Inerrancy in Hebrew Thought
In May of 2020 I wrote the following brief study. You can review it here before we continue:
Now this is the law which Moses set before the sons of Israel; Deuteronomy 4:44 NASB
Who Wrote It?
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.
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This study raises significant issues about our understanding of the Bible as a divinely-inspired document. The Christian world has struggled with the idea of inspired truth for centuries. Its declaration that the Bible is true because it comes from God led to long debates about what divine inspiration means. If you grew up in one of the major Protestant denominations, you are probably familiar with the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration, but in case you don’t know the technical terms, here is a definition:
What Is Meant by the Verbal Plenary Inspiration of Scripture?
The doctrine of the authority of the Bible is often described with the phrase, “verbal plenary inspiration.” What does this phrase mean? What are Christians talking about when they speak of the verbal plenary inspiration of Scripture?
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- Verbal Means Every Word
Verbal inspiration means that every word of Scripture is God-given. The idea is that every single word in the Bible is there because God wanted it there. There are no exceptions.
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- Plenary Means Fully Authoritative
Plenary means that “all parts” of the Bible are divinely authoritative. This includes such things as the genealogies of the Old Testament. All parts of the Bible are of divine origin.[4]
Since this is a recognizable Christian doctrine, we might assume that its purpose is an attempt to shore up the Christian view of the authority of the Bible. But we would be wrong. Now that we’ve examined (briefly) Heschel’s analysis of the maximalists’ view of the Tanakh, we see that verbal plenary inspiration is also a Jewish view, although it is obviously not given the same theological verbiage. When the rabbis attempt to attribute all the teachings of Scripture to the revelation to Moses, they are effectively embracing the same verbal plenary inspiration doctrine of Fundamentalist Christianity. They just don’t apply this idea to the “Christian” apostolic writings. Furthermore, in some rabbinic circles the idea is expanded with the claim that every letter of the Tanakh was given by God.
Of course, the same criticisms that Heschel raises concerning the midrashic attempts of the rabbis apply to the Christian idea as well. Gordon Tucker’s footnote in Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations is particularly telling:
“ . . . if in fact the entire Torah, every letter, was received by Moses at Mount Sinai, then he already received not just laws but also the stories about the laws. Thus, there would be an almost absurd paradox here. For on this view Moses would have been told at Mount Sinai that, for example, the daughters of Zelophehad . . . would present a case to him, Moses would not know the answer to the problem, and God would then enlighten him. It would then mean that, when the time came that the case was actually presented, Moses not only would have forgotten the law, but would be forced to relive the ignorance that he had already been told about it! The whole thing has the aroma of the paradoxes of time travel to it, which is, indeed, one of the persistent problems with what Heschel will presently call the ‘maximalist view.’”[5]
You might object that the difficulty with rabbinic explanation is simply temporal, that is, the temporal claim that Moses received the entire Torah before the events actually happened. If this were the case, all that is needed to resolve the paradox is to alter the temporal claim and state that the revelation to Moses was just as temporally conditioned as all the other events of the Bible. Moses was only given a limited revelation and so he did not know what would transpire with the daughters of Zelophehad. The problem is not with the Bible. It’s with a claim that all revelation was given timelessly.
The solution seems simple enough until we press its implications. What it implies, of course, is that the human agents of God’s divine revelation are temporally bound (as are all human beings) and therefore, the words that they communicate to the rest of humanity are temporally conditioned, that is, they are only true insofar as they express the truth at that moment. But things can change, and what was true at the time of the specific revelation for some particular prophet might change later. In case you didn’t realize the suggested implication here, let me spell it out: what God said at one time might not be true at another time! “Progressive revelation” implicitly contains this implication.
Can’t we avoid this implication by simply saying that what Moses received from God was true for Moses and his audience and whatever parts of that revelation have eternal value are still true even if some parts of the revelation to Moses were only for that particular audience? For example, we could argue that Moses didn’t need to know in advance the regulation regarding the daughters of Zelophehad but that doesn’t make the rest of the revelation suspect. What God intended as eternal truth is still eternal truth. The rabbis were just wrong about the timing of the revelation to Moses. If we can decode the biblical revelation so that we know what is eternally true and what is simply temporally true, then we’ve solved the problem. God’s word is still always true. It just depends on what kind of truth (temporal or not) we’re talking about.
This approach seems to work until we notice what Christian theology does with the Law in the Tanakh. With the argument that the Law is replaced by the work of Christ, Christian theology essentially suggests that even those passages where God specifically says that some particular revelation is true “for all generations” isn’t true. Progressive revelation has since revealed that the Law has been replaced by grace, according to this view, and if that is the case, how are we to know that further revelation won’t replace what we now consider true? The only way to prevent this continuous revision is to canonize the text and close the possibility of more information. This is, of course, precisely what happened. But it seems much more like a stop-gap measure than a spiritual necessity. Furthermore, since there really is no textual support for “replacement” theology, we are left with the same problem; i.e., how do we know it’s always true? If revelation is progressive, what confidence can we have that our doctrines and dogmas won’t change in time? How do we know that God won’t reveal something else in the future and consequently change what we now believe to be true?
