50 Comments

1. Benny Hutman

   I cannot read arabic, so I cannot go back and read the original text of the Rambam in his commentary on the Mishna, but I am fairly certain that Rambam did not mean that it is article of dogma that every letter of our Torah scrolls are the same as the one written by Moshe. The Talmud declared that the even in the days of the amoraim they were no longer experts in “full” and “missing” words (i.e. whether or not a word has a vav as a vowel).

   It is of fundmental importance, according to the Rambam, that no human, be it Moshe or anyone else in later generations, made deliberate additions or subtractions to the text of the Original word of G-d (dictated to Moshe). Human error is inevitable, but deliberate human alteration is not. Rambam held that believing that humans deliberately changed the written text of the Torah undermined the whole entreprise of Torah Observance as doing what G-d wished (not to mention undermining the concept of drashot).

   I concede that at least one major Rishon (Rashi) held that under some limited circumstances that Sages were able to make deliberate changes to the text. That position would be presumably be apikorsus according to Rambam (although there might be a way out that is beyond the scope of this comment).

   Thus, contrary to your Father’s point (and I mean him no disrespect), believing that mistakes crept into the text does not violate the Rambam’s 8th ikar, but higher biblical criticism does.
2. Benny Hutman

   “On the other hand, once we are no longer bound by the absolutist Maimonidean adherence to a specific physical text then even the higher criticism poses no threat as it only is a commentary on the scrolls “that we posess today” and not a challenge to the Torah which we believe Moses actually received.”

   I think you are mistaken as to what higher criticism maintains. Higher criticism is an attempt to figure out (i.e. make educated guesses) as to how the Torah came to be in the first instance, not how it changed over time. The scholarly consensus in higher criticism is that there was no Torah given to Moshe to be written down for posterity. There were rather various oral traditions that were melded together centuries after the events were purported to have taken place. This is a belief about how the Torah was formed in the first instance and I think it is incompatible with being a Shomer Torah.
3. Hillel Field

   Even if one concedes to the existence of the most minute textual variations, how can we accept the validity of an oral tradition of Rabbinic derashot based on a text with doubtful authenticity (which may not represent “Divine will”)?
4. IH

   Speaking of Dr. Lawrence Schiffman and the subject of textual variation, on a show that aired on PBS about the recent Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in NY, Prof. Schiffman said:

   If we go and speak about biblical texts, we’ve got here biblical texts from a thousand years before our earliest otherwise known Hebrew biblical manuscripts which come from about the year 1000, which is literally a thousand years after the scrolls. But, if get into the real historical questions, we now have an understanding of what happened on the Jewish side between the Hebrew Bible and the Talmudic literature and on the Christian side between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that simply did not exist before these scrolls were found.

   And on pp. 37-8 of his Qumran and Jerusalem (Eerdmans, 2010) he writes:

   Among the most significant of the Qumran scrolls are certainly the biblical manuscripts. These documents will shed important new light on the history of the biblical text in Second Temple times.

   The last statement is itself much more important than meets the eye. In the early years of Qumran studies, it was thought that the biblical texts from Qumran would somehow illuminate the “original” text that emerged from ancient Israel. This entire notion has been proven wrong. It is now clear that the biblical text has a history of transmission, and that major parts of this history, which indeed testify to the place of Scripture in the Judaism of the post-biblical period, are to be understood from the scrolls. Indeed, we now know that many textual variants result not only from transmission, but from interpretation and linguistic updating, phenomena that, before the discovery of the scrolls, could not have been understood.
5. Benny Hutman

   That depends on what sort of drashot they are. Many drashot are not the cause of the law, in the sense that prior to the drasha the law was unknown. Rather in many cases, the law was known by tradition and the source in the written text was sought afterward.

   There some cases, however, where this is definitely an issue. However, the Sages had no choice but to work with the best manuscripts they had. Ezra Hasofer found three manuscripts from the first temple period and compared them against each other. He decided on the variations using the principle of “go after the majority” and created a master scroll. This process was done again and again throughout Jewish history. My understanding is that today there are 9 differences (all of one letter) between Ashkenazik, Sephardic and Yemenite scrolls, so I think that the process works pretty well.
6. LeftWingPharisee

   Sounds reasonable to me.
7. Tzur

   I find it puzzling that in this account of so-called “Higher Biblical Criticism,” the basic validity of the Wellhausen theory is taken for granted. But it has been severely challenged by many Biblical scholars, including secular academic ones. Why is there no discussion of that here?

