The Sinai Revelation is a Myth

In late spring, Jewish people around the world celebrate Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, also described in the Hebrew Bible as the Festival of First Fruits (hag habbikkurim) and known in Christian circles as Pentecost. The terms “Weeks” and “Pentecost” reference the seven week (“Weeks”) period between Passover and this Festival of First Fruits, which occurs on the fiftieth day (Pentecost) following Passover. According to Jewish reckoning, it was on this day that the Israelites received the Torah from God on Mt. Sinai. Likewise, in chapter 2 of Acts of the Apostles, Jesus’ Jewish followers in Jerusalem, where the disciples had gathering following their leader’s death, received the Holy Spirit in language reminiscent of the Sinai revelation in chapter 20 of Exodus.

Both of these stories offer gripping accounts of the establishment of a covenant community through a direct encounter with the divine. In other words, both stories are myths. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. The Bible’s account of God’s revelation at Sinai is a myth. This is not to say that it’s not true. The meaning of the term myth as a synonym for falsehood is a popular and inaccurate use of the word. So we need to explore some other meaning of the term myth; a literary understanding—myth as a type of story, a type of narrative.

Myths are, first of all, accounts of a breakthrough of some transcendent, cosmic, sacred realm of being into the everyday, mundane world. Myths involve a direct encounter between the human and the divine, the cosmic, the transcendent, the sacred. Myth always takes place in some beginning time, what the great scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, called in illo tempore, “once upon a time,” a timeless time. So I would point out that the entire story of Egyptian slavery, the Exodus, the giving of Torah is timeless. There are no date formulae in the story. The Pharaohs in the story are never named. The names of the store cities, Pithom and Rameses, are generic names that cannot be identified with any known, historical Egyptian sites.

This is not a careless omission by the author. I would suggest that the author never meant to present us with an historical narrative. The author has written a myth, a timeless story that describes the foundation of the nation of Israel and its covenenant relationship to the divine. I would even go so far as to say that the story of the Exodus involves the creation of cosmic order, while the Sinai revelation is the establishment of human order. The final denouement of the Exodus story is the Song of the Sea, which incorporates the ubiquitous ancient Near Eastern cosmogonic/creation motif—the battle of storm and sea. God’s encounter with Pharaoh is a cosmic battle, establishing God’s cosmic kingship. Once this cosmic order is established, the human order is enshrined in Torah.

So that’s why I say that the Sinai revelation is a myth. I’m not saying it’s not true; I’m saying it’s not historical, and that is critical to its ultimate meaning for us. Myth is not a description of something that happened. Myth is something that happens. Myth in its pristine, earliest incarnation is generally accompanied by ritual. The ritual enacts the myth. The myth is the libretto for the ritual. When we observe Shabbat, the Sabbath, we don’t commemorate God’s resting on the seventh day of creation; we reenact it, enter it, participate in it. We pour a glass of wine and recite the myth: vayyekhulu ha-shamayim ve-ha-‘arets, “the heaven and earth were completed” (Genesis 2). We then enter Shabbat. Shabbat is not something that happened on the seventh day of creation; it’s something that happens every week. We participate in the temporal structure of the cosmos that was established at the beginning of time. Likewise the Eucharist, at least in Catholic theology (I’ll leave Christians to work this out), is a participatory act. The celebrant ingests the body and blood of Christ and thereby enters into the Kingdom, achieves the salvation and eternal life that Christ’s salvific sacrifice offers. In this regard, one might say that myths are paradigmatic; they become models for our own personal encounter with the sacred.

