Last Sunday, we held an early Passover Seder for our friends, but tonight my wife and I are going to Kehilat Sar Shalom for the real thing. The Feast of Unleavened Bread starts at sundown tonight, and for the first time, my wife and I are well prepared.

Of course, I’m not talking about having the right outdoor furniture, but about having the a wide variety of the right food in stock. This year, while we avoid yeast products, we’ll be able to enjoy main courses that feature buffalo meat, salmon, chicken and turkey meat, rather than just chicken, over the course of the next eight days.

That’s a lot more variety than we normally enjoy, and I’m really looking forward to it!

Goliath does not appear from nowhere in the Torah account. While it is well-known that he is a Philistine, less well-known is his parentage.

Without the benefits of an ECA stack, Goliath grew to be nine feet nine inches tall, so his parents had to be giants as well, right? Not so.

According to Jewish tradition, Goliath (or Golyat, to use his genuine name in Hebrew), was one of the four sons of Orpah. Readers of the Book of Ruth will recognize Orpah as the daughter in law who did not stand in loyalty to Naomi after Naomi’s sons die, but returned to her own people, the Moabites.

According to the Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 42b, because Orpah parted from Naomi reluctantly and shed four tears, she was given four sons, all of them giants. This interpretation means that Orpah is oen and the same as Harafa.

All four of Orpah’s sons were giants, although the Talmudic literature makes it clear that Golyat was the tallest and strongest of them. At nine feet nine inches, one would hope so.

It is clear from the Torah text that Jesse was not proud of his son, David. The prophet Samuel had to ask Jesse if all his sons were present before he called David to meet with Samuel. I’ve heard several Christian pastors preach sermons on the topic of David being an illegitimate son of Jesse, but they are missing out on an important truth, since they ignore the teachings of rabbinic sages.

According to Jewish tradition, although Jesse was a largely righteous man, he was not immune to temptation and at one point a slave-girl of his caught his eye and he began to be tempted to sleep with her. What he was not told was that his wife caught wind of his intentions and, secretly, dressed up as the slave girl and took her place on the night Jesse finally consumated the affair.

The affair resulted in a pregnancy, and Jesse’s wife had the baby in secret and gave it to the slave-girl to raise, because she didn’t want her husband to know she’d deceived him and again go lusting after the slave-girl.

So, if the sages are to be believed, and in this case I think they can, David was not really an illegitimate child after all; he was only believed to be illigitimate and Jesse’s wife revealed his legitimacy after David’s anointing to be king.

As a messianic, this holds special significance. David is often thought of to be a picture of what the messiah would ultimately be like, as was Joseph. Here, in this teaching on David’s apparent illegitimacy as well as his actual legitimacy, we have the first way in which his life reflects that of messiah Yeshua.

Like David, Miryam, the mother of Yeshua, had the appearane of an illegitmate pregnancy when the Ruach haKodesh made her pregnant as a young virgin. The single pregnancy gave her the appearance of an illegitimate birth, but anyone who has read the Gospel accounts knows, as Yosef, the husband of Miryam was told by an angel of the L-RD, that Yeshua’s birth was not a result of infidelity, but a legitimate birth after all.

Legitmate or not, of course, they all require baby furniture, so it’s a good thing Yosef was a carpenter.

The Torah teaches that David’s Philistine opponent, Goliath, was a giant who measured nine feet nine inches tall. While on first blush that height may seem inachievable, it’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. Goliath was likely a victim of a pituitary gland disorder known as acromegaly.

Acromegaly, one of the leading causes of gigantism, causes to pituitary gland to continue secreting human growth hormone to the body long after it would cease production in most normal adults. It causes unusual height as well as other body distortions, most notably of facial features.

Three of the most well-known sufferers of acromegaly in modern times are Andre Roussimoff (Andre the Giant), who died at 47 due to the effects of the disease, as well as Dalip Singh Rana (The Great Khali) and Paul Wight (The Big Show). Respectively, Roussimoff was seven feet five inches at his tallest, before the disease began to break his body down, while Rana is currently seven feet three inches and Wight is seven feet tall.

Not all seven feet and over people are sufferers of acromegaly; there are other causes of gigantism. For example, Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics (seven feet one inch) is not known to have acromegaly. Houston Rockets center Yao Ming (seven feet six inches) is also not known to suffer from the disease.

