Rules of Engagement (2)

Then God spoke all these words, saying,  Exodus 20:1  NASB

All these words – Modern Jewish biblical scholars draw our attention to some difficult paradoxes.  Nachmanides is an example:

Our teacher Moses wrote this book of Genesis together with the entire Torah as dictated by the holy One, blessed is He. . . . It would have been appropriate for him to write at the beginning of the book of Genesis, “The Lord spoke to Moses all these words, saying.” The reason it was written anonymously [i.e., with no such introductory phrase] is that our teacher Moses did not write the Torah in the first person . . . whereas our teacher Moses wrote the history of all previous generations and his own genealogy, history, and experiences in the third person. . . . Moses therefore is not mentioned in the Torah until his birth, and even then he is mentioned as if someone else were speaking of him. . . . Thus Moses was like a scribe transcribing an ancient book.  Nachmanides, Introduction to Genesis

Nachmanides’s words typify the mainstream rabbinical opinion regarding the composition of the Torah in general, and of Genesis in particular. Yet throughout the generations there were some who argued that the Torah had been given “in scrolls,” each at the time most appropriate for its content to be revealed. The stories of Genesis, according to this opinion, were also given at their appropriate time, namely, that of the Patriarchs.  Moses then was not merely “like a scribe transcribing an ancient book,” but literally used a preexisting text when writing the Torah.[1]

But this idea didn’t start with Nachmanides.  “Maimonides created a new idea: that all parts of the Torah are unified and equal.”[2]  If this sounds vaguely familiar it’s probably because fundamentalist Christianity adopted the same idea.  Perhaps you’d recognize this as the “dictation” theory of inspiration, that is, that God gave each and every word to His servants who faithfully inscribed the text exactly as God wished.  Of course, in order to avoid known counterevidence to this claim, the theory holds that this applies only to the original texts (which no one has), not to the copies that were handed down to us.  Convenient.  So, Jewish orthodoxy and Christian fundamentalism aren’t so far apart when it comes to the transmission of Scripture.

Now you’re asking, “Why should we care about how God did or didn’t communicate?”  Didn’t we just hear Bigman say: “Biblical scholarship does not impinge on the exalted stature of the Torah, just as the study of art is not able to expose the inspiration behind painting, musical composition, literature, and poetry”?[3]  Doesn’t that mean that our experience of God remains the touchstone of faith in spite of any academic cross-examination of the texts?  After all, your relationship with your spouse doesn’t really depend on the license issued to legitimatize it.  Faith itself doesn’t seem to be validated or nullified by some concern over how ancient texts were delivered.  Well, almost.  You see, if it really is the case that human hands were just as much a part of textual transmission as the divinely inspired (but not dictated) motivation for those human words, then the possibility of misrepresentation and/or human interpretation is a constant factor in understanding those words, and that means there is always some shadow of doubt about what the text actually says. That’s not the same as saying your experience with God is in jeopardy.  All we are recognizing is that human language is used to communicate something about this experience and human language is always paradigmatic.  It comes with built-in assumptions and bias, and unless the language of the Bible is somehow divinely protected from this reality, it too contains assumptions and bias.  That doesn’t mean it can be discarded.  Far from it!  It means that we have the task of sorting through these built-in issues before we can confidently state what God wants us to know through the lens of the author. There really is no plain meaning of the text.

And if you can live with that, then let’s continue to dig.  If you can’t live with that, then there’s lots of room for you in the church or the synagogue.

Topical Index: text, transmission, inspiration, Nachmanides, Maimonides, dictation, Exodus 20:1

[1] “Origins of the Torah,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (eds. Ganzel, Brandes, and Deutsch), 2019, p. 7.

[2] David Bigman, “I Shall Fear God Alone and Not Show Favor in Torah: A Conceptual Foundation for Wrestling with Biblical Scholarship,” in  The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (eds. Ganzel, Brandes, and Deutsch), 2019, p. 303.

[3] Ibid., p. 317.