Niddah 8b ~ A Baby Born After Eight Months

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נדה ח, ב

דאיכא דילדה לט' ואיכא דילדה לשבעה

Some women give birth after nine months, and some after seven months…

Hang on. What about women who give birth after eight months? Why aren’t they on this brief list? The answer is that in talmudic times, a baby born after eight months of gestation was thought to be unable to survive.

A Baby at the Window

Here is an example. In a passage from the tractate Bava Basra we read a list of objects which, if placed in an opening between rooms, blocks the tumah (ritual impurity) from passing from one room into the next. Among that list is a baby born after only eight months of gestation:

בבא בתרא כ, א

 עשבין שתלשן והניחן בחלון או שעלו מאליהן בחלונות ומטלוניות שאין בהן שלש על שלש והאבר והבשר המדולדלין בבהמה ובחיה ועוף ששכן בחלון ועובד כוכבים שישב בחלון ובן שמנה המונח בחלון והמלח וכלי חרס וספר תורה כולם ממעטין בחלון 

Grass that was plucked and placed in an opening, or grass that grew by itself in an opening; scraps of fabric that are smaller than three by three fingerbreadths; a partially severed limb or a piece of flesh hanging from a domestic or a wild animal; a bird resting in an opening; an idol worshipper sitting in an opening; a baby born after only eight months of gestation lying in an opening; salt, earthenware vessels and a Torah scroll -all of these reduce the size of the opening and so prevent the tumah from passing through it.

The Talmud then questions this ruling about the premature child lying on a window between two rooms, one if which contains a source of tumah. Won't the mother of the baby carry the child away? How then can we suggest it will be a barrier to the tumah? The Talmud, as always, has a solution: the case is regarding a child born prematurely on Shabbat. Such a child is mukzteh, that is, it is in a category of objects that must not be moved on Shabbat: 

דתניא בן שמנה הרי הוא כאבן ואסור לטלטלו בשבת

For it was taught in a Braisa. A baby born at eight months of gestation is treated like a stone [on Shabbat, because it is muktzeh.]

The premature baby is given the status of a stone because it was not considered to be viable, and as a non-viable human being it does not contract ritual impurity. So that's why the premature baby is listed along with grass, idol worshippers, and the severed limbs of cattle as preventing the transmission of tumah. Got it?

When we studied Yevamot we came across another case which pivoted on the viability of babies born at seven vs. eight months of gestation. The question there was about proving the paternity of a child, and the discussion hinges on the belief that while a child born after seven months of gestation would be viable, a child born at eight months gestation would not be so.  Rashi noted the following: בר תמניא לא חיי -  "an eight month fetus cannot survive." And so now we can ask, where on earth does this notion come from? 

“it is the women who make the judgments and ... insist that the eighth-month babies do not survive, but the others do.”

— Hippocrates, On the Seventh-Month Child

Seven vs Eight Months of gestation in antiquity

Homer's Iliad, written around the 8th century BCE,  records that a seven month fetus could survive. But it is not until Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE, or some 500 years before Shmuel), that we find a record of the belief that a fetus of eight months' gestation cannot survive, while a seventh month fetus (and certainly one of nine months gestation) can.  His Peri Eptamenou (On the Seventh Month Embryo) and Peri Oktamenou (On the Eight-Month Embryo) date from the end of the fifth century BCE, but this belief is viewed with skepticism by Aristotle.

In Egypt, and in some other places where the women are fruitful and are wont to bear and bring forth many children without difficulty, and where the children when born are capable of living even if they be born subject to deformity, in these places the eight-months' children live and are brought up, but in Greece it is only a few of them that survive while most perish. And this being the general experience, when such a child does happen to survive the mother is apt to think that it was not an eight months' child after all, but that she had conceived at an earlier period without being aware of it.

The belief that an eight month fetus cannot survive has a halakhic ramification: Maimonides ruled that if a boy was born prematurely in the eighth month of his gestation and the day of his circumcision (eight days after his birth) fell out on Shabbat, the circumcision - which otherwise would indeed occur on Shabbat, is postponed until Sunday, the ninth day after his birth. 

רמב׳ם הל' מילה יד, א

מי שנולד בחדש השמיני לעבורו קודם שתגמר ברייתו שהוא כנפל מפני שאינו חי... אין דוחין השבת אלא נימולין באחד בשבת שהוא יום תשיעי שלהן

A child born after eight months of gestation before being fully formed is treated as a stillbirth because it will not live...and we do not set aside the laws of Shabbat [to circumcise him] but he is circumcised on Sunday, which is the ninth day of his life.

This belief persisted well into the early modern era. Here is a state–of–the–art medical text published in 1636 by John Sadler.  Read what he has to say on the reasons that an eight month fetus cannot survive (and note the name of the publisher at the bottom of the title page-surely somewhat of a rarity then): 

Saturn predominates in the eighth month of pregnancy, and since that planet is "cold and dry"," it destroys the nature of the childe". That, or some odd yearning of the child to be born in the seventh but not the eight month (according to Hippocrates) is the reason that a child born at seven and nine months' gestation may survive, but not one born at after only eight months. 

