Page 11 - Attractive Deception - The False Hope of the Hebrew Roots Movement

to “the Great Synagogue,” that body of Jews who lived after the period of the Prophets in what is
largely considered the Persian period of Israel’s history, or the time from the Babylonian exile
forward. Bear in mind that a great many Jews remained in Babylonia after their seventy years of exile
were finished. Only a remnant returned to Jerusalem.

This tradition of how the Oral Torah passed from Moses down to the Jewish religious leaders many
centuries later is a Jewish fable, though the Orthodox Jews do not see it as such. Such fables have
been prevalent for the entire history of the Christian church. The apostle Paul warned Titus about
them.

Titus 1:13-14
For this cause reprove them severely that they may be sound in the faith, not paying attention to
Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth.

In these words of the apostle Paul is a reference to the Oral Torah whose man-made traditions would
be set down in writing as the Talmud about two centuries later. The Oral Torah, like the Talmud and
Midrash, consists of Jewish Myths and the commandments of men which turn people away from the
truth. The Scriptures speak nothing of Yahweh delivering to Moses anything other than the Law
written on tablets of stone. There is no Biblical support to the claim that Yahweh taught Moses a
second Law, an oral one. It is ever the practice of disobedient men to add to the word of God, thereby
altering and rendering null and void the commandments of Yahweh.

The earliest mention in the Scriptures of the Jews giving heed to vain traditions that stood in
contradiction to the divinely inspired word of God is in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah began to prophesy
around 740 B.C.. He wrote at that time of the Jewish people teaching “the precepts of men” as if they
were the doctrines of God. This was undoubtedly a reference to the Oral Torah. Consequently, we
th
can deduce that the Oral Torah was in existence as early as the 8 century B.C.. Moses received the
th
true Law of God in the 15 century B.C.. Somewhere in the time between the original transmission
of the Law at Mount Sinai and the time of Isaiah’s writing, the Oral Torah had its origin.

The Oral Torah most certainly was NOT delivered to Moses, adopted by Joshua, then passed along
by the seventy elders of Israel, or the prophets. Isaiah was a prophet of Yahweh. He rejected and cast
scorn upon the precepts and doctrines that the religious leaders of Israel were teaching as if they were
divine commandments. There has been no greater prophet than Jesus Christ/Yahshua the Messiah.
He repeated the words of His Father that Isaiah had recorded, and set before us an example of the
error contained in the Oral Torah.

Mark 7:10-13
“For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother,
let him be put to death’; but you say, ‘If a man says to his father or his mother, anything of mine you
might have been helped by is Corban (that is to say, devoted to God),’ you no longer permit him to
do anything for his father or his mother; thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which
you have handed down; and you do many things such as that.”

The Oral Law/Torah had much to say about corban, and the Talmud which is the written form of the