Refuting Thomas Dalton’s Rabbinic Contention

Subverting the Old Testament by Conflating it with the Talmud

Refuting Thomas Dalton’s Rabbinic Contention

Subverting the Old Testament by Conflating it with the Talmud of Babylon

By Michael Hoffman

Copyright ©2023

www.RevisionistHistory.org

Readers are forewarned that Thomas Dalton, PhD. is an anti-Semitic promoter of Hitler and Goebbels. Dr. Dalton’s recent essay attacking Jesus, the subject of this critique, was written with a view toward engaging with figures on the white nationalist far-Right who allegedly hold some vestige of Christian beliefs, and disabusing them of those beliefs.

There will be those who will assert that because Dalton’s views are demonstrably false there is no need to refute them. In this writer’s opinion that is a serious misreading of the state of American politics and the extent of the radical dissatisfaction with the present System on the part of people to whom Dalton is appealing.

A revival of neo-Nazism and the rehabilitation of Hitler’s reputation is unlikely to occur if leaders on the far-right retain some considerable nostalgia for the Judean savior of humanity and the book He and His followers quoted approvingly hundreds of times: the Old Testament.

By conflating the Talmud with the Old Testament (as did the London Times journalist Douglas Reed in the 1950s, in The Controversy of Zion), the revival of the National Socialist ideology becomes more likely.

Dalton’s essay, “Jesus the Jew,” first published in The Occidental Observer, and this week to a much larger audience at the Unz Review, endorses the dogma of Orthodox Judaism—that the Babylonian Talmud and successor halachic texts, such as the Shulchan Aruch, are not a nullification of the Old Testament, but an “elaboration” of it.

He offers no evidence for this enormity, which is an article of Orthodox rabbinic faith, other than his own ipse dixit, along with a footnote which refers to a 1929 book purporting to be a summation by Eric Bischoff of the Shulchan Aruch, which Dr. Dalton has translated into English (The original German text is here).

The Torah sheBeal peh in the Second Temple Period

Shulchan Aruch is in fact, like the Talmud Bavli itself, a compendium of escape clauses intended to evade Old Testament laws, together with minutiae governing the micromanagement of the lives of the unfortunate Judaic people who are captive to it. The Shulchan Aruch’s antecedent is the Torah sheBeal peh (the oral law), which Mr Dalton imagines didn’t exist in the time of Jesus. He writes:

“Nick Fuentes dodges the question (of Jesus identity) when put to him, saying ‘Jesus fulfills the law’ and that the Jews ‘who remain’ held on to ‘old sacrifices and old ways of doing things,’ ultimately becoming ‘Talmudic Jews.’

“Obviously Jesus had no chance to become a Talmudic Jew, given that the Jerusalem Talmud was not written until the 300s (in Galilee!) and the Babylonian Talmud not until the year 500” (end quote).

In point of fact, Talmudism as it developed in the first four centuries A.D. is a recrudescence of the religion of the Pharisees, which was predicated on the oral law, as Jesus clearly stated when he denounced it in Mark 7 and Matthew 15 as that which, “teaches for doctrine the commandments of men.”

Hence, Dalton’s notion that “Jesus had no chance to become a Talmudic Jew” is in error when we understand that the early Talmud (Mishnah) existed in oral form during His lifetime and that Jesus could have adhered and propounded the Torah sheBeal peh, as did His Pharisaic enemies.

The Book of the Teachings of the Pharisees: The Mishnah

After the Jewish leaders urged the crucifixion of Israel’s Messiah, the ideology which had previously remained oral, was committed to writing in the Tannaic era as the Mishnah, personified by Ta’nnaim such as the “zugot pairs” Hillel and Shammai.

The Gemara, based upon the Mishnah, was formed in the Amoraic era (300-600 A.D.) in Palestine and Babylon, comprising the supreme law of Judaism, though only the Babylonian (“Bavli”) Talmud has halachic (legal) authority.

The Geonic era (600-1000 A.D.) witnessed the rise of the Jewish Karaite movement which declared the Talmud Bavli to be a tissue of anthropomorphic falsification of Yahweh’s Old Testament. For centuries Karaites, designated as apikorsim (heretics) who dared to adhere only to the Hebrew Bible, were persecuted, hounded and even killed by Talmudists. Maimonides, the philosopher of homicide, taught: “It is a mitzvah (blessed act) to kill a traitor” (Hilchot Shovel UMazik, ch. 8, Halachot 8-9). At one point, the Catholic Church joined in the persecution. In 12th century Spain, Catholic authorities supported the local Talmudic community in helping them expel Karaites from Spain. Karaites who refused to leave were compelled to convert to rabbinic Judaism.( Cf. Nathan Schur, Karaite Encyclopedia (1995), pp. 267-268).