Evidence from Modern Medicine

Today we know that gestational length is of course critical, and that, all things being equal, the closer the gestational length is to full term, the greater the likelihood of survival. We can state with great certainty, that an infant born at 32 weeks or later (that's about eight months) is in fact more likely to survive than one born at 28 weeks (a seven month gestation.) In fact, a seven month fetus has a survival rate of 38-90% (depending on its birthweight), while an eight month fetus has a survival rate of 50-98%. Here is the data, taken from a British study.

Draper, ES, Manktelow B, Field DJ, James D. Prediction of survival for preterm births by weight and gestational age: retrospective population based study British Medical Journal 1999; 319:1093.

More recently, a study from the Technion in Haifa showed that even the last six weeks of pregnancy play a critical role in the development of the fetus. This study found a threefold increase in the infant death rate in those born between  34 and 37 weeks when compared full term babies.  

You can read more on the history of the eight month fetus in a 1988 paper by Rosemary Reiss and Avner Ash.  From what we have reviewed, the talmudic belief that a seven month fetus can survive but an eight month fetus cannot is one that was widely shared in the ancient world, and even in the early modern era.  But all the evidence we have today firmly demonstrates that it is simply not true.

[Mostly a repost from here.]

Niddah 2a ~ The Ethnography of Menstruation Taboos

How the uterus lining builds up and breaks down during the menstrual cycle.

Today we start to learn the very last tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, called Niddah. It addresses the laws of a woman who is menstruating: how she becomes ritually impure, what she ritually contaminates, how she is forbidden to have sexual relations with her husband, and how she may leave her status and become ritually pure. To this day many of these laws are carefully followed by religious Jewish couples who observe periods of sexual abstinence during and following the menstrual period.

It’s Not Just Judaism

It is not just the Jewish tradition that identifies menstruation with ritual impurity (and physical danger). Mary Douglas in her now classic work Purity and Danger noted that this connection was found among many disparate cultures. For example (and there are many) the Mae Enga from the Central Highland of New Guinea also have strong beliefs about sexual pollution. “They believe that contact with it or with a menstruating women will, in the absence of appropriate counter-magic, sicken a man and cause persistent vomiting, “kill” his blood so that it turns black, corrupt his vital juices so that his skin darkens and hangs in folds as his flesh wastes, permanently dull his wits, and eventually lead to a slow decline and death.” And then there are the Lele, a group that lives in the Kinshasa region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here is Douglas (P&D 152):

… a menstruating [Lele] woman could not cook for her husband or poke the fire, lest he fall ill. She could prepare the food, but when it came to approaching the fire she had to call a friend in to help. These dangers were only risked by men, not by other women or children. Finally, a menstruating woman was a danger to the whole community if she entered the forest. Not only was her menstruation certain to wreck any enterprise in the forest that she might undertake, but it was thought to produce unfavourable conditions for men.

According to the South Sudan News Agency, (which claims to be “South Sudan’s Leading Independent News Source”) the Nuer (the second largest tribe in South Sudan) also have their own version of the laws of Niddah:

Many aspects of the Nuer culture are sometimes similar to the cultural aspects of the Bible’s Old Testament people which include feature of their social structure, the kinship reckoning and the extended family aspects of marriage, divorce, rite of passage and even religious concepts of God, spirits, sin and sacrifice. In the spiritual beliefs of Nuer culture, “women who are having their menstrual period cannot drink milk, visit the cattle area or eat food that had been cooked in kettle used for boiling milk because doing so would be harmful to the cattle.”

The Koran (not the Koren) also records a warning against intimacy with a menstruating woman:

And they ask you about menstruation; Say It is harm, so keep away from women during menstruation; And do not approach them until they become pure And when they have purified themselves, then come to them from where Allah has ordained for you; Indeed, Allah loves those who are constantly repentant and loves those who purify themselves. (Al-Quran 2:222-223)

And what about Hindus? In 2011, two Indian researchers published an analysis of the social and cultural practices regarding menstruation. They studied a group of Indian adolescent girls and their mothers from various communities and classes in Ranchi in eastern India, and found that both Hindu (and Moslem) women practiced varying menstrual taboos:

Hindu girls reported restricting themselves from religious practices during menstruation whereas Muslim (follower of Islam) girls reported that they do not touch religious books or read ‘‘Namaz’’ or even do not go to the ‘‘Mazaar (shrine).’’ Even the Sarna tribe girls do not go to the ‘‘Sarnasthal (Worship place of Sarna people)’’ during menstruation however, Christian girls reported that they worship and attend church during menses and can even touch and read the holy Bible.

