Who wrote the Torah? An unlikely group of Orthodox scholars has launched a website that gets to the heart of Jewish tenets.
By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet
“Virtually
all of the stories in the Torah are ahistorical,” declares a manifesto
posted in July on TheTorah.com. “Given the data to which modern
historians have access,” the essay explains, “it is impossible to regard
the accounts of mass Exodus from Egypt, the wilderness experience or
the coordinated, swift, and complete conquest of the entire land of
Canaan under Joshua as historical.” Not only did the events in the
Garden of Eden and the Flood of Noah never transpire, readers are
informed, but “Abraham and Sarah are folkloristic characters; factually
speaking, they are not my ancestors or anyone else’s.”Such sweeping sentiments might be expected from an academic scholar, or perhaps a critic of fundamentalist religion. But the author of this manifesto is an Orthodox rabbi named Zev Farber. The essay, and much of the work of TheTorah.com, is an attempt by dissident Orthodox rabbis and professors to reconcile the findings of modern biblical scholarship with traditional Jewish belief.
This project is not new, but it has bedeviled American Jewry in different ways. Within liberal denominations, while some intellectuals and theologians have grappled with the questions posed by the field of biblical criticism—which sees the Torah as a man-made, composite work produced over time, rather than simply revealed to Moses by God at Sinai—the results have rarely filtered down to synagogue congregants and day-school pupils. Within Orthodoxy, meanwhile, the findings of academia have often met with outright rejection.
By launching TheTorah.com, Rabbi David Steinberg—a former outreach rabbi for the ultra-Orthodox organization Aish HaTorah—and Brandeis Bible professor Marc Brettler, also an Orthodox Jew, set out to challenge this state of affairs, provoking significant controversy within their own community.
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