Loading...Just now I was fishing around for an old post for a rerun, and thought it would be nice to do something on the Old Testament. It’s been a while! Here is one from many years ago that deals with a question I still get regularly today. You might have it too!
QUESTION:
Do you have a suggestion for a book concerning the Old Testament’s construction? I believe in the History of God (by K. Armstrong) she mentioned that there were about five distinct writers for the OT. Is this the scholarly view and do you have a book suggestion to delve deeper into it?
RESPONSE:
This is an issue that has been on my mind a lot lately [I was writing this in 2012!]. Right now, my current writing project is a college-level textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation. This seems to me to be way too much to cram into a semester, but as it turns out, something like half the colleges in the country teach biblical courses this way, rather than having Hebrew Bible in one semester and New Testament another. And, in my judgment, the textbooks currently available for the course are not as good as they should be. So my publisher, some years ago, urged me to write one myself. I decided to make the attempt, and I’m in the midst of it right now.
In what follows I explain what kinds of sources were used to construct the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and why it was not written by Moses — all with good bibliography! Want to see? Join the blog!!
Do you think Moses really existed? What about the Patriarchs?
Not the Moses as described in the Bible, no. Patriarchs? No — I think they are legendary figures.
I understand that sensible scholars can make a reasonable case either way but:
In your view is the name we know as “Moses” more likely of Egyptian or Hebrew origin?
It appears to be Egyptian.
If Egyptian, that is interesting! My understanding is that most scholars discount the Conquest, let alone the Exodus or the Captivity in Egypt as historical (even in the broadest of brushes).
Yet later mythologizers apparently DID have, or invent, an Egyptian name for a mythically Egyptian-reared hero, hundreds of years after the time setting.
Is there any scholarly thought on what’s up with that?
There are various opinions — e.g., that it’s drawing on an Egyptian name by an author who is writing about someone that he claims was born in Egypt. The traditional view, of course, is that hte name is Egyptian because Moses really was a person from Egypt so the stories are all true. My view is that that’s a bit like saying a novel about a man named Pierre from Paris really must be historically accurate because Pierre *is* a name used in Paris. (OK, that’s a bit stretching it, but still…)
When you speak of the Hebrew Bible do you mean the JPS Tanakh translation or the Old Testament as presented in the Christian Bible? Is there a difference between the two?
I”m actually referring to the Hebrew edition itself, not the English translation of it. THe translations of both the Christain OT that you would find in a Bible and the Bible you would find in a Jewish TNK would be made from the *same* Hebrew text. I’m referring to that text.
Tohra has many similarities with the MUCH older Sumerian culture that left us hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, including the creation myth Enuma Elish. Although there are clear differences between the Judaism and Sumerian theology, some of the stories carry some similarities such as the creation of man, the fall of man into a state of mortality, the Garden of Eden, the Sumerian royal list of the generation from Adam to Noah, and the Flood and more.
These very ancient Sumarian tales probably existed long before the Jews were captive in Babylon.
Do you think the Jews could have used or copied some of these Sumarian stories and put them into their own mythology in Genisis?
I think such stories were widespread and came to be explained and explicated in different contexts.
Dear Prof. Ehrman,
yesterday I read an interesting article on the New York Times about Dershowitz’s hypothesis that the Shapira manuscript might not be a forgery, but an earlier version of the Deuteronomy. (I recommend other members of the forum to read the article by Jennifer Schuessler in the Arts section, it should be publicly accessible).
Do you have some comments on this topic or do you plan to post something in the future about it?
Thank you!
B.R.
I’m afraid that without the fragments to examine, there is literally no way to make a definitive decision. But I will say that virtually every time the press gets ahold of a story like this, it turns out to be bogus. Much to everyone’s chagrin!
FWIW we used Hayes’ “Introduction to the Bible “ in our Hebrew Bible class. Also there is a free Open Courses at Yale Class that readers can access by the same author. https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145
Thanks for the book recommendations.
I’m reading A Most Peculiar Book by Kristin Swenson right now based on a previous recommendation of yours. I’m really enjoying it, it’s my favorite non-fiction I’ve read so far this year.
Do we know that the 39 books within the Old Testament is the same collection of books that the Jews and the early Christians had or was the Old Testament cannon organized later? And how certain can we be about the accuracy of the texts themselves in comparison to the long lost originals?
