I am going to begin with a confession that does not favour me. The first time I read the title of the book The Return of the Kosher Pig, I took it for granted that the midrash was an invention. It is a reflex of the trade: when a missionary writes “some of the rabbis declared”, the usual state of affairs is that behind it there is no rabbi at all, only an unaddressed sentence that nobody is going to check. I set about searching in order to expose the forgery and found the opposite. The sentence exists. It is in the Midrash, first-rank commentators discuss it, and more than six hundred years ago a Christian character used it, for a purpose suspiciously similar, in a polemic written by a Navarrese physician. It troubled me, and I do not intend to hide it. It troubled me until I finished reading what those sources actually say; then the discomfort changed sides.
This is what the author presents as the important premise of the book:
“I am sure that some of you who read the title of the book (The Return of the Kosher Pig) raised an eyebrow or two. Who is the Kosher Pig and why will he return? […] The pig, or chazir (חזיר) in Hebrew, represents the symbol of uncleanness for the Jew. Yeshua of Nazareth is the only one who claimed to be of divine nature with full authority even to forgive sins. Modern Judaism, which is based on 13 articles of faith, clearly rejects the idea that God can take the form of a man. Yeshua, because of his claims, is considered unclean to the Jewish people. Surprisingly, some of the rabbis declared that the pig will return in the days of the Messiah and will become kosher when it reveals its true nature. The Return of the Kosher Pig attempts to bring the non-kosher Yeshua back to the Jewish people by presenting the case for the divine Messiah”
(Shapira, n.d., “About” section).
Re-read the central sentence, slowly, counting what it claims about the rabbinic tradition. There are three things: that some rabbis declared it, that the pig will return in the days of the Messiah and that it will become “kosher” when it reveals its true nature. Three assertions about texts and zero citations. Which rabbis? In what work? Where in that text does the Messiah appear, and where a “nature” that is revealed?
I leave the question hanging for a moment, because the honest answer has two halves and the first suits neither side. First half: yes, a midrash exists that plays with the name of the pig. Second half: no version of that midrash says what the author makes it say. And to get from the first to the second one must pass through a scene that seems to me among the most amusing preserved in rabbinic literature.
Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 1:9 comments on the verse “what has been, that shall be” and tells that on a certain occasion the Kingdom (the code name by which the sages designate the Roman government without pronouncing it) sent to ask our masters to send them one of their own:
מַעֲשֶׂה וְשָׁלְחָה מַלְכוּת אֵצֶל רַבּוֹתֵינוּ וְאָמְרָה לָהֶם שִׁלְחוּ לָנוּ קְסִלוֹפָנוֹס אֶחָד מִשֶּׁלָּכֶם, אָמְרוּ כַּמָּה קְסִלוֹפָנוֹס יֵשׁ לָהֶם וְהֵם מְבַקְּשִׁין מִמֶּנּוּ קְסִלוֹפָנוֹס אֶחָד. כַּמָּה מִקְווֹת פַּנָּסִין יֵשׁ לָהֶם, כַּמָּה אֲבָנִים טוֹבוֹת וּמַרְגָּלִיּוֹת יֵשׁ לָהֶם, כִּמְדֻמִּין אָנוּ שֶׁאֵין מְבַקְּשִׁין מִמֶּנּוּ אֶלָּא מֵאִיר פָּנִים בַּהֲלָכָה, שָׁלְחוּ לָהֶם אֶת רַבִּי מֵאִיר, וְהָיוּ שׁוֹאֲלִין אוֹתוֹ וְהוּא מֵשִׁיב, שׁוֹאֲלִין אוֹתוֹ וְהוּא מֵשִׁיב, וּבַסּוֹף שָׁאֲלוּ אוֹתוֹ לָמָּה נִקְרָא שְׁמוֹ חֲזִיר, אָמַר לָהֶם שֶׁהוּא עָתִיד לְהַחֲזִיר אֶת הַמַּלְכוּת לִבְעָלֶיהָ.
“It happened that the Kingdom sent to our masters and said to them: Send us one qesilofanos from among yours. They said: How many qesilofanos do they have, and they ask of him one qesilofanos! [There follows an enumeration of luxury objects, of uncertain gloss: miqvaot panasin:] How many precious stones and pearls do they have! It seems to us that they ask of him nothing but one who illuminates the face (me’ir panim) in halakhah. They sent them Rabbi Meir; and they would ask him and he would answer, ask him and he would answer, and at the end they asked him: Why is its name chazir? He said to them: Because it is destined to return (lehachazir) the Kingdom to its owner”
(Kohelet Rabbah 1:9).
Three details, because each is worth the journey. The first is a pun that no translation preserves: the sages deduce that the Kingdom does not want just anyone but someone me’ir panim (מֵאִיר פָּנִים, “who illuminates the face”) ba-halakhah, and they send, naturally, Rabbi Meir (מֵאִיר). It is a seminary joke made to the face of a superpower. The second is the word qesilofanos (קְסִלוֹפָנוֹס), which has all the appearance of a Greek loanword. The word קְסִלוֹפָנוֹס is a Hebrew transcription of a compound Greek term: ξύλον (xylon, “wood”) + φωνή (phōnē, “sound” or “voice”). Its literal meaning is “sound of wood” or “voice of wood”. In the context of Kohelet Rabbah 1:9:1, this word appears in a list of things that already existed in the past and “there is nothing new under the sun”. The sages identify objects or phenomena with Greek or Latinised names, a common practice in rabbinic literature of the amoraic and post-amoraic period, when many technical terms were borrowed from Greek. The term corresponds to the musical instrument known today as the xylophone, or to a similar wooden percussion instrument. In rabbinic literature, Greek loanwords for musical instruments are frequent, since Hellenistic culture dominated the environment in which the sages lived. The third is the punch: the Romans question the sage about what they want and, at the end, ask him why the pig is called chazir. And Rabbi Meir answers with the most impertinent etymology in the history of diplomacy: because one day it will lehachazir (לְהַחֲזִיר, “return”) the kingdom to its owner. He called the empire a pig, in front of the empire, with a philological explanation, and the empire went away satisfied with the language lesson. Had the author been in that room, he would have told the emperor that Rabbi Meir had just prophesied the return of Yeshua.
Notice what the sage does. He says not a word about the flesh of the pig, nor about the Messiah, nor about any nature that is revealed. He makes a paronomasia on the root ח־ז־ר, “to return”, and what returns is not the pig: it is malchut (מַלְכוּת, “the kingdom”), and it returns li-ve’aleha (לִבְעָלֶיהָ, “to its owner”). Immediately afterwards, when Rabbi Meir is encouraged to another sermon of animal metamorphosis (the wolf, the dog), his colleagues stop him with a dayyecha, Rabbi Meir (דַּיֶּךָ רַבִּי מֵאִיר, “enough, Rabbi Meir!”) and with the verse that sustains the whole passage: ve-ein kol chadash tachat ha-shemesh (וְאֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ, “and there is nothing new under the sun”, Qohelet 1:9). Keep that phrase. A midrash whose base verse is “nothing new” can hardly be the foundation of a novelty.
But the passage does not end there, and what follows is what the author, or his source, should have read before writing “in the days of the Messiah”:
רַבָּנָן אָמְרִין לֶעָתִיד לָבוֹא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מוֹצִיא כָּרוֹז וּמַכְרִיז וְאוֹמֵר כָּל מִי שֶׁלֹא אָכַל בְּשַׂר חֲזִיר מִיָּמָיו יָבוֹא וְיִטֹּל שְׂכָרוֹ, וְהַרְבֵּה מְאֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם שֶׁלֹּא אָכְלוּ בְּשַׂר חֲזִיר מִימֵיהֶם וְהֵם בָּאִים לִטֹּל שְׂכָרָן, בְּאוֹתָהּ שָׁעָה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אוֹמֵר נִשְׂתַּכְּרוּ אֵלּוּ שְׁנֵי עוֹלָמוֹת, לֹא דַּיָּן שֶׁאָכְלוּ עוֹלָמָן אֶלָּא הֵם מְבַקְּשִׁין לֶאֱכֹל עוֹלָמָן שֶׁל בָּנַי עוֹד, בְּאוֹתָהּ שָׁעָה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מוֹצִיא כָּרוֹז פַּעַם שְׁנִיָּה וּמַכְרִיז וְאוֹמֵר כָּל מִי שֶׁלֹא אָכַל בְּשַׂר נְבֵלוֹת וּטְרֵפוֹת, שְׁקָצִים וּרְמָשִׂים, אִם לֹא אָכַל מִשֶּׁלּוֹ אָכַל מִשֶּׁל חֲבֵרוֹ, הֱוֵי לָמָּה נִקְרָא שְׁמוֹ חֲזִיר שֶׁעָתִיד לְהַחֲזִיר הַגְּדֻלָּה וְהַמַּלְכוּת לִבְעָלֶיהָ.
