Many rabbis agree that Ezra changed the Torah text

Many, if not most, rabbis, even ultra-Orthodox rabbis, recognize that as Judaism evolved, changes were introduced into the Torah wording for a myriad of reasons. Tikkunei Soferim, which can be translated as “corrections by the scribes,” refers to at least eighteen changes, and probably many more, that were made in the original wording of the Hebrew Bible during the Second Temple period, perhaps sometime between 450 and 350 BCE.[1]

Alterations Were Made to the Torah Text

Most of the scribal emendations were made to enhance the honor due to God, to avoid a problem, or to use less harsh words. Some sources suppose the changes were made by Ezra the Scribe and/or the Men of the Great Assembly.[2] We do not know exactly when Ezra lived, but he probably lived around 450 BCE.[3] We also do not know with any degree of certainty why he was called a scribe or what the function of a scribe was.

The eighteen alterations of Scripture, listed in the classic work Ochlah W’Ochlah,[4] are as follows: (1) Genesis 18:22, (2) Numbers 11:15, (3 and 4) Numbers 12:12, (5) I Samuel 3:13, (6) II Samuel 16:12, (7) I Kings 12:16, (8) II Chronicles 10:16, (9) Jeremiah 2:11, (10) Ezekiel 8:17, (11) Hosea 4:7, (12) Habakkuk 1:11, (13) Zechariah 2:12, (14) Malachi 1:13, (15) Psalms 106:20, (16) Job 7:20, (17) Job 32:3, and (18) Lamentations 3:19.

The following are several examples:

• In Genesis 18:22, the original text stated “God was still standing before Abraham”; this was changed to “Abraham was still standing before God.” The former is debasingly anthropomorphic; it depicts God in a somewhat servile manner, waiting upon Abraham.
• The original wording in Zechariah 2:12 has God saying that “whoever touches you [Israel] touches the apple of my eye.” The metaphor of someone poking a finger in God’s eye suggests that God has an eye and can be harmed. It was replaced to “his eye,” implying that whoever touches Israel will be punished so severely that it is as if he damaged his own eye.
• The context of I Kings 21:13 indicates that Nabothis being accused of cursing God, but the act is so despicable that “cursed” was replaced by “blessed.”[5]

There are scholars who claim that the number eighteen does not count all of the alterations made to the Hebrew text. There are many more than the rabbis identified and the true number may be closer to thirty.[6]

Not Everyone Agreed That Words Were Substituted in the Torah

Various Midrashim, such as Tanchuma, Exodus Rabba, and Genesis Rabba, as well as many traditional commentators, such as Rashi and Minchat Shai,[7] unabashedly and explicitly accepted that the divine text was changed. They believed that those who made the change felt that their respect for God required that they hide the true text and portray God in a better light than what was in the original wording of the Bible.

However, the idea that anyone, even a biblical figure such as Ezra, would tamper with the divine Torah is so startling that not everyone agreed that it was done. Traditional scholars such as Elijah Mizrachi, Rashba, Joseph Albo, Ibn Ezra, and Josephus in his Contra Apion 1:8 could not abide by the notion that anyone would tamper with the holy text.[8] They felt that statements saying the wording was changed should be understood to mean that it is “as if” the wording was changed; in other words, the original Torah text used these wordings in order to honor God. The modern ultra-Orthodox ArtScroll Chumash commentary, which deletes commentaries that are contrary to the editors’ theology, deleted Rashi’s statement that there are Tikkunei Soferim.[9]

How Should We Understand Maimonides?

Maimonides established thirteen fundamental principles of Judaism.[10]His eighth principle maintains that the Torah in our hands today is identical to the Torah given by Moses. How can we reconcile the idea that changes were made in the Torah with Maimonides’s eighth principle? Didn’t Maimonides know that changes had been made? After all, it was Maimonides who examined the various Torah texts of his generation and determined that the Aleppo Codex was the most authentic version.

