Towards the Timeless Meaning of Torah: Orientation Matters

For the past twenty-five years, I have resisted integrating the study of academic Bible into my own learning and teaching of Chumash (Pentateuch/Torah). While I do utilize academic studies to illuminate the meaning of particular biblical words, phrases, and concepts within their ancient Near Eastern context, I consciously refrain from breaking down the texts of the Chumash into discrete authorship and/or dating, and from emending the text in any way.

This is not a casual but a deliberate choice, born out of a belief in the divine authorship of the Torah. I regard the unified Torah text as a living testament of divine communication, and it is that sense of sacred transmission that guides my engagement with it. Indeed, I consider it vital to preserve revelation and divine authority as the central orientation which underlies Torah learning and teaching.

I understand the notion of orientation as the primary goal or intention a person brings when they study or teach a subject. As Pamela Grossman, in her essay about teaching secular literature, describes the concept:

More than a casual attitude towards the subject matter, an orientation towards literature represents a basic organizing framework for knowledge about literature.^[1]

The orientation of academic Bible study, by and large, is the historicization of Torah — viewing it exclusively as a product of its time, shaped by the cultural, political, and religious forces of Israel, as part of the ancient Near East. My own orientation, however, is to seek and uncover timeless meaning in the Torah, to hear the ongoing voice of divine instruction in its words, and to guide my students in doing the same.

Admittedly, I do not feel the same about the Talmud. I study it using academic perspectives thoroughly and appreciatively— dissecting passages, tracing editorial layers, and splicing and re-ordering comfortably. And while I remain halakhically beholden to traditional interpretations of the Talmud, I enjoy what I experience as a different kind of depth by studying Talmud in this way.

Applying this same approach to Torah, however, feels qualitatively different.

The Talmud represents a multi-generational record of human beings’ attempts to understand, interpret, and apply the word of God. It is a record of sacred struggle and interpretive dialogue. The Torah, by contrast, is itself God’s word. This distinction carries profound implications for how one approaches each text, both intellectually and spiritually.

Undoubtedly, some individuals who are deeply familiar with and actively engage in the academic study of Bible, maintain profound religious reverence for Torah, Tanakh, and Jewish law. Throughout Jewish history, numerous Torah scholars have wrestled on a smaller scale with questions regarding the transmission of Torah, with some even floating the possibility that select verses in the Torah were conveyed through prophets other than Moshe.

Following their lead, some contemporary religious thinkers have sought ways to expand this approach: to faithfully affirm the divine origin of Torah while also accepting more pervasive elements of academic source criticism.^[2] These sincere efforts may provide a religious lifeline for those who believe that both traditional and academic approaches contain a kernel of truth.

My concern, however, ultimately lies not primarily with whether faith and academic study can be made to coexist in theory, but rather with the experiential and spiritual frameworks that each approach cultivates. An individual’s orientation to the text impacts their experiences, assumptions, and has further consequences as well.

I fear that for most people (myself included), the consequences of academic and traditional orientations to Biblical studies cannot be seamlessly reconciled. I am reminded of the Gemara’s phrase נתפרדה החבילה — “the bundle has come apart.^[3]” Once the orientation of historicization takes hold, the tightly bound bundle of reverence, revelation, and timeless instruction risks unraveling.