“The rabbis say: in the time to come, the Holy One, blessed be He, will send out a herald (karoz) who proclaims and says: Whoever has never in his life eaten pork, let him come and take his reward. And many nations of the world who have never in their days eaten pork come to take their reward. At that hour the Holy One, blessed be He, says: These have profited from two worlds! It does not suffice them that they have consumed their world, but they seek to consume also the world of My sons! At that hour the Holy One, blessed be He, sends out a herald a second time and proclaims and says: Whoever has not eaten the flesh of carcasses and torn animals (nevelot u-terefot), of abominations and creeping things—if he did not eat of his own, he ate of his fellow’s. Hence, why is its name chazir? Because it is destined to return the greatness and the kingdom to its owner” (Kohelet Rabbah 1:9; my own translation).
Three notes of a philologist. The first is the herald: karoz (כָּרוֹז, “crier; proclamation”) is a loanword from the Greek κῆρυξ (kêryx), the official crier of the polis, of the same family as κήρυγμα, the “proclamation” with which the New Testament names its own message. Here the crier is God, and his proclamation has nothing of Christological kerygma: it is an audit. The second is the sound of the collection: nistakru (נִשְׂתַּכְּרוּ, “they have profited”) plays with sachar (שָׂכָר, “payment, wage”), the word of the verse that will occupy us later. The third is the grammar, and it is the one that interests me: in both places where the midrash closes its question, the direct object of lehachazir (לְהַחֲזִיר, “to return, to restore”) is a thing that is given back to whoever held it before—et ha-malchut, ha-gedulah ve-ha-malchut, “the kingdom”, “the greatness and the kingdom”—always li-ve’aleha, “to its owner”. It is never the pig that is returned. The hif’il of ח־ז־ר is, in rabbinic Hebrew, a verb of restitution, not of innovation.
One more note, for those who read sister languages. The name chazir (חֲזִיר) probably has nothing to do with the root “to return”: Arabic says خنزير (ḫinzīr) and Judaeo-Arabic חנזיר, with a nasal that Hebrew lost. The midrash neither ignores nor needs this; it does not do etymology, it does homiletics, and homiletics lives on sonic coincidence. Which, incidentally, is a good reason not to rest a doctrine on the permission of the pig upon a play of syllables.
Let us pass to the second witness, which says the same thing in other words and which, had the author known it, would have saved him the title of his pamphlet. Midrash Tanchuma (Buber), Shemini 14, starts from the same text of Vayikra 11 and reads the four animals of the list as four empires:
אֶת הַגָּמָל וְאֶת הַשָּׁפָן וְאֶת הָאַרְנֶבֶת וְאֶת הַחֲזִיר (ויקרא יא ד–ז), את הגמל, זו מלכות בבל, שנאמר בת בבל השדודה [אשרי שישלם לך את גמולך שגמלת לנו] (תהלים קלז ח), את ארנבת, זו מלכות מדי, שנאמר ויבקש המן להשמיד וגו׳ (אסתר ג ו), את השפן זו יון שהשפילה את התורה מפי הנביאים, ואת החזיר זו מלכות אדום הרשעה, שנאמר יכרסמנה חזיר מיער (תהלים פ יד), למה נמשלה לחזיר שעתיד הקב״ה להחזיר עליה את מדת הדין, כיצד לעתיד לבא הקב״ה מוציא כרוז כל מי שעסק בתורה יבא ויטול כרו, ואף הגוים אומרים תן לנו שכרינו שאף אנו עשינו מצוה פלונית, אמר הקב״ה כל מי שלא אכל שקצים ורמשים יבא ויטול שכרו, באותה שעה הם נוטלין איפופסין שלהן, שנאמר אוכלי בשר החזיר והשקץ והעכבר יחדו יספו נאם ה׳ (ישעיה סו יז).
“‘The camel, and the hyrax, and the hare, and the pig’ (Vayikra 11:4–7). ‘The camel’: this is the kingdom of Babylon, as it is said: ‘O daughter of Babylon, who are to be devastated [happy is he who repays you the recompense (gemulech) that you dealt (shegamalt) to us]’ (Tehillim 137:8). ‘The hare’: this is the kingdom of Media, as it is said: ‘And Haman sought to destroy, etc.’ (Esther 3:6). ‘The hyrax’: this is Yavan [Greece], which humbled (hishpilah) the Torah from the mouth of the prophets. ‘And the pig’: this is the wicked kingdom of Edom (Rome), as it is said: ‘The boar out of the forest gnaws it’ (Tehillim 80:14). Why is it likened to the pig? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to bring back (lehachazir) upon it the attribute of judgement. How? In the time to come the Holy One, blessed be He, will send out a herald: Whoever occupied himself with Torah, let him come and take his wage. And the nations too say: Give us our reward, for we too performed such-and-such a commandment. The Holy One, blessed be He, says: Whoever did not eat abominations and creeping things, let him come and take his reward. At that hour they take their ipopsin [ἀπόφασις], as it is said: ‘Those who eat the flesh of the pig and the abomination and the mouse shall come to an end together, says the Lord’ (Yeshayahu 66:17)” (Midrash Tanchuma [Buber], Shemini 14; my own translation, with support from Townsend, 1989).
See how the machinery works. Gamal (גָּמָל, “camel”) is read with gemulech shegamalt (גְּמוּלֵךְ שֶׁגָּמַלְתְּ, “your recompense, which you dealt”); shafan (שָׁפָן, “hyrax”) with hishpilah (הִשְׁפִּילָה, “she humbled”); chazir with lehachazir. It is paronomasia by the book: the darshan hears the sound of the name and turns it into history. Three of the four animals are read in this way, and I know of nobody who has deduced from shafan / hishpilah that the hyrax will become kosher because Greece humbled the Torah. If the method does not produce a zoological conclusion in the other three cases, why should it produce one in the fourth?
And notice, further, two things that the Tanchuma adds. The preposition: not “return to us” but lehachazir aleha (לְהַחֲזִיר עָלֶיהָ, “to bring back upon it”) the attribute of judgement; the pig is the subject who receives the sentence, not the one who dictates it. And the word ipopsin (אִיפּוֹפְּסִין), a transliteration of the Greek ἀπόφασις (apophasis, “sentence, verdict”), the juridical term of the court. That is, the “return” of the pig takes place in a tribunal, and the verse that closes the scene, Yeshayahu 66:17, says what the verdict is: yasofu (יָסֻפוּ, “they shall come to an end”). The Septuagint, moreover, translates the name in the base verse of the midrash (Ps 79:14 LXX) as ὗς ἐκ δρυμοῦ, “boar out of the thicket”: not even for the Greek translator was there anything there but a wild pig devouring a vineyard. The Septuagint thus serves as a neutral control on the lexicon: a translator with no stake in the midrash sees a pig, not a person.
A warning of honesty about the apparatus, because whoever cites is required what one requires of others. In Townsend’s English version the hyrax and the hare appear interchanged with respect to the Hebrew of Buber that I have before me (there the “rock badger” corresponds to Media), and the translator’s own note admits that the relation “is not clear”. I point it out so that nobody repeats it without verifying it against the Hebrew edition; it alters nothing essential.
The third witness, Rabbenu Bachya ben Asher (Saragossa, d. 1340), takes up the Tanchuma and pauses precisely where we are interested:
ובמדרש תנחומא למה נמשלה מלכות זו לחזיר, שעתיד הקב״ה להחזיר עליהן מדת הדין. ויש נוסחאות שכתוב בהן שעתיד להחזיר העטרה ליושנה.
“And in Midrash Tanchuma: Why is this kingdom likened to the pig? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to bring back (lehachazir) upon them the attribute of judgement. And there are versions in which it is written that He is destined to restore the crown to its ancient state” (Rabbenu Bachya, 1998, Vayikra 11:4; my own translation).
Le-yoshnah (לְיֻשְׁנָהּ, “to its ancient state”) is the word I want you to retain, because Maimonides is going to use it in a moment. A crown that is restored to its former condition is not a new crown. Rabbenu Bachya contributes, moreover, a datum of architecture: Moshe enumerates the pig in a separate verse in Devarim 14, and the reason, he says, is that the first three exiles were brief and for that reason are mentioned together, whereas the fourth, Rome, is a long exile “equivalent to all the previous ones combined” (Rabbenu Bachya, 1998, Vayikra 11:4, trans. Munk). The pig, in his commentary, is the duration of our outstanding account, not the advance payment of our salvation.
