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Is this really the Torah God gave Moses at Sinai? (Part 2)

[additional-authors]
March 26, 2015

The idea that 3300 years ago, at Sinai, God gave Moses a Torah identical to the Torah we have today is a powerful concept, one that still resonates. But is it probable, even plausible?

Previously, to explore this idea, we have taken the text of the Torah as we have it today and looked at issues of content, language and script. “>Tanakh strongly suggests that whatever Moses may have written and conveyed at the end of his life was limited in scope. Moreover, external evidence from archeological and other sources indicates that Moses’s sefer haTorah was not written in either the language or the script that a contemporary Torah is. In this post, we look at the transmission of a presumed original Torah, focusing on security for the object and textual variations. 

Securing the transmission of the originally inscribed text

Let’s start with the medium of Moses’s inscription of the sefer haTorah that our Torah says Moses wrote just before he died (see Deut. 31:9, 24-26) and the security afforded the resulting work. Our Torah does not say precisely whether Moses chiseled the words into stone, wrote them with a stylus in wet clay or used a quill on parchment or papyrus.  If the entire Torah as we know it was inscribed on stone or clay tablets, there must have been many of them to include “>Professor Rachel Dulin has noted that the word sefer is used in the Hebrew Bible “>Ark of the Covenant, there to remain as a witness. (See Deut. 31:26.)  Later commentators speculated about this placement.  Each assumed that the item consisted of a single scroll. Under Rabbi Judah’s theory, that scroll was placed near the outside wall of the Ark on a shelf or ledge projecting from and attached to the Ark, while Rabbi Meir thought that it was placed inside the Ark between the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments and the inner wall of the Ark. (See Talmud “>Rashi had difficulty with them. For present purposes, though, the main point is the general consensus among early rabbis that the sefer haTorah was a scroll. Contemporary biblical scholar Prof. Richard Elliott Friedman agrees and translates sefer haTorah as a “scroll of instruction” in his translation of the Torah. (See Friedman, Commentary on the Torah (Harper 2001), at 664.)

Whether the sefer haTorah was, in fact, a scroll or not, its subsequent history is quite mysterious. As the Hebrew Bible relates, after Moses’s death, the Ark, with the scroll presumably either inside or on a protruding ledge, was taken on a long and difficult journey. Taking the story as true for present purposes, over the course of over two hundred years, the Ark was, among other things, carried across the Jordan River, paraded around Jericho, set in a tabernacle in Shiloh, brought into the field during battles with the Philistines, captured by the Philistines and taken to various cities, returned to the Israelites, moved by “>King Solomon in the Temple in Jerusalem. There is no further mention of the Ark in the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible, except for a report in Chronicles that several hundred years after Solomon, “>army destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem around       586 BCE.  The Hebrew Bible relates that the Babylonians carried off valuables that they did not otherwise destroy or burn. (See 2 Kings 24:8-13, 2 Chron. 36:18-19.) There is, however, no specific mention of the Ark being confiscated. Nor is there any claim or even hint expressed that the royal family or any priest or anyone either took with them into exile or hid or otherwise protected or preserved the safer haTorah that was, at Moses’s direction, to be located by the side of the Ark. This does not mean that those transported to Babylon did not take any documents or records, merely that a specific ancient treasure was not specified in the national record, as one might have expected it to be had the object actually been (1) extant and (2) moved.

Is it reasonable to believe that throughout all this time, almost seven hundred years, a scroll exposed to the enemy in battle and to the elements in peace could have survived intact? Given its importance as a sacred writing by Moses himself, the fact that the historical sections of the Hebrew Bible after the Book of Joshua, with one exception, do not mention the sefer haTorah is telling. And that exception, the story of King Josiah’s surprise at a newly discovered scroll by the priest Hilkiah, seems to confirm at the very least that control over and protection of sacred scrolls was not well managed. (See 2 Kings 22:3-20.)

Further, as an object, the existence of the scroll on which Moses wrote God’s words seems to have been of no concern to the authors of the Prophets (the Nevi’im) and the Writings (the K’tuvim), not to mention the editors of the Tanakh. The sounds of silence here, as Sherlock Holmes later observed in the short story ““>Professor Marc Zvi Brettler that in the “>Samaritan Pentateuch, the “>Dead Sea Scrolls, among others, which contain different wording than we find in the Torah we have today. 

“>On the Text of the Torah,” at 1/21.) Student is certainly persuasive when discussing a translation like the Septuagint. (See Id. at 7-13/21.) The philosophy, principles and methodology at play in any translation can be quite complex. For instance, did the first translation attempt to be true to the literal nature of the subject text word by word. Did it seek to convey the meaning of that text thought by thought? Did it seek to balance those two approaches? Did it seek to mimic the sound and cadence of the original language or to appeal to certain linguistic or philosophical sensibilities of the readers by using, for instance, colloquial or gender neutral expressions? And was the first translation consistent? The same questions, and more, would apply to any effort to translate the first translation back independently in order to determine an original text. In short, reverse engineering a translated text compounds the inherent complexity of the translation exercise.

