Sanhedrin 023

4:
The Torah [Deuteronomy 17:2-5] stipulates a most severe response to any incidence of idolatry:

In this translation I have given one Hebrew word two meanings. Usually, in the book of Deuteronomy the term she'arekha [literally "your gates"] indicates the towns and villages that are not part of the city of Jerusalem. In other places in the Bible the same term often is a synonym for the courts – since justice in biblical times was usually administered in the plaza just inside the city gates. The sages have understood the term in our passage as bearing the latter meaning: "and if it proves true … you shall take the man or woman that did this evil out to your gates".

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When thus construed the passage in the Torah takes on the following meaning: when an incidence of idolatry is discovered in Israel it is to be severely judged. However, granted that the term she'arekha can bear the connotation of "courts", there seems to be nothing in the passage that would suggest that this matter of Dinei Nefashot should be any different than any other: "a man or a woman" accused of the sin of idolatry, which bears the death penalty, should be judged in the usual way, by a court of twenty-three. The Gemara [Sanhedrin 15b] learns from this that only when a whole tribe gives itself over to idolatry must it be judged differently from individuals accused of the same sin. And that is the specific issue that is referred to by our mishnah: should an entire tribe give itself up to the practice of idolatry the matter must be judged by the Sanhedrin – and not by a Court of Twenty-Three – since the Torah here seems to be making a distinction between desecration by individuals and general desecration by the public at large.

6:
Our mishnah also requires the false prophet to be judged by the Sanhedrin. The origins of this case are to be found in the Torah [Deuteronomy 13:2-6]:

For the purposes of understanding our mishnah we could ignore the practical problem that this passage raises, but that would be intellectually dishonest. The passage seems to be recognizing an acute problem, but the solution offered ("God is testing you") seems very weak to modern sophistication. Judaism recognizes the possibility of prophecy but offers no real tools for discriminating between the "true" prophet and the "false" prophet. In our day and age we are far removed from the prophetic mindset, so we find it difficult to appreciate the status and methodology of the biblical prophet – which seems to have been a completely thankless task!

7:
It has been said on countless occasions previously that the biblical prophet was very different from the prophets among other peoples of the ancient world. Where prophecy in general seemed to have very little separating it from modern "fortune-telling", Israelite prophecy seemed to be much more akin to the modern "preacher". His or her task – and there were prophetesses in Israel – was to teach God's word in God's name, and not to foretell the future.

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A long parenthetical note.

On the very few occasions that biblical prophets do give an indication of the future they are widely off the mark! In chapter seven of the book that bears his name, the prophet Isaiah counsels Ahaz king of Judah to take no action against the invasion of his country by two foreign armies. Israel and Aram, alarmed at the threat posed by Assyria, try to create a tripartite alliance between Aram, Israel and Judah in order to be a counterweight to withstand the mighty Assyrian military machine aimed at removing all obstacles that lay in its path to its ultimate objective, Egypt. Isaiah, politically very astute, knows that such an alliance would never be countenanced by Assyria, and that the invasion of Judah by the combined armies of Aram and Israel in order to depose Ahaz and set up a puppet-king on the Judean throne would be speedily dealt with by Assyria. By calling out his armies Ahaz had nothing to gain and everything to lose. He would not be able to withstand the two invading armies; so it would be more sage to appear weaker than he really was, so that Assyria after dealing with Aram and Israel might consider Judah so insignificant that she could be by-passed rather than annihilated; in the meantime Assyria would have dealt with the threat to Judah with short shrift. Now this is what actually did happen, which just goes to show how politically astute Isaiah was – but you don't have to be a prophet to draw those conclusions, you have to be a political and military analyst. Ahaz is – as we can imagine – very dubious about not calling out the militia, so Isaiah tries to persuade him by "foretelling the future". The prophet is told to approach King Ahaz and to tell him

The war that is the background to the above passage is to be dated around 735 BCE. Ephraim-Israel was annihilated by Assyria in 722 BCE – thirteen years later and certainly not sixty-five! (Should we perhaps consider that "sixty-five" is a scribal error for "six or five"?) The prophet's second allusion is much nearer the mark: he says that before a child born today would be old enough to tell right from wrong both Aram and Ephraim will be history. What a pity that this passage has been so misunderstood and so distorted for the past two thousand years and made into a christological indication that it never was in any sane person's mind – certainly not the prophet's.

9:
To return to our topic. There was no outward sign that a prophet could offer the general public to "prove" that he had a commission from God. This means that the true prophet is in a cleft stick: he cannot prove that he has a commission from God, and by the same token he cannot disprove a similar claim from a false prophet. In our next shiur we shall see some dramatic examples of this difficulty.

To be continued.

Shabbat Shalom to everybody.