Mesopotamia and Egypt

Torah scholars should learn to appreciate their Mesopotamian and Egyptian predecessors of the biblical regime. 

Scripture teaches us to honor our antecedents. To honor your father and mother is the general biblical admonition to that effect. 

It so happens that the biblical regime is an amalgam of Mesopotamia, Egypt and YHWH. God fashioned Israel and covenanted with the forefathers on account of their having come out of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Moshe was an Egyptian man who married the daughter of the minister of Midian. 

To recognize and appreciate what Israel has in common with Mesopotamia and Egypt is to place the biblical teachings into an historical context and thereby to be able to relate to how Israel fits in with her surrounding nation-states as well as how the Israelite nation itself needs a state. 

In like fashion, we need to study the Talmud so we can get a sense for how historically those ancient Jews, in their own time, dealt with the challenges of national autonomy within the context of a covenantal relationship with YHWH. 

To see ChZL in their historical context is to begin to free oneself from the straightjacket of tradition into which Torah shBaal Peh ultimately placed the Jewish people. These members of ChZL were men who were dealing with the people's and the nation's exigencies of the moment. They didn't have in mind all of posterity; and we today needn't take as gospel what they did or declared for their own moment. We can take instruction from their mindset without having to reproduce their errors nor their inadvertent missteps.