Freedom from Bondage IV

(Continued from these posts: I, II, III)

CHAPTER SIX: BIBLE CODES

In this chapter, Gold dismantles the codes that people have found by placing together equi-distant letters in the Torah. I agree with Gold. Whatever codes may exist are proof of nothing. These codes are a twentieth century phenomenon, and I point that out to emphasize that Orthodox Judaism has no need for them and existed for a long time without them. They are not mainstream and, based on my experience, are viewed by most rabbis as "cute, if they're for real". These codes are, in my opinion (and that of Professor of Talmud Dr. Yakov Elman of Yeshiva University's Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies - link), contrary to a passage in the Talmud (see this post: link). Surprisingly, Gold fails to discuss this problem with the codes.

Click here to read moreIn the spirit of fairness, however, it is important to note that there are essentially two schools of Torah codes adherents. One believes that codes can tell the future and can be found on almost any topic under the sun. The other believes that legitimate codes can be found but that most codes are just statistical noise and can be found anywhere. These are the people behind a serious statistical study that sought to prove that codes are legitimate. They reject and resent the haphazard hijacking of codes research by popularists and amateurs. It is unfair to lump the latter group with the former (see this post: link). I, and I believe the vast majority of Orthodox Jews, am in neither group.

CHAPTER SEVEN: WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?

This chapter raises the issue of literary criticism of the Bible. Gold cites Plaut and Richard Elliott Friedman as his two authorities who state and prove that the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) were written by a number of human beings. This is, without a doubt, the dominant academic theory of biblical composition. However, it is not based on hard facts and has hardly been proven. Keep in mind that literary criticism is a form of guesswork based on readers finding clues in the text. This is the same general approach that gives us theories that Shakespeare was really a woman and the like. No amount of literary analysis, no matter how rigorous, can ever amount to a mathematical proof. At most, literary criticism can tell us that the text makes it seem like there were multiple authors and that, therefore, this is the most reasonable explanation of the text. This leaves open the door for others to suggest alternate theories to explain why the text seems like it was written by multiple authors, something that Orthodox scholars in Israel like R. Mordechai Breuer and R. Elchanan Samet have done, in my opinion at times quite convincingly.

Precisely because Friedman is such a respected scholar, I found his book Who Wrote the Bible? to be an excellent example of the rampant speculation that is the basis of this type of literary criticism (see my review here: link).

Let me make a point here that is made often by Orthodox thinkers but is sometimes misunderstood: The original literary theories about human authorship have all been discarded by later scholars. What has happened over the past century is that the assumption that the Torah was written by God was replaced by the Wellhausean theory that there four authors of the Torah, which very elegantly solved many textual problems. Wellhausen has now been discarded himself. However, once the divine authorship was dismissed, instead of returning to it when Wellhausen was set aside scholars developed more elaborate theories to account for the reasons that Wellhausen had to be rejected. Now there are theories of many authors, borrowing from each other and being occasionally inconsistent. The theory is no longer elegant. It is no longer true to say that when choosing between divine authorship and multiple authorship that the latter is the simplest solution to the many textual problems. The truth is that real texts are complex regardless of who wrote them.