   Just to give one particularly important example, Umberto Cassuto’s The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch (Heb., Torat HaTeudot, 1941; English translation 1961) should be the obligatory first stop in any consideration of this issue, certainly for Jewish scholars. Cassuto was for decades a professor at Hebrew University in Semitics and Biblical Studies. Simply consigning his work to oblivion is not acceptable. In his book cited above, in just over a hundred pages of elegant argumentation he demolishes systematically and I believe definitively the whole theory. His analysis is far more systematic and well-grounded on a thorough knowledge of ancient Near Eastern languages and literature (he was an internationally recognized specialist in those languages), the Torah text itself, and later Jewish religious and other literature, than any other critic of the Documentary Hypothesis. A good summary of his book is on the Wikipedia website under “Umberto Cassuto.” (In general, Wikipedia is not a good source on Jewish topics, but this is an exception.) But there have been other critics of the Documentary Hypothesis, such as Ivan Engnell, John van Seters, and Rolf Rendtorff, each pointing to one or another absurdity or problematic reasoning underlying the whole thing. Even advocates of the DH admit to rather self-contradictory aspects of the hypothesis, and also the antisemitic and dubiously evolutionary assumptions behind Wellhausen’s own thinking; they just think that with whatever modifications are necessary it still has no alternatives. Cassuto shows otherwise.

   It is telling that there is no published in-depth refutation of Cassuto by any of the “Higher Biblical Critics” promoting the Documentary Hypothesis. They obviously think that by ignoring it, they do not need to deal with its arguments at all. Yet they admit Cassuto’s high standing as a scholar and specifically as a scholar of the Biblical text, by including his book title in their footnotes and bibliographies, so as to give the semblance of thorough scholarship.
8. Placido Etzioni

   Nicely stated.
9. LeftWingPharisee

   Are any of the assertions of fact as stated by the Biblical Critics falsifiable? If so, how?
10. ruvie

    Tzur – Cassuto is still considered an apikorus based on the rambam and traditional judaism. He was arguing against an early form of biblical criticism which no longer exists (same like r’ hertz and r’ hoffman). MBS is not just different names of God in the text but includes archaeology, more text from A,N.E. plus linguistics…no one today holds from Welhausen and his proofs – time for many to stop attacking a straw man that doesn’t exist. Cassutto is out of date- major focus is proving Welhausen dating is incorrect (so what– no one dates it back to moshe at har sinai). no different than many other ideas in our religion – like the kuzari argument.
11. Rachel Barenblat

    This is thoroughly delightful.
12. ruvie

    any even better quote from an orthodox scholar:

    “The challenges raised by modern Biblical criticism to Orthodox Judaism cannot be countered merely with “Orthodox Biblical Scholarship” which seeks to disprove the claims of academic scholarship on its own terms. I do not believe that using the tools, methods and assumptions of modern critical scholarship it is possible to produce a compelling academic argument that it makes sense to conclude that the Torah is a unified document produced in the wildernesses of Sinai and Transjordan sometime in the final centuries of the Third Millennium BCE. It may be possible to argue that the Torah is more unified and more ancient than biblical scholars commonly assume, but this approach will never produce a conclusion that is in line with traditional understandings of Torah mi-Sinai.”
13. Ezzie Goldish

    (Previously posted on FB, but worthwhile to add here as well.)

    No time to read in full, but I think you have a few very weak points there and stretches. Rambam wrote well after the Rabbinic changes, so for him to say in the intro to Mishna “as we possess today” is post that and once there’s a more uniform set wording/lettering, and he’s requiring that people accept that as divine. It’s not as if he wasn’t aware of the previous textual differences, since they were already discussed, and he still made his statement. I think it’s extremely presumptuous to eliminate his statement as “untenable” as you have here.

    Separately, to assume he left out the words “as we possess today” in Mishneh Torah as an exclusion is a really big jump, and while it might fit nicely for those who wish it to, it is eminently more logical to presume he meant it in exactly the same way as he said it previously.
14. Tzur

    Ruvie, your argument against Cassuto seems a bit fevered. On the one hand, Cassuto is according to you an apikorus because he differs from traditional Judaism (how is not specified, but anyway … ), while on the other hand the Torah is a composite document according to Jews and non-Jews whom you endorse and who all sharply differ from traditional Judaism. So Cassuto is rejected by an argument that also rejects your own position itself.

    You also say that Cassuto need not be studied because the DH he refuted no longer is believed in anyway — which suggests that his refutation was correct after all and therefore should be studied to understand why the DH is no longer held.

