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EXPLORING
THEOLOGICAL
MYTHS
Different ways of looking at traditional beliefs.
RABBI JEREMY ROSEN

WAS THE TORAH GIVEN TO MOSES ON SINAI ?

The Torah is the word of God, we are told. How do we know this? Is the Torah we have today the same Torah that Moses received three and a half thousand years ago from God on Sinai? Wasn't the language different then ? Didn't they write differently then? How do we explain the variations and discrepancies in the text? Do we really have to take this tradition literally?

When the Torah is lifted up in synagogues it is customary to say ' And this is the Torah which Moses placed before the Children of Israel, by the word of God through the hand of Moses'. The Mishna asserts 'Moses received the Torah from Sinai' This is an indication of the 'pedigree' of Torah and its fundamental importance as the constitution that is the very basis of Jewish history and tradition. But this statement is no more than an assertion. The Mishna goes further, dogmatically, in stipulating the importance of the issue as a criterion for identification with Jewish spiritual continuity. 'Someone who says that the Torah does not come from Heaven, has no part of The World to Come' . Incidentally, it is worth noting that text does not suggest that this disqualifies one from being a Jew. Nevertheless, it is such a vital principle that according to the rabbis, it is one of the sticking points that actually defines being accepted as a committed member of the community. It is not just accepting Torah as the Jewish constitution that is required here. According to this formulation one is required to accept that it came directly from God.

So when it says that Moses received the Torah from Sinai, Sinai is more than an experience on a mountain. ' Sinai' is another way of saying ' From God on Sinai'. Torah comes from God. The wording of this Mishna about accepting Torah from God is strange because it is negative rather than positive. So we are not commanded to assert that it does come from God. Rather we are told that we must not deny it. This distinction actually does make a lot of sense. To be sure of something is very difficult. One has to lay oneself open to a range of ideas and experiences and one cannot be sure at what point one may reach certainty. To deny involves an act of faith far more certain and arrogant than to accept the possibility of something. One is not allowing for doubt. One is saying absolutely that one knows for certain that something is not the case. It is this arrogance that the rabbis were keen to exclude rather than the honest doubter.

We are bound to wonder what actually happened so long ago. How did God transmit? How did God 'talk'? Was Moses a passive receptacle or did Moses himself plays a part in the process of revelation? Was he conscious or not? What did he see or feel while he was receiving ? Was it entirely or partially Divine ? The Talmud is very definite in saying that 'Even if he says that the Torah comes from Heaven apart from one sentence that God did not say but Moses said on his own ( initiative ) this is as though he has ' Scorned the word of God ' ( Numbers 15 ). Even if he said that all the Torah comes from Heaven except for one detail, one logical deduction, one comparison of texts, then it is as though he has ' Scorned the word of God' . This goes well beyond saying that the Torah was given on Sinai. It says that even deductions, innovations that may be made later on in Jewish law, were given on Sinai as well. This surely sounds like hyperbole. It sounds as though the rabbis are trying very hard to establish the authority of Torah and are making assertions for popular consumption. Could this be true ? Yet, Maimonides with all his philosophical training makes this statement one of his Thirteen Principles 'I believe with complete conviction that all the Torah that we now have in our hands is the one given to Moses ' . What did he mean when he said ' Torah' ? Sometimes 'Torah' is used to describe the Five Books of Moses and sometimes it is used to describe the whole corpus of Jewish law. Is Maimonides agreeing with the Midrash that uses Torah to mean everything beyond the text of the Torah or not ? The fundamental importance of accepting Torah as the will of God is essential, he says, but he does not suggest, either here or in his introduction to his Sefer HaMitzvot or the Mishna or his ' Eight Chapters' that discuss the tradition and its transmission, that anything developed subsequently has the same authority as the original text of the Torah.

These statements tell us a great deal about the agenda of the rabbis. We know that they had to battle very hard for their understanding of what the Torah was. Their first struggle was against the Sadducees, the priestly party that resisted rabbinic interpretation, internally and the Samaritans, externally, the neo-Jews who rejected a great deal of the established Jewish canon. Then they had to deal with the Christians who rejected the validity of the laws of the Torah altogether now that a New Testament had been given and the Kaarites who were heirs to the Sadducees in rejecting the Oral Law. It is hardly surprising therefore that they fought to maintain both the sanctity and the integrity of the Torah tradition. But in their polemic some of them made categorical statements that are difficult to understand and some of these statements have entered Jewish thinking as necessary dogma.

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What actually happened on Sinai ? On the face of it Moses received the Ten Statements, usually, but inaccurately called the Ten Commandments. They are called the ' Asseret HaDibrot' not the ' Asseret HaMitzvot', the Ten Statements or Principles, not the Ten Commands. After all the two tablets of stone with these ten statements were all that Moses came down with and then smashed when he saw the golden calf and then, after sorting out the mess he went up Sinai to receive a second version. And it is the Ten Statements that are described as being written by the finger of God engraved on and through stone on both sides, that are most obviously being referred to in talk about a work of Divine uniqueness .

But the text of the Torah seems to suggest that in addition to the Tablets of Stone there was also the Book Of The Covenant which one might reasonably expect to refer to the whole of the Torah. 'And he took the Book of the Covenant and he read it to the people and they said ' Whatever God tells us we will do and understand. ' Rashi in his commentary on this verse says that the Book of the Covenant is the Torah from Breishit to when the Torah was given. But if this is so then there was a text in existence before the Sinai revelation because this reading took place beforehand. There were other texts at the same time that we have lost, such as The Book Of The Wars of God . What was this ? Was it Divine too ? One could argue that on Sinai God excluded some and on the other hand validated other earlier texts and this would solve a lot of problems raised by obscure early texts in Genesis that seem to refer to seemingly lost traditions such as who the Nephillim were or the Sons of the Judges and the Great Sea Serpents . However the word Torah itself is mentioned as being given to Moses on Sinai in the verse 'And God said to Moses come up the mountain to Me and I will give you the tablets of stone and the Torah and the commandments which I have written down to teach them ' . So here is a clear textual basis for the idea that Moses received much more on Sinai than just the tablets although not necessarily in written form.