1. The canon as we know it was not more or less “finalized” until after the NT period. I”ve talked about it on the blog. Do a word search for Hebrew canon or canon of the Hebrew Bible and you’ll probably find the posts. 2. I’m afraid it’s impossible to be even relatively certaon about the accuracy of the texts; the earliest copies are many centureis after the originals, and our modern translations are based on a manuscript more than a millenium and a half after the originals….
Do you have any opinions on the manuscripts in the news recently which may be a source for Deuteronomy?
I’m afraid that without the fragments to examine, there is literally no way to make a definitive decision. But I will say that virtually every time the press gets ahold of a story like this, it turns out to be bogus. Much to everyone’s chagrin!
The rabbis of the Talmud – who could not, of course, admit that the Torah was anything less than the word of an omniscient God – devised a series of logical rules to explain away its inconsistencies, conflicts, and contradictions. For example, there is the rule of “klal u’prat” (ופרט כל) – from the general to the specific. If one passage in the Torah lays out a general rule, and another passage contradicts it, read the second passage as a specific exception to the general rule. (Why do you think Jews make such good lawyers?)
These rules (the 13 rules of Rabbi Yishmael) do resolve most issues. But sometimes, no matter how the rabbis tried to twist the wording, they couldn’t get rid of the contradiction. Contradictions aren’t allowed in God’s word, of course. So they would set it aside by saying “teyqu” – a Hebrew acronym meaning “when Elijah comes [to announce the coming of the messiah] he will resolve all questions and difficulties.”
Wow I never knew that, thanks for the info!
“Assuming Moses was a real person – which many scholars do not assume at all).”
It would be nice to have posts about which characters from the Bible are real people,
and what is the evidence (or lack thereof) either way.
For the Old Testament, once you get to David, the figures mentioned are almost entirely historical. Even later figures have legndary accounts told about them, of course.
So how do these four sources gain acceptance? At some point people writes them up. Do the authors claim that they are based on documents or oral tradition going back to Moses? Why would anyone believe them? Is it because the authors are priests or influential people who already have credibility among the Israelites? How does this all work?
No, authority didn’t really work like that in antiquity. Several people wrote accounts; they circulated; people used them to help understand their collective pasts; at some point other authors edited the various accounts; eventually someone took four of them and put them together and made one very big account. This was put in circulation, and it became the version that most people came to know. Eventually they came to think it was authoritative. Then it got attributed to Moses. And later still it became the Word of God. The process took centuries, arguably over a millenium.
I have your textbook from 2014 and enjoyed it very much. I have also read most of the books you have mentioned in this post. I recently read a book (published in 2020) authored by William Dever, Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? The information is nontechnical which makes it easier to absorb. He describes that the real religion of ancient Israel is almost everything the biblical writers condemned. I agree that Richard Elliott Friedman’s, Who Wrote the Bible? is an excellent read. I particularly enjoyed the way he separated the Priestly texts and J texts to show the reader an example of multiple authorship.
Toward the beginning of Genesis, there are 4 people we know of: Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel. Cain kills Abel and gets cursed to wander the earth. Cain expresses fear that someone he meets (!) might kill him. He wanders off and finds… a wife!
Does this suggest that there was additional J material about other people outside the garden that didn’t make the redactor’s cut, or did the author of J just not care about narrative consistency because the story was intended as a parable, or what?
Yes, there are all sorts of fun problems like that. Inlcuding the fact that Cain founded a city (!). These are just narrative inconsistencies, the sort that creep into legendary materials without anyone noticing the problem. Happens a lot!
Here’s the kicker: archaeological evidence shows no scribal activity in Judah until the late 8th C. Traditional dating to the postulated “J” source stands on very shaky ground… BUT… the characteristics of J, that caused scholars to first propose the doc hyp are still there. The proper name for God, anthropomorphic attributes of God, the henotheistic worldview is undeniable, etc, it’s all there and in most scholars minds represents early ancient near eastern world views. How do we account for that, if we date it all to no earlier than the 8th C?
Are you asking why older views persist for centuries? I’d say many people today truly believe God lives “up there” — as one example. We could come up with lots!