Dr. Dalton proceeds to propagate an even more egregious fiction when he alleges the following:

“The second defense one occasionally sees is both contorted and confused: that the teachings of the Old Testament represent ‘true' religion and that the Hebrews deviated from this true path, degenerating into a rabbinical and ultimately Talmudic Judaism…. Jesus, they say, adhered to the true, original teachings, to the Law and the prophets—later to be called “Christianity”—thus putting him into conflict with the fallen and erroneous Jews…it overlooks the fact that the Talmud, and later documents like the Shulchan Aruch, are elaborations on Old Testament teachings, not deviations from it.”

The Talmud Bavli and the Shulchan Aruch of Joseph Karo, as well as the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, the Kitzer Shulchan Aruch of Shlomo Ganfried, the Mishnah Berurah of Yisrael Meir Kagan, the Aruch HaShulchan of Yechiel Epstein and dozens of other authoritative works of the rabbinic canon, have the force law and represent a theology alien to the Old Testament while massively undercutting and negating it, for example denigrating patriarch Noah and enthusing over the killing of the prophet Isaiah with barely concealed glee.

Moreover, Chazal (the Talmudic “sages”) place their books above God’s Word in the hierarchy of importance. In BT Baba Metzia 33a we read: “For those who engage in the study of Bible, it is a virtue but not a complete virtue. For those who engage in the study of Mishnah, it is a virtue and they receive reward for its study. For those who engage in the study of Talmud, you have no virtue greater than that.”

Talmudism consists of distortion and falsification of the Old Testament because it is is based on anthropomorphic traditions that void the Scripture by means of a series of dispensations and loopholes.

These begin with the Mishnah, which represents the commitment to the writing of the occult legends and lore of those Israelites who had preserved “secret knowledge” which had arisen with the worship of the golden calf, of Moloch and similar abominations.

With the rejection of their Messiah and the commitment of the formerly oral traditions to writing, these Israelites abandoned themselves to an oral law counterfeit of Yahweh’s Word—the primary canon being the Mishnah— “oral tradition learned by constant repetition.”

Babylonian tradition in Talmud tractates BT Berakot 5a and BT Shabbat 31a teach that the Mishnah and the rest of the Talmud (Gemara) were given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai, along with the Ten Commandments. The Mishnah was completed at the end of the Second Century A.D., more than 100 years after the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D. (The exceptions are the tractates Sotah and Abot which are later additions misrepresented as a part of the original Mishnah by the rabbinic “sages” themselves). Engulfed in a sea of everlasting hair-splitting, Talmudic texts can be minefields of deception and pits of derangement and pilpul, as befits those who would replace the Bible with their own authority.

“Whoever claims that David sinned is simply mistaken”

Intense self-worship and self-deception, like the imputation of blamelessness and relative sinlessness, are hallmarks of Talmudic megalomania. Talmudism’s theology encourages the cardinal sin of pride. It removes the responsibility for transgressions against the law of God. For instance, what Christians regard as one of the darkest episodes in King David’s life — his adultery with Bathsheba and his order for the murder of Uriah — Talmudists teach that David did not really sin with Uriah the Hittite’s wife, Bathsheba, by committing adultery with her.

According to the standard teaching in Orthodox yeshiviot (cf. BT Shabbat 56a): “Kol haomer David chatah eino ela toeh” (“Whoever claims that David sinned is simply mistaken”). The Talmud’s story line is that King David only stumbled into the sin with Bat-Sheva for pedagogical reasons, in order to teach the Jewish people the proper path to individual teshuva (repentance).

Talmudism holds that David did not have the intent to sin with Bathsheba (“Bat-Sheva”). It was not a “true sin” because David sinned for a good cause — not to satisfy his lusts, of course — but on high moral grounds, in order to teach Jews the proper path to repentance.

This is quite an alibi. One problem with it: nowhere does the Bible state or teach this. In fact, this rabbinic doctrine completely contradicts II Samuel 12: 5-14. The Bible in no uncertain terms states that David did evil in the sight of God and by so doing contemptuously despised God. The Bible says nothing about David having a godly ulterior motive for cohabitating with another man’s wife. Rather it says in verse 14 that God was outraged by what was in effect a kind of blasphemy (“na’ats”; cf. Strong’s #5006).

What the Talmudists are actually saying is that it is God who is mistaken, since God’s Word clearly declares that David sinned by killing Uriah the Hittite and taking Uriah’s wife: “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house because thou hast despised me and hast taken the wife of Urriah the Hittite to be thy wife.” (II Samuel 12:10).

Who should we believe, God’s Word in the Old Testament book of Samuel, or the word of the Pharisees as found in the Babylonian Talmud?

