[Vision2020] Nation Building and Phil Nisbet's Misunderstandings part 2

[Phil Nisbet]

Nick,

You wrote

“As an addendum, I forgot to add one more item to Phil's misunderstandings.  
I did not call him a "biblical absolutist."  I said that he was like Doug 
Wilson in that he summarily rejects standard scholarship on Judaism just as 
Wilson rejects all biblical scholarship.  Similarity is not necessarily 
identity.”

I have absolutely nothing in common with Doug Wilson.  The only reason you 
make such a reference, Nick, is to try to denigrate me.  The reference is 
specifically galling because the fault involved is largely your own.

You, Nick, have made many claims here on this list, speaking from authority, 
which are flat out outside the norm of scholarship.  Below you will find 
several quite normal historical versions of what I have suggested in my 
postings from the net.  You can also refer to discussions from Bamberger’s 
“The Story of Judaism”, Johnson’s “A History of the Jews” and a host of 
other scholarly works.

http://www.beingjewish.com/yomtov/chanukah/history.html

http://users.aristotle.net/~bhuie/pharsadd.htm

http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/t10/ht104.htm

http://www.billwilliams.org/Scrolls/scrolls.html

You had stated that what you deemed to be original Jewish thought was 
against life after death and based your argument on Sadducee ideas as you 
understand them.  You stated that these were original truths from the First 
Temple period because the Sadducees were from an older school of thought.  
You then stated that my correcting you was wrong because simply everybody 
agreed with you, even Jewish scholars you knew.

The fact is that what I stated was not ‘special Jewish knowledge’ as you 
suggest its actually current thinking in Jewish studies and in most bible 
studies.

The Sadducees were a group of Hellenized upper class folks who subscribed to 
Epicurean ideas during the period of the Second temple.  That is the 
generally accepted scholarship.

Your attempt to suggest that Judaism did not believe in certain things based 
on the Sadducees refusal to accept the Talmudic oral law traditions is a 
rejection of standard scholarship.  The Sadducees attempted to add Greek 
ideas to Judaism in order to hold their positions as satraps to the 
Alexandrian regime in Syria and that is why we Jews celebrate Hanukah every 
year, because their ideas were roundly rejected at the point of a sword by 
the lower and middle classes of the country they were trying to rule for the 
Greeks.  That is understood by the bulk of those who study that period of 
history.

There is a splinter group in scholarship that hold your ideas, but in order 
to do so they have rejected all Talmudic statements on the subject and base 
their premise not on historical documents, but on their own ideas about 
origins.  I find that interesting, since it’s the same sort of approach used 
by your former student Mr. Wilson in his ideas about Slavery in the US.  
It’s a funny old world, now ain’t it just?  “Similarity is not necessarily 
identity.”, now is it?

You have accused me of being anti-Gentile, because I reject your ideas.  The 
above list of sources I provide include both Jewish and Christian sources 
and they are not in agreement with you Nick, even though they are biblical 
scholarship.  Are they all anti-Gentile?

In another posting you place my name in the same paragraph as a rant against 
anti-intellectualism and then backtrack to claim that you were not inferring 
that I was part of the rest of the paragraph.  Interesting, since you also 
backtrack to claim I am only “similar” to Doug Wilson or to biblical 
absolutists after including me in a paragraph.  You will have to excuse me 
for seeing those writings as ploys rather than real refutations of what I 
have written.  That is not the way a scholar handles discussion, which is 
the principle reason I have rebuked you in the past.

This whole thing began because your good friend Ralph chose as his secular 
humanist subject to state that Jews sold their daughters into slavery.  The 
fact that the statement is not correct from the original text or from what 
the Talmud has to say on the subject is the problem.  In order for him to 
get where he wanted to go in a condemnation of Wilson’s premises on slavery, 
he was making flat out anti-Semitic commentary.

The Torah reference deals with contracts for the bonding of daughters.  
Since a marriage contract in a polygamist society is what the actual text 
was dealing with, not slavery as we know it, saying that Jews of the period 
sold their daughters into slavery was simply wrong.  Children in that 
society were held as the property of their father until they reached 
maturity, which for girls was first Menes or about 12 years of age.  Prior 
to that time a father could enter into a marriage or concubinage agreement 
without a child’s approval and unlike a son who might be ‘sold’ into an 
apprenticeship, the contract for marriage was binding for a lifetime.  Later 
portions of Torah Text and discussions in the Talmud deal with ways that a 
daughter so contracted could get out of such a paternal agreement and it is 
also quite specific that once a girl was 12 she had final say on who she 
would marry.

Now you can disagree with how Jewish Law handled marriage and children below 
the age of consent 2000-3000 years ago, but they were not selling their 
daughters into slavery to make a buck.  That’s the kind of out of context 
thing that Neo-Nazi websites spew and is clearly anti-Semitic.  I called 
your buddy on what he wrote and got back a group of statements which went 
even further down this particular road.

You entered this particular fray to backup your friend, but the truth of the 
matter is that what you propose to do so is outside the bounds of normal 
scholarship on the subject.  I have noticed a similar tendency of avoiding 
inconvenient facts in political discussions in which you engage and a 
general tendency to gloss over cases in which people point out false 
statements that you make in consequence.  That is a great way to deal with 
things as a propagandist, but is not scholarly.

Phil Nisbet

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