Generally referred to by both Jews and Christians as “The
Five Books of Moses,” the first five books of the Bible—what Jews call “Torah"—is traditionally understood as having been transmitted
to Moses by God during the revelation at Mt. Sinai. The traditional Jewish
approach to the authorship of the Torah is summed up in the words of
Deuteronomy, words that Jews recite each time the Torah is read in the
synagogue. At the conclusion of the Torah reading, a person is given the honor
or lifting the scroll, exposing a few columns of its text to the congregation,
while the congregation rises and chants these words from Deuteronomy: ve-zot ha-Torah asher sam Moshe lifnei b’nai
Ysirael al pi Adonai be-yad Moshe, “this is the Torah that Moses placed
before the people of Israel from the mouth of the Lord by the hand of Moses.”
This expression raisies many questions. Can we be sure that
the Torah that is mentioned in this passage corresponds to the scroll that we
lift in the modern synagogue? How do we know for sure? The text that Moses is
said to have received from God on Mt. Sinai is given a number of titles: The
Book of the Covenant, The two Tablets of Stone, The Two Tablets of the
Testimony, The Ten Utterances (commandments). Indeed, it is only in Deuteronomy
that the term Torah is applied to a text that Moses received from God.
And how about “from the mouth of the Lord”? God has a mouth? God forbid!! Or is this simply metaphor? I certainly hope so! But let’s then admit that the Torah makes use of metaphor to express a relationship between God’s revelation and the human reception and perception of that revelation.
But I have many more questions about God’s authorship of the
Torah. If God is the author of the Torah, why is God referred to in the third
person. Why does the book open with the words, “In the beginning, God created
the heavens and the earth”? Why doesn’t it begin, “In the beginning, I, God,
created the heavens and the earth”?
This question, of course, raises the issue of genre. What
sort of literature is the Torah? Is it autobiography, i.e., is it a story about
the life of God as told by God? In that case, one would expect it to be written
in the first person. Or is it a form of expository writing—a treatise on
history, or something similar. In that case, one would expect a third person
narration with the author’s “person” in the background: “In the beginning, the
heavens and the earth were fashioned though an act of divine agency as
manifested in thought and word.”
Perhaps the Torah is similar to a work of fiction, wherein
an omniscient narrator, who stands above the narration, recounts a story. From
the perspective of basic format, this would certainly seem to describe at least
the narrative portions of the Torah.
But before proceeding with form and genre, I have some other
questions. If the Torah was dictated by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai two months
after the Israelites left Egypt, did God dictate and did Moses record the
events in the Torah that are narrated as having occurred after the event on
Sinai? For instance, did Moses strike the rock at Meribah instead of simply
speaking to it, knowing that he would be punished for this act of disobedience?
After all, he is said to have read the Book of the Covenant to the Israelites
upon descending from Mt. Sinai. Did he read about his debacle at Meribah? Did
Korah hear that the earth was going to swallow him up for his rebellion against
Moses? Did these two, Moses and Korah choose to engage in their acts of
defiance despite what they read about or heard about in the Torah that Moses
read upon descending from Mt. Sinai? Could they have chosen otherwise? Or were
their choices predetermined by Torah? If so, what is the status of human free
will?
Doubt concerning the Mosaic authorship of the Torah is not
new. In fact, modern biblical criticism may have begun 400 years ago when
Baruch Spinoza questioned statements like, for instance, the one in Genesis 12
describing Abram’s (later renamed Abraham) move to the land of Canaan, where it
says, “The Canaanites were then in the land.” When is “then”? When the Torah
was dictated by God at Mt. Sinai, weren’t the Canaanites still in the land? And
what are we to make of the reference in Deuteronomy 3:14 that the territory
acquired by Jair the Menassite is named Havvot-jair “to this day”? To what day?
To the day that the Torah was written and delivered to the Israelite people two
months after leaving Egypt, or to the day forty years later when Moses
delivered his speech to the Israelites about to enter the promised land? And
was that speech composed at Sinai, or did Moses compose it on the spot? The
chronological issues—the bending of time and space—is breathtaking. Is the
Torah a form of the original “Back to the Future”? Should we expect to see
Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd arrive in the Delorean?
These questions are not raised as a way of mocking or
belittling Torah. Rather, they are meant to demonstrate the absolute
incredulity of any literalist, fundamentalist approach to Torah. Indeed, our ultimate purpose is to place the
Torah within a more humanistic understanding of scripture and divine
revelation. God, the gods, the divine—however one wants to articulate the
sacred, transcendent force that creates and guides the cosmos—does not publish
books; does stand on, mountains and dictate treatises. Indeed, to suggest as
such is to denigrate the true nature of revelation, which is, in fact, a human
product that arises from a human encounter with the divine.
The great civilizations of the ancient world produced
mountains of literature: myths, epics, poetry, historical accounts, legal and
economic materials, expressions of practical wisdom. To suggest that Torah is
divine is to suggest that ancient Israelite civilization was illiterate, incapable
of producing similar works of literature; that they sat around like dolts waiting
for God to produce myths, poems, epics law and history.
I do not believe that my spiritual and genetic ancestors
were dolts! I don’t believe that they were illiterate. I believe, on the
contrary, that my ancestors were brilliant priests, prophets, poets, scholars,
legislators and story-tellers. Like all humans, they were inspired. That is to
say they bore the breath of the divine as their life force as depicted in the
second chapter of Genesis. These were people who struggled to come to grips
with the nature of the world, the nature of divinity and the nature of humanity.
They sought to imbue their lives with order, meaning, purpose and value through
a comprehension of the ultimate source of order, meaning purpose and value in
the cosmos. They longed for a vision of and a connection to that cosmic source
and to translate that vision and that connection into their lives, their
relationships with family and community, and their connections to the larger human
and natural world.
Those struggles are our struggles; those desires and
longings ours. Indeed they are the longings and strivings of all humanity. To
think that somehow we can absolve ourselves of that struggle simply by reading
an ancient book is folly. Our ancestors’ efforts to comprehend and connect to
God are tremendous sources of guidance and inspiration in our struggles, but
they are no substitutes. We are obliged to understand thoroughly the nature of
those struggles, critically and without apologetics. In so doing, we can
illuminate our own struggles and begin to overcome them.
Return to Blog Home Page
No comments:
Post a Comment