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What is the Universal Covenant?

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, or Torah, teaches that every human being descends from Noah, our universal ancestor. (See Genesis 4:22 and Genesis 9, with the ancient commentaries.)

The covenant that God made with Noah and his and Mrs. Noah's (Na'amah's) descendants is the Universal Covenant - a/k/a First Covenant, Rainbow Covenant, and the Noahide (or No'achide) Covenant. It applies to all of us, everywhere and always.

When God declares a covenant to be eternal, "everlasting," and "perpetual," no later event, no prophet, messiah, comet, war or other disaster can end it. So, at least so long as human beings still have human form, this covenant with all its principles exists to teach and guide us, forever.

How is Rainbow Covenant Received Among "the Experts,"Such as Jewish Religious Scholars?

Rainbow Covenant; Torah and the Seven Universal Laws Lightcatcher Books: Springdale, Arkansas; and the Rainbow Covenant Foundation: New York, New York. ISBN: 0-9719388-2-2. Library of Congress Control No.: 2003102494. Copyright 2003 by Michael Dallen. Foreword by Rabbi Michael Katz. Illustrated, with bibliography, index and appendices. Hardcover. $24.95.

Rainbow Covenant represents a clean break with the stale, "traditional" thinking about the First Covenant that still claims to dominate the field.

"Rainbow Covenant is more timely now than when it was written. As the world seems to be spinning out of control and the immorality of political leaders is in the spotlight, it points the way to a life honorably lived. The author wisely uses humor to temper the seriousness of his subject for the average reader, while even the scholar can benefit from the discussion and the copious notes and references." Rabbi Michael Katz (7/7/09)

We - First Covenant - belong to the school that follows the teachings of the Yad Ramah, Rav Mayer Abulafia. According to the Yad Ramah, every nation must determine the details of its own laws - such as penalties, for instance - for itself.

Besides coinciding with logic, common sense, and the general drift of Torah, this understanding of the Noahide system can be traced from the Yad Ramah (circa 1200 C.E.) through the centuries to America's own Rabbi Yosef Soloveichik, of blessed memory, to the mainstream legal, historical and religious scholars of Harvard Law School, Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School, and Israel's Bar-Ilan School of Law, and (for instance) Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the great 21st century Talmudist.

So, despite some vocal, emotional opposition from the anti-Abulafians, who call themselves "traditionalists," these brave, independent-minded scholars unanimously agree about Rainbow Covenant. Several short, condensed blurbs follow:

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, a distinguished scholar and kiruv (Torah outreach) professional, the director of Torah.org, the Judaism Site, writes this about Rainbow Covenant in Rabbi Menken's The Everything Torah Book, "Highly recommended!"

Rabbi Yitzchak Feldheim, President of Philipp Feldheim Inc., and Feldheim Publishers, says about Rainbow Covenant: "It's fascinating!"

Professor Nahum Rakover (Bar-Ilan University, Israel; Deputy Attorney-General of the State of Israel, Israel Ministry of Justice), author of Law and the Noahides, Editor of the Library of Jewish Law in Jerusalem, calls Rainbow Covenant "Welcome and timely, detailed and sound..." [For the rest of his review, see below.]

Rabbi Michael Katz ... With wit and a keen eye for what is essential, [Rainbow Covenant] brings this ancient religion into modern times [and see his more recent (7/7/09) comment above, and the rest of his comments in Rainbow Covenant's Foreword]

Rabbi Yoel Schwartz and Yechiel Sitzman, Yeshivat D'var Yerushalyim, Jerusalem, even though they themselves are regarded as anti-Abulafian "traditionalists," say: Rainbow Covenant is a big, rich book. . . A very valuable and welcome popular introduction to the Noachide laws and the Universal Covenant.

Rabbi Eliezer Cohen, Congregation Ohr Chadash, "a very readable, painstakingly researched book exploring and illuminating G-d's universal laws of morality. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing what Jewish tradition considers every human obligations to G-d and his fellow man."

Arthur Kurzweil, prolific author, an internationally known speaker, editor - and a practicing magician! - and the coordinator of the Talmud Circle Project (with Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz), America's leading Jewish genealogist (and the author of Torah for Dummies and Kabbalah for Dummies) sent the author this personal note: I just read, from cover to cover, your book. It's superb! I am now asking my father, age 83, to read it.

He also wrote this about the book on Amazon.com:

". . . Its gifted author has done a remarkable job of bringing together important primary source material on many profound and eternal ideas... He does so in such an inventive, creative way… This book will be as nourishing to the scholar as it will to the beginner. . ."
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End of short blurbs. Back to the story:

Many people contributed to Rainbow Covenant: Torah and the Seven Universal Laws in its early stages.

Of the different rabbis who helped, Rabbi David Sears, a Breslover chasid and a prolific author himself, and Rabbi David Nerenberg, a Chabad Lubavitcher chasid and an old friend, stand out. But Rabbi Michael Katz, a mainstream Orthodox rabbi and a brilliant scholar who had become, before we met, one of America's leading authorities on Noahism, helped early and late, month after month, year after year, in the writing, editing, and research for the book.

Rainbow Covenant probably couldn't have come into being without his approbation and hard work. Rabbi Katz's careful editing of the final work and his approbation, in the Foreword (see below), were really just a continuation of the confirmation process that had begun several years before between us, with certain Noahides, and with other rabbis, and other legal and religious scholars.

We were happy when, almost out of the blue, we received the unexpected enthusiastic approbation of Professor Nahum Rakover, professor of law at Israel's famed Bar-Ilan University Law School and Deputy Attorney General of the State of Israel - perhaps the world's foremost academic expert on Noahism.

Professor Rakover, who wrote Law and the Noahides (1998), is a leader in the Abulafian - the "Harvard/Bar-Ilan" - school of Noahide studies, along with his Bar-Ilan Law colleague, Prof. Arnold N. Enker, and their associates (distinguished academics at Harvard Law School and at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law).

Professor Enker, particularly, has become one of our good friends and advisors, since the publication of Rainbow Covenant.

Prof. Enker introduced us to the authoritative classic work by Rav Mayer Abulafia (c. 1200 C.E.), the Yad Rama; along with later authorities, advocates of the same approach to the Noahide system, including the Sokochover (Rav Avraham Borenstein), the Chelkas Yoav (Rav Yoav Weingarten), and R' Aaron Soloveichik, of blessed memory.

Abulafian scholars regard Noahism and the Seven Noahide laws as hyper-reasonable, naturally compelling general moral and legal principles that ensure decency, liberty and justice. The Noahide Law, in other words, provides a framework for justice, goodness and civilization, with penalties and all other details of the Law to be determined by every sovereign nation in accordance with its own customs, needs and history.

This paradigm of the Noahide system is starkly different from the anti-Abulafians'. They regard their model as the only "traditionalist, genuinely rabbinic" approach to the subject - but it isn't.

Their views on the subject have also been embraced by several anti-Semitic and conspiracy theorist groups. Why? Because it teaches that the Noahide system ("according to the Jews, God's system") requires each nation to submit to the authority of the leading Jewish rabbis, who will determine the details of the nations' laws based on inflexible - actually, impossibly harsh, unloving, unjust, intolerant and illogical, completely contrary to the general drift of Torah - ideas of what the Noahide Law requires.

The different views are, of course, discussed in much more detail in Rainbow Covenant - and also, to some extent, in Covenant Connection, and in several articles and FAQs on the First Covenant Foundation's website.

See below for Professor Rakover's comments, in full:

Rabbi Yoel Schwartz and Rabbi Yechiel Sitzman at Yeshivat D'var Yerushalyim also helped a great deal, particularly in the early, pre-publication stages. We went through many long, exhaustive pre-publication reviews together, page by page, sometimes word-by-word, with some very lively give-and-take.

Despite some philosophical disagreements between us - as anti-Abulafians (or "rabbinic traditionalists," as they would prefer), they weren't thrilled by Rainbow Covenant's insistence that Noahides need to determine the details of their own laws for themselves - but they gave it their approbation, too (see below).

Dr. James D. Tabor, distinguished University Professor of Religion and Chairman of the Department of Religion at the University of North Carolina (at Charlotte), an internationally known archaeologist, scholar, and best-selling author, first said upon reading it, and still says today, that "Rainbow Covenant is the only book on the Noahide Law that I can recommend." He wrote, as one of the first mainstream academics to review it: At long last we have a practical and learned treatment of this vital subject. . . It is truly and obviously a MOST wonderful work!

An Orthodox scholar and community leader who lives in the same part of Michigan as Mr Dallen, Rainbow Covenant's author, writes:

"The Rainbow Covenant is a very readable, painstakingly researched book exploring and illuminating G-d's universal laws of morality. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing what Jewish tradition considers every human obligations to G-d and his fellow man." - Rabbi Eliezer Cohen, Congregation Ohr Chadash, Oak Park, Michigan

Rabbi Shmuel Cohen, a revered and pious scholar, former longtime principal at Metro Detroit's Yeshiva Beth Yehudah, didn't want to give a full haskama (a traditional rabbinic approbation), saying to the author:

"It's very well done! But… It's almost impossible to write a proper haskama for a book like this. A haskama is supposed to guarantee that the entire book, in all its particulars, including every single concept and almost every word, is absolutely true and trustworthy. But even you, probably, don't agree with everything that's in it: there's just too much there, and we are always learning - and you are the one who wrote it!

"Most haskamos that are given in these cases are based mostly on the author's reputation for personal piety and kosher observance, and an Orthodox family life."

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, a distinguished scholar and kiruv (Torah outreach) professional, the director of Torah.org, the Judaism Site, writes this about Rainbow Covenant, "Highly recommended!" in his Everything Torah Book.

Rabbi Yitzchak Feldheim, President of Philipp Feldheim Inc., and Feldheim Publishers, says about Rainbow Covenant: "It's fascinating!" (But Rabbi Feldheim expressed reservations about the cartoon illustrations "in such a serious book.")

". . . Its gifted author has done a remarkable job of bringing together important primary source material on many profound and eternal ideas. . . He does so in such an inventive, creative way… This book will be as nourishing to the scholar as it will to the beginner. . ."

[In a personal note to the author, Mr. Kurzweil wrote: I just read, from cover to cover, your book. It's superb! I am now asking my father, age 83, to read it.]

[Incidentally, Arthur Kurzweil's interview with musician/poet Leonard Cohen, in Articles, is very good - if you like his music. Obviously, we here think well of his music.]

One of the most remarkable things about Rainbow Covenant is that it, practically alone of all the books on Noahide Law topics, has been welcomed with actual enthusiasm by actual Noahides, longtime leaders in a developing Noahide movement.

Rev. Jack E. Saunders, a former Baptist pastor, helped found the First Covenant Foundation and has served as its co-director and vice-president from the beginning. His contributions to Rainbow Covenant were so substantial that we almost credited him as co-author. Jack E. Saunders says, "Please, buy it and read it!"

Vendyl Jones, another former Baptist pastor, an author and sometime archaeologist, who organized the First International Noahide Conference in Fort Worth, Texas in 1990 (see the video on our website, The Late Rabbi and the Noahides, with the late Rabbi Meir Kahane), says Rainbow Covenant is "Overflowing with wisdom and compassion. . . a great work, a modern classic."

Rev. J. David Davis, yet another former Baptist pastor, founder of the Noahide Study Centre of Athens, Tennessee, author of Finding the God of Noah: the Spiritual Journey of a Baptist Minister from Christianity to the Law of Noah, calls Rainbow Covenant "Absolutely essential reading. The best book available on the Hebrew concept of universal law and morality."

Kimberly E. Hanke, author of Turning to Torah: the Emerging Noachide Movement, writes: "The Rainbow Covenant is an outstanding achievement which fills a great void for all those involved in the Noahide movement. Whether novice or scholar, Jew or Gentile, this is what we have all been waiting for."

Rabbi Yoel Schwartz and Rabbi Yechiel Sitzman:

The Rainbow Covenant is a big, rich book. It is a very valuable and welcome popular introduction to the Noachide laws and the Universal Covenant.

Professor Nahum Rakover:

The Rainbow Covenant is a welcome and timely addition to the existing literature on the Noachide laws.

Its detailed exposition of the Rainbow Covenant, combined with its sound, intelligent explanations of its importance and modern-day relevance, gives non-Jews an opportunity to become well-acquainted with their age-old obligations.

Furthermore, by detailing those laws of the Bible which non-Jews are not commanded to fulfill, you enable Jews to become acquainted with their own heritage in a graphic and exciting manner as well.

