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Jan. 31, 2026 - Dennis Prager Show
01:38:21
Timeless Wisdom: Weekend Torah Teaching - Genesis 6:9-9:16
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God's Moral Judgment 00:15:20
Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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Into Genesis 6, where it is really 6-9.
If you have, and you should always try to bring with you a Torah, Hebrew Bible, specifically the five books of Moses, or just specifically Genesis.
And we are now in the portion of Noah, the second portion of the way Jews divide of the Torah reading.
I am not teaching it that way.
I'm teaching it more by chapter and subject than I am by portion, but it doesn't matter.
I'm merely telling you that.
Some preliminary remarks on what we have thus far come to, where God has decided to destroy the world.
As I mentioned to you last time, I mentioned to you a brilliant insight of Rabbi Gunther Plout, whom I heard ask the question at an audience in which I took part, who is the most tragic figure in the Bible?
People guessed all sorts of names, and he rejected all of them, and he gave his answer.
And I think his answer is correct.
The most tragic figure in the Bible is God.
It was a powerful statement, and I think that it was powerfully enunciated in the Torah itself the last time we were together here in Genesis 6.
God is so happy.
God is so proud of what he has made.
And then he looks around and he sees how miserable it turned out.
I mean, I get the chills as I relate it to you.
What the sadness of God must have been.
And it says God was sad.
And by the way, can God get sad?
I would think so.
How could God not get sad?
If God can't get sad, then God cannot relate to our sadness.
I would have to think that God could get sad, that certain things please God and certain things distress God.
I mean, anyone who believes in God has to answer the question, how does God react to the suffering of little children?
Or for that matter, old adults.
We always pick on little children like the suffering of adults doesn't matter much.
And I have to believe, not because it says thou shalt believe, but logic suggests to me that God cares, that God cries with us, and God laughs with us.
I believe that deeply.
I don't believe he laughs and cries in the way you and I laugh and cry, but I believe when it says he looked down and saw Rabbat Hara, the immensity of bad in the world, after he had so created it so that we would enjoy it, that there had to be a profound disappointment.
Of course, you might argue, but if God is omniscient and knows everything that will be, how could he get disappointed?
Didn't God know what would be?
Well, in that sense, I can't answer that theological question.
I can tell you that there is in Judaism, at least, a belief which sounds self-contradictory.
Everything is foreseen, and yet we have freedom of choice.
So in the sense God gave us freedom of choice and yet knew what might happen or what would happen.
And by the way, as I argued last time, I don't think it robs God of his godliness and of his greatness and of his omnipotence to say that it's possible in some ways that he does not know what humans will do because we have complete freedom of choice to disobey God.
Animals don't.
God knows what your dog will do because your dog is programmed, but we are not programmed.
So either way you look at it, I believe I can live with a God who is disappointed in what happened.
God then decides to destroy the world, which is what we're up to, except for Noah, Noah from Hebrew, who is a good person.
I want to deal with a few ideas about the flood before I go into the text itself, some preliminary comments.
First of all, some people are embarrassed by a God who would destroy the world.
I have asked clergy on my radio program, Religion on the Line, I have asked them on occasion, how do you feel about the fact that God destroyed the world?
Because a lot of clergy today, Christian and Jewish, are, but especially, I think, many Christian clergy have of the non-evangelical sort, and Protestantism and most Catholic priests flirt with a semi-pacifistic attitude towards life, that taking human life is always wrong.
So on occasion, depending on my mood that night, I will ask them, well, what do you think of God then?
God killed everybody.
And not only that, God killed all the animals who certainly couldn't sin.
What do you think of God?
And it is clear that there is a certain embarrassment.
And sometimes as well, a Christian clergyman might at least imply, if not outright state, well, that's the Old Testament's problem, not mine.
I get that real strong sense sometimes.
Well, look, we've advanced.
We have a God.
We have a more loving Testament.
They may not come out and say it because God blessed them.
They're very sensitive not to offend Jews' feelings.
That has been across the board in 10 years of speaking to all Christian clergy.
Nevertheless, there is still a sense of embarrassment.
And by the way, I must tell you, too, that I suspect that at most Hebrew schools outside of the Orthodox world in Judaism, there is also probably a somewhat of a sense of not sure God did the right thing.
If I were God, I wouldn't have done it.
I'm not thrilled with it, and it's not a portion I really want to teach all of our wonderful, sensitive-to-life little kids, especially in our environmentally aware age.
All these animals being killed, ah, people, big deal, but all the animals, think about that.
The spotted owl was among those that God virtually destroyed.
So you have a certain, I am convinced, embarrassment with regard to this portion of the God who destroyed the world.
I am not at all embarrassed.
Okay, I stand here in this sense, very, very comfortable with a God who would destroy the world because people were bad to each other.
It makes perfect sense to me.
I created a world for you to love each other, for you to be good to each other.
You ruined it.
Goodbye.
God does not believe in life for life's sake.
That's my argument with pacifism in the final analysis.
It seems to affirm to my ears a belief that the purpose of life is to live.
Those of you who hear me more than in this course, for example, on my radio shows, know that I have a certain bemused attitude towards those who are passionate about, I mean, to an extent that I am not, about long life and about every possible thing that could be carcinogenic and so on.
It seems to me that for a lot of people, the issue is to live, not to live well, not to live deeply, not to live profoundly, but to live longly, to live healthfully and long.
They spend so much time being healthy that they can't possibly enjoy life as much as some other people because so much of the time is spent in duration.
God is saying that is not the issue.
Life is not what I created life for.
Your purpose is not merely to live.
Therefore, my first statement about the impending flood as we are to read it today is: I am not embarrassed by it.
What God did makes perfect sense to this individual.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
I created a world for people to be good, for people to enjoy one another, for people to enjoy the world I made.
If you ruin it, you don't belong here.
End of issue.
Point number two.
I made this last time, so I'll be very brief.
God destroys the animals.
God destroys the animals because they were created for human beings' use.
Not abuse, but our use, our enjoyment, our use.
If there are no people to appreciate animals, animal life from the biblical perspective has no purpose.
Which makes perfect sense because animals can't build anything.
Every generation of animal is the same as every generation before it.
I mentioned this last time, so again, I don't want to belabor the point.
But your dog is identical to your dog's great, great, hundred, hundred, hundred generations back dog.
They think the same, act the same.
Nothing is progressed.
Nothing was created.
Nothing is done.
They exist.
I have two dogs.
I love them.
I'm not anti-animal.
But I'm not a believer that animal life has some intrinsic purpose, except for ours to enjoy and to appreciate, not to abuse.
You will see as I teach today in these chapters about the flood and after, the deep, deep concern with animal suffering in Judaism, in the Torah portion specifically.
But animal life has no intrinsic purpose outside of humans' enjoyment.
Number three, one of the major reasons for the flood is the Jewish revolutionary, revolutionary, absolutely unprecedented notion of universal moral law.
God punishes everyone because everyone is guilty.
Because there is a universal moral law.
It's the antithesis of what we are taught very often today, where this culture has this morality, this culture has this morality.
Who are you to say which morality is correct?
The answer is, according to the Bible, there is, in fact, one morality for the world.
That doesn't mean in every act of life there is only one way to live.
Of course not.
Thank God for different cultures and different ethnic groups.
But there is one basic moral law.
If it says thou shalt not steal, it is meant universally.
That is why it is not a matter of democracy.
If morality were a matter of democracy, God wouldn't have destroyed the world.
People voted with their actions that evil was all right.
That's why the Nuremberg trials, the Nuremberg trials are based, if you will, on Noah.
Because every Nazi at Nuremberg could have said and did say, except for a frank, did say, in my society, what I did was right.
Who are you to judge me?
You in England, you in America?
Who are you to judge me?
In Nazi Germany, killing Jews was okay.
