Revelation, textual criticism, and divine writ

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by David Weiss Halivni

Seven hundred years later, when the children of Israel returned from Babylonian captivity, repenting and singling out the sin of having proclaimed the golden calf to be "your God who brought you out of Egypt" (Nehemiah 9:18), revelation was restored.

How can it be that the text that resides at the very core of judaism, the Pentateuch itself, is susceptible to textual criticism that reveals it to be both internally uneven and apparently inconsistent with observed Jewish law? This is both an academic question of religious and literary history and a pressing theological challenge. On the one hand, we must survey the textual record of Jewish history and appraise the ways in which Judaism has dealt with the difficulties posed by its sacred canon. On the other hand, we shall have to respond to the modern religious Jew who confronts the maculation of the written holy word.

The incongruities of the Pentateuch, and its disparities with observed laws, are not the new discoveries of modern textual science. In fact, traditional sources dating back to the time of canonization itself seem already to have struggled with the insufficiency of the Pentateuch's literal surface, searching the text for hidden meanings and mining the tradition for corrective oral law. No learned Jew has ever been oblivious of the canonical scriptures' inability to stand alone. Though the tides of theological dogma concerning the independence of the written word have turned and turned again, as shall be shown, the need for adjunct explication and expansion has always been addressed. The great difference in our time is that modern sensibilities can no longer accept old solutions on faith. No matter how the textual problems were resolved in the classical rabbinic texts, the modern Jew remains troubled by the very need for such solutions. As the rigors of analytical science have occluded the comforts of mythology in the human psyche, the modern religious Jew has become ever more unable to believe that maculation in the scriptural Torah does not exist as such.

We must therefore begin with the premise that the literal surface of the canonical Pentateuch is marred by contradictions, lacunae, and various other maculations whose provenance appears more human than divine. We propose that some of the problems that trouble the modern critical scholar were already known to the very people responsible for canonization itself. We shall trace the history of the canonical word from a point of departure at which its purveyors themselves knew it to be imperfect. Pointing out the means by which these agents of canonization worked to make their legacy viable nonetheless, I shall suggest an answer to the question of how they could, in good conscience, have passed on a text whose problems they recognized very well. Moving on through the history of subsequent Judaism, we will study the interplay between the maculate written word and corrective oral traditions or exegesis as this relationship proceeded through several stages, consonant always with the intellectual spirit of the age and leading finally to the theological challenge of the present day - Jewish faith confronted by the science of textual criticism.

The historical survey begins by recognizing that the written Torah is maculate; the theological argument must begin with the selfsame premise. I assume that the textual problems in question were at issue at the time of canonization as well. The prophetic sponsors of the sacred word, at the very time of its canonization, were aware of maculations in the text. From the perspective of tradition, this starting point is not so revolutionary as it may seem. In fact, the survey will reveal substantial acknowledgment in traditional Jewish sources of a restorative project at the time of the return from Babylonian captivity. Both evidence within the later books of the Bible, and more-explicit statements in early rabbinic literature, attest to a restorative editorial role for Ezra the Scribe, the religious leader of Israel at the time of the return from exile. Moreover, this evidence in traditional sources indicates that the notion of an editorial project with respect to the Pentateuch was, in fact, theologically acceptable to the rabbis of ages past. Indeed, the concept of Ezra's editorial prerogative was employed by several illustrious rabbinic commentators to account for the literal surface of the Pentateuch.(1)

According to the biblical account, it was Ezra who brought forth the Holy Scriptures and presented them to the people of Israel upon the nation's return from captivity in Babylon. It was Ezra who vouched for the written word, ensuring its sacred status with his prophetic endorsement. As the people of Israel repented the sins of the exiled generation and declared their willingness to embrace God's word, it was Ezra who brought this word to the people.

That is not to say that the Torah was revealed by God to Ezra, in effective supervention of the traditional revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai. At least one illustrious rabbinic commentator of the Middle Ages went as far as to claim that it does not matter whether the Torah was revealed through Moses or through Ezra;(2) but even if we speculated that the canonical Torah was revealed anew, word for word, to Ezra, we could not thereby account for persisting maculations in the text. Rather, Ezra's role, seen from the perspective of tradition, must remain secondary to that of Moses, but central nonetheless. In fact R. Yose, in the Talmud (B.T. Sanhedrin 21b and parallels), states, "Had the Torah not been revealed to Moses, it would have been revealed to Ezra." This proverbial passage deserves our close attention. No other steward of God's word could be so aptly likened to Moses in Jewish tradition as Ezra, and yet the difference between these two figures is crucial as well, as the Talmudic quotation suggests. Ezra was not only the final biblical prophet; he also was the prophet in whose time the people of Israel, at long last, embraced the Torah. Moses, by tradition, was the prophet of original revelation, the medium through which God's will came to his people. But the people of Moses' time, also according to tradition, were unfit and unprepared to hear the word of God. The people "stood at a distance" as the Torah was revealed. Only in Ezra's day did the nation gather around, willing and eager to receive the written word. In this sense, the work of Ezra completes the work of Moses.