[The author's] readable and colorful style of writing invites and engages the reader to inquire further into the prolific source material presented in the notes to [the] book. Let us hope that this book will assist in spreading the Noahide Covenant, to complete what [it] calls the "permanent revolution" of the Torah, among both Jews and non-Jews alike."

Rabbi Michael Katz, from Rainbow Covenant's Foreword :

". . . The more deeply one delves into the Noachide Covenant, the more one learns of God's expectations for the nations. . .

It is the Noachide Laws that will bring the nations of the world to an understanding of Torah as it relates to the unfolding of the grand design that God has for all of us. . .

Michael Dallen's fine book will be of inestimable assistance in helping the searching ben (son) and bat (daughter) [of] No'ach find their path to true religion. He presents his material in a succinct manner that will appeal to the novice while still providing food for thought to the more advanced student, who will also enjoy examining the footnotes and doing his own further research. . .

I heartily welcome Michael Dallen's book. Mr. Dallen has embraced the historical importance of the emerging Noachide movement and, with wit and a keen eye for what is essential, he brings this ancient religion into modern times. The reader will feel himself a part of this exciting journey and will, we hope, be inspired to become an added light to the torch that will eventually illuminate the world."

What About the Golden Rule?

The Golden Rule

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. - Leviticus 19:18

Many people don't know that the so-called Golden Rule comes from Torah. For the people of Israel, obedience to the Golden Rule is a legal obligation. In fact, it's two obligations (Leviticus 19:18, 19:33). You shall love your neighbor; you shall love the stranger. Together, the two of them constitute "a fundamental principle of the Torah," according to the Rabbis. In his classic work, the Sefer HaMitzvot or Book of the Commandments, the great scholar Maimonides lists them as the 206th and the 207th of Israel's 248 Positive Commandments (the Torah includes a total of 613 commandments, 248 positive, 365 negative), based on their location in the Written Torah.

Noahides, people who aren't bound by the Covenant of Sinai, who are obligated only by the First Covenant, aren't legally bound, compelled or obligated by any of the Torah's positive commandments. If they fail or refuse to keep these laws - to Israel the Golden Rule is law, as well as moral precept - they are not liable legally. They will have sinned, however, at least in the case of these two laws: they will have "missed the mark," as "sin" originally meant. In other words, they will have fallen short of what they should and could have done, and also what they should and could have been, as decent, righteous, moral human beings.

Even though God has not commanded Noahides directly in this matter, He has given all mankind some knowledge of His law through His Torah - through the Bible, which we can read in any number of versions and translations.

Concerning the stranger*:

The stranger who stays with you shall be unto you as the home born [that is, like your own neighbor] among you, and you shall love him like yourself, because you [Israel] were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am HaShem (the Lord) your God. - Leviticus 19:34

"Love him like yourself." To love another person as yourself: 1) if you can give yourself the benefit of the doubt, you must do so for your fellow; 2) as you try to anticipate your own wants and needs, you should try to anticipate the wants and needs of the stranger. God wants us, at the very least, to show sensitivity to the needs of one's neighbor and the stranger.

Who is the stranger? One who doesn't quite fit in. He or she is the outsider, the visitor, or foreigner. God refers to the stranger in the same context as the orphan or widow - as someone who may be weak and helpless (as opposed to the convert, one would think; someone recognized or even sponsored by a congregation of one's fellows) who especially needs your help.

What does it mean to love the stranger? To see yourself in him or her; to recognize the Divine spark in him or her. To feel empathy and act upon it. If you think that you might feel thirsty if you were in the stranger's place, for instance, as you see him passing by on a cloudless day panting in the heat, for instance, you should anticipate his need for water and offer him what he needs.

The great sage Hillel, in order to put the two Golden Rule commandments together in a very practicable form, expressed them in the negative, as follows:

What is hateful to yourself, do not do unto another. - Talmud, Shabbat 31a

One might extend this, however: what is hateful to yourself, you should not suffer to be done unto another. This is what love, and justice, is really all about - and this is what God cherishes. He expects us to recognize the godliness in our fellow man.

Why should we behave this way? Because this is a principle of Torah which has been revealed to all humanity, according to the Torah itself. It is a basic part of "the general drift of Torah," which is the essence of the Law or Way of the First Covenant::

Beloved is man, for he exists and was created in the very "image" of God. - Rabbi Akiba, Mishnah Torah, Pirke Avot 3:18.

What is man that You are mindful of him. . .? For you have made him little lower than the angels… (Psalm 8:5)

I call Heaven and Earth to witness, the Divine Spirit (in Hebrew, ru'ach hakodesh) rests upon every person, whether he is Jew or gentile, if his life be worthy - Seder Eliyahu 9

All men are God's creatures, and manifest the glory of His work. All are sacred to His Holy Name. - Rabbi Yehuda Loew, Beer HaGola (c. 1589, p. 150)
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*Stranger - in Hebrew, geyr; plural, geyrim. In later Hebrew, the meaning of this word changed to refer mainly to converts or proselytes to Israel's religion (that is, converts to Judaism). In the Torah's Hebrew, as one can clearly see from the context of the quoted passage here, stranger simply means stranger - that is, a visitor, a temporary sojourner, a misplaced person or a traveler - a different sort of person from one's neighbors, basically, but not a convert or proselyte. It is commonly recognized, after all, that the Hebrews in Egypt weren't converts or proselytes to Egyptian cults or religion. They were simply "strangers" - foreigners - in the sight of native Egyptians.

Why Doesn't the World Know More About This Covenant?

The Torah was given a long time ago, but its meaning is elucidated only over time.

Even when God entrusted His Holy Torah to His beloved servant Israel, He gave it, in a sense, as raw material: as wheat to make flour and as flax to make cloth, through the Torah's own appointed methods of logical interpretation. - Midrash (ancient rabbinic commentary)

Israel has known about the First Covenant, the covenant between mankind's legendary common ancestors, Adam and Eve and, ten generations later, with Noah and his family, since Israel became a nation. That is not to say, though, that Israel has known all there is to know about it. For many years, the people of Israel were a little embarrassed by it. Because of flawed understanding, this aspect of God's Torah - the Torah, all of whose "ways are ways of pleasantness" - seemed rigid, harsh, and even cruel.

It took many generations - in fact, the return of the People of Israel to the Land of Israel, in modern times - to get to this true understanding of the Universal Law:

Every nation is obligated to determine the details of its own laws for itself. Among the nations, a person may elect to follow any religion; so long as that religion is not steeped in immorality and crime, he or she can be a righteous person. The Torah is tolerance: all its ways are ways of pleasantness (Proverbs 3:17). Nevertheless, the religion of Israel, belief in the Torah, the Bible, and in the One God of Israel is no mere matter of faith. It is much more than that - and we can prove it!

The religion from Sinai, the mission of Israel, is really everybody's. Noahism and Torah aren't the harsh, medieval nonsense that some people believe, or teachings that pertain mainly to 'End Times' - Messianic times. In fact, these liberating holy teachings remain, now and forever, the key to the survival and success of humankind on earth.

Professor Xiaodong Wu, writing below, has made this prognostication of the future [See the full article, The Third Opportunity, A Chinese Noahide's Concerns, as well as A Response to Dr. Wu .

Only when Noachide centers being part of Jewish Communities becomes a norm will the Universalism of Judaism become reality and the purpose of Jewish existence fully justified. Although it is true that, although subject to the dominating power of Christianity and Islam, some Jewish ideas have prevailed and the Torah truth has been revealed (partially), a good teacher can’t be considered to have fulfilled his duty by merely handing over a textbook.

Michael E. Dallen opens the Introduction of his book The Rainbow Covenant, so appropriately, with a quote from R. Elijah Benamozegh:

“Mankind cannot rise to the essential principles on which society must rest unless it meets with Israel. And Israel cannot fathom the depths of its own national and religious tradition unless it meets with mankind.”

This book – The Rainbow Covenant - has touched my heart. So much so that the thought echoes perpetually in my mind: if only a book like this had been available and known centuries ago...

I am not a historian and certainly not a Torah scholar. Indeed, my above analysis might be an oversimplified derivation from the complex human historical play, not to mention the incomprehensible dynamics of the Jewish internal affairs. But if you could bear with my perfunctory assumption, let me say one more thing.

This is the third opportunity. Now. Right now.

What Are the Names of God?

Also see "Who and Where is God" in FAQs (Concerning some benefits of meditating on the Name)

If the Bible's Book of Job has a central message, it's that God is great beyond imagining, and always near. God is immanent (real and here and now) and transcendent (beyond normal existence).

He sustains every particle and atom in the universe. He is immediately, intimately somehow "with" each of us, and concerned with every human being, in ways that confound even the proudest philosophies.

And the Lord [HaShem] passed by before him, and proclaimed, "HaShem, HaShem, God [El], merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth" Exodus 34:6

"The Lord" ("HaShem," above) - the Tetragrammaton, or four-letter holy Name, Y, H, V, and H. The High Priest of Israel used to whisperingly pronounce it just once a year, on Yom Kippur [the Day of Atonement, Leviticus 16:34], in Jerusalem's Holy Temple. This is the name that Israel, in casual or ordinary speech, usually renders as HaShem - literally, "the Name" - or, in sacred, worshipful speech, as Adon-oi ("My God").

Divine holy names include:

El, particularly evocative of God's overwhelming power, and also His Nature as God of truth and justice

Elyon ("the Most High")

El ha-Gibbor ("God the Strong One")

Yah (one of God's Names, related to the Tetragrammaton - see below)

Shaddai ("The Almighty")

El Shaddai ("God" - i.e., El - "The Almighty")

Adon-oi Zev-a-ot ("My Lord of Hosts" - "hosts," as in "the Heavenly Hosts," the holy beings in the Divine Court of Heaven, or "God of the Hosts [or "Armies"] of Israel.")

Kedosh Yisroel ("the Holy One of Israel")

HaKedosh Baruch Hu ("the Holy One, Blessed be He")

Attik Yomin ("Ancient of Days")

Ha-Makom ("the Place")

Ha-Shechinah ("the Divine Presence")

Adon-oi ("My Lord." This is the Name or holy tag by which Israel normally refers to HaShem, the One God, the God of Israel)

Ha-Rachaman ("the Merciful," or "the Compassionate One")

Abbir Yaakov ("Champion of Jacob")

E'in Sof ("the Infinite")

Avinu Malkeinu ("Our Father, Our King")

Tzur Yisroel ("Rock of Israel")

Magen Avraham ("Shield of Abraham")

Ribbono shel Olam ("Master of the Universe")

El-o-h-i-m (usually spelled "Elokim" in these pages, this is a very holy name, usually translated as "God" in the Bible; literally "the Powers"; or in some cases refers to a body of human leaders or judges, as in b'nai Elokim, "sons of the leaders/judges." Especially evocative of God's Nature as God of Justice (rather than His Nature as God of forgiveness or mercy, say).

When the People of Israel spoke of the God of Israel to non-Hebrews, in Biblical times, they normally referred to Him by this Name, Elokim, which was well-known to their Semitic neighbors. It was like a generic word or name for God - as opposed to the Name, the Tetragrammaton (Y/H/V/H), by which He had particularly revealed Himself to Israel.

This name - Y, H, V, and H - is particularly evocative of God's mercy and forgiveness. It's related to the Shem Ha-Mephorash, the ineffable, basically unknowable Divine Name of 216 letters (including 72 groups of three-letter Names of God). The Names involving El or combinations thereof, like Elokim, better-connote God's infinitely powerful and justice-loving (rather than His forgiving, mercy-loving) Character.

People sometimes try to pronounce the Name as "Jehovah" - a linguistic impossibility in Hebrew (but at least we can all be certain that it's wrong).

Observant Israel, on the other hand, does not try to vocalize the Name: to do so would be ridiculously presumptuous - no one knows its true pronunciation; and anyway, who is man to audibly slap some false name on the Eternal, Infinite Creator, trying to approximate His holiest, most cherished name?

In fact, there is some reason to think that this name - a form of the Hebrew verb "to be," connoting "He Was, He Is, He Shall Be - is an acrostic which isn't currently meant to be pronounced; that it carries a wealth of meaning beyond our current capacity for understanding; and that it cannot be pronounced until God Himself eventually somehow gives us the wisdom and holiness necessary to understand and pronounce it correctly.

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More About God's "Name"

God existed before He created the Universe, and He shall always exist. If there's such a thing as beyond the end of time, God will still be there. He is complete. He is perfect. However, while this may sound like heresy, His Name is not complete, His Name is not yet perfect. [For more on this, go to "Soul of Fire" in Articles.]

