From Medina Raḥamim to Elul Seliḥot:
Toward a Prehistory of Nocturnal Penitential Prayer

Aton M. Holzer

Shulamit Elizur, the undisputed doyenne of piyyut scholarship, published in 2016 a characteristically magisterial study on the origins of the seliḥot liturgy.[1] This liturgical category – like the prayerbook as a whole – is not attested before the eighth and ninth centuries. The great payyetanim of late antique Eretz Israel – Yose ben Yose, Yannai, and R. Eleazar ha-Qalir – composed qinot, qerovot, and other poetic forms, yet, as Elizur has demonstrated elsewhere,[2] seliḥot cannot be ascribed to this early Eretz-Israeli stratum. Contrary to earlier assumptions that located their genesis in the pre-classical Palestinian milieu, the genre is in fact a Babylonian creation, nurtured in a setting where “primitive” poetic styles persisted well into later centuries. The available evidence indicates that seliḥot entered the liturgical repertoire of the land of Israel only after the late eighth century, and even then only in a limited and sporadic fashion. From Babylonia, the genre subsequently radiated westward, leaving its imprint on Italy, Ashkenaz, and Sefarad.

The seliḥot as they have come down to us consist of two distinct components. The seliḥot proper are payyetanic compositions structured upon the framework of a primordial abecedarian proto-seliḥah preserved in the Seder of R. Saʿadyah Gaon. This early prototype interwove biblical verses drawn alternately from Torah, Writings, and Prophets. Three verses, however – the Thirteen Attributes (Exod. 34:5–6), the Prayer of Moses (Num. 14:19–20), and the Prayer of Daniel (Dan. 9:18–19) – were singled out for repetitive or responsive recitation, while the remaining verses were gradually supplanted by confessional passages (viduy) or thematic prose paragraphs. Elizur contends that the genre most plausibly derives from a pre-classical Palestinian text embedded in the Qedushat ha-Yom blessing for Yom Kippur, where prayers composed entirely of biblical verses were customary. In Babylonia, this early piyyut – and, in due course, the expanding sequence of piyyutim modeled upon it – was transplanted into the Amidah at the selah lanu blessing, thereby establishing the formal locus of the seliḥot within the liturgy.

A second, distinct component of the seliḥot service is the raḥamim – the repetitive litanies beginning with ʾEl raḥum shimekha. This section was not initially bound to the fixed liturgy but was instead recited in assemblies convened during the ashmoret ha-boker (“the third watch of the night,” before dawn) throughout the month of Elul, the Ten Days of Repentance, and Yom Kippur. As with seliḥot, this practice finds no precedent in the late antique liturgy of Eretz Israel, but rather emerges within the Babylonian milieu. In the course of time, the raḥamim were often relocated to the taḥanun following the morning prayer, and, once the seliḥot component was excised from the Amidah, the two elements were joined. Thus, on Yom Kippur, only the evening service retained raḥamim, while the other services preserved seliḥot. In Sephardic communities, the seliḥot rites that remained independent of the fixed liturgy – those recited at ashmoret during Elul and the Ten Days of Repentance – developed in a more fluid and less regimented manner: seliḥot-type piyyutim were freely interwoven with raḥamim-litanies, precisely because their origins lay outside the structured framework of the Amidah.

When, then, did these nocturnal gatherings originate? No documentary evidence attests to seliḥot or raḥamim before the eighth century. Nevertheless, there is reason to suspect that Babylonian Jewish communities had already consecrated the month of Elul to penitential supplication by the close of late antiquity. A fascinating recent study by Michael E. Pregill traces the evolution of traditions surrounding the Golden Calf episode across late antique Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He demonstrates that the ḥet ha-ʿegel was a charged theme in Eastern Christianity from the fourth century onward, generating a distinctive cross-pollination between Jewish and Syriac Christian traditions in the Sasanian orbit.

A striking motif emerges in the writings of Ephrem of Nisibis (306–373) – who integrates certain midrashic elements, such as the murder of Hur and apologetic defenses of Aaron – namely, the portrayal of Israel as an unfaithful bride:

“The Holy One took the Synagogue up to Mount Sinai
He made her shine with pure white garments, though her heart was dark
She whored with the Calf (bĕ-ʿeglâ gārat), and He came to despise her
He smashed the Tablets, the book of her covenant (kĕtābâ da-qyāmāh).”[3]

This imagery appears to have acquired particular resonance in the Aramaic-speaking milieu, aided by the rendering of saru (Exod. 32:8) as satu in the targumim – a translation evocative of sotah – and echoed, albeit in less explicitly sexualized form, in the Peshitta. The motif was subsequently taken up by Syriac Christian theologians and exegetes such as Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Jacob of Serugh. As Pregill persuasively argues, rabbinic sources themselves came to embrace this image, precisely as both a product of and a response to this polemical environment.

It may therefore be that the month of Elul – the period traditionally associated with Moses’ ascent to atone for the sin of the Golden Calf – was observed with particular intensity, at least on an individual level, within the Babylonian milieu, where the Golden Calf served as a focal point of interreligious controversy.[4] A possible allusion to such a practice appears in Seder Eliyahu Zuta, a distinctive rabbinic midrashic work and moral treatise,[5] likely composed in Babylonia between the fifth and ninth centuries:

“Were it not for God’s forbearance toward Israel during the first forty days that Moses was up on Mount Sinai to bring the Torah to his people, the Torah would not have been given to Israel. By what parable may the matter be illustrated? By the parable of a mortal king who wed a woman he loved with utter love. Having sent for a man to act as a go-between between him and his future queen, he showed the emissary all his nuptial chambers, his halls of state, and his private living quarters. The king then said to the go-between: Go and say on my behalf to the lady, ‘I do not require anything from you. You need make for me only a small nuptial chamber where I can come and dwell with you, so that my servants and the members of my household will know that I love you with utter love.’ Yet even while the king was concerning himself with the measurements of the nuptial chamber [she was to make for him] and while he was dispatching a messenger to convey many, many gifts to the lady, people came and told him: ‘Your future wife has committed adultery with another man.’ At once the king put aside all the plans he had in hand. The go-between was expelled and withdrew confounded from the king’s presence, as is said, While the King was thinking [about the measurements] of His nuptial chamber, my spikenard let go [and lost] its fragrance (Song 1:14)… During the last forty days when Moses went up a second time to Mount Sinai to fetch the Torah, Israel decreed for themselves that the daytime hours of each day be set aside for fasting and self-affliction. The last day of the entire period, the last of the forty, they again decreed self-affliction and spent the night also in such self-affliction as would not allow the Inclination to evil to have any power over them. In the morning they rose early and went up before Mount Sinai. They were weeping as they met Moses, and Moses was weeping as he met them, and at length that weeping rose up on high. At once the compassion of the Holy One welled up in their behalf, and the holy spirit gave them good tidings and great consolation, as He said to them: My children, I swear by My great name that this weeping will be a joyous weeping for you because this day will be a day of pardon, atonement, and forgiveness for you – for you, for your children, and for your children’s children until the end of all generations.” (Ch. 4, Braude translation)

The precedent for individual supplications is reflected within the raḥamim-style litanies themselves – for example, “He who answered Abraham our father … to Isaac his son … to Daniel … to Ezra.” Daniel Boyarin has noted that the prayers of the narrator in the extracanonical 4 Ezra (late first century CE) bear striking affinities to the litanies, confessions, and invocations of the divine attributes that later characterize the seliḥot.[6] Even if one remains cautious about retrojecting the fully developed genre – absent from both Talmuds and unattested in the Palestinian West – back to so early a period, and even if many of Boyarin’s textual parallels must undoubtedly be assigned to later strata,[7] the evidence nonetheless suggests the possibility of an early use of penitential litanies in private devotion. This, in turn, stands in contrast to their later employment within the communal ʿAmidah of fast days, as recorded in m. Taʿanit 2:4.