If you want to get a sense of prevailing attitudes about menstruation at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, try this, written by Pliny the Elder written around 79 CE in his famous work Natural History (7:15):

But it would be difficult to find anything more bizarre than a woman's menstrual flow. Proximity to it turns new wine sour; crops tainted with it are barren, grafts die, garden seedlings shrivel, fruit falls from the tree on which it is growing, mirrors are clouded by its very reflection, knife blades are blunted, the gleam of ivory dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are instantly corroded by rust and a dreadful smell contaminates the air.

Ritual impurity as disorder

One of Mary Douglas’ many contributions to the ethnographic study of purity is her analysis of the concept of “dirt”:

If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements…. It is a relative idea. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing…(P&D 36-37)

Perhaps then, rabbinic hierarchies of ritual purity and impurity were an attempt to identify "matter out of place.” Douglas wrote that “if uncleanness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order.” Which is precisely what the complicated laws found in this tractate attempt to do.

“...the binary, pure/impure structure at the base of nidah also imposed order on the chaos.”

— Shai Secunda. The Talmud's Red Fence. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Shai Secunda and the Iranian Talmud

Shai Secunda is Associate Professor of Judaism at Bard College and the Persian language consultant for Koren’s Steinsaltz Talmud. He is a scholar of the historic Iran in which the Babylonian Talmud was produced, and he has written a new and invaluable book when it comes to the history of the Jewish laws of Niddah: The Talmud's Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Contex. Alas you will need to wait until 2020 for Oxford University Press to publish it. What makes his book really interesting is that it he reads talmudic passages alongside texts composed by the neighboring religious communities in the Sasanian Empire, which was comprised of “an impressively diverse spectrum of religious communities including, among others, Christians, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, Jews, and Zoroastrians.” The empire lasted from 224-651 CE and was the last Persian kingdom before the rise of Islam. It was inside of this empire that the Babylonian Talmud was composed. He noted for example, that in Zoroastrian tradition there was a myth about the dangerous powers of the gaze of menstruating women. (You can find more examples in his 2014 paper The Fractious Eye: On the Evil Eye of Menstruants in Zoroastrian Tradition.)

And she should not look at the sun nor at the other luminaries. And she should not look at cattle and plants. And she should not engage in conversation with a righteous man, for a demon of such violence is the demon of menstruation that, [where] the other demons do not strike things with the evil eye, this one strikes [them] with the evil eye.

The Zoroastrian Parallels of Niddah

Secunda notes some important parallels between this Zoroastrian tradition and some of the laws of Niddah that were formulated in the Babylonian Talmud. Take for example the Middle Persian compilation known as Sayist ne Sayist. Here is an excerpt, translated by Secunda:

A menstruant woman who becomes clean within a three-night period, should not wash until the fifth day. And from the fifth day to the ninth day, whenever she becomes clean, she is to keep sitting in cleanness for one day for the waiting period. Afterwards, she should wash in the usual way. And after the nine-day waiting period, the waiting period is not an issue...

[Regarding] the menstruant woman, if she has sat in [a state of] menstruation for one month and she [still] is not clean on the thirtieth day, even if she at that time did become clean, and afterwards again became a menstruant, then the [requirement of] the waiting period goes back to the beginning, and it is not authorized for her to wash until the fifth day.

“As the text makes clear,” he writes, “according to Zoroastrian law a woman cannot simply purify herself as soon as her menstrual flow ceases, rather she must wait additional time before purification is allowed. The technical Middle Persian term for the additional day is tayag – “(waiting) period,” while the practice of observing it is known as “sitting in cleanness.”  This stringency reminds us of another (Niddah 66a), this one enacted by the Jews in Babylon (and still practiced today):

R. Zeira said: The daughters of Israel were stringent on themselves that even if they see a drop of [vaginal] blood like [the size of] a mustard-seed, they sit [and wait] seven clean [days] on account of it.

Secunda notes that “as it is introduced here, the origin of the described custom is not located in Biblical law, nor is it a legacy of rabbinic legislation, rather, it is attributed to Jewish women who are said to have taken up the stringency on their own.” Thus there is

evidence that two religious communities living alongside Babylonian Jewry deliberately extended ritual impurity even beyond the actual menstrual period. Mandaean authorities strenuously maintained that a couple must wait for a final, post-menstrual baptism before reuniting sexually. Sasanian Zoroastrian priests put considerable effort into establishing, delineating, and debating a one-day ritual waiting period, which was exegetically linked to a section of their scriptures. In short, all three religious communities tried, in their own way, to extend ritual impurity beyond the menstrual flow.

Then Secunda suggests this, which he acknowledges is “entirely within the realm of speculation.”