To perfect and complete His Name, God needs us - human beings. In the words of kaddish, the ancient but mysterious "mourner's prayer" that punctuates every Hebrew prayer service: "magnified and sanctified be God's great Name." Kaddish speaks to the future. The Amidah, Israel's "standing prayer" (worshippers pray standing), the Jews' principal prayer, does too. God's great name will be magnified and sanctified, but it is presently incomplete. "May He give reign to His kingship in your time." Only when all mankind begins to turn to Him, when His kingdom comes into being, God will "magnify and sanctify Himself." (Ezekiel 38:23) "On that day the Lord will be one and his Name will be one." (Zechariah 14:9)

We understand that God's Name is not Him. He is perfect and complete, even though His Name isn't yet. His Name is only connected to Him. But that's a crucial connection. In another context, Scripture says, "as is his name, so is he." (Samuel 25:25)

Using words of command, God clearly tells us in the Scripture: honor His Name, do not take His Name in vain, for any low purpose, and - a fundamental First Covenant principle - do not curse or blaspheme His Name.

This is a true principle of higher consciousness, or God-consciousness: Since God gives us free will, we have this choice, right here on earth, either to honor His Name or dishonor it. We can help complete and perfect His Name, or we can diminish it through our own thoughts and actions.

How will His Name finally become perfect? God works through history. Aleynu, the spiritual high point of Israel's morning and evening worship services, provides an outline of the future in the second, final paragraph. Israel prays to see God's mighty splendor, for:

1) The removal of detestable idolatry (in other words, not just any idolatry, but particularly offensive, noxious idolatry; in Hebrew, gilulim) from the earth. Then,

2) He will utterly cut off all false gods.

Then, the final stage,

3) He will perfect the universe through His holy sovereignty.

All humanity will begin calling upon His Name - we will all (or practically all, nearly everyone) recognize His sovereignty; we will all realize that to God and only God every knee should bow.

Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His Name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, Psalm 29:2

What is Torah?

When the Law of Sinai came into the world, freedom came into the world. — Mishnah Torah, Pirke Avot [Sayings of the Fathers] 6:2

Torah is Hebrew for "teaching," "guidance," "way" or "law." In its narrowest sense, Torah means the Five Books of Moses (The Pentateuch, or in Hebrew, the Chumash - the Five), the first five books of the Bible. Beyond that, the word Torah denotes all the details of all the laws, statutes, "testimonies" and ordinances that God revealed to man at Sinai. This includes the whole Oral Torah, the Written Torah's "other half." The Written Torah was, for the most part, eventually put into writing. It consists primarily of the Mishnah Torah (the "Repetition [or "teaching"] of the Torah"), the Gemara ("learning" or "complete learning" from Aramaic, the primary language of the Talmud) or Talmud ("Teaching" or "learning," from the Hebrew), and the commentaries associated with them.

The inner meaning of Talmudism is unshakeable trust in God and unreserved obedience to His declared Will. - Robert Travers Herford

Israel calls the Bible the Tanach, an acronym: T - Torah; N - Nevi'im (prophets); Ch - Chetuvim (writings, such as Psalms, Proverbs, and histories). However, in its most commonly used sense, the word Torah means the whole Bible, and the entirety of the Hebrew Revolutionary Tradition developed and handed down from Sinai.

Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. — Leviticus 25:10

Every word and letter of the Five Books, the Written Torah, was canonized, or firmly set into the current form, by the time of the prophet Ezra (Nehemiah 8-13). This was in the 4th century before the common era (BCE). Long before that, Israel had the Oral Torah. Most non-Jews (that is, b'nai noach) don't even know of the Oral Torah's existence. But the Bible cannot be understood without it. Even the Christian scriptures, which are not part of the Hebrew Bible and are not always friendly to the Hebrews themselves, acknowledge this.

See Matthew 23:1-3: "Then spoke Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, saying, 'The scribes and Pharisees [that is, the rabbis of Israel, masters and teachers of the Oral Torah) sit in Moses' seat: All that they bid you to observe, that observe and do.' Moses, God and history appointed the people of Israel custodians, interpreters and guardians of the Torah. You are My witnesses, says God, and My servant, whom I have chosen. (Isaiah 43:10)

One of Israel's greatest geniuses explained the Oral Torah thus:

Whatever is mentioned there received the full assent of all Israel, and those Sages who instituted its ordinances, issued the decrees, introduced the customs, gave the decisions, and taught the correct rulings, constituted the whole body or the majority of Israel's wisest members. They were the leaders who received the traditions concerning the fundamentals of Judaism in unbroken succession back to our teacher Moses. (Maimonides*, Mishneh Torah, Introduction)

The essence of the Torah is revolutionary. We speak throughout this website, and throughout the book, The Rainbow Covenant, of the Hebrew Revolution - really, the Righteousness Revolution. God, HaShem, is the God Who acts in history to set men free. The greatest and most revolutionary gift the Torah offers, the most fundamental of all principles and the basis of all learning (See Psalm 83:19), is simply this: the knowledge of the existence of the Supreme Being. Man may have only one true Master — HaShem, God, the One.

No other idea, philosophy or worldview has done more to elevate mankind.

God has concentrated Himself in the Torah. - R' Dov Ber, Or HaEmet 15

The laws pertaining to B'nai Noah are known principally through the Oral Torah. See Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin, folio 56, 59. Other references include the Mishnah Tosefta, Avodah Zorah 8.4 (in some editions, chapter 9); Talmud, Hullin 141 and Bava Kamma 38a; the Jerusalem Talmud, Kiddushin 1; the Midrash (ancient rabbinic commentary), Genesis Rabbah 16:9, 24:5, 34:8, Deuteronomy Rabbah 2:17, 2:25; Song of Songs (Shir haShirim) Rabbah 1:16; Seder Olam Rabbah chapter 5, Kuzari, 3:73; Rashi on Genesis 9, Exodus 15:25, and Sanhedrin 56.

O, how I love Your Torah! It is my meditation all the day. - Psalm 2:4

One of the main source-books for this body of wisdom is the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides (*Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, or Rambam, c. 1135-1204 CE), Hilchot Melachim (Laws of Kings).

That they may know that You alone, Whose Name is God [HaShem], is the (High) over all the earth. - Psalm 83:18

The law [Toras] of the Lord [HaShem] is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the ordinances of the Lord are true, they are altogether righteous. - Psalm 19:8-10

Seven Commandments? Not Ten Commandments?

Nothing's wrong with the Ten Commandments. It's just that they don't command - which is to say, legally obligate - anyone except the people of Israel. Alone of all the world's nations, the Jews are required to keep these holy laws. In fact, a Jew who violates any one of them faces extreme legal penalties, at least theoretically, while Noachides or non-Jews have absolutely no legal obligation to keep, for instance, the Fourth Commandment (pertaining to the Sabbath).

God gave these great and holy laws to Israel so that everyone could learn from them. But Israel stands in a unique relation to all this law. The Ten Commandments and the whole Ten Commandments system - a system of precisely 613 laws that were revealed at Sinai and inscribed by Moses in the Bible - constitute a wonderful but special priestly body of law for the Bible's "people of priests." They address Israel specifically - look at the language: God tells the Hebrews, "I am your God, O Israel, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage." Obviously, this isn't for the slave masters of Egypt, but for the people who had come out of slavery in Egypt. Note too, the self-identification of the Deity in these passages: He, the Lawgiver, identifies Himself by a particular holy name, the unique Name - the Tetragrammaton, the Y, H, V, and H - that most people of that age, quite like most people of our modern age, had never even heard of, but which was (and is) well-known to the Jews.

From Moses' time to the present, Israel's rabbis have taught that God gave Israel the Ten Commandments to obligate the Jews to serve Him in a unique way. The Ten Commandments rules Israel, and Israel alone. But everyone can and should learn from this law - which does, after all, come from the Deity Himself. And, so long as the people of Israel follow this law, they will be worthy and able to serve God by bringing their fellow human beings - all the descendants of Noach - God's most fundamental, universal laws: the Seven Commandments, the laws of the Rainbow Covenant.

What is the Hebrew Revolution?

We are the party of liberation. We are the party of revolution.

Religion is supposedly "the opiate of the masses" - but this religious movement overturned Egypt back when the pyramids were new - and we've been fighting the great enemies of mankind ever since. In every generation, for uncounted generations: ancient Philistines, Assyrians and Babylon, tyrannous Rome and cruel Byzantium, the blood-lusting Inquisitors of Spain and Portugal, Nazi Germany and every Nazi, Soviet Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, every single Muslim terrorist who ever lived....

(Ever notice how you can tell a lot about a thing by its enemies?)

We are the servants of the God of freedom. We are the enemies of paganism.

"If God doesn't exist, nothing matters. If God does exist, nothing else matters." We are not mystics, but He - God, HaShem, the God of all Creation - has convinced us of His reality, and that He loves us (His human children), and that He wants us to be happy.

So, we ask, how can we know God? What's His Name? (Who is He? What's His Nature?) How can we know His will?

If you seek Him, the Holy One of Israel, you'll find His fingerprints in history (He is continually operational!) and science. You'll find Him, if you know where and how to look, in the pages of the Torah, the "Guidance," or Bible - "the book of Divine righteousness."

History leads to knowledge of God

Exodus is a radical, revolutionary book in human history, which tells the story of the world's greatest revolution - of a series of events that turned Egypt's "gods" and all else upside down, making slaves the masters. It's the Deity's introduction of Himself to all mankind as the God of human freedom, love and justice (Who is the enemy of everything degrading).

The Exodus was just the beginning of things... This revolution is a continuing, eternal revolution.

Can I Be a Christian, or an Atheist, Say, and Still Keep the First Covenant?

Yes. One can keep the Covenant Law on several levels.

Keeping the laws against 1) perverse and cruel dietary practices (See Torn Limb), 2) larceny, 3) criminally perverse sexual conduct, 4) murder, and 5) anarchy (society's obligation to make and keep a system of police and courts to protect life and property and prevent the strong from oppressing the weak) are basic obligations. Whatever one's spiritual or religious beliefs, everyone must avoid transgressing these laws.

As for idolatry and blasphemy, Israel's ancient prophets didn't roam the world denouncing other peoples' idols. Jonah didn't go to Nineveh to denounce the paganism there but the horrible cruelty, oppressiveness and immorality of the Assyrians.

Sacrilege is always idolatrous, idolatry is always sacrilegious. The commandments against a) sacrilege and b) idolatry, which are so closely related to each other that they can practically be regarded as one commandment, are different.

At the level of the Law that everyone always must enforce and keep, "blessing God" (actually, cursing Him, directing a curse against Him) is forbidden. It's sacrilege. As for the Universal prohibition against idolatry, the real prohibition is against "strange worship" (in Hebrew, avodah zarah - avodah (service, work or worship), zarah (strange). To worship one's gods or God in cruel, hurtful, disgusting, oppressive ways violates the Law. To cut oneself to "suffer as He (Jesus) suffered," to make a bonfire of one's enemies as a sacrificial offering, to throw people off cliffs to appease some supposed deity, to worship rats, to excrete, or urinate, or have sex in public as a worshipful act, to blow oneself up along with as many women and children as one can in order to win a place in Heaven - these are all avodah zarah/strange worship. The Law prohibits them absolutely, forever.

As for idolatry in the sense of worshiping anything created (instead of or even along with their one Creator), that's a different matter. Israel's strict monotheism is not one of the minimal requisites of civilization. The peoples of the world haven't yet learned enough about the Law, or the Lawgiver, to keep these laws as Israel - with its unique history and long connection to HaShem - is commanded to keep them. So, for instance, one of recent history's leading advocates of the Law of the First Covenant, Aime Palliere, was a practicing Roman Catholic priest (See The Unknown Sanctuary: a pilgrimage from Rome to Israel (Paris, 1923/New York, 1993).

One can, in the world as it is today, believe in a different God than HaShem (the God of Abraham), or in several gods, or no god, and still be a very good person.

So, for instance, a Hindu who worships Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, or a Buddhist, who makes offerings and bows to Buddha, can keep the Universal Law. Despite doing something that's absolutely forbidden to Israel, he or she can be a very good person, and good people can confidently expect a place of honor in Heaven above.

