Today a Rabbi gave a stupid drasha and waxed eloquently about about the four elements fire, water, air, and earth. Now I don't really object to that classification of the elements perse (despite the fact that it is obviously obsolete) but what reaaally bugs me is when Rabbis and people say "Judaism says that there are 4 elements etc." or the "Torah considers matter of consisting of four elements etc." NO! NO! NO!
The four elements are a completely non-Jewish concept. They are never mentioned anywhere in the Tanach (and I'm not sure if it's even in the Gemara but I could be wrong) and only snuck into Jewish literature from - yeah you guessed it the Greeks. In the time period when the Rabbis were writing it was considered established "science" that all matter consisted of those four elements. This was a completely Greek idea which was thought up by the Greek philosopher Empedocles HUNDREDS OF YEARS before the Mishna or Gemara were written. (Though Enuma Elish, apparently, does mention sea, earth, sky and wind but since the Torah was OBVIOUSLY not influenced by Baylonian mythology not really relevant) Furthermore Empedocles and other scholars using the idea took it very literally and considered water, air, fire, and earth the basic elementary materials of matter. (So none of this junk about "the four elements are mystical and spiritual") Nowadays we know Empedocles was wrong (open a chemistry book) and the prevailing atomic theory is more like the theory of Democritus.
So calling the four elements a "Jewish" or "Torah" idea is but another example of modern (modern only in the sense of happening to live in the modern era) Rabbis learning Gemara and Rishonim completely out of historical context (like Artscroll's Gemara notes) and concluding that Greek science which they read in the some Jewish text is in fact "Jewish science".
When will they ever learn....
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