Freedom From Bondage II

(Continued from this post)

INTRODUCTION

Gold's main point is that the fulcrum point on which all of Judaism rests is the Bible. If the Bible is not true then Judaism is not either. To this he adds other, barely relevant claims, implying that the problems between Israelis and Palestinians are due to fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible. That is a side issue, and Gold's presentation seems to neglect the fact that Israel's Haredi population are not settlers and their leading rabbis have, in the past, supported land-for-peace settlements.

But Gold's main point assumes a literal reading of the Bible. He places that literal ("fundamentalist") reading against modern scholarly challenges and suggests that if the literal reading fails then Orthodox Judaism is false. That is not a legitimate comparison because Orthodox Judaism has never taken the Bible entirely literally, dating all the way back in history. Fundamentalist readings of the Bible are a uniquely Protestant (and perhaps Karaitic) phenomenon and have no place in a learned discussion of mainstream Judaism (cf. Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, "Fundamentalism Reconsidered" in The Jewish Action Reader, pp. 247-260).

Click here to read moreThere is still a challenge that can be made but it has to be between Orthodox Judaism on its own terms and modern scholarly conclusions. As to who wins that challenge, that can be left for later chapters.

Gold's underlying assumption in this introduction is that Orthodox Judaism needs to prove that it is correct. I understand where he got that assumption -- the three books on which he bases his understanding of Judaism. But the truth is that Orthodox Judaism has no need to prove itself and, perhaps more importantly, undermining a proof of Orthodox Judaism is not the same as undermining Orthodox Judaism itself. Who says that I am obligated to prove my religion before accepting it? That would essentially force all religious people into being conditional believers: I accept my religion assuming that it is not subsequently disproven. That is an unacceptable situation. Rather, people come to belief for a variety of different reasons and are not necessarily convinced of the truth of their religion due to a conclusive logical proof (see this post: link). There is nothing wrong with that (see these posts: I, II, III). What would undermine Orthodox Judaism, though, is conclusive proof that it is incorrect. As someone trying to disprove Orthodoxy, Gold bears the burden of proof in this discussion. We have yet to see whether Gold can muster such arguments.

CHAPTER ONE: PROVING AND DISPROVING REVELATION

This is the best chapter in Gold's book. Here he produces strong arguments against the various logical proofs offered for the correctness of the Torah. For example, he points out that we can't assume that various facts in the Torah are correct and then argue based on them that the entire Torah is correct. This, Gold says, is illogical.

He also utterly demolishes R. Dovid Gottlieb's so-called proof (also known as "The Kuzari Proof") for the Torah. Over the past few days, I read the latest updated version of R. Gottlieb's book. It is not my place to argue in detail with his logic but I found it to be fatally burdened with unstated and unproven assumptions about psychology, sociology and Jewish history. Gold has a field day, although I'm not sure that he and R. Gottlieb speak the same "language" so there will likely be some talking past each other in any rebuttals that are produced.

Gold correctly demonstrates that it is essentially impossible to prove that any specific event in ancient times (i.e. the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai) happened if it left no physical evidence. Of course, this does not mean that it did not happen, only that we cannot prove its occurrence.

Gold further argues that a more likely belief is that the Torah is not true because it describes miracles. In other words, since miracles are highly unlikely, it makes more sense to disbelieve them than believe them. Be that as it may, it is certainly no proof against the Torah because it is a circular argument: It is based on the assumption that miracles are highly unlikely. If you are willing to stipulate the likelihood of miracles in the biblical period, as most people considering religion are willing to do, then the probabilities change and the two options become fairly equal. In fact, given the lack of certainty inherent in the fields of history and archeology (discussed in the next chapter), perhaps some people will find the truth of the Torah to be more compelling than any other option.

While I found Gold to have made a strong presentation in this chapter, I don't think it accomplished what he wanted. He is arguing against a charicature of Orthodox Judaism. The truth is that Orthodox Judaism does not need to be conclusively proven logically or empirically. Make no mistake, I am not saying that it can be illogical or contrary to empirical evidence. However, absent any "smoking gun" that historians have never been able to find and I am certain never will, Orthodox Judaism is a meaningful and powerful understanding of the world and man's relationship with God. It stands on its own as a transformative and uplifitng way of life regardless of whether we can muster the logical arguments to demonstrate that 1+1=Orthodox Judaism.

In the middle of this chapter, seemingly gratuitously, Gold throws in an argument that the Exodus could not have happened as the Torah describes because of the number of people said to have left Egypt. This is a powerful challenge -- perhaps the strongest in the book -- but it belongs in chapter 2, which is where we will discuss it.

CHAPTER TWO: BIBLE AND ARCHEOLOGY

In my opinion, this chapter raises the most important questions on the Torah and Orthodox Judaism. However, rather than writing a strong chapter and placing the burden on me to explain why I think it is wrong, Gold did me the favor of writing an extremely unbalanced and biased chapter that largely does my work for me. For someone who has read a little about the current state of archeology, the tipoff comes on the first page of this chapter. Gold quotes a 1999 article in Ha'aretz by Ze'ev Herzog that disputes the Bible's record of history. To Gold, this is the final conclusion of modern scholarship, "what had now become consensus among the leading archeologists in the field." What Gold does not tell us is that this article was rebutted the next week by Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archeology Review.