One recognizes that every act of idolatry, in the sense of worshiping anything created, diminishes the honor that people should give to God. Further, one makes no judgment here on people, b'nai Noah, who come to acknowledge the oneness of God, recognize that one should worship Him directly, but then go back to other ways. Probably, that would constitute an act of betrayal, a repudiation of the truth and God. A Noahide who did that would be very like a Jewish person who did that.

Mark the man of integrity, and behold the upright! - Psalm 37:37

We are speaking above of crimes. Being a good person involves more than just avoiding criminal violations of the Seven Commandments. One should try to do the very opposite of what the Law forbids. a) In the matter of the commandment against larceny, for instance, one shouldn't just avoid stealing but should try to live charitably and give charity. One should also avoid the corrosive sin of coveting, or excessively desiring, the property or privileges of another. b) In the matter of the commandment against murder, one shouldn't just avoid murdering people, one should try to save the life of a person in danger. c) In the matter of the dietary commandment, one shouldn't just avoid the horrible crime at the root of the commandment, one should also try to avoid eating blood, avoid eating any animal that wasn't killed in a kindly, decent way, and avoid any kind of cruelty to animals in general. d) In the matter of the sexual commandment, one shouldn't just avoid criminally perverse acts but should instead try to do what the Torah declares to be good and right: to marry a person of the opposite sex, bring children into the world, and raise them to do good. e) In the matter of the commandment against anarchy, one should hate injustice and try one's best to make justice and fairness prevail everywhere.

Further, in the matter of the commandment against "blessing God" (or really, cursing Him), one should go beyond refraining from cursing Him and bless Him and honor Him, with all one's might and all one's soul, and in every way. In the matter of avoiding strange worship, instead of merely refraining from worshiping evil beings or even good beings or things which are mere created things or beings, one should worship God alone and worship Him in purity.

A person who does any of these things is better than one who does none of them. One who does all these things and lives like this is a boon to the world, regardless of his or her religion or lack thereof. This individual is one of the righteousness of the nations; this person will get from God infinite and eternal rewards, and his memory and merit will be a blessing in the world. This is keeping the First Covenant.

Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. - Isaiah 1:17

But this is not the end of the story. A person who lives like this due to the belief that it is good and right to do so - that doing so is ultimately right, and not just personally beneficial or expedient - is, all things being equal, a better person than one who doesn't hold to such beliefs. The first person is bound to be more consistently and thoroughly good than the other. He or she is likely to live like this all the time, and not just sporadically.

At an even higher level, one who believes that God - the Ultimate in goodness, however else one may think of Him (or possibly of Her, or of Them) - sees what one does and cares about what one does, and has given us His Law to guide us in His Way, is, all things being equal, closer yet to God's ideal, a better person than one who doesn't hold to such beliefs. This is so because the God-loving, God-fearing person is 1) likely to be more conscientious about consistently, constantly doing the right thing and, 2) likely to be more involved in studying, learning and concentrating on what doing the right thing actually entails. Holiness doesn't come by instinct, nor by accident. Holiness requires study, and practice. Animals are ruled by their instincts. Man, whose intellect surpasses his instincts, who has the free will to make choices for himself, makes moral choices based on learning (The Rainbow Covenant, p. 246).

Without wisdom, there cannot be any good act or true knowledge. - Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed 3:36

The ultimate operational principle in doing and living righteously is the Ultimate, HaShem. Belief in HaShem, according to the Torah, is the first principle: as more people turn to HaShem, more people will conduct themselves in accordance with the First Covenant; as more people conduct themselves in accordance with the First Covenant, more people will turn to HaShem. This is the faith and knowledge that will transform mankind. So the person who deliberately, knowingly and publicly follows HaShem directly advances God's Own great agenda, His larger plan for all the world. Bringing one's fellows true knowledge of God, by words, deeds and example - this person is completely fulfilling the First Covenant.

Let all Your awe be manifest in all Your works, and a reverence for You fill all that You have created, so that all Your creatures may know You, and all mankind bow down to You to acknowledge You. - ancient Hebrew prayer, in the Amidah for the High Holidays

Eventually, every nation will acknowledge Him and even "know Him," in a sense. For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of HaShem, as the waters cover the sea (Habakuk 2:14). At that point the last two commandments, the two highest commandments of the Seven Commandments, will become fully operative. Outright, deliberate acts of idolatry and sacrilege will be outlawed - that is, turned into crimes, at least into misdemeanors - everywhere. The peoples of the world will demand it. At that point, beyond merely avoiding sacrilege or insults to His Name, people everywhere will honor His Name. Beyond just avoiding the worship of values and "gods" that are not God, people everywhere will worship God, HaShem.

They shall declare My glory among the nations. - Isaiah 66:19

How Does Christianity Connect to the First Covenant?

We often get questions about different religions. The vast majority of them concern Christianity.

Responding to one such question, Michael Dallen writes:

. . . My mother, of blessed memory, always made a point of distinguishing between the religion of Jesus, which was Torah-based, and what became the religion about Jesus. She thought well of Jesus, Yeshu ben Yosef, as an individual, a real person, although she also thought that much that was said and written about him was assembled from different legends. She did not think of him as being any kind of god. She thought it's possible, or even likely, that he had been providentially chosen, for reasons we can only guess at, to do what he did in life. On the other hand, she didn't think of him as being the Messiah (that is, the Davidic Messiah, the re-born king of Israel, the leading, last anointed one - meshiach or messiah means anointed; the kings of Israel were anointed with sweet olive oil) among all the remarkable individuals that HaShem might someday anoint to help redeem men. She thought, along with most Jews who know anything about this at all, that that's completely impossible. (This is, after all, something that Israel should know a bit about, because the concept of messiah comes out of Israel's Tradition).

In her view, and in mine, Jesus didn't "save" non-Jews from "the Burden of the Law" - that is to say, from the privilege and duty of keeping the Torah's 613 Commandments. The 613 are all the laws, statutes and ordinances of Sinai: the full Torah, in other words. According to the Torah itself, people who aren't Jewish aren't bound and never were bound by the Torah in its totality. The full 613 do bind Israel, since they are meant to make and keep Israel a holy people, "a kingdom of priests," "a light unto the nations."

Further, as you say, this is all part of G'd's great plan to show other nations the Way to G'd - which is really the Way OF G'd. This Way or path is in the Torah: in fact, it's part of those 613 Commandments. The 613 Commandments and the wise and ancient Rabbinic ordinances that complement them are legally binding on the Jewish people. Jewish courts, Torah courts, have or have had (and one day will again have) the power to enforce them on individual Jewish people, with all the directed power of the state, police and courts.

Other people - Noahides (or No'achides), the vast majority of the human race - aren't bound that way. They are bound only by the Law of the First Covenant, the Rainbow Covenant - the Law that G'd gave to mankind's legendary common ancestors, and, through them, to all mankind, eternally. Israel is bound by this same great covenant, incidentally. G'd NEVER cancels, abrogates, or welshes on His covenants.

The Law of the First Covenant, the Noahide Law, consists of seven broad commandments, which are actually headings, or categories, of Law and Guidance. These are the Seven Noahide Commandments, the Universal Law or Way. People - all people everywhere, eternally - are obligated to enforce the Universal Law's bare requirements: to avoid perverted gastronomy and cruelty to living beings; to avoid the perversions of theft and murder, and idolatry and sacrilege; to avoid sexual perversions, including incest, (male) homosexuality, adultery and bestiality; to renounce anarchy and lawlessness and the oppression of the weak by the powerful, by setting up a system of courts, police and laws to enforce the Universal Law, including every necessary law.

One soon finds that, the bare requirements of the Universal Law aside, G'd expects more of each of us than that we simply avoid committing felonies, or criminal violations of the basic Seven Commandments. He calls all of us, everyone - all human beings - to holiness. To achieve holiness, one must do the opposite of whatever the Universal Law forbids.

What does this mean? Instead of merely refraining from committing murder, for instance, one should act to save the life in danger (although one isn't legally bound to do so, even though a Jew, pursuant to Torah, is bound that way). Instead of merely refraining from thievery, one should give charity. Instead of merely refraining from idolatry, one should worship and serve G'd, HaShem; instead of merely refraining from profaning His holy Name, one should always be trying to honor it. And so forth.

One soon finds that the Law or Way of the First Covenant is surprisingly rich and deep, and that the Torah of Israel is the one and only way to fully explore this Universal Torah. That is, the Torah's universal moral Law applies to everyone; the Torah's universal moral laws are G'd's Universal Torah. So the Law, or Way, of the First Covenant, the Noahide or Universal Covenant, is for everyone, and the Torah - Israel's Torah - is how we get into it.

Everyone who aspires to more than merely avoiding committing felonies under G'd's Law (which are perversions that make people less than fully human while they dirty and corrupt the world) needs to study, and practice, what righteousness requires. Mankind's chief reference and source-text for that is the Torah… For more on this subject, you really ought to get a copy of The Rainbow Covenant yourself.

What is the First Covenant Religion?

As the Bible tells the story, you are Noah's descendant:

And God spoke unto Noah, and to Noah's children with him, saying:

'And as for Me, behold, I establish My covenant with you, and with your descendants after you.' Genesis 9:8-9

A covenant is a solemn, reciprocally binding pact or contract, confirmed and symbolized by mutual pledges. After the great Flood in the Bible, God took the rainbow, a pre-existing phenomenon, and made it His pledge, the symbol of His covenant (Genesis 9:11-17).

With this great covenant - the Rainbow Covenant, the First Covenant, the Noahide or Universal Covenant - God guarantees that Earth shall abide (somehow). Day and night and springtime and harvest-time will never be cut off by any further disaster like the Flood. We have God's covenantal guarantee.

We can also rest assured that we - human beings - will abide as the earthly masters of this planet. The world's Owner and Creator has knowingly given our own kind - humankind - dominion over Earth. We won't be supplanted by space aliens or other non-human beings. In fact, He calls on us to serve Him as His stewards, His conscious servants, subject solely to Him.

Would God in His wisdom simply give us these precious gifts but leave us in the dark about how to use them? How about instructions?

You are the children of the Lord your God. - Deuteronomy 14:1

Have you ever held a touchstone? If you have what you think is a piece of gold, you can scratch a touchstone with it and the mark it leaves on the touchstone will show you whether your gold is real and, if it is, its purity.

God gave our distant ancient ancestors seven touchstones. These eternal, universal gifts, principles of God-consciousness and truth, exist to connect us to the sacred cause of Israel. They make us more conscious of our Maker. They are the Bible's beating heart.

You shall be holy; because I, the Lord your God, am holy - Leviticus 19:2

Can a Thinking Person Accept the Bible as True?

I Evolution

II Creation's Six "Days"

III. Figurative language - the Sun "goes quiet"

IV Biblical numbers: ages and census figures

I. Nowadays, when fundamentalist religious people argue "intelligent design versus evolution," one should ponder what the Bible* really says. It speaks of life's progress from the lowest and simplest forms to the most complex and highest. Why shouldn't the Creator use evolution as His instrument, as a tool like a scalpel, to accomplish exactly that? The Biblical account, as many commentators have pointed out, ** actually anticipates Darwin

Now, I am speaking for myself here - not for the foundation, not for my fellow trustees. But one surely must appreciate that the Bible, like any great classic, must be approached on its own terms. We have it, and are blessed in having it, for moral instruction. We have it so we can learn about God and discover how we ourselves are intended to fit into the greater scheme of things. It is not a science textbook - yet the stories it relates reflect things that really happened, in some sense; they are, in essence, as true to reality as any stories concerning the same tremendous things could be.

One also needs to recognize that Israel has something called the Oral_Torah. It's where most of our knowledge of the Seven Commandments of the First Covenant (the Rainbow Covenant) comes from. It explains, elucidates, and extends our understanding of the Written Torah, of Scripture's first Five Books, when the Scriptural text itself seems insufficient.

II. The Torah itself - the Oral Torah - warns against taking Genesis' account of Creation completely literally (Mishnah Torah, Hagigah 2:1; Genesis Rabbah 1). The ancient Hebrew tradition is roomy enough to posit, for instance, that the Universe is 15 billion years old.

Sometimes, with the Bible, what may seem absurd is just a faulty translation. As in the story of Creation, for example.

Moses, at God's command (as I believe, as the Torah teaches), wrote that Creation occurred in six uninterrupted stages or yomim - a word which Biblical literalists translate as days. But Hebrew's yomim, not unlike English's "days," is a versatile word. Moses was surely using it in a figurative sense: not in the sense of conventional planetary days but in the same sense as the yom or day in Isaiah's "Day (yom) of the Lord." (Isaiah 13:6). That is, as stages, or eras: set, indeterminate, uninterrupted periods of time.

