Strange Spice Pt 2 – Battle of the Rabbis

            vs.                               

In Pt 1, we saw how the Mishnah has violated the Torah, and rewritten the Laws of the Ketoret in Ex 30.

9 Ye shall offer no strange incense thereon, nor burnt-offering, nor meal-offering; and ye shall pour no drink-offering thereon.

34 And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum; sweet spices with pure frankincense; of each shall there be a like weight.

The justification for this departure from Torah law is given, typically, by Maimonidean obfuscation. Thus in Hilchot Klei HaMikdash, Ch 2 he says the following:

Halacha 1

The incense offering was prepared every year. Preparing it fulfills a positive commandment, as [Exodus 30:34] states: "And you take spices...." Four of the spices are explicitly mentioned in the Torah. They are balsum, onycha, storax, and frankincense. The others were communicated as a halachah communicated to Moses at Sinai.

Halacha 2

[The requirement for] eleven spices was communicated to Moses at Sinai. The would prepare them with an exact weight and add to them - without weighing them: Salt of Sodom, Jordanian amber, and an herb that would produce smoke. Only select people would know its identity and that knowledge was conveyed as halachah from person to person.

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1008227/jewish/Kli-Hamikdash-Chapter-2.htm

Maimonides is relying on a parallel universe “oral law” for which there is no evidence whatsoever in the Torah. In fact, the Torah time and again refutes such lies.

The classical “proof “ the rabbis cite is from Exodus 24:

12 And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Come up to Me into the mount and be there; and I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment, which I have written, that thou mayest teach them.'

They claim that the law and the commandment refer to the written and Oral laws respectively. They were to sloppy, however, to even finish reading this verse, in the rush to come out with a proof text, since it states “which I have written”.

http://tanakhemet.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/saadia-gaons-textual-proof-crumbles.html

A number of other proofs are available that demonstrate that as far as God and Moses were concerned, there was no Oral law. Thus:

Deut. 30;10: if thou shalt hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep His commandments and His statutes which are written in this book of the law; if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul.

Deut 27:3,  And thou shalt write upon them all the words of this law, when thou art passed over; that thou mayest go in unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of thy fathers, hath promised thee.

Josh 8: 32 And he wrote there upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he wrote before the children of Israel.

             35 There was not a word of all that Moses commanded, which Joshua read not before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the strangers that walked among them.

These in general are disproofs of any Oral Law, since for there to have been any oral law, these verses would be redundant, God forbid.

Now, amongst the rabbis, there is sometimes a dissenting voice in how to interpret the Torah. In the case of the spices, it comes from Rashbam - Samuel ben Meir , the grandson of Rashi and elder brother and teacher of  Rabbi Tam (called Rabbeinu by his followers).

Rashbam interprets the Torah according to its plain and therefore most logical meaning. On Ex 30:34, he interprets this as including only 4 ingredients, the first 3 being spices, since they are punctuated by the word סַמִּים , spices,  followed by the 4^th ingredient, which is translated as frankincense.  This contradicts not only the Rambam, but the Mishna as well.

As pointed out already, http://tanakhemet.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/starnge-spices-pt-1.html , the Mishna is in violation of the Torah in at least 3 major ways.

a) by bringing strange incense
b) they use unequal weights
c) they bring drink offering!