    And you claim that Cassuto’s “major focus” was proving that Wellhausen’s dating was incorrect, but this itself is badly incorrect. It suggests that you have not read his book. His major focus was on the composition of the Pentateuch and why Wellhausen’s analysis of the supposed various documents comprising the Pentateuch was ignorant and erroneous, reflecting poor logic and no knowledge of Jewish religious literature. I should add, however, that although Cassuto served as an Orthodox rabbi in Italy before moving to the Yishuv and taking up a position at Hebrew University, he suggests at the end of his book, merely in passing and briefly, that it is possible that the Pentateuch was composed out of oral traditions in the time of Kings David and Solomon, so that put him offside with the Orthodox. Nevertheless, as I wrote, he devotes no space to any extensive justification of this suggestion, since the dating issue itself lies outside of the topic of the book. The focus of that was instead to show that the Torah books from Genesis through to Numbers was not composed of many documents, but was one document from the start. One can accept Cassuto’s arguments about the DH without accepting his aside on dating, because his arguments are not based on that and are entirely persuasive in themselves on secular, scholarly, linguistic, literary and other grounds. Those arguments are neither Orthodox nor non-Orthodox in substance.

    However, regrettably, I must demur from your claim that the DH is no longer advocated by so-called “Higher Biblical Critics.” It is still generally endorsed by Christian scholars, and by many Jewish ones too. Re-arrangements of the dating of the various “documents” or their contents by various scholars does not change the basic DH. It remains a question of the actual text-structure and composition of the Torah: is it based on one author/text, or many? Rabbi Yuter himself is advocating the DH in the article above, for example. Various Chumash commentaries still used by Liberal/Reform and Conservative congregations take it for granted. Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (1987) is a fervent often cited advocate. None of the above deal in any way with Cassuto’s refutations, by the way; they pretend through their silence on this that those refutations do not exist even where they cite him in their bibliographies. So Cassuto has not been refuted; he has only been ignored. That is not scholarship, it is blind partisanship.

    So we are not talking about a straw man that Cassuto has exposed as substanceless, but a supposed, still continuing “emperor” that Cassuto correctly describes as without armour or even clothes, whose dominion is merely dream fantasy. Cassuto is not “out of date.” Modern archaeology and linguistics have not changed his arguments. Have a look at the actual work before dismissing it.
15. Tzur

    An empty and self-refuting citation. Any scholar who wrote your quoted passage was not “an orthodox scholar.” Furthermore, the substance of the claim is incorrect. There is a good deal of serious Biblical scholarship, not necessarily Orthodox in itself, which nevertheless supports the view that at least the greater part of the Chumash (aside from a few editorial insertions) does indeed go back to the 13th century BCE. Have a look, for example, at Jacob Milgrom’s commentaries on Leviticus and Numbers. He examines the Hebrew of these books, and shows that many terms were archaic or were applied in ways no longer in use even by the early monarchical period; their usages however were entirely congruent with the usages found in Ugaritic texts from the 13th century BCE. Language changes over time, as you will know I am sure, and the terminologies and usages of one generation can seem out-of-date even by the next one. The brilliant linguist and Semiticist Moshe Held (z”l) once delivered a paper at a conference I attended in the 1970s that made the same point, and also showed through specific examples that the interpretations and explanations offered by Rashi in the 11th century CE of particular Hebrew words were confirmed by recent archaeological and linguistic findings from Ugarit and elsewhere in the 13th century BCE and earlier: this proved that there was indeed an authentic and accurate oral tradition retained by scribes down through the centuries and preserved in Rabbinic yeshivot in the Rhineland of medieval Europe, which Rashi hands on to us.
16. Tzur

    A further problem with the entire thesis that we have no Torah mi-Sinai, in whatever form, is that we are talking about a literate culture. There were scribes from the beginning of ancient Israel, and yet the DH requires us to believe that they never bothered to write down, preserve nor read any account of the Sinai revelation, the central account of the origin and identity of themselves, the core of their religion, for at the very least some 300 if not 400 years, The “J” document, the first of the four documents hypothesized, is said to have been written around 950 or so BCE. That non-existence of a Torah text, or very very late composition of any version of it, quite simply, is unbelievable.
17. Chavrusamatch

    agreed.

    would be interested what circumstances you would say that changes could be made to the text…
18. ruvie

    read the full post here and judge for yourself: http://morethodoxy.org/2013/07/25/should-we-stopping-worrying-and-learn-to-love-the-documentary-hypothesis-a-response-to-zev-farber/

    your proof on one item is really nice but proofs where rashi didn’t get right would destroy your hypothesis. and what exactly was that oral tradition and has any critical research been publish? the talmud itself can’t quote back more than a few generations (as oppose to what you may see elsewhere – i think in islam- where the quotes back 10-20 generations).
19. LeftWingPharisee