Rabbi Student is on considerably less solid ground with variants, like the Samaritan Pentateuch. (See Id., at 2-3/21.) By “>Mt. Gerizim.

Student acknowledges the obvious, which is that there are “many differences” between the Samaritan Torah and the textus receptus we have, but concludes that these differences “can be due to the free hand the Samaritan scribes exhibited in developing their Torah.” Consequently, for him, “the Samaritan Torah fails our test of being a reliable witness.” (See Student, above, at 2/21.)

The differences, however, individually and collectively, are more probative than Rabbi Student allows. In his argument, Student concedes that he is departing from the approach of modern scholars and admits that he is assuming that today’s standard text, his textus receptus, is “correct,” unless “categorically disproven” otherwise. (See Id. at 1/21.) But giving something a Latin label does not make it sacrosanct, and placing a thumb on the scale of evidence imposes a burden of proof that will always skew the analysis and never lead to an accurate reading of that evidence. Why, for instance, assert that Samaritan scribes “developed” their holy text with a “free hand” and not allow for the possibility that Judahite scribes did so similarly?

If we want to evaluate the totality of circumstances objectively, as opposed to proving a point, we cannot proceed under any, much less unwarranted, assumptions. More specifically, given what we know today, “we cannot,” according to Prof. Brettler, “assume that the text . . . as we now have it is the same as the text . . . when it was originally written.” (See Brettler, above, at 22.)

In addition, if there were, once, one text written by Moses, or even one redacted by Ezra, surely that text was modified over the centuries. As another Hebrew Bible scholar “>Bible codes from a textual perspective, the ideal of an unchanged Torah text “was not achieved in practice as far back as manuscripts and other evidence enable us to see.” (See “>Gezer Calendar, discussed “>Aleppo Codex (c. 930 CE) and the “>Masoretic Text tradition, but agreement among modern works is still lacking. For instance, the well regarded “>A List of Some Problematic Issues,” at 2-5/68.)

The illusive nature of the original Torah has not deterred researchers from seeking to find it. Currently, for instance, there are at least two academic efforts aimed at producing a scholarly edition of the Tanakh, one known as the “>Hebrew Bible Critical Edition  Project, formerly known as the Oxford Bible Project. Yet, even as one may anxiously wait to read of new developments, perhaps Prof. Brettler is correct in concluding that “(i)t is naïve to believe that we may recover the Bible’s original text (what scholars call the ‘Urtext’), namely the text as penned by its original authors. “ (See Brettler, above, at 22.)

Conclusion

The traditional claim that the Torah we have today is identical to a text authored in the thirteenth century BCE strains credulity. Regardless of whether the author was divine or human, for the traditional view to be valid, not one but a series of improbable events would have had to occur in the creation and multiple transmissions of that text over well more than one hundred generations.  The evidence, internal in the Tanakh and external on hard stone and clay and soft manuscripts, says those events did not occur. Analyzing the content, language, script, security and transcription of a proposed original Torah demonstrates why such a document, if it ever existed, must have been different, perhaps considerably so, from the Torah we have today. 

There is no reason to stress or strain over either the evidence or the result of our inquiry. The Torah we have might not have come from Moses, and certainly it has not arrived unimpaired from some original manuscript, but it remains a very special document, one that holds appeal to a wide variety of individuals.

Implicitly conceding the lack of historicity for an original thirteenth century BCE Torah from Moses, at least for the purpose of making a greater point, philosophy “>has argued that what is important is the authority rather than the authorship of the Torah, whether the Torah “represents a supremely good (“divine’) way for us to live . . . .” It is an interesting and significant argument, one that (perhaps ironically) parallels positions taken by less ritually observant individuals. 

Putting aside the problematic issue of “authority,” we can agree that the Torah plays and deserves a unique role in the Jewish civilization. Those who appreciate miracles (whether supernatural or not) can marvel at the Torah’s continued existence and power. We still have it, and we continue to read and study and even wrestle with it. And atheists like Israeli writer Amoz Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Sulzberger also can recognize that honor is due the Torah as literature that “transcends scientific dissection and devotional reading.” In their words, “no other work of literature so effectively carved a legal codex, so convincingly laid out a social ethic.” (See Jews and Words (Yale 2012), at 5-6.)

With its depth, its breadth and its reach, the Torah may well have been intended initially as a vehicle to hold and share the sometimes inconsistent stories, codes and customs of the residents of ancient Judah, perhaps before but certainly after their exile from and return to their homeland. In this light, its role was to bind the people together with a common created history and collective purpose.  The Torah that we have today serves a similar function, as trans-national, trans-generational glue for the Jewish People. Against all historical odds, it remains, in words from Proverbs, an etz hayim, a tree of life to those who hold fast to it. (See Proverbs 3:18.)

A version of this essay was previously published at

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