BEMA 74: Silent Years — Synagogue

Transcription Status

22 Apr 23 — Initial public release

19 Oct 22 — Transcript approved for release

Silent Years — Synagogue

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we begin our journey into the historical context of the world of Jesus, looking at the new Judaism that arose from the ashes of exile.

Marty Solomon: This whole—I don’t know how many episodes we’re going to be looking at—like ten episodes we’re going to do on the context of the world of Jesus before we jump into the biblical Text. Critical. Context is everything.

Brent: Speaking of context, we have a special guest again.

Marty: We have a lot of things, but special guest Jim Feicht is here again in the BEMA Studios. Here you are still.

Brent: Staying and studying under the rabbi.

Marty: That’s right. That’s right. Still here to add his two cents. Appreciated having him in the intro episode. We also, by the way, have a presentation that you want to pull up. It’ll be very helpful. Lots of photos and pictures. We’re going to be talking about some things today.

Brent: Picture-heavy presentation.

Marty: Yes, very much so. Definitely pull it up, it’s going to be very useful. There’s going to be a lot of that in this session, I think; a lot of pictures, because context is so important, like I was saying, and—funny story:

Aaron and I were in Turkey doing some scouting this last year. We were at Antalya which is the port on the south side of Turkey, modern day Turkey, Asia Minor in the biblical day, we’re in the same harbor that Paul would have sailed into, for a little bit of context. A bunch of tourist groups go there all the time and they go on these boats to sail in and out of the harbor that Paul came into. Well, all the boats that leave early in the morning pull out of the harbor and they play My Heart Will Go On as they pull out. Aaron looked over at me and said, “Boy, context matters, doesn’t it?” Not the song that I want playing for me as I pull out of harbor on a ship.

Brent: In case you don’t know the reference, that is from the movie Titanic.

Marty: I can feel like an insertion here, oh boy. Podcast insertion!

Brent: I don’t know if I really want to do that. I’ll consider it. I’ve actually never seen the movie, but I do know that that song is from Titanic.

Marty: Yes, absolutely. A little Celine Dion—whoo, man, obscure pop culture reference number one.

Brent: I don’t think that’s very obscure. It’s one of the highest grossing movies of all time.

Marty: This is true. Alright. Here’s the point that I really want to make today about. I want to talk about the—like Brent was saying in that opening line. There is a new Judaism after exile. When they come back from Babylon, things are different. I think a lot of us—well, most Christians—we’re not used to studying the Jewish context of the Bible anyway, but then if we start to study the Jewish context of the bible, we just kind of make all Judaism, like, one Judaism. We have a hard time pulling apart modern Judaism from Jesus’s Judaism and most of us are completely ignorant of the fact that Jesus’s Judaism was completely different than David’s Judaism.

Brent: Which was maybe completely different from Abraham.

Marty: Oh well, yes, absolutely.

Brent: It just hit all the stories. You’re like Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and you just kind of feel like it’s all the same. At least I did when I was growing up. I didn’t make any distinctions between the eras. Didn’t really read any of the prophets. I knew that the kingdom split and knew about the exile because you read Daniel, of course, because Daniel has good stories. You know they’re off somewhere else for a little while, but I never made any distinctions about any of the different eras.

Marty: Yes, absolutely. We got done with session two recently. Session two is a different kind of Judaism. It was a Judaism that was struggling to really understand the plot of God’s narrative and the mission of God and what their call was in the world. They were struggling with obedience. In fact, a lot of scholars even wrestle with how much of the bible did they actually have? We have this weird, obscure story of Josiah, his era, and they’re cleaning up the temple and they find a scroll. Not multiple scrolls, but a scroll in the temple as they’re cleaning it out.

How much of the bible did they even have? How much did they know? A huge historical discussion about that. We’ll talk more about that in this session I think, but more on that later. How much do they have? How much do they know? We don’t have any evidence that they ever observed a Sabbath year, a Year of Jubilee. In fact, the biblical Text will seem to insinuate they never did.

Brent: Is it not for Sabbath years?

Marty: We don’t have a record of them doing that—and how much trust, by the way, would that take? Not to throw them under the bus. To observe a Sabbath year—I’ve talked to farmers in our world here. What a massive act of trust it would have been to just let the land lie fallow. We just don’t know, we don’t know from history how much they did and we kind of assume from the biblical narrative and what pieces we do have from history, they struggled at that point in history. What we might call Sinai Judaism, Levitical Judaism, whatever you want to call that period of Judaism.

