Update and shepherds wrap up.

Hi, our family recently rescued and abandoned 5-6 week old kitten. He has been taking up a lot of my time and I've had to readjust my daily schedule. Plus school has started and kids need a mom who is available, no matter how old they are. When I returned to see where I left off, I groaned. I'm tired of the shepherd question. So, I will summarize what I learned and be done:

*Shepherds are not called unclean in Hebrew or Egyptian literature. They were a common occupation in ancient times. Egyptians owned and herded sheep, ate mutton, and used wool.

*Shepherds were considered common laborers and looked down on by the elite wealthy Egyptians and elite rabbinical Hebrews. However, they were not "the lowest of the low."

*Egyptians had a sheep headed god named Khnum. The symbols of Egyptian royalty included a shepherds crook and a flail, which encompass animal husbandry and agriculture.

*Shepherds were required to keep their flocks out of the city and in designated or approved grazing areas. This was for practical reasons and not because they were "banished."

*There is a nuanced distinction between those who merely tend sheep and those who own the flocks. I am not talking of Philo's metaphor here but of the reality of life. The picky laws and commentary in the Talmud make this distinction for legal purposes, not as social commentary. Some rabbis stated that shepherds who owned their flocks might let them accidentally graze on land that was not theirs. Therefore they were technically thieves or robbers, because they benefitted from stolen goods, whatever the sheep ate. Even if they tried their best to keep their sheep from straying on to other's property, they could not be certain it would never happen. Those who merely tended sheep for wages were not guilty of theft, because they recieved no profit when the sheep ate from fields that did not belong to the owner of the sheep.

Thieves and robbers, even imaginary ones, were disqualified from serving as witnesses in legal cases. They also disqualified many other professions such as sailors, potters, shop keepers, camel drivers, and of course, all women. One rabbi in the Talmud admonishes his fellow rabbis not to let their children enter one of these professions, because it would disqualify them from serving in the jewish legal system.

Even though the hired hand shepherds were not automatically considered robbers, they still could not serve as witnesses in court. There were other qualifications which included being educated in Torah and being land owners. Sounds like the rabbis and the religious elite, the ones who made the rules, were the ones who got the privileges. Go figure.

*In one place, there was an odd rule that three shepherds could testify together, but that was disputed. I also seem to remember a story in the Talmud about a rabbi who used to be a shepherd.

*I never saw any indication that shepherds were any more despised than any other ordinary people of the first century.

The end. Next time we will get back to the bible.

Shepherds part 8

In paragraph 9 of Mr. Alcorn's article Shepherd's Status, we read "In the course of 400 years, the Egyptians prejudiced the  Israelite's attitude toward shepherding." Again, there are no sources to back this up and no reasons to believe it is true.

In paragraph 10, we see a statement that shepherding in Palestine decreased after the Israelites occupied the land and settled down. Again, no sources to back this up. Not surprisingly, Mr. Alcorn seems unaware of the current scholarship, supported by archaeology, that shows the Israelites probably originated and developed  from within the Canaanite people. They were Canaanites to begin with.

Mr. Alcorn continues to make statement after statement of dubious historicity, with no sources given. In paragraph 12, this claim is made: "In the days of the prophets, sheep herders symbolized judgement and social isolation. (Zephaniah 2:6)."   I don't think Mr. Alcorn read the context of that passage in Zephaniah very well. The shepherds represented Yahweh's people, the remnant of the house of Judah. They were supposed to show god's loving care for his chosen ones.

We are given Dr. Joachim Jeremias as a source for the statement that shepherds were "despised in everyday life." We are not told in which of Dr. Jeremias's writings we would find this, or where he got his information.

Paragraph 13 says, "Shepherding had not just lost its widespread appeal; it eventually forfeited its social acceptability. Some shepherds earned their poor reputations, but others became victims of a cruel sterotype. (Sources ??) The religious leaders maligned the shepherd's good name; rabbis banned the pasturing of goats and sheep in Israel, except on desert plains." We will see there is a small kernel of truth in the last statement when we examine the Mishnah's statements about shepherds. But it is not the whole truth.

The article goes on to say, "The Mishnah, Judaism's written record of the oral laws, also reflects this prejudice, referring to shepherds in belittling terms. One passage describes them as 'incompetent'; another says no one should ever feel obligated to rescue a shepherd who has fallen into a pit. Mr Alcorn does not tell us where in the mishnah we can find these statements. My guess is he didn't actually check to see if they are there.

If you read the Wikipedia article on the Mishnah you will see that it is a collection of documents about oral traditions and laws, supposedly passed down from through the ages. They were written and edited by rabbis, combined with other documents written and edited by rabbis. Some of the documents are comentaries on the Mishnah. All together, the collection is called the Talmud, and there are two versions of that. Think of the whole thing as a kind of law library reference encyclopedia.

In the next post I will attempt to uncover just what we can find about shepherds in these documents.