And now the part that does not suit me, because the integrity of an argument is measured by what it concedes. The Or HaChaim, the commentary of Rabbi Chaim ben Attar on Vayikra 11:3, starts from a real problem: the verse enunciates a zoological rule (“whatever parts the hoof… chews the cud”) and the Talmud (Chullin 59a, as the Or HaChaim itself cites it) observes that every animal that parts the hoof chews the cud, except the pig. A rule with a single exception, and the Torah names it immediately. The commentator then ventures a hypothesis:
וְאוּלַי מִמַּה שֶׁלֹּא הוֹצִיא מִן הַכְּלָל סָמוּךְ לְהוֹדָעַת הַכְּלָל רָמַז שֶׁאֲפִלּוּ הַחֲזִיר בַּכְּלָל, עַל דֶּרֶךְ אָמְרָם זִכְרוֹנָם לִבְרָכָה (רבינו בחיי בשם תנחומא) לָמָּה נִקְרָא שְׁמוֹ חֲזִיר שֶׁעָתִיד לַחְזֹר לִהְיוֹת מֻתָּר, וּמֵעַתָּה כְּלָל ״כֹּל מַפְרֶסֶת״ וְגוֹ׳ הִיא ״מַעֲלַת״ וְגוֹ׳ לֹא יָצָא מִכְּלָלוֹ דָּבָר, וְעַל זְמַן מֵהַזְּמַנִּים אָמַר הַחֲזִיר שֶׁהוּא מַפְרִיס וְכוּ׳ לֹא יִגָּר.
“And perhaps, from the fact that He did not remove it from the rule adjacent to the announcement of the rule, He hinted that even the pig is within the rule, in the manner of what they said, of blessed memory (Rabbenu Bachya, in the name of the Tanchuma): Why is its name chazir? Because it is destined to return (lachzor) to being permitted; and henceforth the rule ‘whatever parts the hoof,’ etc., ‘chews the cud,’ etc.—nothing has gone out of its generality; and with respect to a certain time [of the times] He said of the pig that it parts the hoof, etc., ‘it does not chew the cud’ (lo yigar)” (Ben Attar, 1998, Vayikra 11:3; my own translation).
In Munk’s paraphrase, the pig “will conform to the pattern of chewing the cud” in the ideal future announced by the prophets. This is the closest thing to the author’s position that exists in the three sources I was given, and it must be examined under a magnifying glass, because it has three features that almost nobody underlines.
First, ve-ulai (וְאוּלַי, “and perhaps”). The hypothesis is the commentator’s and is marked as hypothesis; it is not a saying of the sages but a reading of them. Second, what changes is the animal, not the law. The rule (parts the hoof and chews the cud) remains intact; the Or HaChaim saves it precisely by having the pig, some day, fulfil it. There is no derogation of the criterion but metamorphosis of the subject: if the pig of this commentary comes to be kosher, it will be because it chewed the cud, because from within it did what the pig does not do. It is the opposite of what the author needs, which is for the criterion to flex and for the Torah to “return” the pig without the pig changing, so as to make room for someone whom the current criterion rejects. Note this; I shall need it.
Third, and this is what costs me most to say, because it runs against the current of those who cite the Or HaChaim with reverence: I do not find in Rabbenu Bachya what the Or HaChaim attributes to him. The edition puts in parentheses “Rabbenu Bachya, in the name of the Tanchuma”, and Munk’s translation renders it as if Rabbenu Bachya said that the pig will chew the cud. But in Vayikra 11:4, as I have it before me, Rabbenu Bachya transmits the two versions of the Tanchuma (“to bring back upon them the attribute of judgement” and “to restore the crown to its ancient state”) and neither says that the pig will be permitted or will chew the cud. Either the reference points to another place in his commentary that I have not located, or the Or HaChaim is reading with a different version. I do not assert it: I leave it marked as a matter to verify. And let it be recorded that the idea that God “will permit the forbidden” exists as an independent derash (the edition of the Even Bochan that I use refers to Midrash Tehillim 146:4 and Vayikra Rabbah 13:5), and that the Rishonim asked themselves, rightly, how to reconcile it with the immutability of the Torah.
Let us do the accounts, because the account is short. Kohelet Rabbah, the Tanchuma and Rabbenu Bachya read chazir as Rome; in all three, what “returns” is the kingdom, the crown or the judgement; in none is the subject of “returning” a Messiah or the object a person. Only the Or HaChaim approaches the reading that serves the author, and it approaches with a “perhaps” and with a condition that destroys it. One question remained that would not leave me in peace: if the midrash says that, where does the idea come from that the “returning pig” is a theory about the expiry of the Torah, and from there about Yeshu? The answer was in a book of 1380 that I already had open on my table.
Shem Tov ben Yitzchak Ibn Shaprut was born in Tudela, Navarre, around 1340, and was a physician, a datum that will have its charm in a moment. He lived on the edge of an age that was running out of time: the Iberian Peninsula of the last third of the fourteenth century, with a Church ever more sure of itself, with preachers who no longer wished to persuade but to corner, with rabbis summoned to dispute under surveillance and with the shadow of 1391 around the corner. According to the usual biography, a public disputation with Cardinal Pedro de Luna (the same who decades later would be the antipope Benedict XIII) pushed him to put his answers in writing. From this came Even Bochan (אֶבֶן בֹּחַן, “The Touchstone”), completed around 1380 and revised later, a work that mixes dialogue, exegesis and one of the most studied Hebrew versions of the Gospel of Matthew of the Middle Ages. The title evokes Yeshayahu 28:16, the verse of the “tested stone” that Christian exegesis reads in a Christological key: Ibn Shaprut snatches it from them and turns it into an instrument of proof. It is no minor gesture.
With the genre of the dialogue one must be prudent. The character whom the text calls ha-meshalesh (הַמְשַׁלֵּשׁ, “the one who triples”, from shalosh, “three”; that is, “the Trinitarian”) is a literary figure, and it is plausible that he condenses real arguments of the controversy of his time. But to condense is not to invent: his reasonings are perfectly recognisable, and for that reason they matter. This is what he says in the second chapter. I quote at length, because here the context is the argument.
אמר המשלש: אמונתך טובה היא רק שהיא חסרה שלא תאמין בשלוש אשר הוא הכרחי לך להאמין יען אתה מאמין בתורת משה אשר השלוש נתבאר בה בהרבה מקומות כאשר אראה לך בראיות ברורות. גם מה שאמרת שהצדיק נושע בצדקו ויורש גן עדן בקיום מצות תורת משה אינו אמת כי לא תחזיק במצות החדשה שלא תמצא בכל יעדי התורה הישנה דבר רק כל יעדיה הם בטובות העולם הזה [63] בלבד. גם מה שאתה מקוה למשיח נכזבה תוחלתך לפי שכבר בא ולא הכרתם אותו כמו שאוכיחך בראיות ברורות מהכתובים.
“The Trinitarian (ha-meshalesh) said: Your faith is good, except that it is lacking, in that you do not believe in the Three (shalosh), which it is necessary for you to believe, since you believe in the Torah of Moses, in which the Three is explained in many places, as I shall show you with clear proofs. Also, what you said, that the righteous man is saved by his righteousness and inherits the Garden of Eden (gan Eden) by the fulfilment of the commandments of the Torah of Moses, is not true, for you do not hold fast to the new commandments, since you will not find in all the promises of the old Torah anything, but all its promises are in the good things of this world [63] alone. Also, what you hope from the Messiah (mashiach), your hope has been disappointed, since he has already come and you did not recognise him, as I shall prove to you with clear proofs from the Scriptures”
(José-Vicente Niclós, ed., Šem Tob ibn Šaprut, «La Piedra de Toque» (Eben Bohan): Una obra de controversia judeo-cristiana, Bibliotheca Hispana Biblica 16 [Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1997], pp. 61–63).
And further down, on the same page, appears what concerns us. The formula that the Trinitarian cites, in the Hebrew in which it circulated, is this:
למה נקרא שמו חזיר שעתיד הקב״ה להחזירו לנו
“Why is it called chazir? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to return it to us” (Niclós, La Piedra de Toque, p. 63).
And this is the complete paragraph in which he uses it:
ועוד אמרו, ובתים מלאים כל טוב אפילו קדלי חזירי להם. ועוד, אם החזיר נכלל בכלל טוב, אין מדרך החכמה העליונה לאסור דבר שכלו טוב, אלא לצורך שעה, בדרך הרופא שיאסור לחולה הבשרים והמטעמים הטובים ויאכילהו המרים הבלתי זנין לנגד החולי בהם. ועוד כתיב ביחזקאל, וגם אני נתתי להם חקים לא טובים ומשפטים לא יחיו בהם.
“[And behold the sages wrote the opposite, namely what Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: ‘which I command you this day’ (Deut 7:11), ‘this day to do them’, and not tomorrow to do them, whose sense refers to the days of the Messiah. And they said further: Why is its name chazir? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to return it to us. (The Hebrew of this opening is not reproduced in the source text; I render it from the Spanish given in the article.)] And they also said: ‘and houses full of all good’ (Deut 6:11)—even pigs’ napes for them. And further, if the pig is included in the rule of ‘good’, it is not the way of the supreme wisdom to forbid something that is entirely good, except for the need of the hour (le-tzorech sha’ah), in the manner of the physician who forbids the sick man the good meats and delicacies and feeds him the bitter, non-nourishing things against the illness that is in them. And further it is written in Ezekiel: ‘And I also gave them statutes that were not good and judgements by which they would not live’ (Ezek 20:25)” (Niclós, La Piedra de Toque, p. 63).