    The Vilna Gaon made several changes to Tanakh (but not the Chumash), but only after (in his words) 150 proofs.
20. ruvie

    it would seem that scribes as an elite group was around the time of ezra that followed the prophets. no doubt there were scribes but is there proof of a literate culture that read vs an oral culture way back then? i really don’t know. again, i am not in favor of jepd stuff per say – but we do not have great answers with evidence to the questions raised. we can’t take our biases and predilections and look back 3000 plus years and say we where the same people with the same tendencies.
21. LeftWingPharisee

    Anyone done an analysis of “I do not believe that using the tools, methods and assumptions of modern critical scholarship” from a Torah perspective? I’m allergic to accepting things from academia simply because they’ve been blessed by the credentialed.
22. LeftWingPharisee

    It seems to me that you are having trouble with uncertainty. What’s wrong with accepting that we will never know what happened 3000 years ago with scientific certainty (until Moshiach)?
23. Benny Hutman

    The Vilna Goan made changes to the Talmud, not Tanach (as far as I know).

    Also the Goan was making changes to get back to what he believed was the true text, not deliberating changing it to something new.
24. LeftWingPharisee

    I heard from reliable sources that he also made changes to Nakh’s text. But you are absolutely right, he was restoring the original, not creating new, Ch’V’Sh.

    My point was that transmission errors have occurred. That doesn’t invalidate the Rambam.
25. Benny Hutman

    Rashi appears (there is some controversy as to what Rashi means) to write in a couple of places that the “Sofrim” made alterations in pesukim (for example to prevent a verse from sounding coarse regarding G-d). I have heard it hypothesized (by Rabbi Jeremy Wieder) that according to Rashi there may have been a Mesora handed down that under certain circumstances (such as society sexualizing G-d) the Sanhedrin could change the text to alternate version.

    If the second version was also Moshe m’pi HaGevura, then it might not violate the Rambam’s 8th ikkar.
26. ruvie

    because the evidence mounts in the wrong direction. scientific certainty doesn’t exist in any other discipline except science so its a meaningless statement or thought process.
27. LeftWingPharisee

    I question the reliable inferences one can make from the “evidence”. Here’s an example. The Mesorah tells us where Kever Yosef is. However, modern scholarship tells us that an Arab Sheikh is buried there, which may well be true. Does that invalidate the Mesorah? No, because someone may have dug up Yosef haTzadik’s bones and buried a sheikh there; the “evidence” doesn’t prove or disprove anything.
28. ruvie

    thats not really mesorah. mental gymnastics doesn’t help your case.
29. LeftWingPharisee

    It’s not gymnastics. Modern Biblical scholarship puts out as statements of facts things that are not falsifiable; therefore, they are as much a question of bitachon as the 13 Articles. In other words, you’re arguing religion with religion, which is a pointless waste of time.
30. ruvie

    its theories that may match the most evidence – “facts” are dubious. of course many of those facts are falsifiable – evidence shows up and destroys previous theories or at least puts them in doubt. of course, interpreting the evidence is always subjective and depends on the intellect of the individual – but its all subject to peer review which is another way to say to get ahead you destroy another scholar’s proof (dog eat dog). if you keep blinders on you will never have all the options to choose for possible answers – to me that’s dishonest.
31. ruvie

    Tzur – you are correct on my dating focus (confused for a sec with R’ DZ Hoffman). but modern biblical scholarship has moved on and with different ideas which cassuto is not relevant too. i am not sure if he is been ignored but less relevant with mbs moving on from source criticism as it main focus. in the last 30 years many orthodox folks have become scholars in the MBS world – so Cassuto is well known. perhaps you have an article to point to.
32. LeftWingPharisee

    Here’s a legitimate use of science to question the Mesorah. The 4th Chapter of Shabbos lists the substances that “increase the heat”. One listed is sand. There is a difficulty here, because sand = silicon dioxide, which is a very stable compound which requires a lot of energy to decay. It is a valid question, because the statement “silicon dioxide is a stable compound” is a falsifiable statement. To question the Mesorah based on the latest models of linguistic theory, models that are not falsifiable, is a waste of time.
33. ruvie

    “Therefore, even if one were to say that small parts of it were not written by our master, Moses, this would not itself be heretical. This claim only becomes heresy at the point where one stops relating to the Torah as being totally of divine origin. Therefore, once people believe that the verses of the Torah stem entirely from a divine origin, there is no prohibition to expand that which our sages said about the final verses of the Torah to other verses, since the essential point that remains consistent throughout is that the Torah stems from the word of the “mouth” of God.”