Judaism 1.0 was a totally different Judaism than post Babylon, post-exile Judaism. One of the questions I love to ask my students, I’ll ask you, Jim. Did the exile in Babylon work? Did it work? God sent them off to exile to discipline them? Did it work?

Jim Feicht: Yes, it did.

Marty: It did work, didn’t it? I think most Christians would typically respond to the question like, “Well, no; they came back and they still missed the point.” And they did, they missed some things. I would assume that we’re missing some things. I would think that Christians today, we’re probably missing some things. I don’t think with all of the Holy Spirit and Jesus stuff that we’re aware of, that we understand everything appropriately. Sure, they miss some stuff, and we’re going to talk lots about that, but the exile did work because they came back totally different.

The Judaism that Jesus lived in the midst of was not the Judaism that David ruled in the midst of. It was completely different. In order to communicate that today, I want to talk about synagogue. And we don’t know historically exactly how the evolution of synagogue came to be. Lots of discussion, but most scholars that I’m aware of seem to be fairly confident that the idea of synagogue started in Babylon in exile. You have a destroyed temple sitting in Jerusalem. You have been carted off into exile in different parts of the world, but let’s just say Babylon for ease of conversation, and you have lost the centerpiece of your worship. What was the only centerpiece of their worship, Brent, when they pre going off to Babylon? Did they have any church buildings? Did they have anything?

Brent: They had a temple.

Marty: That was it, right?

Brent: That’s it.

Marty: One building, one location, and that building is now destroyed and you have to somehow create—the only central centerpiece to your faith is now lying in ruins. You have to reinvent yourselves as you sit in exile. Out of this somehow arises synagogue. Almost everybody seems to believe it did not start as a building, whether they even built synagogues at all in different places during exile, post exile is a huge question.

It started with groups of people in what we would call living rooms, just homes. People gathering together to talk about the story of God, to talk about the Text of God and trying to find a way to express and to understand their faith. Synagogues probably start more like what we would call house churches, house synagogues, and eventually, maybe after they moved back home under their own, what we might call freedom. After all of that, they might start building some buildings. Very humble at first, and then they become more and more and more elaborate, especially after the time of Jesus.

They become more and more elaborate in their construction, but eventually they do come back and eventually at some point in that silent years and at least a century before Jesus and possibly even maybe a century even before that or more before Jesus steps on this earth, they’re building buildings that we’re going to reference and call synagogues. I think we can learn a lot just by studying synagogue itself.

In your presentation, we’ve got a diagram that we’re going to reference, because there are seven elements to synagogue. Not all of them are going to be seen on this diagram, but Brent came with us to Israel and got a whole lot of pictures of different synagogues. We’re going to try to use our pictures and our photos and our diagrams to try to talk about seven elements. Now, it’s important to know not all seven elements are always found in every single synagogue that you’re going to run across, but these seven elements are consistent. A lot of synagogues might have five of seven or six of seven, but the seven show up consistently in multiple cases in different synagogues that you find.

Brent: If you’re listening in a place where you can’t stop and actually look at these right now, the diagrams and the pictures will be labeled so you can go and look at it later and say, “Oh, that’s what it is.  Okay, I see what that meant.”

Marty: Yes, the diagram that you’re looking at is actually a recreation and artistic recreation of a synagogue that you’ll see pictures of from Brent in this presentation of a synagogue in Gamla. Gamla was—we’ll talk about it later—was a zealot compound and is located north-northeast of the Sea of Galilee. They recreated what they think that synagogue would have been like when it was in full construction or finished construction would we say, fully constructed and we’re going to use that diagram to kind of point out a few things.

The first thing that we’re going to talk about outside the synagogue, usually almost always you’re going to have a mikvah. There are synagogues that didn’t have a mikvah, but on that diagram there, you see a pool sitting outside the door and that was a baptistry. Jews—we’ll talk more about mikvah in future lessons—but Jews had two different forms of mikvah, an Essene Mikvah and a Pharisee Mikvah. We’ll talk more about those later as well, but the Pharisee Mikvah was a ritualistic cleansing. Before you wanted to come in to worship God, before you entered that synagogue—I think it’s important to note as we get into this, was synagogue meant to replace temple?

Brent: No.

Marty: Not at all. Right? You’re never going to replace the temple.

Brent: They still have the temple in Jerusalem at this point.