How might we envisage the role that the Sasanian religious context may potentially have played in the invention of the Jewish “clean day” stringency? In light of our above focus on the attribution of the stringency to the “Daughters of Israel,” perhaps it was specifically Jewish women who acted as a conduit for outside religious influence. It could be argued that female piety draws more easily on neighboring female practices – even ones initiated by male religious authorities, like Zoroastrian priests. Unlike rigorously policed rabbinic discourse, Jewish women could have conceivably “traded notes” with their gentile neighbors with far greater ease than their male compatriots, allowing for a more seamless adoption of new customs and approaches…

In some of his early work on the relationship between Babylonian Jewry and Sasanian Zoroastrianism, Yaakov Elman posited a kind of one- upmanship – in his formulation, a “holier than thou syndrome” – between Jewish and Zoroastrian women. One dynamic of this competition would be that Jewish women could argue that their approach of waiting a full seven days following their period was more stringent, purer, and thus more efficacious, than both the Mandaean and Zoroastrian systems.

There is a great deal more of interest in Secunda’s book, which finishes with these wise words:

Not only do observant Jews still practice the strictures of nidah, difference and differentiation remain an important part of the calculus. To this day, one of the measures by which religious Jews identify themselves as religious is based on the observance of “family purity” – as the laws of nidah are commonly known…. 

Whether we like it or not, difference continues to form the bedrock of meaning and with it, human culture and society. …systems of purity and impurity, with their differences and distinctions, are here to stay. We might as well try to make sense of them.

Middot 37b ~ The Lineage of the Cohen

On the very last page of the tractate Middot that deals with the architecture of the Temple in Jerusalem, we read this touching scene described in the Mishnah:

מדות לז, ב

לִשְׁכַּת הַגָּזִית, שָׁם הָיְתָה סַנְהֶדְרִי גְדוֹלָה שֶׁל יִשְׂרָאֵל יוֹשֶׁבֶת וְדָנָה אֶת הַכְּהֻנָּה, וְכֹהֵן שֶׁנִּמְצָא בוֹ פְסוּל, לוֹבֵשׁ שְׁחוֹרִים וּמִתְעַטֵּף שְׁחוֹרִים, וְיוֹצֵא וְהוֹלֵךְ לוֹ. וְשֶׁלֹּא נִמְצָא בוֹ פְסוּל, לוֹבֵשׁ לְבָנִים וּמִתְעַטֵּף לְבָנִים, נִכְנָס וּמְשַׁמֵּשׁ עִם אֶחָיו הַכֹּהֲנִים. וְיוֹם טוֹב הָיוּ עוֹשִׂים, שֶׁלֹּא נִמְצָא פְסוּל בְּזַרְעוֹ שֶׁל אַהֲרֹן הַכֹּהֵן, וְכָךְ הָיוּ אוֹמְרִים, בָּרוּךְ הַמָּקוֹם בָּרוּךְ הוּא, שֶׁלֹּא נִמְצָא פְסוּל בְּזַרְעוֹ שֶׁל אַהֲרֹן. וּבָרוּךְ הוּא, שֶׁבָּחַר בְּאַהֲרֹן וּבְבָנָיו לַעֲמֹד לְשָׁרֵת לִפְנֵי ה' בְּבֵית קָדְשֵׁי הַקֳּדָשִׁים:

In the chamber of hewn stone the great Sanhedrin of Israel used to sit and judge the priesthood. A priest in whom was found a disqualification used to put on black garments and wrap himself in black and leave the premises of the Temple. One in whom no disqualification was found used to put on white garments and wrap himself in white and go in and serve along with his brother priests. They used to make a feast because no blemish had been found in the seed of Aaron the priest, and they used to say: Blessed is the Omnipresent, blessed is He, for no blemish has been found in the seed of Aaron. Blessed is He who chose Aaron and his sons to stand to minister before the Lord in the Holy of Holies.

What was the “disqualification” about which the Mishnah speaks? It arose as a result of aspersions about the lineage of the Cohen, as Maimonides describes in his Mishnah Torah:

רמב’ם חל׳ ביאת המקדש, ו, יא

בֵּית דִּין הַגָּדוֹל הָיוּ יוֹשְׁבִין בְּלִשְׁכַּת הַגָּזִית. וְעִקַּר מַעֲשֵׂיהֶם הַתָּדִיר שֶׁהָיוּ יוֹשְׁבִין וְּדָנִין אֶת הַכְּהֻנָּה וּבוֹדְקִין הַכֹּהֲנִים בְּיוּחֲסִין וּבְמוּמִין. כָּל כֹּהֵן שֶׁנִּמְצָא פָּסוּל בְּיִחוּסוֹ לוֹבֵשׁ שְׁחוֹרִים וּמִתְעַטֵּף שְׁחוֹרִים וְיוֹצֵא מִן הָעֲזָרָה. וְכָל מִי שֶׁנִּמְצָא שָׁלֵם וְכָשֵׁר לוֹבֵשׁ לְבָנִים וְנִכְנָס וּמְשַׁמֵּשׁ עִם אֶחָיו הַכֹּהֲנִים

The Great Court sat in the Chamber of Hewn Stone. Their most important and most frequent task was to rule on the ancestry and disqualifications of the priests [who served in the Temple]. Any priest in whom there was a disqualification because of their ancestry would dress in black and wear a black headscarf and would leave the Courtyard. And a priest who was found to be of appropriate ancestry would dress in white and enter to serve with his fellow priests.

