The Original Torah

The Political Intent of the Bible's Writers

S. David Sperling

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781479819133
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Is the Torah true? Do the five books of Moses provide an accurate historical account of the people of ancient Israel’s origins?

In The Original Torah, S. David Sperling argues that, while there is no archeological evidence to support much of the activity chronicled in the Torah, a historical reality exists there if we know how to seek it.

By noting the use of foreign words or mentions of technological innovations scholars can often pinpoint the date and place in which a text was written. Sperling examines the stories of the Torah against their historical and geographic backgrounds and arrives at a new conclusion: the tales of the Torah were originally composed as allegories whose purpose was distinctly and intentionally political.

The book illustrates how the authors of the Pentateuch advanced their political and religious agenda by attributing deeds of historical figures like Jeroboam and David to ancient allegorical characters like Abraham and Jacob. If “Abraham“ had made peace with Philistines, for example, then David could rely on a precedent to do likewise. The Original Torah provides a new interpretive key to the foundational document of both Judaism and Christianity.

CHAPTER 1

It Says in the Torah

I freely acknowledge that the fundamentals of my faith make it impossible for me to conclude that the Torah was not written by Moses, and surely not that it was written after the time of Moses. … We are obligated to accept with complete faith that everything written in the Torah is absolute truth.

—Rabbi David Z. Hoffmann (1843-1921)

The holy canonical Scriptures in their original text are the infallible truth and are free from every error. That is to say, in the sacred canonical Scriptures there is no untruth, no deceit, no error, not even a minor one, either in content or words, but each and everything presented to us in Scripture is absolutely true whether it pertains to doctrine, ethics, history, chronology, topography, or onomastics, and no ignorance, no lack of understanding, no forgetfulness or loss of memory can or should be ascribed to the amanuenses of the Holy Spirit in their writing of the Holy Scriptures.

—Johann Quenstadt (1617-1688)

The narrative contents of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, or the Torah in the Jewish tradition, are easily summarized, because the Torah provides a chronological account running from the creation until the eve of the settlement of ancient Israel in its promised land. This account is completed in the Book of Joshua.

The first book, Genesis, relates how God—known variously in Hebrew as Yahweh and Elohim—creates the heaven and earth and all that they encompass, what we now call the world. Dissatisfied with the behavior of his human and animal creatures, this same God obliterates most of them in a great flood, sparing only the righteous Noah and his family among the humans and enough animals to repopulate the earth after allowing for sufficient burned offerings by Noah. In the tenth generation from Noah through the line of Noah’s son Shem, Yahweh begins calling on the ancestors of Israel to promise them the land of Canaan to which they have immigrated. In the meantime, however, famine in Canaan causes Israel’s ancestors to move to Egypt, where God has thoughtfully brought one of their own to great power.

The second book, Exodus, continues the tale. Having grown to immense numbers in Egypt and become a great nation there, the Israelites are subjugated by the Egyptians for a considerable period, during which they are treated with extreme forms of brutality, including infanticide. God responds to their outcries by sending his plagues on the Egyptians and drowning their army in the sea. Guided by two pillars, one of fire and one of cloud, as well as by the man Moses, the Israelites travel through the desert to Mount Sinai where God descends from heaven and speaks to them. He takes the occasion to enter a covenant with them, which certifies Israel as his people, and to give them ten commandments and all manner of good laws. For their physical needs, God provides bread from heaven and water from stone, and for their religious requirements, he offers detailed instructions on the construction of a portable sanctuary where they may serve him. This same sanctuary also provides for atonement, which is frequently required, considering Israel’s tendency to be ungrateful and inconstant, as witnessed in their worship of a golden calf.

In the third book, Leviticus, the Israelites are still in the desert, where they are given the needed instructions about who is to perform the divine service of the sanctuary and how and when to perform it. God’s presence in the midst of the Israelites requires him to legislate detailed rules to maintain cultic and ethical purity. With divine foresight Yahweh also prepares them for life in the promised land, where they will need to know about such practical matters as land sales, slave purchase, accurate weights and measures, and the proper treatment of the less fortunate. But God’s closeness to Israel also has its disadvantages. Israel is warned in no uncertain terms that its future tenure in the promised land is contingent on avoiding the “way of Egypt and the way of Canaan” and adhering to the divine statutes.

Numbers, the fourth book of the Torah, brings us to the second year of the wilderness journey, when a detailed census is undertaken. The Israelites are organized into the military units essential to an army on the march. Again they are given numerous laws to govern them in the promised land. To aid Moses and advise the Israelites, God appoints seventy elders to whom he gives divine spirit, qualitatively equal to that of Moses himself. Despite Yahweh’s manifold provisions, however, the ungrateful Israelites complain continually about the food and the leaders that they have been given.

