Topic B: Authorship
Who we believe 'wrote' the Torah, and how it was passed down,
impacts on how we read the text and how we will interpret it.
Our beliefs form a set of assumptions that color the questions
we ask (and answer) of the biblical text. Each system has a discipline
that is often bothered by the same textual problem. But what question
we ask will be different.
Who Wrote the Torah? There are three main answers:
God: According to Jewish tradition, God 'wrote' the Torah. That is
to say, God is the author. However, even among most Orthodox,
it was a human (usually identified as Moses) who actually penned
the parchment. The 'midrash' very fancifully has God actually
writing the Torah in very anthropomorphic terms. The point is,
that if God is the author, (discounting scribal errors on the
part of Moses, human secretary), the book is Divine. Divine authorship
means that the text is perfect: no contradictions, no extraneous
information, no mistakes. Anything that appears problematic is
because of OUR limited understanding. If the Torah seems to contradict
scientific knowledge, then either science will be proven wrong,
or we do not understand the Bible properly. If the Torah is God's
word, then every word and letter has deep meaning. The Torah is
eternally valid, and speaks to today as much as it did to our
ancestors. This is the traditional approach to Torah study.
People: Critical scholarship holds that the Torah is a human document,
written over a period of time, by numerous authors. (This explains the apparent contradictions,
repetitions, etc.) The Torah is a product of a specific time period,
and the Torah (like a pot found at an archeological site) is an
article that allows us to peek into a window of how the ancient
Israelites lived and what they believed. Even the medieval Rabbis
had their doubts about Moses being the sole author (like when
the Torah writes, 'and Moses died.') But it was in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries (along with all the other intellectual
revolutions) that 'Mosaic/Divine' authorship was seriously questioned.
The most famous proponent of this was the Graf/Wellhausen theory
called the documentary hypothesis. Using literary style, names of God, and other clues, they identified
four strains or sources they called J, E, P and D. This is the
scholarly, 'critical' approach to Torah study.
Both: We can believe that both God and humans had a 'hand' in writing
the Torah. If Revelation means that God revealed (communicated)
the Torah to humans, then God AND people share in its writing. God inspired the people who wrote
the Torah. That means we can find both God's eternal message,
as well as layers of a historical process. (Which is which is
sometimes a problem). This approach posits that God 'reveals'
divine truth (in a way only known to God) that individual(s) wrote
down, or passed down. This may have been much like the composer's
or inventor's flash of inspiration. Another possibility is that
the Torah is our response to historical events shaped by God's
master plan. As modern liberal Jews, we have the option to try
and balance both these approaches. Our Torah study can be sensitive
the nuances of the text (as if God wrote it) yet aware of the
historical processes and analytic tools of scientific criticism.
This way we can synthesize both traditional and modern methods
of Torah study.
No matter what our personal beliefs, two things seem indisputable:
the Torah is a record of the ancient Israelites' encounter with
the Divine; for thousands of years, Jews have read/studied the
Torah as a way of connecting with that Divine voice.
Rabbi Plaut, in his introduction to this commentary writes,
While God is not the author of the Torah in the fundamentalist
sense, the Torah is a book about humanity's understanding of and
experience with God.
However, unlike the biblical scholar who sees the Bible simply
as an antique document that describes how the authors and their
listeners saw the world, Plaut continues:
We believe that it is possible to say: The Torah is ancient Israel's
distinctive record of its search for God. It attempts to record
the meeting of the human and the Diveine, the great moments of
encounter. Therefore, the text is often touched by the ineffable
Presence. The Torah tradition testifies to a people of extraordinary
spiritual sensitivity. God is not the author of the text, the
people are; but God's voice may be heard through theirs if we
listen with open minds.
One other distinction is important:
...one should keep in mind that what the authors said in their
own time to their own contemporaries within their own intellectual
framework is one thing and what later generations did with this
text, what they contributed to it by commentary and homily is
another. This long tradition of holding up the book like a prism,
discovering through it and in it a vast spectrum of insights,
makes the Torah unlike any other work.
Classroom Forum
Topic B:
