Who Wrote the Torah? Part 3 - R

James Kugel

Scholars are not sure about the historicity of this passage, or even if it reflects attitudes in the time of Ezra himself or in some slightly later period. But it is certainly significant in any case for what it says about Scripture. The public reading is said to take place at the people's initiative, and they stand patiently-not just community leaders, but men and women and older chidren—for something like five or six hours to hear God's words. For such an account to be plausible, Scripture must have already acquired a central place in people's consciousness, and a central role in their lives. Interesting too is the fact that Ezra's listeners don't just listen to the words: the Levites are there to help them "understand the law," explaining what the words mean and "giving the sense" (perhaps, as one tradition has it, restating the text for them in Aramaic). The Age of Interpretation is here.

James Kugel

In short, we are now in the world of Scripture. The writings of the past are full of lessons for the present, and actual interpreters-the Levites mentioned in Nehemiah 8 or Ezra himself here in Nehemiah 9—will tell you what the lessons are and what Scripture really means for you to think and do.

Nehemiah 9: The First Historical Survey in the Bible to Mention Sinai and Torah

by Prof. Hava Shalom-Guy

The addition of this supplement completes the trend already obvious in Nehemiah 9’s unique inclusion of the Sinai Revelation in its historical survey. Outside the Torah’s narratives of the Sinai or Horeb revelation, only a handful of biblical texts refer to a tradition of Sinai as the place of divine residence (e.g., Deut 33:2, Ps 68:8–9, 17ff.), but none of these mention the revelation of laws on Sinai.

As many scholars note, the absence of the tradition of the divine revelation at Mount Sinai/Horeb from other biblical historical surveys reflects the lack of this tradition’s centrality for their circles when these surveys were composed. In contrast, its placement here highlights the centrality of the revelation of laws at Sinai concept in the Persian period.

The redactor put the finishing touches on this unique aspect of the prayer by concretizing the “teachings, laws, and commandments” given at Sinai, describing them as the Torah of Moses. This mirrors the stabilization of Pentateuchal authority in Israelite life during the restoration period, and the importance assumed by its public reading and study as reflected in Neh 8:1–9:4; 10:30; 13:1–3.

The mention of the divine revelation at Sinai and the giving of the Torah in Neh 9 underscores the divine origins of the Torah and the positive attributes of its rules, teachings, laws, and commandments, viewed as binding by many Jews in the Persian period.

Sukkot in Ezra-Nehemiah and the Date of the Torah

by Dr. Lisbeth S. Fried

It seems clear that Ezra 3 reflects the version of the holiday prescribed in the book of Numbers and perhaps Deuteronomy as well. There, the holiday is celebrated in Jerusalem, and the offerings for each day of the holiday are offered as prescribed. There is no suggestion of a command to either collect branches or to live in booths.

The description in Nehemiah 8, on the other hand, is entirely different. It reflects a version of the holiday that is prescribed in Leviticus. In both Leviticus and Nehemiah the holiday is called “Booths,” and in both the people are told that they must collect leafy boughs and must live in booths. Contrary to what was practiced by the Maccabees and what is written in Leviticus, the passage in Nehemiah does not describe the people using the collected branches to rejoice before YHWH, but rather it describes them using the branches to build booths and live in them. Moreover, there is no recognition in Nehemiah that the holiday had to be celebrated in Jerusalem. Rather, the people build their booths on the rooftops and courtyards of their own homes in all their towns as well as in Jerusalem...

It must be concluded that the customs of the holiday were not set, and that the torah itself was not set, even by the time of writing Ezra-Nehemiah...

Scripture and Translation

by Franz Rosenzweig

…[F]rom our belief in the sanctity, i.e. the uniqueness of the Torah and in its revelational character we cannot draw any conclusions concerning its literary genesis… [I]f all of Wellhausen’s theories were right… this would not in the least affect our belief… We, too, translate the Torah as a single book; to us, too, it is the work of one spirit. We do not know who he was; that it was Moses we cannot believe. Among ourselves we identify him by the siglum used by critical scholarship for its assumed final redactor: R. But we fill out this R not as Redactor but as rabbenu [our Teacher].

Preserving Multiple Opinions

by Prof. Rabbi Jeffrey Tigay

In keeping with his method, in presenting two separate accounts of how Moses appointed his subordinates, the redactor who joined Deuteronomy to the preceding sources made no attempt to choose between the accounts or rewrite them to smooth out the contradictions, even if he may have reconciled them in his own mind. This presented a challenge that was taken up by later commentators, as in the midrash that held that Moses actually required all seven qualities. But the redactor was more interested in preserving the differences than in reconciling them.

Similarly, Jewish religious authorities in postbiblical times sometimes encountered multiple views of how a prayer should be worded or a practice should be followed. Talmudic literature records a number of cases in which our liturgy has combined different versions of the same prayer. The best known example is found in the Passover Haggadah, which contains two different answers to the Four Questions: Avadim hayyinu (“We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt”), and Miteḥillah ovdei avodah zarah hayu avoteinu (“At first our ancestors were idol-worshippers”). These are actually the different answers suggested by two different Talmudic authorities of the third century, Samuel and Rav. Confronted with these two different suggestions, the early post-Talmudic authorities ruled that “we practice in accordance with both,” and since that time the Passover Haggadah has included both answers. In this case and others like it, two or more rabbis prescribed their own version of a prayer, and the Talmud decides “Therefore we will say both, or all, of them.”

