Could an Ancient Eclipse Explain a Biblical Omen?

While eclipses may not be mentioned explicitly in the Hebrew Bible, Frederick Baltz suggests there might be an oblique, and perhaps unwitting, reference to one in the story of King Hezekiah, a heroic figure who saved his people from the Assyrian onslaught and led them away from idolatry. The books of Kings, Isaiah, and Chronicles all tell of Hezekiah’s illness and miraculous recovery:

The biblical account relates that Isaiah the prophet was sent to Hezekiah to inform him that he would die from his illness. Hezekiah prayed for healing, and Isaiah had not yet left the palace when he was sent back to the king with a different message: the Lord would heal him and give him another fifteen years of life. A sign was to confirm the healing. A shadow could move forward or backward on an outdoor stairway. Hezekiah chose for the shadow to move backward, [and so it did]. (2 Kings 20:10).

On March 5, 702 BCE, the sixteenth year before Hezekiah’s death, a prominent solar eclipse appeared over the Middle East. Its path crossed the Arabian Peninsula, and the obscuration of the sun over Israel was more than 60 percent.

If a stairway had been engulfed in darkness and then restored to daylight, the shadow would have appeared to retreat. A shadow wave, produced by an eclipse, may also have given the appearance of a shadow retreating. If you are in the path of the eclipse on August 21, you, too, may be able to see this rare biblical sign.

Read more at Bible History Daily

More about: Hebrew Bible, Hezekiah, History & Ideas, Isaiah

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society