Marty: At this point, prior to Jesus, prior to AD 70 when the Temple gets destroyed, they have a temple; and so you’re very, very adamant and careful that synagogue is not replacing temple. In fact, prior to AD 70, synagogues were always built with the doors going away from Jerusalem. Wherever Jerusalem was, your door exited away from Jerusalem because you never wanted to assume that the synagogue was replacing the temple. After the destruction of the temple, they flipped it, and it was just a way of mourning the loss of the temple, but synagogue never replaced temple. It’s not the same thing, it doesn’t function in the same way.

Before you even went in to gather around the Text as a community, you wanted to make sure that your heart was right before God. Mikvah was a ritualistic cleansing that you would do. It wasn’t a conversion baptism like we’re familiar with in the Christian tradition. You would do this every day in a lot of cases, but you would do it every week before you entered synagogue. You wouldn’t enter synagogue without cleansing yourself in mikvah.

Brent: The same way that you take a shower and you get up in the morning before you go out to do whatever daily ritual.

Marty: Yes, absolutely. This mikvah there, and then Brent’s got a photo of a mikvah, probably one from Gamla there. Back to that diagram. Second thing that we might look at here would be—Basilica would be the second thing. Basilica is the pillared section of the synagogue. Almost all synagogues had a basilica that held up the roof, just a bunch of pillars, rows of pillars that held up the roof. They did that for a couple of reasons. Practically, they just didn’t have the technology. Some of the Roman, Greco-Roman technology existed, but the people that built these synagogues at this point in history did not have the technology to span that entire roof distance.

They had to build the basilica because you could go from the end of the building, the edge of the building into the basilica, and then you could span the difference between one side of the basilica and the other. That’s how you would build that, but the other thing that it allowed was you’ll notice you have this elevated portion of the building with windows, and the one thing that they said is, “You read God’s Light by God’s light.”

You read Torah by sunlight. You always created a way for the sunlight to get into the center of your synagogue so that you could read Torah, read the light of God, the word of God, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” You’re going to be able to read the light of God by light from God, so that’s basilica.

Brent: Just to be clear, the roof was completely covered. It was just the windows on the side of that raised portion of the roof.

Marty: Yes, and lots of things are different, lots of synagogues did it in different ways, but they always had some way typically to let the light in, always be careful of making absolute statements, but yes, absolutely, you have the right idea. Now, in the middle on this diagram, there is nothing represented there, but in the middle of the synagogue, like dead smack dab in the middle, is going to be the bema.

Typically when you hear people talk about it, especially in a Jewish context, it’s going to be pronounced differently. We’ve always called it BAY-ma [as opposed to BEE-ma] for a lot of different reasons, partially just me learning how to say my Hebrew over time and partially because I never wanted to get confused with the “bema seat” of judgment in the New Testament and the Greek. I wanted to distinguish between the Greek and the Hebrew there. Bema is the center platform in the middle of the synagogue. It might be stone, it might be wood, but it’s not massive. It’s not a huge stage, it’s not a huge elaborate platform.

It’s usually just a slightly raised platform that somebody is going to stand on when they read the Text. One of the most moving things for me as I studied about bema was it sits in the center of the room. Later on after synagogues are influenced by Western Hellenistic thought, that bema is going to move closer and closer to the front of the room. It’s going to start to look and resemble much more of a stage. If you go into a synagogue today, the bema is very much a Greek stage setting, but in that second temple period, that world of Jesus, bema sat in the center of the room.

That was symbolic because we gather around the Text. The community comes in and they literally gather around the Text. Versus in our world, Jim, what’s the image that we have in our—you go to church now, and do we gather around the Text?

Jim: Absolutely not.

Marty: Where do we typically gather in our churches?

Jim: We usually sit in stadium seating or theater seating and up in front of us is the stage.

Marty: Right. We got some performers. We’re the audience.

Jim: Yes sir.

Marty: Yes, it just mirrors our Greek world. There are good reasons for that, not throwing our whole culture under the bus, but I could use a world where we gathered around the Text. One of my favorite churches that I ever was connected to was a very large church, thousands of people, and they purposely built their church around a central stage and an audience that sat in the round around the stage in order to mirror this idea. Instead of coming to watch something happen in church, instead of coming to be a spectator, we have all kinds of stuff that reinforces this worldview. I’ll get done preaching a sermon. What does everybody tell me, Jim? What does everybody tell me?

Jim: “It’s in the Text.”

Marty: Well, yes, but what are they telling me when I’m done preaching the sermon? I’m out in the hallway, I’m out in the lobby. What does everybody come up to me and say?