Pause on the sequence, because it is a clockwork mechanism and all its pieces are in the author’s book, though dismantled. First piece: Eruvin 22a, bent towards “the days of the Messiah”. Second: the chazir / lehachaziro turned into a promise of permission. Third: the pig’s nape as proof that the pig is “good”. Fourth: the analogy of the physician, that is, the idea that the prohibition was an emergency prescription, liable to expire. And fifth: Ezekiel 20:25 as a divine confession that the old law was deficient. It is curious, by the way, that the Christian character should speak of patients and diets to an author who lived by prescribing. The conclusion arrives a few lines later, without any subtlety:
יראה מכל זה שהמצות [?] אלא לאותו זמן לצורך שעה. ולכן, בבא ישו משיחנו נתן לנו תורה אחרת טובה ומשפטים נחיה בהם.
“It is seen from all this that the commandments [lacuna in the text, perhaps: ‘were not given’] except for that time, for the need of the hour. And therefore, when Yeshu our Messiah (Mashichenu) came, he gave us another Torah, a good one, and judgements by which we shall live” (Niclós, La Piedra de Toque, p. 65).
למה נקרא שמו חזיר שעתיד הקב"ה להחזירו לנו. וכן אמרו אשר אנכי מצוך היום לעשותם היום לעשותם ואין היום ליטול שכרם.
“Why is its name chazir? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to return it to us (le-hachziro lanu). And so they said: ‘which I command you this day to do them’—this day to do them, and there is no ‘today’ to take their reward (ha-yom litol secharam)” (Shem Tov ibn Shaprut, Even Bochan, Gate 11, ch. 15; cf. David ibn Zimra, She’elot u-teshuvot, II, no. 828; cf. Igrot Kodesh, vol. 3, p. 153).
Before adding up the links of this chain it is worth examining the first, because the formula has more pedigree of citations than of source. It circulates as midrash: the Ritva (Chiddushim, Kiddushin 49b) brings it “in the name of the midrash”, the Mikropedia Talmudit registers it as a midrashic tradition and refers to Rikanti, on Shemini, and to Rabbenu Bachya, who gives it in the name of the Tanchuma. Rabbenu Bachya brings it at Vayikra 11:7, and Abravanel, in his Principles of Faith, attributes it to Vayikra Rabbah together with the saying that all the festivals will be abolished except Purim and Yom Kippur (ed. Kellner, p. 68). No preserved redaction contains it thus: the Torah Temimah denies that such a midrash exists, and in Vayikra Rabbah the tradition figures only with another redaction, referring to Rome. It has been pointed out, moreover, that the Ben Ish Chai observed that the current saying “atid chazir lehitaher” (עתיד חזיר ליטהר, “the pig is destined to become pure”) is missing from the available midrashim, and that the Yefeh Toar on Vayikra Rabbah 13:3 says he did not find it. What does exist, in Kohelet Rabbah 1:9 and in the Tanchuma that we read above, differs on a grammatical point before a doctrinal one. In Kohelet Rabbah the hif’il of ח־ז־ר governs a lexical object, et ha-malchut (אֶת הַמַּלְכוּת), with a dative of possession, li-ve’aleha (לִבְעָלֶיהָ, “to its owner”). Since malchut is feminine, if the verb pronominalised its object it would say lehachzirah (לְהַחֲזִירָהּ), never lehachziro. The Tanchuma constructs lehachzir ‘aleha (לְהַחֲזִיר עָלֶיהָ, “upon it”). The late formula bears instead a masculine accusative suffix, -o (ו־), whose only possible antecedent is the animal, plus a dative of beneficiary, lanu or le-Yisra’el. The pig, which in the classical midrash was the term of the comparison, becomes the object of the verb, and a political restitution (the kingdom to its owner) turns into a dietary restitution (the animal to us). The shift of a clitic is the whole novelty. The formula belongs, moreover, to the genre of homiletical etymology (“why is X called X? Because…”), whose clearest specimen is Vayikra Rabbah 11:7: “why is he called Achaz? Because he seized (achaz) the synagogues and the houses of study”. From that “because” nobody infers a norm or an abrogation. The midrash on “HaShem matir asurim” (ה' מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים, Ps 146:7) works in the same way: asur (אָסוּר) means at once “bound” and “forbidden”, and the game lies in the polysemy of the lexicon, not in an amendment of the law. Even accepting the late formula, those who cite it defuse it. The Radbaz (II, no. 828), whose answer I cite below, neutralises it. Rabbenu Bachya and Rikanti understand it as a parable of the strength of the nation compared with the animal, and the Or HaChaim demands an animal that already has the signs of purity, because the Torah does not change. The second saying, which the polemicist hooks on with an “and so they said” (וכן אמרו), does not speak of abrogating either. In its Talmudic form (‘Avodah Zarah 3a; cf. Eruvin 22a) it contrasts the “today” of action with the “tomorrow” of payment, and the Messiah appears in neither saying. The compiler adds him, as befits a florilegium of testimonia, and further on we shall see that inference refuted with the Talmudic text before us. Observe, finally, the dative. In the voice of the sages lanu designates Israel, and two pages later (p. 65, l. 16) the same lanu, now in the mouth of the Trinitarian, designates those who receive “another Torah”. What is disputed, at bottom, is who the “us” is to whom restitution is made.
«אבל דעתי הפעוטה כי אלו המדרשים וכיוצא בהם מדברים לימות המשיח שתרבה הטובה והשמחה והמנוחה והתענוג עד שיהיו כל הימים שוים אצל בני אדם כאלו נתבטלו המועדים שאין הפרש בין חול למועד לא שתתבטל המצוה ח"ו […] וכבר נשאלתי על כיוצא בזה שאמרו ז"ל למה נקרא שמו חזיר שעתיד הקב"ה להחזירו לישראל ולפי הפשט איפשר לתרץ על הדרך אשר כתבתי כי יהיו ישראל אוכלים משמנים כאלו הותר להם בשר חזיר לא שיותר להם בשר חזיר ח"ו [ועל דרך הסוד יש למעלה שר אחד ושמו חזריא"ל והוא קטיגור על ישראל] ועתיד הקב"ה להחזירו לישראל להיות להם סניגור ודעהו.»
“But my humble opinion (de’ati ha-pe’utah) is that these midrashim and their like speak of the days of the Messiah, when the good, the joy, the rest and the delight will multiply, until all days will be equal for human beings, as if (ke-ilu) the festivals had been annulled, for there is no difference between weekday and festival, not that the commandment will be annulled, God forbid (chas ve-shalom). […] And I was already asked about the like of this that our sages of blessed memory said: Why is its name chazir? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to return it (le-hachziro) to Israel. And according to the plain sense (peshat) it is possible to resolve it in the way that I have written: that Israel will eat rich foods (mashmanim) as if pork were permitted to them, not that pork will be permitted to them, God forbid. [And by way of the secret (sod), there is above a prince whose name is Chazriel, and he is a prosecutor (qatigor) against Israel,] and the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to return him to Israel to be a defender (sanegor) for them; and know it”
(David ibn Zimra, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Radbaz, II, no. 828).
The Radbaz matters for three reasons, and the first is one of architecture: the saying about the pig does not reach him alone, but paired with another, the one that announces that the festivals will be abolished except Purim, the same pair that Abravanel records together as from Vayikra Rabbah. Both are resolved with a single key, the particle ke-ilu (כְּאִלּוּ, “as if”). The festivals will be annulled “as if” (כאלו נתבטלו) because, with good and rest multiplied, all days will be equal, “not that the commandment be annulled”; and the pig will be returned because Israel will eat rich foods “as if” (כאלו הותר) it had been permitted to them, “not that it be permitted”. Twice, in a single responsum, the same chas ve-shalom: whoever brings the formula into the discussion is the first to deny the inference that is asked of it today. The second reason is lexical. Mashmanim (מַשְׁמַנִּים) resonates, it seems to me, with the banquet of Nechemyah 8:10, “ichlu mashmanim” (אִכְלוּ מַשְׁמַנִּים), the festive meal of a holy day, which places the saying of the pig in the same register of messianic abundance as that of the festivals. The third is that, if the gloss between brackets is accepted, the level of sod does not touch kashrut but inverts a function: Chazriel (חזריא"ל), with the root of chazir plus the angelic suffix, is a qatigor (קטיגור) who accuses Israel and whom God will return so that he may be a sanegor (סניגור). Both terms are loanwords from Greek, κατήγορος and συνήγορος, and the first is the one that the Apocalypse (12:10) puts on the lips of heaven when it calls the adversary ὁ κατήγωρ τῶν ἀδελφῶν ἡμῶν, “the accuser of our brothers”. Nobody in that scene is eating anything. And the order of his replies, first the peshat and then the sod, leaves at neither level a chink through which a permitted pig could enter, still less a person.
Now, the question that the medieval Trinitarian interlocutor and the contemporary missionary share without knowing it (or knowing it, I do not know): if the pig “returns” and becomes permitted, what exactly changed: the pig, the law or our understanding of both? Observe that the structure of his thesis is identical to the one the author presents as a discovery: from chazir it is inferred that the forbidden will be permitted; from there, that the Torah is temporary; from there, that someone came to bring another. Where the character of 1380 deduces the expiry of the law from the pig, the author deduces the identity of the Messiah from the pig. That is his whole innovation: to personify the metaphor. I do not know whether the author read Ibn Shaprut and I do not claim that he did. I affirm that the scaffolding of his novelty has the age of a medieval manuscript, and that Ibn Shaprut had the delicacy to preserve it for us with a date. And to this the Midrash itself had already answered in advance: ve-ein kol chadash tachat ha-shemesh.
I am going to do what the interlocutor did not do, which is to open the page of the Talmud. Eruvin 22a, the passage that the Trinitarian invokes with the authority of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, says this, and notice above all what comes before:
אָמַר רַבִּי אִילָא: לְשֽוֹנָאָיו הוּא דְּלֹא יְאַחֵּר, אֲבָל יְאַחֵּר לַצַּדִּיקִים גְּמוּרִים. וְהַיְיָנְא דְּאָמַר רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן לֵוִי: מַאִי דִּכְתִיב ״אֲשֶׁר אָנוֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיוֹּם לַעֲשָׂוֹתָם״, ״הַיוֹּם לַעֲשָׂוֹתָם״ — וְלֹא לְמָחָר לַעֲשָׂוֹתָם, ״הַיוֹּם לַעֲשָׂוֹתָם״ — לְמָחָר לְקַבֵּל שְׂכָרָם.
“Rabbi Ila said: It is with those who hate Him that He does not delay [Deut 7:10], but He does delay with the perfectly righteous. And this is what Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: What is that which is written ‘which I command you this day to do them’? ‘This day to do them’—and not tomorrow to do them; ‘this day to do them’—tomorrow to receive their reward” (Eruvin 22a; cf. Koren–Steinsaltz, The William Davidson Talmud).
Steinsaltz’s gloss makes explicit what the text implies: today is the time to fulfil, “in this world”, and tomorrow is not, “for there is no obligation or possibility of fulfilling commandments in the World to Come”; tomorrow is the time to collect. Now count how many Messiahs there are in the sentence. None. The “tomorrow” of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi is the hour of sachar (שָׂכָר, “payment”), the collection of the righteous whom Rabbi Ila has just said God delays, and the collection is in the World to Come, not in the days of the Messiah. The phrase “whose sense refers to the days of the Messiah”, which the Trinitarian puts in the mouth of the Gemara, is of his own harvest. And there is more: the formulations that circulated in the polemic read ha-yom la’asotam ve-ein ha-yom litol secharam (היום לעשותם ואין היום ליטול שכרם, “today to do them, and there is no today to collect their wage”); the edition I use refers in addition to ‘Avodah Zarah 3a as a parallel. In all the variants the contrast is the same: it is a lesson against antinomian laziness. Do it today, because tomorrow you will no longer be able to; and you will collect afterwards. It is the opposite of “stop doing it”.
But let us suppose, for love of the argument, that “tomorrow” meant “the messianic age”. Then one would have to explain why the same Talmud, in a saying that it cites in the name of Shmuel, affirms the opposite of what the interlocutor needs:
אֵין בֵּין הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה לִימוֹת הַמָּשִׁיחַ אֶלָּא שִׁעְבּוּד מַלְכֻיּוֹת בִּלְבָד
“There is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except servitude to the kingdoms alone” (Berakhot 34b; Sanhedrin 99a).
The difference between the world of today and the days of the Messiah is shi’bud malchuyot (שִׁעְבּוּד מַלְכֻיּוֹת, “subjugation to the kingdoms”). See how well it fits: the chazir of Kohelet Rabbah is exactly that, the kingdom that oppresses and that will be forced to restore what it holds. Two independent texts, one aggadic and one Talmudic, describe the same event with the same political vocabulary, and neither touches foods. Maimonides codifies it without ambiguity in a passage that uses, once again, the root ח־ז־ר:
הַמֶּלֶךְ הַמָּשִׁיחַ עָתִיד לַעֲמֹד וּלְהַחְזִיר מַלכוּת דָּוִד לְיָשְׁנָהּ לַמֶּמְשָׁלָה הָרִאשׁוֹנָה
“The King Messiah is destined to arise and to restore (ul’hachzir) the kingdom of David to its former state (le-yoshnah), to the first sovereignty” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Melachim 11:1).
Lehachzir (לְהַחֲזִיר) and le-yoshnah (לְיָשְׁנָהּ): the same verb as Rabbi Meir before the Romans, the same locution as Rabbenu Bachya on the crown. And what follows in Maimonides, in the same line, is that in his days “all the laws return as they were before”: sacrifices are offered, the sabbatical years and jubilees are kept “according to all their precept, written in the Torah”. And in 12:1 he adds, so that nobody is confused by the metaphors of the wolf and the lamb, that one should not think that in the days of the Messiah anything of the course of the world will be annulled, but that olam ke-minhago noheg (עוֹלָם כְּמִנְהָגוֹ נוֹהֵג, “the world goes on in its custom”). Rabbi Meir, whom his colleagues halted with “nothing new under the sun”, would have agreed. The Or HaChaim, who dreams of a pig that chews the cud, was thinking of something else; but even his dream leaves the rule intact.
There is a Talmudic saying that could serve the Christian thesis, and out of honesty I mention it: Niddah 61b records mitzvot betelot la’atid lavo (מִצְוֹת בְּטֵלוֹת לֶעָתִיד לָבֹא, “the commandments will be abolished in the time to come”). But ordinary tradition reads that maxim, in the context of the sugya itself, as referring to the dead man, who is free of obligation (chofshi min ha-mitzvah), not to the living of a future era who cease to eat kosher. What cannot be done is to cite an isolated maxim against the whole body of halakhah, aggadah and Maimonides, and call it “some of the rabbis declared”.
There remains the last recourse of the Trinitarian, which is the one used by almost all who wish to demonstrate the temporality of the mitzvot: Shmuel, though a Levite, offered a burnt offering (1 Sam 7:9), and Eliyahu (Elijah) offered outside the precinct on Carmel (1 Kings 18). But that example was already catalogued before Ibn Shaprut wrote a line, and by name: hora’at sha’ah (הוֹרָאַת שָׁעָה, “a temporary directive”). Yevamot 90b uses precisely Elijah on Carmel as the paradigmatic case, and adds the conditions that bound it: an already accredited prophet, a concrete circumstance, and no pretension that the measure is law for the generations. The general rule, on the other hand, is stated by the Talmud elsewhere in a dry phrase that I should like to see on the cover of every book of the genre: ein navi rashai lechadesh davar me’atah (אֵין נָבִיא רַשַּׁאִי לְחַדֵּשׁ דָּבָר מֵעַתָּה, “a prophet is not permitted to innovate anything from now on”; Shabbat 104a; Megillah 2b). The circle closes: ein kol chadash, nothing new, neither under the sun nor from the mouth of the prophet.
Keep reading, because what comes next is what made me close the book for a moment. The Trinitarian divides the Torah into three parts and declares it deficient in each:
«וכאשר תבחן תורת משה באלו הג׳ עניינים תמצאה חסרה. […] מצות התורה יחלקו לשלושה חלקים, למצות מדיניות והם המצות השכליות […] נקראים מוראליש, ולמצות משפטיות יקראו ג׳ודיסיאלס […]; ולמצות עבודיות […]. ונכללו בזה העבודות והמועדים נקראים סירימוניאליש, כי סירי בלשון יון אלוה»
“And when you examine the Torah of Moses in these three matters, you will find it deficient. […] The commandments of the Torah are divided into three parts: the political commandments (mediniyot), which are the rational commandments (ha-mitzvot ha-sichliyot), […] are called ‘moralish’; and the judicial commandments (mishpatiyot) will be called ‘judisyalas’ […]; and the service commandments (avodiyot) […]. And included in this are the services and the festivals (ha-mo’adim), called ‘sirimonyalish’, for siri in the language of Yavan means god (Eloah)” (Niclós, La Piedra de Toque, p. 67).
Do not miss the detail: “morals”, “judicials”, “ceremonials”. Ibn Shaprut transcribes in Hebrew letters three terms that are neither Hebrew nor his own: they are the scholastic classification of the precepts of the Old Law that Thomas Aquinas systematised in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 99, a. 4), with the added thesis that the ceremonial precepts ceased with the coming of Yeshu (I-II, q. 103, a. 3). This matters for two reasons. The first: it confirms that the interlocutor is not a mere rhetorical device but the voice of the theology of his time, so that the objection “the ceremonial part of the Torah expired” has a precise scholastic genealogy. The second: it is the repertoire that a good part of the contemporary Messianic world inherits almost without retouching when it affirms that diet, Shabbat and sacrifices were “shadow” and not substance. The author is not at the end of a Jewish tradition; he is at the end of a scholastic tradition, and the pig is its Hebrew disguise.
