Avodah Zarah 042

7:
Let us now turn our attention to the teaching of Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili, the second of the opinions quoted in our present mishnah. The usual pattern of arranging the various opinions of the sages in a mishnah would require us to assume that Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili holds an opinion that is different from that of Tanna Kamma, which we explained in the previous shiur. Indeed, as we have also seen in the previous shiur, in the Gemara it was assumed that there was a difference of opinion between the two and two sages tried to explain it.

8:
But if we search the halakhic Midrash on the book of Deuteronomy, Sifré, we find there [Sifré, Re'eh, 8] that the teaching of Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili is a 'stand-alone' explanation of a biblical verse. The verse [Deuteronomy 12:2] reads as follows:

In his comment on this verse Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili points out what might be an absurdity. If the non-Jews worship mountains and hills does that mean that the Torah commands us to destroy those mountains and those hills?

9:
In order to remove this possible absurdity Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili punctuates the verse differently. Instead of putting the main pause after the word 'gods' he moves it back in the verse and puts it after the word 'worshipped'. Thus he would render the verse as follows:

Having done this he can now make his point (which is also quoted in our present mishnah):

Since the mountain itself is not a pagan deity, but only the supposed home of a pagan deity, it is the idol which the Torah commands us to destroy, not the mountain itself; it is the Asherah which the Torah requires us to destroy and not the verdant tree under which it has been erected.

Thus, Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili is saying the same thing as Tanna Kamma in different words:

10:
The teaching of Rabbi Akiva in our present mishnah is also derived from the same passage in the Sifré [Re'eh 8] with slightly different wording:

What Rabbi Akiva has done is to put the comma in the sentence back where we had it originally. In other words, he is telling Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili that he has mis-read the verse. (Actually, of course, Rabbi Yosé ha-Gelili did no such thing, he just re-arranged the punctuation of the verse for the purposes of his midrash.)

11:
This re-arrangement of the punctuation of biblical verses was possible because the original text had no punctuation at all. The way we interpret biblical verses today is based on the text we have received from the Masoretes. The Masoretes were groups of bible scholars working between the 7th and 11th centuries CE, based primarily in Israel in the city of Tiberias. They added a system of pronunciation and diacritical notes onto the existing biblical text in an attempt to fix the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions and cantillation of the Tanakh. The Ben-Asher family of masoretes was largely responsible for the preservation and production of the Masoretic Text that we use today, although an alternate Masoretic text of the Ben-Naftali masoretes which differs slightly from the Ben-Asher text existed. Rambam endorsed the Ben-Asher as superior. Thus the Masoretes devised the vowel notation system for Hebrew [nikkud] that is still used as well as the symbols used for cantillation of the text [te'amim].

12:
Our mishnah also deals with the Asherah:

It is not always clear from the biblical text whether an asherah was an idol or a tree. The Torah [Deuteronomy 16:21] commands:

However, modern archeology has unearthed many examples of an asherah: a figurine of a woman in wood or bronze. So many scholars suggest that the above verse should be rendered thus:

I have already pointed out that the asherah was usually set up underneath a verdant tree, so the tree itself may have been considered an asherah. In any case, unlike the mountains and hills, our mishnah teaches that an asherah-tree must be destroyed because it was planted there deliberately by human beings for the purposes of worship.