“Many laws which have scant Scriptural basis”

The Mishnah testifies to the Biblical nullification it undertakes by stating in its own pages:

“The laws concerning the Sabbath, Festal-offerings and acts of trespass are as mountains hanging by a hair, for they have scant Scriptural basis but many laws”—Mishnah Hagiga I, 8.

Because it is held by the rabbis to be the supreme oral revelation of Sinai, having been passed down orally across millennia, the Mishnah is a law unto itself which does not need to claim a Biblical basis for its authority.

A Remarkable Admission from Yale University’s authority on the Mishnah

A preeminent 20th century American rabbi, Jacob Neusner, translator of the Mishnah for Yale University Press, writes:

“… Scripture plays little role in the Mishnaic system. The Mishnah rarely cites a verse of Scripture, refers to Scripture as an entity, links its own ideas to those of Scripture, or lays claim to originate in what Scripture has said, even by indirect or remote allusion to a Scriptural verse of teaching…The Mishnah is a document of imagination and fantasy...Mishnah…is remarkably indifferent to the Hebrew Scriptures…

“In fact, the Mishnah is...a principal holy book of Judaism. The Mishnah has been and is now memorized in the circle of all those who participate in the religion, Judaism...the two great documents formed around the Mishnah and so shaped as to serve, in part, as commentaries upon Mishnah, namely, the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud, form the center of the curriculum of Judaism as a living religion.” (The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. xvii.

In the Talmud Noah is depicted as a reprehensible individual

Much is made of the “Noachide laws” for gentiles, including the U.S. government’s Public Law 102-14 which has pronounced the rabbinic “Noachide laws” noble and by implication, worthy of enforcement. However, the “Noah” of the Noachide (“Noahide”) laws is not the Biblical Noah, whom the Talmud despises.

About Noah, the Bible teaches: “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.” (Genesis 6:9). In Hebrew, “blameless” denotes without flaw. Noah is a precursor of Abraham, not less than Abraham. What is required of Noah, God also requires of Abraham: to walk before Him blameless.

The “sages” of the Talmud however, teach that the phrase “in his generation” indicates that in any other generation Noah would not be holy or significant: “Noah was only righteous in his generation; had he lived in the generation of Abraham, he would not have been considered significant at all.” (B.T. Sanhedrin 108a).

The Talmud seriously errs in defaming Noah; and it gets worse. The rabbinic Midrash declares that no good was found in him (Midrash Rabbah: Genesis I [Soncino 1983, vol. 1], p. 289.). This Midrash also proclaims that Noah was an alcoholic who was castrated when he was on his way to have coitus (Ibid., pp. 290-291; 293).

Furthermore, concerning Noah we are also apprised that he was unworthy to transmit the Torah shebeal peh to Klal Israel. Noah was supposedly too defective to merit this distinction:

“...the Torah became uninterested (in Noah) following the episode of the vineyard.”

Where is this detraction of Noah found in the Bible? In Scripture Noah is a second Adam. Some Christians have noted a parallel between the saving wood of his Ark and the wood of Christ’s cross on Calvary.

In Talmudism however, Noah is a low character. Reference is made to “Bereishis 9,” the Talmudic and Midrashic rabbinic tradition, wherein Noah is castigated as a drunkard.

Another Talmudic libel of Noah centers on the malicious fantasy that the patriarch was sodomized on board the ark by Ham.  This is not in God’s Biblical Word. It was made up out of whole cloth by the Midrash. The Gemara meanwhile, equivocates between asserting that Ham sodomized Noah and Ham castrating him (cf. Sanhderin 70a).

The Old Testament only states: “aser asah lo beno ha-qatan” (that which his younger son had done to him; cf. Genesis 9:24). From there the salacious imagination of man runs wild.

Jesus declared that the Pharisees were the spiritual heirs of those who killed the prophets and were witnesses against themselves in this regard (Matthew 23:31). The Babylonian Talmud contains just such a witness: BT Yebamoth 49b states that the prophet Isaiah was justifiably killed for declaring that the Israelites had unclean lips.

Your “Sons” Have Corrected You, Yahweh

By Yahweh’s law of the Old Testament, Shemittah (the Sabbatical Seventh Year) renders all loans null and void. Deuteronomy 15: 1-2: “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed.”

Beginning with the Pharisee Hillel, it was decided that this law of Yahweh could be nullified for the benefit of lenders. A lender can avoid having the debts canceled by executing a “prozbul.” To cancel Yahweh’s law which was institued to liberate the Israelite people from debt peonage, the Talmud informs us in BT Gittin 36a:

“The Mishnah taught that Hillel the Elder instituted a document that prevents the sabbatical year from abrogating an outstanding debt. We learned in a mishnah (Shevi’it 10:3) if one writes a prozbul the sabbatical year does not abrogate the debt. This is one of the matters that Hillel the elder instituted…”

This is not “elaboration” as Orthodox rabbis and Thomas Dalton would have us believe. It is falsification. Here is more:

In the Old Testament God proclaims His name to His people, pronounced Yahweh in Hebrew (Jehovah in English):

“I am YHWH that is my name” (Isiah 42:8; Jeremiah 33:2).