One answer was offered by my late teacher Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, the rosh yeshiva of Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore, Maryland: “Rambam knew very well that those variations existed when he defined his principles. The words of Ani Ma’amin and the words of Rambam, ‘the entire Torah in our possession today,’ must not be taken literally, implying that all the letters of our present Torah are the exact letters given to Moshe Rabbeinu. Rather it should be understood in a general sense that the Torah we learn and live by is for all intent and purposes the same Torah that was given to Moshe Rabbeinu.”[11]

Another answer is that Maimonides wrote the thirteen principles for the general population. He intended them to be what he called “essential truths” – ideas that the general population needed to know, even though they weren’t actually true. In fact, Maimonides himself did not believe all of the thirteen principles, only the first few dealing with God. For example, at the start of the essay containing the thirteen principles, Maimonides states that he does not believe in resurrection. Yet at the essay’s end, he includes resurrection as one of the principles of Judaism.

[1] The Midrashim Sifrei Numbers 10:35 and Mekhilta Exodus 15:7 use the expression kina hakatuv, “the verse was substituted.”

[2] While the present-day consensus is that the changes in the Torah were made by Ezra, some sources insist that they were done by either Nehemiah, Zechariah, Haggai, or Baruch. See the sources in Saul Lieberman’s Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (Jewish Theological Seminary, 1994), 28–37, and Menachem Kasher, Torah Sheleima, Parashat Mishpatim(Jerusalem, 1992), volume 5, book 19, pages 374–75.

[3] Ezra’s activities are described in the biblical book bearing his name and in the biblical book Nehemiah. He was a priest. Ezra 7–10 and Nehemiah 8 state that he reintroduced the Torah to Jews in Jerusalem, enforced the observance of the Torah, and exhorted Jews about intermarriage with pagans.

[4] Das Buch Ochlah W’Ochlah (NY: Ktav, 1972), 113. First published in Hanover, 1864.

[5] Apparently thinking that readers would be confused to read that Naboth is being accused of blessing God, the JPS translation changed the wording back to “cursed.” The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Jewish Publication Society, 1917).

[6] See Tikkunei Soferim: An Analysis of a Masoretic Phenomenon, by Avrohom Lieberman, in Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 5 (2007): 227–36.

[7] Minchat Shai notes and explains most of the eighteen Tikkunei Soferim in its commentary to Zechariah 2:12.

[8] See Kasher’s Torah Sheleima and ibn Ezra’s commentaries to Numbers 11:15, 12:12, and Job 32:3.

[9] Nosson Scherman, ed., The Chumash: The Stone Edition (ArtScroll Mesorah Publications, 1993). Another example of ArtScroll censorship is the deletion of Rashbam’s comment in the first chapter of Genesis, where he states that according to the Torah the day begins in the morning, not at sunset, for the Torah states that God performed certain acts of creation and then “there was evening and morning” and a new creation was made after the morning on the new day.

[10] Found in his introduction to the tenth chapter of Mishna Sanhedrincalled Chelek.

[11] Quoted from Rabbi Weinberg’s lectures in Yaakov Weinberg, Fundamentals and Faith: Insights into the Rambam’s 13 Principles, ed. Mordechai Blumenfeld (Targum Press, 1991), 116.

Does a Man Need to Leave His Parents to Cling to His Wife?

Prof. Ziony Zevit

Marriage Advice: Leave Your Parents Behind?

The chronological sweep of the first parasha of Bereshit is mind-boggling, extending from the creation of the cosmos through the birth of the tenth generation of humans.^[1]  Tucked into this vast narrative is a brief comment about human nature that is, to my mind, regularly misunderstood. 

בראשית ב:כד עַל־כֵּן יַעֲזָב־אִישׁ אֶת־אָבִיו וְאֶת־אִמּוֹ וְדָבַק בְּאִשְׁתּוֹ וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד

Genesis 2:24 Hence a man ya‘azob his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh.

