(Past) Week in Review
This past week, we had lots of parsha-related posts.
I’ve been talking about Eliyahu Munk’s translations of Biblical commentators. Now, credentials such as ordination doesn’t really matter. There are plenty of people with titles who say nonsense, and people without who make good points. But, I don’t want to not call him rabbi if he was actually ordained. I asked ChatGPT, using RAG (retrieval augmented generation — that is, search) and reasoning, whether he had semicha, and it performed quite poorly. See my analysis there. In the comment section, Happy posted DeepSeek, which did a better job on this task.
In Censored Sefornos on Beshalach, I consider a few non-translations. Maybe because the song is a recap of earlier events? Eliyahu Munk doesn’t translate Seforno that the manna was so fine that one did not layer on the other, and I wonder if that is because of the explanation for having two challot, representing layers of manna. In Rashbam, about Hashem Yimloch leOlam vaEd, the disparity between the actual comment (that after settlement in Israel, Hashem’s kingship will be established in all the kingdoms) and the translation (“will be king forever”) is quite strange…
Meanwhile, in his translation of Chizkuni, Eliyahu Munk explains that he will avoid translating the comments about the grammar of Biblical poetry, because his readers (nor he) are not expert classic Hebrew grammarians. But then, he does so, on the phrase am zu ga’alta. But alas, gets it wrong. Zu means asher, rather than zot, and that is exactly what Chizkuni was trying to say!
Looking at other meforshim, I talk a little bit about the nature of the Torah Temima commentary, and how the essence is the footnotes, not the quoted ma’amarei Chazal. I translate one of them, and give my thoughts, so that we can experience the commentary. The topic is the midrash that Pharaoh escorted the Hebrews out of Egypt. I don’t think there was a scribal error in the Mechilta.
Meanwhile, regarding Daf Yomi, there was my article summary about Rav Sechora, and the question of how Rava could use him as an example of one who taught Rava but a single halacha, when Rava quotes him all the time. My article preview (but posted in full elsewhere, and wait for the summary post) for this past Shabbat was about the group “and all of Rav’s students”.
Also, on Sanhedrin 46b, I discusses who King Shapur was — it was Shapur II — and how his Zoroastrian identity informed the conversation about the requirement of Jewish burial. Zoroastrians believed the proper approach was the tower of silence, in which bodies were exposed to the elements to decay and be eaten by birds.
Finally, in Rav Pappa the Elder, I discuss his appearance citing Rav. He’s second-generation, and likely the father of many of the “bar Pappas” we recite at a siyum. Later in the same sugya is the normal fifth-generation Rav Pappa, so what is the significance of that?
