. A poet always reaches out. Whether he’s writing English poetry or whatever, they’re always reaching out to the most obscure words, because they need to really fine-tune their message. I doubt there’s a finer poet than the author of Iyov. And the words he reaches out to are words that can only be understood from the Arabic; there are words there that are clearly Aramaic. He is really reaching out to into the farthest reaches of the Hebrew vocabulary.
And, of course, as Ibn Ezra tells us, don’t forget Hebrew was a dead language. Hebrew died out; half of the Jews in the Second Temple spoke Greek and half of them spoke Aramaic, but essentially nobody spoke Hebrew, which means that our entire vocabulary of Hebrew is limited to the books of Tanakh and a little bit of Mishnah. In Mishnah, sometimes they use words like “Where’d that word come from?” So, scholars will tell you they just made it up and people with a little more faith will say Judaism had some vocabulary beyond the Tanakh. But we are kind of limited – there are a limited number of words in Tanakh because, as a dead language, you’re stuck with what you have there. And, in Iyov, apparently there’s some usages that are just a little bit beyond our ability to understand, otherwise, from context.
Found this interesting quote from Rabbi Eric Levy describing Biblical prophecies (From his "Hoy, Ariel, Ariel: Isaiah 28-35 - Politics and the State of the Union in Judea"):...politically, we're getting a picture: there's treaty-making going on. See, normally, you don't see this - you just see the words of the prophet. And the prophet is like the op-ed pages of the New York Times: if you haven't read the first pages, you don't know what the op-ed pages are talking about. Because sometimes they allude to things you just assume that we know. And, a lot of times, when you read the prophecies, you only get the allusion, because the prophet is assuming that everybody knows what the historical background is here.
Yesterday was the third and last day of the YCT Yemei Iyun in Bible and Jewish Thought and, just as in previous years, the first two days (day one & day two) were devoted to Bible and the third to Jewish thought (for instance, last year). 
There was offered four tracks: Miracles in Jewish Thought, Thought of Rav Zadok, Social Action in Jewish Thought, Philosophy of Jewish Education and I ended up attending three sessions all in the last of those four tracks.The first session I attended was Dr. Scott Goldberg speaking on "Views of Teaching and Learning: From TaNaKH to Modern Times", which was good - very well put together and Dr. Goldberg came across very articulately.
The second session I attended was Rabbi Jack Bieler, who spoke on "A Vision of Modern Orthodox Education", which seemed to me to offer an obvious proposition, for the most part, that, in a Modern Orthodox day school, the curricula ought to be integrated, such that there is not a bifurcation of areas of study between the general studies and Jewish studies. However, it seemed that the room was primarily composed of teachers and it seems that that is not how it actually is(!), so they all liked this idea and were discussing various experiences they had had along these lines.,
The third [and last] session I attended was Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, who spoke on "What is the Purpose of Teaching Talmud?", which was great. I am glad I had that session at the end, because (no disrespect to any of the other presenters) Rabbi Klapper is my favorite presenter and on such an interesting topic. He started out knocking down the usual answers given to the question and, aside from the pragmatic answer of that's part of the culture, suggested a new idea, which I do not feel worthy of trying to paraphrase in this space, but hope to find a direct quote....
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I think that, once again, the program was successful and I enjoyed the speakers and atmosphere tremendously. Although the building was chilly the first two days, it was sorted out on the third day. I wished it was back in Manhattan, as it had been last year, since it would make it easier to reach for us folks living in New York City, but, oh well.... Although on the first day I saw no fellow YCT students or graduates, on day two, I spotted several other graduates and that held for this last day, as well. The only current YCT student present was one who was presenting on that last day. Wherever I end up next year, I hope I am able to make it in for this program once again - it is a unique atmosphere of educators and rabbis who are quite knowledgeable on these topics.
Yesterday was day two of YCT's Yemei Iyun in Bible and Jewish Thought (having attended day one, as well), the only full day of the program.