A note on language, for the pleasure of showing the crack. The text explains that ceremonial comes from siri, which “means God in the Greek language”. It does not. Most probably siri is a deformation of κύριε (kyrie, “Lord”), whereas caerimonia, from which “ceremonial” comes, is a Latin word of obscure origin that the Latins themselves related to the Etruscan city of Caere. Perhaps the notion is the character’s, perhaps that of whoever transcribes it; it does not matter. What matters is that one who presents himself as holder of the key to the sense of the Torah should offer a toy etymology for the name of his own categories.
And now, at the close of the chapter, the piece that explains everything, first in the Hebrew that Ibn Shaprut preserves and then in English:
ואם בשלישי, כי הם לא יספיקו לכפרה שלימה עד מות ישו ומזה הצד היא חסרה מצד תכליתה מאד. גם שהעבודות ההם היו מזוהמות בשריפת הבשרים והחלבים והזאת הדמים. אמנם עבודתנו היא נקייה בלחם וביין ומכפרת כל העבירות בשלימות באכלנו את לחם אלהינו ונהיה קדש ומי שאלוהיו בקרבו לו יירא דבר רע.
“And as for the third, they do not suffice for complete atonement (kaparah shelemah) until the death of Yeshu, and from this side it is very deficient in respect of its purpose. Also, those services were defiled by the burning of the meats and the fats and the sprinkling of the bloods. But our service is clean, in bread and wine, and atones for all transgressions completely when we eat the bread of our God, and we become holy, and he who has his God within him shall fear no evil thing” (Niclós, La Piedra de Toque, pp. 67–69; the printed text reads lo [לו], perhaps for lo [לא]).
Two expressions stop me. The first is mezuhamot (מְזוּהָמוֹת, “contaminated, filthy”), applied to the worship that the Torah describes, again and again, as reach nichoach (רֵיחַ נִיחוֹחַ, “a pleasing aroma”; e.g. Vayikra 1:9). Whoever calls zuhamah what God calls nichoach is not reading the Torah: he is replacing it. The second is kaparah shelemah (“complete atonement”), which presupposes that the previous one was incomplete, and which is another way of saying, with the vocabulary of the fourteenth century, what the author says with a pig. And notice that the passage is the end of a chain: the pig, the physician, Ezekiel, and finally blood and fat as unworthy. Diet is the bait; sacrifice, the hook.
The Trinitarian interlocutor invokes Yirmeyahu three times. I am going to do what a hostile witness does: call Yirmeyahu himself to testify. In the passage of the “new covenant” (Yirmeyahu 31:30–32 in the numbering of the Masoretic Text; 31:31–33 in the Christian), the phrase that decides the sense is not berit chadashah (בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה, “new covenant”), which appears only once in the whole Tanakh, but this:
נָתַתִּי אֶת תּוֹרָתִי בְּקִרְבָּם וְעַל לִבָּם אֶכְתֲּבֶּנָּה
“I will put My Torah within them, and upon their heart I will write it” (Yirmeyahu 31:32 MT).
Not “another” Torah. Torati (תּוֹרָתִי, “My Torah”): the same one, internalised. The covenant is new in its mode of inscription, not in its content. And the same prophet, two chapters further on (33:18), promises that to the Levitical priests “there shall not be cut off a man before Me to offer a burnt offering, to burn a grain offering and to make sacrifice every day”. If Yirmeyahu repeals the cult in chapter 31, he restores it without warning in 33. The reading that does not produce that contradiction is the rabbinic one.
There remains Ezekiel, which is where the Trinitarian’s manoeuvre is subtlest and most revealing. Look at the two verses together:
וָאֶתֵּן לָהֶם אֶת חֻקּוֹתַי וְאֶת מִשְׁפָּטַי הוֹדַעְתִּי אוֹתָם אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה אוֹתָם הָאָדָם וָחַי בָּהֶם. […] וְגַם אֲנִי נָתַתִּי לָהֶם חֻקִּים לֹא טוֹבִים וּמִשְׁפָּטִים לֹא יִחְיוּ בָהֶם.
“And I gave them My statutes and made known to them My judgements, which if a person does them, he shall live by them. […] And I also gave them statutes that were not good and judgements by which they would not live” (Yechezkel 20:11, 25).
The phrase that the Trinitarian puts in the mouth of Yeshu, “judgements by which we shall live”, is the photographic negative of Yechezkel 20:25 and, at the same time, a calque of 20:11: asher ya’aseh otam ha-adam va-chai bahem (אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה אוֹתָם הָאָדָם וָחַי בָהֶם), which is, in turn, the self-description of the Torah of Moshe (cf. Vayikra 18:5). That is, the Trinitarian takes the “living by them” that the prophet says of the Torah, distributes it between an “old” Torah from which he removes that property and a “new” one to which he grants it. It is a theft of vocabulary, not a discovery. And the context, which the interlocutor omits, is in the following verse: Yechezkel 20:26 explains that those “statutes not good” refer to the offering of the firstborn to the fire (be-ha’avir kol peter rachem, בְּהַעֲבִיר כָּל פֶּטֶר רָחַם), a punishment for rebellion and not a confession about Sinai.
There is, finally, one piece of this puzzle that is not in Ibn Shaprut and that speaks from the other shore: Maimonides. The ninth of his thirteen principles says, in the Judaeo-Arabic in which he wrote it, which I reproduce because it contains a detail that no translation preserves:
אלקאעדה̈ אלתאסעה̈ אלנסך̇. וד̇לך אן הד̇ה שריעה̈ משה לא תנסך̇ ולא תאתי שריעה̈ מן קבל אללה גירהא ולא יזאד פיהא ולא ינקץ מנהא לא פי אלנץ ולא פי אלתפסיר, קאל לא תוסף עליו ולא תגרע ממנו. וקד בינא מא ינבגי אן יבין פי הד̇ה אלקאעדה̈ פי צדר הדא̇ אלתאליף.
القاعدة التاسعة النسخ. وذلك أن هذه شريعة موسى لا تنسخ ولا تأتي شريعة من قبل الله غيرها ولا يزاد فيها ولا ينقص منها لا في النص ولا في التفسير، قال לא תוסף עליו ולא תגרע ממנו. وقد بينا ما ينبغي ان يبين في هذه القاعدة في صدر هذا التأليف.
“The ninth principle: abrogation (naskh). That is, that this law (sharī’a) of Moses is not abrogated, and no other law (sharī’a) comes from God besides it, and nothing is added to it and nothing is diminished from it, neither in the text (naṣṣ) nor in the interpretation (tafsīr); He said: ‘You shall not add to it, nor diminish from it.’ And we have already explained what ought to be explained in this principle at the head of this composition” (Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10, ninth principle).
Three details of a philologist, which are worth more than any sermon. First, naskh (النسخ, “abrogation”): Maimonides chooses the technical word of Islamic theology, the same root as Qur’an 2:106 (mā nansakh min āyatin aw nunsihā), because his adversary is double: the Church, which says that the Torah was superseded, and Islam, which says that it was corrected. The dot over the kaf and over the dalet in the manuscript (ך̇, ד̇) is not an ornament: it marks the Arabic letters خ and ذ, absent from the Hebrew alphabet. Second, sharī’a (שריעה, شريعة): to say “Torah”, Maimonides writes the word that Arabic uses for revealed law; the Torah of Moshe is sharī’at Mūsā. Third, the pair naṣṣ (נץ, نص, “text”) and tafsīr (תפסיר, تفسير, “interpretation”), which are the written and the oral Torah: immutability embraces both, and therefore the law cannot be abrogated by way of an interpretation. And notice the citation that closes his line: lo tosef alav ve-lo tigra mimenu, Devarim 13:1 in the Hebrew numbering. The verses that follow immediately upon that warning, Devarim 13:2–6, open the chapter of the mesit u-madiach (מֵסִית וּמַדִּיחַ, “enticer and misleader”): the prophet or dreamer who offers a sign or wonder and, with it, invites to follow another way. The foundation of immutability and the threshold of the misleader are the same page of the Torah. That is not a coincidence that I have fabricated; it is in the order of the verses.
I owe myself an answer. At the beginning of the article I asked where the Messiah appears in the midrash of Rabbi Meir, and I left the question hanging. He does appear, and one need not go far: he is in the same paragraph of Kohelet Rabbah 1:9, a few lines after the pig, with a portrait of his own and without a single pig in sight.