The point that is being made with the destruction of the world is that it doesn't matter if everybody does it, it's still wrong.
Morality is not only what people do.
If it's only what people do, then widow burning was okay in India.
Then child sacrifice was okay in Carthage and in Mesoamerica.
The whole point here is there is a universal morality.
And it changed history.
And by the way, it is still not accepted.
The idea that there is one right and wrong for everybody, for poor and rich, for black and white, for male and female.
This is being tested in our own civilization right now.
The idea that morality is universal.
Number four, the flood story tells us that God controls the world.
This is difficult for a lot of us, including me, to fully appreciate because it's so difficult to see God's control.
If you're hit tonight by a drunk driver, God forbid, going home, did God control that?
I can't answer that question.
But the fact that I can't answer it is a statement in itself.
I can't say no definitely.
I can't say yes definitely.
But you cannot read the Torah.
And that's why I say to you, it's religious for me.
Those who know me well know that this is not the sort of thing I would normally say.
But after immersing myself in this Torah section for the last couple of days in particular, I realized that I cannot be authentic to the tradition and say that God does not control the world.
That is exactly what it is teaching.
That God does control the world.
And it's very much against two ideas.
Against polytheism, which held that pagan gods controlled the world.
And against atheism, which says that there is no control.
That the world is dominated, as it were, by bad or good luck.
There are two extremes, the polytheist and the atheist.
The polytheist holds that different gods conduct different things.
The atheist holds that it is all random.
Judaism held, the Torah held, God controls the world.
Number five, the flood story tells us that God judges the world.
God judges the world.
Two things are operative.
One, judges, two, the world.
God does not only love the world.
Everybody's into love.
Right?
You ask most people, what does God do?
God loves.
How many people, if you ask them, what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of God will say judging?
And anybody who does will obviously be dismissed as a perhaps very controlled, sick personality.
Well, God doesn't only judge, but he certainly does judge.
And this is, you can't get harsher than this.
God Judges the World 00:12:43
Judge the whole world guilty, except for Noah and his family.
Second part, as I said, was world.
God does not only judge Jews because God is not the God of Jews.
God is the God of the world.
One of the things that I most adore about the Torah is that it doesn't begin with Jews.
It is to me one of the greatest statements of its legitimacy that it wishes to tell you about the world.
Jews come later.
Why Jews come later, why Jews come at all, is something we'll get to.
But we haven't touched the Jew yet.
We haven't touched Judaism yet.
We have talked about the Bible, which is obviously the basis of Judaism.
But God judges mankind for good and for bad.
Noah's not Jewish, and he's called the highest thing a Jew could be called.
The highest appellation for a Jew in Judaism is Tzadik, righteous.
Noah, the non-Jew, is called righteous.
And he didn't keep kosher.
And I say that on many, many levels.
And finally, number seven is that what we have here, and I have shown you this from Genesis 1:1, over and above everything else is a polemic against polytheism.
And you must read all of the beginning chapters of Genesis, including this, as an onslaught against polytheism.
And I will show you where specifically in the story of Noah.
Those are my preamble words with regard to the story that we are about to read.
My final beginning thoughts entertain the issue of polytheism.
I have said to you, and any of you, again, who've heard me know, Judaism's great teaching is ethical monotheism.
There's one God and one ethic for everyone, which is exactly what the flood is about.
It's one of the reasons I like the story.
I'm not happy about the story.
Don't get me wrong.
But it is important and it supports ethical monotheism.
What is wrong with polytheism?
Why is Judaism, why is the Torah so anti-polytheism and paganism?
Why is it so relentless in its attack?
Let me give you a couple of reasons briefly, and then everything will flow much more smoothly as we understand what is involved here.
Number one, many gods means many moralities.
One God means one morality.
Two gods, and you already have a fight.
Which morality do I follow?
Even for those, I have often argued, even for those who posit Satan as a divine force against God, what is your rational, not faith, but what is your rational argument against being a Satanist?
If I have two competing forces, which is exactly what the Zoroastrians had, a God of good and a God of evil, why not follow the God of evil?
And if I have ten gods, then clearly morality is not the issue.
Do you know what the issue was for the ancients who were pagan?
The issue was propitiating God, not obeying God's moral law.
How do I propitiate the God of fertility with fertility rights?
How do I propitiate the God of thunder, the God of earthquake, the God of volcanoes?
Probably by sacrificing children in fire so that that God won't bring fire to this world.
Propitiating the gods, and you will see that in this story, propitiating the gods was what polytheism was about.
Which brings me to the third point of why Judaism opposed polytheism.
Polytheism is anti-human.
The only way to liberate human beings to advance in this world was to get them away from polytheism.
The reason, give you one simple thought from Noah.
What does Noah do in the famous chapter which we're going to discuss tonight when he gets drunk?
The first thing that we know about Noah is that he tilled the soil and that he created a vineyard.
He planted a vineyard.
In Greek, and that's high-level pagan, and other pagan philosophies, all of the things that people do were started by gods.
In the case of the vineyard of wine, Dionysus was the creator of wine for Greeks, not people.
And for Egyptians, it was Osiris.
For everything, there was a God who started it, not people.
Ironically, the belief in the one God of the Hebrew Bible is what liberated humanity to become humanist.
To believe in people.
One way of saying it is you become a religious humanist, not an atheist humanist.
For Judaism, the human being is at the center of everything.
Once God created, we continue the work.
But not in polytheism.
You don't do a thing.
These capricious gods do everything.
They kill you when they want.
They save you when they want.
Do you know why Utna Pishtim was saved in the Gilgamesh epoch?
One reason was he was handsome.
Very different from Noah.
God doesn't know if you're handsome or beautiful.
It's irrelevant to God because God is God.
God is not a mortal.
But in polytheism, the gods were mortal.
The gods themselves were semi-mortal.
The gods themselves were just us in superman form with super flaws as well as super strength.
The world advanced because Judaism said there is an invisible God.
It enabled science to develop.
The idea that we're not run by gods of volcanoes and gods of thunder, but rather by natural law, enabled science to develop.
It is not a coincidence that it's the Judeo-Christian world that gave us the science that we have.
Admittedly, with the use of Greek reason, the Greeks offered this possibility, but within the Greek bounds, they still would have been bound to their gods unless they would have been questioned and overthrown, which is what apparently Socrates tried to do.
Judaism said that we ought to repair the world.
Paganism said we ought to propitiate the gods.
There's a very big difference in what human beings are supposed to do.
Okay, that's the introduction to set the incredibly important introduction for the flood.
Genesis 6, verse 9.
I won't deal with it again.
It begins with the issue of Noah being a righteous man, and I had it vote with you which is better, to be righteous among righteous people or to be righteous among miserable people.
We had a long thing on that, and I think I swayed a lot of minds to realize that among miserable people was a more difficult task for some, and I don't remember exactly what I persuaded you, because I'd have to get back into it and then persuade me again about the same thing now that I think of it.
But it is a very fascinating issue that the rabbis raised, which in fact is more meritorious to be truly decent among the truly decent or truly decent among the truly miserable.
Okay, some of the differences in here.
God chooses Noah.
I'm going to periodically give you differences between the ancient Near Eastern epics and the Noah story.
Let me make something here clear.
It is as apparent to anyone willing to read that the ancient Near East had very, very similar flood stories to the story of Noah.
It is clear that to the ancient Israelite, to the ancient Jew, this story and ancient Babylonian Mesopotamian stories were utterly familiar to them, utterly.
And that is part of the reason that some ideas are mysterious to us.
They were completely familiar to them.
It would be as if I made a reference to a film that every one of you was seen, and 2,000 years from now, people would try to figure out without never seeing the film and the prints were destroyed, what was he talking about when he referred to God with the wind.
Was he referring to wind?