Brent: “It’s a good sermon.”

Marty: It’s a good sermon, right? “That’s a good job. That’s a good job.” Wait a minute. What? That’s a good job? What was I doing? I’m participating with the community in worship, but we have all this language that insinuates I was the performer, I was the one doing the action and everybody else was just kind of watching. That’s the whole idea of bema. We’ve got a couple of pictures. Brent will throw one of them in there to show you an idea anyway of what a bema could be.

Brent: I could throw a modern one in there too.

Marty: You could.

Brent: I have to go get a picture of that thing.

Marty: Yes, absolutely. The BEMA Moscow group here on the Palouse built me, at the beginning of our time in BEMA this last go around, built me a bema that we set up in the middle of our room—just out of some two-by-fours. Wood. Perfect idea. Perfect size.

Brent: Pretty simple.

Marty: Pretty simple. You get the idea. You’ll notice in synagogue, it’s not super elaborate and you’ll notice in synagogue this stuff is pretty simple. It’s going to be ornate later, trust me. They’re going to get pretty fancy later in history, but at this point in history, they’re pretty straightforward, pretty straight-laced and pretty standard. The fourth thing we can point out here would be the chief seats. Chief seats. In their world, everybody sat on the floor. Cross legged, maybe. Most of the time would have been stone pavers, different things. Might be dirt, might be gravel in some cases, who knows?

Typically stone pavers, but you’re going to sit cross legged, on your knees, whatever. You’re going to sit on the floor around the bema. Now, the chief seats are those benches around the outside of the synagogue and those few rows are reserved for those people that are more seasoned in the community. More wise. One of the requirements of chief seats in the Jewish world was gray hair. You have to have gray hair before you were invited to sit amongst those in the chief seats. I don’t know, I’m in a room right now with Brent and Jim and me. There are two of us that have gray hair, but I think only one of us who would actually qualify for… [chuckles]

The community would approach and they would say, “Jim. It’s your turn to sit. You have lived a life of great obedience. You have been a model for us and today is the last day that you sit on the floor because today we move you into the chief seats.” Of course, Jim, you would say what?

Jim: Absolutely not.

Marty: Absolutely not. You would refuse, but the community would gather around and they would insist and they would say, “No, this is our honor and a way of honorin—” Again, I just think of all the things that we could learn in our worldview, because in our world, those people with gray hair and those older folks there that we push them to the back and we push them to the fringes. We don’t give them places of honor. They’re seen as people that impede progress, people that get in the way of and here’s the system that honors the work that they’ve done.

When we treat them like that, of course they get bitter and of course they get angry and it just keeps falling apart, rather than having a system that honors and promotes them to places of great honor. And you can probably already hear Jesus’s teachings about chief seats. That’s the idea of chief seats. Those that have come before us and are still with us, but they have walked the path much longer than we have, they get offered those chief seats and that is where they sit. That is a place of honor and reverence.

Then the next thing we might talk about and we got a picture in there of chief seats that you can see. Then on the diagram there, the next thing we might talk about would be a Torah closet. Now, one of the cool things as we’ll have Brent put a picture of this in the presentation. In Chorazin, there’s a wonderful example of a Torah closet. The synagogue is simple. There’s some nice Hellenistic artwork, probably scholars think added later at a later date, but the building itself doesn’t scream elaborate artistic unbelievably ornate, but the Torah closet, do you remember the Torah closet in Chorazin, Brent?

Brent: Vaguely.

Marty: Yes. That was where they had put all their artwork. I mean, beautiful geometric designs. A huge, hand-carved stone archway to go over the top of the Torah closet. If you were standing in the building and you wanted to know what was important to this group of people, that would be the only thing in the building that made you go, “Well, that is what they spent all their time and their money and their focus on.” That’s where you keep Torah.

I hope that as we go through synagogue, you’re catching a theme here. They gather around Torah. They gather around the bema. Torah is central to their community. They put their time and their energy and their focus into Torah. Everything about synagogue screams Torah. This is what changed about Judaism. When they went off into captivity, they said, “Why did we end up here?” The answer, one of them was, “Well, we ended up here because we didn’t obey the rules.” Yes, it’s far more complicated than that, but one of the answers is, we didn’t obey the rules. Well, why didn’t we obey the rules? Because we didn’t what, Brent?

Brent: We didn’t know them.