No no, what I am pointing out is that the monolitrous worldview embedded in much of the traditionally older material seems to reflect an earlier time, late Bronze Age early Iron Age, and yet according to Finkelstein and others, no scribal activity is evident until perhaps the late 8th C. It would appear that we must either date the primeval narrative later than people like Noth and Wilhousen dated it OR shift our understanding of Israelite world view a few centuries later, how do you feel?
I think I’m understanding you, but maybe not. I’m saying that if sources were not written until the 8th c, they could easily embody views that were around in earlier times, say the 10th century. Not everyone had the cutting edge views of the 8th century in the 8th century. some had older views. And older traditions certainly had older views.
Off the (current) topic:
I apologize if anyone has already mentioned this, but the current issue of Harper’s magazine has a nice little piece on the recently-discussed Hobby Lobby/Dead Sea Scrolls scandal as one of their “Annotation” features.
(If you don’t have access to Harper’s, the article is on-line here:
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/false-prophets-forged-dead-sea-scrolls/. )
Coincidentally enough, just yesterday in the New York Times there was a feature about how a possible document fragment that was dismissed as a forgery over a hundred years ago might be an authentic early version of Deuteronomy that lacks certain law passages among the narrative portions. Are you aware of or have any thoughts on this particular controversy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/arts/bible-deuteronomy-discovery.html
I’m afraid that without the fragments to examine, there is literally no way to make a definitive decision. But I will say that virtually every time the press gets ahold of a story like this, it turns out to be bogus. Much to everyone’s chagrin!
Coincidentally enough, just yesterday in the New York Times there was a feature about how a possible document fragment that was dismissed as a forgery over a hundred years ago might be an authentic early version of Deuteronomy that lacks certain law passages among the narrative portions. Are you aware of or have any thoughts on this particular controversy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/arts/bible-deuteronomy-discovery.html
I’m afraid that without the fragments to examine, there is literally no way to make a definitive decision. But I will say that virtually every time the press gets ahold of a story like this, it turns out to be bogus. Much to everyone’s chagrin!
I was reading in Diarmaid McCullough’s “Christianity” about how after the Babylonian exile, many of the dispersed people of the Habiru came back from the corners of wherever they went with the stories of the lands they inhabited trailing behind them. From Babylonian flood myths to Jews named “Moses”.
Why would you say (if you would say) Jesus did not ever study 1 Enoch, Chapter 71, which discusses the Son of Man?
Mainly because I don’t think Jesus was studying books like there. In the impoverished hamlet of Nazareth, where would he have had access to it? In any event, the only way to know what Jesus knew is to see what he says. That in itself is massively difficult. But there is not anything recorded — let alone anything that can be established as historical — in which he indicates he had read 1 Enoch.
Professor,
By Jesus “reading” do you mean hearing it read? What’s the chance anyone in Nazereth could read to read it to him, much less that he could read? But,how about Magdala? They’ve found what looks like a Synagogue and if so is it likely someone there could read Hebrew?
If there were, say, 30 or 40 families there, it’s easy to imagine that a few adult males there were literate on some level; possibly more. How could they afford Torah scrolls? I really don’t know. But maybe that was a prized possession.
Ehrman: I do not think Jesus was studying books like that there in Nazareth. In the impoverished hamlet of Nazareth, where would he have had access to it?
Steefen: Jesus could get to Capernaum, then Jesus could get to Sepphoris and Tiberias. Jesus could get to John the Baptist and the Jordan River and Bethany (with Qumran on the way to Jerusalem from Bethany East in Perea, Jesus could get to a 1 Enoch scroll (Book of Parables, 100 BCE) or people talking about it, especially as he opened discussions that he was the Son of Man. “Oh, you say you’re the Son of Man? You’re picking up where Enoch left off, or something?” // Then, as Paul spoke of Jesus as an angel. Paul could easily be referring to 2 Enoch (first half of 1 century CE) where the Son of Man has ascended to heaven, to the 10th heaven and became an angel.
I would say our historical conclusions should be based on probabilities which are themselves beased on what we know about the historical circumstances at the time. Otherwise we can just claim that Jesus got all his learning from Egypt, or teh Brahmin’s in India.
Hey, why not? Well, there are a hundred reasons why not, for those who study history as opposed to use their imaginations.