The word יַעֲזָב (ya‘azob) is usually translated leave, and the verse is understood to mean that after marriage young men leave, or should leave, their parents, strike out on their own, and set up their own homes with their new wives.  This understanding of the verse has made it popular in speeches delivered at weddings.  It is held to reflect a truthful ancient observation that men left their parents’ homes to live with their wives, as well as contemporary sensibilities concerning sociological and economic aspects of marriage. Today, young couples typically establish their physical domiciles apart from their parents’ and, ideally, begin their independent economic lives.

Contextually, however, this understanding is problematic. The verse begins with עַל־כֵּן, “hence,” indicates that it is a logical conclusion drawn from that which precedes it in the text. Prior to this verse, God creates Adam (Gen 2:7), employs him in the garden of Eden (v. 15), provides him with sustenance (v. 16), and, finally, provides him with a mate—first bringing him all the animals, who prove unsatisfactory (vv. 18–19), and ultimately forming Eve from his bone and presenting her to him (vv. 21–22). In verse 23—immediately preceding our passage—Adam declares of Eve:

זֹאת הַפַּעַם  עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי  וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי  לְזֹאת יִקָּרֵא אִשָּׁה  כִּי מֵאִישׁ לֻקֳחָה־זֹּאת׃

‏ This one at last Is bone of my bones  And flesh of my flesh.  This one shall be called Woman,  For from man was she taken.

 Verse 24 follows logically on verse 23 in its projection that men will take wives and become “one flesh”: just as Eve came from Adam’s flesh, so are men and women destined to reunite. But what of the text’s apparent statement that men must leave their parents? Adam, after all, has no biological parents to leave. How, then, does this statement relate to its narrative context?

Earlier Interpretations

Over the centuries, commentators have puzzled over the statement about men and their parents in verse 24.  

John Calvin: The Bond of MarriageIn the sixteenth century, John Calvin (1509–1564) addressed the relationship between verses 23 and 24 in his Commentary on Genesis:

It is doubted whether Moses here introduces God as speaking, or continues the discourse of Adam, or indeed, has added this in virtue of his office as teacher in his own person.  This last of these is that which I most approve. 

For Calvin, the connection between the verses implied by “hence” raises the question of whether the speaker is the same as in verse 23—that is, Adam—or whether it is someone else—namely God, or Moses as narrator. Calvin thinks it most likely that verse 24 reflects Moses’ own teaching based on the divine narrative.

Calvin continues:

The sum of the whole is, that among the offices pertaining to human society, this is the principal, and as it were the most sacred, that a man should cleave unto his wife. And he [Moses] amplifies this by a superadded comparison, that the husband ought to prefer his wife to his father. But the father is said to be left not because marriage severs sons from their fathers, or dispenses with other ties of nature, for in this way God would be acting contrary to himself. While, however, the piety of the son towards his father is to be most assiduously cultivated and ought in itself to be deemed inviolable and sacred, yet Moses so speaks of marriage as to show that it is less lawful to desert a wife than parents. Therefore, they who, for slight causes, rashly allow of divorces, violate, in one single particular, all the laws of nature, and reduce them to nothing. If we should make it a point of conscience not to separate a father from his son, it is a still greater wickedness to dissolve the bond [of marriage] which God has preferred to all others.

Calvin argues that Moses could not possibly have meant that a man is to leave his parents on account of his marriage.  Rather, he suggests, the verse teaches that in cases of conflict, a man should prefer his wife to his father, because the bond of marriage is more significant than the bond of birth.

Rashi: Prohibition of IncestRashi (1040–1105) commented on this verse as follows:

רוח הקדש אמרה כן לאסור על בני נח את העריות

The Holy Spirit said this, in order to prohibit incest among the descendants of Noah.

In assigning this verse to the “Holy Spirit,” Rashi implicitly addresses the possibility, raised by Calvin, that verse 24 is a continuation of Adam’s speech in verse 23. Whereas Calvin attributes the verse to Moses, Rashi attributes it to God. Likewise, Rashi rejects the notion that the Torah is instructing men to leave their parents, suggesting instead that they are to “leave” their immediate families in choosing mates and select wives who are unrelated to them.