Every one of you would know exactly what I would mean by God with the wind.
That's how you have to understand here.
A lot of the mysteries to us in reading the Bible were no mysteries to them.
They understood exactly what was meant and exactly what was being overthrown from the pagan stories.
After all, they had a flood, they had an ark, they had the measurements unbelievably similarly, they had similar wood, they had similar pitch to put it together, so you could say, well, look, the Bible's just a variation on a pagan theme, but the differences are what matter, not the similarities.
Which brings me to another critical point.
Everything is neutral in life.
It depends what you do with it.
You can use pagan symbols and make them holy.
That is exactly what Judaism teaches.
It monotheized a pagan story of the gods picking a guy named Utna Pishtim to save.
That's what was done, and we can do that too.
That's why, to give a Christian example, every so often on the radio show, somebody will call up a former believing Christian who is wanting to convert the world to his newfound atheism.
And he is proud to note that, look at all the pagan origins to Christmas.
Doesn't everybody know all the pagan origins?
To which I then listen very attentively and then say the two words that have deflated more arguments than any two words I've ever offered on the radio.
So what?
And then there's silence.
So what's your point?
There are pagan origins to everything.
You think things come out of the sky?
New ideas come out of nowhere?
Of course they're going to use the vessels.
Excuse me, new ideas did come out of the sky.
I believe monotheism did come out of the sky, to be honest with you.
That's part of my faith as a Jew.
I have very few I believes.
That's one of them.
That came out of the sky, but not the vessels into which it's put.
Of course there are going to be symbols.
If a Jew tells me, well, you know, the three festivals, they're just ancient pagan festivals of the seasons for the spring harvest and so on, and I'll say that's true.
And you know, when Jews walk around with the lulav and et rogue, with the citron and the palm branch on Sukkot, on tabernacles, that's just an ancient fertility thing.
It's obviously fertility symbol of a penis and testicles.
You go, yeah, that's true.
So?
Look, to me, it just shows what Judaism was able to do with it.
That's the genius of Judaism, that it took something so primitive and ennobled it.
See, there's a talk about a film.
See, Sister Act.
You will see what could be done to rock music.
It was brilliant.
That was part of the brilliance of that film.
Taking very mundane rock songs and rock lyrics from the 50s and making them holy.
That's the task of religious people.
Not to leave the world, but to make the world as it exists holy.
Use the pagan stories, but make them ethical monotheists.
That's what's done.
And I gave you already some examples that Noah, the most important is Noah's picked because he's moral.
Make Yourself an Ark 00:07:38
And God judges the world because they're immoral.
Remember what I read to you last time about one of the ancient Near Eastern stories, why the gods decided to destroy the world?
Because the people were making too much noise.
I read it to you.
Gunther Plout brings it in his commentary on the Torah.
Well, you know, they're bellowing too loud.
It's time to get rid of them.
They're keeping me up.
That was what one of the gods said.
They're just not letting us sleep up here in the celestial heavens.
So we'll destroy them.
And what does God, Jehovah, say?
People are hurting each other, and I don't want that.
Not hurting me.
You can't hurt me, God.
You are hurting each other.
I'm getting rid of you.
Except for the good person I found, him I'll save.
Another difference, incidentally, and I told you I'm going to point them out periodically.
In the Gilgamesh epic, Utna Pishtim makes sure to take gold and silver onto the ark.
You will notice, nothing is mentioned about inanimate objects.
Not a hint of anything of value taken aboard the ark.
The only thing of value were animals and Noah's family.
Isn't that touching?
Wouldn't you think he'd say, you know, can I bring my bank account with me?
My savings?
Only animals.
Locusts were more important than all the gold in the world.
Isn't that touching?
That's different.
And believe me, to us, you've got to learn it.
But to the ancient Israelite who knew the Gilgamesh epic, that made a very big statement.
No gold, no silver on the ark?
Boy, that's something.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
Also, in all the other stories, the hero is granted immortality.
Not Noah.
Noah's not granted immortality.
He's simply saved to start replenishing the earth all over again.
He's a person.
Okay.
6.11.
The earth became corrupt before God.
The earth was filled with lawlessness.
This is why God wishes to destroy it.
God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth.
God said to Noah, I've decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them.
I am about to destroy them with the earth.
Make yourself an ark of gopher wood.
Any of you know what gopher wood is?
Don't raise your hand, because it's not possible to know what gopher wood is.
All it did was take a Hebrew word, which only appears, to the best of my knowledge, this one time in the entire Bible.
And according to the scholars I read, they still don't know what it is.
They have speculation, but it seems to be unique.
At any rate, gopher wood is what it was made of.
If you're interested, incidentally, God then gives the exact dimensions, which again is to those who study the parallel stories, part of exactly what the traditions were.
All of them gave measurements.
It was a very precise story and probably far longer.
At any rate, in modern terminology, the ark by Torah's measurements was 450 feet in length, 75 feet wide, 45 feet in height, and it had a displacement of about 43,000 tons.
Okay?
It, of course, as I pointed out last time, had no crew.
Also unique to the biblical story.
All of the other stories had crews.
This had no crew.
God was the navigator.
That's the whole point.
And remember I told you too, the word used for ark is the same word as used for that which Moses is put into, which also had no crew.
God was the navigator in Moses' little box, little tevah, and was the navigator in Noah's big tevah.
In 6.11, you will notice that it says, The earth was destroying itself before God.
The point here is critical, not before man.
When people are in the midst of evil, they don't notice it.
It is God who notices it and God who judged it.
That's okay?
Just a little important point to notice.
God noticed it, and he is offended when we hurt each other.
According to the way the text is written, I won't read you verse for verse here, I'm just relating the story because it would take too much time.
He had 120 years to build the ark.
The Jewish tradition held that the reason for that was so that people would have the time to ask, what are you doing?
It's a very large sailboat you're building, Mr. Noah, in the hope that he would say, well, because God is going to destroy the world because you're ruining it.
But apparently it did not work.
Either they didn't ask or he was too afraid to tell them, we don't know.
That's something we went about last time.
6.14.
Make yourself, as I said, this ark of gopher wood, and you will make it with compartments and cover it inside and outside with pitch.
The word for pitch used here, kofer, is not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.
It does, however, appear in another Middle Eastern story, in an Akkadian story where the exact same word in Akkadian kupru, here, kofer, is used, which means, again, that the details were very clear to ancient Israelites, and it's the ideas that were changed much more than the details.
A modern, a 20th century Orthodox rabbi, Oznaim Latorah, is what he called himself, Rabbi Zalman Sarotskin, makes a very sweet point here.
He notes that in the ark, Noah's family could only be kind.
Their only option was to be kind the whole time because they had to spend the whole time feeding animals.
According to one tradition, they never slept the whole time because they had to feed the animals who ate at night at night, the animals who waited day during the day.
And you can imagine there must have been a lot of noise as well inside the ark, given all the animals who were there.
But it is a very touching little thing that this rabbi notes, that all they could do was be kind the whole time.
God wanted them to train.
The new world will come from just this family.
Let them start off on a purely kind note.
And the kindness, touchingly, is towards animals.
That's the way it was supposed to begin.
It didn't work out, but that was God's attempt at any rate.
Now, we have the story of the floods, which came for 40 days, and only after 150 did they begin to abate.
And everything on the whole earth is destroyed.
Six times it uses the word Eretz.
Six times the whole earth is destroyed, all the animals therein.
Reading it and reading it and reading it, I finally realized something was missing.
Missing Fish Mention 00:15:12
There is no mention of fish.
Now, God saved insects.
By the way, you can imagine what a task.
How do you collect two of each insect?
No, really, you know, when you think about it, just that the pragmatics of it is very difficult.
Do you know the sex of a fly?
It's an interesting question, but I won't get into it.
Because there's nothing to get into.