Other, later developments within “Babylonian territory” – regions under the halakhic and tributary jurisdiction of the Babylonian center by the close of late antiquity – may likewise hint at the existence of such practices and illuminate stages in their historical evolution.

Recent scholarship suggests that rabbinic Judaism maintained a significant presence in the Arabian Peninsula, at least in its northern regions – possibly even reflected in the toponym Khaybar (deriving from ḥaver[8]) – as well as in the Jewish city of Yathrib/Medina, which some now identify as a community of halakhah-observant, rabbinic Jews.[9] This line of research is relatively recent, its conclusions necessarily tentative, yet it opens promising avenues for further inquiry.

While the midrashic material drawn upon by the Qurʾan appears to be of Eretz-Israeli provenance[10] – attesting to the earlier dominance of the Eretz-Israeli center – the Arabian Peninsula after 570 was largely under the sway of the Sasanian Empire or its clients, with direct Sasanian control extending as far south as Najrān and Jeddah. The Ḥijāz itself is later described as long having functioned as a “backyard” of the Babylonian academies:[11]

“’Abdur Rahman bin ‘Abdul Qari said, ‘I went out in the company of ‘Umar bin Al-Khattab one night in Ramadan to the mosque and found the people praying in different groups. A man praying alone or a man praying with a little group behind him. So, ‘Umar said, ‘In my opinion I would better collect these (people) under the leadership of one Qari (Reciter) (i.e. let them pray in congregation!).’ So, he made up his mind to congregate them behind Ubai bin Ka’b. Then on another night I went again in his company and the people were praying behind their reciter. On that, ‘Umar remarked, ‘What an excellent Bid’a (i.e. innovation in religion) this is; but the prayer which they do not perform, but sleep at its time is better than the one they are offering.’ He meant the prayer in the last part of the night. (In those days) people used to pray in the early part of the night.’” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Vol. 3, Book 32, Hadith 227)

The “Prophet’s Mosque” of Medina, in its original form, seems to have resembled a synagogue, with the qibla (direction of prayer) even initially facing Jerusalem. In the first decades of the seventh century, before the coalescence of an “Islamic” identity, Jews might actually have been included in the proto-Islamic muʾminūn (“believers”) movement.[12] This hinges, to some extent, on whether the word characterizing the Jews’ relationship to the new movement is umma (“[one] community”), as Fred Donner reads it, or amāna (“secure”), as Michael Lecker would have it.[13]

Regardless, in the early period of Islam Jews and Christians seem to have joined the “community” without having to recant their previous faith or identity, and there was no “conversion” rite or procedure.[14]

The brief “honeymoon” between Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Yathrib ended abruptly, culminating in the bloody execution of some four hundred men of the Jewish tribe of Banū Qurayẓa.[15] More recent revisionist scholarship, however, tends to regard this episode – attested only in sources written a century or more later – as altered,[16] exaggerated, or even fabricated, serving primarily the purpose of boundary-setting.[17] These retellings were likely shaped by later Muslim conflicts with Jewish communities in Damascus and Baghdad, while the original events, insofar as they occurred, are better understood as a matter of political expediency rather than religious confrontation.[18]

In any case, many Jews appear to have remained in Medina for several decades thereafter. The expulsion of non-Muslims from the Ḥijāz – the western province of Arabia – was long attributed to the second caliph, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 634–644), who was also credited with the shurūṭ ʿUmar (“Pact of ʿUmar”), the charter assigning dhimmī status to Jews and Christians and thereby marking clear boundaries between them and the emergent Islamic polity. More recent research, however, tends to assign both the expulsion and the Pact not to ʿUmar I, but rather to ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 717–720).[19]

Jewish sources themselves offer little contemporary testimony datable to this formative period. One exception is an apocalyptic work composed around the mid-eighth century, Nistarot de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, pseudepigraphically attributed to R. Shimon bar Yoḥai – cast here as the fiercest rabbinic adversary of Rome.[20] This work strikingly celebrates ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, conqueror of Jerusalem from the Byzantines, as a beneficent figure whose reign would prepare the ground for Israel’s redemption. The text prophesies that the Ishmaelite regime would vanquish Christendom and create the conditions for the advent of the Messiah:

“The second king who will arise from Ishmael will be a friend of Israel. He will repair their breaches and mend the breaches of the Temple; he will shape Mount Moriah and make the whole of it a level plain. He will build for himself there a place of prayer (hishtaḥavayah) upon the site of the ‘foundation stone’ (ʾeven shetiyyah), as Scripture says: ‘and set your nest on the rock’ (Num. 24:21). He will wage war with the children of Esau, slaughter their troops, and capture a great multitude of them. And in the end, he will die in peace and with great honor.”

ʿUmar acquired the epithet al-Fārūq (“the redeemer”) – from the same root as purqan – most likely through Jewish usage.[21] The early Islamic movement may at first have been perceived in terms akin to contemporary Noahides: strict monotheists who acknowledged Israel’s chosenness and with whom joint prayer posed no obstacle. ʿUmar’s acceptance of the Byzantine surrender in 637 and his subsequent activities in Jerusalem – including the readmission of Jewish residents, the clearing of refuse from the Temple Mount, and the construction of an initial “prayer-house” open to all worshippers, Jews among them[22] – could only have deepened Jewish admiration for him and for the movement he led in its formative environment.

It was during ʿUmar’s caliphate that the month of Ramadan, having been unmoored from the solar calendar after 632, fell successively in Iyyar,[23] then in Tishrei (637–639), and thereafter in Elul (640–642). Jews observing the Babylonian rite of raḥamim by night would naturally have assembled in Medina’s spacious prayer-house during the nights of Tishrei and Elul/Ramadan. Before the incorporation of seliḥot, these supplications were recited individually. ʿUmar evidently regarded the practice as salutary but preferred that it be performed collectively; hence, alongside the adoption of seliḥot, the communal ashmoret service became standard across lands under Babylonian influence. Intriguingly, however, the seliḥot embedded in these ashmoret gatherings retained an individualistic tenor for centuries – most clearly visible in the piyyutim of R. Isaac ibn Ghiyyat, composed especially for the nights of Elul. Thus, even as the ashmoret gatherings assumed a communal form, they continued to be conceptualized as assemblies of individuals.[24]

The Geonic treatment of this custom, preserved in R. Isaac ibn Ghiyyat’s Hilkhot Teshuvah (§58), records that both the ninth-century Gaon R. Kohen Ẓedeq b. Abimai of Sura and the renowned eleventh-century R. Ḥayya Gaon of Pumbeditha restricted the practice to the Ten Days of Repentance in their own locales. Yet R. Ḥayya also concedes that in “some places in Persia” the recitation of taḥanunim extended through the entire month of Elul, and R. Isaac ibn Ghiyyat notes that such was likewise the practice in his native al-Andalus. To one line of speculation, then, another may be added: the custom of seliḥot throughout Elul – attested both in Persia at the eastern edge of the Jewish world and in Spain at its westernmost reach, both within the orbit of Babylonian influence – appears to have “skipped over” the very center itself, namely, the Geonic academies of Babylonia.

As Simcha Gross has demonstrated,[25] the Iggeret of R. Sherira Gaon, in recounting the Geonic academies’ greeting to the Islamic conquerors, reflects the rising prominence of the ʿAlids as the Abbasid caliphate matured; in this recension, it is specifically Caliph ʿAlī whom the Geonim are said to have welcomed with great affection. By the late tenth century, the Shiʿite Būyids had assumed control of Baghdad and much of the Iraq–Iran region. Within Shiʿi circles, the prayer service introduced by ʿUmar – the Tarāwīḥ – was condemned as an illegitimate innovation, and both Fāṭimid and Būyid rulers actively suppressed its observance.[26] Indeed, even today Shiʿi sources continue to enumerate its perceived deficiencies: that it is performed at the wrong time (in the early evening rather than at the close of night), that it diminishes the primacy of individual prayer, and that it is conducted with undue haste.[27] It is not difficult to imagine that similar criticisms contributed to the suppression of month-long nocturnal supererogatory prayer within the Geonic academies of Baghdad and its environs – the very setting in which anti-Tarāwīḥ polemics were most vigorously advanced. Moreover, the month of Elul coincided with the kallah, when vast numbers of students converged upon the Geonic centers for intensive study, thereby directing the academies’ energies away from nocturnal penitential assemblies at precisely this season.