The decision would be made on the testimony of priest and those who knew of his lineage, as described in this Mishnah :

משנה כתובות דף כג עמוד ב 

וכן שני אנשים, זה אומר כהן אני וזה אומר כהן אני - אינן נאמנין, ובזמן שהן מעידין זה את זה - הרי אלו נאמנין; רבי יהודה אומר: אין מעלין לכהונה על פי עד אחד

Likewise in the case of two men; one says, "I am a Cohen", and the other says "I am a Cohen", they are not believed. If however they testify about one another they are believed. R. Yehuda said: we do not elevate [a person] to the status of Cohen based on the testimony of only one witness....

But what if the Cohen was mistaken about his ancestors? What if the witnesses were being paid to dupe the locals into believing the Cohen was legitimate? Is there an alternative to the methods mentioned in this Mishnah? In today’s world of genetic testing there just might be.

The Saturday Night Live Cohen 

My friend Misha Galperin, (the former CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and  CEO of International Development at The Jewish Agency) is a Cohen. Only he didn't know it when he arrived in America from the Soviet Union.  Here's what happened, as told to me in a recent email that he kindly allowed me to share:

Five months after arriving in the US, I am sitting in the lounge of Yeshiva University's dorm watching SNL with my tutor who was teaching me Alef Bet is so I can start classes on Monday.
A skit starts with guest host Leonard Nimoy dressed as Mr. Spock - with ears - and at the end he raises his right palm in the symbolic gesture and says: "Live long and prosper!"
I turn to the tutor and ask him what this gesture means. Why?--he asks. "Because my father taught me this, and his father taught it to him before being murdered by Nazis in 1941. My father did not know what it meant, but he taught me..."

And so Misha learned that he was a Cohen from Saturday Night Live. But not all Cohanim are so lucky. (Fun fact: Leonard Nimoy ז’ל wrote about his decision to give Mr. Spock this priestly hand salute in his 1997 autobiography I Am Not Spock.)  With neither witnesses nor TV to help, is there another way to establish one's genealogy as a member of the priestly class? That's where the Cohen Gene comes in.  

The Cohen Gene

If all Cohanim are descended from Aaron, and the privilege is only transmitted from father to son, then perhaps being a Cohen can be genetically linked to a chromosome that is only passed from father to son. And there is such a chromosome. It's the Y chromosome, and all (fertile) men carry a copy that comes only from their biological father. (Quick recap: girls are XX and boys are XY. So all girls carry one X chromosome from mum and one X chromosome from dad. Boys, on the other hand, only get their X chromosome from mum, and their Y chromosome from dad. This can lead to other problems like hemophilia, which we've talked about elsewhere.) That's exactly what prompted  Karl Skorecki from the Technion, and colleagues from University College London, to analyze the Y chromosome in Cohanim and compare it to the rest of the Jewish population.  In 1997 they published a paper in Nature that looked at a special bit of the Y chromosome called YAP. Actually, they looked at 6 kinds of the YAP haplotype, (a haplotype being what geneticists call bunches of DNA sequences), and compared their frequency in Cohanim and non-Cohanim.    

Skorecki K, et al. Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests. Nature 1997. 385:32.

As you can see highlighted, the YAP+ haplotype was found in only 1.5% of those who self-identified as Cohanim, but in over 18% of non-Cohanim.  The different frequency was found in both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Cohanim,  a result that the authors claimed was "consistent with an origin for the Jewish priesthood antedating the division of world Jewry into Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities."

“These Y-chromosome haplotype differences confirm a distinct paternal geneology for Jewish priests.”

— Skorecki et al. Nature 1997. 385: 32.

David Goldstein, who directs the  Center for Human Genome Variation at Duke University, also published a study on the Y-chromosome of Cohanim, using a sample that included the DNA swabbed "from the mouths of sunbathers on the beaches of Tel Aviv." Here is what Goldstein concluded:

Despite the high levels of variation, we could see a clear difference between Cohen and Israelite chromosomes. The most common chromosomes observed in the Israelites (that is, non-Cohen and non-Levite Jews) were found in only 12% of the Israelite individuals sampled. By contrast, more that half of the Cohen Y chromosomes were identical at the sites considered - that is, the majority of the self-identified Cohanim had the same type of Y chromosome. Even more remarkable, this same type of Y was found at high frequencies in both Ashkenazi (45%) and Sephardi (56%) Cohanim. (Goldstein, p.31)

Goldstein named this chromosome type the Cohen Modal Haplotype, and claimed that it showed "definitively" that Cohen status was not adopted (i.e. made up by some, eager for the benefits) but inherited.  And now things started to get really interesting. 