I have no idea how it was done.
We assume that there was some divine intervention.
Noah, take that fly.
I missed that one.
Take that one, and so on.
At any rate, nothing about fish.
What happened to the fish?
Why weren't the fish killed?
If all of nature is there for human use, why weren't the fish killed?
And I read about 12 commentaries, none of whom dealt with the issue.
One did, but it was such a mystical answer that I just didn't bother with it.
The other 11 simply ignored it.
So I figure when this happens, when I read the Torah text, and something so obvious hits me, I figure I must have missed it.
So I read it again.
I read the commentaries.
And then I figured, maybe I didn't miss it.
Maybe it's not dealt with.
Well, I called up my last resort, because I don't like to bother the man, but my biblical scholar hero is Jacob Milgram.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
Professor Jacob Milgram teaches at Berkeley.
He is one of the world's leading Bible scholars, just to give you two examples.
He is the most perhaps distinguished series of biblical commentaries in the world is the Anchor Bible.
He is the author of Leviticus.
I mean, Torah is the author of Leviticus, but he's the author of the commentary on Leviticus.
And for the Jewish Publication Society series, he's the one who did numbers.
So I'm very fortunate to have a long-standing relationship, and I call him up.
I mean, it's a very funny thing when you think about it.
I haven't spoken to him in about a half a year.
Jack, how are you?
Dennis, great to hear your voice.
What's new?
Jack, why weren't the fish killed in the flood?
What's bothering you, Dennis?
Well, I'll tell you what's bothering me.
I don't understand why the fish weren't killed.
And sure enough, he tells me that this issue about the fish in this story and in the Torah generally was one of the biggest detective stories of his entire life's work in biblical studies.
Because he notes, and this is very interesting, I certainly didn't realize it.
He said, Dennis, you don't realize what you hit here.
There is not a single fish mentioned in the Torah.
And it's true.
There are no fish mentioned.
And he said, that and other things started me thinking, and I realized, after hearing a marine biologist speak after the Six-Day War, he mentioned the following.
He mentioned that after the Suez Canal was closed, the fish died out, and there were no longer any fish off the coast of Israel in that area.
And then I said I started inquiring and I began to realize that in ancient Israel they were simply unaware of fish.
They knew they existed, but that was about it.
They had no consciousness, as it were, of fish.
And he is convinced that that is the reason that they're simply not mentioned.
Which is a, you know, after all of what is done, you'd figure there must be some great profound biblical reason here.
He says, that's probably the reason.
And it's, I'm sorry?
No, no, no, with the name of a fish, halibut, shrimp, etc., etc.
I mean, other animals are mentioned, especially when it comes to koshrut.
When it comes to koshrut, you have fins and scales are prohibited, but you have no names of fish.
You certainly have names, Rabbi Finlay.
Dolphins in the building of the tabernacle.
I'll call Jack in the morning and let you know on Shabbos.
Not a fish.
Ah, not a fish.
That's cheap, but you're right.
Anyway, that is, I have another, there's another possible answer, by the way, because it is a fascinating omission.
It just does not mention the fish being killed.
Another possibility is it's so obvious that nobody would think of it.
Fish can drown.
It would be rather funny, and God brought a lot of rain and killed all the fish.
That makes sense.
In fact, if anybody would have thrived during the flood, it should have been the fish.
However, I disqualify that as a possibility because it would imply that somehow or other fish have a life of their own that would be valuable, whereas the other animals are only valuable vis-à-vis human beings.
On the other hand, it may not imply that.
It's simply that the text wants to be logical.
Fish don't die in floods.
So maybe that is the reason.
Maybe you didn't need to have all of the inquiry into the marine life of the ancient Near East.
Maybe that's the reason.
It would be an odd thing.
God would have had to have killed the fish in another way in order for the fish to have died.
Is this on fish?
Yes.
You sure?
Yeah, but his statement, for those of you who didn't hear, and for the viewing audience around the world, the comment is that 40 days of freshwater rain would kill saltwater fish.
What about freshwater fish?
Okay, so thank you.
Also, I'm not even sure in the depths of the ocean, I mean, those that really live low, if it would have even affected them, but it's an interesting point.
Anyway, it's one of those things that when you read about, you would look into.
The other possibility is, my third possible choice, is that fish don't matter much.
And there may be some truth to that.
I'll tell you why.
There are laws in Judaism on how to kill fowl and how to kill land animals, but no laws on how to kill fish.
They're considered basically to be the most primitive of species, which if you keep fish, you know to be true.
Fish are not smart.
Okay?
Dogs are smart.
Frogs are smart compared, probably.
But fish are not as smart.
And perhaps that is another reason.
It just didn't matter.
Anyway, the fish are not mentioned, and whatever reason you'll come up with, you'll come up with.
6.16.
Make an opening for daylight in the ark, and so on.
God tells Noah exactly what to do.
He tells him in every instance what to do.
And God is the director of events here.
Which is, by the way, again, contrast with the other stories of the crew doing things in the ancient Babylonian stuff.
Here, God is the actor.
God controls.
6.21 is interesting.
God is instructing Noach and says, for your part, take of everything that is eaten and store it away to serve as food for you and for them, the animals.
Now, what is food that is eaten at this point in biblical history?
Only vegetation.
Vegetables and fruit.
So it is almost a reminder to us that they are still vegetarian.
You are not to eat any animals on board, one of the obvious reasons being that it would cause a problem for that species if you ate the last two of any group.
So just wanted to show you it maintains an inner coherence.
All right.
In chapter 7, God tells them, God tells him in the beginning, you finally go to the ark.
I have seen that you are a tzaddik, a righteous person before me in this generation.
Once again, God adds in this generation.
And who knows?
It might have been God's way of saying, look, you're the best of a bad lot.
That's back to our old thing.
Or even in this generation, you're an incredible tzaddikh.
Next, of every clean animal, you shall take seven pairs, males and their mates.
And of every animal that is not clean to a male and its mate.
Interesting thing here.
You probably all know, and if you don't, it's something you certainly should become aware of.
There is, in the biblical world, there are two, there is a major division.
The traditional believer holds that these are God's words.
The non-traditional believer, who may still be a traditional practitioner of the religion, but not traditional believer, holds with a documentary hypothesis.
Virtually every biblical scholar, not every, virtually every holds that there are strands of stories in the Hebrew Bible, in the Torah, in the Torah specifically.
They are four strands.
Jehovah, Elohim, Priestly, and Deuteronomic.
Deuteronomic is only the book of Deuteronomy.
Let's leave that aside.
Otherwise, what they say are there are three strands that an editor put together.
One was done by the priests and the priestly class.
One was done by what they call the person who used Elohim for God's name and the person who used Jehovah, J, for God's name.
It is not easy to refute that, nor do I have any desire here to refute that.
I'm merely explaining to you how some people see it.
And I will give you an example.
What I just read to you was, God instructing Noah, take seven pairs of clean animals into the ark.
But right before that, God had instructed, and in this case, hold on, this is Jehovah.
If you read 7-1, you will see what name for God is used, Yahweh or Jehovah, correct?
Beforehand, and I don't, I can't, either I'll find it immediately or, yep, beforehand, yep, perfect.
Please look at verse 13 on chapter 6.
Chapter 6, verse 13 says, by Yomer Elohim and Noah, God Elohim speaking to Noah says, take two pair of every species.
Chapter 7, God speaking with the other name, Jehovah, says, take seven pair of the clean species.
I'll talk what clean species or pure species means in a minute.
This is a perfect example for you to understand the documentary hypothesis.
What did the scholar say?
Obviously, we have two stories.
Which is it?
Is it two of every pair, or is it two of every pair and seven of the clean pair?
And since it's different God's name used in each particular case, it's clear we have two different stories that the editor simply put into one text.
