Julian Ungar-Sargon

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Daf Ditty

A wide-ranging commentary on the daily page of Talmud.

Illustration from the 13th century Morgan Bible of David bringing the Ark into Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6).

Yoma 52: Ark, Texts and Historicity

jyungar June 2, 2021

For the source text click/tap here: Yoma 52

To download, click/tap here: PDF

The rabbis have difficulty with a particular verse regarding the measurements for the Sanctuary. Rabbi Yochanan said that Yosef of Hutzal told us of the dilemma with I Kings 6:19: "And he prepared a partition in the midst of the House within to set there the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord." We are reminded that Isi ben Yehuda says that there are five verses in the Torah whose meaning cannot be decided by reading the text on its own:

Issi ben Yehudah said: There are five verses in the Torah where the grammatical construction of the verse is undecided (if a certain phrase in the verse should be connected to an earlier clause or a later clause), and they are: ‘se’eis’; ‘like almond’; ‘tomorrow’; ‘cursed’; and ‘rise up’.

My colleague (from Brandeis days) Michael Carasik suggests that, in many cases, the Masoretic decision to place a pause in a location that seems to contradict the peshat was made not to contradict it, but to add a second possibility. Given the Talmudic declaration that only five verses in the Torah are undecidable in this way, one may say that the Masoretes per formed their task with quite a gentle touch. They do not seem to have wished to force a particular exegesis upon the reader.

Rather, despite the restrictive quality of the vowels and punctuation marks which they were adding to the traditional consonants, they may, paradoxically, have been actuated by a desire to preserve the indeterminability of the text which had enabled Jewish interpreters for more than a millennium to use the Bible as a springboard for their own literary and theological imagining.

This leads us to the work of Professor Dov Weiss Halivni's work on the redaction of the talmud and the stratification of the layers of gemoro. His understanding of our sugya leads to a unique and original thesis regarding har Sinai and authority of the text.

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Julian Ungar-Sargon

This is Julian Ungar-Sargon's personal website. It contains poems, essays, and podcasts for the spiritual seeker and interdisciplinary aficionado.​