Some religious people will disagree, but to most religious people today it's obvious that the six "days" of Creation weren't literal 24-hour days. Certainly, if Genesis' yomim were days they must have been very unusual, since the Earth's sun wasn't created until the fourth "day" (Genesis 1:14).

III. Of course, one recognizes, in the Bible's Book of Joshua, that the sun doesn't literally stop in the sky in the course of the battle for Gibeon. That would tear the solar system apart. Rather, the sun "goes quiet" (Job 10:12-13), which is a perfectly natural translation of the Hebrew. Not only that, careful dating reveals that afternoon to have been the occasion of the total eclipse of the sun in the area - an event which probably dismayed Joshua's enemies, the idolatrous, sun-worshiping Amorites.

We also must acknowledge that the story of Job, for instance, is at least partly fictional. Does the Father of Justice play with good and saintly people as with a toy? Or look at the very beginning of Job: can mortal man eavesdrop on Heavenly conversations?

IV. What about: 1) the recounting in Genesis of the extraordinarily long life-spans of certain individuals; and 2) the huge census numbers for Israel that the Bible apparently recounts?

1) One appreciates, again, that the Oral Torah warns against taking the early chapters of Genesis completely literally. One also appreciates that Scripture, in these passages, speaks of the (even then) distant long-ago, of legendary events and times. And perhaps some remarkable individuals did, pursuant to God's will, live extremely long lives - to transmit their culture successfully, possibly, in antediluvian times, when the world was young and rich and the first true men were still relatively disease-free. Anyway, Genesis tells the story this way: this, it seems, is what we need to read and hear, even if we don't take everything in it literally.

2) This has bothered me: the extraordinarily large figures that the Torah supposedly gives to Israel in the desert, in the course of the Exodus. This issue also comes up in regard to the people's offerings in the wilderness, and to the different numerations given for the tribes of Israel generally.

Scripture isn't speaking here of the distant long-ago or legendary times but of the present. Moses himself is writing; Israel is still in the desert. And these numbers are huge, impossible.

The Talmud discusses this problem; it's no new discovery. It directs one to the very beginning of the book of Exodus, 1:7, where the Torah speaks of the amazing fertility of the people of Israel in Egypt. "The children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly (literally, swarmed), and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with them." So, after some 210 years in Egypt, the 70 Hebrews who had entered had become - how many? Obviously, something miraculous took place in Egypt and Israel increased tremendously. Based on the figures that the Written Torah gives us, it looks like the 70 increased to about 20,000. That's miraculous! Especially in an age without modern hygiene, where life expectancy was low and disease rampant. However, that's not miraculous enough for the traditionalist school, which interprets the same language to say that the 70 became at least three or four million!

Those numbers aren't even consistent with the rest of the story! They don't jibe with the Scriptural account itself! But there is a simple explanation. And it validates the Written Torah.

Israel took a census "on the first day of the seventh month of the second year" after the Exodus began (Numbers 1:1-45). It counted every male over 20-years old - when a man is fully ready for military service, the Torah teaches*** - from all twelve tribes of Israel except the Levites. (The Levites were counted separately.) The numbers given are unbelievable. If we follow the conventional translation of the Bible's ancient Hebrew, the count was 603,550 men, and another 22,000 men of the tribe of Levy: a total of 625,550 men of military age or older.

This number exceeds the troop numbers for Napoleon's Grand Army when he invaded Russia! The Industrial Age had already begun in Europe; the population had boomed. Still, the only way Napoleon could assemble such a huge army - fewer than 600,000 troops - was by enlisting soldiers not just from France but from most of the countries of Europe.

Similar census results for Israel, taken later, appear in Numbers 26:2, 51: 601,730 men, along with 23,000 able-bodied Levites (26:62).

Beyond the period of the Exodus, during the reign of King David, another census of men of military age in Israel gives an even higher number: 800,000 "valiant men who drew the sword," 500,000 of whom came from the tribe of Judah/Yehuda (2 Samuel 24:9). In 1 Chronicles 21:5 the census figures given are 1,100,000 total; of the Judeans, 470,000. These figures, so it's said, imply a total population - including women and children - of more than five or six million (A.F. Kirkpatrick, Samuel). And Israel, even then, was one of the world's smallest countries.

Those are unreal numbers for the late Bronze Age. Best estimates put the world's total population at the time at about two hundred million - including all China, India, Europe, Africa (including Egypt), Persia and the rest of the Middle East, Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines, Indo-China, Indonesia, and the Americas.

One of the problems with these figures is that, if they were real, there would still be a visible track in the desert where the millions of people walked. There would be litter, and other evidence available to archaeologists.

Another problem with these figures, as we noted above, is that they don't jibe with the Torah itself.

Deuteronomy 4:38 records Moses telling the people that they will soon drive nations "greater and mightier than you" out of the Promised Land. Deuteronomy 9:1 says the same thing. In 7:1, again, the Torah speaks of seven nations in the Land, each of them "greater and mightier" than the nation of Israel. In Deuteronomy 7:7, the Torah describes the people of Israel as "the fewest of all peoples." In 7:17 it notes that the seven Canaanite nations are (each) "more numerous" than the Hebrews.

Let's consider this. If the Hebrews, the people of Israel, numbered just five million, and each of the seven Canaanite nations was just a little larger - say, 5,500,000 - that would put the population of the land, not including the invading Hebrews, at just a little less than 40 million. That would be a population at least five times greater than the entire area - even including Lebanon and Jordan - currently supports. And that's from an era before scientific farming, mechanical water pumps or effective plumbing, not to mention large-scale sewage works, landfills or incinerators. Further, as the Torah itself repeatedly describes the land, it's not urban but rural, pastoral, agricultural, and low-density.

Later in the Bible, the Book of Judges tells us that a mere 600 warriors made up a respectable contribution from the tribe of Dan. The 600 was actually pared down from about 6,000 - that was a very respectable force. It's a long way from 6,000 to 603,550! (Not to mention more than 22,000 Levites, or any from the mixed multitude who had joined the Hebrews.) A century later, six of the twelve tribes of Israel could offer no more than 40,000 men of military age; if we double that, to help us roughly account for the other six tribes (including the Levites), the number we get is 80,000. Obviously, there is a huge difference between 80,000 men of military age and the figure of more than 625,000 mentioned earlier. Yet the smaller number comes from a time when the people of Israel had been living and flourishing, relatively speaking, in their Promised Land for generations. There should have been more men available to fight, not fewer.

What's going on with these strange numbers? Again, there's a simple answer.

In Hebrew, the word elef has come to mean "a thousand." Sometimes it's translated as a "myriad" ("many"). Elafim, the plural form, denotes myriads, or thousands. But words' meanings often change over time. Words that refer to numbers are especially hard to pin down, because context alone can't define them.

(The ancient Romans' word for a hundred was century, for instance. But "century" began as a military term. An officer called a centurion commanded a unit called a century, which might include anywhere from 15 to 50 to 150 troops or more. "Century," far from being a fixed number, is somewhat like the word "division" in a military context: a division of troops may include four or five thousand soldiers up far past 12,000.)

In fact, it appears that the census lists in the Torah use "tens" and "hundreds" as absolute numbers, reflecting the actual number of fighting men counted. But Moses probably was using the word elef here - as Samuel did too, elsewhere in the Bible - based on military usage, in the sense of a contingent of soldiers of varying numbers, as a squad, or as a group of men assigned to a tent. Ancient Israel probably assembled to fight in units - contingents - based on social or family ties. Some units would be larger than others; they might range in size from five or six men to 15 or more. (This would also follow the pattern of other ancient armies, such as those of Babylon and Rome, with its decuriae, which were organized this way too.)

Later in time this sense of elef as "contingent" was discarded; although it can still connote "very many" or "a myriad," its principal use today is to denote "a thousand." But that's not what Moses meant by it. (The thinking here is based on the work of the early 20th century scholars G.E. Mendenhall and Sir Flinders Petrie, described in Encyclopedia Judaica under "Census.")

When Numbers 1:21 declares, for example, that the tribe of Reuben enrolled "46 elef 500" fighting men, this is conventionally translated as 46,500 men. But if elef in this context really means contingent, as we believe, this passage should be translated, "Those enrolled from the tribe of Reuben, 46 contingents = 500 [men]. That is, the "thousands" or elefim represent contingents or units of men, and the hundreds and tens the actual number of men. So, in Numbers 1:20–1:43, the tribe of Shimon raised 59 elefim (contingents), this being actually 300 men. The tribe of Judah/Yehuda, with 74 elefim, raised 600 men. The tribe of Issacher, raising 54 contingents, offered 400 men. Zebulon, 57 elefim, 400 men. Ephraim raised 40 elefim or contingents, or 500 men… Manasseh, 32 elefim = 200 men in arms. Benjamin, 35 elefim = 400. Dan, 60 = 700 men. Asher, 41 elefim, or 500 men. Naftali, 53 elefim, or 400 men. Gad raised 45 elefim or contingents, consisting of a total of 650 men.

The totals here come out to 5,500 - these being men 20-years old or older. Later, just before entering the Promised Land, after a total of 40 years of life and strife and death in the wilderness, Israel takes another census. The count is lower, according to Numbers 26; it's just 5,000 men.

In the context of the late Bronze Age, an armed force of 5,000, or even an armed force half that size, would make up a very respectable fighting force. Assuming that the total number of the people of Israel, including women and children, was something like four times that number (a reasonable assumption, apparently; the same multiple is frequently applied to the 603,550 figure), we are speaking of a total of 20,000 people, not including the Levites and not including the "mixed multitude" of b'nai noach that accompanied Israel at least part of the way across the desert but which wasn't counted in either census.

Once again, in the context of the late Bronze Age, those are very respectable numbers. Moses, looking the people over, comments proudly that they grew from just the 70 people who original went down into Egypt and that now, thanks to HaShem, they are "like the stars of heaven for multitude." (Deuteronomy 10:22). That's a good poetic description of such numbers, some 20,000 people or more.

Five thousand men in arms: such numbers don't make Israel's army the largest army on earth - such densely populated countries as Egypt and China would surely have been able to muster more troops - and they don't make the people of Israel one of the largest nations on earth either. The Torah's comments above, about the remarkable, or even miraculous, nature of the coming conquest of Cana'an, make sense now. In fact, the whole story of the Exodus comes into clearer focus. Moses wouldn't have needed electronic amplification to address the whole nation; Israel could move without sucking up all the groundwater or polluting it with animal and human waste. As for the pronouncements of modern "experts" that the Torah's account of the Exodus is mythic, let them consider it again in the light of these numbers. They take it out of the realm of the impossible and fanciful and bring it back into history where it belongs. These numbers also validate the Torah. It's accurate, despite the mistakes that mere people have made with it. (It's also natural that people would have made just such a mistake: these numbers don't affect spiritual or legal principles; in times of harsh oppression, as during the long counter-revolutionary reign of King Manasseh (c. 478 BCE), for instance, the old ways of understanding such things would be among the first things to be lost.) It's very, very different from other ancient works. It's no mythology; it's more truthful and realistic than most of us ever even imagined. What the skeptics, cynics and academics thought to be mere exaggeration isn't. Moses was no liar, Moses got it right. Besides its innumerable other sacred qualities, the Torah is a great historical work.

____

* One refers here solely to the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to the end of Second Chronicles. Nothing mentioned here or below pertains in any way, either positively or negatively, to the Christian Bible, the New Testament - the word testament coming from the Latin testamentum, or covenant - as it's called. The focus of this article is the First Covenant.

** See J.H. Hertz, the Penateuch and Haforahs (Soncino, 2d edition (1937)), Genesis, Additional Notes, "Jewish Attitude to Evolution" (pp. 194-195).

*** As for relatively recent

***George Orwell, fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the late '30's, probably wasn't thinking of this Torah precept when he wrote that a combat soldier should, ideally, be at least twenty. Men younger than that aren't as reliable as they should be, given the grinding demands of war. They have such a deep need for sleep, Orwell wrote, that they are prone to fall asleep even when standing up, even when marching, and even in the course of guard duty ("Notes on the Spanish Militias," An Age Like This: 1920-1940 (1968).]

Why Believe in God at All?

One day, people will look back on history and wonder how anyone could not believe in God, HaShem.

As science advances, people encounter a constantly accumulating array of facts, bringing more knowledge of God to man. Most scientists, contrary to popular opinion, are not godless. (Some of them also have a better idea than most people of how confident, but wrong, people have been in the past.)