Notes:

Many thanks to Prof. Y. Tzvi Langermann, Prof. Shulamit Elizur, and Prof. Gabriel Said Reynolds, for their valuable comments on several of the ideas discussed in this article. Needless to say, all errors remain the sole responsibility of the author.

[1] Shulamit Elizur, “The Origins of the Selihot Piyyutim,” Tarbiz, vol. 84, no. 4 (2016): 503-542 (Hebrew), available here (https://www.academia.edu/36608670).
[2] Shulamit Elizur, “The Character and Influence of the Babylonian Center of Poetic Production: Considerations in the Wake of Tova Beʾeri’s Books,” Tarbiz, vol. 79, no. 2 (2010-2011): 229-248 (Hebrew), available here (https://www.academia.edu/36608504).
[3] Hymns on Faith 14.6, translation in Michael E. Pregill, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an: scripture, polemic, and exegesis from late antiquity to Islam (Oxford University Press, 2020) 216.
[4] Fascinatingly, in Second Temple times the month of Elul appears to have been the season when numerous calves – specifically, since ovine and caprine births occurred earlier in the year, prior to the preceding goren – were brought to the Temple for the tithe of animals (maʿasar behemah). One may wonder whether a symbolic connection was drawn between this practice and the atonement for the sin of the Golden Calf observed at this time of year. See Ze’ev Safrai, Mishnat Eretz Yisrael: Tractate Bekhorot, with Historical and Sociological Commentary (Yavneh: Kvutzat Yavne, 2020), 297–298 (Hebrew).
[5] Lennart Lehmhaus, “‘Were not understanding and knowledge given to you from Heaven?’ Minimal Judaism and the Unlearned ‘Other’ in Seder Eliyahu Zuta,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3 (2012): 230-258, available here (https://www.academia.edu/1817892).
[6] Daniel Boyarin, “Penitential Liturgy in 4 Ezra,” Journal for the Study of Judaism, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1972): 30–34, available here (https://www.academia.edu/36253296).
[7] Shulamit Elizur, “The Character and Influence,” p. 243, fn. 54.
[8] See discussion in Raphael Dascalu, “Revisiting the Qur’anic aḥbār in Historical Context,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (2021): 41-65.‏
[9] See Haggai Mazuz, The Religious and Spiritual Life of the Jews of Medina (Leiden: Brill, 2014).‏
[10] Holger M. Zellentin, “Aḥbār and Ruhbān: Religious Leaders in the Qurʾān in Dialogue with Christian and Jewish Literature,” in Angelika Neuwirth and Michael Sells, eds., Qurʾānic Studies Today (New York: Routledge, 2016), 258-289, available here (https://www.academia.edu/34810735).
[11] See Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 125.
[12] See Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).‏
[13] See summary in Mark R. Cohen, “Islamic Policy Toward Jews from the Prophet Muhammad to the Pact of ‘Umar,” in Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora, eds., A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the origins to the present Day (Princeton University Press, 2013), 58-77, available here (https://www.academia.edu/37423214).
[14] Ilkka Lindstedt, Muḥammad and his followers in context: the religious map of late antique Arabia (Brill, 2024), ‏319.
[15] Meir Jacob Kister, “The Massacre of the Banū Qurayẓa: A Re-Examination of a Tradition,” Society and Religion from Jahiliyya to Islam (Routledge, 2022), VIII 61-VIII 96.‏
[16] JaShong King, “The Message of a Massacre: The Religious Categorization of the Banū Qurayẓa,” Ancient Judaism, vol. 6 (2018): 203-226.‏
[17] See Mohammed Ahmed, “The Literary Role of Jews in Qur’anic Exegesis,” (Ph.D Diss., University of Cambridge, 2025).‏

Gabriel Said Reynolds, who serves as the Jerome J. Crowley and Rosaleen G. Crowley Professor of Theology and Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, expresses skepticism regarding the traditional accounts in the Sīra literature about the Jewish tribes of Yathrib and their interactions with Muhammad and his followers. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that the existence of Jewish tribes in the Hijaz is beyond dispute, a fact confirmed by the discovery of rock inscriptions in the region (personal communication).
[18] See e.g. Juan Cole, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires (Hachette UK, 2018).‏
[19] Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Harry Munt, “‘No two religions’: Non-Muslims in the early Islamic Ḥijāz,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 78, no. 2 (2015): 249-269.‏
[20] See the discussion by John C. Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic: A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalyptic Reader (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 76-77. Translation in ibid., p. 81-82.
[21] Suliman Bashear, “The Title ‘Fārūq’ and Its Association with Umar I,” Studia Islamica, no. 72 (1990): 47-70.‏
[22] Beatrice St Laurent, “Discovering Jerusalem’s First Mosque on the Haram al-Sharif and Capitalizing Jerusalem in the Seventh Century,” Bridgewater Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (2017): 23-28.‏
[23] Ben Abrahamson and Joseph Katz, “The Islamic Jewish Calendar: How the Pilgrimage of the 9th of Av became the Hajj of the 9th of Dhu’al-Hijjah,” Paper presented at the‏ Jamalullail Chair for Prophetic Sunnah International Conference (JCICI), Malaysia, October, 2020, available online here (https://www.alsadiqin.org/history/The%20Islamic%20Jewish%20Calendar.pdf).
[24] Ariel Zinder, “‘There They Stand at Midnight, Time and Again’: Selihot for Repentance Nights by Yitzhak Ibn Giyyat; A Critical Edition with an Introductory Essay and Literary Analysis,” (Ph.D Diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014; Hebrew).
[25] Simcha Gross, “When the Jews Greeted Ali: Sherira Gaon’s Epistle in Light of Arabic and Syriac Historiography,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2 (2017): 122-144, available here (https://www.academia.edu/33854404).
[26] Christine D. Baker, Medieval Islamic Sectarianism (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), 55. Incidentally, the Sunni call to the morning fajr prayer – al-ṣalāt khayr min al-nawm (“prayer is better than sleep”) – bears a striking resemblance to the opening of the piyyut of unknown provenance, Ben adam mah lekha nirdam; qum qera be-taḥanunim (“O mortal, why do you slumber? Arise and call out in supplication”)
[27] See, e.g., “Chapter One: The lies, innovations & conjectures behind Tarawih,” available here (https://shiapen.com/comprehensive/tarawih-a-parody-of-prayers/chapter-one-the-lies-innovations-conjectures-behind-tarawih).

Stet in the Beit Yosef: Fish and Milk, from Typographical Error to Typological Exemplar
Aton M. Holzer

Rabbi Dr. Holzer is Director of the Mohs Surgery Clinic in the Department of Dermatology, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and is an assistant editor of the recent RCA Siddur Avodat HaLev. ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9852-3958/ 28 Binyamin, Beit Shemesh, Israel 9952200/ Aton.holzer@gmail.com

A passage in the magnum opus of R. Joseph Karo (Maran, or the Mehaber, 1488-1575), the Beit Yosef (YD 87:5) tends to be reckoned among the more consequential scribal errors in Jewish legal texts.

[ה] ”דגים וחגבים מותר לאכלן בחלב“. ריש פרק כל הבשר (קג:) ”(כל הבשר) אסור לבשל בחלב, חוץ מבשר דגים וחגבים“. וכתב הר”ן דכיון דלבשלן שרי משמע דלאכלן בחלב נמי שרי, דאיסור בשר בחלב בלשון בישול אפקיה רחמנא, וכן כתב הרמב”ם והרשב”א דלאכלן בחלב נמי שרי. ומכל מקום אין לאכול דגים בחלב מפני הסכנה, כמו שנתבאר בספר אורח חיים סימן קע”ג.