Marty: We didn’t know the rules. They came back with a different kind of Judaism because they said, “Never again will we not know the rules. We will be a people that know.” They created an entire system. They created an entire gathering, an entire building around knowing Torah, bema, Torah closet. Another thing that would reinforce that is our next item, and that would be the Moses seat. Again you can’t see it in the diagram. It’s not something that’s there, but we’ll have a picture there of an example of what a Moses seat could be or could look like. Couple examples, actually, that you’ll see in the presentation.

One in Sardis and probably one in Chorazin. This is a place where the reader, whoever was chosen to read the Text—there are no clergy in synagogue. What about rabbis? Yes, there are rabbis, but a rabbi is no different than anybody else in the synagogue service, because the people that read, who are the people that read in synagogue, Jim?

Jim: You and me.

Marty: Yes, you and me. There are no clergy. There’s no pastor. Everybody gets assigned. It’s your turn to read this week, and probably would’ve been posted, we assume. Maybe the bulletin board outside of synagogue posted whose family, the Feicht family has that reading this week. The Solomon family is up next week. The Billings family the week after that, and somebody who has been bar mitzvah-ed is going to read the Text. Somebody gets to read the parashah reading. I think we talked about that before. Parashah reading. Maybe we have, maybe we haven’t, so much to cover.

Brent: We’ll get to it.

Marty: We’ll get to it later. So much to cover.

Brent: In a particular Gospel, I think.

Marty: Yes, yes, yes. There would’ve been a Torah reading, the books of Moses, and there would’ve been a prophet reading. Somebody was assigned to do that reading. Well, whoever was assigned to do the Torah portion for that day sat in the Moses seat and it wasn’t somebody special. The only synagogue that Jesus ever read in was a synagogue where? Jim, where was Jesus from?

Jim: Nazareth.

Marty: Yes, the only synagogue that he ever read in. That was his hometown. That was the only synagogue where he was a member of the community. Now, he taught in all the synagogues, but not during synagogue service. He would go to a synagogue and teach when service wasn’t going on, and you could attend a synagogue service if you were in Chorazin. Jesus taught in Chorazin, but Jesus never read in the service in Chorazin, because a rabbi is no different than the others; the people that read in Chorazin are members of the community of Chorazin. That becomes something that we end up seeing, and that’s the Moses Seat.

Brent: How often did they have the synagogue service?

Marty: Every Shabbat. It seems like in some places in the Galilee, they would do synagogue service on Friday evening as Shabbat started. That gave them all of Shabbat to rest on the next day, what we would call Saturday. In most of Judaism, they do synagogue on Saturday. They do synagogue service on Shabbat itself during the day on Saturday. We seem to have some differences historically, but most of Judaism would do it once a week on Shabbat. That gives you an idea of what we’re working with.

We’ve got one more element there. That’s the first six. We’ve done mikvah. We did basilica. We did bema. We did chief seats. We talked Torah closet. We talked Moses Seat. The last thing we want to look at here is the study room. Every synagogue had a study room. Some of them much, much bigger than others. The study room size. Do you remember the largest study room we’ve ever found, Brent?

Brent: The largest one?

Marty: Or, Jim? Anybody remember? Where was that one at?

Brent: I don’t know. I remember Gamla being the smallest one.

Marty: Yes, and not the smallest ever found, but it was small in comparison to some of the other huge synagogues. In Gamla, probably could seat, we estimate, a couple thousand people in Gamla sitting at synagogue. In that study room, you could probably even throw a picture of it in there if you’ve got one and—

Brent: It’s kind of a joke. [laughs]

Marty: Yes. How many people do you think you could fit in that comfortably?

Brent: I don’t know. Comfortably? Like five.

Marty: Yes, maybe 10 or 15 in their world, compared to a synagogue that seats 2,000. Then there was one of the largest study rooms.

Brent: I feel like 2,000 sounds optimistic, but I guess if you’re all cramped in there and comfortable with each other, then maybe you could do it.

Marty: Yes, absolutely. Then you had the study room in a place like—can you remember, Jim?

Jim: I want to say Caesarea?

Marty: Oh, man. Not quite. There’s a cool synagogue there. We never went to see that one, but that’s a cool one there, I never took you guys to. Don’t tell anybody.

Brent: Oh, yes. I didn’t get to go there.

Marty: Yes. I haven’t taken anybody there. I’ve done some scouting there, but I didn’t take anybody there. It’s a pretty cool one. It’s got a balcony, two decks. It’s pretty sweet. A little small, but pretty cool.

Jim: I remember being there. I just can’t think of the name of it.