The "best minds," for thousands of years, rejected the concept of God's creation of the universe ex nihilo - from nothing. They had another idea. But perhaps the biggest thing to come out of modern science since World War II is the scientific validation of God's creation of the Universe ex nihilo (in Hebrew, yesh me-ayin, "something out of nothing"), or "the Big Bang."

This item came out much more recently:

Two "very well-conceived studies," reported in the journal Science, that a "brain-building gene" which plays a crucial role in giving us all human intelligence first came on the scene "approximately 5,800 years ago." That was as close as they could date it. See The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2005, p. A-14.

The Torah teaches that the first true man, Adam (and his spouse, Eve), arrived on the scene 5,769 years ago. (2009 corresponds to the Hebrew calendar year 5769).

Scientists believe the gene has something to do with language, improving man's ability to process language and symbols. They are calling it the "Adam gene." See our newsletter: Covenant Connection, February_2006

The "best minds" in physics and chemistry long believed that there was "no room in the universe for God to act." Now, from studying quantum mechanics, the marvelously strange forces affecting subatomic particles, they know otherwise.

There is no god but He in Whom the people of Israel believe. - Muhammed, The Qur'an, Sura 10:90

See "El, God of Abraham," Covenant Connection, January 2008, about thinkers like Freud and Einstein and some of the "scientific" misinformation which convinced them to reject the God of their fathers.

Astronomy used to teach that the Earth was the center of the universe. Then it taught that the Earth was one of billions or trillions of planets sustaining intelligent life. Now, most astronomers believe that the Earth is a very rare jewel - part of a planetary system far away from the x-rays and cosmic rays and interstellar catastrophes that make most solar systems dangerous. We are sheltered from comets and meteors by the gravity of our moon, and the asteroid belt beyond Mars, and then the gravity-heavy gas giant planets, Saturn and Jupiter, beyond Mars. Recently, astronomy found that, even beyond the furthest planets, dense swarms of smaller objects provide further protection, almost like a thick blanket wrapped around our solar system.

From the still-unfolding principles and laws of physics, from the nature of the 95% of the universe that scientists today know only as "dark matter," which we cannot yet even perceive, to the discoveries of archaeology and better understanding of God's Torah, from the principles of quantum mechanics to the facts revealed by astronomy, from sub-molecular biology to the teachings of the prophets: all of this will eventually help us know Him better.

Just in the last few years, archaeologists came across what looks like the foundations of the palace of David, King of Israel, in Jerusalem. The "best minds" in archaeology - that is, the conventional wisdom of the secular establishment that dominates academia - had been insisting for decades that the David of the Bible is purely a storyteller's invention! That no such place ever existed!

As science advances and people understand the universe better, we will laugh at the idea - the conventional wisdom of scholars, priests, theologians and other "experts" - that God isn't what He is: present and immanent, intimately involved with every human being while He also sustains every particle, force and atom in existence; transcendent, holy, eternal, kind, intelligent, compassionate, fair and just, self-aware, etc.

And Jesus answered him, The first of all the Commandments is Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is One Lord. - Christian Scripture, The Gospel According to Mark 12:29

Biologists have been saying lately that people seem to be created with a "God gene" which makes human beings yearn for transcendence, fills us with awe and makes us feel thankful, and - in general - encourages us to believe in either gods or God.

Since this is my, Michael Dallen's, essay, I get to speak personally here: that gene never switched on for me, as far as I know, until after I had concluded intellectually that the God of Israel is God. Before that, I didn't feel any great lack because I didn't believe in Him, I didn't feel bereft or pointless, I didn't feel any awe-filled tug on my heart from a higher power or powers. . . I began believing in God not out of faith but because logic, as it seemed to me, demanded it.

God reveals Himself to man, in a sense, in many different ways. One often says that the Hebrew Revolution has many "hooks." Torah scholars have long acknowledged that the Torah - God's Revelation to mankind - has seventy (70) different "faces."

The Bible itself teaches that God, HaShem, is the "God Who Hides" (Isaiah 45:15). The King of the Universe first "revealed" Himself to me, at any rate, through His actions in world history. Some people "see" Him" in the wonderful workings of the cosmos. Some "see" His acts in the sphere of biology, through the development of complex organisms (requiring multiple genes to "turn on" simultaneously in myriad creatures all the time - when even one such occurrence would be incredibly unlikely).

I "saw" Him principally in the apparent patterns of reward and punishment and good and evil in the annals of humanity. I "saw" Him in the history of the Jews.

God, the Torah teaches, created the people of Israel to serve Him and the rest of the human race as His special "witnesses" in the world - as a more or less dependable central cadre of activists devoted to the truth of His Oneness. One can see God's hand, as it were, in the existence, survival, accomplishments - and the enemies - of the Jewish people.

These same... Folk, from time almost immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the human race, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets. - H.L. Mencken

The leading geographer of the ancient world was a Greek, Strabo. He was no friend of Israel. He wrote, near the start of the Common Era (that is, near the year one of the common era, at the end of B.C. or B.C.E. (before the common era)." These Jews have penetrated to every city, and it would not be easy to find a single place in the inhabited world which has not received this race [sic], and where it has not become master." Now:

1) the Jews are not a race - they are a people, a national or ethnic group, as well as a sacred society, but Jews are black, white, yellow, brown, red; the Jews include people of every race and from every nation (more or less).

How odd of God to choose the Jews - Lewis Browne

It's not so odd. The Jews chose God. - Leon Roth

2) People often speak of the great power of "the Jews." In Strabos' time, the Jews in the land of Israel lived under Roman tyrants. Jews elsewhere lived under every sort of legal disability. On the other hand, they tended to be good earners. More than nineteen centuries later, "the Jews" had risen to the very heights of world power, it was said, but they still couldn't help their brothers - one out of every three Jews in the world - from being murdered in Europe. With all that power, "the Jews" couldn't get even one country in the world to open its borders to their own relatives, people who were about to be murdered. Today, despite all "world Jewry's" mythic power, it doesn't seem to be sufficient to get exclusive possession even of the land of Israel, a piece of real estate smaller than New Jersey. Neither is it capable of keeping the Jews who live in Israel, particularly including the most helpless, civilian women, children and babies, safe from being maimed and killed by vicious zealots who want to create a world without Israel.

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. - John Adams, second President of the United States

Despite persecution, the Jewish people have given the world quite a bit. If one includes some people who had only a Jewish father and not a Jewish mother (who therefore are not Jewish, unless they converted to Judaism) as well, of course, as people who converted to Judaism, no less than 22% of all winners of the Nobel Prize, for instance, come from Moses' "people of priests." 22% is quite a remarkable figure considering that the Jews number no more than 1/4 of 1% of the human race.

When checked against clear Bible prophecy, the peculiar role played by Israel in history and the accomplishments of the Jews among men since the invention of the alphabet (possibly including the invention of the alphabet) stands out. Moses declares that it's meant to. He tells Israel to carefully keep God's statutes and judgments:

For this is your wisdom, and your understanding in the sight of the nations, that shall hear all these statutes and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. - Deuteronomy 4: 6

Which leads us to those statutes and judgments, the sublimity and utter righteous consistency and goodness of the Torah. The current conventional wisdom of the professorate insists that it was committees or a committee of men who gave us the Torah, that it was written by different people at different times and pasted together so as to present the Torah to the people of Israel, as part of a long-kept secret, deliberate fraud, as a supposedly God-given whole.

Academia posits that a mysterious "Redactor" did the work, putting the various strands together and got his or her colleagues to ratify the whole, all while keeping the big secret. I accepted all that thinking, but then I became an adult. I had watched committees deliberate and had served on committees - endless committees, as one recalls. No committee that I'd ever seen, no committee that I could imagine, could ever have done what academic orthodox opinion claimed it did. Never mind the impossibility of keeping the work - again, orthodox opinion holds the work to be a fraud, the passing off of a wholly man-made paste-up job as Moses' and ultimately God's - secret for generations.

One must consider the fundamental goodness, the amazing correctness, the depth and myriad different facets of the Torah and of the Bible generally. (One must approach it on its own terms. One must give it a chance. If you do give it a chance, if you go through it as you should, with a good rabbinic commentary... Other very great works, including Shakespeare's and Dante's, even if one approaches them with all sympathy, don't offer anything comparable to Torah.) And then, look at every other human attempt to speak in the name of the ultimate, of God or gods - the Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, the Japanese, the Babylonians, the Hindus, the Persians, or even America's "Christian Scientists," not even getting into the scriptures of the Mormons, the New Testament of the Christians or the Quran of the Muslims - one sees the Torah's sublimity and recognizes the great difference.

The Jews were the only ones whose sacred Scriptures were held in ever greater veneration as they became better known. - Archbishop Jacques Benigne Bossuet

To have bound this New Testament, so completely rococo in taste, with the Old Testament into one book, as the Bible, is perhaps the greatest piece of audacity and "sin against the Holy Spirit" which literary Europe has on its conscience. - Friedrich Nietzsche

I wondered why the soldiers of Israel, according to the Torah, must be at least 20 years old. Surely that was a mistake, I thought: 17, 18, 19, why waste those good years of health, flexibility and aggressiveness? But the Torah teaches holiness, even in the context of war. Soldiers must often serve both day and night, and must stay awake since lives depend on it. A piece by George Orwell - not a big fan of the Torah or Bible - cleared up the mystery. The best age for a soldier began at 20, he wrote, because men younger than 20 fell asleep too easily. They needed sleep so badly that they fell asleep even while standing up, and sometimes even while marching. No discipline could prevent it, they simply had to sleep and would, he said. Once they reached the age of 20, one could generally count on them to keep awake.

I wondered about the Torah's prohibition of abortion, except in cases to save the life or health of the mother. Then I learned that the prohibition starts only 40 days after conception; before that the fetus-to-be is regarded as "mere water," or little more than a hairy egg. And a new study came out, which I read about in the papers: modern radiological imagining shows that a fetus acquires a neural network and its gender approximately 40 days after conception.

I wondered about the date the Torah gives for the creation of the first true human beings, 5,766 years ago (this is written on the 25th of Tishrei, according to the Hebrew calendar, in the year 5766, or October 27, 2005 CE). Then a new genetic study came out, tracing an important anti-micro cephalic (anti-"pinhead") gene, which apparently has a lot to do with making human beings human, back "approximately 6,000 years ago."

I wondered why certain animals were kosher or fit to be eaten by a holy people while other animals weren't kosher. Then I read an article and book by a Dr. Temple Grandin, whose specialty is designing animal chutes, pens and the facilities for animal slaughter.

She shows - although she's Christian, not Jewish, and doesn't keep kosher herself - that the kosher land animals are not frightened or bothered by the smell of blood or death. She says that, as herd animals, they aren't bothered by being penned up with their own kind, nor frightened by being herded through chutes, so long as the chutes are reasonably well-designed. They can be slaughtered for food on an industrial scale without terrifying them, in other words. Further, as one sees from the mechanics of kosher slaughter, if they are slaughtered as the Torah commands, with a razor-sharp blade swept across the throat, severing the main arteries and causing instantaneous unconsciousness from the loss of blood pressure in the brain, they suffer almost no pain, or probably no pain at all. So a kosher animal, if killed in a kosher way, can be turned into food for human beings to eat in a truly kindly and even holy way.

Further, the procedure removes as much blood as possible from the body and tissues of the animal, since the heart keeps pumping even after the animal loses consciousness. This is good for someone who wants to avoid eating blood - the Torah telling Israel and anyone else who cares about this, not to eat or drink any blood at all. Further, the meat itself will stay fresher longer, because blood is a growth medium for bacteria.

One could go on and on about the Torah's endless virtues. If one simply approaches it on its own terms. . .

Torah gives us God's great revolutionary Plan, which makes so much sense (See If You were God): after creating all existence including all humanity, He cultivates a people and embodies His Law in them, so they keep it as a nationalist and a family and a religious duty. As a result, they produce people who challenge other people, who help move humanity along, to raise us all up, and to impress upon the whole world certain fundamental truths - the First Covenant and the Universal Law itself, of course, along with such inherent basic spiritual and moral principles as:

the absolute unity and holiness of God

the oneness of His creation

the oneness of humanity

the sanctity of human life

the sacredness and dignity of the human personality and human free will the uniform application of law, due process, and proportional justice the Sabbath and the seven-day week the efficacy of prayer the immortality of righteous souls and the promise of worldly redemption in the coming millennial age Or take the sheer sublimity of the Torah - if you realize that no one today, no matter how great one's knowledge of the Bible's original ancient Hebrew, can read the text without the help of commentaries... Consider how many of its ancient prophecies have already been realized, and how none of its prophecies has ever failed yet…

One of the aspects of Torah that "got" me early on was the prophecy that, should Israel fail to keep the Torah, "a non-nation, a vile nation" would rise up to be "pricks in the eyes and thorns in the sides" of the Jews in the land, possibly resulting in yet another spell of exile. The repeated Biblical promise that the land of Israel, as small as it is, cannot and must not be divided between the people of Israel and any other people who claim sovereignty over the land is striking too.

