Hello Everyone,
Now that the Daf Yomi program has begun to study masechet Nazir, we thought that it would be interesting to discuss the “institution” of נזירים (or in English “Nazirites”).
The title of these two sessions “The Nazir in Jewish History” presents a challenge to me because there is not much of an historical record of Nazirites in Jewish history. Of course everyone is familiar with Samson who is one of the most famous persons in the entire תנ”ך and he was a Nazir.
But other than Samson there are intriguing mentions of some Nazirites in the Talmud and Josephus.
So today we will focus on these intriguing mentions of Nazirites and what if anything we can learn from them.
I would add at this point that the word nazir in modern Hebrew refers to Christian monks. Since there are no Halachic נזירים (until the Beit hMikdash will be rebuilt במהרה בימינו אמן) the word “nazir” was given over to them. This being the case academics have written many wildly speculative papers on the institutions of both Halachic נזירים and Christian monastic movements. I do not wish to discuss these papers.