Dating the Original Aaron

So all, (all right, not all, but certainly most) of the approximately 500,000 Cohanim alive today seem to have originated from a common ancestor - a primordial Cohen. And just when did he live? Well, by analyzing small differences in the Cohen Modal Haplotype, and assuming that a generation time is 25 years, Goldstein et al. stated (with a confidence interval of 95%) that the origin of the priestly Y chromosome was "sometime during or shortly before the Temple period in Jewish history."

Not So Fast...

OK, a couple of things need to be noted here, before anyone claims that "genetics proves the Bible." First- as Goldstein himself notes in his book, his numbers may be off, by quite a bit:

Permit me here, after what was for me the first - and still one of the few - real thrills of discovery that punctuate the tedium and detail of science, the necessary reality check. Our results appeared to be a striking confirmation of the oral tradition. It even led to repeated claims in the press that my colleagues and I "found Aaron's Y chromosome." But although three thousand years is our best guess [as to when Primordial Cohen may have lived] the range of possible dates was and is very broad. Given our uncertainty about the ways mutations happen and how fast, we may be off by several hundred years or more in either direction. (Goldstein p.38).

Second, some later work done by Skorecki (he of the Technion 1997 Nature paper) suggests that the class of Cohanim may have had more than one common ancestor.  This work posits that there was not one primordial Cohen, but a few clans of Cohanim, from whom all later Cohanim are descended. (Or more technically stated:"...lineages characterized by the 6 Y-STRs used to define the original Cohen Modal Haplotype are associated with two divergent sub-clades...and thus cannot be assumed to represent a single recently expanding paternal lineage.")

And finally, work from Brigham Young University (and boy, those guys are really into ancestry) reminds anyone looking to do a quick Cohen DNA test to be careful.

The Cohen Modal Haplotype is observed in high frequency within the Cohanim, but also presents with significant incidence in other non-Jewish populations. The occurrence of the CMH in deeply divergent SNP haplogroups also indicates a lack of specificity of the CMH to the ancient Hebrew population. As such, inference of relation to Jewish populations for individuals or groups should be performed with caution when using the original CMH definition, as a false-positive result is likely.

 "A false positive is likely" - in other words, the test may show you are a Cohen, but really...you aren't. 

Genetic Testing - It's Not Just for Cohanim

And now that a Cohen "Gene" may have been identified, what about the rest of us non-Cohanim? Some have used genetic testing to discover a forgotten heritage or find long-lost cousins.  One rather keen family member of Polonsky rabbinic lineage (claiming in passing to be descended from King David, the Kalonymos family, and Rashi) used the presence of a "relatively rare R-M124 haplotype" on the Y chromosome to confirm a common ancestor and find a new marker that represents "Polonsky rabbinic lineage." (I confess I am jealous. My grandfather drove a black London taxi, and last time I checked, Rashi was not one of my known ancestors.) 

It's Not About Your Ancestors, It's About You

רמב"ם הלכות שמיטה ויובל פרק יג הלכות יב –יג 

ולמה לא זכה לוי בנחלת ארץ ישראל ובביזתה עם אחיו? מפני שהובדל לעבוד את יי לשרתו ולהורות דרכיו הישרים ומשפטיו הצדיקים לרבים שנאמר יורו משפטיך ליעקב ותורתך לישראל, לפיכך הובדלו מדרכי העולם לא עורכין מלחמה כשאר ישראל ולא נוחלין ולא זוכין לעצמן בכח גופן, אלא הם חיל השם שנאמר ברך יי חילו, והוא ברוך הוא זוכה להם, שנאמר: אני חלקך ונחלתך

ולא שבט לוי בלבד אלא כל איש ואיש מכל באי העולם אשר נדבה רוחו אותו והבינו מדע להבדל לעמוד לפני יי לשרתו ולעובדו לדעה את יי והלך ישר כמו שעשהו האלהים ופרק מעל צוארו עול החשבונות הרבים אשר בקשו בני האדם הרי זה נתקדש קדש קדשים. ויהיה יי חלקו ונחלתו לעולם ולעולמי עולמים ויזכה לו בעה"ז דבר המספיק לו כמו שזכה לכהנים ללוים, הרי דוד עליו השלום אומר: יי מנת חלקי וכוסי אתה תומיך גורלי

Why did the Levi'im not receive a portion in the inheritance in Israel and in the spoils of war like their brethren? Because they were set aside to serve God, to minister to Him and to instruct the masses about His just paths and righteous judgments... Therefore they were set apart from the mundane matters of the world. They do not wage war like the remainder of the Jewish people, nor do they receive an inheritance, nor do they acquire for themselves through their physical power. Instead, they are God's legion...and He provides for them...