“Fish and locusts, it is permitted to eat them in milk.” In the beginning of the chapter kol basar (bHullin 103b) [it is written]: “(all flesh) it is prohibited to cook in milk, except for the flesh of fish and locusts.” And R. Nissim wrote that since cooking them is permitted, it implies that to eat them in milk is also permitted, for the prohibition of meat in milk was set out by the Torah in the semantics of cooking, and likewise did Maimonides and R. Shlomo ibn Adret write, that to eat them in milk is also permitted. And in any event, one should not eat fish in milk because of the danger, similar to what was elucidated in Orah Hayyim 173.

In his 2014 “A Guide to the Complex,”[1] Shlomo Brody highlights this passage – which invokes a heretofore ostensibly unknown ‘danger’ regarding consumption of fish in milk, and which makes reference to a chapter that deals with measures that must be taken with regard to the ‘dangerous mixture’ of fish and meat[2] – as a banner example of the ‘impact of inaccurate texts on Jewish law.’ He adds that ‘Ancient manuscripts regularly suffered from poor penmanship, slipping of the eyes, and misunderstandings by unlearned or confused copyists.’ The first to make this sort of observation regarding this passage was none other than R. Karo’s younger contemporary and interlocutory commentator R. Moses Isserles (Rama, 1530-1572), who puts it humorously (Darkei Moshe, Tur YD 87:4):

.ולא ראיתי מימי נזהרין בזה וגם בא”ח סימן קע”ג אינו אלא שלא לאכלו בבשר משום סכנה אבל בחלב שרי ועי”ל סימן קי”ו ולכן נראה שנתערב להרב בשר בחלב

And in all my days I have never seen [anyone] take care with regard to this, and also in Orah Hayyim 173 there is not but not to eat [fish cooked] in meat because of danger, but in milk it is permitted, and see earlier in chapter 116, and therefore it appears that the Rabbi has confused (mixed) meat and milk.

As neat as this solution appears, there remain some problems. For one thing, in context, the Beit Yosef discusses the consumption of various forms of flesh – fish and locust – in milk, not meat; replacing the word ‘milk’ for ‘meat’ would render the ultimate sentence a nonsequitur with regard to the full passage.

For another, the idea of danger attendant to mixtures of fish and dairy is not entirely unprecedented. R. Bahye b. Asher (1255-1340), who hailed from R. Karo’s native Christian Spain two centuries earlier (but from Zaragoza, quite a ways from Toledo), seems to make reference to such a practice in his commentary to Exodus 23:19:

.וכן דעת הרופאים בתערובת דג וגבינה שנתבשלו כאחד שמוליד תכונה רעה וחולי הצרעת

And so is the view of the physicians regarding the mixture of fish and cheese that were cooked together, that they beget a bad character and the illness of tsara’at (biblical ‘leprosy’).

To be sure, this is a lone statement, found in a decidedly non-Halakhic work, at a distance of two centuries and one continent from R. Karo’s work, which was completed in Ottoman Safed.

A third is that it is difficult to ascribe scribal error to the Mehaber’s project, if only because Beit Yosef was not transmitted in manuscript, and does not exist in manuscript – at least not beyond the author’s autograph. The four volumes of Tur with Beit Yosef were printed in different Italian publishing houses over the course of the 1550’s, in the author’s own lifetime, and he lived to see several printings of the Beit Yosef and Shulhan Arukh, the precis of the conclusions of halakhic discussions in the Beit Yosef. In fact, printing, and particularly choosing to do so in Renaissance Italy – where there was a Christian censor but superior presses to what was available in Ottoman Turkey, but more importantly, where (Jewish exile) cultures met and wide dissemination was guaranteed[3] – was central to R. Karo’s stated mission, a messianic objective of a piece with his participation in reconstituting the Sanhedrin to administer corporal punishment.[4] Taking a page from the messianic project of Sultan Suleiman, Kanuni or “the lawgiver,”[5] his project would complete Maimonides’ project[6] to unify the Jewish people under a uniform system of law in anticipation of redemption. And indeed, in his own lifetime, Beit Yosef and Shulhan Arukh enjoyed wide dissemination and readership, if not universal acceptance.[7] 

Figure 1: 87:5 in its first printing (Venice, 1551)

Given this, if “milk” is an error, it is much more likely typographical than scribal, and not the best example of the phenomenon R. Brody describes. But more importantly: given that the printed versions were available to the author, and were widely read and used, in his presence, for more than twenty years, the possibility that a typographical error of such consequence would go unnoticed by the author or his immediate milieu is at least somewhat diminished. The author himself issued a work called Bedek ha-Bayit with corrigenda and addenda, and there is a gloss on siman 86, but not 87.

—

Muhammad ‘Abd al-Ra’ūf al-Munāwī (1545-1621), a renowned scholar in Ottoman Cairo whose hadith commentary is still popular in Sunni Islam, also composed a compendium of fundamental, practical scholarly-spiritual knowledge related to a number of everyday issues[8] – a sort of Islamic Orah Hayyim, as it were – known as Tadhkirat ūlī al-albāb bi-maʻrifat al-ādāb. This work is significant as a snapshot of the cultural climate in Early Ottoman Cairo, and has traces of persistent Mamluk attitudes, reconfigured in light of Ottoman sensibilities and cutting-edge intellectual trends in his time in Cairo, which, under the Mamluks, had long been a hub of science and the occult (which, at the time, were also deemed ‘sciences’) in the Islamicate world.[9]

In his compendium,[10] there is a fascinating discussion of food mixtures, launching off a discussion of Galenic medicine and the inadvisability of combining food that relate to different humors/elements (moisture/water, dryness/air, coldness/earth and hotness/fire). In pertinent part:

يعسر علينا اثبات كثير من ذلك بالقياس فمن ذالك انه لا يجمع بين سمك و لبن فإنه يولد أمراضا مزمنة كالجدام والبرص والفالج

It is difficult for us to prove much of this by (syllogistic) reason. For example, that combining fish and milk causes chronic diseases such as leprosy, vitiligo, and paralysis.

Figure 2: Tadhkirat ūlī al-albāb bi-maʻrifat al-ādāb,folio 14a (Yale, Landberg MSS 163)

Paulina Lewicka, a Polish scholar who studied foodways in Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo,[11] highlights this passage and notes that it represents a novelty on the Egyptian scene.

In fact, there seems to be no evidence that avoidance of mixing fish and milk products had been observed in Egypt of the Mamluk period, or in the medieval Middle East in general. This combination, which is considered unhealthy today, appeared in a number of old Arabic-Islamic recipes where fish and yoghurt were put together. Al-Munāwī’s remarks may have reflected, then, a new trend in medico-culinary thinking.[12]

Lewicka also notes in al-Munāwī’s treatment of Galenic medicine an interesting development: even though Galen’s theory of humors had formed the basis of Islamicate medicine for centuries, in the Muslim-Sufi environment of early Ottoman Cairo there was discomfort with use of pagan theories and concepts. Instead, al-Munāwī traces the theory of humors to Kitāb al-Tawrāt, the Torah,[13]  where, according to him, Adam was created with dry soil, wet water, heat (nefesh/nafs) and cold (ru’ah/rūḥ).

—

R. Yosef Karo, living in the same territorial-ideological expanse as al-Munāwī – with frequent interchange between Safed and Cairo by figures no less than R. David abi ibn Zimra, R. Bezalel Ashkenazi, and R. Isaac Luria – had ample access to the developments in Cairene medicine that inspired the Tadhkirat passage.

