A Response to Rabbi Efraim Palvanov

Rabbi Efraim Palvanov’s lecture, Jesus in the Talmud, was given in good faith to Christians at the Villa Maria Education and Spirituality Center. He opened books; many churches only meet as internet weapons. That matters. The Talmud is a sea of Jewish wisdom. I learn from Palvanov on Edom, on history, on the long memory of Jacob’s twin.¹

This essay exists for a different reason.

If a Christian walks out of that room still clutching a list of “365 prophecies Jesus fulfilled,” we have not started at the beginning. That list is not in our Bible. It is a later inventory laid over the Tanakh. Biblical faith, if the word biblical means the book Israel received, does not begin with a man who dies for someone else’s sins. It begins in a garden with two trees, and it returns in Moses’ last speech: life and death, good and evil, set before you today.²

The Talmud is great. How well do you know your Bible?

Why I Am Writing This

I write as a chazan who has spent years in rooms with pastors and as a Jew who once lived inside the church’s reading of “our” book. The site I keep, beithashoavah.org, is built on one claim: we are one human family, fractured since the brothers of Genesis, and the Tree of Life was never replaced by a cross.³

Palvanov’s class asked Christians to hear Jewish sources. I am asking Jews and Christians the harder question first. Before we debate Yeshu in Gittin or Sanhedrin, can we read Genesis 2–3 and Deuteronomy 30 without importing a second plot?

That is the reason for this essay. Interfaith speech that starts in the Talmud will be clipped. An interfaith speech that starts in the Garden has to address the text.

Pros and Cons of the Palvanov Lecture

Pros. He did not hide Gittin 56b–57a. Palanov showed that the same sugya has Yeshu telling Onkelos to seek Israel’s welfare. He put Messiah, son of Joseph, the leper at Rome’s gate, and the Temple signs forty years before 70 CE on the table, rather than leaving them to hostile channels. He treated Christians as adults who could hear a Jewish voice. For an audience raised on “the Talmud says Jesus boils in excrement,” that correction is a public service.

Cons. Coded Balaam-as-Jesus readings and “Christian-sounding” Talmud lines become missionary clips the next morning. Chronology is soft: Yehoshua ben Perachiah is a century early. The venue’s goal — to help Christians learn about Jews — can blur into “the rabbis almost agreed with us.” Most of all, the lecture cannot carry the load Christians actually bring: a claim that Tanakh already announced a dying-and-rising God-man hundreds of times. If that claim is false, the Talmud debate is a side room.

Tovia Singer’s caution belongs here. Missionaries who say they do not believe the Talmud still quote it when it helps. Manis Friedman’s caution belongs here too. You may explain the difference without pretending that the two covenants are one. Palvanov sits between them. This essay chooses Singer’s starting gate and Friedman’s plain speech: serve the Father’s written word.⁴

The 365 Prophecies Are Not in Our Bible

Popular Christian apologetics still repeats that Jesus fulfilled 365, or 300, or “every” messianic prophecy. Search the Tanakh for that catalog. It is not there. What you find are specific promises about a king from David, ingathering, peace among nations, a rebuilt House, knowledge of Hashem covering the earth as water covers the sea. Those have not arrived. That is why Jews say the Messiah has not come. It is not stubbornness. It is literacy.⁵

A substitute death that pays the moral debt of the world is not the plot of Eden, not the plot of Leviticus (where a person brings his own offering and returns), and not the plot of the prophets (where Hashem says return and live). Ezekiel 18 is blunt: the soul that sins shall die; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. Isaiah 53 is a debate we can have — Israel as servant, a righteous sufferer, later midrash — but it is not a license to rewrite Genesis.⁶

If the Bible is true, start where it starts.

The Garden: Answer Fohrman’s Three Questions

Rabbi David Fohrman, in A Book Like No Other, Eden, will not let the story stay a lullaby. He asks the questions a child would ask.⁷

First: Why a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Those ideas have nothing obvious to do with trees or with each other. What is each tree for?

They are not two snack options. There are two ways of being human. The Tree of Life is life received from the Giver — relationship, trust, remaining in the Father’s definition of good. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is the ability to name good and evil from ourselves. The Torah later calls wisdom a tree of life to those who take hold of her.⁸ After the path is guarded, Sinai is not Plan B. It is the same Tree in a form that a nation can walk.

Second: What is the function of each tree? If they may eat of every tree but one, they already have life. Why plant a Tree of Life in the middle and later treat it like an emergency? Why would God withhold the knowledge of good and evil if “do not eat” already required knowing that a command can be broken?

The Only Verse That Promises Eternal Life

Adam was not a statue. He already knew enough to hear a command. What he did not have — and was not to seize — was the right to author good and evil. The Tree of Life was not extra decoration. Eternal life in Genesis 3:22 is attached to eating from that Tree, not to a later human sacrifice. In Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, I argue Adam was never automatically immortal. Life was given and had to be chosen. The cherubim guard a path, not a hole in the ground where the Tree once stood.⁹

Moses answers the “emergency” question at the end of the Torah. He sets before Israel life and good, death and evil — the two trees in speech, with no flaming sword:

“For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven… But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”¹⁰

The Tree without the angels. That is biblical faith.

Third: Eve seems to misidentify the tree. The text says both special trees are in the midst. She speaks as if the forbidden tree is the one in the middle. Did she confuse them?