...One reason for preserving both versions of a text, then, may be out of reverence for their authors. Another possibility is that the redactors considered all the sources they preserved as authoritative or valid, perhaps even as sacred, presuming that “these and those are the words of the living God.” This phrase, in which the Talmud sometimes characterizes conflicting opinions of different sages, is certainly applicable as well to what seems to be the biblical redactors’ evaluation of their sources.

The redactors’ commitment to presenting multiple versions “as is” admittedly produces confusion about what exactly happened in the past and, in cases of contradictory laws, exactly what to do. Eventually this forced commentators to adopt non-literal, midrashic methods of interpretation to reconcile inconsistencies. These methods had a beneficial effect, fostering a kind of “loose constructionism” that enabled Jewish law and theology to adapt to changing ideas and societal needs, such as construing “an eye for an eye” (Exodus 21:24-25 and elsewhere) more humanely to mean monetary compensation for injuries and accommodating the creation story in Genesis 1 to philosophical and scientific ideas of cosmology.

Dr J H Hertz in Hertz Chumash Preface to the First Edition 1936

My conviction that the criticism of the Pentateuch associated with the name of Wellhausen is a perversion of history and a desecration of religion is unshaken.

Chapter II is not another account of Creation.
No mention is made in it of the formation of the dry land, the sea, the sun, moon or stars. It is nothing else but the sequel of the preceding chapter. In Chap. I man is considered as part of the general scheme of created things. Chap. I supplements the brief mention of the creation of man in v. 27 of the last chapter, by describing the formation of man and woman and their first dwelling place, as preliminary to the Temptation, and the consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Chap. Ill. Only such details as are indispensable for the understanding of that event are given.

The Hertz Chumash: A Polemical Defense of Judaism

by Dr. Rabbi Harvey Meirovich

Hertz’s primary aim was to instill a sense of pride in that generation with an underlying premise of having them appreciate and observe the mitzvot as interpreted by the Rabbis. Thus, he had no interest in discussing the “finer” points of biblical criticism; his intent, to leave them with an overall impression.

Is the Torah a Pentateuch or Hexateuch?

by Prof. Marc Zvi Brettler

Stated differently, imagine if you can, giving someone who was not at all familiar with the Bible and its structure the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and asking them to divide these nine books into two groups. I believe that most people, on the basis of content, theme, and structure would put the divider between Joshua and Judges rather than between Deuteronomy and Joshua.

For these and other reasons, from the end of the nineteenth century, many biblical scholars spoke of the Hexateuch, six books, namely Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, rather than the Pentateuch, the five books of Genesis-Deuteronomy, the Torah, as the first large unit of the Hebrew Bible. This consensus has begun to erode, with some scholars returning to the Pentateuch model, others speaking of a Tetrateuch (Genesis-Numbers) followed by the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy-Kings), books that share much common vocabulary and ideology. Others refer to an Enneateuch, a nine-book collection of the Pentateuch plus Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings...

As implied above, the five-book Torah is primarily a book of nomos, law. Such a work became the Torah by the fifth-fourth century BCE or so, the period of Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles, likely supplanting a six-part collection, the Hexateuch, comprised of Genesis-Joshua. This may have even happened in some form during the Babylonian exile, when the Jews no longer possessed the land, and a book that emphasized land-possession was replaced by one that advocated the centrality of law.

The Hexateuch began with creation and a more “universal” introduction that served, in part, to justify the choosing of Abraham; it then moved to its prime focus, the promise of land and progeny to the patriarchs and its fulfillment. The Hexateuch is thus thematically more coherent than the Pentateuch. It likely came into being in some form when Israel was in its land, with the promise fulfilled. Relative to the Hexateuch, the Pentateuch downplays the fulfillment of the theme of the promise to the patriarchs, concentrating instead on Moses as a lawgiver and the centrality of the law of Moses.

Thus, the difference between a Pentateuch and the Hexateuch is about much more than whether the first unit of the Bible contains Joshua or not, and is comprised of five or six books. The debate reflects the nature of this collection: Is it a law-book, or is it a narrative book with laws about a promise fulfilled?...

Torah from Heaven: Redefining the Question

by Dr. Rabbi Eliezer Finkelman

The argument for rejecting an evolving Torah with multiple authors as an option for the believer comes down to this: If the Torah is the revelation of God, it cannot have differences in style in the same book, or different versions of the same story; God can write only in a uniform style. God cannot write a book that shows sources, or takes part in a literary tradition, or that asserts counterfactual material, or that contains contradictions, because by definition, a perfect God must not produce such an imperfect product. To rephrase the last point, God has limitations or constraints generated by the very definition of God, and therefore we can confidently assert that God does not have the ability to produce a book with these listed characteristics.

But how can anyone know this? Who knows enough literary theory or enough about God to determine what kind of text could reveal the message from God? By what process could one find out what literary style God can or cannot use? This supposed limitation on producing a complex, contradictory, book in a literary tradition, etc., does not amount to the unique limitation on God’s abilities. We presume to know that God cannot produce this book because it would fit into the much larger set of “things that God, by the definition of God, cannot do.”

It seems to me that, in the idiom of the Talmud, “ipkha mistabra,” the opposite seems likely. If the only example of a book produced by God shows signs of complexity, inner contradiction, counter-factuality, of tweaking literary conventions, then perhaps God can and did produce such a book...

There is no reason to think that the process of God’s revelation to humanity and the formation of God’s Torah would not reveal itself to be as complex and unpredictable as God’s universe. In fact, I argue that claiming that God could not have produced the Torah through such processes as combining sources, telling multiple versions of tales, making counterfactual claims, and tweaking existent literary conventions could approach a form of idolatry.