His relationship with classical philosophy – the ostensible basis for Galenic (as opposed to prophetic) Cairene medicine – is complicated. In his mystical diary Maggid Meisharim (80a-b), he cites his angelic guide who allows that, pace the view of other Kabbalists of his day, Maimonides was not condemned to reincarnate as a worm because of his philosophical views – but only because he was saved from this fate by his Torah and good deeds, and thus was allowed to reincarnate in a usual way before ascending to join the souls of the righteous. However, there is evidence that he himself was more accepting and even dabbled in philosophy – but assigned it a decidedly secondary or tertiary position to the study of Talmud and Halakhah, either behind or on par with Kabbalah, which also took a backseat to Halakhic sources in terms of study and Halakhic decision/pesak.[14]

The case of milk and fish may serve as something of an acid test for medical science. R. Karo includes it in his Beit Yosef, but as an ayn le-ekhol – it should not be eaten – rather than ‘it is forbidden.’ Clearly R. Karo prohibits it, as perhaps a contemporary posek (if not for the Igrot Moshe) might prohibit smoking, but does not share al-Munāwī’s view that humoral medicine is a de’orayta. And while cutting edge Galenic knowledge merits mention in Beit Yosef, the Mehaber omits it from the Shulhan Arukh (87:3), the repository of pesak, regarding which, just as for Kabbalah,[15] the Talmudic sources – which explicitly permit such a mixture (kutah, e.g. Pesahim 76b) – trump all.

Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum

Aton M. Holzer
Aton.holzer@gmail.com
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9852-3958
28 Binyamin, Beit Shemesh, Israel 9952200

The Mishnah in Ta’anit (4:6) puts forth a series of lists of five calamities that befell the Jews on each of two major fast days, the seventeenth of Tammuz and the ninth of Av, beginning in the days of Moses in the Wilderness and culminating after Bar Kochba:

חמשה דברים ארעו את אבותינו בשבעה-עשר בתמוז (וב) וחמשה בתשעה באב. בשבעה-עשר בתמוז נשתברו הלוחות ובטל התמיד והובקעה העיר ושרף אפיסטמוס את התורה והעמיד צלם בהיכל. בתשעה באב נגזר על אבותינו שלא יכנסו לארץ וחרב (את) הבית בראשונה ובשנייה [ו]נילכדה בית-תר ונחרשה העיר

Five matters occurred to our forefathers on the seventeenth of Tammuz, and five on the Ninth of Av. On the seventeenth of Tammuz the tablets were broken; the daily offering was nullified; the city was breached; Apistemos[1] burned a Torah scroll; and placed a statue in the hall (heikhal). On the Ninth of Av it was decreed upon our ancestors that they would not enter the Land; and the Temple was destroyed the first time, and the second time; and Beitar was captured; and the city was plowed.[2]

There is little mystery surrounding the five events of the ninth of Av; all of the events – the decree of the death of the generation after the return of the spies in Numbers 14, the destructions of the First and Second temples, the defeat of Bar Kochba at Beitar and the plowing of the city limits by Tineius Rufus in the founding of Aelia are well-documented events, even if some did not precisely occur on the ninth of the month.[3] All share a theme: the final stage of catastrophe, the coup de grâce to a generation’s hopes.

In contrast, the list for the seventeenth of Tammuz is shrouded in mystery.

1. While the date of Moses’ descent from Sinai with the Law (Exodus 32) is not given in Scripture, the Rabbinic calculation assigning it to the seventeenth of Tammuz, forty days after revelation on the seventh of Sivan – itself extrapolated from the text – is straightforward enough. Still, it is somewhat curious that the Mishnah selects the breaking of the Tablets, rather than the other dire events of that day – the crime of the creation of the Golden Calf, its immediate punishment in the execution of three thousand of its Israelite worshippers, or the removal of the peoples’ mysterious ‘adornments’ from Horeb, for example.

The nullification of the daily offering is mentioned in Josephus:
2. Titus now ordered the troops with him to raze Antonia to its foundations and create an easy way up for the whole of his army, while he himself brought Josephus into service. He had learnt that on this day — it was the seventeenth of Panemus (Tammuz)  — the so-called ‘continual sacrifice’ had ceased to be offered to God for lack of officiants, and that this was causing great distress to the people. (The Jewish War 6:93-94).

At first glance, this seems clearly the referent of the Mishnah. However, examination of evidence internal to Rabbinic sources – the Talmuds, early Rabbinic treatments of Daniel 12:11 and medieval commentators on both – yield five possible occasions for the cancellation of the tamid, beginning from the reign of Manasseh and spread over the subsequent seven centuries.[4] To be sure, the events surrounding the Second Temple’s destruction do constitute the fifth possibility, but that is a minor view, resting primarily on the evidence of yBerakhot 4:1 and yTa’anit 4:5. Vered Noam (pace Tal Ilan)[5] reads the Talmudic passages carefully and against Josephus and argues that those Yerushalmi sources are derivative from the parallel narrative in Bavli, which clearly reference an earlier period, and was only secondarily adapted to the context of the destruction of the Second Temple. The Bavli passage (bSotah 49b, bBava Kamma 82b, bMenahot 64b) reads:

The Sages taught: When the kings of the Hasmonean monarchy besieged each other, Hyrcanus was outside, and Aristobulus was inside. On each and every day they would lower dinars in a box, and [they] would send up daily offerings. A certain Elder was there who was familiar with Greek wisdom. He communicated to [them] by Greek wisdom. He said to them: As long as they are engaged in the service, they will not be delivered into your hands. On the following day, they lowered dinars in a box and they sent up a pig to them. Once it reached halfway up the wall, it inserted its hooves [and] Eretz Yisrael shuddered four hundred parasangs. They said at that time: Cursed is the person who raises pigs, and cursed is the person who teaches his son Greek wisdom. And with regard to that year, we learned: An incident in which the omer came from Gaggot Tzerifim, and the two loaves from the valley of Ein Sokher.

For this source, which appears thrice in Bavli, the dramatic event of cancellation of the tamid-offering is firmly linked with the waning days of Hasmonean rule. The placement of the event as second in the Mishnah’s list supports the contention that the identified event preceded those associated with the Great Revolt.

3. The linkage of the ‘breach of the city’ to the seventeenth of Tammuz is more problematic. With regard to the first commonwealth, Jeremiah (39:2) dates the breach of the walls of Jerusalem during the Babylonian conquest to the ninth of Tammuz. With regard to the second, Josephus describes various stages of conquest of the various walls of Jerusalem during the Roman siege under Titus, beginning with the seventh of Artemisius/Iyyar (War 5:302) and culminating near the end of Tammuz, with none actually occurring on the seventeenth of Tammuz.[6]

4. Rabbinic sources never elaborate upon details of the reported incident of the burning of ha-torah, ‘the Torah,’ by the mysterious Apistemos, who appears in Talmud manuscripts as Apostomos or occasionally Postomos (?posthumous). Yerushalmi (Ta’anit 4:5) attempts to clarify its whereabouts:

“Apostomos burned the Torah.” Where did he burn it? Rebbi Aḥa said, at the ford of Lydda. But the rabbis are saying, at the ford of Tarlosa.

In non-Rabbinic sources, the burning of Torah scrolls is recorded as early as the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes; in 1 Maccabees, it is a widespread phenomenon.