I'm going to take a vote with you, because I don't think you have a particular bias, most of you, one way or the other.
How many of you think that it is two stories totally different, one based on an Elohim storyteller, one based on a Jehovah storyteller, or one story which uses different names for gods for whatever reason, but merely embellished the original order with an additional order, take seven of the pure and two of the other.
Do you think it's totally separate stories, or do you think it's one story with two different names of God?
Separate stories, raise your hand.
One story, two different names of God.
I'll bet you it was 50-50.
I'll bet you it's exactly 50-50.
Now, that's an interesting thing when I read this, and I don't have a particular bias in either direction, because I believe that I'm still studying God's Word, whether or not there are different documents weeding in or not.
So it doesn't matter to me which turns out right, but I want you to understand, if you ever hear of the documentary hypothesis, don't think that automatically it makes perfect sense.
Because I kept reading that this instruction to take seven pair of clean animals contradicts the first instruction, which only mentioned two pair of all animals.
It doesn't contradict it.
It's not true.
It's not a contradiction.
It's an addition.
I'm telling you now one thing else.
Take seven.
Others will say, why didn't God tell it at one time?
That's not the way they wrote texts in those days.
You give one instruction.
They embellished.
Be that as it may, God does instruct Noah.
Take seven pairs of clean animals.
Two pair of unclean.
What is a clean animal?
Clean animal has nothing to do with kashrut, even though later it is used there.
It has to do with that which could be sacrificed to God.
This is critical for you to understand because the first thing that Noah does when he gets out of the ark is sacrifice animals to God.
And he only takes of the clean.
Now, that was understood in the ancient world clearly.
Carefully Chosen Sacrifices 00:05:15
In every civilization, some animals were fit to be sacrificed, some animals were not fit to be sacrificed.
That was the only issue.
Extras were taken because they would be sacrificable.
That was the whole thing.
It may not make you comfortable, but at least I want you to understand the particular issue.
By the way, only when we get to Leviticus will I deal with this at length.
But since that may not happen until you have grandchildren, let me therefore tell you in a sentence or two, unless you are a strict vegetarian, you have no argument with animal sacrifice.
You cannot tell me that it is okay to kill cows for hamburgers, but it's not okay to kill cows to get closer to God.
Okay?
I don't buy that.
So if you're a strict vegetarian, I understand your problem with sacrifice.
But if you're not, you can't have any in my opinion.
It is simply another reason for human beings to kill an animal.
And the only issue comes, do they suffer or not, not whether or not they're killed.
I am not a proponent of animal sacrifice.
I am a defender of its practice, however, in the biblical, in the Torah story.
Anyway, that is why he has told seven of those.
Here's a touching little thing, though.
Listen to this.
Of every clean animal, you shall take seven pairs, males and their mates.
And of every animal that is not clean, two, a male and its mate.
Of the birds of the sky also, seven pairs, male and female.
Why doesn't it say with regard to birds, the animal and its male and its mate?
Why does it say there, male and female?
I think again we have a hint of the Torah's view that there is a hierarchy in animals.
You know what terms it uses?
Very sweet.
You know what terms it used?
It says in your English, at least my English, a male and its mate.
But do you know it's the same words as a husband and wife?
Another way of translating it would be, of every clean animal you shall take seven pairs, husbands and their wives.
Ish v'ishto is the Hebrew, a man and his woman, literally.
And it's interesting that it's used.
It's never used that way with animals in the Torah.
A man and his woman.
It's adorable, actually.
It uses male and female, which is what it does with birds.
I'm a strict believer that the words of the Torah are very carefully chosen.
Editor, no editor.
They're very carefully chosen.
And I think the reason is that when you're talking about higher animals, you can actually talk about a man and its mate a male and its mate, much more than you can with birds, who are simply lower.
And with the fish, we don't even bother at all.
And by the way, and that, remember I told you that there was a mystical reason for not mentioning the fish that I totally rejected?
You want to hear it?
Even if you don't, I'll tell you.
The reason was this.
It's really, it's interesting, but it's not my cup of tea, but I'll tell it to you.
One of the things for which people were apparently punished was lawlessness, murder.
Why murder?
How do we know was murder?
Because it only used one word in Hebrew, chamas, which is lawlessness.
How do we know that it was murder?
I'll tell you in a moment when we get to it.
Stealing and promiscuity of a truly exalted, even trans-Californian dimension.
Okay?
I mean, all right?
Now, this particular rabbi, I don't recall who it was who wrote this, wrote as follows.
He said, God expected fish to be promiscuous.
They are already, there's no concept of mate whatsoever in the fish kingdom.
None whatever.
They eat their children.
They're totally, they are the antithesis of civilization fish.
But with the higher animals, there is at least some more movement towards civilization, as it were.
And so they were, You can't punish the fish in any event because that's exactly what you expect from them.
I didn't buy it, but I just wanted you to understand the idea of hierarchy in animals makes sense.
And here's an example: birds, male and female.
But the higher animals bring them in as man and woman, or male, you know, using the terms for man and woman.
That's one of the beauties of knowing the Hebrew.
But even if you don't know Hebrew, you could see the difference where male and female are not used except for the birds.
Except for the birds.
Okay.
Now, okay.
716. Thus they had entered Thus they that entered comprised male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him, Noah, and the Lord shut him in.
Noah's Family Exodus 00:12:43
In the Utna Pishtim story, Utna Pishtim shuts the hatch.
In this story, God shuts the hatch.
To you, this is a little detail.
To the listener 2,500 years ago, this was a big difference.
God runs the world.
God did the whole thing.
Next, 8:1, chapter 8, we have everything destroyed, just to keep up with the story.
Everything that which existed is destroyed, and the waters arose for 150 days.
It rained for 40, they arose for 150, and then began to recede.
Chapter 8, verse 1: When the waters had swelled on the earth 150 days, excuse me, 8-1, God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark, and God caused the wind to blow across the earth, and the waters subsided.
Once again, God is in complete control.
Do you know what it was in the Mesopotamian story?
It really would crack you up if I read it to you.
As soon as the gods unleashed the floods, they all got scared because they couldn't stop them.
They didn't control nature like the God of the Bible controls nature.
They got scared.
They cowered from what they had actually unleashed.
It's a fascinating difference.
But here, God says, okay, it's time.
I'll send a wind, and now things will get dry.
Then, of course, you know, and then, by the way, God just wills it.
Remember in Genesis 1, let there be light, there was light.
Let there be water, separate, the waters separated, and so on.
Same thing here.
God said he brought a wind, and the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were stopped up, and the rain from the sky was held back.
That's it.
God just wants it.
It happens.
It's very calm, very smooth.
Then, on the date that's given, it actually gives a date on the mountains of Ararat, which we identify today as Armenia.
The ark rested.
And he sent out a raven, came back, sent out a dove, came back third time, realized it didn't come back, that he had found dry land, and he knew that he could open things up and begin to leave the ark.
Now, look at this interesting thing: 8:16.
And God said to Noah, 8:15, now 8:16, Come out of the ark, leave the ark, together with your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives.
Did you get the order there?
Now please read 8:18, two verses later.
So Noah came out together with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives.
I want to give credit where it is due.
This one is due to Leon Cass, professor at the University of Chicago, who points out that this was a big mistake on Noah's part.
God said to Noah, go out with your wife and your sons and your sons' wives.
But he went out with his sons and his wife.
And the point that Cass makes is a very powerful one.
Let me read it to you, because it's his words.
It's in Commentary Magazine, June 1992.
Noah reverses the order and emerges first with his sons, and only then with his wife and his sons' wives.
Failing to give proper place to his wife, Noah has perhaps inadvertently failed to appreciate the right order of the household.
Failed to see that leading a family life means more than sowing your seed.
Failed to recognize that it requires honoring both father and mother if transmission is to take place.