Another vindication of the Torah that constantly recurs in history is the remarkable, amazing absence of character and unscrupulousness of Israel's enemies, of every generation. There has been so much evil and so many enemies: Nazis, Communists, pogromists, inquisitors, the Aryan Nations and White Aryan Resistance and the Ku Klux Klan, Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi of Libya, Black American racists, Arab and Muslim tyrants and jihadists of every stripe... Such enemies tend to hate each other, but they all fiercely hate the Jews. They often even make common cause with their detested enemies in order to attack the Jews because they hate Israel more. . . If it's true that a man can be judged by his enemies, it's all the more true of a nation: if a people can be judged by its enemies…

Mankind cannot rise to the essential principles on which society must rest unless it meets with Israel. And Israel cannot fathom the depths of its own Tradition unless it meets with mankind.

(by Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh, 1823-1901)

Naturally, history can be slanted, neglected or forgotten; supposed common sense and human logic can mislead. Further, most people don't know enough to look at the Bible through the eyes of the people who are its focus. One realizes that most Bible translations are organized and shaped to lead one away from God! At the same time, they denounce Israel for not abandoning the Torah and directing its worship to a new god! (This new savior, redeemer and champion, the new "Lord," in place of HaShem, is, of course, a Jew himself - as were his mother, his grandmother, and ALL the early founders of the new religion).

When the God of Israel promises the people of Israel blessings, in the Bible, The New American Bible for Catholics that's now at my elbow says that the blessings will go to the Catholic Church. When the same God promises the people of Israel cursing, the same Bible says that the curses will go to the Jews.

Despite all such nonsense, one can see the future building. Sinai has changed people, and the world, and the world keeps changing. The God of Israel promises mankind progress. Often that seems doubtful. But one can also see from the Bible's prophets that the evidence of God's greatness - the greatness of HaShem - will build, through history, until finally no man can deny it. (See, e.g., Isaiah 2:2, 66; Psalms 105, Ezekiel 37:28)

Why Should I Keep the First Covenant?

My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone from My lips. - Psalm 89:35

God so loves mankind that He shows us His Way and gives us His Law. The idea that His laws are bad or unworthy in any sense doesn't hold water: why would God inflict unworthy laws on those who follow Him?

You shall keep My statutes. - Leviticus 19:9

If He meant to "free" us from "the burden of the Law," why would He tell us that His laws are eternal?

Every one of Your righteous ordinances is everlasting. - Psalm 119:160

The First Covenant - the Adamic, Noahide (or Noahite), Universal or Rainbow Covenant - requires us to act like truly human beings. This involves keeping God's laws for us. If you want to do what is right, if you want to please your Maker, if you want to benefit yourself and those near to you, and bring good into the world, and refine yourself - then keep God's Law and follow His Way.

What does the Lord [HaShem] require of you, but to fear* the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul? - Deuteronomy 10:12

The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear* God, and keep His commandments, because this is the purpose of man. - Ecclesiastes 12:13

Fearing God is the feeling that humanizes man's dealings with his fellow creatures; the "fear" of God is the voice of kindliness and conscious. [See Exodus 1:17 (Egypt's midwives refuse to obey the king's order to murder the newborn babies in their care, because "they feared God"); Deuteronomy 25:18 (Israel's eternal enemy, Amalek, viciously attacks the weak and helpless among Israel by preference, because Amalek does not "fear God").] Blessed is everyone who fears HaShem, who walks in His Ways (Psalm 128:1). The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10).

Do His will as if it were your will, that He may do your will as though it were His will. - R' Gamaliel, Mishnah, Pirke Avot 2:4

A covenant is a contract of a permanent, unconditional character, unless the words of promise involved explicitly state a condition or limitation of some kind. Look at the words of the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, chapter Nine: the covenant between God and man is unconditional, without limitation of any kind. This is a permanent covenant, an eternal "contract," if you will, between God and us, His creatures.

Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.* - Isaiah 1:17

*1) Knowing how to do well doesn't come by instinct or inheritance, it must be learned;

2) Justice secures each person's individual rights;

3) relieve the oppressed, or "set right the oppressor" [by opposing his wrong actions];

4) judge (win justice);

5) plead (take the part of - literally, "strive for") the weak and friendless. (See Isaiah, above, with Rashi.)

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. - Psalm 42:3

Human beings have free will, imagination and intellect. We have the capacity to behave much better - and also, much worse - than mere animals. As God has put us at the top of the planetary food chain, giving us dominion over the Earth and every plant and creature on or in it, He requires us to live up to certain standards. Those standards are part of His covenant with us; He has set them out for us for everyone to read and learn in His covenantal Law, His Way.

Teach me, O Lord, the way of Your statutes; and I will keep it at every step. Give me understanding, and I shall keep your Law, and observe it with my whole heart. Make me to tread in the path of Your commandments; for therein do I delight. - Psalm 119:33-5

He requires us to behave ourselves, to conduct ourselves better than mere animals, in accordance with our exalted, uniquely elevated place in His creation. He requires us to keep His Law.

Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who delights greatly in His commandments. - Psalm 112:1

If I Keep the Law, Will I Go to Heaven?

What happens when you die? What is the essence of a human being?

Life in this world deserves the full-time attention of the living. But the Torah - the biblical "Guidance" or "Teaching" from Sinai, the Way, the Hebrew Scriptural tradition - speaks directly to this: to the immortality of the soul, of life after death.

Look at Ecclesiastes - in the original Hebrew, Koheleth, from the opening sentence, "The words of Koheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem". Koheleth focuses particularly strongly on this towards the end, in the final chapter. "Man goes to his eternal home" at the moment of death (Ecclesiastes 12:5). Koheleth describes what happens at the passing:

"The silver cord snaps and the golden globe is released. And the pitcher breaks at the fountain, and the wheel is released into the pit, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God Who granted it." (Ecclesiastes 12:6)

The dust returns to the earth as it was. Every living body, the tissue, blood and bone, is of earth, and it naturally returns to Earth. As the Earth, a planet, is made of the same material as the stars - star dust - so is every individual being on it, animal and human. But human beings are more than mere animated stardust. The person's spirit - in Hebrew, ru'ach - or "wind," is of God. It returns to Him, Koheleth says. It's part of God's treasury, a vast collection of awareness or spirit.

Every being that breathes with lungs has a ru'ach. Fish and bugs have no ru'ach, as the Bible makes clear: God didn't command Noah to collect them, but only creatures in which there is a ru'ach (Genesis 7:15). Take away a creature's ru'ach, and it dies (Psalm 104:30). Ecclesiastes or Koheleth doesn't find much difference between humans and animals because, after all, we all share ru'ach (Ecclesiastes 3:19). This is the quality that gives us self-awareness and consciousness. These things, as people who practice meditation know, are connected to breath. Like one's breathing, ru'ach can, to some extent, be consciously controlled.

Ru'ach gives us the ability to dream and many of our likes and dislikes, our personal tastes. Most of all, it gives us our social selves, our personas, including the power to relate to our fellow creatures as well as ourselves. Even prophecy, the very highest level of ru'ach, serves a social purpose: one who receives the ru'ach of the Lord must act upon it, to do justice and convey the truth to others. This is sharing the spirit, or ru'ach, in other words. So ru'ach can be transferred. We see that when Elisha asks of Elijah/Eliyahu for a "double portion" of Eliyahu's ru'ach (2 Kings 2:9). This helps explain the nature of Koheleth's returning wind. Parents receive ru'ach from their parents and can give of their ru'ach to their children; God Himself may take someone's ru'ach and give it to someone else - as He took of Moses' ru'ach (without diminishing Moses') and gave it to the seventy elders (Numbers 11:25), or as He removed His special ru'ach from King Saul (1 Samuel 16:14). Ru'ach may be given only for a moment, as Samson received a burst of extra strength and bravery when the "ru'ach from the Lord came mightily upon Him" (Judge's 14:6).

Koheleth's pitcher and the fountain - this implies something liquid. A wheel is a circle, a self-enclosed space, a little world unto itself, like an individual's self-awareness. Pierced or broken, its contents - whatever is within it - are released; they spill out into a pit. The English word "pit" is the translation of the Hebrew "bor," which is a water-well, a reservoir or cistern under the earth. Liquid's nature is to flow. It follows the path of least resistance to flow downwards. The pit in this case is a watery place or realm beneath the earth. This reflects the ancient Hebrew concept of underground waters, the tihom, a subterranean sphere of being, dark, quiet and liquid.

Part of the soul is liquid. This is known, in Hebrew, as a nefesh. Every living being, both animal and human, has a nefesh. The Bible in Leviticus (24:17-18) tells us that one who murders a human nefesh deserves death and one who wrongly kills an animal nefesh - an animal belonging to someone else - shall pay restitution. Man or animal, when the body dies, the nefesh leaves.

The Bible's language, the words it uses about the nefesh, tell us that the nefesh is somehow liquid. "He poured out his nefesh to death," (Isaiah 53:12); "My nefesh leaks away out of sorrow," (Psalm 119:38); "as water spilled on the ground which cannot be re-gathered, God does not spare any nefesh." (2 Samuel 14:14).

According to Koheleth, at the moment of death, the nefesh flows downwards. It flows into the bor or pit or well and then down to the tehom, the realm of subterranean water. This is the underworld, within which lies sheol. Often translated as "grave," sheol is more than just the body's resting place or tomb. Sheol is the Bible's underworld. This netherworld, apparently, is where each soul or some part of the soul rests, floating asleep in quiet liquid darkness.

Even the proudest beings die, as Isaiah teaches. He speaks directly to the proudest and most pompous among us: "You shall be brought down to the nether-world (sheol), to the uttermost parts of the pit (bor)." (Isaiah 14:15).

Some translations of the Bible actually call the netherworld, sheol, "Hades." [One tends not to capitalize the Hebrew place name, unlike the Greek name, since Hebrew doesn't use two cases, capitals and small letters.] Since Hades is a pagan Greek deity, that's interjecting a false god, an idol, into the God-conscious purity of the Bible.

"The way of life goes upward for the wise [person], that he may depart from the grave (sheol) beneath." - Proverbs 15:24

Earth, air, water - what about fire? What about the gold globe? Gold stands for fire, light and sunshine. The fiery aspect of the human soul is the neshama. The Hebrew word for fire, aish, forms part of the root of neshama. When "the silver cord snaps" the neshama breaks free of its worldly link. It is the nature of fire to rise, as it is the nature of water to flow downwards: when the neshama, the fiery core of the human being, the fiery part of the soul, breaks free in death, it rises.

Stars are suns: Golden Globes of fire. Sun and light are heavenly: "The Lord shall be unto you an everlasting light." (Isaiah 60:19); "the sun of righteousness shall arise for you who fear My Name [God's Name]." (Malachi 3:20). The neshama rises up to the eternal, divine light of God.

Besides being fiery and a source of light and tending always to rise, the neshama is also the "speaking-soul," connected to human speech, as the very last verse of Psalms calls for everyone - all neshamas everywhere - to chant God's praise. But it's also connected, at an even deeper level, with the concept of name. The Hebrew word for name, shem, forms most of the root of neshama. We call God HaShem - literally, the Name, referring to the ineffable, never vocally articulated four letter proper names of God.

HaShem and shemayim, the Hebrew word for heaven, share the same root. We also know, because the Bible tells us, that God calls all the fiery, light-giving stars of heaven by their names (Psalm 147:4). So we can speculate that the heavenly, starry destination of the fiery soul, shemayim, which includes the "name" or identity, the shem, that one achieves in life, are all integrally connected.

Name means identity. "As is His name, so is he" (1 Samuel 25:25). The neshama is the means by which we create our own identities or "names." God writes them in His "book." The Hebrew concept of name connotes the realization of potential. One's "name" is one's distilled essence; what one does and thinks, accomplishes and becomes in the world of the living. One's name results because of the interaction of all our inherent components, the nefesh and ruach and body and neshama. Ultimately, our names are as eternal as the stars: God knows us by our names; eternal life is the due of everyone whose "name is written in His book"; because God knows our names, we can expect to be delivered.