The first session I attended was Leeor Gottlieb's "An Overview of Tehillim: Tempestuous Textual Transmission". I would say that Leeor Gottlieb is on my list of my three favorite presenters at the Yemei Iyun. I enjoyed listening to him last year at one session and some of his audio on the YCT website in the Yemei Iyun section. He spoke on some of the textual transmission issues, but interestingly not only pointed out that אלקים is a general description (i.e. a god) and that the tetragramatton is more of a proper noun (God/Lord), but also pointed out that in one section of Psalms there is a greater intensity of the former than the latter. For those folks interested in Psalms, this is worth downloading (even though the downloads are free) when it gets uploaded.
The second session I attended was Rabbi Menachem Leibtag's "What Is the Purpose of The Temple?", although he wasn't speaking on this topic generally, but rather in the context of the book of Kings. I realized my sense of the history of kings was definitely in need of going back into the Bible to get a better sense.
The third session I attended was 
"Halakhic Sections in Devarim and Applications in Nakh: When Conflicts Arise in Interpretation", presented by Rabbi Hayyim Angel. This was interesting as he presented a tension between interpreting things in the Bible whether on the level of reading the Bible as an explainer of the text versus as a halakhic decisor - definitely not easy.
The fourth session I attended was Rabbi Eric Levy on "The Second Generation: Bemidbar 20-35". I actually hadn't planned on attending this session initially, but after hearing him the day before, I decided to go hear him again. He spoke about some of the differences between the first generation in the desert and the second - including talking about what Moses' sin or non-sin was, which was good (definitely download it when it goes on the YCT website). 
The fifth [and last] session I attended was Elana Flaumenhaft speaking on "The Ceremony on Har Grizim and Har Eival", in which she discussed a variety of different aspects of it. At the end, she spoke of a colleague's comparison between that ceremony and revelation at Mt. Sinai, which was great, primarily about the earlier ceremony being more passive and the later one more actively involving the Israelites.
Yesterday, I attended YCT's seventh annual Yemei Iyun on Bible and Jewish Thought. This year it is being held at Ma'ayanot high school in Teaneck, NJ. The Yemei Iyun is being organized in conjunction with Beit Morasha of Jerusalem, Center for Modern Torah Leadership, Drisha Institute for Jewish Education, Lookstein Center for Jewish Education and Yeshivat Maale Gilboa. I've attended the Yemei Iyun every year since I've been in YCT and this year was no different.
The four sessions I attended yesterday began with Rabbi Aryeh Klapper's clever "Did Hevel Have a Sense of Humor?", which wasn't essentially about the title (although, for those interested, Cain was utterly sarcastic) and is well worth the listen when it gets uploaded to the YCT website.
The second session I attended was given by Rabbi Shmuel Klitsner on "Two Biblical Reactions to Catastrophe: An Intertextual Comparison between Genesis 9 and Genesis 19", which was interesting as he showed the similarities and what little differences there were between the instances of Noah and the unfortunate incident with his son Ham along with Lot and his daughters. One thing that bothered me, though, was that when Rabbi Klitsner considered Ham's sin to be either seeing Noah's nakedness, castrating Noah, or homosexually raping him, I then mentioned to him a fourth possibility: that Ham had sex with Noah's wife, as suggested in an article I read three weeks ago (John Sietze Bergsma and Scott Walker Hain, "Noah's Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:20-27)," JBL 124, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 25-40) and he inexplicably swept it aside. Upon the completion of the lecture, I once again brought up the possibility and he once again swept it aside (although a lady in the front row did agree with me about it's plausibility). Anyways, aside from that, it was a good presentation (and there was another unrelated neat point about leadership he made).
The next talk I heard was by Rabbi Klapper again, this time on "Why Only Moses Could Unbury Joseph." This was a smart talk in which Rabbi Klapper essentially argued that Moses and Joseph were opposites: whereas Joseph started out as a shepherd (and living in Canaan), he dreamt of agriculture (an Egyptian thing), became more Egyptian, and became part of the bureaucracy [and helping to enslave people], Moses started out growing up an Egyptian within the bureaucracy but eventually discovered his Israelite identity, became a shepherd, and eventually freed slaves.
