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הידע של אלוהים לא יכול להיות מושגת על ידי המבקשים אותו, אבל רק אלה המבקשים יכול למצוא אותו

OUR DIALOGUE WITH THE DIVINE


Who wrote the Torah? A question that, even if I don't want to think about it, it still bothers me subliminally...

I suppose I'll never really find out, as no one has so far, no matter how long and deep one studies it and researches it... it all ends up as an act of faith, or does it?

I'm posting here a couple of articles by journalist (and thus not an "expert") Elon Gilad, which briefly summarise the heart of the matter in simple terms. Then I finish off with a simpathetic word by Reb Jeff.

Who Wrote the Torah?
For thousands of years people believed that the five books of the Pentateuch were written by Moses. But it couldn't have been, academics say.

by Elon Gilad, Haaretz, 22 Oct , 2014

For thousands of years people believed that the five books of the Pentateuch were written by Moses. The Talmud even explicitly says so. But it couldn't have been, academics say.

Even a cursory read of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, shows that the Torah could not have been written by a single person – because of differences in style, language and contradiction in the texts, among other things. Scholars studying the bible in Germany during the 18th and 19th centuries concluded that it was a composite work by editors tying together earlier texts written by very different authors.

This conclusion is based on four characteristics recurring in the Torah. (1) The language used in different sections differs widely. (2) Varying ideology. (3) Contradictions in the narrative. (4) The text is strangely repetitive in part, for no obvious reason, indicating that two versions of a single story were included.

Let's start with the indications that the authors of the Torah were a multitude of people from different eras, not one person; then we can consider who these writers were. Aptly, we can begin with examples from Genesis.

In the name of God

The best example of changing language is in the name of God.

The Bible begins with the line “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
Throughout the first account of creation, God is called Elohim. But starting in Genesis 2:4, a second and different account of creation begins - in which God is called Yahweh.

The two accounts also vary in ideology. Elohim in the first account of creation was transcendent - creating the world by his will alone, without interacting with mankind. Yahweh in the second account of creation is immanent, almost human: He talks with Adam and performs surgery on him too. Evidently these two sharply different visions of God were conceived by different men.

In further proof of differential authorship, the accounts of creation contradict one another. In the first, Elohim creates the animals on Thursday and then creates man and woman on Friday - together. In the second account, Yahweh creates man, then the animals, and only after failing to find a partner for man among them does he create woman out of man’s rib. These strikingly different stories had to be written by different people.

Say what? And say it again

The repetition and contradictions thus start with Genesis. Another case is Noah’s Ark.

Unlike the case of creation, the redactor didn’t put the two accounts of Noah and the flood side by side. The two accounts are interwoven, as we see from the morphing name of God, which switches back and forth between Elohim and Yahweh from passage to passage. But the merger of the two stories is not seamless otherwise too.

For one, Noah loads the animals onto the Ark twice: "There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as Elohim had commanded Noah"״ (Genesis 7:9); and then again just a few passages later "And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life" (Genesis 7:15).

Even more strikingly, perhaps, we are told twice that the flood covered the earth: "And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters" (7:18) followed by "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered." (7:19)

If it isn't concrete evidence that there was more than one writer, it's still an impressively smoking gun.

Meet the writers: The Yahwist, the Elohist, priests, and the Deuteronomist

Ultimately the German scholars, led by Julius Wellhausen, came up with "the Documentary Hypothesis," postulating that the Pentateuch was compiled from of four earlier books long lost in time, which were merged by an editor dubbed the Redactor. The scholars gave each of these four books (or writers) a name: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly writers, and the Deuteronomist.

The Yahwist was characterized by using the Tetragrammaton ("Yahweh") as the name of God. The Elohist writers, who called God "Elohim", were Israelite priests. The Priestly writers were evidently temple priests (Judeans) serving in Solomon's Temple and their decedents, who dwelled on rite and sacrifice, and evidently engaged in battles over their status as well. And last but not least, "the Deuteronomist" is called so because he wrote Deuteronomy.

Incidentally, the first account of creation was evidently written by a Priestly source, the second by a Yahwist.

Scholars bitterly disagree over who wrote what and which texts are truly ancient and which were added later, as certainly much of the biblical sources surely consist of layers of additions and were not completely written by one single person. Yet there is much we can say about the writers of the Torah, even if we can’t name them.

The Elohist texts, the oldest in the bible

The background for the writing of the Bible is the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in the late 8th century BCE.

Israel and Judah were related Iron Age kingdoms whose residents practiced a sort of early Judaism, which was still a far cry from the rigid monotheistic religion we know today.

