An encounter with Rabbi Meir Weiss

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungbook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

25 March 2010

A Seventh Day Adventist can be a Jew but not all Seventh Day Adventists are Jews because they keep the Sabbath and do not eat pork. There is a great difference between Judaism (with all its influences, Christian, Arabic, Enlightenment and Rationalism, Relativism, Secularism etc.) and Seventh Day Adventism. The consonantal text of the Masoretic text of Judaism is also accepted unchanged by Seventh Day Adventism as the very Word of God, even more than some modern Rabbis in Judaism will be willing to admit. Enlightenment and Rationalism is avoided by Seventh Day Adventist scholars as far as possible. Seventh Day Adventists are under the same threat of arrests if they prozyletize or do missionwork in Israel, which Judaism strongly resists even in the days of Christ, Paul and others. It is in this context that I wish to reflect on a special meeting I had with a very famous Rabbi in Israel. From what I understand from Paul Lippi, who was at the Jerusalem Center for Adventist Studies near the Albright Institute at 11 Abu ibn Talif street, is that Rabbi Meir Weiss was a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University where he taught for many years.

On the 2nd of August 1989 I went to 14 Radav street in Jerusalem to meet the professor.

I met the short Rabbi with the white beard at his house. He had shiny eyes and a blessedness invites one looking at him. We spoke partly English and partly German and he invited me in. I saw his office and many books. We exchanged thoughts on where I was studying at that time and he knew prof. dr. Gerhard Hasel's books and said that he enjoyed reading them. Prof. Hasel was my teacher. We spent time talking about his work on Hosea. Apparently he was busy on this project for many years. This thought inspired me later in 1999 to start my own research on Hosea.

I shall never forget how cordial prof. Meir Weiss placed his arm around me when we took a picture in the street in front of his home in the Jerusalem sun. I was already close to the big Jerusalem Synagogue when my mind was still occupied by this friendly old man.

Rabbi Meir Weiss is known for many articles but also a book The Bible from Within: The Method of Total Interpretation. He also wrote a book in Hebrew called: Studies in the Text and Language of the Bible (Jerusalem: 1981). One article in this book is "Synonymous Variants in Divergences between the Samaritan and Masoretic Texts of the Pentateuch" (63-189). Many variants in the Samaritan Pentateuch with the Masoretic text are actually synonymous roots. Emmanuel Tov listed five examples from Weiss (E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992: 94). I have met Tov on a number of occassions and this book of mine is actually enorsed with Tov's personal signature on the 18th of April 1993 at Notre Dame University in South Bend Indiana. In another article of Rabbi Meir Weiss he wrote on "Recensional Variations between the Aramaic Translation to Job from Qumran cave 11 and the Masoretic Text" Shnaton 1 (In Hebrew with an English Summary; Jerusalem 1975): 123-127. Weiss found that the Targum from Cave 11 was a freer translation than the later Targums and Tov and Weiss concluded that the freer translations are earlier and the literal translations (which were brought into line with the Masoretic text) are later. Here this researcher may differ. This rule that freer is early and literal is later is not true. The authority of the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition was an unchanged situation due to strict transmission rules. What is the case is that scholarship during the days of Antiochus Ephiphanes and under the influence of Hellenism were more permissive in their strictness concerning literalism and thus created for a secular society some easy readings. Affluent secular societies prefer easy readings and a freer paraphrase is this product. The free translation of Targum from cave 11 is thus evidence of a degenerative society or scribal practice and not an early recension of the Targum. Weiss and Tov took it seriously as representative of the only type in those days. It is better to assume that very literal Targums were also present in those days (contra Tov 1992: 149). If the translator of Job in Aramaic was doing so with a defective text or with a good text that was dictated from memory due to the unavailability of good texts, then one can understand the product. In the days of Antiochus Epiphanes 167-164 BCE the effort to hide good texts would be a normal procedure. The printed edition of Targum Job will be different than the Qumran Targum of Job, not because the latter is an earlier recension and the printed edition a later concocted edition aligning intentionally with the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition. No, literal and free targums exists side by side even at Qumran.

When prof. Gerhard Hasel died in 1994, this researcher asked prof. dr. Rabbi Meir Weiss if he could submit an article in honor of Gerhard Hasel and he did. It was in Hebrew and with the help of Paul Lippi I was able to get it translated into English and published it in a series of Essays in honor of Gerhard Hasel.

I do not know if prof. dr. Rabbi Meir Weiss is still alive but this encounter with Rabbi Weiss was a very pleasant experience. He is very unassuming which is a beauty about his character and personality.