However, the disease may be the cause for the extreme heights reached by Bao Xishun (seven feet, nine inches), Leonid Stadnyk (eight feet five inches) and Robert Wadlow (eight feet, eleven inches). Stadnyk is currently in failing health due to the disease, and Wadlow, who lived from 1918 – 1940, died at the age of 22 from the affliction. Both Xishun and Stadnyk are still alive.

People afflicted with acromegaly tend to die young. In the time of David and Goliath, there was no modern medicine, let alone Medical Alert bracelets, to help diagnose such conditions, nor were there today’s treatments that have proven to extend the lives of such folks.

While even Wadlow, at eight feet eleven inches, would have been about 10 inches shorter than Goliath, the existance of such people shows that the existance of Goliath himself is not so far-fetched as some Biblical minimalists would have you believe.

The latest topic I’ve taken on while writing lessons for my bar and bat mitzvah class at Kehilat Sar Shalom is a character study on the life of David. One of the things I was somewhat surprised to learn is that David was older than traditionally thought at the time of his conflict with Goliath.

The misconception seems to arise from the fact that he is the youngest son of Jesse, but simply being the youngest does not mean he was 12 or 14 at time time of this battle, as is traditionally depicted. As revealed in the book, The Legends of the Jews, by Louis Ginzberg, David was already 27 at the time of his anointing to be the next king of Israel by the prophet Samuel. This event is recording in I Samuel 16, and his conflict with Goliath comes in I Samuel 17, chronologically a later date than his anointing. So David had to be at least 27 at the time he battled Goliath.

Now there’s something to contemplate when sitting on your shower stool with time to spare as you clean up and prepare for the day ahead!

Every once in a while, I run across a word for phrase in the Bible that just throws me for a loop. The most recent example came while I was brushing up on my David character study I’m writing for my Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids.

We know the Bible teaches that nothing evil can come from Adonai our G-d; as a holy G-d, nothing evil can enter his presence.

We also know that King Sha’ul’s madness was probably brought on by both the horrors of war and the rebuke he’d received from Adonai, in which G-d ultimately rejected him as king over all Israel. There’s only so much a flawed Israeli king can take, right?

And then, there it is in front of me. A verse in I Sh’mu’el states that after Adonai’s blessing was removed, King Sha’ul was tormented by, “an evil spirit from G-d.”

An evil spirit? From G-d?

Maybe it’s the translation, but… something fishy’s going on there. Could someone be playing games with our theology…? …No, probably not.

Personally, I think it’s a colloquialism, in this instance. Clearly, King Sha’ul had fallen to some form of mental illness, given that his outbursts of temper stemming from this were often violent, and that David’s music soothed his troubled spirit.

So, this coming weekend is Passover and my wife and I will be able to go to and enjoy our shul’s community seder for long-term members. That will be enjoyable, certainly. But while a Seder is far more relaxing than stressing over, say, computer rental, it can still be a lot of work and stress for the people hosting it.

My wife and I know; we held our third Seder last weekend for some close friends, which is nearly as dear an annual tradition for us as the Seder at our shul. We held our first one before we were married, over at a friend’s apartment. So it’s only our second time hosting as a married couple.

This year’s affair was smaller than normal; in part, that was by design, since spring has been a little tight on the purse strings. But although we only invited three other people this time, one of them canceled last-minute and it ended up being a foursome.

It was nice though. I led our little group through the haggadah and ceded sermon duties to my wife, who did well delivering a message customized to our guests, as well as a general review of the messianic symbolism in the Seder meal.

A good time was had by all; this weekend, the real matzah-fest begins!

We know that Yeshua’s earthly father, Yosef, was a carptenter according the the gospel accounts. Or was he? Recent linguistic and cultural studies indicate that the vocation of Yeshua’s earthly father may not be as clear-cut as once thought.

According to those who promote this new theory, the word translated carpenter might not indicate the same sort of image that word brings up today of a semi-prosperous but humble man building various items and facilities, just as chairs, tables, and – at least according to one Kurt Vonnegut novel – execution stakes for the Roman army.

Instead, the word used can be interpreted to mean one who does a wide variety of menial manual labor, with duties ranging to such things as re-pitching house roofs, cleaning out stables and other, even less glamorous work. The according to the same researchers, people who did such work often lived on the edge of poverty.

Such an interpretation is not the traditional way we think of Yeshua’s family; rather than fitting into our definition culturally of a working middle class, Yeshua’s upbringing may have been far more humble than traditional thought and interpretation would lead us to believe. If – and this is a big if – these new researchers are correct. So, even though there were no class A motorhomes back in the first century, even if there had been, it’s likely such an extravagance would have been well out of Yosef and Miryam’s reach.