This attitude dominates the chapter. Gold takes the most extreme, anti-Bible views and accepts them as, pardon the term, gospel. He refers to Israel Finkelstein and Asher Silberman's book The Bible Unearthed as "an authoritative discussion of what modern archeology has to tell us about the events chronicled in the Torah and the book of Joshua" (p. 29). Compare this with the description of the book by Kenneth Kitchen, a highly respected historian, in his On the Reliability of the Old Testament (link):

[A] careful critical perusal of this work - which certainly has much to say about both archaeology and the biblical writings - reveals that we are dealing very largely with a work of imaginative fiction, not a serious or reliable account of this subject. (p. 464)

On the patriarchal and exodus periods our two friends are utterly out of their depth, hopelessly misinformed, and totally misleading. (p. 465)

Their treatment of the exodus is among the most factually ignorant and misleading that this writer has ever read. (p. 466)

Other than The Bible Unearthed, Gold's main source of historical judgment is The View from Nebo, a book by a journalist from The Wall Street Journal. The author of this book, Amy Dockser Marcus, lived in Tel Aviv and, at least as Gold presents her view (I haven't read the book), concluded that the archeological record is unequivocally contrary to the history told in the Bible.

I don't find this surprising because I know that there are different schools of thought among historians. These books are representative of the minimalists, i.e. those who minimize the truth of history told in the Bible. There are other schools of thought. George Robinson, a columnist for The Jewish Week and, I believe, a Reconstructionist Jew, wrote in his book Essential Torah (which he kindly sent to me without prompting -- p. 547):

Within biblical archaeology there are at least two schools of thought: the traditionalist, who believe that there are some finds that confirm our belief in the Hebrew Bible, and the minimalists, who think that very little in the ostensibly historical passages of the Tanakh are true. Of course, there is a spectrum of opinion between those positions.

Journalist Jeffery Sheler, from US News & World Report, wrote a book titled Is the Bible True?. Unlike Marcus (as described by Gold), Sheler discusses the progression of views among historians about the truth of the history in the Bible (pp. 13-14):

[I]n the second half of the twentieth century, refreshing winds of change began to blow across the biblical-studies landscape -- change that would profoundly affect the debates over the Bible. The fledgling field of biblical archaeology had come into its own as a mature discipline and produced breathtaking discoveries that would shed dramatic new light on the historicity of the Scriptures. In some instances, the material evidence provided important new corroboration of biblical episodes that minimalist scholars had long since written off as nonhistorical...

The evidence uncovered and the conclusions drawn in this modern quest for biblical truth often are complex and should not be oversimplified. Seldom do they line up neatly as "for" or "against" the Bible.

It isn't like Gold is entirely unfamiliar with the view that there is truth in the Bible's history. He quotes James Hoffmeier's book Israel in Egypt and calls it "just about the only source the Orthodox point to for arhceological justification." Gold then proceeds to belittle Hoffmeier for teaching at a Christian college and amateurishly argue on his scholarship. The truth is that Hoffmeier is a respected Egyptologist and his two books on this subject are tightly argued and amply footnoted. Additionally, whether or not Hoffmeier's book is the only text to which Orthodox Jews point is irrelevant. Hoffmeier is not a lone voice and the many books and articles he cites demonstrate that. Perhaps even more convincing is the voluminous work by the highly esteemed Prof. Kenneth Kitchen On the Reliability of the Old Testament (from which we have already quoted above).

Gold's attempt to paint a picture of a consensus with a few quackpot dissenters is simply not an accurate portrayal. He chooses to believe, or finds more convincing, the minimalist view. That does not mean that they have conclusively ended the debate and disproven the Torah.

Similar to the above, Gold has the habit throughout the book of quoting Gunther Plaut's commentary on the Torah -- essentially the standard Reform text -- as if it represents the final word on the meaning and the history of the Torah. It is no such thing. It is the view of one Reform rabbi and one Assyriologist who assisted him. My point here is simple: Gold wants to dictate to us what the conclusions of scholarship are, to which our beliefs must conform. In reality, scholarship does not work that way. There are often multiple views and consensuses often change over time.

This is not to say that the consensus of modern scholarship agrees entirely with the traditional Orthodox views. That is certainly not the case. However, there is a solid view among some scholars that supports the truth of the biblical narratives with certain interpretations.

However, the above should not be used to mask some of the substantial issues that Gold raises. While it is both easy and convenient to dismiss his challenges because of the extreme position he has staked, that would not be entirely honest. It is true that there are views among respected historians that support the belief in the truth of the Bible's record of history. However, there are certain passages in the Bible that no contemporary historian accepts as being literally true. Gold raises two biblical narratives that he believes archeology has disproven. The first is the Exodus and the second is the conquest of the land of Canaan by Joshua. Both, he tells us, never happened. However, anyone can read the books mentioned above and see scholarly views to the contrary.

Gold also raises the issue of how many Jews could have left Egypt. He tells us -- from Plaut -- that it is impossible that 600,000 men (plus, presumably over a million women and children) left Egypt and traveled through the desert for forty years. There are suggestions to reinterpret the Bible to allow for fewer people, but that is highly inconsistent with Orthodox tradition. As things stand now, this is a real challenge to Orthodox Judaism but, all alone, it is much less of a challenge than the impression Gold tries to make that modern scholarship contradicts the entire Bible. Personally, I am willing to say that this is a good question and that I look forward to seeing how things progress over the next few decades (for more on this, see this post).

The stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis (Adam and Eve, the tower of Babel, etc.) deserve discussion in a separate post.

(More to come)