If we could read and understand the Hebrew language we would read and understand and probably really enjoy the first 19 verses in Chapter 15 of Genesis. These verses were written in beautiful Hebrew language.
In fact, this is one section from the Bible sung in Hebrew. This, according to verse one states, “Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord.”
In the Talmud, there is a passage that says, “The angels too, broke out in song when the Egyptians were drowning in the sea.
But then the Talmud says God rebuked them for singing songs while the Egyptians died.
Do we or should we rejoice in the destruction of our enemy? The Jews check the Talmud to know the answer to that question.
God does not rebuke Moses and the Israelites for singing, He only rebukes the angels for singing. God evidently does not hold people to the same high standards the angels are to possess.
But the Talmud is not direct revelation from God as our Scriptures are.
The Talmud is a collection of writings that covers the full gamut of Jewish law and tradition. It was not compiled and edited until between the third and sixth centuries.
The main text of the Talmud is the Mishnah, a collection of terse teachings written in Hebrew, redacted by Rabbi Yehudah the Prince, in the years following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
Over the next several hundred years, the rabbis continued to teach and expound on these teachings.
Many of those teachings were collected into the Jerusalem Talmud, which contained the teachings of the rabbis in the Land of Israel.
The Talmud was therefore, not direct revelation from God as the Holy Scriptures are. It is a compiled list of what is appropriate for the general population of the Jews.
The Jews believe there is the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old Testament, and also the Oral Torah that helps us understand the Torah.
They believe that just before the giving of the Torah God tells Moses that He will give him “the stone tablets, the Torah and the commandments.”
This leads us to wonder, what is the difference between them?
On Mount Sinai, Moses received both the law of God and a precise set of instructions for the sacrificial system. These were to form the basis of the religious ceremonies of the Israelites.
Both sets of instructions were called the law, but they were different in that the law of Ten Commandments defined what sin was, whereas the ceremonial law contained the solution to the sin problem. God wrote the Ten Commandments, and Moses wrote the ceremonial law, or book of the law.
Exodus 31:18 says, “And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”
Then Exodus 32:16 says,“And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.”
Then in Deuteronomy 10:1-2 we read: When Moses returned from meeting with God on Sinai he found that the Israelites had made for themselves a golden calf to worship. Moses was so angry that he broke the tablets of stone. Then God said to him, “Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and come up unto me into the mount, and make thee an ark of wood. And I will write on the tables the words that were in the first tables which thou brakest, and thou shalt put them in the ark.”
Moses commanded the Levites to take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee
The Ceremonial Law of types and ceremonies was written by Moses in the book of the law, and was placed beside the table of stone in the Ark.
These two sets of laws, the one moral and the other ceremonial, were thus entirely different and served different purposes.
And then there is The Oral Torah. It is like an owner’s manual and or a companion guide to the Torah.
With it we can understand what the Torah mean, and determine the details of the various commandments.
They are convinced that just before the giving of the Torah on Mt Sinai, God tells Moses that He will give him “the stone tablets and the Torah”.
By adding the word “commandments” in addition to the Torah, God implies that there are commandments not included in the Torah.
These are the oral commandments that were passed down from generation to generation, from Moses to Joshua and then down to the leaders and sages of each generation until eventually, after the destruction of the Second Temple, they were written down in what is known as the Mishnah.
How much easier life is in this “age of Grace”. We have Paul’s writing telling us what God will do for us and what we are encouraged to do for Him.
For by Grace are we saved…
We don’t have to study all the books telling us what to read or how to live.
Praise to God for accepting our simple faith.
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