Text and Transmission

You shall also speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘If anyone curses his God, then he will bear the responsibility for his sin.   Leviticus 24:15  NASB

Anyone – The more you look, the more complicated it becomes.  That’s how I feel after a few decades of investigating the issue of textual transmission.  When I first became a believer, I accepted the claim that the Bible I had in my hand was the word of God—and nothing but the word of God.  What that meant was that every word in that leather-bound book was exactly what God wanted.  No mistakes.  Nothing left out.  No accidents.  Just pure divine instructions for living.  Of course, there was a big separation (in fact, a separate, blank  page) between the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament.”   The Old Testament was basically all that historical stuff about the Jews with occasional great stories for life lessons and a few really important theological verses, but for the most part, my faith began with the book of John, retreated to the Gospels, and came to rest in the letters of Paul.  Like all the other Christians I knew.

Then I grew up.  And the more I understood ancient writing and culture, the more my naïve dogmas fell apart, until one day, like this day, I realized that the Bible is like other ancient literature in composition and structure.  That doesn’t mean, by the way, that it’s like Aesop’s fables or Homer’s histories.  It is a collection of sacred material; material that is the basis for a way of life based on the revelation from the God of Israel.  It is special, but it’s not heavenly.  What I mean is that it is, as the rabbis say, “written in human language.”  Heschel puts it like this:

As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash. . . . Judaism is based upon a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation, upon the will of God and upon the understanding of Israel. . . . There is a partnership of God and Israel in regard to both the world and the Torah: He created the earth and we till the soil; He gave us the text and we refine and complete it. “The Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah unto Israel like wheat from which to derive fine flour, or like flax from which to make a garment.”[1]

Sommers recaps this approach in his comments about Heschel and Rosenzweig.

In their opinion, the text of the Torah is a human reaction to, or interpretation of, an event in which the divine will was expressed by supralinguistic means. Thus, Rosezweig [sic] and Heschel encourage us both to accept the Torah as authoritative in the halakhic sense and to question it.[2]

Of course, many conservative Christians and orthodox Jews still hold on to the same theological position I had as a young believer.  They might be much more sophisticated in the articulation of this doctrine, but it basically comes down to the same point.  The Bible (whether Christian or Jewish) is exactly what God wanted to say, revealed from Heaven, and without any mistakes.  It is divine language communicated to human beings.

This position requires some significant textual gymnastics.  Why?  Because there are a lot of very odd things in the text that force us to come up with “stretched” interpretations in order to maintain the belief.  We’ve had a look at some of these over the years, but today I thought it might be fun to look at this particular example.  In this verse, the word ish is literally repeated, without any clear explanation why.  Here’s the Hebrew verse:

וְאֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, תְּדַבֵּר לֵאמֹר:  אִישׁ אִישׁ כִּי-יְקַלֵּל אֱלֹהָיו, וְנָשָׂא חֶטְאוֹ

I’ve highlighted the repetition of the word ish.  Virtually every translation ignores this oddity, rendering it as “anyone” or “whoever” or some equivalent.  But that translation could have been accomplished with a single occurrence, so, why is it doubled?  Is it for emphasis (like “man, man!” meaning “any man!”), or is it just a scribal error copied endlessly over generations, or is there some deeper meaning here?  Frankly, no one knows.  You’re free to make up your own explanation.  What’s hard to imagine is that God wanted the duplication in the text without telling us why.  That leads some of us to posit that the Bible really is God’s revelation in human language, along with human anomalies.  Maybe Heschel is right.  The revelation was an event; the interpretation is a human attempt to explain it.  As Sommers says, “This debate over whether revelation was an event or a process did not end with the Bible.”[3]

According to Rabbi Akiva, the Torah is a closed system with its own unique language that cannot be deciphered by human intelligence. The Torah scholar must therefore make use of the system of divine hermeneutical rules for the interpretation of the Torah. Many have followed this path, including Jacob ben Asher and the author of Sefer Yetzirah.

An opposite approach posits that the Torah is the word of God given to man, and is thus limited in its language and contents. This idea is expressed in rabbinic literature by the phrase “the Torah uses human language.” According to this approach, meaning cannot be extracted from every superfluous word in the biblical text because the Torah is written according to human forms of expression. As we have seen, Rabbi Ishmael advanced this argument against Rabbi Akiva in the case of the adulterous daughter of the Kohen. Another example can be found in tractate Sanhedrin 56a, where the sages rejected Rabbi Meir’s deduction on the basis of the repetition in the verse “Anyone (ish ish) who blasphemes his God” (Lev. 24:15), and explained the verse as conforming to patterns of human speech: “What of it? The Torah uses human language.”[4]

What do you think?

Topical Index:  textual anomalies, ish, revelation, inerrancy, Leviticus 24:15

[1]Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 185, 274. Heschel quotes from Tanna de-Vei Eliyyahu Zuta 2:1.

[2] Benjamin Sommer, “Revelation and Religious Authority in the Sinai Traditions,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (Academic Series Press, 2019), p. 322.

[3] Ibid, p. 330.

[4] Chezi Cohen, “The Torah Speaks to People,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (Academic Series Press, 2019), p. 341.