The last talk I heard was Rabbi Eric Levy speaking on "The Problem of the City of Shechem in Tanakh", which was surprisingly excellent. I'm not going to give away the punchline of this lecture (at least not in this posting), so you should wait for this to come out on the YCT audio page, once
it gets uploaded - it was excellent and I look forward to listening to more of Rabbi Levy's stuff (available on his website).
Okay - wondering what I'm going to hear today....
On 30 June, I attended day two of YCT's sixth annual Yemei Iyun in Bible & Jewish Thought (the previous day, I attended day one). Just like the previous day, the sessions were on the Bible. I started off with Rabbi Shalom Carmy's "War in Sefer Devarim". I then heard Rabbi Yitzchak Blau speak on "Jewish Thought Perspectives on the Concept of Tumah".
After lunch, I heard Yehuda Kraut speak on "Deciphering the Shema: Staircase Parallelism in Devarim 6:4", which was really neat and the most academic session for me of not only the day, but of the three days. After going through four different standard syntax solutions for deciphering Deuteronomy 6:4, he then explored four imaginative syntax solutions from scholars, then presented his understanding of it being an AB//AC=ABC, thus resulting in Hashem Elokeinu Ehad for the latter half of the verse. Apparently, "staircase parallelism figures prominently in Ugaritic literature" and there are several other instances in the Bible of this feature.
Then Rabbi David Fohrman spoke on "Why Couldn't Moshe Enter the Land? The View from Sefer Devarim", although apparently he had submitted two different topics and both got squished into one time slot, so he spoke about the view from Sefer Bamidbar. It was the most entertaining presentation of the day for me, accompanied not only by a powerpoint presentation, but a really cool pointing out that in every instance in which there is a water crisis for the Jews, there is an anagram of Miriam's name (thus the Rabbis' having such an idea as Miriam's Well). He also had a very close and good reading of the story of Moshe striking the rock, etc.The last session of the day Rabbi Aryeh Klapper on "Beyond Good and Evil: A Philosophical Reclamation of the Concept of Holiness" started off with the problematic of the notion of sexual morality being reduced to interpersonal and turn to ethics, and that there is no language of value involved in the discussion. It was yet again another interesting class.
The first day of YCT's 2008 Yemei Iyun in Bible and Jewish Thought was 29 June and the first session I attended was Rabbi Dr. Tsvi Blanchard on "Origins and Beginnings: Genesis, Law and the Redemptive Narrative", which was chock full of information - it was definitely a session for which I would have liked to have more time. After that session was Rabbi Uri Etigson on "Does God Haave Real Feelings? An Inquiry into Reading the Bible", which was interesting as he started out discussing Maimonides' conception of God not having feelings. Having been reading the Guide this summer, it is clear to see that he is fighting an uphill battle, going against the straightforward readings in the Bible (I would also say rabbinic literature, but he doesn't really have to defend those readings to the masses). Indeed, Rabbi Etigson said that he used to think about these things in a Maimonidean fashion, but came around to seeing it as it is. He then presented some rabbinic statements about God's emotionality and then moved on to try to show that God cared for Adam & Eve by providing for them (I was skeptical about this last point).
There was a special panel discussion in celebration of ten years of LookJed on "Using Academic Methods and Tools in the Study of Tanakh", co-sponsored by the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education. This was a new feature not found in any of the previous Yemei Iyun, but was definitely excellent - I definitely enjoyed it. Although there were definitely some interesting points, I wanted to quote here some neat points made by Rabbi Zvi Grumet: "Intellectual Orthodoxy isn't for the masses." "Teachers don't have to have all of the answers - but they should know such things exist." "Dogma shuts down discussion and there is no more opportunity for dialogue."
The Followed by dinner.
After dinner, I heard an excellent presentation by Professor Leeor Gottlieb on "Did Nehemiah Have a Kosher Lulav?", which I found to be the most enjoyable class of the day for me.
The last class of the day I heard was by Rabbi Tzvi Grumet on "Confronting Halakhic Sections in Humash", wherein he presented the idea that the Humash is really alll narrative, even the discussions of commandments (a thesis of which I wasn't convinced (sorry)).
