Benjamin Sommer
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THE TIKVAH CENTER FOR LAW & JEWISH CIVILIZATION Professor Moshe Halbertal Professor J.H.H. Weiler Directors of The Tikvah Center Tikvah Working Paper 02/12 Benjamin Sommer Artifact or Scripture? Authority and Revelation in the Bible and Jewish Thought NYU School of Law New York, NY 10011 The Tikvah Center Working Paper Series can be found at http://www.nyutikvah.org/publications.html All rights reserved. No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form without permission of the author. ISSN 2160‐8229 (print) ISSN 2160‐8253 (online) Copy Editor: Danielle Leeds Kim © Benjamin Sommer 2012 New York University School of Law New York, NY 10011 USA Publications in the Series should be cited as: AUTHOR, TITLE, TIKVAH CENTER WORKING PAPER NO./YEAR [URL] Artifact or Scripture? ARTIFACT OR SCRIPTURE? AUTHORITY AND REVELATION IN THE BIBLE AND JEWISH THOUGHT By Benjamin Sommer PREFACE In this book, I attempt to addresses several audiences at once: biblical scholars, students of modern Jewish and Christian thought, constructive theologians, clergy and religious educators, and, not least, ambitious lay readers who wonder about the place of the Bible in their lives and in the life of their communities. My goals for these academic, clerical, and lay audiences differ. Biblical scholars, along with lay readers interested in literary interpretation of the Bible, will find my analysis of biblical texts worthy of attention. These readings can show both scholars who specialize in Jewish and Christian theology and religious Jews and Christians more generally that the the Bible is more subtle and more interesting than they may have realized. I hope that by drawing at once on close readings of the Bible in its ancient context and on constructive theology, this book will convince readers that biblical criticism need not be hostile to theological pursuits, and in fact that biblical criticism presents the constructive theologian and the religious reader with important tools. Conversely, many biblical critics have shunned theology and the study of Jewish though as irrelevant to their area of study. I intend the chapters that follow to demonstrate to my colleagues in the guild of modern biblical studies that sensitivity to the concerns of later religious thinkers can enrich our understanding of the biblical texts themselves. Finally, I want to suggest to specialists in Jewish thought that a particular liberal trend within modern Jewish philosophy represents the continuation and elaboration of a tradition of thought that goes back to the very origins of the Jewish people. Striking a balance between providing necessary background and moving new arguments forward is always an elusive goal. This is all the more the case in a book that The Jewish Theological Seminary, This is a work in progress. Comments are welcome at [email protected] 1 draws on several disciplines and speaks to varied audiences. It will be necessary at times for me to pause to explain matters that some readers already have studied, and I hope these readers will be forebearing in the relevant paragraphs. Where necessary I use endnotes to refer readers to useful overviews of scholarship. Otherwise the endnotes are intended for academic specialists in one field or another; there I engage with specific arguments from biblical criticism, religious studies, and Jewish thought that relate to my claims in the main text. Many readers will prefer not to look at the notes at all, and even specialists will look at some and not others. It is for this reason that I have made them endnotes and not footnotes; they are not part of the flow of my argument. Though the endnotes are lengthy (fully ** % of the book), they are quite selective in their references to secondary literature. The topics I address are fundamentally important and also quite broad; they invoke several academic fields, one of which has flourished since the early nineteenth century. Consequently, they have generated an enormous amount of secondary literature in a variety of languages. I cannot be comprehensive in my references to these literatures. Translations are my own, unless I specifically indicate otherwise in an endnote. I refer to biblical verses using the numbering system found in the Hebrew (Masoretic) text.On occasion, the numbering in some English translations varies by one or two verses. INTRODUCTION This is a book about revelation and authority in Judaism. It is not the first such book to be written. The topic I address has been examined in monographs and articles, poems and sermons, written not only by modern Jewish thinkers (for whom it has been especially central) but throughout Jewish history. The vantage point from which I examine this topic, however, is surprisingly rare. I focus attention on biblical texts themselves, in particular ones that address the relationship between revelation and religious authority. My thesis is a simple one. Biblical texts that describe the giving of Torah move simultaneously and without contradiction in two directions. They insist that duties emerge from that event, and that the religious practices performed by