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Jewish
Responses to Challenges to the Historicity of Biblical History The traditional
Jewish view, still treated as a fundamental belief in Orthodox Judaism, was
clearly stated by the great medieval rabbi-philosopher Moses Maimonides – “The
Eighth Fundamental Principle is that the Torah carne from God. We are to
believe that the whole Torah was given us through Moses our Teacher entirely
from God. When we call the Torah "God's Word" we speak
metaphorically. We do not know exactly how it reached us, but only that it
came to us through Moses who acted like a secretary taking dictation. He
wrote down the events of the time and the commandments, for which reason he
is called "Lawgiver." There is no distinction between a verse of
Scripture like "The sons of Ham were Cush and Mizraim" (Gen. 10:6), or "His wife's name was Mehetabel and his concubine was Timna"
(Gen. 36:39, 12), and one like "I am the Lord your God" (Ex. 20:2),
or "Hear, 0 A Maimonides Reader; Edited,with introductions and notes, by Isadore Twersky, A
Reform Jewish response – “It is generally held in Reform
circles that the Higher Criticism has irrevocably destroyed the authority of
the Pentateuch. The Jew in the past held that the Five Books of Moses were
dictated by God to Moses. Modem scholarship is said to prove that this could
not have been so, that, on the contrary, the Torah is a compilation of
documents composed during several centuries. “If these premises are accepted,
we can draw from them the logical conclusion that the Jew in the past was
mistaken in his view about the authorship of the Pentateuch. What does not
follow logically from the findings of the Higher Criticism is the
widespread notion that, because Moses did not write the Torah, it can no
longer be the authoritative rule of-Jewish life. “Let us be clear about this: the
Jew in the past lived by the dictates of the Torah, not because Moses had
written it down (although he was firmly convinced of this), but because the
Torah was divine revelation, because God had made known His wilI in its pages. The information that it was not Moses…
who wrote the Torah merely shows-if the claim can be fuIly
substantiated-that the Jew in the past was not too familiar with the literary
history of his own people. It does not necessitate the conclusion that
God could not have made use of J. E. P. and D in the same way in which, at
one time, it was thought (mistakenly, it is now said) He had made use of
Moses. “Again, the question of whether or
not a certain ritual is a divine commandment cannot be settled with a
reference to archeological findings pointing to a non-Israelite or
pre-Israelite provenance of the particular rite under discussion. No Reform
Jew would insist that the prohibition of murder is not a commandment
of the God of Israel-merely because murder is also discountenanced in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead…. This is an interesting piece of
information, but it can hardly rule out the possibility, on logical grounds,
that God used this pre-Israelite raw material and incorporated it in His
Torah. Does every worthwhile religious ordinance have to be a creatio ex nihilo? “After all, according to the view
of the Higher Critics, and of Reform's own Julian Morgenstern in particular,
each "code" now contained in the Pentateuch was accepted at a
specific historical occasion by the people as a whole, in a solemn covenant.
Accepted as what? As the definite demands which the covenant deity made upon
his partners of the covenant. If we follow this line of reasoning to its
logical conclusion, we must arrive at a point in Jewish history when the
Pentateuch as a whole (in the form in which it left the hands of its last
redactor) was accepted as divine revelation by the people. This would be the
canonization" of the Torah. Tradition ascribes this
"canonization" of the complete Pentateuch to the time of Moses.
Modern scholarship would set the date at about 400 B.C.E.-that is, a good 700
or 800 years after the time of Moses. Inasmuch as the findings of
modem scholarship clash with the traditional notion, it is very much a
question of temperament and training as to which of the two dates a modern
Jew will ultimately accept. But,… the question of dating the Pentateuch has very little
to do with the authoritative or non- authoritative character of that book.” PROBLEMS OF REFORM
HALACHA by Jakob J. Petuchowski
in CONTEMPORARY REFORM JEWISH THOUGHT Edited by Bernard A Conservative
Jewish response – “For Conservative Jews, the Torah
is no less sacred, if less central, than it was for their pre-modern
ancestors. I use the word "sacred" advisedly. The Torah is the foundation
text of Judaism, the apex of an inverted pyramid of infinite commentary, not
because it is divine, but because it is sacred, that is, adopted by the
Jewish people as its spiritual font…. The sense of individual obligation, of
being commanded, does not derive from divine authorship, but communal
consent. The Written Torah, no less than the Oral Torah, reverberates with
the divine-human encounter, with "a minimum of revelation and a maximum
of interpretation." It is no
longer possible to separate the tinder from the spark. What history can
attest is that the community of The Sacred Cluster: The Core Values of
Conservative Judaism by Ismar Schorsch See further the discussion by
Louis Jacobs in We Have Reason to Believe |