A couple of posters in this thread have run into the same uncertainty about the Jewish faith and the quoting of Scripture. This seems like a no-brainer on the surface, but the more I think about it the less certain I am, so here goes… Do Jews quote Scripture the way that Christians do? When Dubya quoted Psalm 23 as described in the above thread, did that have meaning only for Christians, or for Jews as well? It’s in the Old Testament and therefore part of Jewish belief, right? So I’d think that his words comforted those of the Jewish faith as well as the Christian. However, I don’t think I’ve ever heard/seen a Jew quote Scripture to anyone, whether proselytizing or not. Can someone of the Jewish faith or someone who knows about these things enlighten me?
Jews quote scripture all the time, and the 23rd Psalm is a particular favorite. I remember my Mom telling me about how the rabbi recited it to my uncle just before his open heart surgery.
Two points:
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Jews only quote the Old Testament. Although I accept that New Testament verses are a part of modern American culture (I’m particularly fond of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians – “through a glass darkly” and all that), I sometimes feel uncomfortable when I hear the New Testament quoted, particularly when the speaker appears to be proselytising.
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Depending on their particular beliefs, some Jews may do a large part of their quoting in Hebrew. During religious services and ceremonies such as the Passover seder we quote many passages from the Old Testament in Hebrew, so they might not be recognized by non-Jews as being Bible quotes.
That said, discussion of the fine points of Torah has an ancient and important history in Judaism, which includes extensive quotation of scripture.
While scripture quoting is done it is often done carefully (mainly because short quotes are often taken out of context) when yeshiva scholars study they often refer and quote to commentaries on passages rather than the passages themselves.
Of course quoting New Testament scripture at us is probably pointless.
IANAR (I Am Not A Rabbi) but these are just my experiences…
Not sure what you are asking. Psalm 23 is indeed part of Jewish scripture, and is often recited at funerals and other sad times. I’m sure there are differences in interpretation, however. I imagine many Christians would understand the ubiquitous “He” as referring to Jesus, but we Jews understand it as referring to God.
This is an interesting point. My impression is that to most Christians, the Bible is so important that there is literally nothing else. In Judaism, there is much else; this does not detract from the importance of our Bible in any way, for it is the rock around which the other traditions are built. Prior generations, who were closer to the writing of the Bible than we are, were taught what the its true meaning is, and Jews are careful to use the filter to understand the Bible better. That’s why Jews may tend to quote from all sorts of rabbinic literature and tradition – not because they’re more important than the Bible, but because it is based on the Bible. A big problem everyone has is when to decide when to take the Bible literally, and when to take it metaphorically; we try to solve this by always consulting the commentaries rather than relying on our intuition and guesswork.
I think it should be mentioned that Jews don’t proselytize. It’s not part of the Jewish religion, as it is the Christian.
I think that the question is, do the Jews use the same conventions for referring to passages as do the Christians? In other words, would the identifier (picking some numbers at random) II Kings 17:4 (Second book of Kings, chapter 17, verse 4) refer to the same passage for a Jew and a Christian?
As a practical matter, yes. The paragraph numbers were invented by some Christian scholar and do not conform to paragraph breaks in Jewish tradition. However, they crept into the Jewish editions of the Bible, and there are so many references to them in other works that they are going to stay there.
The Hebrew Bible is broken into chapters and paragraphs (parsha petucha and parsha setuma, in Hebrew), but they were not numbered. The familiar chapter and verse numbering system was designed by the Church in the Middle Ages.
The Jews were forced (that might be too strong a word) to learn to use this system because the Church used it to refer to various verses in the course of the various Church-Synagogue Debates which were held throughout the middle ages, in which the Jews were forced (here it is not too strong a word) to participate.
Even though those debates are no longer held, gotta admit that it is a useful tool for identifying chapters and verses, and so we’ve continued to use it. Two other things I should note, though.
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The chapters divisions as designed by the Church do not always correspond to the traditional Jewish ways of splitting up the book. The Church divides the chapters logically by subject, often segues from one to the next, and keeps the verses connected to show that the topics are connected beneath the surface. For example, Genesis 5:32 is the last verse of that chapter in the Church designation, and that is logical because it lists Noah’s sons, and the whole rest of chapter 5 is a geneological list. But in the Hebrew, there is a break between verses 31 and 32, so that v 32 is connected with the story that follows, because Noah’s sons were so much a part of the story of the Flood.
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I have found that in Psalms, the chapters (i.e., the individual psalms themselves) are divided and numbered exactly the same in Jewish and Christian Bibles. But the verses are not. Many psalms (Ps. 92, for example) contain a title at the beginning, and the Jewish texts count it as verse 1, but the Christian bibles do not count it, or count it as verse 0. The result is that the verse numbering is off by one for the whole psalm, and references can get confusing. In other psalms (#145, for example), the first Hebrew verse contains both title and text, so the numbering is the same in both Jewish and Christian versions.
Besides the Psalms that Keeve mentioned, there are a few other places where the Jewish chapter divisions are different than those in the KJV (and, probably, in other Christian Bibles as well). For example, I Kings chs. 4-5 consist of, respectively, 20 and 32 verses in Jewish Bibles, as compared to 34 and 18 in the KJV.
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(I would guess that the difference is that Jewish scholars saw the middle 14 verses - which describe the opulence of Solomon’s kingdom and the vastness of his wisdom - as an introduction to the diplomatic exchanges between Solomon and Hiram (5:15ff), while Christian scholars took that section to be an appendix to the description of Solomon’s internal administration (4:1-20).
If that’s the case, though, then I wonder why no one thought of splitting the difference and assigning the first eight verses, which deal with internal affairs, to ch. 4, and the rest - about Solomon’s wisdom, which evoked Hiram’s approval - to ch. 5.)
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RedNaxela
Uh, actually, that wasn’t my question, but that’s okay. I know I wasn’t very clear, but that’s mostly because I wasn’t too sure of what I was asking, either. SpoilerVirgin and Keeve pretty much answered what I was looking for. Thanks to everyone who’s contributing to this thread, and sorry I wasn’t more clear in my question.
As for the OP, I’ve heard Israeli politician quote the Bible quite often. However, unlike most American instances, the context isn’t always religious - the “Old Testament” is considered the national epic of the Jewish people, as well as the greatest collection of prose and poetry in the Hebrew language. In a certain way, it’s a lot like a British politico quoting Shakespeare.
I’m glad you pointed this out. Many Christians think of proselytizing as such a natural part of religion that they assume that all religions do it. Fact is that they are the main religion that proselytizes.