And now he adds, fascinatingly, and if you stick with me through Genesis, this will be the single most recurring pattern in the book.
Measure for measure, as we shall see, Noah will have his own paternal authority challenged by one of his sons.
He challenged her maternal authority.
He's going to get his paternal authority challenged.
The book of Genesis, overwhelmingly, after these first chapters of God's ethical monotheistic omnipotence, is a book that says the following, as the mother, then you will deny the centrality.
You will have your fatherhood denied its centrality, which is exactly what happens in spades a little later, as we will see tonight.
But isn't that fascinating?
These are things, I read this thing, did I read it a hundred times?
Probably a hundred times in my life.
If I read it 400 more, I would not have noticed.
That is why you need to learn from people in this stuff.
Who would pick that up?
God tells them the order to come out and it's reversed in the text.
And you don't think that's intentional?
All of these things tell you something.
That's the beauty of it.
That's the profundity of it.
That's the divinity of it from my perspective.
You can't quite do the same thing to Shakespeare, who was certainly brilliant.
8.19, the next sentence.
So Noah came out, oh, excuse me.
So every animal, every creeping thing and every bird, everything that stirs on the earth came out of the ark by families.
Even they came out by families.
This is the touching little phrase.
Noah's family, then it's followed by Aardvark family and, you know, and, you know, just down the line.
It's a very touching little thing.
And, you know, the imagery is so powerful that it is amazing that they don't make more films for, especially for kids, on the basis of this stuff.
It is just, it's really incomparable.
See, and by the way, again, you can think of a dog family, of an Aardvark family.
You couldn't think of a fish family.
See, no, you know, it is, it really is.
There is something here about the fish.
That's why, by the way, I must tell you that in my own perspective on the issue of animal eating, I do draw a distinction between meat eating and fish eating.
I think there really ought to be three categories.
Vegetarian, carnivore, and fishetarian.
To me, it would make sense.
I really do see, I don't believe that you are violating moral norms in any way by eating fish.
They're there to be eaten, it seems to me.
I don't want to get into an argument.
If you don't think they're there to be eaten, they're there to enjoy life.
Okay, I won't argue with you.
Okay.
8.20.
Do me a favor.
Write it down.
I'm dying to get through.
Please do, though.
I'm serious about that because I always leave time.
But I do want to get through the text as best as possible.
Let's see.
Yes, 8.20.
What is the first thing that Noah does upon leaving the ark?
Noah built an altar to the Lord, and taking of every clean animal and every clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar.
Now, that's why they had the seven of the clean ones.
He couldn't sacrifice, obviously, right?
Could not sacrifice any of the others.
There would be no species.
Interestingly, Cass, whose point I loved about the parents, makes a point that I don't agree with.
I'll read it to you, though, just so that you'll understand how different people can read that text.
This is what he writes about Noah offering a sacrifice in 8.20.
Noah offers a sacrifice of gratitude of every clean beast and every clean fowl.
He italicizes the word every, which is in the Torah.
In thus offering up scores of his former arkmates, you get Cass's point already?
In offering up scores of his former arkmates.
He is not pleased, Cass, about what Noah did.
Guy just lived with these people, excuse me, just lived with these creatures and now gives them up as sacrifices.
Noah shows something of the wildness of the antediluvian man, pre-flood man.
His impulse to express gratitude is under the circumstances thoroughly intelligible.
But his belief that God would like to gorge himself on roast meat is utterly unfounded.
See, that's his argument.
I don't agree with it.
It's obvious that that's why God gave him the seven clean, but it's an interesting point in any event.
You know, he had just spent this time, all of this 150 days or whatever it was, with all these animals and then sacrifices some of them.
And, you know, I have no problem with sacrifice, but it's hard to sacrifice that which you've related to.
Right?
It's just, that's the way it is.
But anyway, that's just to give a defense of Cass's point, which I don't think the text warrants.
8.21.
God smelled the pleasing odor.
This shook Jews 2,500, 3,000 years ago.
You have to understand this.
It does nothing to you.
Zilch, I could tell.
It absolutely would have shaken an ancient Israelite.
Because in all of the ancient epics, they had the same words.
Their hero also offered a sacrifice.
And their God also, or gods, also smelled with favor or smelled the nice odor.
But they all did something afterward.
Some of them ate it themselves.
In the ancient world, the belief was that the gods ate it.
It was a libation, not a sacrifice.
It's food for the gods.
Here is the Gilgameshepic, the biggest and best known of all of them.
The gods smelled the sweet aroma and crowded like flies around the sacrificer.
Now do you see how beautiful this sentence is?
God smelled the sweet aroma.
End of issue.
That's it.
He doesn't crowd around the sacrificer like a fly.
That's why you need to know ancient Near Eastern stuff to appreciate what it's doing to it.
Well, what does God do?
Look at the profundity.
Versus the Gilgameshepic, and they crowded around like flies.
What are the next words in this?
God savors the fine aroma and says to his heart, says to himself, to his heart is literal, I will no longer curse the earth because of man, because the will of man is evil from his youth.
Probably the verse in the Torah I've quoted the most in my life, Genesis 8.21.
And therefore I will not, I will not again, I will not continue to hit, to hurt the living things that I have made.
In other words, look, I understand that man's will is towards evil from his youth or from the beginning, though they are different how you read it.
Whichever way you read it, though, this is certainly a theme that I have developed and don't want to develop at great length at all because I've spoken so much about it.
God's Realization 00:03:27
There is no Jewish basis for the belief that people are basically good.
None whatsoever.
It is not a Jewish belief.
A Jew who takes Judaism seriously in any way, liberal or orthodox, just cannot hold that in good faith with his outlook, with his religion's outlook.
It is a secular humanist belief.
It is a radical belief that people are basically good and they are corrupted by external forces.
No, we have bad in us, we have good in us, and we are in control or not in control depending on who we are.
And that's what God is saying here.
This is what you are.
I won't curse the world because of it.
I recognize it.
This is what you are.
You continue.
You might destroy the world, but I, God, won't.
This is my, I have another, I am making another attempt, but now I give you my word, as you will now see, that I will not destroy the world.
And in 22, in a very beautiful, beautiful Hebrew, it says, so long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
God, I God, won't interrupt nature anymore.
That's powerful, isn't it?
What happens, happens.
I, in that way, am stepping back.
You, man, wish to ruin it, ruin it.
You want to pollute the world?
Pollute the world.
You want to bomb the world to Smithereens?
Bomb the world to Smithereens.
You want to commit genocide?
Commit genocide.
I won't stop you.
I tried.
I did stop you, but I'm not going to do it again.
I now know what you are.
You know what you are, but God doesn't give up.
God is going to do something now, very dramatic, in order to change what happened last time.
In the meantime, you do, I skipped over it, but you do understand that, of course, God had made the vow not to destroy anything, and the rainbow is the symbol of this vow that God will not destroy the world anymore.
I told you last time, and I repeat this time, a critical element.
God makes three attempts biblically to make the world good.
Attempt one is conscience.
Attempt two is universal moral law.
Attempt three is revelation to the Jews.
We are now in attempt two.
Attempt one failed miserably.
Giving human beings a conscience didn't stop them from becoming despicable.
So now God realizes I need to reveal morality.
I can't merely build it into people.
I need to reveal it.
Therefore, the very first thing God does after the flood is reveal morality.
Look, chapter 9.
Revealing Morality 00:02:49
God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, be fertile and increase and fill the earth.
Remember, it's exactly what he said to Adam.
We're starting all over again.
It's the exact same words that God did to Adam and Eve.
God says to Noah and his children.
Second verse, the fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky.
Okay?
And upon all the fish of the sea.
See, they're not neglected, so there must have been a reason.
I think I may have hit on something earlier.
