From The Vault: Yomah Ma 39b

Well we are less then a month from Rosh HaShanah, and five weeks from Yom Kippur, and I have been reading some relevant material. There is a story I came across in the Talmud related to the Day of Atonement that some Christians like to use as a tool for converting Jewish persons. Just in case you don’t know (and I’m paraphrasing off of the top of my head, so if I get one small detail wrong keep it together) in ancient times the Jewish High Priest would take two goats, and throw lots to determine which one was the scapegoat. The sins of the entire community were put on this lucky creature and he was led out in the wilderness to die. They called this goat the “scapegoat” because he would try to escape all the time.

OK. I made that last part up…

Anyways. The High Priest would put a crimson thread on the scapegoat, and he would hang a similar thread on the gates of the Temple. Apparently, the thread that hung on the gates of the Temple would turn white signaling the forgiveness of the people’s sin. Yomah 39b relates this story:

“Forty years before the Temple was destroyed, the lot never came into the right hand, the red wool did not become white, the western light did not burn, and the gates of the Temple opened of themselves, till the time that R. Johanan b. Zakkai rebuked them, saying: “Temple, Temple, why alarmest thou us? We know that thou art destined to be destroyed. For of thee hath prophesied Zechariah ben Iddo [Zech. xi. 1]: ‘Open thy doors, O Lebanon, and the fire shall eat thy cedars.’”

The Christian apologist’s reasoning pertaining to this passage goes something like this: the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. and the Talmud says that 40 years before this destruction the crimson wool stopped turning white. Can anyone tell me what happened 40 years before the destruction of the Temple around 30 C.E.? That’s right Jesus died, and became the atonement for our sins and this proves that the old system is invalid.

That sort of reasoning is fine except for one thing: the number forty.

If you are a fundamentalist of a certain worldview and reading persuasion you might want to stop reading right now because I’m going to use a word you don’t like very much: symbolic. There, I said it. As you may or may not know the number forty is highly symbolic in the ancient Hebrew writings. Primarily I can think of three ways. 1) it is the duration of a generation 2) it represents a period of testing 3) it represents a time of change brought around by God’s strength.

I declare myself a follower of Christ, but I’m going to have to go with meaning 2 or 3. I mean seriously think about it. When the Mishna was redacted/compiled by Judah HaNasi the whole Christian thing wasn’t exactly a secret. And to say that the rabbis were pedantic in their argumentation would be an understatement. If there was something in the text that pointed to Yeshua the Nazarene as the Son of God and as the Atonement for the world I’m pretty sure they would have noticed it. These guys knew their sacred texts in ways that would put most modern Christians to shame. It would not have “slipped their attention.” I think that the Rabbis were so involved in some sort of defense of God and the destruction of the Temple that they employed this highly symbolic language to show that not only did they know the Temple was to be destroyed but that God himself was responsible.

Perhaps, this is one of the differences between a high context and a low context society. Any of the original readers would have known instantly what was meant by the symbolic use of the number forty, and 2000 years later we see only a literal number of years that point us back to 30 C.E.

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