I was about to dismiss this seemingly silly question with a flippant answer along the lines of “Yes, and Shakespeare’s writings were much better in the original German,” when it struck me that OP might be confusing “the Hebrew Torah” with the New Testament.
Continue readingThis is a good question, as it highlights how Hebrew, in its love of concision by cramming prepositions and possessive indicators into the prefixes and suffixes of verbs and nouns, can sometimes overload itself.
As you partly point out in your question:
Many years ago, I was working for a while as ‘Deputy Food Manager’ (i.e., ‘the guy who schlepps the big boxes from the delivery platform at the back to the walk-in fridge’) at a kibbutz in southern Israel.
The kibbutz members frequently complained about the lack of variety of our meat offerings (basically, chicken, turkey, or beef)—so one day the Food Manager took me for a ‘research trip’ to another kibbutz in the southern Negev—Lahav, some forty km to the east, where, it was rumoured, members were very happy with their food.
The ‘research trip’ was a sham—he and I, and everyone else already knew why the Lahav members were happy with their food: they had pork alternatives almost every day, thanks to their pig farm.
It’s a common refrain in Jewish synagogues throughout the English-speaking world:
The Parsha Experiment – Shoftim: Is This Just A Boring Parsha?
—and it drives me (and no doubt every Israeli) around the bend every time I encounter it.
Elohim was the name of God for the Israelite (northern) tribes.
IHVH was the name of the God of the Judeans (southern tribe).
Since both religions were based on the belief in a single, Creator, God, the two traditions were knitted into one when the refugees of the northern kingdom were absorbed into Judea following the destruction of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians around 725 BCE, at the instruction of the Judean King Ezekiah.
This is one of those fun questions, like “Mummy—how do babies come into the world?”, or “How does Santa deliver our presents when we have no chimney?” The actual history is a lot more prosaic but more interesting than the pat answers, such as that the Hebrew words for water (mayim) and sky (shamayim) are also seemingly plural but are not (actually they are, as they use plural adjectives as well, and if quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck—it’s a duck). Talmudic tradition of centuries of pilpul is capable of much greater feats than that—such as why placing restrictions on women is really a sign of respect, or why there are several different answers to what happens when Two Men Come Down The Same Chimney.
From an item in today’s Times Colonist newspaper:
Instead, suggests the Kolot Mayim Reform Temple, “Gemar Chatima Tova”—have an easy fast—would be more appropriate for the solemn holiday […]
This is indeed one of the conclusions that Yitzhak Ben-Zvi—a historian and ethnographer who would later become Israel’s first President—reached from studies of the names and traditions of many Palestinian villages and Bedouin communities.
Continue readingThe Quran’s version of the story is reflective of the conventional practice in the Middle East (and throughout the world) of primogeniture—i.e., succession by, or preference of, the first-born son.
The Hebrew term ruaḥ haqodesh רוח הקודש still is feminine—grammatically speaking. But it doesn’t have the same meaning as in Christianity, where it was elevated to one of the Trinity or a manifestation of God, so the notion that you may be implying that God was perhaps originally conceived in Judaism as a feminine entity is a non-starter.
In Judaism, the holy spirit is merely of a type of connection or communication between God and man, similar to the ‘divine voice’, and therefore usually associated with prophets.
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(Originally written in reply to a question at Quora.com).
Notes by Autumn Light 