    is this heresy?
34. Moh Oshiv

    The question is not about the accuracy of the Biblical text, on this there are many opinions, many of them within the framework of orthodox Judaism. The question here is which tools one uses to arrive at an opinion. When Chazal grappled with these same issues, such as contradictions in the text, the use of certain Divine names for different passages, and so on, and arrived at radically different conclusions than those of modern day scholars, it is this what makes these modern conclusions heretical. Further, Chazal did not doubt for one second that God actually dictated the Biblical text to Moshe, a text that according to all authorities is at least 99.5% identical to the text we have today, whereas Farber denies this fact, which makes his opinion heresy of the highest order.
35. Tzur

    Yet another oddity, shall we say, about the DH is that it claims a composition process about the Pentateuch that allegedly makes use of general reasonings applicable to all writings and all Scriptures, from which the Torah text cannot be exempted, but unfortunately for the thesis, there is no example of any other scriptural text in world religions that shows the alleged process. I.e., the uniqueness of the Torah text and its contents is supposedly undermined and even delegitimized and destroyed, by the use of a method relying on the uniqueness of the Torah text itself in comparative religious terms.

    A further absurdity: the interweaving of the various sources, in particular J, E, and P, the ones applying to Genesis through Numbers, in which each is retained verbatim but merely cut-and-pasted into a single text interleaving sentences and even just sentence clauses together, is supposedly due to the sanctity of each text for its own community. These texts are so revered that they cannot be paraphrased, and even seeming contradictions must be retained when putting a sentence or phrase of one after a sentence or phrase of another. In other words, the sanctity of each means that each must be ripped to pieces and the pieces patched together into a “better” version. The desecration of each source is because it is already sanctified in custom. This, of course, is a self-refuting nonsense. And, as mentioned, there is not a single example of such desecration of sanctified texts anywhere else in world religions.

    Yet another absurdity: although the supposed authors of the separate sources were intelligent enough to present a unified text without any seeming contradictions, the priests who brought all this together (according to Wellhausen), or the final Redactor(s) (according to other versions) were dumbbells who could not see a self-contradiction when it stared them in the face.

    A good example of the supposed contradictions in a Torah passage that DH advocates say shows separate sources is the account of the Flood in Genesis. Cassuto shows, however, that there are no contradictions in the narrative, and Gordon Wenham fleshes this out in his Genesis 1-15 (1987) commentary on Genesis by demonstrating that actually the entire narrative there follows a tight chiastic structure (i.e., verses and meanings being repeated and thus framing a central assertion, in ABCDCBA form). It is a single, very ingeniously constructed text, in which every word before the central point, “D” in the formula I gave, is echoed by a word after it, in reversed order. Chiastic style is found throughout the Torah and is a chief form of Biblical narrative. Wenham’s elegant analysis is also available in his “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative,” Vetus Testamentum, XXVIII, 3 (1975): 336-348, available on-line at http://www.scotthahn.com/download/attachment/3402. I recommend it to those unduly swayed by the DH.

    Finally, the earliest post-Joshua historical and prophetic writings already make reference to a Torah from Sinai, and there is much reference as well to its teachings in other books of the Tanakh. On this, see R.W.L. Moberly, The Old Testament of the Old Testament (1992).

    None of the comments offered here by ruvie change anything in what I wrote above, but rather show failure to have read Cassuto (and thus no credibility in assessing his work), ignorance of contemporary “Higher Biblical Criticism” (termed familiarly by ruvie as MBS, by which is meant “Modern Biblical Scholarship” for us common folk), and plenty of red herrings. As for the antiquity of written Hebrew and therefore of literacy at least by a scribal elite, I would suggest to ruvie that articles on the history of the Hebrew language and script be read, e.g., in the Ency. Judaica.
36. Tzur

    Scribes as an elite group existed from the beginnings of the Jewish people, certainly from the Mosaic period and in the land of Israel. The Torah account of Sinai insists on it, and we find writing mentioned as a matter of course in the earliest historical books following the Pentateuch. But we need not just rely on this. Indeed, the first syllabic script in the world, the ancestor of all syllabic scripts of Eurasia, was proto-Hebraic script, of which a graffiti in the Sinai has been dated to around 1,850 BCE. Canaanite cultures naturally made use of this, too. So of course the Jewish people in the land had it as well.
37. Tzur

    No, instances in which Rashi didn’t repeat the Ugaritic-related meanings of Hebrew words would not disprove anything, ruvie: again, wishful thinking. Rashi does not need to be 100% accurate in terms of Ugarit for us to conclude that he faithfully preserves an authentic oral tradition going back 2,300 years. I do not know the precise percentage of the explanations that Rashi gives for archaic Hebrew words that reflect the Mosaic period itself and echo Ugaritic forms, but in common sense 40% to 80%, or indeed any significant percentage at all, is sufficient to prove the existence of this authentic chain, which cannot be a matter of coincidence when it is repeated again and again as Moshe Held showed.