Before we collapse in theological apoplexy, consider the power that this idea brings to exegesis. Why is it that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul seem to be able to quote Scripture (the Tanakh) in ways that completely violate the original intent and context of the authors and apply prophetic words in such novel ways in their own writings? For example, what makes it possible for Matthew to rip Jeremiah’s statement about Rachel crying for her children completely out of context and apply it to the slaughter in Bethlehem while claiming that his novel application is the fulfillment of prophecy? The answer is that Matthew does not hold a doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration, even in its Jewish maximalist form. For Matthew, the text of the Tanakh is malleable. It’s simply the clay from which he can construct an entirely new meaning. What Jeremiah thought was true about the analogy of Rachel was only true during Jeremiah’s time. Now, at the time of Matthew’s reconstruction, the truth is different.
You can appreciate what a powerful tool this is for understanding the “fast and loose” application of the Tanakh in apostolic scripture. This also explains why the earlier community of believers did not have a canon. The canon became necessary in order to stop further revisions. Canonization forbids continual revelation. The angel Maroni can’t exist in a post-canon world.
Despite this explanatory power, I hope you also see the darker implications; implications like Paul’s mistake in believing that the Messiah would return within the lifetime of the Thessalonians. If the Bible truly is progressive, then how do we know that what those human agents wrote two thousand or three thousand years ago is still what God wants us to know? Once again we face the question: “How do we separate eternal truths from temporal truths?”
This darker implication is the reason that Jewish maximalists and Christian Fundamentalists adhere to verbal plenary inspiration and the concomitant, required canonization. They simply want to ensure that the Bible is certain! They want to affirm that what it says is what God wants it to say extemporally, that is, independent of the passage of time. And, of course, this means that whatever God says in one place must be true in all places, in all times, for the real author is God, not human temporal agents, and what God says must always be true, even if it is understood temporally by human agents.
Now we uncover the real problem with this passion for certainty. The real problem is treating the Bible as if an omniscient God is the actual author. If we say that the Bible is God’s word for men, those who propose verbal plenary inspiration intend that statement to mean that every word is ultimately authored by God. They are then required to resolve apparent conflicts within the text and the additional conflicts with historical and archeological evidence. Nothing can be just a human mistake. So Joshua must have encountered a Canaanite king at Ai, Solomon must have had more gold than the total production known to human history, Jeremiah must have been right about Anathoth and Jehoiakim, the Judean exile of Ezekiel must have been only forty years, etc. All of these (and many more) are unsupported by external evidence. The task of the proponent of verbal plenary inspiration is to show that the external evidence must be wrong. The commitment to the certainty of the text trumps any other evidence. As you can see, the argument is viciously circular.
We could argue that the Bible contains God’s words for men (along with a lot of other words), but then we wouldn’t have the certainty we desire about the text. Neo-orthodoxy lives with this. The neo-orthodox problem is to sort out which words are God’s and which are the words of human authors. As you can imagine, this takes a very fine-toothed comb. The effort has failed simply because theological bias is dandruff in the textual combing. Neo-orthodoxy concedes certainty but ends up with chaos. Few believers are comfortable with the bald spots.
Perhaps what we learn is this:
The problem isn’t Christian. The problem of certainty belongs to any religious group that asserts a particular text(s) are God-given, fixed revelation. When the Bible is treated as God’s book, human intervention becomes moot and the subsequent rigorous examination of the text is stifled, rejected, or forbidden.
Certainty, or the desire for it, is the real motivation behind canonization, but all this does is exacerbate the problem. Now the text must be consistent, non-contradictory, and comprehensive. Now the text must be something other than human since all human paradigms are essentially malleable. No counter evidence can be allowed. Heretics must be eliminated.
In the end, the authority of inspiration appears to be a choice, not a requirement. This makes us very uncomfortable because we want a faith that doesn’t require faith. We want a “faith” that is certain. We can choose such a “faith,” but the choice will demand heavy taxes. If you can live with the payments, you’ll feel good (and justified). God is on your side. Just don’t think too much. And never ask a question.
This may seem an inadequate defense of faith; that faith is simply a matter of choice and that choice determines the consequent corollaries of a system of beliefs. But there is some solace here. If faith is a paradigm, then theology is paradigm articulation—nothing more (or less). Just as Newtonian physics eventually collapsed because it was theoretically inadequate, religious faith based on a choice for certainty will also collapse (if it hasn’t already). But Newton’s mistake doesn’t mean that ordinary living stops operates as if “rest” is real, as if “mass” is not relative. Euclid’s geometry is untrue in a spherical world, but that doesn’t mean we take the curvature of the earth into consideration when we lay the foundation of a building. Euclid works, most of the time. So does Newton. It all depends on scale. Little lives don’t worry about cosmic issues. So we ignore reality while we live in a constructed world. In many ways, faith is like that. If you go to the Western Wall at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, you will see men in long dark coats with fur hats, clothing that is completely out of place in the hot, arid climate of Israel. But tradition is more powerful than climate because tradition is about identity. Our traditions include particular affirmations about the Bible. Those traditions might seem completely out of place in the larger world of academic inquiry, but we are loathe to give them up because they aren’t just about what we believe. They are about who we are. We don’t ask questions, not because the answers might be upsetting but because asking is a form of identity theft.
Certainty and authority are incestuous bedfellows, but it seems we prefer dysfunctional inclusion rather than heretical exclusion.
[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.
[4] https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/stewart_don/faq/bible-authoritative-word/question3-verbal-plenary-inspiration-of-scripture.cfm
[5] 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), p. 553, fn. 2.