members of the nation that witnessed revelation are matters not of choice but of obligation. This obligation, which lies at the heart of the covenant between God and Israel (that is, at the 2 Artifact or Scripture? heart of the Jewish religion), is an obligation precisely because it results from an act in which God made God’s will known to a group of human beings. In this sense, the biblical texts express what we might call a high theology of revelation. And yet these same texts also work very hard to problematize the notion of revelation, to make their readers unsure as to precisely what occured at Mount Sinai, and most of all to prompt their audience to wonder: did the texts and laws that result from the event come directly from God’s mouth, or are they the product of human intermediation and interpretation? In this sense, biblical texts express a low theology of revelation. The Bible at once anchors the authority of Jewish law and lore in the revelation at Sinai and destabilizes that authority by teaching that we cannot be sure how, exactly, specific rules and teachings relate to the divine self-disclosure at Sinai. The Bible is the first Jewish book that valorizes yet questions revelation, but not the last, because certain medieval and modern Jewish thinkers make a similar move. Among moderns, this trend is evident in the work of Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Louis Jacobs, and to some degree Hermann Cohen, André Neher and Emmanuel Levinas. Furthermore, elements of this trend can be found among medieval Jewish mystics and philosophers, and in classical rabbinic texts of the Talmudic era. That rabbinic and medieval precursors can be found for what is usually thought of as a modern understanding of revelation has been argued already, especially by Heschel himself in his massive study, Torah Min Hashamayim Be’aspaqlaria Shel Hadorot,1 and also by other scholars,2 in particular Yohanan Silman in his book Qol Gadol Velo Yasaf: Torat Yisrael Bein Shleimut Lehishtalmut.3 But scholars and theologians have not noticed the ways in 1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Torah min Hashamayim B’aspaqlarya shel Hadorot, 3 vols., in Hebrew (London and New York: Soncino and the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1965 and 1990); English translation with very useful notes: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted Through the Generations, edited and translated by Gordon Tucker (New York: Continuum, 2005). Heschel’s Hebrew title might be translated two ways. It can be taken as a phrase, in which case the title designate the subject of a historical, descriptive study: “Torah from Heaven in the Lens of the Generations,” or, less literally, “The notion of revelation as viewed through Jewish tradition.” But the title can also be translated as a sentence that makes a constructive theological claim: “Revelation occurs through the lens of the generations” -- that is, “Torah comes to us through the medium of tradition itself.” One who studies the book carefully will see that Heschel intends both senses. 2. For the claim that Heschel’s philosophy of revelation has deep roots in classical rabbinic literature, see Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, Brown Judaic Studies, no. 171 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1989), 119–33; Alexander Even-Chen, A Voice from the Darkness: Abraham Joshua Heschel Between Phenomenology and Mysticism, [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oveid, 1999), 160–79. 3. Yochanan Silman, The Voice Heard at Sinai: Once or Ongoing? [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999). For the argument that this view of revelation is far more loyal to the traditions of medieval Jewish 3 which the Bible anticipates these modern Jewish theologians and the extent to which biblical authors already probed the connections between revelation and religious authority. There are two main reasons that scholars failed to observe the Bible’s own subtlety on this matter. First, scholars of Jewish thought and Christian theology who examine this issue tend not to engage in close literary readings of the biblical texts. Rather, they cite a few biblical texts as background briefly before moving on to their own fields of specialty. (One exception to this trend is Heschel; another is Martin Buber, whose view of revelation and authority is very different from the one that concerns me in this book.) Second, the interpretations I put forward commincate themselves most clearly when we read the Bible as the anthology of ancient Near Eastern texts that it is and thus see biblical texts as their first audiences in ancient Israel saw them -- in other words, when we examine the Bible through the lenses of modern biblical criticism. (By “biblical criticism” I mean the sort of biblical study carried out by professors in modern universities, colleges, and seminaries; I will discuss the methods and assumptions of this field in more detail in the chapter that immediately follows this introduction.) Theologians, both Jewish and Christian, have tended to shun biblical criticism, regarding it either an inimical or irrelevant to theological concerns.