Left: revelation at Mount Sinai. Right: Ezra reading the Torah.
Hearing God’s Voice: Two Models for Accepting The Torah
By considering two moments in the Bible at which the people gather to hear God’s word: the revelation to Moses at Sinai in Exodus, and Ezra’s assembly in a Jerusalem square in Nehemiah, we can contrast the clear revelation we yearn for with the hidden revelation that upon reflection we should accept.
Published: November 4, 2013
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
Scholars today see many different strands in the story of revelation at Sinai, and the version I give represents just some of these. For a more nuanced view, see Marc Brettler, “’Fire, Cloud, and Deep Darkness’ (Deut 5:22): Deuteronomy’s Recasting of Revelation,” in The Significance of Sinai: Traditions About Sinai and Divine Revelation in Judaism and Christianity. Ed. George J. Brooke et al.. (Leiden: EJ Brill, 2008), and the sources cited therein.
The most powerful arguments of this sort are to be found in the section on “Sense-Certainty” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in the so-called “Private Language Argument” that runs through the first 250 sections or so of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is also relevant) and in Wilfred Sellars’ attack on “the myth of the given” in his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
Both stories are also nested in wider covenantal narratives. Ezra’s speech in Neh 9-10 contains practically all the elements of standard ancient covenants that scholars have long found in the Torah: a preamble explaining God’s right to obedience, terms of the covenant, and witnesses. The one thing that’s missing is rewards and punishments, although these may be implied by 9:25, 27-8 and 33-7.
Ezra characterizes the people as more than just captives but “slaves” under foreign rule: avadim anachnu (Ezra 9:9; Neh 9:36). In fact, he suggests that they are still slaves even after he has brought them home. It is not clear what he means by this, but he does take the return home to be an alleviation of that slavery, and in any case, his use of the word avadim (especially when one takes Neh 9:36 together with Neh 9:17-18) evokes the slavery of Egypt.
Isaiah 44;28 reads Cyrus as an agent of God. My thanks to Marc Brettler for pointing out the relevance of this text to my argument.
Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998)
Quoted in Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (NY: Schocken, 1965), p.64. See also the discussion of this and related texts in Frank Talmage, “Apples of Gold: The Inner Meaning of Sacred Texts in Medieval Judaism,” in Arthur Green, ed., Jewish Spirituality, (New York, 1986), vol. 1, especially 324-5.
See Fleischacker, Divine Teaching and the Way of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp.24-27.
See Fleischacker, Divine Teaching, pp.42-44.
Even on quite late datings of these books, Greek thought is unlikely to have penetrated Judea much, and the time-frame of the events that actually take place in Ezra-Nehemiah precedes the birth of Socrates.
Halivni himself sees proto-Rabbinic tendencies at work in the roughly contemporaneous books of Chronicles: Revelation Restored, pp.25-6.
Halivni, Restoration Restored, pp.26-7.
I suspect that most modern Orthodox Jews stick with Orthodox halakha largely for pragmatic reasons, especially in the face of the failure of progressive Jewish movements to sustain halakhic commitment in their laity
Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. GEM Anscombe, second edition, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958): “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