Archaeology tells us that the Kingdom of Israel was the greater regional power, while Judah was a backwater vassal kingdom. This changed when the Assyrians destroyed Israel in 722 BCE. Following Israel's subjection, many of the Israelite elite moved to the Judean capital - Jerusalem. These Israelite refugees brought their sacred texts with them: the Elohist texts, which are probably the oldest in the Torah.

These texts were probably written by court scribes in Semairah, the capital of the Kingdom of Israel, or by priests in one of the kingdom's important cultic sites such as Shilo. The Elohist source focuses on locations in the Kingdom of Israel and on the Israelite heroes Moses and Jacob, whom the Israelites saw as their ancestors. (It is not known whether the ancient Judeans also thought Moses and Jacob were their forefathers, but after the "Israelization" of Judah, they probably "adopted" their patriarchy too.)

With this influx of culture coming in from the Kingdom of Israel, the Judean priestly cast had to come up with their own narrative about Judah with its own mythical leaders and traditions. This is where the Yahwist source comes from, though at least some may have been written by Judean scribes before the destruction of the kingdom of Israel.

Whatever the case, it was shortly after this destruction that the two texts, the Yahwist and the Elohist, were merged by scribes into a single book.

The man who wrote Deuteronomy

The next portion of the Torah to be written is Deuteronomy, and this time we have a lot more information on its author. We even know his name: Shaphan (though some think the author was the prophet Jeremiah).

This scribe may have single-handedly changed the entire course of history by leading the king to profoundly change Jewish worship.

While the Yahwist-Elohic scripts take no issue with polytheism and people worshiping God or even several gods in temples and other cultic sites throughout the land, the ideology of Deuteronomy is clearly one God, one temple. Its composition evidently coincides with the unification of the Judaic cult and exclusion of other gods, which happened during the reign of King Josiah starting in 622 BCE.

The account, possibly written by Shaphan himself, goes as follows: "And Shaphan the scribe shewed the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king. And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.” (2 Kings 22:10-11)

Scholars generally agree that this "book of the law" was an early version of Deuteronomy. Shaphan claimed that the book had been found in the Temple while the priests were cleaning up the storeroom.
Josiah thereupon ordered sweeping religious reforms: “Go ye, enquire of the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found: for great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us.” (22:13)

Josiah's reforms centralized the Jewish cult in Jerusalem and banned its practice anywhere else. It created a powerful oligarchy of temple priests, which took over and became the cultural elite of Judah from then on.

The Priestly source

It is these Judean temple priests (and their descendents) who are the Priestly Source.
Theirs is not only by far the largest portion of the bible but was the last added – which doesn't mean the texts were added to the "end". For example, the first account of creation that opens the bible was written by these priests.

Possibly the priests felt uncomfortable erasing ancient texts that came before theirs. They may have feared a force would punish them for editing of early text. On the other hand, they didn’t seem to have a problem adding to the text.

While the Israelite priests saw themselves as descendants of the great Moses, the temple priests believed they descended from Zadok, the first High Priest to serve in King Solomon's Temple. The temple priests honored Elohist text as well as references to Moses, and would not have changed them – but they could justify their primacy over the Israelite priests by writing that Zadok’s lineage was descended from Aaron, Moses’ big brother and that God commanded that only they may give sacrifices to God.

Put otherwise, the temple priests – the "priestly writer" – are suspected of adding Aaron to the story of Moses in order to legitimize their standing in society.

Anyway, it was they who wrote all those laws in Leviticus. It was they who wrote most of the Bible.
The earliest parts of this priestly writing were carried out in the final decades of the Kingdom of Judah, but most would be written during the exile in Babylonia, after Judah's destruction in 586 BCE. These temple priests led the Jews in their exile and continued to write in Babylon. Some even believe that Judaism as we know it today was forged in the crucible of the Babylonian exile.

In any case, when Cyrus the Great decreed that the Jews could return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple in 538 BCE, he authorized a decedent of these temple priests, Ezra, to function as the returnees’ leader.

Ezra is called a scribe, a writer of books, and likely wrote at least some parts of the Priestly Source. He is also a good candidate for the Redactor, who edited the whole library preserved during the exile into a single book, though some further edits and changes evidently took place later as well.

Nehemiah, also a Jewish leader and contemporary of Ezra, seems to imply that at least some of the "book of the law of Moses" read to the people by Ezra on Rosh Hashanah upon the return from Babylonia was new: "And they found written in the law which the Lord had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast of the seventh month."

There are some parallels between this story of the people learning about sukkot ("booths") and the discovery of Deuteronomy, discussed above. In the first case they learned that they should celebrate Passover for the first time; now in the case of Nehemiah and Ezra, they are told to celebrate Sukkot. Whether or not these holidays existed before the writings of Ezra and Deuteronomy is unknown.