    However, you are at least right that oral traditions may indeed be at least as accurate as, or even more accurate than, frequently recopied written ones over periods of thousands of years, at least in cultures with a strong emphasis on oral narrative and rote memorization such as we find in ancient Jewish culture. Another good example is that of the Vedas, ritual hymns which were composed, it is generally thought, between 1,500 and 900 BCE. The various collections of Vedas represent the work of different but related Brahminical priestly groups, and it is possible to determine dialectical differences between early and late hymns and different regional groups with great precision. Nevertheless, the Vedas were not written down until the modern period, despite the fact that for very many centuries the archaic Sanskritic texts were generally not fully understood by those who repeated the ritual hymns in ceremonies. The key to this accuracy is a Brahminical practice we find again amongst the ancient Hebraic scribes, and retained right up to the Talmudic period, namely, constant recitation of an oral tradition in groups, so that the wording is exactly known, and any deviation from it is instantly recognized and corrected. The Talmudic period spoke of Tannaim, students who were highly accomplished in oral memory and recitation, and who could repeat back verbatim the lectures and explanations given by their rabbinic masters so that the students could go over the material again and again.
38. Tzur

    This especially applies to “Higher Biblical Criticism,” I think. It is a remarkable thing about this entire discipline, pursued chiefly in Christian seminaries in former times but now also in secular universities, that all of its key terms for Biblical Israel and its religion are calculated to draw a sharp antithesis between Judaism/Jews and Biblical Israel. The terms for God, the religion itself, the people who follow it, the land they live in and even the Scripture they possess, are made to be different from the Jewish ones, archaizing and de-Judaizing pre-Exilic Israel. This is too general and consistent to be a coincidence. It extends to wilful anachronisms to acchieve its effect, but often excuses itself as necessitated by avoiding anachronisms. So we are told that the God of ancient Israel is really a national god like unto Baal and Ashtarot, called “Yahweh” despite the explicit prohibition on the casual use of this term in the Mosaic Torah. The religion is “Israelite religion,” which is allegedly altogether different from “Judaism” due to its full or quasi-polytheism or genial “henotheism,” not the later, post-Exilic monotheistic Judaism with its supposedly fierce, punitive and “legalistic” God. The people who follow this pre-Exilic religion are “Israelites” (comparable, it is often said, to contemporary Arab Bedouin tribalists): they are emphatically not “Jews” (for, it is said, they only take over the religion after the Exile). The land these “Israelites” or “Hebrews” live in is “Canaan” or “Palestine,” not “the land of Israel” as in Biblical texts and certainly not “Judea” or “Israel” unless talking about the specific kingdoms; the scripture they develop is the “Old Testament” which in any case is certainly not the “Law” (i.e., “Teaching” or Torah) of “later Judaism.”

    So we see that if you want to accept “Higher Biblical Criticism” you are obliged by the basic terminology of the discipline to presume that the God, the religion, the people, the land, and the Scriptures of Biblical Israel are all radically different from “later Judaism” and what Jews have made of it. In a word, this is anti-Judaism in action, a kidnapping of their sources and appropriation of them for non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish goals. This does not mean that all or even most scholars working in this field are antisemites per se or at the least Judeophobes, but it does mean that what frames the whole discipline of “Higher Biblical Criticism” and shapes its discourse, willy-nilly, is Judeophobia. This has been a chief motivation from the very beginning, whether from a Christian desire to appropriate the “prophetic” strand in pre-Exilic Judaism from the Jews and deny it to “later Judaism,” to claim it as a kind of proto-Christianity, or from a secular motivation (beginning with Spinoza even more than with Hobbes) to undermine the influence and legitimacy of the Bible in Western culture and of Judaism as a religious heritage in the modern world. As mentioned already, Wellhausen himself is a relevant case in point, and exemplifies precisely these motivations.