The breaking point is reached when a party of twelve Israelite spies returns from a survey of the promised land. Ten members of the group report that Canaan is populated by gigantic warriors living in massively fortified cities, and so the promised land will be impossible to conquer. The Israelites, discouraged by the report and lacking faith in the divine ability to overcome the natives of Canaan, express the wish that they had died in Egypt or the desert. In punishment, God announces that they will get their wish, that the people will wander in the desert for forty years until the entire exodus generation has perished. Only their children will enter the promised land, along with faithful Joshua and Caleb, the two lone dissenters from the majority report. Although Moses and Aaron are not culpable in this matter, they fail to sanctify Yahweh publicly when he commands them to bring water out of a rock. As punishment, they too are barred from the land, sharing the fate of the rest of their generation. Despite these setbacks, God resumes his kindnesses by turning the curses of the seer Balaam into a blessing and by giving the people victory over two powerful Transjordanian rulers, Sihon and Og.

In the final book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, we find Moses on the east bank of the Jordan River (present-day Jordan) within sight of the promised land but barred from it. Moses takes the opportunity offered by his impending death to deliver a farewell programmatic speech, in which he revises many of the narratives and laws contained in the previous four books. God’s covenant with Israel is presented elaborately, echoing the wondrous blessings for adherence and the severe penalties for violation found at the end of Leviticus. The book ends with the new generation of Israelites poised to enter the promised land, following the death of Moses, still in his prime at the age of 120.

The Book of Joshua completes the narrative. As Moses’ legitimate successor, Joshua leads the Israelites across the Jordan. With God fighting for Israel, many of the formidable city-states of Canaan, including the great-walled Jericho, are destroyed. The land is pacified and distributed among the tribes, and Yahweh’s covenant is renewed. According to the Book of Joshua, everything promised to the ancestors in the Torah is given to their descendants. Joshua dies contentedly at the age of no. This, in brief, is the account from the creation to the Israelite settlement of the promised land as narrated in the traditional sequence of biblical books from Genesis through Joshua.¹

How much of this narrative may be considered historical, that is, in reasonable agreement with actual events? Nowhere in the Torah, nor in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, is there a claim that the events related actually happened.² Nonetheless, for much of Jewish and Christian history, the factual nature of the Bible was not questioned. Such original thinkers as the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Benedict Spinoza, the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the French thinker Voltaire became notorious for casting doubt on the historical reliability of the Bible, and they were not the first such questioners. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that until the nineteenth century, most Jewish and Christian believers would have agreed with David Hoffmann and Johann Quenstadt, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the Torah and the rest of the Bible are factual.

The books of the Torah are also known as the “Five Books of Moses,” the biblical figure considered their author in Jewish sources as well as in the writings of the New Testament. Traditions of Mosaic authorship played a significant role in the Torah’s credibility because God had, according to the Torah, spoken to Moses. Accordingly, challenges to Mosaic authorship called into question the very reliability of the Torah, even though it does not actually name Moses as its author. Indeed, no Old Testament source goes beyond what we find in Malachi, the book that concludes the prophetic section of the Hebrew Bible:

Remember the Torah of Moses, my servant, to whom I gave at Horeb laws and statutes for all Israel. (Mal 3:22)

Although “laws and statutes” would accurately characterize much of Exodus through Deuteronomy, that characterization would be inapplicable to Genesis. Nehemiah, chapter 9, which summarizes the narratives of the Torah, including those of Genesis, and is probably our earliest witness to some of those narratives, says only:

You decreed commands, statutes, and law for them [the Israelites] through Moses, your servant, (v. 14b)

Neither Malachi nor Nehemiah says anything about the Mosaic authorship of the Torah’s narratives. Nonetheless, by the first century, Jews took for granted that Moses had written the whole Torah. The historian Josephus devotes books 1-2:9 of his Antiquities of the Jews to a paraphrase of Genesis, accompanied by frequent comments in which he repeatedly refers to Moses as the author of Genesis. Similarly, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo understood Genesis as the necessary introduction to the Mosaic laws:³

Moses … introduced his laws with an admirable and most impressive exordium. … It consists of an account of the creation of the world implying that the world [cosmos] is in harmony with the law [nomos] and the law with the world.

Despite such early witnesses, as late as the thirteenth century, Jewish scholars still felt the need to prove the Mosaic authorship of the Torah from the Torah itself. Consider the following “proof” adduced by Moses Nahmanides (1194-1270) from Exodus 24:12⁴

He [God] told him: “Come up to me on the mountain and while you are there I will give you the tablets of stone and the Torah and the commandment that I have written to instruct them.”—The “tablets of stone” means the ten commandments; “the commandment” means the entirety of positive and negative commandments. Therefore “and the Torah” includes the stories from the beginning of creation…. It is the clear and manifest truth that the entire Torah from the beginning of the Book of Genesis until “in the presence of all Israel” [the final verse of Deuteronomy] reached the ear of Moses from the mouth of God.

Nahmanides’ “proof” of Mosaic authorship is far from “clear and manifest” and will convince only those who need no proof. The Torah itself claims Mosaic authorship only for some specific sections. Most of the narratives about Moses refer to him in the third person, including those describing the man as uniquely humble (Num 12:3) or dead, buried, and lamented (Deut 34:5-8).