Both Calvin and Rashi offer alternatives to the common understanding that a man should leave his parents on marriage. Yet neither interpretation relates verse 24 to Adam’s circumstances in the text, and thus they fail to account for the enigmatic עַל־כֵּן, “hence.”

JubileesApproximately 1200 years before Rashi, Jubilees, a Jewish composition of the Second Temple period thought to have been written ca. 125 BCE, explained the connection between the verses differently.  According to Jubilees, the Angel of Presence explained to Moses what had happened in the Garden of Eden.  As the angel spoke, telling Moses what Adam had said after seeing Eve for the first time, he continued, adding the comment now found in verse 24.  Moses simply wrote what he heard, not distinguishing between Adam’s words and the angel’s comment.^[3]  Whereas Calvin attributes the verse to Moses and Rashi attributes it directly to God, Jubilees takes a sort of middle position, attributing the comment to the angel.

Although the midrashic explanation of Jubilees accounts for the lack of elegance in the transition between verses 23 and 24, it does not clarify what verse 24 means. Like Calvin and Rashi, Jubilees fails to relate the verse to Adam’s circumstances and thus does not explain the function of עַל־כֵּן.

Reconsidering the Meaning of ya‘azob:
The Biblical Evidence

Calvin, Rashi, and Jubilees are undoubtedly correct in their assessment that verse 24 is a general teaching based on the narrative and not a continuation of Adam’s speech.  Yet they fail to explain the connection between the first part of this teaching and Adam’s circumstances. In my view, this failure stems from a misunderstanding of the term ya‘azob.

The Bible contains 216 verbs formed on the root of ya‘azob, ‘-z-b.  In three passages, the sense of “leave” or “abandon” is inappropriate, and the verbs must be understood as conveying a different sense.  

Helping one’s Neighbor’s Donkey (Exod 23:5)The first of these is Exod 23:5:

כִּי־תִרְאֶה חֲמוֹר שֹׂנַאֲךָ רֹבֵץ תַּחַת מַשָּׂאוֹ וְחָדַלְתָּ מֵעֲזֹב לוֹ עָזֹב תַּעֲזֹב עִמּו

‏When you see the ass of your enemy lying under its burden and would refrain from setting it right[4] (me’azob), you must nevertheless set it right (‘azob ta‘zob) with him.

In other words, together with your enemy, you must help reposition the load on the donkey’s back so that the animals can stand up. 

Although Deuteronomy 22:4, addressing a similar set of circumstances, does not use forms of the verb ‘-z-b, it clarifies the intention of the words in Exodus.  Deuteronomy instructs Israelites not to be oblivious when they see a kinsman’s donkey or ox fallen on the road, most likely under a load:

לֹא־תִרְאֶה אֶת־חֲמוֹר אָחִיךָ אוֹ שׁוֹרוֹ נֹפְלִים בַּדֶּרֶךְ וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ מֵהֶם הָקֵם תָּקִים עִמּוֹ

‏If you see your fellow’s ass or ox fallen on the road, do not ignore it; you must help him raise it (hakem takim).

This verse instructs the Israelite to help his kinsman get the animal to its feet, to help correct a situation deemed unfortunate.

Restoring a Wall (Neh 3:8, 34)The second passage occurs in a description of workers reconstructing gates and repairing breaches in the walls of Jerusalem (Neh 3:8):

עַל־יָדוֹ הֶחֱזִיק עֻזִּיאֵל בֶּן־חַרְהֲיָה צוֹרְפִים ס וְעַל־יָדוֹ הֶחֱזִיק חֲנַנְיָה בֶּן־הָרַקָּחִים וַיַּעַזְבוּ יְרוּשָׁלִַם עַד הַחוֹמָה הָרְחָבָה׃

‏Next to them, Uzziel son of Harhaiah, [of the] smiths, repaired. Next to him, Hananiah, of the perfumers. They restored (waya‘azebew) Jerusalem as far as the Broad Wall.