So the Sinai revelation is a myth. It’s not something that happened in history that we commemorate through the ritual of Shavout, the Festival of Weeks. It is something that happens, something we enact, something we participate in through the ritual of Shavout.  We receive Torah. The Torah actually tells us this is so. In the Book of Deuteronomy, presented as Moses’ farewell address to the people of Israel about to enter the land of Israel, Moses reminds the people about the affair of the twelve spies—those who came back to the encampment with discouraging news first described in the Book of Numbers. He says (Deut. 1:34-36),

When the Lord heard what you said, he was angry and solemnly swore: “No one from this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your ancestors, except Caleb son of Jephunneh. He will see it, and I will give him and his descendants the land he set his feet on, because he followed the Lord wholeheartedly.”

So, theoretically, the people standing before him hearing the speech represent a whole new generation, those who did not participate in the affair of the spies, nor, for that matter, in the revelation at Sinai. Yet just before the passage in Deuteronomy that articulates the Ten Commandments, Moses declares (Deut. 5:3-6),

“It was not with our ancestors that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today. The Lord spoke to you face to face out of the fire on the mountain. (At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire and did not go up the mountain.) And he said: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”

Nobody who actually stood at Sinai was in that crowd, but they all stood at Sinai—mythically as we have come to understand myth. Perhaps this is what is meant by great medieval commentator Rashi, interpreting the verse at Exodus 19:1, which dates the arrival of the escaping Israelites at Mt. Sinai with the expression, “on this day,” when he asks,

“There was no need to write other than ‘on that day.’ Why is it [written] on this day? So that the words of Torah should be something new as though God gave them today!”

So for Rashi, every day—today, in fact—is the day we receive Torah. Not only that, but according to Pesikta de Rav Kahana, a fourth century midrashic (interpretive) text, we all receive Torah as individuals in a voice unique to each of us.

When the Holy One spoke, each and every person in Israel could say, “The Divine Word is addressing me.” Rabbi Yosi, the son of Hanina, said: “Do not be surprised by this idea. For when manna came down to feed Israel, each person tasted it according to his or her capacity… What is true about the manna is also true about the Divine Word. Therefore the Holy One said: ‘Do not be misled if you hear many voices. Know that I am the One God for each of you.’”

Indeed, the Christian analogue to Shavuot and the Sinai Revelation, Pentecost as depicted in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, also describes each recipient of the Holy Spirit as hearing the words in his/her own language.

So I would suggest that this tradition upholds the mythic notion of the Sinai revelation as I have defined it. We do not commemorate a revelatory event that our ancestors experienced thousands of years ago. We, too, experience this event, we participate in the Sinai revelation, and each of us experiences this event as a unique, personal encounter.

There’s one more piece that I think is the clincher in all of this. The volume Etz Hayim, the Bible used in Conservative Jewish congregations, includes an essay written by Rabbi Elliot Dorff titled “Medieval and Modern Theories of Revelation.” Dorff is no heretic. He’s the current chair of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly and Professor of Philosophy at the American Jewish University. In this essay, Dorff references two of the modern giants of Jewish theology and philosophy: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. He characterizes both as existentialists with their understanding of Torah and revelation as features of each individual’s relationship with the divine. Articulating Rosenzweig’s approach to the subject, Dorff writes,

“Rosenzweig’s existentialism is manifest, however, in his concern that as we strengthen our relationship with God, we should not see our increased obligation as simply burdens imposed on us from the outside by God (i.e., as laws). Instead, we must seek to transform the requirements of Judaism into living commandments whose authority comes from within us, as individuals, as well as from God because they derive from the relationship that we have with God. The Torah’s precepts, then, are not only demands but bridges between each individual and God. Until a given rule can function as an outgrowth of one’s relationship with God and a further strengthening of it, the rule is not incumbent on the individual—at least not yet (pp. 1402-1403; emphasis added).”

That is the Sinai revelation. It’s not about commemorating some putative historical event. It is mythic. It represents a timeless and direct encounter between the human and the divine. At every moment, we stand at Sinai, each of us, as individuals and as a community; we hear God’s voice and we enter into a covenant relationship with God. This, to me, is the true challenge of Torah. It’s really about how I establish a covenant relationship with God and how I embody that relationship in my daily life.