On the fifteenth day of Kislev in the 145th year he built an abomination of desolation on the altar, and they built pagan altars in the cities of Judah roundabout and offered up sacrifices at the doors of their houses and in the streets. They tore up and burnt the books of the Law that they found, and wherever they found someone with a book of the covenant, or if anyone insisted upon (observing) the Law, the royal judgment killed him. (1:54-57)

Josephus records the burning of a Torah during the procuratorship of Ventidius Cumanus (48-52 CE):

…This disaster was followed by another disturbance, this time caused by bandits. On the road up to Beth-horon an imperial servant called Stephen was set upon by bandits and robbed of the baggage he was carrying. Cumanus sent troops out round the neighbouring villages to arrest the inhabitants and bring them in to him, to be charged with failure to pursue and capture the robbers. In the course of this, a soldier found in one of the villages a copy of the book of sacred law, which he tore in pieces and threw into the fire. The Jews reacted with horror, as if it were their whole country which had gone up in flames. As soon as the word went out, religious fervour drew them together like a magnet, and they converged in a mass on Caesarea, insistent that Cumanus should not let this insult to their God and their law go unpunished. He could see that the crowd would not stop agitating until they received satisfaction, and thought it best to produce the offending soldier and order him to be led through the ranks of the complainants on his way to execution. (War 2.228-231)

The ancient city of Beth Horon (today Beit Ur al-Fauqa and Beit Ur al-Tahta) is about twenty-six kilometers east of Lod (Lydda), and the ‘road up to Beth Horon’ generally refers to the road running north from Jerusalem, not east from Lydda – so the if the referent of the Jerusalem Talmud is historical, the ‘ford’ (or straits, or passages) of Lydda (or of the mysterious ‘Tarlosa’[7]) is not a good match for this incident.

Rabbinic literature omits all of these, but records several other events at which a Torah scroll was burned; none involve a villain named Apostomos. In a list of sins committed by the Judean kings deemed wicked, some manuscripts of bSanhedrin 103b include:

Amon burned the Torah and sacrificed a gecko upon the altar.

A passage in bYevamot 16b describes:

And Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani said Rabbi Yonatan said: What is which is written: “The adversary has spread out his hand upon all her treasures (Lamentations 1:10)? This is Ammon and Moab. When the gentiles entered the Sanctuary, all turned to the silver and the gold, and they turned to the scrolls of Torah. They said: this in which it is written: “An Ammonite and a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 23:4)? Let it be burnt by fire.

“When the gentiles entered the sanctuary” can refer to any of at least four events: the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE, the defilement of the sanctuary by Antiochus in 156 BCE, its destruction by Titus’s legions in 70 CE, or, the incursion of Pompey in 63 BCE:

the disappearance of a golden vine from the Temple when ‘the gentiles entered the sanctum’ (bYoma 21b, 39b) parallels Josephus’s report (Ant. 14.34-36) of Aristobulus’s gift of this particular Temple adornment to Pompey, right around the time that this gentile and his men indeed entered the sanctum.[8]

Other events recorded in Talmud and Midrash include the martyrdom of R. Hanina ben Teradyon, burned alive while wrapped in a Torah scroll, recorded in bAvodah Zarah 18a; and yTa’anit 4:5 records R. Simeon b. Gamaliel reporting precisely the same fate for the children in five hundred schools in the city of Betar, subsequent to its conquest under Hadrian.

Traditional commentators struggle to identify Apostomos – Antiochus? Hadrian? Some unknown Greek soldier? – and why the destruction of a Torah scroll – lamentable as it may be, but something rather common throughout Jewish history, even in Second Temple and Rabbinic sources, as we have seen – would rank among five reasons to establish a fast for all generations. Tif’eret Yisrael fixates upon the hey ha-yedi’a, the definite article, and suggest that the Torah scroll was a special one — the Torah of Ezra, which he suggests, based on Tractate Soferim 6:4, was in the sanctuary and served as the urtext for further copies; or else that Apostomos destroyed many Torahs, in an effort to eradicate Torah from the Jewish people. The 19^th-century commentary Divrei Yirmiyahu (R. Jeremiah Löw) on Rambam (Hilkhot Ta’anit chap. 5) avers that the referent is the Torah of Moses, or Ezra. Imrei Da’at on the Mishnah (R. Nathan Lieberman) argues that regarding the Torah of Moses, this is impossible, as bSotah 9b writes of Moses and David that their enemies never exerted power over their handiwork.

5. The most prominent narrative in both Rabbinic sources and Josephus regarding the placing of an idol in the sanctuary refer to an event that almost did, but ultimately did not, occur: the emplacement of statues of the emperor in the Temple by Gaius Caligula, against the strenuous protest of the Jews – which was not implemented before his assassination. (War 2.184-203, Antiquities 18.256-309; Megillat Ta’anit 22 Shevat with Scholia, tSotah 13:6, et al.)

Given the violent reaction of the people to this initiative, and the record of the celebration of its thwarting with a holiday, it is unlikely that the actual emplacement of a statue in the Temple would be forgotten and thus absent from the historical record.[9] It thus remains to identify the incident with those actually documented to have installed an idol in the sanctuary precincts – the Judahite King Manasseh (II Kings 21:7), Antiochus Epiphanes (1 Maccabees 1:34), and probably Hadrian.[10] Complicating this is that some texts link this event to Apostomos (ve-he’emid, and he emplaced, rather than ve-hu’amad, and there was placed), including the best early Mishnah manuscript – MS Kaufmann A50 – which would necessarily restrict the identity of Apostomos to one of those three personalities. But Rabbinic literature elsewhere refers to each of those three by their proper names! And Antiochus, who appears rarely in early Rabbinic literature, in any case had a different Greek nickname — ἐπιμανής, epimanus, “the madman.”

Pompey and Circumstances

An innovative approach[11] was suggested some fifty years ago in an obscure Hebrew journal by Eliyahu Katz (1916-2004), a Rabbinic judge, poet and polymath who served as Chief Rabbi of pre-war Nitra, postwar Bratislava and from 1968 forward, Beersheba – but it received little attention, and suffers from some problems.

His theory focuses upon the incursion of Pompey into the Temple, mentioned earlier in brief. In greater detail: in 63 BCE, the armies under the command of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus – Pompey the Great, finished his Senate-authorized task of pacifying belligerent Asia minor and Syria, and swung south and handily (and completely illegally) consumed civil war-torn Judea, killing thousands, abrogating the Roman Republic’s alliance with Hasmonean Judea. Josephus describes the events in his Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews; in the latter, which relies mostly on pro-Roman sources¹[12] (and in this passage, particularly the Pontic Greek geographer Strabo of Cappadocia[13]), he writes: (Ant. 14.4.3-5, Marcus translation)

And indeed when the city was taken, in the third month, on the Fast Day, in the hundred and seventy-ninth Olympiad, in the consulship of Gaius Antonius and Marcus Tullius Cicero, and the enemy rushed in and were slaughtering the Jews in the temple, those who were busied with the sacrifices none the less continued to perform the sacred ceremonies; nor were they compelled, either by fear for their lives or by the great number of those already slain, to run away, but thought it better to endure whatever they might have to suffer there beside the altars than to neglect any of the ordinances. And that this is not merely a story to set forth the praises of a fictitious piety, but the truth, is attested by all those who have narrated the exploits of Pompey, among them Strabo and Nicolas [of Damascus] and, in addition, Titus Livius, the author of a History of Rome.

Now when the siege-engine was brought up, the largest of the towers was shaken and fell, making a breach through which the enemy poured in; first among them was Cornelius Faustus, the son of Sulla, who with his soldiers mounted the wall, and after him the centurion Furius, with those who followed him, on the other side, and between them Fabius, another centurion, with a strong and compact body of men. And there was slaughter everywhere. For some of the Jews were slain by the Romans, and others by their fellows; and there were some who hurled themselves down the precipices, and setting fire to their houses, burned themselves within them, for they could not bear to accept their fate. And so of the Jews there fell some twelve thousand, but of the Romans only a very few. One of those taken captive was Absalom, the uncle and at the same time father-in-law of Aristobulus. And not light was the sin committed against the sanctuary, which before that time had never been entered or seen. For Pompey and not a few of his men went into it and saw what it was unlawful for any but the high priests to see. But though the golden table was there and the sacred lampstand and the libation vessels and a great quantity of spices, and beside these, in the treasury, the sacred moneys amounting to two thousand talents, he touched none of these because of piety, and in this respect also he acted in a manner worthy of his virtuous character. And on the morrow he instructed the temple servants to cleanse the temple and to offer the customary sacrifice to God, and he restored the high priesthood to Hyrcanus because in various ways he had been useful to him and particularly because he had prevented the Jews throughout the country from fighting on Aristobulus’ side; and those responsible for the war he executed by beheading. He also bestowed on Faustus and the others who had mounted the wall with alacrity fitting rewards for their bravery. And he made Jerusalem tributary to the Romans, and took from its inhabitants the cities of Coele-Syria which they had formerly subdued, and placed them under his own governor; and the entire nation, which before had raised itself so high, he confined within its own borders. He also rebuilt Gadara, which had been demolished a little while before, to please Demetrius the Gadarene, his freedman; and the other cities, Hippus, Scythopolis, Pella, Dium, Samaria, as well as Marisa, Azotus, Jamneia and Arethusa, he restored to their own inhabitants. And not only these cities in the interior, in addition to those that had been demolished, but also the coast cities of Gaza, Joppa, Dora and Straton’s Tower—this last city, which Herod refounded magnificently and adorned with harbours and temples, was later renamed Caesarea – all these Pompey set free and annexed them to the province.