Then came ma'ariv, and thus concluded day one of the Yemei Iyun of 2008.
I've recently been listening this week on my iPod [intermittently (thanks to iTunes' remember playback position feature (which is great when listening to lectures/shiurim))] to Leeor Gottlieb's lecture on "The Lost Legend of Moshe's Children" from last year's YCT's Yemei Iyun (audio for all of the shiurim) and came across the following on the targum (Aramaic translation) of Chronicles:
After responding to a question, Dr. Gottlieb says, "I'm going to use that question as an opportunity to speak on the targum of Divrei HaYamim; just a short introduction," and continues Basically, nobody knows about this targum. And when I say nobody, I mean nobody. The rishonim that wrote a perush for Divrei HaYamim that appears in the Mikraot Gedolot did not use this targum, even though it existed in their day and age. Nobody knew about it. It was just an unknown - it's just one of those things that happen. "Hakol talui bemazal afilu sefer torah shebehekhal", tell us, our sages.* This targum was unlucky enough to be a targum of Divrei HaYamim. Now, nobody reads Divrei HaYamim in Hebrew, let alone the targum in Aramaic, so it just was left in the backshelves, I guess, of the libraries and not many people knew about it. Therefore, RaDaK, for example, and other mefarshim, who wrote a perush on Divrei HaYamim, when they need to prove the meaning of a word and they bring a targum, you will note, and I checked this, and I'm one of the few people today who actually study this targum and it's a topic I put a lot of time into, so when they quote a targum, they, in their perush, it is not the targum of Divrei HaYamim that they quote, it's Targum Yonatan on the parallel chapters in Shmuel and Melakhim. Each and every time that they bring a targum on one of the pesukim in Divrei HaYamim, you'll see that it's only on pesukim that have parallels in Shmuel and Melakhim.
So nobody really knew about this targum, but manuscripts were copied over the generations. There were four manuscripts about sixty years ago, by the way, all from the thirteenth century and I say there were four, because now there are only three. This fourth manuscript happened to be in Dresden at the end of World War II and the Allies destroyed the city of Dresden and all that is left of this mansucript is like a charred, black block that cannot be deciphered in any manner or form. So that's one that's out of the question. Then, there's another manuscript that is so brittle that it can't be used either, but we have the good fortune of using a printed edition of this manuscript that was made in the eighteenth century that was made by one of the last people who was able to open it up without ruining it. So that's pretty much all we have: just these three manuscripts and some printed editions. You'll see, whoever wants to check, you'll see that there are some Mikraot Gedolot that don't have a targum at all for Divrei HaYamim. There are others that don't have the targum on the printed page of the text, but at the end of the volume, you'll get the whole targum in one block. And then there is a third group of Mikraot Gedolot editions that bring the targum on the page and they ascribe it to Rav Yosef of Sura, but I think that's a mistaken yihus. It seems almost impossible to ascribe it to Rav Yosef for linguistic reasons - I'm not going to get into that now. But what's improtant for us to know is that the enormous traeasure of information and wealth that is in this targum is basically unknown to almost all mefarshim. Only some of the very late mefarshim - when I say late, i mean in the past couple of centuries and not much more than that actually used it. and even then they didn't make full use of it.
* - Found in the Zohar (האדרא רבא כרך ג (במדבר) פרשת נשא)
I know it was weeks ago (three, to be precise), but I figured I would post about attending YCT's Yemei Iyun, nevertheless. It was their fifth annual such event, this now being my third consecutively-attended (including having attended it last year).
For me, the best sessions were those presented by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper (with whom I just spent this past shabbas up in Boston). He presented four sessions: "Writing Modern Midrash," "What is the Purpose of Animal Sacrifice?", "So Long, But Thanks For the Fish: A New Reading of the Jonah Story," and "Maimonides and Messianism." Yes, there were others I attended and from which I benefited, such as Rivka Kahan's "Understanding the Enigmatic 'Hatan Damim' Episode of Ch. 4 of Exodus" which has always been a puzzling text to me (and many others, I'm sure).
Whenever the lectures get uploaded [here], they are definitely worth a listen.
