lethargic_man | Familiarity with the Bible

When I was an undergraduate, I encountered Christians who would quote parts of the Bible (by which I mean what they call the Old Testament) that I was unfamiliar with. I was appalled that non-Jews should know the Jewish holy book better than a reasonably well-educated Jew like myself did.

It took me quite a while to realise that actually each religion concentrated only on certain areas of the Bible: there would be parts of it that Christians would be familiar with but not Jews, but also the other way around. Jews concentrate on the Pentateuch (the first five books) much more than the rest; I suspect the average Christian would be impressed by just how well Jews know its contents.

The flip side of that coin, though, is that there were parts of the Bible that I scarcely knew at all. The book of Job, for instance, I only knew the title of (and even then, I had no idea how to pronounce it in English); reading it as a nineteen-year-old was a bit of an eye-opener. And indeed, both when I first read my way through the whole book^* at that age, and when I did so for the second time^† (ongoing), there were large sections of historical material of which my knowledge was really rather poor.

* ObGogolBordello: "First time I had read the Bible // It had struck me as unwitty // I think it may started [sic] rumour // That the Lord ain't got no humour."

† ObGogolBordello: "Second time I read the Bible // I was thinking it's all right, man."

For years, I've wondered if I could quantify this somehow: just how much of the Bible do we know as Jews? It felt like aside from the Torah, portions of the Prophets read as hafṭārāh, the Five Megillos (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther), and a bunch of Psalms and the odd other passage (e.g. the last half-chapter of Proverbs) included in the liturgy, we neglect the rest.

Having got to the end of my Samaritan Torah blogging, I decided I was finally going to find out. This was going to be my next big blogging project; but unlike blogging the Samaritan Torah or Josephus, all the work here would be up-front: it would only end up in a single blog post at the end of it.

And here's the result (or a photo-reduced screenshot of part of it, to whet your appetite):

[screenshot]

View complete chart as a separate web-page (opens in new tab). You may find it useful to read with a copy of the Bible in a parallel tab.

I will admit I found the result surprising: It turns out I'm familiar with a much better distributed subset of the Bible than I thought I was, though in many cases I would be familiar with verses, or allusions to part of a verse, or even whole psalms, without being able to name chapter and verse.

This is largely because the liturgy draws from a much wider range of Biblical sources than your average Jew today is familiar with. It's also necessary to take into consideration that I am much more knowledgeable now than I was as a nineteen-year-old. Nevertheless, my knowledge remains sufficiently patchy that the result is rather subjective: I almost never daven, for example, Tachanun or the third benediction after the Shema in the evening, so I'm much less likely to recognise verses quoted in those. (Similarly, I have left out verses referenced in parts of the liturgy that I never come across in the yearly cycle at all, such as pidyon haben or funeral prayers.)

Nonetheless, I have tried to keep this as general as possible, and have refrained from marking as high recognition (or indeed at all) Biblical verses which I have referenced in the talks I've given at Limmud (e.g. Amos 8:2), or which go into my Jewish learning icon on my blog (e.g. Proverbs 3:13).

Crossposts: http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/466838.html

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

liv

That's an amazing piece of work, and thank you for putting the results up here. I am half tempted to do a Reform version (partly prompted by your comments on Isaiah 53, which has a prominent place in our YK liturgy). Also we have haftarahs from Ketuvim but probably fewer direct pasukim in our liturgy. Probably not quite tempted enough to actually do it.

From:

lethargic_man

That's an amazing piece of work,

Thank you. It would have been a lot harder without ArtScroll's rigorous footnoting (or Birnbaum's less rigorous footnoting!) of the sources of quotations in the liturgy.

I am half tempted to do a Reform version (partly prompted by your comments on Isaiah 53, which has a prominent place in our YK liturgy).

Really? I had a minor boggle on reading this, but that's only because I'm so used to traditional Judaism avoiding any Bible passages which might possibly be read as Christological. Of course, there's nothing theologically dubious in it, and teaching Jews to read it with a Jewish reading would give them a weapon against any Christians who attempted to evangelise them with it. And I can see how it would fit in to the themes of Yom Kippur; it's just that a surface reading make it look somewhat like the martyrology, which I've never been able to see the point of, and would be surprised to learn the Reform movement included. (Grassroots Jews, where I've been davening for the last five years on Yom Kippur, does not read that.)

Also we have haftarahs from Ketuvim

Really? Such as?

Probably not quite tempted enough to actually do it.

Shame; I'd be interested to read it (in the light of my comments above). If you change your mind, I'll happily give you the program I wrote to generate the web page from a simple text file—and indeed my data file for it as a starting point for you.

Edited Date: 2013-12-10 01:20 pm (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

I think this is a brilliant idea and I am in awe that you actually put in the work to implement it. The presentation is great - only 1 gripe which is that the colours you have used are a bit easy to confuse on the computer (the blues and greens all look rather similar to my eye) and I am not colour blind. Could they be more distinct? I realise that you were trying for a spectrum of blues etc I wonder if patterns would work better eg "-" for nothing X Y W I Z ! ? for various codes or maybe pattern+colour? I haven't worked it out really - just floating my thoughts here.