It’s certainly not as far-fetdched as saying he picked it up in Sepphoris; but what’s the *evidence* that he went and acquired learning in Sepphoris, given what historians know about rural life in Galilee at the time?Babylon!
Professor Ehrman. I studied Classical Greek and Latin several years ago using the JACT courses in England as a hobby and now, enthused by following your Great Courses lectures and several of your online debates on YouTube, I would like to try my hand at learning New Testament Greek.
May I ask whether you might be kind enough to make two recommendations:
A course book designed to teach New Testament Greek, specifically aimed at those wishing to pursue a self-learning process which I can readily purchase.
And,
A distance learning, on-line New Testament Greek Course. It is important for me that this is a course taught within a secular framework and one which is free from any non-secular bias, if that is at all possible ?
Many thanks.
Michael
I’m sure it’s all entirely possible, but I’m afraid I don’t know what resources are available for either one. All of my teaching has been in person and I haven’t kept up with online resources. Maybe others on the blog have suggestions? If you come across a few options, let us all know and I’ll let you know if I I can get a sense of them. The main problem is that in secular settings, “New Testament Greek” is not a language. Everyone at a secular school, college, or university learns classical Greek (Attic, normally) and only once they have learned Greek do they start to think about the New Testament. “New Testament Greek” is a bit like “Harper Lee English” — to learn English/Greek you wouldn’t pick a book, you would learn the language (if you see what I mean). Only in Christian seminaries is that at “thing” that people call New Testament Greek. But having said that, there are certainly books out there that would give you what you’re looking for. I just don’t know which ones are best for those who want ot be self-taught.
Genesis 4 has the story of Cain and Abel, and Genesis 5 has the story of “Adam’s descendants”. Yet Gen 5 doesn’t mention Cain and Abel at all. Do you think they are from different sources?
If you check out a HarperCollins Study Bible, it will actually break down the sources for you. Roughly: Gen 1 = P; 2-4 = J; 5 = P.
One ‘legend’ was Daniel. We are told he couldn’t have predicted the Greeks so this book was written after Alexander the Great. But the book of Daniel speaks of another enemy destroying the temple, Jerusalem and Israel itself – and killing the Messiah (who will die for His people.) This is CONVENIENTLY OVERLOOKED, which of course makes for intellectual dishonesty.
So if Daniel is legendary, then obviously WHOEVER WROTE DANIEL IS SOMETHING OF A LEGEND HIMSELF. After all, how did HE know? Certainly this writer wasn’t of the religious orders because the Messiah of the Jews doesn’t suffer, die (and yes, resurrected as David, Isaiah and Zechariah state – long before Paul.)
And… if this legendary author wrote of the Romans and Jesus then he most likely anticipated the Greeks too. Occam’s Razor stuff, actually.
I don’t know any scholar on Daniel who overlooks that passage. Whom are you thinking of? And do you know what scholars say about it? If not, I’d suggest a good starting point would be John Collins commentary on Daniel — or most anything else he wrote on Daniel.
Is this type of ‘redactional reconstruction’ common in literature, outside of the Bible? For example, do classicists read works of Greek philosophers, and propose later editors or compilers?
They are not opposed to it, but most classical works are not of the same sort of thing as the biblical narratives, either in the Hebrew Bible or NT: they instead are single person compositions. When there are exceptions, yes, they apply similar methods. Homeric scholars have had a field day with the Iliad and the Odyssey over the years, figuring out “originals” “edits’ “interpolatinos” etc.
The one thing that really convinced me of multiple authorship is the flood story. As we have it, it’s very confusing and seemingly contradictory. But when we read either of the two (proposed) stories (that were later combined into one), each story makes perfect sense and flows naturally. I don’t think there’s another way to explain this, besides multiple authors.
Is it legitimate to propose multiple authorship, without any kind of ‘direct’ evidence? By ‘direct evidence,’ I mean, for example, having a complete or partial copy of a ‘Yahwist’ text, which doesn’t include something from the ‘Priestly’ source. (I realize we don’t have anything like this.)
I would say it’s certainly legitimate, yes; one would need to look at the totality of the evidence and then figure out if it’s convincing or not. Sometimes one can make a more slam-dunk case than others. Yes, if we had J in toto we could compare the Torah to it and that would be an even stronger case. But the case scholars have made since the 19th century is so compelling that virtually everyone is convinced except those with firm religious reasons not to want to accept it.