רַבִּי בֶּרֶכְיָה אָמַר בְּשֵׁם רַבִּי יִצְחָק, כַּגּוֹאֵל רִאשׁוֹן כָּךְ גּוֹאֵל אַחֲרוֹן, מַה גּוֹאֵל רִאשׁוֹן נֶאֱמַר (שמות ד, כ): וַיִּקַּח משֶׁה אֶת אִשְׁתּוֹ וְאֶת בָּנָיו וַיַּרְכִּבֵם עַל הַחֲמֹר, כָּךְ גּוֹאֵל אַחֲרוֹן, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (זכריה ט, ט): עָנִי וְרֹכֵב עַל הַחֲמוֹר. מַה גּוֹאֵל הָרִאשׁוֹן הוֹרִיד אֶת הַמָּן, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (שמות טז, ד): הִנְנִי מַמְטִיר לָכֶם לֶחֶם מִן הַשָּׁמָיִם, אַף גּוֹאֵל אַחֲרוֹן יוֹרִיד אֶת הַמָּן, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (תהלים עב, טז): יְהִי פִסַּת בַּר בָּאָרֶץ. מַה גּוֹאֵל הָרִאשׁוֹן הֶעֱלָה אֶת הַבְּאֵר, אַף גּוֹאֵל אַחֲרוֹן יַעֲלֶה אֶת הַמַּיִם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (יואל ד, יח): וּמַעְיָן מִבֵּית ה׳ יֵצֵא וְהִשְׁקָה אֶת נַחַל הַשִּׁטִּים.
“Rabbi Berechyah said in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak: As the first redeemer, so the last redeemer. Of the first redeemer it is said (Shemot 4:20): ‘And Moshe took his wife and his sons and set them upon the donkey’; so the last redeemer, as it is said (Zechariah 9:9): ‘poor and riding upon a donkey.’ As the first redeemer brought down the manna, as it is said (Shemot 16:4): ‘Behold, I will rain down for you bread from heaven,’ so the last redeemer will bring down the manna, as it is said (Tehillim 72:16): ‘May there be a handful of grain in the land.’ As the first redeemer brought up the well, so the last redeemer will bring up the waters, as it is said (Yoel 4:18): ‘And a spring shall come forth from the House of the Lord and water the Valley of Shittim’” (Kohelet Rabbah 1:9; my own translation).
See how the portrait is assembled. The last redeemer is described typologically with the first, ke-go’el rishon kach go’el acharon (כַּגּוֹאֵל רִאשׁוֹן כָּךְ גּוֹאֵל אַחֲרוֹן), with three parallels drawn from the life of Moshe: the donkey, the manna, the well. The Messiah of this midrash is a Moshe who returns, “poor and riding upon a donkey” (chamor, חֲמוֹר). He is not a pig (chazir, חֲזִיר) that is discovered. There are two letters of distance between the two words and a whole world between the two theologies, and the Midrash does not confuse them even when it puts them in the same paragraph. The evangelists, by the way, looked for their protagonist in the same verse as Rabbi Berechyah: Matthew 21:5 and John 12:15 cite Zechariah 9:9 with its donkey. When they wished to find Yeshu in an animal, they chose the donkey. None sought him in the pig.
The Sages did not use the pig to speak of pigs; they used it to speak of an appearance. Midrash Vayikra Rabbah 13:5, which reads the same four animals as four kingdoms, says of the last, Edom:
מה חזיר הזה בשעה שהוא רובץ הוא מפשיט טלפיו כלומר שאני טהור
“Just as this pig, when it lies down, stretches out its hooves, as if to say: I am pure” (Vayikra Rabbah 13:5; cf. Bereshit Rabbah 65:1).
And the kingdom of Edom, the midrash continues, robs and plunders while feigning justice. It is the image that already appears with regard to Cain in Bereshit Rabbah 22:13, and it is the one that gives sense to all the foregoing: the “kosher pig” of the midrash is not a promise but an oxymoron with intent, the animal whose only plea is its hoof. And the midrashic tradition anchors the restitution in a verse that deserves a close look, Ovadyah 1:21: ve-alu moshi’im be-har Tziyon lishpot et har Esav ve-hayetah la-Shem ha-melucha (וְהָיְתָה לַיהוָה הַמְּלוּכָה), “and saviours shall go up on Mount Zion to judge Mount Esau, and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s”. The owner of the kingdom, according to the verse, is HaShem.
The Tanakh had already drawn the scene without the help of rabbis:
נֶזֶם זָהָב בְּאַף חֲזִיר אִשָּׁה יָפָה וְסָרַת טָעַם
“A ring of gold in a pig’s snout: a beautiful woman who lacks discretion” (Mishlei 11:22).
The Septuagint says it in its driest Greek, ὥσπερ ἐνώτιον ἐν ῥινὶ ὑός, “like an earring in the nose of a pig”. The ornament does not change the animal. The New Testament knew it and says it twice without noticing that it is answering the author: Matthew 7:6, μηδὲ βάλητε τοὺς μαργαρίτας ὑμῶν ἔμπροσθεν τῶν χοίρων, “nor cast your pearls before pigs”; and 2 Peter 2:22, which cites a proverb, ὗς λουσαμένη εἰς κυλισμὸν βορβόρου, “a sow that has washed, [returns] to wallowing in the mire”. A Hebrew sage, an evangelist and the author of an apostolic letter say the same thing with three images: gold, pearls and water can be put on it, and it remains a pig.
There is another porcine scene in Bava Kamma 82b (cf. Menachot 64b and Sotah 49b) which tells that, when the Hasmonean brothers were disputing the throne, Hyrcanus besieged Jerusalem from without and Aristobulus resisted from within. Each day the besieged lowered a basket of coins over the wall and received in exchange the lambs of the tamid, the daily sacrifice. An old man versed in “Greek wisdom” revealed the secret to the besiegers: as long as those within continue the service, they will not fall. The next day:
למחר שלשלו להן דינרין בקופה והעלו להן חזיר. כיון שהגיע לחצי החומה נעץ צפרניו בחומה ונזדעזעה ארץ ישראל ארבע מאות פרסה על ארבע מאות פרסה. באותה שעה אמרו: ארור שיגדל חזיר, וארור שילמד בנו חכמת יוונית.
“The next day they lowered denarii in the basket and they sent up to them a pig. When it reached half the wall, it dug its nails into the wall, and the Land of Israel shook four hundred parasangs by four hundred parasangs. At that hour they said: Cursed be he who raises pigs, and cursed be he who teaches his son Greek wisdom.” The Mishnah had codified it as a norm: ve-lo chazirim be-chol makom, “nor pigs in any place” (Bava Kamma 7:7).
What goes up in the basket is not a lamb that reveals itself: it is the substitute for the lamb. Whoever reads John 1:29, ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου (“the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”), and afterwards Bava Kamma 82b, will understand why the title of the book sounds, to rabbinic ears, like the basket of the second day.
A whole book of the Tanakh ends with the pig, and not by chance. In the final chapters of Yeshayahu, those of the “new heavens and new earth”, the pig appears three times, and always as an accusation: “those who eat pig’s flesh” (65:4), “he who offers a grain offering: pig’s blood” (66:3, מַעֲלֵה מִנְחָה דַּם חֲזִיר) and, at the close, the scene that the Tanchuma chooses as verdict of the tribunal:
המתקדשים והמטהרים אל הגנות אחר אחד בתוך אוכלי בשר החזיר והשקץ והעכבר יחדו יספו נאם יהוה
“Those who sanctify themselves and purify themselves to enter the gardens, behind one in the midst, who eat the flesh of the pig and the abomination and the mouse: together they shall come to an end, says HaShem” (Yeshayahu 66:17; the central part of the verse is obscure).
Notice the first clause: ha-mitkadshim ve-ha-metaharim, “those who sanctify themselves and purify themselves”. These are those who have the hoof in plain view: they wash, they consecrate themselves, they enter the garden, and they eat pig. It is the washed pig in prophetic version, and the Tanchuma sets it as the final sentence. That is: the midrash that the author would need for his “pig that becomes kosher” closes its scene with the verse in which those who eat pig perish. Rabbenu Bachya, who knows the same chapter, uses it for something else (he pairs the pig with the dog in 66:3 when commenting on Vayikra 11:4), but the direction is the same.
I come to the logical knot, and I build it with an observation that seems to me more important than any citation. The missionary tradition has used this midrash in two ways that exclude each other. The first is that of the Trinitarian of 1380: the midrash proves that the pig, that is, the forbidden food, will be permitted; therefore the Torah is temporary; therefore someone could bring another. Let us call it the reading of the food. The second is the author’s: the pig is Yeshu, who becomes kosher when he reveals his nature. Let us call it the reading of the person. The two share one word and nothing more. If the pig is a food, it is not Yeshu; if it is Yeshu, the midrash does not speak of foods. Whoever cites the same text for both things either does not know that they are two, or trusts that the reader will not know it.