The reason that the claim of the Torah’s Mosaic authorship persisted as long as it did may be explained by subsequent religious developments. As we have seen, the author of Nehemiah 9 (fifth-fourth century B.C.E.) attributed all the laws and statutes of the Torah to Moses. Sometime before the first century C.E., the attribution had been imprecisely broadened to include the entire Torah. By the first century C.E., this imprecise attribution had become accepted, so that for such seminal figures as Philo, Josephus, Jesus, Paul, and Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai, the Mosaic authorship of the Torah was a given, an article of faith to be passed on and defended. Employing this given as a foundation, classical Christianity and rabbinic Judaism constructed massive theological and institutional edifices that, in their different ways, claimed to be the fulfillment of the “Torah of Moses.”

As long as these edifices remained intact, so did the notion of the Mosaic authorship of the Torah. By the late nineteenth century, however, historical forces had combined to undermine the solidarity and authority of institutional Christianity and Judaism, so that authorship of the Torah could be viewed as an academic question rather than an article of faith, not just in universities, but even in seminaries. In the earlier dogmatic context, internal contradictions and historical anachronisms had been viewed as challenges to the audience rather than as problems inherent in the Torah proper or in its attribution to the single author Moses.

In the newer academic context, these same contradictions and anachronisms were explained in a manner that attempted to do them justice. Simply put, the origin of the Torah seemed much better explained by the hypothesis that it was not the work of a single author but a compilation of literary “sources” or “documents,” which had originated at different times and places, some of them written many centuries later than the events they related. But the documentary hypothesis, although infinitely superior to the earlier theologically grounded attempts to answer what were properly academic questions, raised fundamental issues of historicity. “Moses,” personal secretary to God, had been an unimpeachable source for the actions of his remote ancestor Abraham. In contrast, the credibility of the anonymous composers of the reconstructed literary sources J, E, P, D, and R has generated enormous debate over the past century.⁵

Julius Wellhausen, the scholar most closely associated with the “documentary hypothesis,” which identifies the hypothetical “sources” or “documents” from which the Torah was composed, insisted that the Pentateuchal narratives had historical value only for the period in which they were composed but not for the period of their setting.⁶ In practice, this means that if a story told about Abraham and set (in modern chronology) in the eighteenth century B.C.E. contains an anachronism—the geographic name Chaldees, for example, which did not come into use until a millennium later—then the story can tell us nothing about the period of Abraham. After all, Well-hausen argued, even if a real patriarch named Abraham had existed in the second millennium B.C.E., no genuine record of him or his activities could have been preserved, because literacy had not yet reached Syria-Palestine.

When Wellhausen began writing, the potential of archaeology to contribute to biblical interpretation had barely been glimpsed. Accordingly, in 1878 there was nothing unusual about making an unverified statement about the extent of literacy in the second pre-Christian millennium. Wellhausen’s pronouncement about the historicity of the Pentateuch’s narratives thus went largely unchallenged for more than half a century and continued to dominate biblical studies even after his death in 1918. As we shall soon see, although Wellhausen was essentially correct in his estimation of the Torah’s unhistorical character, the significant fallacies in his methods and working assumptions were exploited by the “biblical archaeology” movement.

Unlike Wellhausen, who reached his central conclusions about the literary “sources” or “documents” by closely reading the Bible and comparing and contrasting the agendas of the various texts, biblical archaeologists argued that the Bible could not be properly interpreted without being read in light of the archaeological data from the Middle East of the second and first millennia B.C.E. In 1888, ten years after the publication of Wellhausen’s epochal Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, the Amarna letters were unearthed in Egypt. These documents from the fourteenth century B.C.E. proved conclusively that there had been extensive scribal activity in second-millennium Syria-Palestine. Nonetheless, Wellhausen did not retract or modify his assertion about the absence of literacy.

Similarly, Wellhausen maintained that the names of the protagonists in the patriarchal stories were merely backward projections of tribal names from the historical Israelite period, rather than genuine ancient names. This claim, too, was refuted when the name Jacob showed up in an eighteenth-century B.C.E. site uncovered at Chagar Bazar in Iraq and in a fifteenth-century Egyptian list compiled by King Thutmosis III of Egypt. Similarly, the name Ishmael was used in eighteenth-century texts from Mari in Syria, and the personal name Israel was found in thirteenth-century B.C.E. texts from Ugarit, also in Syria. These and other flaws in Wellhausen’s reconstruction stemmed from viewing the Bible in isolation from the broader world that ancient Israel had inhabited, an isolation that became increasingly difficult to justify.⁷

Between the two world wars, Middle Eastern archaeology continued to expand, bringing the second pre-Christian millennium into the light of history and nailing the lid on the coffin of Wellhausen’s assumptions about literacy. Thousands of written documents from Syria-Palestine provided incontrovertible evidence that ancient traditions could have been written down and preserved, and many of these bore directly on the Bible. To cite a well-known example, scholars had long puzzled over the following passage in Ezekiel:

If I send a pestilence into that land and pour out my wrath upon it with blood, to cut off humans and animals from it; even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live...