Dear Dr Ehrman,
1. With 4 fellow Blog members already asked the same question about Dershowitz’s claim and 260 comments in NYT article since March 10th till date, do you think there is an urge, world over, to find TRUE SOURCES behind the texts of Bible? And why?
2. I have read the article and curious to know about the “trial by fire” event in June 2019 in Harvard Law School to hear Dershowitz’s claim?….Were you there as well? Does such “confidential seminars” happen often?
Regards,
No, I wasn’t there. Maybe I better post on this. But I”m not an expert in Hebrew philology, and so all I can do is give an educated assessment of the situation. I’ll try to do so.
A bit off topic, maybe, but certainly related–
If one does not understand American English idiom of the day, one may be easily misled in interpreting what is being said or written. I sometimes have a bone to pick with authors on this score, and have to wing it in trying to understand. In my salad days, it was even worse. Since I got some of my information from the grapevine, I was never quite sure what was up. Now, however, I’m mostly good to go.
In reading scripture in Greek, Hebrew or other ancient languages, and trying to translate into English, how much of a problem is idiom? Are ancient idioms understood well enough to be reasonably sure of proper translation? Has idiom been a big factor in understanding ancient biblical sources?
Good point. Most idioms in Greek are well understood, if they are sufficiently idiomatic that they get used a lot. With enough usages, it is relatively easy what something might mean. With Hebrew it’s more complicated. Unlike Greek, for which we have masses of ancient text, for ancient Hebrew Bible, the Bible is more or less the text. So there are far fewer places to go to to see how usage works. Even so, there can be difficulties in both languages, just as today, idioms in English English and American English come as a surprise to one from one place or another (as I discovered when I first met my British now wife). (“Open the boot!”)
I like your recommendation of Richard Elliott Friedman’s book. I bought the 2nd edition back in 1997 and was amazed and delighted by it. Interestingly, it has this blurb from the Wall Street Journal: “Controversial … Now the documentary theory is entering the public arena … That’s because of Mr Friedman’s book.” And the Independent (London) said “One of the most dramatic reappraisals of the Old Testament in recent times.
Was “Who Wrote the Bible” that influential at the time? Has the theory changed much since he wrote? Thanks!
I think most experts — of which I am not one! — think that the book did a world of good communicating older scholarship to general readers, but that the actual situation is even more complicated than the “four-source” documentary hypothesis allows. But for a broad readership, that view more or less still gets the important point across.
Bart, one of the first comments, above, says, “Although there are clear differences between the Judaism and Sumerian theology, some of the stories carry some similarities such as the creation of man, the fall of man into a state of mortality, the Garden of Eden, the Sumerian royal list of the generation from Adam to Noah, and the Flood and more.” But Genesis does not say that Adam and Eve were created as immortals and that they lost that immortality. From what I understand, the Hebrew for “die” as in “on that day you will die” is the same that’s used for the death of mortals without any implication of immortality being lost. Would you agree with that?
I suppose the fact there is a “tree of life” that is forbidden them suggests that they were meant to be mortals; otherwise they wouldn’t need to eat fruit for life.
Yes, and the reason God evicted them form the Garden was so that they wouldn’t eat of it, not directly because they had disobeyed but because they might again.
Prof Ehrman,
Can you kindly comment on these:
Q1. I read elsewhere on the Samaritan Pentateuch. Does it have significant differences with the Hebrew Torah (Jewish version)?
Q2. Are there very significant textural variants between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament?
Thank you.
1. I’m afraid I don’t know much about it; 2. No, the Christian Old Testament, at least today, is translated from the Hebrew.
Prof Ehrman,
During the last zoom session which discussed the Apocalyptic deeds of Jesus, the last question posed hinged on Jewish Messianic prophecies. If I got you right, your response to the question of Jesus’s fulfillment of these prophecies pre-supposed that there seem not to be any agreed set of Jewish prophecies concerning the Messiah (what we term as Messianic Prophecies) or at least, you seem to have mentioned something to make me think so?
Christians of course do interpret certain Jewish scriptures as Messianic prophecies. Kindly help me get some clarity by helping with these questions.