Marty: Yes—Capernaum. We’ll talk about Capernaum. That was like the Harvard or the Yale of the Jewish world. You can tell when you look at their study room, because their study room is almost—bigger than, in fact—square footage, I’m not sure. It might even be bigger than the actual—and there’s not many chief seats. There’s only like one, maybe two rows at the most of the chief seats in Capernaum, because that’s where the young people were studying the Text. You didn’t have a bunch of gray haired people, but you had this huge synagogue and a huge study room.

You can just look at the study room—and I know we got a BEMA listener out there—I won’t call her out by name. She disagrees with me on this one because she doesn’t think that’s the indication of the size of the study room. That’s a good point because rabbis didn’t always teach in the room. Rabbis taught out and about just like Jesus did, taking their disciples out. It is a possibility that the size of the study room doesn’t indicate their devotion to the Text, but there’s also a good possibility that it might, and it might at least give us maybe a hint. Maybe it’s not the only indicator, but it may be a hint indicator.

Jim: Well, study room wouldn’t be storage for other scrolls, the non-Torah scrolls or…

Marty: That’s a great point. You don’t need extra storage for scrolls because you have so few in their world. You don’t have, unless you’re in a place with a ton of resources or just a huge amount of people, you don’t have a whole Torah scroll. You don’t have all the Hebrew scriptures. People estimate that a whole Torah scroll in their day would’ve been the equivalent of about three quarters of $1 million. That’s 750,000 bucks equivalent to today’s wealth.

It’s like building a church building. It’s like building a small church building, but you get the idea. It’s a huge, huge expense. What you probably had was maybe you had Leviticus and you had Isaiah and Habakkuk and maybe Esther, but if you wanted to study Deuteronomy, well, you had to go to the next town over about 11 miles away. They had Deuteronomy. If you want Genesis, which raises a really important question, which is if you don’t have all the scrolls, what’s your question, Brent?

Brent: How do you know them?

Marty: Yes. How do you know them? Which leads to my closing conversation for this podcast. Jumping off of that study room conversation, synagogue wasn’t just about a worship service once a week. Synagogue was about an entire way of life and an entire mindset, worldview, lifestyle centered around Torah, centered around Text, but with that also came an education system, because they knew that if they were going to learn their Text and never forget the rules again, they were going to have to teach it to who?

Brent: To their children.

Marty: They’re going to have to pass it on to their kids. If they don’t do that, they’ll lose it within one generation. They created an elaborate education system to teach that Text and to make sure that this Judaism became a Judaism that was centered around the Text. That’s what we end up seeing. We have found a whole bunch of things about Jewish history that teach us about what their education system looked like. We know that education system, we’ll have a slide that has these references on it, by the way, in your presentation, but we know that their education system started with something called Bet Sefer, ages about 5 to 9. Consider kindergarten through about third grade age.

It’s your first level of Jewish schooling. You learn all kinds of things. You learn your math, you learn your sciences, but you learn like the reason you’re doing this is to learn Torah, and so you’re one primary job in Bet Sefer—we’ve discovered that girls also attended Bet Sefer at a much higher rate than we originally thought; girls and boys alike, mostly boys, but even a good portion of girls are going to Bet Sefer to memorize Torah.

When I say memorize, over the course of those four years, four or five years, you’re wanting to commit Torah to memory, to have such a familiarity with Torah that you’re able to start quoting—a Rabbi could be quoting anywhere in Torah. He could pick a book, he could pick Exodus and just start quoting, not tell you it’s Exodus, not tell you where he’s quoting, just start quoting in Exodus, stop mid-sentence, point to you and you would need to be able to pick up quoting right where he left off without hesitation and keep quoting.

This is the familiarity, by the time you’re done with Bet Sefer, that you’re wanting to have with the books of Moses. It’s just unbelievably intimidating to consider what that worldview would have been like, but that’s Bet Sefer. Now, how many people do you suppose, Jim, are making it through that schooling?

Jim: Not many.

Marty: Not many. You’d have to be gifted, you would have to be so well-studied and just have some natural talent to be able to pull this off. Scholars still debate, is it 1%, is it less than 1%, could it be 2%, or 3% or 4%, but we’re talking single digits in the percentage of students that are moving on to the next level of Jewish schooling, which there’s a lot of historical debate. Is it Bet Midrash, is it Bet Talmud—it’s one of the two, we just don’t know exactly how it worked after Bet Sefer. That’s the one that’s well-recorded in history. Eventually, you move on to what I’m going to call… What do I have on my slide, Brent?

