Torah MiSinai and Biblical Criticism: Rising to the Full Challenge

Here are two examples from Spinoza: 

“The author of the Pentateuch is almost universally supposed to have been Moses. Aben Ezra a man of enlightened intelligence and no small learning who was the first so far as I know to treat of this opinion dared not express his meaning openly but confined himself to dark hints…”

“The whole of the book of Moses was written at full length on the circumference of a single altar ( Deuteronomy 27 and Joshua 8 ) which later according to the rabbis consisted if twelve stones: therefore the book of Moses must have been of far less extent than the Pentateuch.”

Scholars such as Umberto Cassuto offered dramatically different suggestions for how the Torah was written, while others like Yechezkel Kaufman tweaked the theory to avoid Wellhausen’s antagonistic (Christian) bias against law and ritual.

Early alternative versions of parts of the Torah have been found in Qumran. Additionally, the Samaritan Pentateuch and Greek Septuagint each represent variant versions of the Torah, canonized by different communities (the former by the Samaritan community, the latter originally by Hellenistic Jews and later by the Greek Orthodox church.) Our Masoretic text is based upon the Aleppo Codex of Ben Asher (ca. 10^th century CE).

See: Louis Jacobs, We Have Reason to Believe (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995), p. 15.

Brian Klug, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951 (ed. James C Klagge & Alfred Nordmann; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 44.

It is worth noting that Amit Kula, in his book Existential or Non-Essential [Hebrew], also makes use of Wittgenstein in discussing revelation and history.

Klug emphasizes how Wittgenstein’s own rational views were modified over time and how towards the end he came to give religion a very significant role in his own life.

The objection might be raised that no similar formulation is used in the Talmud of the Sinai experience. But the rabbis have agreed that certain principles apply to Torah that take it out of a scientific context. For example the idea that there is no fixed chronological order to the text (TB Sanhedrin 49b etc.) shows that interpreting Torah and creativity may not be mutually exclusive within defined parameters.