“This is my name forever” (Exodus 3:15).

“My people shall know my name” (Isaiah 52:6).

“Hitherto hath YHWH blessed me” (Joshua 17:14).

“This is the statue of the law which YHWH hath commanded” (Numbers 19:2).

“And YHWH gave command unto Moses, so did Aaron set it down before the Testimony, as a thing to be preserved.” (Exodus 16:34).

Yahweh’s name appears several thousand times in the Old Testament.

In the traditions of the elders of the Pharisees, committed to writing as the Mishnah, the name YHWH, by which God wanted us to know Him and identify ourselves, was forbidden, replaced by circumlocution ("LORD” or “Hashem”).

The failure to make the substitution and engage in the suppression is condemned as a serious sin. The Mishnah defines the eternally damned in these terms: “Those who have no portion in the world to come: he who pronounces the divine name as it is spelled out.”

— Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:1.

Talmudic megalomania’s nullification of God’s Word reaches a narcissistic pitch in BT Bava Metzia 59b. There, in a debate between God and the rabbis, the rabbis win the debate. The Talmud has God say, “My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me!”

When it comes to the use of His Holy Name as He commanded, it appears as though your “sons” have “corrected” you, Yahweh — or so they think.

The Right Honorable Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth of Great Britain from 1991 to 2013, wrote in The Guardian newspaper (December 21, 2001), that he loves “that extraordinary moment in the Talmud in which God is outvoted on a point of Jewish law and celebrates the fact that His children have defeated Him.”

Most of the leaders of the West and the priests and pastors of Churchianity love it too.

When men institutionalize their egos to such an extent that they celebrate God Himself having been defeated by them, we are no longer in a realm that is even remotely Biblical.

The Talmud is persistent in testifying against itself in this regard. The chutzpah beggars belief:

“Since God already gave the Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai we no longer pay attention to heavenly voices. God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of the rabbis.” (BT Bava Metzia 59b).

And:

In Talmudism a zaddik (also spelled Tzadik), is a spiritual master “whose righteousness surpasses his iniquity” (cf. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Sefer Madda, 3:1). The zaddik is believed to have the power to change heavenly decrees and alter divine judgments. The Babylonian Talmud states approvingly in the Gemara, “God decrees and the zaddik nullifies the decree” (Mo’ed Kattan 16b).

A Talmid chacham could supply many hundreds of instances in which the Mishnah, Gemara and successor texts with halachic status, such as those of the posekim Joseph Karo, overthrow Yahweh’s Word in favor of situation ethics and human opinion. For instance, in Genesis, Yahweh decrees that man shall live by the sweat his brow. Rabbi Karo, compiler of the Shulchan Aruch, decrees in the Kefesh Mishneh that Talmud scholars are not required to work and can be supported by taxes.

Thomas Dalton’s didactic statements are intended to refute and dismiss centuries of classical Talmud scholarship by giants such as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (Entdecktes Judenthum), Johann David Michaelis (Mosaisches Recht) and Alexander McCaul (The Talmud Tested). This is a grave disservice to his readers.

The Talmudic texts and their halachic sequels are not of Moses, they are, in the words of the Kabbalah, “where Moses is buried” (Tikkunei Zohar 1:27).

“Illustrations and reasons of the laws of Moses I never take from the Talmud. The oral traditions of the…rabbis…give not the sense of the Mosaic writings. Many of the laws in the Pentateuch would make a strange figure indeed, if we were to interpret them as the Pharisees did, whose exposition, according to Christ’s declaration, in many cases served to inculcate doctrines and precepts directly the reverse of what Moses had taught, and commanded.” —J.D. Michaelis, Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, vol. 1, pp. 51-52 (Great Britain, 1815). Michaelis was Professor of Old Testament exegesis, Hebrew antiquities, Mosaic law and Semitic languages at the University of Götttingen from 1745-1791.

Copyright©2023 Independent History and Research

FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE CONTRA CANCEL CULTURE

Michael Hoffman is the author of the textbook, Judaism Discovered (2008) and a condensation for the general reader, Judaism’s Strange Gods (2011). He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and the author of seven other books published in the United States, as well as overseas in Japanese and French translation. His podcast Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History® is heard around the world.

I am grateful to the paid subscribers who make my research and writing possible. Thank you. — Michael