The results are most interesting. I have always found fascinating to see which books the Rabbis of the Talmud quote. They knew the whole of the Tenach by heart from what I can make out (certainly in Mishanic times they did and I think later too). So what they quoted was probably what they were interested in. There are a large number of Talmudic quotations from Psalms and also a very frequent use of verses from Job (normally completely out of context). Of course indexing the whole Talmud would be a mammoth proposition - though perhaps a Bible edition exists where someone has done it? Did you go through the whole of the traditional Siddur for this? The Siddur of Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld has almost every verse of the liturgy cross-referenced to Biblical verses (though the references are not always direct, many are homiletic). He put a huge amount of work into doing that.

If you daven regularly on weekdays (which I did when I was saying kaddish for my mother) you pick up a lot of extra psalms that Shabbat davenners miss out on, yet it is interesting that from your study many Psalms are just "missed out" altogether, it appears.

I am unclear why the beginning chapter of Bereshit is classed "low recognition". How did you decide on the classification (have I missed reading some "notes" here?)

Best wishes & yeshar koach on the study.

Jonathan Gazing at (some of the more prominent!) Stars

From: (Anonymous)

P.S. Also of interest is the bits we and Christians BOTH read and are familiar with. A friend was telling me how his sister is reading "A woman of worth ...etc" (ie the last chapter in Proverbs) at their mother's funeral service today. Clearly they read that one too.

Bits of Isaiah we read and Christians read and we understand them very differently.

The book of Esther is well known to Jews from reading every Purim. I was surprised to find a Mennonite Christian friend who was familiar with it too.

From:

lethargic_man

The results are most interesting. I have always found fascinating to see which books the Rabbis of the Talmud quote.

Ooh, that would be interesting to find out.

Of course indexing the whole Talmud would be a mammoth proposition - though perhaps a Bible edition exists where someone has done it?

Well, the copy of the Talmud at the Hebrew University website shows references for quotations, but only down to the level of the chapter, not the verse; identifying the verse would be tricky, not just because where the quotation ends is not indicated but also because quotations in the Talmud are not always word-accurate. I'd need to find verse-accurate references I can go through mechanically before I'd try taking this idea further.

Did you go through the whole of the traditional Siddur for this?

Yes; I went through the ArtScroll siddur and shalosh regalim machzorim, and the Birnbaum High Holydays machzor, which both helpfully identify all quotations; also went through all the yearly readings, and finally skimmed the Bible looking for anything else I might recognise from elsewhere, such as "Can the leopard change its spots?" (Jer. 13:23), or the stories in Daniel, or the reference to Tel Aviv in Ezekiel.

If you daven regularly on weekdays (which I did when I was saying kaddish for my mother) you pick up a lot of extra psalms that Shabbat davenners miss out on,

I don't, which is why few of these (counterexamples include Psalm 100) made it into my list.

yet it is interesting that from your study many Psalms are just "missed out" altogether, it appears.

There's only so much liturgy, or to put it another way, so many references you can cram in before communities complain the service is too long.

I am unclear why the beginning chapter of Bereshit is classed "low recognition".

It's not. The chapter number is classed medium recognition because the entirety of the Torah is thus classified; however many parts of the Torah, including all the individual verses within the chapter, override that with another, higher-recognition classification.

How did you decide on the classification

What seemed intuitive to me, for the scheme, and how well I personally recognised things, for individual examples.

From: (Anonymous)

Clarification: What do you mean by "the scheme" as opposed to "the individual examples" ?

Re: Talmudic bible quotes. The standard traditional editions of the Talmud has these in the margin in tiny abbreviation letters in Rashi script including chapter and verse, as far as I know. What I was asking was has anyone done it the other way around? ie A Tenach with all the references to the Talmud. I had a vague memory there is a book that does this. I asked my learned wife who tells me there are both things:
(1) The Soncino Talmud translated into English includes a full list of bible quote references in the Talmud in the index volume. (2) Going the other way (more interestingly) there is a volume that goes from the bible verses with references to where they are quoted in the Talmud. She can't remember the name but there are actually two such books in the first book case in the LSJS library - and the librarian will know where to point you to find them. One is small and just gives references - the other is huge as it also gives the context.

From: (Anonymous)

Re: Psalms not being quoted in the liturgy.

I think the Psalms are very patchy some are magnificent, some are, well...not, and some are frankly pretty unintelligible.

So as well as the issue of the sheer volume, maybe there was some quality control going on here, when the liturgy was constructed.

From:

lethargic_man

That's all well and good, but no help to me doing it on my computer without spending years typing in references. What I was after was something freely available online that I can write a program to parse, to do the whole thing automatically.

From:

lethargic_man

There was a bit of quality control going on with inclusion into the Biblical canon too: Psalms 151–155 didn't make the cut!

From: (Anonymous)

You might find a Soncino online. Otherwise try and tap into the Bar Ilan Project via someone who has a subscription or a disc copy.

From: (Anonymous)

So they didn't - how interesting: http://www.summascriptura.com/html/Psalms_151-155_Wright.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalms_152%E2%80%93155
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_151

From: (Anonymous)

OK, I found not Soncino online that included the index volume (I think because it is missing from the CD-ROM version).

However there is online: http://kodesh.mikranet.org.il/ which does seem to cross reference the Chumash to the Talmud Bavli, Talmud Yerushalmi
(Click on הפסוק במאגרים אחרים and get hot-linked cross-references in the Talmud and Rambam.)

Still the cross referencing is probably a bit embedded in the programming so it may be difficult/impossible to extract for your purposes - still it may be worth a look!