The Good Samaritan..followed the Oral law??

I just received the latest copy of Messiah magazine ( no, I am not being paid any royalties by ffoz).

As I was thumbing through it I came across an interesting article by Toby Janicki regarding the parable of the Good Samaritan titled The Good Samaritan and the Oral Torah.

Toby Janicki illuminates a slightly different perspective on the story of the Samaritan.

To recap the story, a man is travelling away from hoe and is beaten, robbed and left for scavengers at the side of a road. The first two men who happen upon him ( a priest and a Levite) do not stop to help and in their minds they seem to be justified in their inaction. We wonder what their thinking might be.

We pick up the story with Janicki's article. He indicates that the the Greek text of Luke's parable points toward a term that would describe the man's state as "half-dead" and carries this over to a likely Hebrew word of "dying".

It is made profoundly clear in Vayikra 21 (Leviticus) that a priest is not permitted to defile himself for the dead, excluding (with the exception of some family members) any contact with the dead.

As he points out in his article, both the priest and the Levite were heading to Jerusalem to serve at the Temple. Likewise, both would have followed the Sadduccean, rigid, literal reckoning of the letter of the Torah. Again as Janicki points out they both "probably thought that this man was dead or "dying"." Any assistance or aid they might have rendered would have meant a potential breaking of Torah for the priest, and inability for the Levite to perform his Temple duties.

The Pharisaic Oral interpretation of Leviticus 21:4 is "ingeniously interpreted" by the rabbis.The phrase "among his people" was regarded as indicating:

"... if a corpse was abandoned "outside" of his people where there was no one else to bury him, then even a priest should become unclean for this great mitzvah(good deed)."


Called a "met mitzvah " - "commandment of the dead", this mitzvah was looked on as being obligatory for even the priests and for Nazarites.

A high priest and a Nazarite may not defile themselves [by contact] with their [dead] relatives, but they may defile themselves with a met mitzvah. (m. Nazir 7:1)


He concludes the article by stressing the heart of the Master. His ultimate concern was the true spirit of the Torah-- what I feel is the greater command to love your neighbour. Yeshua's clear support for the Oral Torah's interpretation and its principle of met mitzvah. Again what we see is the the Master refining both the letter of the Tanakh and the rabbinical interpretation of the Oral torah to demonstrate his Halakha.

....And this is the Torah

This is the Torah,

V'zot haTorah. As a believer in Yeshua, the Jewish Messiah, this has been sort of an all consuming search for me for the last year (well the last 20 years really). What does it mean to really follow our Mashiach? What really is Torah?Is it just the written Torah? Did some comprehension of the Oral traditions need to be appreciated in order to fulfill the written Torah? What does Torah observance look like?

Are the rabbinical observations, rulings and traditions an acceptable and reasonable addition to faith in Yeshua? Did Yeshua really teach against everything that the Pharisees taught? Did He just take issue with certain inexcusably complex and legalistic traditions that interfered with following Torah?

What about Ultra-Orthodoxy or even Orthodoxy for that matter? Are there truths about our Rebbe ( Yeshua ben Nazaret) that we can glean from their Rebbes/Sages ( despite the fact that Orthodox Judaism would seem to be completely antagonistic toward our Messiah)? Do we as believers have any business going near kaballah or the Kabalists?

Anyone who really wants to dig to learn, who has eyes that are really ready to see, please come in..look around and get comfortable.


"...Uncover my eyes and I behold wonders out of Thy Torah....."
(Psalm 199:18 Youngs Literal translation with paraphrase of Torah by myself)