Fun Talmudic Weirdness

[xiphias]

"R. Ishmael ben Elisha said: Suriel, the Prince of the Presence, told me three things: when dressing in the morning, do not take your shirt from the hand of your attendant, do not let water be poured over your hands by someone who has not already washed his own hands, and do not return a cup of wine brewed with asparagus to anyone save to the one who has handed it to you, because a company of demons -- some say a band of destroying angels -- lie in ambush for a man and say, 'When will somebody come and do one of these things so that we can trap him?'"

Next time I play In Nomine, I want to play the Demon of Returning a Cup Of Wine Brewed With Asparagus to Someone Who Didn't Hand It To You In The First Place.

Comments

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

This is decidedly odd. And you'd think, for all the OT-inspired proscribed behaviors in the Christian cult I grew up in, they would have included this one. Yet I'd never heard of it before.

I suppose it was stood in for by the Demon of a Man Wearing Pants Without Back Pockets Such That He Might Be Mistaken For a Woman. (Okay, I malign them, that was one of the splinter-groups' tenets, along with men not being able to wear pastels, and woman not being able to wear pants with a fly. The particular pastor that led that splinter group off from the main cult had a Thing about gender roles and felt the cult wasn't strict enough about them.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

To be technical here: this is from the Talmud, which is specifically what Christians don't accept as gospel. See, the Talmud is where Jews actually get the laws by which we live (except for teddywolf, who's a Karaite heretic (okay, that's an obscure reference, and I'm just teasing him: Teddywolf follows the laws that are actually in the Torah, but not the Talmudic ones. The Jews who rejected the Rabbinic interpretations called themselves Karaites -- they're still around. Since normative Judaism is Rabbinic, this is technically a heresy, which is why I call Teddy a Karaite heretic. The Karaites are the successors of the Essenes and the Saudicees, while the Rabbinic Jews, which is basically normative Judaism, are the successors of the Pharisees. So, if you really want to freak out your parents, let them know that you hang out with Pharisees, now, which is what modern Judaism is.)

So, anyway, the Talmud is the collected writings of the early Rabbis who formed modern, normative, Rabbinic, Pharisitic Judaism. It's not in the Torah, so your cult leaders wouldn't have read it.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I see. :) You're right...reading the Talmud would have been *research*, and we can't have that, can we? :)