Q1. Do Jews have verses about the Messiah and what he ought to do/fulfill (Messianic Prophecies)?
Q2. If yes, could you kindly mention some of such verses?
It’s hard to know given our limits of evidence; for a full and helpful study, see John Collins, The Scepter and the Star (about ancient Jewish Messianic expectations). ONe way to see is by reading Psalms of Solomon (from outside the Bible) 17: 21-32, which seems to embody a traditional Jewish view, based on such passages as Isa. 49:6-7; Psalms 2 and 110.
I have found the River of God by Gregory Riley an insightful account of various influences on the development of the Jewish (and ultimately the Christian) worldview over time. Have you read it and what do you think of it? And, while he does cover the influence of Zoroastrian thought on Judaism, he does not suggest that the story of Moses and Yahweh/Elohim could be based on that of Zoroaster and Ahuramazda. This seems quite plausible if the relative timing of each story can be established with enough confidence to support it.
Yes, I read it but it was a while back; I’m not as sure about Zoroastrian influence. It’s a rather vexed issue that experts don’t agree on. But I don’t see how stories about Moses could derive from Persian influence; they were around centuries before any interactions with Zoroastrian thought could have occurred I should think.
I am far from being an expert but it does seems to me that the Zoroastrian influence on Judaism & Christianity is pretty strong (and Riley makes a good case for it). As to the Zoroaster/Moses parallel I agree it is more speculative and there is not enough evidence yet. If they are unrelated though we have to accept that these very similar tropes appeared completely independently in two different religious traditions. Lets hope for more archeological discoveries!
If on Christianity, only through Judaism. And I too used to think it was strong re:Judaism, until I read the counter evidence. Dating the Zoroastrian texts to the third century BCE or earlier is a real problem.
It would seem indeed that any influence on Christianity is through Judaism but the mention of Magi in Mathew is curious. Again I am not an expert but my understanding is that a good case for dating the Old Avestan Gathas can be made for ~1000BCE. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (Stausberg, 2015) discusses dating but there are probably more recent publications on the matter. There is a good circumstantial case to be made for the influence based on common themes (e.g. Zoroaster as the foremost law giver, personification of evil, angels, souls, last days & final judgement etc) as well as the higher status and sophistication of the Persian empire versus that of Judah from where the exiles had come. There is also the esteem held for Cyrus and the precedent of Biblical borrowings from Gilgamesh. None of this is conclusive but on the balance of probabilities I am personally persuaded until such time as more evidence to the contrary appears.
Dear Prof. Ehrman – Thank you for this. I’ve been on a Hebrew Bible binge lately myself and am just returning to your blog after a gap of more than a month.
I second your recommendation of Richard Elliott Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible,” explaining the documentary hypothesis, and add his “The Hidden Book in the Bible,” which posits, then presents in English his version of the full J source – which he says stretches from Gen. 2 to 1 Kings 2: a connected narrative from creation to King Solomon. He says it’s the oldest extended prose work on Earth and speculates it may have been (51% probability he guesses) written by a woman.
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Bible-Richard-Elliott-Friedman-ebook/dp/B002EBDP50
He has also published a full Torah translation color-coded for each source, “The Bible with Sources Revealed.” (He believes the conquest of Canaan is not historical but that a small Exodus – of only the Levites –occurred.)
https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Revealed-Richard-Elliott-Friedman-ebook/dp/B002BD2UWA
Finally, Friedman has been doing a wonderful series of lockdown lectures from Athens, GA, called Return to Torah. Only 3 episodes left.
https://www.jewishlive.org/returntotorah
2)
I also second your reader’s recommendation of Christine Hayes’s Yale survey course on the Hebrew Bible (parallel to the also excellent New Testament one by your friend Dale Martin).
https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145
Finally, as Pesach has just begun, I recommend a tour de force lecture on the origins of the “Passover” as unrelated pastoralist and grain-growing rites, and their later subsuming into the Exodus narrative, by Alan Cooper. He’s a professor and former provost at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the first person to have been a professor there and at the Christian school across the street, Union Theological Seminary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3V_QcwybKY&t=4327s
Oh yes, and he also sang lead for Sha Na Na on “At the Hop” at Woodstock before Jimi Hendrix came on.
I have had many hours of fun and learning with all of the above. Enjoy!