Not only the tribe of Levi, but any human whose spirit moves him and who understands with his wisdom to set himself aside and stand before God - to serve Him and minister to Him and to know Him, proceeding justly as God made him, removing from his neck the yoke of the many mundane things which people seek - that person is sanctified like the Holy of Holies [in the Temple]. God will be his portion and heritage forever and will provide what is sufficient for him in this world, just as He provides for the Cohanim and the Levi'im...

Maimonides, in his Mishnah Torah,  reminds us about what is really important. It's not bringing a witness into town and telling everyone who your ancestors are. And it's not getting a DNA test to prove your stock. It's about searching for religious meaning in a world of materialism.  And that search is open to anyone, woman or man, Jew or not, Cohen, Levi, or even a plain old Yisrael.  

[Repost from Ketuvot 23b]

Middot 34a ~ The Temple as a Model of the Solar System

The Second Temple in Jerusalem. On the right are the three northern gates into the courtyard. From front to back they are The Women’s Gate (שער הנשים), The Gate of the Offering (שער הקרבן), and The Gate of the Ray (שער הניצוץ).

In tomorrow’s page of Talmud, we read the following Mishnah that describes the architecture of the Temple in Jerusalem.

מדות לד, א

שִׁבְעָה שְׁעָרִים הָיוּ בָעֲזָרָה, שְׁלשָׁה בַצָּפוֹן וּשְׁלשָׁה בַדָּרוֹם וְאֶחָד בַּמִּזְרָח. שֶׁבַּדָּרוֹם, שַׁעַר הַדֶּלֶק. שֵׁנִי לוֹ, שַׁעַר הַבְּכוֹרוֹת. שְׁלִישִׁי לוֹ, שַׁעַר הַמָּיִם. שֶׁבַּמִּזְרָח, שַׁעַר נִקָּנוֹר, וּשְׁתֵּי לְשָׁכוֹת הָיוּ לוֹ, אַחַת מִימִינוֹ וְאַחַת מִשְּׂמֹאלוֹ, אַחַת לִשְׁכַּת פִּנְחָס הַמַּלְבִּישׁ, וְאַחַת לִשְׁכַּת עוֹשֵׂי חֲבִתִּין

There were seven gates in the courtyard [of the Temple the stood in Jerusalem]: three in the north and three in the south and one in the east. In the south: the Gate of Kindling, and next to it the Gate of the First-borns, and then the Water Gate. In the east: the Gate of Nicanor. It had two chambers, one on its right and one on its left. One was the chamber of Pinchas the dresser and one the other the chamber of the griddle cake makers.

The Temple was not only the physical resting place of God on earth. It was also a model of the universe itself, and built into it was the very structure of our solar system. Here’s how.

Rabbi Moses Isserles: Halachist and Astronomer

For Ashkenazi Jews who practice their faith, perhaps the most important figure is Rabbi Moses Isserles (d. 1572). R. Isserles, better known by his acronym as the Rema, earned this accolade because of his gloss on the Shulhan Arukh, the code of Jewish law, which had been written by a Sephardic Jew, Joseph Caro (d. 1575). Caro’s magnum opus was the defining code of Jewish law, but it had a serious deficiency in that it lacked the customs and rulings of the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany and Poland. Moses Isserles redressed this defect by writing a commentary and supplement for the Ashkenazi Jews, and as a result the Shulhan Arukh with Isserles’ gloss became the authoritative code and guide for all Polish-German Jews. The Shulhan Arukh was first published in Venice in 1565 and went through six editions in Caro’s lifetime alone, with Isserles’ gloss becoming the authoritative reference work for Ashkenazi Jews. 

But the Rema’s scholarship was not limited to the vast field of Jewish law, and he was deeply interested in astronomy. He wrote a commentary on the Hebrew translation of Georg Peuerbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum (New Theories of Planets), which had been published in 1473. He also wrote a more esoteric work of astronomy entitled Torat Ha’olah (The Laws of the Burned Sacrifice), in which he demonstrated how the Temple in Jerusalem symbolized a wide range of astronomical phenomena. The Rema claimed that there was a direct numerical relationship between the Temple and these phenomena, and he wove together a wide range of earlier rabbinic sources and non-Jewish astronomers to prove his thesis. For example, he wrote that the altar of the Temple corresponded to the layout of the heavens, and that the seven gates leading into the temple corresponded to the seven planets.

The Azarah [the large courtyard in the Temple] was a reflection of the World of the Spheres as we have explained, which is why they stated that it had seven gates, which represented the seven planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. For each of these planets has its own gate in its own particular path, and the path of one is not like the path of another. Three of the gates in the Temple are on the left and three on the right, representing the three planets to the right of the sun which are the major ones. These are hinted to in the gates on the east, as I will explain. And the three gates to the left represent the three planets to the left of the Sun which stands in the middle, like a king in the middle of his soldiers. And in truth this fact has persuaded the astronomers to believe that the sun is at the center of all the stars [Torat Ha’olah 12b].