Brent: Bet Midrash.

Marty: Bet Midrash. Bet Midrash is going to be ages 10 to 13. It’s going to be 10 to around your bar or bat mitzvah. Now, girls at this point we believe are out of the education system whether that’s cultural demands or cultural stigmas or whatever it is. As far as we know, we don’t see too many females ever in this level of education, but Bet Midrash is where you’re going to memorize the rest of Tanakh. Obviously, you have a lot of raw talent and raw ability, you’ve made it past Bet Sefer.

Consider, by the way, that 99% of the Jewish population is, at this point—you’ve been told by some rabbi, some teacher, you’ve been told by the instructor, “You obviously love God and I’ve seen how much you love Torah, but you don’t have what it takes. Go home and pray that your children will be able to do what you could not.” Sounds totally damning in our culture, but in their culture, it doesn’t carry that same stigma because 99% of—it’s not like you’re going home hanging your head because everybody’s looking at you, you going, “Oh, you too?”

We all had that experience, except for this 1% cream of the crop that got the opportunity to move on. They’re going to memorize the rest of Tanakh. Now, if you’re sitting there with your Bible, grab that Bible and hold the chunk of Genesis through Malachi in your hand and try to just grasp in the next three years—the concept of people committing the rest of that book to memory, but that’s what they did in Bet Midrash, from ages 10 to 13.

After that, if you were really the best of the best, you might apply to be what they’re called a talmid, a disciple. If you thought you had what it took, you had not just scripture committed to memory, but you had a working knowledge and a raw ability to interact with and interpret that Text. You didn’t have the authority to interpret it, but if you thought you could get into that kind of world, you would apply to a rabbi. That rabbi would grill you.

By the way, we could put this in the show notes. I would recommend: Ray Vander Laan has a video about this in his That the World May Know series, and Rob Bell also did a NOOMA titled Dust, and it puts it in a really nice 10-minute concise package to talk about this as well. If you thought that you had what it takes, this rabbi would grill you; he would ask you a ton of questions, he would try to just test you and put you under scrutiny to see if you had what it took to be like him.

Because the goal, and you’ll see this at the bottom of your slide there on the presentation, the goal is to know what the rabbi knows, in order to do what the rabbi does, for the reasons that the rabbi does them, in order to be just like your rabbi in his walk with God. To know what the rabbi knows, in order to do what the rabbi does, for the reasons that the rabbi does them, in order to be just like the rabbi in their walk with God.

What I hope to convey and we have been talking for a long time, so we need to cut this thing off, but what I hope to convey in this podcast, the Judaism that arose from the ashes of exile, as we said at the beginning of this podcast, the Judaism that arose was not the Judaism that went into exile. I know that we love as Christians to throw Judaism under the bus and the Pharisees and we talk about, “They’re just so legalistic and they just miss the point, and how could they be so stupid?”

I think we need to really check ourselves before we do that, because this was a people—if we had a fraction of the devotion to the Text that they had, we’d be making massive steps forward and they just had an absolute devotion to learning the ways of God. This is what we see in the Jesus story. Obviously, Jesus goes out and he calls a bunch of people and what are they doing, Jim, when Jesus goes out and finds them? At least most of them.

Jim: Fishing.

Marty: Yes, they’re fishing. What does that tell us? What does that tell us, Jim?

Jim: They’re just common people.

Marty: At some point during the education system, what must have happened?

Jim: They weren’t good enough.

Marty: They weren’t good enough, which is what 99% of people were, so they got told to go home and ply their father’s trades, that’s what Peter and Andrew are doing. There’s James and John, what are they doing? They’re fishing, but who are they fishing with? Brent, who are they fishing with?

Brent: Is it with their father?

Marty: Yes, fishing with their father. What does that mean? If they’re fishing with their father, these guys haven’t even been bar mitzvahed yet, because if they’ve been bar mitzvahed they’d be fishing on their own. They’d be grown men plying their father’s trade on their own. That means they’re younger than 13. James and John are like 11 or 12—maybe 10 years old. How old are these guys? Now, we have to be honest and remember that a 13-year-old in their culture is the same as an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old in our culture, but even still, these are young kids.

These aren’t 30-year-old bearded men who we see in all the videos and movies following Jesus around. These are young kids, and we’ll talk more about that because there’s good evidence to suggest that Peter was the only one that even gets close to maybe 18, 19, 20, 21 maybe—maybe, but probably not. We’ll talk more about that later, but these are young kids, and somewhere along the way just like Jim pointed out, they’ve been told, “You obviously love God and you love Torah, but this isn’t for you,” and Jesus goes out and he walks on the beach and he calls them.