Now, why do you think God says to the survivors of the world's destruction, I'm going to make animals afraid of you?
Because you wouldn't realize that they're a little scared about eight of them.
And all these animals around, if they don't scare us, they'll eat us.
I mean, if they're not scared of us, they'll eat us.
So, you know, it's practical.
God just don't worry about it.
I know you're coming out of the ark.
And even though you were very nice to them, they're not fully aware that you saved their lives.
So we will make them afraid of you.
Okay, so we deal with that.
All right?
Now, here comes, here come one of the most fascinating things in the entire Torah.
The laws that are incumbent upon all people.
They are known as the seven laws of the children of Noah, or the seven Noahide laws.
Judaism holds that Jews are responsible to hundreds of laws.
The rest of the world is responsible to seven.
It's gotten from here.
But it's not as clear in every instance as the tradition holds.
Let's look, though, what the text says.
We are in chapter 9.
God is speaking to all of humanity, as it were, in repeating this thing.
He gives laws.
Law number one, be fruitful and multiply.
Law number two is coming up in verse four, but verse three has a revolution.
Here it is.
Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat.
Just as with the green grasses, I give you all these.
You can now eat animals.
Until now, we were to be vegetarian.
From the Garden of Eden through the Ark, we were to be vegetarian.
God now allows meat-eating.
Why Meat-Eating Matters 00:08:14
My friends, my favorite question in life is always, why?
Why does God all of a sudden allow meat-eating?
I don't have an answer.
Sarotskin, Rabbi Serotskin, has an interesting thought on it.
Let me read it to you.
Many theories have been advanced This is an Orthodox rabbi earlier this century in Europe and then in Israel.
Many theories have been advanced to explain Noah's descendants being permitted what was forbidden to Adam.
In my humble opinion, this allowance has the educational value of teaching man his great worth, his superiority over the animals.
The sins of the flood generation were rooted in ignorance of this fact.
They adopted the promiscuous ways of the animals who have no concept of marriage or family, with males selecting and exchanging females as they please.
Assuming that man was free like the animals, quote, they took for themselves wives from whomever they chose, Genesis 5, 2.
According to the rabbis, even married women, males, or animals.
For they imagined that man is no better than any animal.
Likewise, from seeing animals chasing away the weak from good grazing lands, man learned robbery, filling the earth with violence and slaughter.
Hence the flood, beside being punishment for the wicked, served also to teach Noah and later generations that man is the center of creation.
In order to dispel man's misconception that he and the animals are equals, God permitted Noah and his descendants to consume the flesh of all creatures, to teach man that when he consumes an animal, that animal, by helping to build the man's body, is itself elevated spiritually.
By contrast, no living creature is entitled to prey upon man.
Of every beast will I demand it.
I will demand the soul of man.
I'll tell you about that.
From this, man may learn his exalted worth and realizing that he was made in God's image, he will perform no more beastly acts.
His answer is this.
People thought they were animals.
And by the way, don't laugh at that.
That is exactly what a serious part of secular intellectual life in America holds and in the Western world generally, that we are merely animals with brains, with bigger brains.
And a major way to remind people that they're not animals is to enable them to eat animals.
This is his argument.
It makes sense.
You may not buy it for you, but it does make sense.
It is a constant statement that I am higher than an animal.
After all, why wouldn't you eat a person?
Because you assume you are not higher than people.
That repulses you, but the idea of eating animals is not nearly as repulsive and shouldn't be, even if you're a vegetarian.
It's just not as repulsive as eating people.
That at any rate is his theory as to why it comes here.
It's an interesting question and an interesting answer.
More interesting is this.
Law number two.
Law number one was be fruitful and multiply.
Law number two given here is in verse four.
However, you must not eat flesh with its lifeblood in it.
That is the first of the seven Noahide laws, but the second law given here.
What does that mean?
You can't cut off a piece of animal while it's still living to eat it.
Which was so common that the Torah mentions this ten times.
Ten times in the Torah, the idea is spoken of with regard to how animals were eaten.
That's how common it was in the world.
Oh, they didn't have refrigeration.
So if you wanted a chicken leg, you pulled off a chicken leg.
And it still lived, so it would stay fresh.
I find it powerful in the extreme that the first law after simply being fruitful and multiply that the human being is given after the world is destroyed is not to torture animals.
You can eat them, but don't hurt them.
That's what God is saying.
That, of course, is the basis of kashrut.
You can eat them, but you can't hurt them.
That's what kosher is all about.
Obviously, I won't go into detail now, but this is the world's kashrut.
It's not the Jews' kashrut yet.
It's the world's kashrut.
Kashrut has to do with how you kill animals to eat them.
So you may not eat an animal where the blood is already going through the animal.
Okay?
Now, next.
But for your own lifeblood, so in other words, you can kill an animal.
But to remind you, you're not an animal, the next sentence comes.
This is very important stuff.
But for your own lifeblood, I will require a reckoning.
I will require it of every beast.
Of man too, I will require a reckoning for human life, of every man for that of his fellow man.
The second of the seven laws, well, no, it's actually the third of the laws given here.
I'll leave that for a moment, is you cannot murder.
Is that clear?
You can't take human lifeblood.
You can kill, you can spill the blood of animals, but you may not eat the blood, which we'll talk about later, and you may not eat a piece of a living animal.
You can kill an animal.
You may not kill a person.
You may not murder a person.
If you do, I require a reckoning.
Even if a beast kills a human being, I require a reckoning.
It is a law later in the Torah that an animal that kills a person must be put to death.
It's interesting, isn't it?
You can kill animals, but they can't kill you.
Furthermore, if they do kill you, they are put to death.
And so is a person.
One of the reasons that I feel I am pro-capital punishment for murder for many reasons, but I feel deeply, deeply enmeshed in the bases of Jewish morality from these sentences.
Look at number six.
Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.
And the Torah says why.
God says why.
This is God speaking.
You can't in the Torah and the rainbow is put as the Symbol.
One final point from Nachem Sarna, who is the scholar who has done Genesis for the Jewish Publication Society series on the capital punishment issue.
He wrote, Capital punishment is here divinely sanctioned.
Murder cannot be recompensed by monetary restitution, as was often the case in the ancient world.
Remember, it was also a battle against the ancient world.
You could pay off a debt if you murdered somebody.
Capital Punishment Debate 00:07:07
That was not allowed by God in Judaism.
You can't pay off a person's life.
All right, my friends, any questions?
I will not get to Noah's drunkenness today.
We'll start with Noah's drunkenness next week so that I could take.
Yes, please.
God told them to go in.
And if you look at 8.18, we know that Ark is putting out age.
Okay, let's check that out.
8.15.
Elohim says to Noah, you and your wife go out of the ark.
Yes, go on.
8.18.
Yes.
And he built a build and fair name of the art.
That's right.
Yeah, but even if you were right, the use of Jehovah in 20 is after 18.
Yeah, but it's the same person.
No, and no, no, no, no.
Those who believe in the documentary hypothesis would say they're two different stories.
Okay, but what I thought you were going to ask is, and this would be a legitimate question, it says here that God told them, leave, you and your wife, leave.
And it says that he and his children and his wife left, right?
But when they went in, he told him, you, your children, and your wife, go in.
All right?
Now that would be a fair question.
Why did God tell them to go in, you, your children, and so on?
And I have no answer to that.
I can only tell you that the order was reversed here.
It had to be deliberate.
6-2, yes.
God was sending and request that he made the human being.
It could be a while, but I would just say it would be wrong with the fact, and they felt control of those times.
Is it the angel that went down?
And it is the end of the banana.
And God didn't find a switch know that it is the angel together.
There were two separate questions there.
The first one was: it said that God was disappointed with the way people acted, but he had never told them how he wants them to act.
That's not till much later.
It's not really much later.
It's already now.