The third passage occurs later, in verse 34 of the same chapter in Nehemiah. In a speech to fellow opponents of the wall-building project in Jerusalem, Sanaballat asks:

מָה הַיְּהוּדִים הָאֲמֵלָלִים עֹשִׂים הֲיַעַזְבוּ לָהֶם הֲיִזְבָּחוּ הַיְכַלּוּ בַיּוֹם הַיְחַיּוּ אֶת־הָאֲבָנִים מֵעֲרֵמוֹת הֶעָפָר וְהֵמָּה שְׂרוּפוֹת׃

‏What are the miserable Jews doing? Will they restore (haya‘azebuw), offer sacrifice, and finish one day? Can they revive those stones out of the dust heaps, burned as they are?

Homonyms: Two Meanings of ‘-z-b

In commenting on Exod 23:5, medieval Jewish exegetes such as Rashi, Rashbam, and Ibn Ezra pointed to the distinctly different sense of the verbs formed from the root ‘-z-b in these verses.  Only in the twentieth century, however, did scholars associate these meanings with a second root, which lexicons list as ‘-z-b II, with cognates in Akkadian, Epigraphic South Arabic, Ge‘ez, and Ugaritic.^[5]  On the basis of these cognates, the posited meanings of ‘-z-b II are “to help, fix, make whole, set right.” 

The Ge’ez cognate, ‘azzaba, “to assist, uphold, help,” is particularly relevant to Gen 2:24. Based on this understanding of ‘-z-b, our verse can be translated: “Therefore a man strengthens/supports/helps his father and his mother and clings to his woman/wife and they become one flesh.”

God as Adam’s ParentOnce we recognize that Gen 2:24 is making use of this second root, of ‘-z-b II, we can understand how it connects to the preceding narrative. As noted earlier, Gen 2:24 follows a narrative in which God brings Adam into the world, employs him in his garden, provides for his sustenance, and provides him with a proper, human wife.  In all these matters, God acts like a good, responsible parent (Gen 24:1-4; 38:2, 6; Jud 14:2–3). The typical parent was expected to raise children to adulthood and, in return, expected that they would remain loyal and responsible (Isa 1:2; Prov 10:1; 17:6; 22:6).

By working in the garden, Adam has fulfilled his obligation to God, and he will presumably continue to do so.  The “hence” of verse 24 spells out the implication of the complete Adam narrative for all of his descendants: they are obligated to care for their parents (Exod 20:12; Deut 5:16) and, simultaneously, to cling to their wives.

In view of this explanation of the verse, it may still be used at weddings, but I suspect that it will become more popular in the speeches that parents address to their children.  

___________________

Professor Ziony Zevit is Distinguished Professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures at the American Jewish University. He earned his BA at USC, and his MA, Can. Phil., and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.  Among his books are The Religions of Ancient Israel (2001), Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew(2012) (with Cynthia Miller-Naudé), and What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (2013).

[1] See my TABS essay “Before the Beginning: Appreciating the Thought of an Ancient Cosmologist.” 

[2] See my book, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, pp. 153–54, 305, nn. 5, 6, 7.

[3] Jub 1:27–3:7.

[4] NJPS renders ‘-z-b “raise,” referring to the burden.

[5] L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament(revised edition), Leiden: Brill, 1999, p. 807; M. Z. Kaddari, A Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew(Hebrew), Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006, p. 787; W. Leslau, A Comparative Dictionary of Ge‘ez, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987, p. 80; A. Cooper, “The Plain Sense of Exod 23:5,” HUCA 59 (1988) 1–2, 22. D. J. A. Clines, The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 6 (Sheffield Phoeix Press, 2008), 332–33, suggests many attestations of this root in the Bible in addition to those mentioned here.