Have you ever been in Bible studies and everybody—what is the observation that everybody makes, Jim, when we’re sitting in Bible study and they drop their nets and everybody asks the question—what’s the question that they always ask?

Jim: Why did they drop their nets?

Marty: Yes. “I can’t believe they just dropped their—they just dropped their nets and left?! I can’t believe they did that.” Well, yes, they just got given like this—

Brent: They didn’t even go home to give their mom a hug?

Marty: Yes. My goodness, “They just left everything in the water?!” Yes. They’re jumping out of the boat, they’re yelling at their friend who’s 100 yards away like, “Hey, bring my boat to shore. Tell dad I got invited to go follow a rabbi”—and trust me, their parents are not upset when they get home, or rather when they don’t come home and somebody else brings that news to them—their family throws a party. Because some rabbi invited them to be—scholars estimate, maybe there’s a hundred talmidim, maybe one hundred disciples in the 1st century.

We know of five rabbis in the first century: Jesus, Gamaliel the Elder, Gamaliel the Younger, Hillel, Shammai—that whole era of about 100, 150, 200 years. We know of five, six, seven rabbis. We assume that maybe there was more, so maybe there’s what, ten, twelve rabbis? Some rabbis had one disciple, some rabbis had multiple disciples, so scholars estimate about 100 disciples. 100 disciples in a people group of 6 million Jews. That’s the small group of people we’re talking about here.

Brent: Even on top of that, those are the people who have the instantaneous mid-sentence recall…

Marty: Oh, absolutely.

Brent: But the entire culture has this devotion to the Text where their familiarity with Torah…

Marty: Oh my goodness.

Brent: Vastly beyond what we have today.

Marty: Even the ones that get told to go home could run circles around a whole room of us educated, internet-educated, doctrine, bible-believing evangelicals today. Even some of the least educated people in their day knew their Text because they didn’t have it. The whole reason we got into this was you were asking about scrolls and we asked the question how do you know? You know, because as a community you’ve committed it to memory.

The hazan, the leaders, there are people that have memorized it. They may not have it on immediate recall, but they have it all memorized and you can study it and read it and recite it to each other—this is the world of Jesus and this is going to be important for us to understand.

Brent: We’ll run into some of those characters with Jesus where it’s like, “Wow, how do they know that?”

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: This is it.

Marty: I feel like, and I know where we are—we’re back to a 40-minute podcast, that’s what I’m talking about—and I feel like there’s still so much. I’m just sitting here scrambling because I feel like we’re merely scratching the surface of things that we really need to unpack. Hopefully, we’re going to have the time to do that in the future. Just trying to set the stage. Again, this context matters so much, doesn’t it, Jim?

Jim: Yes, it does.

Marty: Did you have a favorite synagogue? You came with us to Israel. Turkey?

Jim: I did.

Marty: What was your favorite synagogue that you went to?

Jim: I would say it was Gamla.

Marty: Okay, I like that. Yes, absolutely. Do you think everybody should go find their own synagogue too?

Jim: I think so.

Marty: We should do some trips in the future and bring everybody, and everybody should go find their own synagogue.

Jim: Absolutely.

Marty: Brent, do you think that’s pretty good?

Brent: Absolutely.

Marty: Yes, we should all go find our own synagogue.

Brent: You think that you can just understand by seeing a picture, but it’s so different.

Marty: To stand there. Pretty cool. Jim, you got a shout-out to anybody out there?

Jim: Yes. To my Irvine boys. Also to another guy out there who I adore, Brian, the Trabuco guy—he’s one of my favorites.

Marty: We shouldn’t talk about Brian on this podcast. He’s doing a better job than I am. Like he’s running a more legit program down there that I’m running with mine. He’s “the one that shall not be named.” [sarcasm] No, he’s doing a great job. Love, love to watch what Brian’s doing. Yes, big shout-out to all our BEMA California peeps. Good stuff. All right, Brent. I’m done, 45 minutes in, time to call it.

Brent: All right. Well, let’s see. I guess you can just go to bemadiscipleship.com, check out everything—schedule’s there, map of discussion groups around the country and around the world, in fact. Let’s see. You can find Marty on Twitter at @martysolomon. I’m at @eibcb. Jim is at @bemafollower. Love that. Still good. Thanks for joining us on the BEMA podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.