Over the years the Bible continued to change, albeit slightly. Several versions were in circulation before the text was canonized in what we call the Masoretic Text. However, it seems likely that by the time of the Second Temple, 6TH century BCE – 1ST century CE, much of the Torah existed in very much the form we know today.

Haaretz Contributor


Did Moses Really Write the Torah?
Jewish tradition says that God dictated the Ten Commandments and also the Torah to Moses atop Mt. Sinai - but actually, the bible says no such thing.

by Elon Gilad, Haaretz, 21 May , 2015

On the sixth day of Sivan 6, some 3,500 years ago, Moses climbed up Mount Sinai. During his 40-day stay on the mountain, according to popular Jewish tradition, God dictated to him not only the Ten Commandments but the whole Torah, as well as the Oral Law.

Many believe that Moses not only "received" but even wrote the Pentateuch – the five books of Torah – on Mt Sinai.

Descriptions of Moses going up Mt. Sinai (e.g., Exodus 19, Exodus 24, Deuteronomy 4) say that he received the Ten Commandments there (Exodus 31:18 – "He gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God"). But nowhere does it say that he wrote a book on the mountain or came down with one.

There is mention of Moses receiving "torah", which in ancient Hebrew simply meant "law", throughout Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy - but this seems not to have been an event confined to Mt. Sinai, rather a process that continued throughout the 40 years the Israelites wandered the desert.

So Moses may well have "received" the Torah on Mt. Sinai. But how did people gain the impression that he wrote the texts himself?

Some sections of the Torah do explicitly say they were written by Moses (e.g., Deuteronomy 31:22: "Moses therefore wrote this song the same day, and taught it the children of Israel"). That might be taken as odd, if he wrote the whole thing.

Also, the entire story of Moses is narrated from third-person omniscient perspective, treating him just like the rest of the characters. That too suggests that Moses was not the author. Take for example the verse: “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3). (Also, by definition, if he was the meekest man in the world, he wouldn't have written that – he would have been too modest.)

And then Moses died

The rabbis of the Talmudic era did believe that, divinely inspired, Moses wrote the Torah himself - up to the last eight verses. The Talmud preserves a rabbinical dispute about whether Moses wrote those last verses describing Moses’ death, burial and legacy - or whether they were written by his successor, Joshua (tractate Bava Batra, 14b-15a).

Come the Middle Ages, the rabbis noticed more difficulties. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra wrote in his 12th-century Bible commentary that 12 verses in the Torah are anachronistic and seem to indicate that they were written after the time of Moses. For example, when Moses was alive, the Canaanites still controlled the Holy Land. So the verse ending with “And the Canaanite was then in the land” (Genesis 12:6) ostensibly could not have been written by Moses, but by someone who lived after the Israelites took over Canaan, that is, after Moses died.

In his commentary on this verse, Ibn Ezra wrote, “It holds a secret of which the wise man should be silent” (he doesn't tell us what the secret is, but it may be that Moses seems not to have written all of the Torah).

Enter Spinoza

Indeed scholars remained silent on the topic for centuries, until in the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza read Ibn Ezra’s commentary – and could remain silent no more. In his Theological-Political Treatise (1670), Spinoza elaborated on the topic and concluded that Moses could not possibly have written the entire Pentateuch. His English contemporary Thomas Hobbes came to the same conclusions, without Ibn Ezra's help.

A century later, a French professor of medicine named Jean Astruc set out to prove the two heretics wrong, using the newly-emerging science of textual criticism. With the help of techniques that had, up to then, been applied only to Latin and Greek classics, he studied the Torah and came to the conclusion that Moses compiled the Book of Genesis by putting together two older texts. He published these findings anonymously in 1753.

Using similar techniques, in 1805 Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, a German Bible scholar, published a study arguing that Deuteronomy had been written by a different author or authors from the rest of the Torah.

Half a century later, in 1853, Hermann Hupfeld, an Oriental studies scholar, showed that what Astruc identified as two sources was apparently three.

All these studies were consolidated towards the end of the 19th century by Julius Wellhausen, another German biblical scholar. His coherent theory is, with some alterations, the consensus view of the Torah’s authorship, which is accepted by an overwhelming majority of Bible scholars today.

The different parts of the Torah were written by priests and scribes in the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah during the First Temple period and the Babylonian Exile (9th to 6th centuries BCE). These parts were stitched together by Ezra the Scribe to create a single historic narrative and legal code for the returning exiles. (Ezra was the priest appointed by the Persian overlords to lead the Jews in Judea.)

Judea at the time was a province of Persia, which ruled that the Holy Land should be administered by the rules and laws stated in this authoritative collection compiled by Ezra. The Second Temple officials concurred.