The reading of the food, moreover, has in the New Testament its own guarantor, which is the place where it is least advisable to look:
ὅτι οὐκ εἰσπορεύεται αὐτοῦ εἰς τὴν καρδίαν ἀλλ’ εἰς τὴν κοιλίαν, καὶ εἰς τὸν ἀφεδρῶνα ἐκπορεύεται, καθαρίζων πάντα τὰ βρώματα.
“…because it does not enter into his heart but into the stomach, and goes out into the latrine, purifying all foods” (Mark 7:19).
Notice the participle. With καθαρίζων, nominative masculine, the gloss becomes a declaration attributed to Yeshu, and it is the reading printed by the usual critical editions; but a neuter variant exists, καθαρίζον, which would make the digestive process what “cleanses” the foods and would leave the sentence without a legislator. Acts 10:15 (ἃ ὁ θεὸς ἐκαθάρισεν σὺ μὴ κοίνου, “what God has cleansed, you must not call common”) and Romans 14:14 (οὐδὲν κοινὸν δι’ ἑαυτοῦ, “nothing is common in itself”) repeat the logic. And the account comes out thus: if the pig was already declared pure, by decree, two thousand years ago, there is no need for it to “return”; the rabbinic promise of the future would be fulfilled in advance, and whoever cites it in the future tense, as the author does, contradicts his own Christian Scripture. And if it must still return, Mark 7:19 is an inexact gloss. What cannot be is that the pig is already clean and is still awaiting its return.
Notice, moreover, the lexicon. The Septuagint translates chazir with ὗς (Vayikra 11:7; Devarim 14:8) and chewing the cud with μηρυκισμός (Vayikra 11:3). The gospels abandon that vocabulary and say χοῖρος (Matthew 7:6; 8:30–32; Mark 5:11–16; Luke 8:32–33; 15:15–16), and in the scenes in which the pig is protagonist the image does not change: the herd of Mark 5:13, ὡς δισχίλιοι, “about two thousand”, ends drowned in the sea, and the prodigal son of Luke 15:15–16 hits bottom feeding χοίρους. The word ὗς reappears, according to the concordance, only once in the New Testament: in the proverb of the washed sow. Earliest Christianity does not show itself more generous. The Epistle of Barnabas (10:1), in Codex Sinaiticus folio 337, reads “you shall not eat pork” (οὐ φάγεσθε χοῖρον) as “you shall not join yourself to such men, who are like pigs” (οὐ κολληθήσῃ… ἀνθρώποις τοιούτοις, οἵτινές εἰσιν ὅμοιοι χοίροις), who forget the Lord in abundance and recognise him in need, and 2 Maccabees 6:18 has Eleazar die for refusing to eat ὕειον κρέας, “swine’s flesh”. When the pig was a question of martyrdom and morality, nobody baptised it Messiah.
A datum of language, which anyone can check with a concordance. The noun chazir appears in seven passages of the Tanakh (Vayikra 11:7; Devarim 14:8; Yeshayahu 65:4, 66:3 and 66:17; Mishlei 11:22; Tehillim 80:14), but the verb ח־ז־ר in the sense of “to return” does not belong to biblical Hebrew, which for that says shuv (שׁוּב); it is a verb of rabbinic Hebrew and of Aramaic. In other words: the paronomasia chazir / lehachzir works only in the language of the Sages. It is not a prophecy hidden in the text of the prophets; it is a game of the school. The noun, on the other hand, belonged to the common language: Jewish Aramaic says חֲזִירָא, and Syriac ܚܙܝܪܐ (ḥzīrā), which is the word that the Peshitta puts for the pigs of Mark 5. And a detail for whoever works with manuscripts: in Tehillim 80:14, the verse that sustains the midrash of the pig-Rome (יְכַרְסְמֶנָּה חֲזִיר מִיָּעַר), the ayin of מיער is written suspended according to the Masoretic tradition, and the Masorah marks it as the central letter of the Psalter.
An irony of the archive, before closing. Messianic and Hebrew Roots circles venerate the Hebrew Matthew of Ibn Shaprut as if it were an orphan manuscript rescued from the Church. But that Matthew does not travel alone: it is inside the Touchstone, in book XII or XIII according to the recension, and the same book that preserves it opens, in its first chapter, with the Trinitarian whom we have just heard. The Jewish Encyclopedia summarises the purpose: Ibn Shaprut translated portions of the four gospels into Hebrew “accompanying them with pointed observations”, and answers to those observations written by a convert named Jona are preserved (Gottheil and Kayserling, 1901–1906, s.v. “Ibn Shaprut”). That is: whoever cites Shem Tov to prove that the gospel was Hebrew is citing a polemicist at the very moment when he arms his readers against it.
Let us do the final account with the sources on the table:
| Source | What is the chazir? | What “returns”? | Who changes? | Messiah in the scene? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kohelet Rabbah 1:9 (Rabbi Meir) | Rome, “the Kingdom” | the kingdom and the greatness, to its owner | Rome, which restores what it holds | Apart, and with another typology: the last redeemer, like Moshe, upon a donkey |
| Tanchuma (Buber), Shemini 14 | Edom, Rome | the attribute of judgement, upon it | Rome, which receives sentence (Isa 66:17) | No |
| Rabbenu Bachya, Vayikra 11:4 (cites the Tanchuma) | Rome, the fourth exile | the judgement, or the crown to its ancient state | Rome, which restores | No |
| Or HaChaim, Vayikra 11:3 | a future, hypothetical pig (“perhaps”) | to become permitted again | the pig, which will chew the cud | No |
| The Trinitarian (Even Bochan I, 2) | the forbidden food | permission | the Torah, which expires | Yes, in the conclusion: “Yeshu, our Messiah” |
| The missionary author’s book | Yeshu | “will return” and “will become kosher” | Israel, which accepts him | Yes |
I began this article supposing that the midrash was an invention, and I close it knowing that the invention is another: not the phrase, but its subject. Rabbi Meir says that Rome will return what it holds. The Trinitarian of 1380 says that the law will return what it forbids. The missionary author says that Israel will reverse its verdict on a person. Three different subjects for a single paronomasia, and only the first is in the text.
It remains to say what the tradition does promise, because the pig of the sources does not remain without a destiny either. Yirmeyahu says it:
יְיָ עֻזִּ֧י וּמָעֻזִּ֛י וּמְנוּסִ֖י בְּי֣וֹם צָרָ֑ה אֵלֶ֗יךָ גּוֹיִ֤ם יָבֹ֙אוּ֙ מֵֽאַפְסֵי־אָ֔רֶץ וְיֹאמְר֗וּ אַךְ־שֶׁ֙קֶר֙ נָחֲל֣וּ אֲבוֹתֵ֔ינוּ הֶ֖בֶל וְאֵֽין־בָּ֥ם מוֹעִֽיל׃ הֲיַעֲשֶׂה־לּ֥וֹ אָדָ֖ם אֱלֹהִ֑ים וְהֵ֖מָּה לֹ֥א אֱלֹהִֽים׃ לָכֵן֙ הִנְנִ֣י מֽוֹדִיעָ֔ם בַּפַּ֣עַם הַזֹּ֔את אוֹדִיעֵ֥ם אֶת־יָדִ֖י וְאֶת־גְּבֽוּרָתִ֑י וְיָדְע֖וּ כִּֽי־שְׁמִ֥י יְיָ׃
“O Eternal, my strength and my stronghold and my refuge in the day of distress: to You nations shall come from the ends of the earth and shall say: Surely our fathers inherited a lie, a vanity, and there is no profit in them. Can a man make gods for himself, when they are no gods? Therefore, behold, I will make them know this time; I will make them know My hand and My might, and they shall know that My Name is the Eternal” (Yirmeyahu 16:19–21; my own translation).
Notice the direction of the movement: the nations come towards the God of Israel, and the first thing they confess is that their fathers inherited a lie, sheker; Israel is not led towards anyone. And notice the question of verse 20, which is not mine: haya’aseh-lo adam elohim ve-hemah lo elohim, “can a man make gods for himself, when they are no gods?”. Tzefanyah 3:9 says it from another image:
כִּי אָז אֶהְפֹּךְ אֶל עַמִּים שָׂפָה בְרוּרָה לִקְרֹא כֻלָּם בְּשֵׁם ה לְעָבְדוֹ שְׁכֶם אֶחָד
“For then I will turn the peoples to a pure speech (safah berurah), that all of them may call upon the Name of the Eternal and serve Him shoulder to shoulder.”
The pig “becomes kosher” (in a metaphorical sense) when what makes it tref changes, and the prophets name what that is: the lip, and the Name that this lip invokes. The Or HaChaim said it with the image of an animal that chews the cud: what is lacking is lacking within.
Rabbi Meir explained his name to the Romans to their face, and the Romans went away content with the language lesson. You, who have read this far, no longer have that excuse. If what returns is the kingdom, and it returns to its owner, who do you think is asking for it to be given back, and who, seated upon it, hopes that nobody will ask why it is called what it is called?