    Having said all that, the positive fruits of modern Biblical studies must also be granted, and the work of scholars of good will. There is much that can be learned from them.
39. LeftWingPharisee

    It can be an excellent source of shylas and kashas. However, when used as a battering ram against the 13 Articles, no, it crumbles into dust.
40. ruvie

    Tzur – i don’t think you have proven that rashi had an oral tradition going back 2,300 years on ugaritic meanings- perhaps old french. if so i would expect some scholarly articles on your theory – perhaps a link or two to show someone has taken your subject seriously? i don’t see any corroboration from people in the talmud who can memorize – usually called “reciters” who memorized whole sets of misnah and tosefta(probably other items as well) for the academy and was the official version of said academy. but our issue was cassuto – was it not?
41. ruvie

    i am talking about scribes as a class of folks that acted as leaders like ezra – assume there was always scribes but not on the level of ezra and they were post prophets (earlier scribes were not political and leaders but secondary players) which later led to the rabbis – and rabbinic judaism.
42. ruvie

    my point originally about cassuto was that his ideas post being rabbi may have forced him to leave the rabbinate and is considered heretical (eventhough he believed in an united text).

    Cassuto proposed an alternative critical theory – an oral tradition of epic poetry provided the raw material that was later woven into a unitary and artistic text of the chumash. in the end this differs from torah misinai and a text dictated word for word by hashem to moshe given that this composition is centuries later.

    that is one of the reasons why orthodoxy does not study Cassuto as oppose to r’ hoffman – although i think there is much value in Cassuto especially in his knowledge of ancient languages and comparative literature.

    MBS is a discipline that is subject to peer review (not a science where one can replicate experiments). the fact that today there are many orthodox scholars in the field speaks volumes to its general acceptance. that doesn’t mean all scholarship is correct – like many disciplines there is much garbage and shoddy speculation. it doesn’t mean the whole discipline is false. today no one believes in j,e,p and d –or Welhausen – its much more complicated than that with literary criticism, philology, archeololgy and other tools and methodologies. if it doesn’t bother you – then ignore it – that works for many too. but to this layman (neither a rabbi, educator, or scholar) it seems that orthodoxy has failed to offer compelling answers to the same questions with some proofs.
43. Tzur

    Please inform Rabbi Yuter that “today no one believes in j,e,p and d –or Welhausen” (sic).
44. Vincent Calabrese

    The documentary hypothesis is more than just Wellhausen’s formulation. It’s true that few if any endorse the hypothesis in the form that he put it. But most Biblical scholars still accept *some* form of the DH, in that they believe the Torah to be an product of the editing-together of several originally-independent source documents.

    Though, of course there are some scholars who endorse a supplementary hypothesis (one original work comprising most of the Torah to which some smaller parts were added) and some who favour a fragmentary hypothesis (the Torah is the result of the accretion of many smaller units rather than a few large, independent documents).

    All I know of Cassuto is what I’ve read on the Wikipedia page, but I wasn’t partucularly impressed (for example the assertion that the Sh’ma “states bluntly that “Yahweh” and “Elohim” are One”. It does no such thing. It doesn’t say ‘YHVH v’elohim echad hem’ or ‘YHVH hu ha-elohim’ or anything like that–it says that YHVH is ‘our God’.)
45. Tzur

    Elohei refers to a plural noun, i.e., Elohim (in the construct form “Elohim of …”, Elohei), which of course is understood from earliest times amongst the Jews to mean “God” in the singular so it takes a singular verb, that is to say, all the elementary powers of the universe other peoples worship as “gods” are merely functional expressions of the one God who created and sustains the universe. Eloheinu means “our God.” The Shema declares that Elohim, God, is worshipped by us and known through personal encounter as YHVH, otherwise referred to as Adonai, our Lord, the God of history. Both are the same One God, the Shema explicitly states. It is one of the crucial failings of the Wellhausen hypothesis that the profound universalism of the message of the Shema, repeated in every Torah reference to YHVH Elohim, is effectively denied and cancelled. The God of the natural world, the Creator of the universe, who is behind all the aspects and powers of nature known in one way or another by all peoples and cultures, is identical to the personal God encountered in history in the Mt. Sinai revelation, in prayer and prophetic visions, and in the ultimate direction of events. To splinter YHVH off into the so-called Jahwist source, utterly unconnected per se to the so-called Elohist source, is to cut at the root of Biblical religion and to obscure, fatally, its universalism and profundity. Cassuto points this out, and he is right. He also points out that Jewish religious literature down through the ages has made use of each term appropriately, and, by using them together, makes a significant statement about Judaism as a whole.
46. daized79