For this misfortune which befell Jerusalem Hyrcanus and Aristobulus were responsible, because of their dissension, for we lost our freedom and became subject to the Romans, and the territory which we had gained by our arms and taken from the Syrians we were compelled to give back to them, and in addition the Romans exacted of us in a short space of time more than ten thousand talents and the royal power which had formerly been bestowed on those who were high priests by birth became the privilege of commoners.

Rabbi Katz identifies Apostomos with Pompey, on the basis of his replacement of Jewish law with Roman law after his conquest of Jerusalem, thus ‘burning the Torah’, figuratively speaking – and renders Apostomos as efes (Hebrew for null) tomus (Latin for book). He argues that Josephus’ “in the third month, on the Fast Day” refers the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz. Tammuz is the fourth Jewish month – but he suggests that Josephus’ use of an ancient Judean numeral for ‘four,’ in boustrophedon, was mistaken for a Greek gamma. Josephus records Herod’s conquest of Jerusalem as occurring on the same day as Pompey’s (Ant. 14:16:4), and so Herod’s erection of a golden eagle on the great gate of the Temple (War 1:648–655, Ant. 17:6:2) can also be linked to the seventeenth of Tammuz.

The theory is supported by Sefer Yosippon, a tenth-century Hebrew Italian-Jewish history of the second Temple period that draws upon Josephus, the books of Maccabees, Midrash and Christian and Latin sources; in chapter 36 and 43, which treat Pompey’s and Herod’s siege, respectively, the dates of conquest of the Temple are given as the seventeenth of the fourth month – i.e., the seventeenth of Tammuz.

However, there are difficulties with this theory. For one thing, internal and external evidence points to the probability that the ‘third month’ properly refers to the third month of the siege, and that ‘the fast’ to which Josephus refers in the contexts of both Pompey and Herod is Yom Kippur.[14] In any case, observance of the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz seems to have crystallized during the second century CE, well after the events and most likely the historian reporting them.[15] While Katz’s interpretation of a ‘figurative’ destruction of the Torah scroll seems a bit forced, it is not impossible to see in Yevamot 16b a reflection of the destruction of an actual scroll by Pompey’s men. But recent work suggests that the report of Herod’s installation of a golden eagle in the Temple is legendary.[16]

But perhaps Rabbi Katz was on to something.

• If Pompey’s invasion of the Temple took place on Yom Kippur, in the third month of the siege, that would place the beginning of Pompey’s siege – which involved the ‘breach of the city’ from its very outset, by Hyrcanus’ men admitting Pompey’s forces into the city (War 1.143) – squarely in the latter part of the month of Tammuz. In that case, huvke’ah ha-ir refers not to the events of 586 BCE or 70 CE, but the initial incursion of Pompey’s army in Tammuz, maybe even 17 Tammuz, 63 BCE.

• As far as butal ha-tamid: as seen above, Josephus takes pains to indicate that at no time during Pompey’s siege and even invasion was any part of the Temple service interrupted – but in the Rabbinic account, interruption of the tamid did indeed occur around the same time as Pompey’s arrival with Hyrcanus’s (or Pompey’s?) betrayal of the besieged Temple by supplying a pig for the tamid sacrifice.[17]

• Admittedly, Heikhal in the Mishnah always refers to the sanctum of the Temple. But this is likely simply accidental; Heikhal properly refers to a kingly hall (cf. II Kings 20:18, Isaiah 39:7, Ezra 5:14, Psalms 45:9, 16, Proverbs 30:28, Daniel 1:4, II Chronicles 36:7), but the Mishnah has no interest in royal palaces. Pompey had built a world-famous Heikhal: the theater-temple complex constructed during his second consulship. The first permanent theater in Rome, Pompey’s theater was an imposing complex in which the Senate would sometimes meet, and where Caesar was assassinated. This hall, much like the heikhal melekh Bavel referenced in some of the aforementioned Biblical citations, included gardens, objects collected during Pompey’s campaigns, and fourteen statues commissioned of sculptor Coponius representing the populations (nationes) that Pompey had subdued;[18] these almost certainly included a statue representing Judea.^[19] As such, the ‘emplacement of a statue in the hall’ may refer to Pompey’s concretization of the conquest of Judea.

Josephus has numerous Greek nicknames for various characters, particularly in his autobiography;[20] this is of a piece with his Greco-Roman milieu, in which proper names and surnames were often subjected to wordplay, and indeed Caesar himself puns on Pompey’s cognomen, magnus, in his writings.[21] Of Pompey’s conquest, Josephus writes in Against Apion,

One should also be particularly amazed at the great intelligence in what Apion goes on to say. For he says that it is evidence of the fact that we do not employ just laws or worship God as we should that [we do not govern,] but are subservient to other nations, one after another, and that we have experienced some misfortunes affecting our city… while we, being free, used to rule in addition over the surrounding cities for about 120 years up till the time of Pompey the Great; and when all the monarchs, on all sides, were hostile to the Romans, ours alone, because of their loyalty, were maintained as allies and friends. (2.11.125-134).[22]

One may detect here a complaint: Judea was unfailingly, singularly, loyal to Rome, and yet it took her freedom.

Pompeius, when encountered in a late Hellenistic milieu – where Semitic languages and Greek were spoken in equal measure – evokes the Aramaic ܦܘܼܡܵܐ (puma) and Hebrew פה, both words for mouth. Heinrich Ewald suggested that Apostomos be parsed αἰπύς στόμος, “big mouth,”[23] and this would fit Pompeius (mouth) Magnus (large) – the conqueror with a too-voracious appetite, who betrayed Judea’s loyalty by conquering and plundering it – כי אכל את יעקב ואת נוהו השמו.

• Even the Biblical reference, the breaking of the tablets, resonates for an identification with Pompey:

So Judas chose Eupolemus the son of John of the Haqqoz clan and Jason the son of Eleazar and sent them to Rome to establish friendship and alliance with them, and to remove the yoke from them, for they saw that the kingdom of the Greeks was subjugating Israel into slavery. They went to Rome—and the trip is very long!—and entered the council and declared: “Judas, also known as Maccabaeus, and his brothers and the community of the Judeans have sent us to you to establish alliance and peace with you, so that we may be listed among your allies and friends.” This found favor in their eyes. And this is the copy of the letter, which they wrote in response on bronze tablets and sent to Jerusalem, so as to be a memorial there, among them, of the peace and alliance: Let it be well for the Romans and the people of the Judeans on sea and on land forever, and let sword and enmity be far from them. But if war is made upon Rome, first of all, or upon any of its allies in its entire realm, the people of the Judeans will fight together with them wholeheartedly, as far as opportunity prescribes to them. And they will neither give nor supply their enemies wheat, weapons, money, or ships—as Rome decided, and they will observe their obligations without receiving anything. In the same way, if the people of the Judeans is attacked first, the Romans will fight enthusiastically as its allies, as far as opportunity prescribes to them. Nor will they give to the allies (of the partner’s enemies) wheat, weapons, money, or ships, as Rome decided, and they will observe these obligations without duplicity. (-I Maccabees 8:17-28)[24]

Pompey’s betrayal of the treaty between the Hasmoneans and Rome in devouring the Judean state was nothing short of a shattering of the bronze tablets, the physical testament to the pact. It seems no coincidence that all aggadic treatments of the Tablets of the Law dilate on Exodus 32:16, ‘harut al ha-luhot’ – inscribed on the tablets – homiletically rendering it herut, freedom (Kallah Rabbati 8:2, Avot de-Rabbi Natan 2:3, bEruvin 54a, Exodus Rabbah 41:7, Leviticus Rabbah 18:3, Numbers Rabbah 10:8, Song of Songs Rabbah 8:6, et al.). Judean freedom ended on the seventeenth of Tammuz, when Pompey ‘broke’ the bronze tablets promising cooperation and non-aggression in exchange for loyalty.