The rise of the author

So it seems that Moses did not write the book after all. The reason Jews came to think so nonetheless was the outcome of two historical processes during the Second Temple period.

The first change was conceptual: Ancient societies had a different grasp of books than we do.

We place emphasis on authors and exhibit their names on the front cover. Not so in ancient Babylon and Egypt: Most books had no specific author. They were created by successive generations of scribes and their authority drew from their antiquity, not from the supposed writer.

It was only once Judea fell under Greek culture that a book market began to develop and the author began to be of importance. The first Hebrew book to state clearly who its author was is the Wisdom of Sirach, written in the beginning of the second century BCE by a Jewish scribe named Ben Sira, well after the Greek conquest.

Thus an identity for the writer of the Pentateuch became sought. But how did the misunderstanding that it was Moses arose? That brings us to the second change – a semantic one.

Everywhere in the bible where it says "hatorah" – it means "the law." There is one exception, in the Book of Nehemiah, where he mentions "hatorah" – referring to the Pentateuch: “And Ezra the priest brought the Torah before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month” (Nehemiah 8:2).

This is the first known use of "hatorah" to mean "the Pentateuch" as opposed to "the law". The practice caught on. Thus, apparently, later generations of rabbis misread the passages in the Torah where Moses received "hatorah" as meaning Moses received not "the law" but "the Pentateuch."

Haaretz Contributor

👉After all this, I'd like to finish off with a resolutory word from Jeff Goldwasser...


by Reb Jeff

Did Moses write the Torah? Just ask the Torah itself. In [a specific] Torah portion (Vayelech) it says:

"Moses wrote down this Torah and gave it to the priests, sons of Levi, who carried the Ark of the Covenant of Adonai, and to all the elders of Israel" (Deuteronomy 31:9).

Doesn't that close the case? The Torah says that Moses wrote the Torah. Who or what would know better?

Okay, I admit it. That's not such a good argument. According to the text of Moby Dick, the novel was written by a fellow named Ishmael, not by Herman Melville. The Torah may not be the irrefutable source of information about the authorship of the Torah.

What makes the matter even more complicated is this: The word "Torah" may not mean the Torah, as we understand it, when it appears in the Torah. Based on etymology and usage in the Torah, the word, תורה (Torah), means something like "instruction," "teaching," or "law." Maybe the Torah means some other work when it uses the word "Torah." Maybe it means only some portion of what we call the Torah.

But even that does not answer the question of whether Moses wrote the Torah (whatever the word "Torah" means). If Moses is the author of the Torah, how do we explain the fact that the Torah contains a narrative about the death of Moses (Deuteronomy 34:1-12)? How do we explain that there are many verses in the Torah that are written from the perspective of a time long after Moses? Genesis 14:14, for example, says that Abraham traveled "as far as Dan." The land of Dan was not called that until the tribe of Dan settled there. According to the Hebrew Bible, that did not happen until after Moses was dead and buried.

Further, if Moses is the single author of the Torah, why are there so many obvious contradictions in the Torah, including two versions of the Ten Commandments that disagree with each other? The Exodus version says that Shabbat is a memorial of the seventh day of creation; the Deuteronomy version says that it is a reminder of the exodus from Egypt. Wouldn't a single author maintain consistency?

Traditional Jewish commentators have answers to these questions. Some say that Joshua wrote the verses about the death of Moses. Some commentators say that God instructed Moses how to write the Torah in such a way that it would be understood by future generations. Tradition says that Moses intended the seeming contradictions to convey subtle distinctions of meaning.

Those answers might be satisfactory if you are determined to prove that Moses is the author, otherwise, they don't really pass Occam's Razor. Why accept an explanation filled with odd assumptions and acts of divine intervention when a simpler explanation would suffice? Why not just say that the Torah was not written by Moses? Some traditional Jewish commentators—Abraham Ibn Ezra and Joseph ben Isaac in the twelfth century, Hezekiah ben Manoach in the 13th century—seem to imply that this must be the case.

What does this mean to us? Does it matter whether the Torah was literally written by Moses? If we find great meaning and reflection on the nature of our lives and our relationship with God in the Torah, why do we care who wrote it? Does the history of the text compromise its truth?

Modern scholarship reveals much about the origin of the Torah, and we ignore what historical inquiry teaches us at our own peril. But scholars cannot tell us everything about this sacred text.

The Torah stands at the center of the Jewish journey to understand our existence. Along that journey, the Jewish people have found profound reflections of life's meaning in the Torah's words. It need not be the literal work of one man who lived more than three thousand years ago. It is the journal of a people's long quest to understand ourselves and to understand God. It is the record of our dialogue with the divine.

Rabbi Jeff Goldwasser
Dead Sea Scroll of Deuteronomy