Beyond Sinai and Sources: The Torah in Its Final Form

As someone raised in the Jewish tradition, and a scholar, though not a rabbi, I have been trained to answer a question with a question, so allow me to switch up the question slightly and interrogate the notions of Torah mi-Sinai and academic Bible study.

Does “the tradition” suggest that all of Torah is from Sinai? In the account of the revelation at Sinai (Exodus 19:14–23:33), the Torah declares the Decalogue and the Covenant Collection to be from God, and Leviticus implies that many (all?) of its laws were told to Moses in the Tent of Meeting or at Sinai. But this does not cover every law in the Torah.

And as for the oral tradition, rabbinic Judaism treats it as a second Torah revealed at Sinai, and which, ironically, often trumps the Torah’s own formulations, at least among the traditionally observant. And yet, the Torah itself says nothing about it.

Deuteronomy and its laws are an especially significant case. Deuteronomy 1:5 presents Moses as “expounding,” from the Hebrew root ב.א.ר, to explain in detail, often with a sense of interpreting.^[1] The implication is that even within the Torah, interpretation of the tradition is already happening in the person of Moses.^[2] If that is the case, then the “traditional” notion that the Torah was revealed at Sinai already comes with a correlate that some of what is written in the Torah is filtered through the interpretation of Moses.

And what about authorship of the Torah itself? It never says a word about this.^[3] Here is where the Documentary Hypothesis—the theory that the Torah is a composite text of multiple sources, written by four or five major schools of thought or authors, and revised over hundreds of years—plays an important role.

The scholars who developed the Documentary Hypothesis argued that multiple sources can be discerned through the terminology used to refer to the divine as well as other stylistic concerns. Over the two centuries that different versions of this theory have been regnant, scholarship has engaged in defining, redefining, and refining the separation of the text into its theoretical component parts so that we could better understand what the constituent components of the current text originally meant.

I confess that I do not exercise this mode of research. Though admittedly in the minority, I am just not convinced of its goals and aims in terms of understanding the text. Presumably, the notion is that if we could get back to the “original” or “authentic” text we would better understand it. From my standpoint, speculating about the Torah’s sources does not respect our final version of the text, and scholars approaching the text from such a vantage point do not have to grapple with the Torah as it is presented in the Masoretic Text.

Like the traditional belief in Torah from Sinai, source criticism has become “traditional”—it is the assumed stance among scholars. And while many reconstructions are possible, no ancient document proves that sources ever existed, nor is there any concrete evidence for these “schools” and/or authors.

So where does that leave us? There is little problem reconciling tradition and academic scholarship if one loves the text and the tradition, but understands both as fluid, and in need of interpretation from within the traditional text itself. I would argue that both the Jewish Tradition and modern scholarship demand that every generation carefully read the texts and view them with fresh eyes appropriate to its period. Neither Jewish tradition nor the modern academy demands we agree with everything said and done by previous generations of teachers.