• The burning of the Torah – the definite article – indeed suggests a specific, known Torah scroll. In the Second Temple literature, outside of later Rabbinic sources, there is indeed one attestation of a known Torah scroll:

And they came with the gifts that had been sent and the remarkable parchments on which the legislation had been written in golden writing in Judean characters, the parchment being worked amazingly and the common joins constructed to be imperceptible. When the king saw the men, he inquired about the books. And when they uncovered them rolled up and they unrolled the parchments, pausing for a long time and prostrating himself about seven times, the king said, “I thank you, O Men, and even more the one who sent you, but mostly the God whose utterances these are.” (Letter of Aristeas 176-177)

The grand gold-lettered Sefer Torah from Elazar the high priest of Judea, from the Temple precincts, was the vorlage of the Septuagint, in this second Temple telling. The historicity of the Letter of Aristeas is, to be sure, problematic, to say the least; but the erstwhile existence of an urtext for the Septuagint is supported by most scholars,[25] and the ancient report that it was held in reverence is supported by writers centuries hence. Tertullian reports that in the library of Alexandria, the Septuagint was displayed along with the Hebrew original.[26] John Chrysostom writes that Ptolemy Philadelphus “deposited it [the Septuagint] in the Temple of Serapis . . . and even today the translated books of the prophets are still there.”[27]

The great library of Alexandria – the cultural crossroads of the ancient world – was destroyed when Caesar[28] set fire to the Egyptian fleet in the port at Alexandria, in the ‘straits of Lod’ – Lod, in Rabbinic parlance, also being a name for Egypt, after his son Ludim (Genesis 10:13).

Caesar was good to the Jews, and so even if the Rabbis knew that he was at fault – unlikely in the fog that surrounded the event in the historical record – they blamed the one who compelled Caesar’s stay in Egypt: Apostomos, Pompey. His ill-fated attempt to raise a force against Caesar in Ptolemaic Egypt set off a cascade of events resulting in the incineration of the Torah – the Pentateuch portion of the Septuagint and its vorlage, sent from the high priest of Judea in hoary antiquity, the crown jewel of the Egyptian Jewish community and potent symbol of its full integration and acceptance in the fabric of Ptolemaic Egyptian society from its outset. The subsequent century and a half of Alexandrian Jewish life was marked by anti-Semitic writings, pogroms and ultimately annihilation.

The destruction of the library was one of the most traumatic events in the history of the West, and highlights the manner in which the career of Pompey, the betrayal of an ally in the name of narrowly defined self-interest, was tragic both for the Jewish people, as well as Rome and Western civilization, to which the Hasmoneans had tethered their carriage.

Admittedly, much of the above is conjecture, and some is more than a bit far-fetched. Perhaps it is fitting that for one key villain in Judaism, the villain of Shiva Asar be-Tammuz, be he Pompey or someone else, the imprecation yimah shemo ve-zikhro – may his name and remembrance be erased – indeed was fulfilled!

[1] As it is vocalized in the MS Kaufmann A50 manuscript.
[2] Koren-Steinsaltz translation, from Sefaria, with modifications.
[3] See Yuval Shahar, “Rabbi Akiba and the Destruction of the Temple: The Establishment of the Fast Days” (Heb.), Zion 68:2 (2003), 145-165.
[4] Itamar Warhaftig, “On the Seventeenth of Tammuz the Daily-Offering was Cancelled – in the First Temple or the Second?” (Hebrew) HaMa’ayan 33:4 (1993), 6-14.
[5] Vered Noam, “The Fratricidal Hasmonean Conflict,” Josephus and the Rabbis, Vol. 1 (Heb), 318-340.
[6] See discussion in Shahar, “Rabbi Akiba,” 159-165.
[7] Ben Zion Luria challenges the common scholarly assumption that the referent is the site of the village of Talluza (Tira Luzah) since this village had been Samaritan throughout the Roman period; instead he identifies it with Bethel. Both are a considerable distance from Beth Horon. See his “And Apostomos Burned the Torah” (Heb.), Beit Mikra 32:4 (1987), 293-295.
[8] Daphne Baratz, “A Golden Vine/Garden in The Temple,” in Josephus and the Rabbis, Vol. 1 (Heb), 341-348.
[9] See Steven Fine, “Caligula and the Jews: Some Historiographic Reflections Occasioned by Gaius in Polychrome.” New Studies on the Portrait of Caligula in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Brill, 2020), 100-104.‏
[10]  Étienne Nodet, “On the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple’.” Rethinking the Jewish war (Peeters, 2021), 236-248.‏
[11] Eliyahu Katz, “Who Knows Five” (Heb.), Niv ha-Midrashiyah 10 (1972), 122-125.
[12] Jane Bellemore, “Josephus, Pompey and the Jews,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte H. 48:1 (1999), 94-118.‏
[13] Alessandro Galimberti, “Josephus and Strabo: The reasons for a choice.” Making History: Josephus And Historical Method (Brill, 2007), 147-167.‏
[14] Nadav Sharon, “The Conquests of Jerusalem by Pompey and Herod: On Sabbath or ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’?.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 21:3 (2014), 193-220.‏ To be sure, there is some difficulty regarding placing the account to Yom Kippur, since the tamid-offering on Yom Kippur is offered exclusively by the high priest, and it is unclear why so many others would be involved in the sacrificial rites on that day.
[15] Shahar, “Rabbi Akiva.”
[16] Jonathan Bourgel, “Herod’s golden eagle on the Temple gate: a reconsideration.” Journal of Jewish studies 72:1 (2021), 23-44.‏
[17] For Josephus, the referent is the Paschal sacrifice, four months before Pompey’s incursion.
[18] Eleonora Zampieri, Politics in the Monuments of Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar, Routledge, 2022), 64-65.
[19] James M. Scott, Bacchius Iudaeus: a denarius commemorating Pompey’s victory over Judea, (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 34.
[20] I am indebted to Prof. Kenneth Atkinson for this insight.
[21] Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, “Great Expectations: Wordplay as Warfare in caesar’s Bellvm Civile,” The Classical Quarterly 73:1 (2023), 184-197.‏
[22] Translation by Barclay, in Mason, Flavius Josephus, 233-238.
[23] Although he connected the nickname with Antiochus Epiphanes. See Georg Heinrich August von Ewald, The history of Israel, Vol. 5, Transl. J. Estlin Carpenter (Longmans, Green and Co., 1874)‏, 293 note 2.
[24] Translation from Schwartz, 1 Maccabees, 284-285.
[25] Emanuel Tov, “The Septuagint.” The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud, Volume 1 Mikra. (Brill, 1988), 161-188.‏
[26] Christophe Rico, “The destruction of the Library of Alexandria: A reassessment.” The Library of Alexandria: A cultural crossroads of the Ancient world (Polis, 2017), 293-330.‏
[27] Thomas Hendrickson, “The Serapeum: Dreams of the Daughter Library,” Classical Philology 111:4 (2016), 453-464.‏
[28] Rico, “The Destruction.”