Q&A: Did the Talmud and the Zohar know things that science discovered only later?
Did the Talmud and the Zohar know things that science discovered only later?
Question
Maybe I’m mistaken, but I understood that you do not attribute divine knowledge to sacred writings. How, then, do you explain, for example, the knowledge about continental drift and the number of stars?
For example, it is written in the Zohar: “It was taught: the waters brought forth one actual land, and from it seven lands came into being” (New Zohar, 12a).
And in the Talmud, for example, they knew the number of stars when science thought there were only a few thousand: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to her: My daughter, I created 12 constellations in the firmament, and for each and every constellation I created 30 troops, and for each and every troop I created 30 legions, and for each and every legion I created 30 divisions, and for each and every division I created 30 cohorts, and for each and every cohort I created 30 camps, and on each and every camp I hung 365 thousand myriads of stars corresponding to the days of the solar year, and I created them all only for your sake” (Tractate Berakhot 32b).
How do you explain this? Was there divine knowledge in these sacred writings?
Answer
I didn’t say any such thing. What I said is that I do not know of a way to extract that kind of knowledge from there.
The sources you cite are very weak. First, I don’t know what the various views were in that period were already present in the ancient world). Second, you have to examine all the predictions and check how many of them actually came true. Some isolated detail or another could be coincidence. And third, these are vague aggadic passages, from which you cannot derive factual claims. By the way, I’m fairly sure that the number of stars described there is not the correct number as known today.
Discussion on Answer
The continent didn’t split into 7, so there’s really nothing to explain.
Things that appear in the Zohar are not evidence of an early scientific discovery.
If anything, it adds weight to the view that the Zohar was written later.
The Zohar was written, or at least compiled and edited, late. That’s not just a conjecture; it’s closer to a scientific conclusion (though not necessarily certain).
The splitting of the continents speaks about five continents. Hidabroot and the like shove in two other whatever-parts; I don’t remember which. It’s ad hoc and pretty arbitrary. If the Zohar had said it split into 17, they would have counted 17.
Same with the number of stars. There were estimates ranging from 10^20 to 10^25 (the Talmud comes out to 10^18), so it’s entirely plausible that it’s coincidental even if it had been correct. The estimates have changed dramatically since then, and you can see on the Hidabroot website that they too changed the calculation from the Talmud (now they refer to stars of a certain size, etc.).
In short… with ad hoc reasoning you can find tons of phenomena with zero probability. Every shuffle of a deck of cards is an utterly improbable event, so if you update the desired card order after the shuffle, it turns out you “predicted” the shuffle with a probability of one in 8×10^67.
Maybe the Talmud was really referring to spiritual stars too… that surely would have worked out fine for the preacher of the day a millennium ago.
Thanks. So can one say that the statement about the continent splitting into seven is just a fluke or something like that? Because it sounds pretty precise.