Philo: The Menorah was also a Model of the Solar System

The Rema was following a long tradition of ascribing allegorical meaning to the Temple and its various contents. Perhaps the earliest to do so was Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish biblical commentator who lived in the first century. He wrote of the allegorical meaning of the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that was placed in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple in Jerusalem:

[F]rom this candlestick there proceeded six branches, three on each side, projecting from the candlestick in the center, so as altogether to complete the number of seven; and in all the seven there were seven candles and seven lights, being symbols of those seven stars which are called planets by those men who are versed in natural philosophy; for the sun, like the candlestick, being placed in the middle of the other six, in the fourth rank, gives light to the three planets which are above it, and to those of equal number which are below it, adapting to circumstances the musical and truly divine instrument.

The menorah as symbol of the order of the planets from the Earth. From here. Don’t be confused - this is not a model of the heliocentric solar system. Rather, the sun is the fourth of seven ‘planets’ from Earth, so it is in the middle.

The famous Spanish commentator Isaac ben Moses Arama (c. 1420–1494) also described the Menorah as a model of the solar system, in his commentary on the Torah called Akedat Yitzhak (The Binding of Isaac). It is fascinating to read see how Arama weaved the Ptolemaic geocentric system into his allegorical interpretation of the menorah, echoing Philo’s commentary:

The Sun is the central branch, for it is that which is required to lead all the others. [The three branches on each side represent] the three planets, three on one side and three on the other, which serve to help and support the perfection of one’s intentions. . . .

It is easy to mistakenly read Arama’s allegorical interpretation as placing the Sun at the center of the solar system, but this is not what he described. Rather, Arama outlined the order of the planets of the Ptolemaic system. These were the seven planets in the order in which they orbited the Earth, with the Moon closest and Saturn furthest away, as shown in the figure above.

Allegory is re-interpreted…allegorically

Although Isaac Arama’s interpretation would have been understood in the early-fifteenth-century pre-Copernican world, this allegory made no sense if the Sun was not the fourth planet of seven presumed to be orbiting the Earth. Hayyim Yosef Pollak, a nineteenth-century rabbi who wrote a commentary onAkedat Yitzhak, noted this problem. Pollak paraphrased Arama’s explanation in a post-Copernican way:

The six branches that come out from the sides hint at the six types of partial wisdom [contained in the Torah] that help to complete the main type of wisdom [represented by the central branch]. . . . You can also imagine the Sun is the largest and most central of the planets, and around it orbit the other six planets. . . .

Although both Arama and Pollak interpreted the central branch of the menorah as allegorically representing the Sun, their cosmology was completely different. Pollak’s interpretation is not in fact what Arama had originally written, leading to the curious, if not entirely unexpected, situation of an allegorical explanation itself being interpreted allegorically. 

The Menorah and the Catholic Church

A similar exegesis was made by a Carmelite priest from Calabria in southern Italy, Paolo Antonio Foscarini, in a letter that he wrote in 1615. Foscarini’s goal was to demonstrate how the Bible could be reconciled with the new Copernican model. In the letter Foscarini suggested that the six branches of the Menorah found in the Temple corresponded to the six “heavens,” or planets, that orbit the Sun.

And could it not be that, in the marvelous structure of the candlestick placed in the Tabernacle of God, our most loving God wished to represent secretly to us the system of the universe and in particular of the planets?…it could be that these branches signify the six heavens which rotate around the sun as follows. Saturn, which is the slowest and furthest away, completes its path around the sun through all twelve signs of the zodiac in thirty years; Jupiter, which is closer, in twelve years; Mars, which is closer still, in two years. The earth, which is closer than that, moves through its path together with the orb of the moon in one year, i.e twelve months. Venus, which is still closer than all of these, in nine months. Finally Mercury, which is closest of all to the sun, in less than three months…

Having described the six branches, the Sacred Text goes on to discuss the cups, the small globes and the flowers [that adorned the branches of the Menorah]…Could it be that these three cups…are intended to signify globes (like our own earth)…? More precisely, could it be that they signify those globes [i.e moons] discovered by the telescope which are associated with Saturn, Jupiter Venus and perhaps other planets…

Alas, the letter (“Concerning the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus About the Mobility of the Earth and the Stability of the Sun”) didn’t get a wide readership. It was was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in March 1616 as “completely prohibited and condemned.”

The Second Temple in Jerusalem was a spectacular building, and its loss is still mourned in our daily prayers. So the next time you gaze up at the starry night, pause for moment to reflect on the grandeur of what once was.

Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889 during his stay at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. From the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[Much of this post is based on New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish reception of Copernican Thought.]