Who Wrote It?
Now this is the law which Moses set before the sons of Israel; Deuteronomy 4:44 NASB
Set before – You want your life to conform to God’s standard, right? You want to know what God wants you to do, and what displeases Him. So, you read your Bible. You think that what it says is God’s words to men, His instructions for living, His attitudes and actions, His purposes. You’re sure you can trust the Book. Then you start investigating how the canon was formed. You begin to see that political and sociological influences may have altered the texts. You realize that the believing community of the first century had other sacred books that you don’t have. You discover the translator’s bias. Your faith in the Bible you’ve been reading all your life starts to shake. What you need is the correct Bible; you know, the one God gave to the prophets, the one with the right answers. But now you’re not so sure if you can ever find it.
The Church comes to your rescue. With the doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy, it assures you that you can trust the “authorized” text because the Church accepts it. The Church provides you with the “right” answers based on its interpretation and vouches for those answers on the basis of its doctrine. That used to be enough, but . . . not anymore.
Did you think this was just a Christian problem? No, not at all. The same problem, i.e., the accuracy and authority of the Scripture, is also a Jewish problem. Of course, Jews don’t have to worry about the accuracy of John, James, or Paul, but they still have the problem with their greatest prophet, Moses. And in order to assure Jewish readers that the biblical text of the Torah is the one that God gave to Moses, they also have a doctrine of inspiration. God dictated the Torah to Moses who wrote it down as a dutiful scribe. Deuteronomy 4:44 is one of the proof texts for this doctrine. It’s all about the words śam lipnê, “set before.”
To emphasize the significance of the statement, one frequently sees Jews point at the Torah. “This is it,” traditionalist Jews proclaim, “admittedly a copy written by a scribe, but word for word and letter for letter identical with the one transcribed by Moses as God dictated it.”[1]
For this text, various rabbis elaborate the method of communication between God and Moses.
The Midrash assumes that during the forty days and nights which Moses spent on Mount Sinai, God revealed the entire Bible, as well as the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the Aggadah (Exodus Rabbah 47:1 on Exodus 34:27). Many of the Bible commentators, however, seem to describe a more nuanced process, both with respect to the revelation and to the ultimate writing of the text of the Torah.[2]
There is a significant debate among rabbis about the interaction between God and Moses, as noted above. This debate has been going on for a long time. Heschel calls this a debate between the minimalist’s position (that Torah is the work of human agents moved by God in some way) and the maximalist’s position (that Torah is God’s exact dictation to human scribes without any human interference). Gordon Tucker remarks:
For those who take the more minimalist view, Moses became a paradigm for future generations. If he could assert his human input and innovate, then so could religious men and women of every generation. For the maximalists, Moses was the pinnacle rather than paradigm. For them, human fulfillment comes from recognizing the divine hand that wrote through him and from using power of interpretation not to innovate but rather to maintain and defend the Torah’s supernatural character and power.[3]
Is it any different than Christian fundamentalists and neo-orthodox? When evangelicals assert that every word of the original divine text was given by God and is inerrant, they sound very much like the rabbis who claim “the entire Torah, every letter, was received by Moses at Mount Sinai” and copied by Moses exactly as God directed.
The issue with transmission of the divine message is not an issue about method. It is an issue about certainty. It is the assertion, by Christians or Jews, that the Bible is God’s TRUTH. The Bible is not the mixture of human experience and divine interaction. It is God’s words—nothing more and nothing less. In other words, the Bible is the answer.
But there are problems with this attempt at certainty. Not just historical problems, but problems with the internal consistency of the maximalist’s view. It might not be very comfortable to investigate these problems. If you’re able to simply set them aside, you’ll have the certainty you’re looking for. But it comes at a cost—deliberate blindness.
As for me, I would rather see.
Topical Index: inspiration, inerrancy, Deuteronomy 4:44
[1] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-torah-of-moses/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (ed. and trans. by Gordon Tucker, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2007), pp. 552-553.