That's what I'm pointing out.
That is exactly my point.
God did tell us how we should act through conscience.
But conscience is not enough.
Remember, Torah means teacher.
For anybody who believes that it is enough to have a conscience, the Torah is saying it's not enough.
People will do bad.
I'll give you a practical example.
I'm writing an article on this right now.
I asked my son, who can testify to this truth, during the looting, I said, would you loot?
And we had a discussion on it, and I said, even if you could get away, if you knew you could get away with it, would you loot?
And he said, no.
And I said, why?
Because it's in the Ten Commandments.
Because you can't steal it.
Remember, is that correct?
Okay, I have testimony.
All right.
I have a belief that most parents, most including Jewish parents, and I will add the word unfortunately, for them that would not be their favorite answer.
Most educated parents in America would prefer that their child would say, when asked, if you knew you could get away with looting, why wouldn't you do it?
That the child answer, because it's wrong.
Most secular people think conscience is enough.
It isn't.
The whole point of the Torah story is that conscience isn't enough.
That you need revelation in order for morality to succeed.
That you have to have God-based law.
It is not enough to feel something is wrong.
That when push comes to shove, people will weaken and they will do the wrong thing.
Not every single individual.
For some, conscience will be enough.
For most of us, you need to have divine revelation, God, as an ethical basis.
So my answer to you is, people knew what they should do and violated it anyway.
Did Nazis know that they were wrong when they mass murdered Jews?
It's a question that has perplexed me my entire life.
What did the average Nazi shooting Jewish men, women, and children, and grandmothers and grandfathers at ravines in Ukraine think?
And it is interesting that the research that I have done thus far reveals that to a very large extent, they were drunk when they did it.
That sober, they couldn't do it.
And drunkenness is the single most effective blunter of conscience that the human being has.
Which is why you will see the very first problem with Noah is drunkenness.
That's the very next story in the Bible.
Personal statement.
That's why I hate alcohol more than all the vices put together.
Because it blunts the conscience much more than any of the others.
More than gambling, more than sex.
It is the worst.
People will do the most horrible things.
What did they say during the looting and the rioting?
Look at all the beer flowing in L.A. Remember that?
It was one of the first things.
Liquor stores were among the first places looted because that disembodies you from your conscience.
Conscience can be pried loose far better than being raised with the belief that God said something.
As for the Nephilim and the children of Elohim as described in those very odd sentences in Genesis 6, beginning, it probably was an anti-polytheistic polemic against the belief that gods and people marry and have intercourse, which is exactly what all the pagan religions argued, and that precedes the destruction of the world.
The idea that man and God can have sexual relations so offended everything that the monotheistic idea wanted that it was time to start all over.
God's Smell Test 00:07:48
That's the reason why we stuck where it was.
Yes.
The question was, what was the rationale of the Israeli government taking reparations from Germany if you cannot accept money in compensation for murder?
They did not take it in compensation for murder.
They took it in compensation for property stolen.
It was clear no Israeli would ever hold that this is money for the dead.
Never.
Just the sheer amount of German Jewish money stolen.
After all, the people owned things who were sent away.
That alone.
Yes?
But why destroy land animals and not water animals?
That's the question that's being posed.
Because as a result of the flood, the animals overlap the given flood.
Right.
The way of saving the animals, the idea of them in the arm, where you were fish, or even the living flood.
Okay, fair enough.
They solve our fish dilemma.
Yes.
There is no hint at God being displeased at this point with sacrifice.
In fact, we had Abel's sacrifice being favored by God in just the previous couple of chapters.
It is clear later on that, at least to most commentators, including traditional Jewish ones like Maimonides, that God wanted to wean us from sacrifice.
That in the final analysis, even animal sacrifice is not the dream.
It was a stopgap, as it were, a compromise because sacrifice is so basic to people.
And again, it obviously is.
Every civilization we know of had animal sacrifice.
And I am sorry to say every civilization I've ever encountered of the ancient world in reading had human sacrifice.
Why would God enjoy a sacrifice if in the final analysis he wants to do away with it?
Because the only purpose of sacrifice is our intent.
If our intent is to truly say, God, I love you so much, I'm so grateful to you that I am willing to sacrifice something of great value to me, that means something to God.
God couldn't care less about the smell.
God cares that you care enough to want to thank him.
So I would say to someone today, in Judaism, the argument is that after sacrifice is ended, instead, as Hosea put it, the murmurings of our lips will substitute for the sacrifice of calves.
So I would say to you that if you spend X amount of time, a day, a week, in prayer, that you have sacrificed what is precious to you, time, for God.
God doesn't need your prayer, your words, any more than he needs your bullocks, correct?
I don't mean the department store.
It's an old word for cows.
Right?
God doesn't need our words either.
You could say, why pray?
It was the intent that mattered.
But there was no hint, and it doesn't say that God was pleased.
It just says that God smelled a nice smell.
That's, by the way, Cass's argument that he wasn't pleased.
Because it doesn't say God was pleased.
All it says is God smelled a nice smell.
I wouldn't go as far as him, but it certainly doesn't say, and God was pleased to have a good smell, because he loves good smells.
If it had that, I'd have trouble with the Bible.
Okay?
Yes, no, but even the people who hold the documentary hypothesis do not argue that the believers believe in two gods.
Everyone...
Everyone holds that monotheism is basic to the Torah.
But the people who believe that there are different documents hold that one strand used this name for God, and the other strand uses the other name for God, and that those are little thumbnail ways of identifying where the strands are.
Of course, they run into big problems on those occasions where it has both names in the same verse.
I don't think it's quite as smooth as they make it, but at least I wanted you to understand where it came from.
Let me take these two, and we'll say goodnight.
Yes?
To repeat for the microphone, I said that there were three attempts at making a good world.
Conscience, revelation to the world, revelation to the Jews is the third.
But that does not come till Exodus.
Or you can argue it comes with Abraham, but there were no new moral laws given to Abraham, so you have to argue it's the Ten Commandments.
Okay?
So what God did, God tried two universal methods.
Universal without revelation, conscience.
Universal with revelation, the laws to the children of Noah.
And then non-universal particularist.
Even that didn't work, universal revelation.
So God says, I'll give one group, as it were, a great many laws to lead a particularly holy life to make my will known in the world.
That's what the Jewish role is in the world.
There is a group that took exactly what Jews are supposed to be, Jehovah's Witnesses.
That is exactly what Jews are supposed to be.
And have been, even though often unwittingly, and in many cases, in the modern world, unwillingly.
Yes?
These three attempts, when you're looking at these three attempts that God took to find every world to behave the way he wanted it to, one could see a fallible God.
And I've heard it advanced by another rabbi that no, I'm not comfortable with it because God didn't say it.
He didn't say I was wrong, and now I won't do it again.
He simply said I won't do it again.
There's a very big difference.
There is no intimation that God thought he made a mistake.
He made a mistake, he thought, in creating people, but he certainly didn't say he made a mistake in destroying people.
I mean, it may sound harsh to us, but there is no implication whatsoever.
What he is saying is this: I won't destroy you.
You can destroy you.
That's the subtext, as it were, but I won't.
But then in these three attempts to define a good law?
The reason for the three attempts, in my belief, is because it's the Torah's way of teaching us that the other ways don't work.
See, without this, people would say, who the hell needs revelation?
We all have conscience.
Everybody knows that stealing and murder is wrong in their gut.
So who needs revealed law?
That's the reason for the story.
Never ever lose sight that the whole purpose of this is to teach us how to live, not to tell a story.
Okay?
A couple of comments.
The next session is two weeks from tonight.
Do if you do come back, and I trust you will, bring two things.
One, a Torah.
Two, a friend.
Because it's nice to share this stuff with other people, a study of the Torah.
Thank you all so much for being here.
Thank you.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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