Fohrman is right that the geography is the theology. When the human eye treats the forbidden as the center, the Tree of Life is already off-center. Chavah’s sentence is the first time a human relocates the middle of the world. Every later religion that puts a man, a church, or a caliphate in the middle of the Garden is repeating her grammar. The Father’s written word keeps Hashem in the middle. Chosenness is not a trophy. It is the firstborn’s job to remember where the center is.¹¹

One Family, Two Brothers Against Jacob

We are one large family. The fractures are family fractures. Ham and Canaan open a wound after the Flood. Ishmael and Isaac split a house. Esau and Jacob shared a womb. The prophets do not treat those names as museum tags. They treat them as patterns that return when Jerusalem becomes a cup of reeling.¹²

Ishmael The Donkey of Zachariah 9:9

Ishmael is named Pere Adam—a wild-donkey of a man. His hand against everyone, everyone’s hand against him; he dwells alongside all his brothers.¹³ That is not a racial slur. It is the Torah’s picture of untamed strength living next to the covenant line, blessed with nationhood, not given the everlasting covenant of Isaac.¹⁴

Esau is Edom. He is the twin who sold the birthright and later comforted himself with the thought of killing Jacob. Our Sages read Rome — and the Christian civilization that rode Rome — as Edom: the brother who wants the blessing without the yoke. Palvanov’s own Understanding Edom series traces that line. I have written the same identification: Esau is not Ishmael. Brad Scott taught the opposite when I was in the church. The Hebrew Bible and the Jewish library do not.¹⁵

Esua I Hated

Psalm 83 puts them in one sentence: the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, a pact against Israel’s inheritance. Obadiah judges Edom for violence against his brother Jacob. The war we are watching is not “religion versus religion” in the abstract. It is the old triangle: Jacob holding the Land and the Book, Ishmael pressing as the wild donkey, Esau pressing as the twin who cannot bear that the birthright stayed in the tents.¹⁶

Hashem said the end from the beginning.¹⁷ The brothers of the world are still broken. The Jewish people were chosen to keep the Father’s written word so that the family has a way home. If we are chosen, the family should not replace that word with a second scripture or a dying god.

Zechariah: Check the Address

People say “Zechariah 12 says two of the city and one was saved.” That is not what chapter 12 says.

Zechariah 12 is Jerusalem as a cup of reeling and a heavy stone. Nations gather. Judah is made a firepot. Hashem defends the tents of Judah first. Then the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem receive a spirit of grace and supplication, and they look to Hashem concerning those who were pierced, and mourn as for an only son. Jewish reading does not have to donate that verse to John 19. It can remain Israel’s mourning in war, the piercing of her own, the grief of a firstborn nation.¹⁸

The “two parts / one third” text is Zechariah 13:8–9:

“And it shall come to pass in all the land, says the LORD, that two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein. And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined…”¹⁹

The “part of the city” text is Zechariah 14:2: the city is captured, houses plundered; half the city goes into exile, and the rest of the people are not cut off from the city. Then Hashem goes out to fight.²⁰

Three different cameras: siege (12), refining remnant in the land (13:8–9), partial exile from the city, then divine war (14). Mixing them into one slogan is how prophecy becomes a meme. Read the addresses.

A remnant refined, calling on the Name, hearing “You are My people” — that is Sinai language coming home. It is not a church altar call.²¹

Chosen Means the Father Already Spoke

Rabbi Fohrman shows that the Ten Sayings of Sinai are already pulsing through Genesis in order — family law written in family wound. Rivkah’s warning about Esau is already the grammar of “no other gods.” The civil branches of Ki Teitzei grow from those same fractures.²²

Psalm 147 is not polite. He declares His word to Jacob, His statutes to Israel. He has not done so for any other nation. Christians and Muslims may hold translations. They were not in the forty-year yeshiva.²³

So the question returns. If the Jewish people are chosen by Hashem, should not the family accept the Father’s written word? The who of the Tanakh is not a committee. The Boss speaks. Hashem commands. Hashem forgives the one who returns. He does not install a mediator you must worship in order to reach Him.

Maimonides could say Christianity and Islam spread monotheism among the nations and still deny that either one is the Tree. Palvanov can say Jacob and Esau may yet embrace and still not put Esau in Jacob’s tallit. I can honor a lecture that opened the Talmud for Christians and still say: do not start there.²⁴

Conclusion

The Talmud is great. How well do you know your Bible?

Know the Garden. Answer why there are two trees. Know that Moses put both trees back in your mouth and heart. The 365 prophecies Jesus fulfilled prophecies is a poster, not a pasuk.

Know that Ishmael is the wild donkey who dwells against his brothers, and Esau is the twin who never made peace with the birthright. Know that Zechariah 13:8–9 is the two-thirds and the third, and Zechariah 14:2 is half the city, and Zechariah 12 is the stone the nations break themselves on.

Then, if you still want to talk about Yeshu in the Bavli, we can. We will talk as people who have read the Father first.

For the longer Tree of Life argument, the Esau and Ishmael essays, and the Fohrman reading of Genesis as Sinai in seed form, see beithashoavah.org.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Debunking Christian Myths About the
• Hashem Chose a Family: The Tree of Life Blueprint Was Given to Protect All of Adam
• Bible Codes Revealed at Yiboneh with Rabbi Moshe Zeldman
• How Christianity Transforms the Tanach’s Messages of Life into Doctrines of Death:
• How Can Christianity and Judaism Be “Two Sides of the Same Coin” When One Looks Nothing Like the Original Blueprint?