The Oral Law
As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. Romans 4:17 NIV
As it is written – Judaism today is intimately dependent on the Oral Law. Of course, the Tanakh is still the foundation text, but rabbinic interpretation often follows the pathway of tradition found in the Oral Torah. Without this rabbinic commitment to the oral tradition, Judaism would look very different. This means that if there is a tension between the written Tanakh and the oral tradition, rabbinic exegesis usually defers to the tradition. The implications are enormous. Yehuda Brandes writes:
. . . the fundamental difference between the peshat exegetes, scholars, and Bible critics on the one hand, and the sages on the other, is the level of “sincerity” with which they relate to the peshat. The peshat exegetes regard this as the primary and fundamental way of interpreting the Bible, and ascribe enormous significance to its role in the formation of the believer’s worldview and perception of reality. The derash exegetes, in contrast, derive their worldview and perception of reality from the Oral Law, and regard the peshat as an additional exegetical option that can never take precedence, either in understanding the Bible or in the formation of the believer’s worldview. Principles of faith and the finer points of halakhah are not determined by their conformity to the plain meaning of the biblical text. On the contrary, by means of derash, the verses are made to conform to the beliefs and opinions, and laws and customs of the Oral Law. This approach allows the sages and those following in their path to relate freely to the peshat and accept the possibility that it contains contradictions and difficulties, both intrinsic and theological.[1]
What Brandes describes is paradigm commitment. This means that rabbinic exegesis does not consider the written text as the final authority. It is the oral tradition, now inscribed as the Talmud, that is the final authority, and because the Talmud is the ultimate source of biblical knowledge, the Tanakh is interpreted according to the Talmudic tradition. When my rabbi friend here in Parma says that his training only occasionally examined the Torah, he reflects this view. What mattered in his study was the Talmud. The Torah was secondary.
You will recognize immediately how different this approach is from the typical Christian exegetical process. For conservative Christians, it is the text of the Bible, the sixty-six canonized books, that matters. Of course, there are numerous commentaries, but the ultimate authority is the text, not the tradition or the scholars who reflect on the text. If we don’t recognize this important difference, we will often not understand the conclusions drawn by rabbinic thought. In a sentence, rabbinic Judaism has a different Bible than Christianity, and the difference is not simply the addition of the apostolic material.
Topical Index: rabbinic exegesis, Talmud, oral law, derash, peshat, Romans 4:17
[1] Yehuda Brandes, “The Sages as Bible Critics,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (Academic Series Press, 2019), p. 212.
Thank you, Skip, for providing this essential clarification to allow an accurate understanding of the distinctions inherent in our “traditional” orientations.
The decisive qualification is made clear, being made manifest by Yeshua of Nazareth, who stated plainly, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Yes, was this not the same battle Yeshua, our Messiah, faced and stood up against continuously in his ministry days?
And let us also recognize that, in contradiction to our verbal commitment to use only the Scriptures, we “Christian” believers hang on to a similar paradigm as we “interpret.”