God Himself has a name. Israel's famous "mourner's prayer, "kaddish," speaks about its coming completion. Kaddish is recited to lend meaning to death and offer the mourner solace, but it doesn't mention eternal life or souls at all, not even the soul whose current absence from the planet's surface is being mourned.

"Magnified and sanctified be God's great Name." Recited in tooth-breaking Aramaic, the everyday language of the Jews in Babylon, kaddish mourns the current incompleteness of God's Name. The soul of the departed, the neshamah, or "name," having come from God's heavenly throne in the first place, has now returned to heaven to reunite with its Source. Like a heavily freighted spark, partly realized and fulfilled by its time on earth and purified through death, it adds what it's gained in life to the glory of His Name. It becomes, in a sense, part of Heaven. God says that, when the time is ripe, "I will magnify and sanctify Myself" (Ezekiel 28:33). The identity, the "name" or neshamah of the departed, is linked to that process. Only when "the Lord will be one and His name will be one" (Zechariah 14:9), will His Name, along with the purified neshamas - the "names" - of the departed, become properly regarded, magnified and sanctified.

Are the Bible and the Torah Sexist?

Man does not fulfill his destiny without woman, nor woman without man, nor the two together without the Divine Presence among them. - Midrash (ancient rabbinic commentary), Genesis Rabbah 8:9

Everything depends on the woman. - Genesis Rabbah 17:7

In mankind, the differences between the sexes go beyond the merely physical: gender changes everything.

Women, compared to men, probably constitute the higher form of life. In the Biblical worldview, Creation proceeded in ascending order: from the earlier and less advanced forms to the latter and more advanced. Adam - whose name literally means "man," from a root meaning "earth" - came before Eve (in Hebrew, Hava or Chava, or literally, "life"). Men may have more size and muscle and upper-body strength, but the human male seems to belong to the lesser sex, in some respects, and not necessarily the stronger.

The recurrent problem of society is to define the male role satisfactorily. - Margaret Mead (Male and Female, 1949, p. 160)

And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. - Genesis 1:27

The great mothers of Israel, starting with Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, through Miriam and Deborah, the Biblical prophetesses, and onward, Jewish women over time, were all - obviously - merely human. They each combined greatness, simplicity, and shortcomings. Unless you canonize Jewish Motherhood itself as saintly, you can't canonize any individual mother.

Leave it to mankind, though, to do exactly that to the poor Jewish girl, "Mary," who's said to have given birth to "Jesus." Just one of the problems with that is that it detracts both from the eternal cosmological force - an amazing uplifting force for civilization - that is Jewish mothers, and also from every individual Jewish mother.

See "A Woman of Valor," the last section of the Book of Proverbs - part of the protocol of prayer and worship that sanctifies the Sabbath - Proverbs 31:10.

Are Jews Supposed to Help Noahides Discover God's Truth?

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O, give thanks unto the Lord [HaShem]; call upon His Name:

Make known His deeds among the peoples. - Psalm 105:1

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Are Jews Obligated to Help Noahides Discover Their Way?

Establishing the Law in the World

According to Maimonides' Mishneh Torah: "Someone who does not wish to accept the Torah and its commandments [that is, Israel's laws] should not be forced to. [But] By the same token, Moses was commanded by the Almighty to compel all the inhabitants of the world to accept the laws given to the descendants of Noah." (Hilchot Melachim 8:10). This obligation is incumbent upon every individual in every era. However, "compel," in this context, is normally interpreted as "compulsion through persuasion - to lead men's hearts to the will of their Creator." (Mishnah Torah, Pirke Avot 3:14, Tosefot Yom Tov).

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Should a Non-Jew Convert to Judaism?

Israel refers to non-Jews as gentiles — or "clans," from the Latin — or "goyim," or literally "nations," in Hebrew. Non-Jews are also called B'nai Noah, the children (or descendants) of Noah, as opposed to that branch of B'nai Noah called B'nai Israel, the children (or descendants) of Israel/Jacob.

For this is your [Israel's] wisdom, and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, that, when they hear all these statutes, they shall say, 'Surely this great nation [goy] is a wise and understanding people.'— Deuteronomy 4:6

Declare His glory among the nations ["among the goyim"]. — I Chronicle 16:24

The Torah maintains that the righteousness of all nations merit infinite and eternal reward. A non-Jew or goy who adheres to the Rainbow Covenant by fully living the Noahide Law is likened to Israel's High Priest himself! This is the cohen gadol, a living model of human rectitude and purity.

Whoever professes idolatry rejects the Ten Commandments… And whoever rejects idolatry professes the entire Torah.— Midrash, Sifre to Number's 15:22

A cohen is a direct descendant of Israel's first High Priest, Aaron, Moses' older brother. The cohen gadol, or great priest, serves as the chief officiant at Temple services in Jerusalem (when the Temple is operational), Israel's chief representative before God. Obviously, this is a person of the very highest status — and a pious Noahide is considered to be on that same exalted level! See Talmud, Bava Kamma 38a, Avoda Zorah 3a; Midrash, Sifra to Leviticus 18:5.

Whoever wishes to adopt the religion of Israel is required to accept, not the Torah with all its statutes and ordinances, but the precepts which were promulgated for b'nai Noah. - Maimonides, Responsa #124

Someone who is not born into the people of Israel — someone who isn't born to a mother who is Jewish — becomes a truly righteous, decent, enlightened human being by keeping the Noahide Law. Again, the Torah compares such a person to Israel's cohen gadol. However, some people want even more, religiously, than they think that the Noahide Law has to offer. (Very few people understand how much the Noahide Law actually does offer.) So, if he or she feels inclined to take up a radically different level of religious discipline, along with a different social — not to mention family — circle, he or she can plunge into the sort of study that will eventually allow one to convert to Judaism.

You [Israel] shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples, … A kingdom of priests and a holy nation. — Exodus 19:5

Converting to Judaism doesn't just involve a change in one's religion. Conversion means joining the Jewish people, the people of Israel — as a literate, full-fledged member of a people, an ethnic group and a nation, as well as a sacred society. It means a change of destiny, by changing one's cultural and national identity too.

He who has never been persecuted is not a Jew. — Talmud, Hagigah 5a

Genesis 12 gives the example of Abraham leaving family, city and country in extremely zealous servitude to God, HaShem. Similarly, the Book of Ruth gives the example of Ruth, a Noahide who joined Israel, who became a Jewish convert, by joining Naomi, her beloved mother-in-law, according to the ancient formula, "Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you dwell, I will dwell, your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried; the Lord (HaShem) do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me." (Ruth 1:16-17).

Our nation [Israel, the Jewish people] is a nation only by virtue of its Torah. — Saadia Gaon, Emunot v'Deot 3:7

You are My witnesses, says the Lord [HaShem], and My servant whom I have chosen. — Isaiah 43:10

One can serve God and man very well without belonging as a member of the people of Israel. One need not adopt the religion of Israel as a member of Israel to be all that one can be. God cherishes the righteousness of all nations (Mishna Tosefta, Sanhedrin 13.2).

Before embarking on a path leading to membership in the people of Israel, one should first learn and keep the First Covenant - the universal laws and moral precepts which apply to all mankind, including the people of Israel.

Should Noahides Celebrate the Sabbath?

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. - Exodus 20:8

Call the Sabbath a delight. - Isaiah 58:13

Every Torah holiday is connected to the greatest and most frequent holiday, the Sabbath (Shabbos or Shabbot, in Hebrew). All these holidays, the Torah's "holy convocations," are interconnected.

For the true monotheist, the faithful follower of the One God of Israel, the Seventh Day marks the goal and finish of each week. The Sabbath stands for the proposition that:

1) God and God alone created the universe out of nothing, in six uninterrupted stages - in Hebrew, yomim: days or stages;

2) After creating people, God stopped, or took a break. That is, He didn't go on making better and better beings. Rather, He finished at humanity. So He nominated us, ordinary men and women, for greatness, to be His vice-regents on Earth. He arranged Creation so that we are responsible only to Him. He put us at the top of the world's food chain. The Sabbath, or Shabbot (Shabbat, or Shabbos), stands for the proposition that we have the right, despite our many flaws, to enjoy our exalted place in life and the universe, all of which is God's Creation.

Israel's prophet Isaiah speaks praise fully of "everyone [including non-Jews] who keeps Shabbot from profaning it." (Isaiah 56:6). "Happy is the man who does this, and the son of man who holds fast by it: who keeps the Sabbath from profaning it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil." (56:2)

Every Noahide who renounces idolatry needs to observe Shabbot, says Rashi, the great Torah commentator - because failing to properly honor the Sabbath is itself a species of idolatry (Rashi on Yevamot 48b).

Everyone will eventually keep the Sabbath - the Seventh Day - on the Seventh Day. "Because it confirms the true theory, that of the Creation, which at once and clearly leads to the theory of the existence of God." (Maimonides, Moreh Nevuchim - "Guide for the Perplexed" - part 2, chapter 31: "The Institution of the Sabbath Serves (1) to Teach the Theory of Creation, and (2) to Promote Man's Welfare")

This is not to say, however, that everyone should keep the Sabbath as the Jews do - as Divinely commanded days of feasting, joyful worship, and TOTAL rest from work.

Israel has a special national relationship to the Sabbath. Beyond the Sabbath's elemental connection to all Creation (See Exodus 20:11), it serves as a special "sign" or symbol between the people of Israel and God (Exodus 31:17). The Jews were slaves in Egypt, and HaShem Who gave mankind the Sabbath freed them. From then on, finally, they could enjoy and keep the Sabbath; from then on the Sabbath has stood for freedom - liberation (See Deuteronomy 5:15). So, while B'nai Noah are tied to the Sabbath in one way, Israel's relationship to it also includes this second, liberation, connection.

Israel lights two candles at the advent of the Sabbath, which symbolize the Jewish people's two connections to it: 1) the universal connection, which puts man at the top of the food chain and reminds us that God is the master and the Creator of everything; 2) the national or liberation connection, so that Israel "might remember how kind God has been in freeing us from the burden of the Egyptians." (Maimonides, Moreh Nevuchim, ibid.)

Noahides should not light two candles at the advent of the Sabbath. They are not the "us" in the sentence above; they don't have the same connection as a nation to Egyptian slavery, etc., as Israel. Even though the story of the Exodus exists to teach all mankind true concepts of God - that He is holy; that He is kindly; that He acts in history to set men free; that He clearly distinguishes between one person and another (as He distinguished between individual Hebrews and individual Egyptians); that He hates idolatry; that this world and not just Heaven is important to Him; that He desires to be recognized and honored by all men; that He hates the oppression of one by another; etc. - Noahides and Israel do not share the same history. The Jews have their own special, national relationship to the Exodus, and to Shabbot, and it would be presumptuous and wrong of Noahides to intrude on that aspect of the Sabbath.

Israel is commanded to keep the Sabbath; Noahides are not. The Torah makes Sabbath observance obligatory for Jews - one who fails to do so deserves punishment, and Israel's Torah courts (which don't exist at present) are obligated to enforce that law. Noahide courts have no such obligation. A Noahide who fails to keep Shabbot isn't violating the Noahide Law. While the reverse of idolatry is worship of the One God, including commemorating and celebrating the Sabbath, that is a moral, not a legal obligation. However, a moral obligation is still an obligation.
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All of God's laws, and His entire sacred system, exist for our own good. By keeping the Sabbath, one imitates God. One commemorates, by personally adopting, His Own cyclic rhythm of Divine creativity. To fail to honor the Sabbath is to fail - God forbid - to honor Him as the Creator. To honor a different day as one's Sabbath is to show respect to a different "god" than the Creator. As for the period of the Sabbath itself, which particularly celebrates God's creation of rest, fulfillment, peace and rejoicing, it is especially auspicious for spiritual fellowship and communal worship.

Torah holidays, including the Sabbath, can be shared by everyone, Jew and Noahide alike, but only upon the Torah's terms. B'nai Noah are well advised to honor the Sabbath, and their Maker, by refraining from some but not all workaday activities. B'nai Noah should refrain from trying to appropriate them completely as their own - without respect for the senior, "firstborn" role and status of the people of Israel.

Finally, it should go without saying that B'nai Noah have every right to honor or prayerfully commemorate whatever days or events that seem honorable to them, like national memorials or personal anniversaries. The one thing is, they shouldn't observe Torah-denying rites or holidays.