    It makes total sense that when he says as we have it today it doesn’t mean every single word, but generally. Farber is so far off this discussion that I don’t get why were’s even having it. Of course it’s heresy. He’s not, like Halivni, telling us that moshe got a tora but it was corrupted. Farber’s saying he never got a tora, he had some prophecy and some later people had some more prophecy and the Exodus never happened.
47. e. pruzhaner

    Putting aside the Rambam, orthodox Jews consider the Talmud to be authoritative. It would thus be relevant to cite the Gemara (Sanhedrin 99):

    תניא אידך כי דבר ה’ בזה, זה האומר אין תורה מן השמים ואפילו אמר כל התורה כולה מן השמים חוץ מפסוק זה שלא אמרו הקדוש ברוך הוא אלא משה מפי עצמו זהו כי דבר ה’ בזה ואפילו אמר כל התורה כולה מן השמים חוץ מדקדוק זה מקל וחומר זה מגזרה שוה זו זה הוא כי דבר ה’ בזה…ת”ר והנפש אשר תעשה ביד רמה זה מנשה בן חזקיה שהיה יושב ודורש בהגדות של דופי אמר וכי לא היה לו למשה לכתוב אלא ואחות לוטן תמנע ותמנע היתה פלגש לאליפז וילך ראובן בימי קציר חטים וימצא דודאים בשדה, יצאה ב”ק ואמרה לו תשב באחיך תדבר בבן אמך תתן דופי אלה עשית והחרשתי דמית היות אהיה כמוך אוכיחך ואערכה לעיניך

    Another [Baraitha] taught: Because he hath despised the word of the Lord — this refers to him who maintains that the Torah is not from Heaven. And even if he asserts that the whole Torah is from Heaven, excepting a particular verse, which [he maintains] was not uttered by God but by Moses himself, he is included in ‘because he hath despised the word of the Lord.’ And even if he admits that the whole Torah is from Heaven, excepting a single point, a particular ad majus deduction or a certain gezerah shawah, — he is still included in ‘because he hath despised the word of the Lord’.

    …Our Rabbis taught: But the soul that doeth aught presumptuously: this refers to Manasseh the Son of Hezekiah, who examined [Biblical] narratives to prove them worthless. Thus, he jeered, had Moses nothing to write but, And Lotan’s sister was Timna, And Timna was concubine to Eliphaz, And Reuben went in the days of the wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field…
48. Ya'aqov HaDani/James Walker

    I would like to briefly note that this entire article focused on Textual Criticism of the manuscript history of the Torah, and not actual Higher Criticism (which is a hypothetical way of explaining the *origins* of the Torah in a way that assumes prophesy is impossible and that various committees of Israelite storytellers conspired to rewrite mythology and package it as a national revelation).

    This merging of two completely different fields of inquiry is a mistake made by the Religious Left (progressive Judaism included), as well as the extreme Religious Right. You can seek the most accurate text of any document – ancient or modern, sacred or not – without making any claims about its origins or authorship. A kethiv male’ or kethiv Haser spelling of the same word, for example, is a matter of consulting tangible artifacts (in our case, ancient codices and sifrei Torah). There is no tangible evidence, however, of any of the JEPD documents – they are merely hypothetical divisions, chosen based on the theological, ideological, and literary assumptions of Wellhausen and his students.

    Just as we don’t view Christian or Islamic assumptions about prophecy and the character of the people of Israel as being serious “academic challenges” to the validity of the Torah, neither should we take secular humanist ideological premises as somehow more “realistic”.

    Full disclosure, I’m a Qaraite.
49. Kevin McElroy

    I absolutely agree with you, Benny Hutman. Higher Criticism is completely incompatible with a believer in the divine origin of the Torah.
50. Kevin McElroy

    “Yet they admit Cassuto’s high standing as a scholar and specifically as a scholar of the Biblical text, by including his book title in their footnotes and bibliographies, so as to give the semblance of thorough scholarship.”

    Absolutely correct, Tzur. I was reading some scholarship by a well-known scholar, and Cassuto is only mentioned in a footnote. No one can really challenge his scholarship because it would do them no good. He has brought down a lot of the lore of the Documentary Hypothesis. There is a solution that some scholars have chosen since his book, and that is redesign the theory to remove some of the contradictions which Cassuto so elegantly pointed out. There are many other questions that should be posed against the hypothesis, but Cassuto couldn’t have done it in his time.

    I believe in a divine Torah given to Moshe at Mt. Sinai, but it has been altered (intentionally and unintentionally). Cassuto helped solidify my belief in the divine Torah despite the oppression by the so-called “higher criticism” folks at the university. More people need to challenge this theory.