Apostolic Friends Forum - Uncut Hair and the Nazirite Vow for Women

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1ofthechosen (Post 1540607)

It's talking about hair not a covering. Listen to this:
http://www.apostolicfriendsforum.com...&postcount=277

Men prayed with Prayer shawls it never meant a head covering.

The kippah and prayer shawl were post apostolic rabbinic inventions:
http://www.apostolicfriendsforum.com....php?p=1187415

Quote:

For years I understood the bible to teach that men should pray and prophesy with their head uncovered and that women should pray or prophesy with their head covered. I believed that Paul's teaching on this was not merely cultural, but that he was correcting an aberration that had appeared in the Corinthian church of women praying with uncovered heads.

I had believed that the biblical christian practice was at odds with both Gentile and Jewish practice. Gentiles generally prayed or conducted religious rites with thei rheads uncovered(not all of them, but it seemed to be a generally prevailing custom), whereas Jews - both men and women - prayed with their heads covered. Thus, Paul was not enforcing a Jewish or gentile custom, but was promoting a distinctly Christian custom, where men prayed with head uncovered, and women prayed with head covered.

In studying this subject, I had found that there was no debate of any substance in the first several hundred years of Christiendom concerning this. In fact, the practice seems to have prevailed throughout Christendom all the way until the last hundred years or so, at which point the Christian woman's headcovering was pretty much dropped by most all professing Christians, at least in Western Europe and America. (I realise many Christians do still keep this custom, of course, but it is nowhere as prevalent as it used to be.)

But a little while ago it hit me. I was missing something in my understanding. *IF* Paul had taught a custom or practice that differed from both Jewish and Gentile religious custom, there is a problem.

If the Jewish custom was for men to pray with a headcovering (as it is today among Orthodox and traditional Jews), then Jesus would either have prayed in a manner contrary to Paul's teaching, or else he would have introduced a new custom (later affirmed by Paul). But there is NO RECORD of such a new fangled introduction. There is no record of debate or contention regarding men praying with covered or uncovered heads. Paul's instruction in 1 Corinthians deals primarily with some women who were doing things contrary to what the apostle claimed was the universal practice of the churches of God. Although he mentions men, he spends most of the time dealing with the subject of women praying uncovered.

So then I asked... who says it was the Jewish custom of the day for men to pray with a headcovering? And I did some research. And found this tidbit:

"The practice of covering the head is not based on any explicit statement in Jewish legal sources; it "is merely a custom, a minhag, that first appeared among the Jews in Babylon" during the rabbinic period (roughly, from the beginning of the Common Era to 500 C.E.). In Palestine, by contrast, the sources indicate that "people would not hesitate entering a synagogue, reading from the Torah, and participating in the religious service with uncovered head."

This difference in custom made its way to medieval Europe: in Spain, which tended to follow the Babylonian practices, authorities required that the head be covered during prayer, while in France and Germany, which were more influenced by Palestinian ritual traditions, there is some evidence that Jews would pray bareheaded.

Although by the thirteenth century the Northern Europeans (Ashkenazim) had begun to adopt the Spanish (Sephardic) custom, later authorities in central and eastern Europe continued to write that the prohibition against worshipping bareheaded "has no foundation in the Talmud." As one of them remarked (in Lauterbach's translation): "There is no prohibition whatever against praying with uncovered head, but as a matter of propriety it would seem to be good manners to cover one's head when standing in the presence of great men, and also during the religious service.""

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/prac...spective.shtml

So... Paul was not introducing anything new. The practice of men praying with a headcovering was a POST CHRISTIAN DEVELOPMENT in Judaism.

Quote:

http://www.jewishmag.com/122mag/kippa%5Ckippa.htm

" However, while the kippah plays a prominent role in the contemporary Jewish world, the obligation to wear a head covering has its origin in regional customs, rather than halakhah (Jewish law). Indeed, it is due largely to its status as minhag (Jewish custom) that a wide variety of head coverings have been accepted as kippot.
...

In the Middle Ages, French and Spanish rabbis introduced the practice of covering one's head during prayer and Torah study, and Maimonides (1135-1204) similarly ruled that a Jewish man should cover his head during prayer (Mishne Torah, Ahavah, Hilkhot Tefilah 5:5). These rulings do not, however, address specifically the wearing of a kippah at all times, and in purely halakhic terms (as stated by Maimonides), it seems that kippot were not required, but strongly recommended during prayer.
...

In thirteenth-century Germany, for instance, Jewish boys were not required to wear kippot when they were called to the Torah. In contrast, seventeenth-century Russian scholar David Haley suggested that Jews should always keep their heads covered in order to distinguish themselves from the Christian majority. "