The question, however, remains, exactly what Moses did receive.

'Why is the law of Shmitta ( the seventh year release of land, slaves and commerce ) connected to Sinai , were not all the commandments given on Sinai? It is to teach that just as with Shmitta all the principles as well as the details were given on Sinai so every single commandment was given, principles and details on Sinai ' . And further ' Even that which an old student finally teaches in front of his master has already been said to Moses on Sinai ' . The Gemara itself realizes that this creates a practical problem. 'Could Moses have learned all the Torah in forty days ? But God taught him the general principles only ' . Such a position also offers a solution to the twin problems of Moses not knowing how to deal with the cases of the son of an Egyptian father who cursed using God's name and the gatherer of wood on Shabbat . Moses, when faced with a crisis had to detain the principal while he clarified exactly what God wanted. There were specific details that Moses was uncertain about. It is inevitable that human fallibility will in the course of time, lead to error or ambiguity. How often do we forget what we have been told ? The problem was not just one of principle but also of practicality.

The rabbis are further divided as to how Moses wrote down the Torah 'Rabbi Yochanan said in the name of Rabbi Beena ' The Torah was given in scrolls because it says ( Psalms 40 ) 'Because I said that I have come ( revealed Myself ) through the book of scrolls which I have written'. Rabbi Shimon Ben Lakish said ' The Torah was given complete ( sealed ) because it says ( Deuteronomy 31 ) This book of the Torah has been presented .' Given the assumptions now accepted as the norm in conventional minds, that the Torah was written down at one moment immediately after revelation, this divergence of opinion is significant even within a fundamentalist context. And Rashi takes the surface meaning even further to suggest that final compilation took place very late indeed in the biblical narrative. Rabbi Beena's position means ' As each part was taught to Moses he wrote it down. At the end of forty years when all the parts were complete, he joined them and sewed them with sinews.' And Rabbi Shimon be Lakish's position is that ' Nothing was written until the end of forty years when all the sections had been taught. What had been taught to Moses during the first and second years was kept orally until they came to be written down.'

Of course this is not very interesting to those who attribute the Torah to a much later editor. For them none of this is a problem. The narrative is not to be taken literally. It also ignores the problem of script because the script we have nowadays was initiated by Ezra almost a thousand years after Sinai . Was the script used at Sinai the one archaeologists believe was in use at that time, the early Hebrew script, the one Moses wrote in? Surely not the one that Ezra brought back from Babylon? Yet the Talmud talks about the tradition that the tablets of stone were carved through both sides. How then did the middle of the letters 'Mem' and 'Samech' which are totally surrounded by the outlines of the letters , how did the middle space stand up suspended and not fall out ? The answer the Talmud gives is that it was a miracle. In fact if the commandments were written in an earlier script then other letters, like the Ayin , would have been problematic, not these two. But within the traditional world, these issues were not dealt with or even considered. Yet what we can see is that the differing views of the rabbis speak of greater variety and ambivalence than is normally allowed. The traditional point of view accepts unreservedly the Divine influence and authorship without even attempting to understand the means and the mechanisms. These remain obscure. We know nothing of how anything was actually transmitted. Apart from the tablets we only know by Midrashic deduction that Moses descends and starts teaching, first Aharon and then the priests and then the elders. The Talmud gives a very moving expansion of this as Aharon moves aside and listens to Moses repeating the Torah to his sons, then they move aside as the elders come in. It is a lesson in the methodology of oral transmission. But it was oral. There is no hint of a text available to them at that stage.

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The law that Moses received was not the end of the matter. It must have included within it the means of further deduction and evolution. There is the role of the priest and the judge and the framework of consultation and of majority opinion. All incorporated in the Torah itself. The rabbis accepted this new reality that once the original revelation had been given, it was up to man to take it further. The classic narrative is that of the debate over Achinai's oven ( a relatively minor issue of ritual purity affecting an oven that could be taken apart and reassembled and thus changing its status ).' The rabbis declared it impure ( contrary to Rabbi Eliezer's view ). On that day Rabbi Eliezer replied ( to the rabbis ) with all the arguments in the world but they still did not accept him ( his point of view ). He said ' If the law is like my ( position ) let this carob tree be uprooted a hundred amot from its place as proof ( some say four hundred ). They said ' We do not accept proof from a carob tree'. He said ' If the law is like my ( position ) let the spring of water prove it. The waters started flowing in the opposite direction. They said' We do not accept proof from a spring'. He said 'If the law is like my position let the walls of the Study Hall prove it'. The walls stated to lean over to fall. Rabbi Yehoshua rebuked them and said ' Why are you intervening in a dispute between wise men ?' The walls did not fall out of respect for Rabbi Yehoshua but did not return to the upright position out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer and they stayed leaning. Rabbi Eliezer said' If the law is like my position let the Heavens prove it. A voice came down and said ' Why are you arguing with Rabbi Eliezer, the law always goes according to him'. Rabbi Yehoshua stood up and said ' It is not in heaven' ( Deuteronomy 30.) What did he mean ' It is not in heaven' ? Rabbi Yirmiya said that the Tora has already been given from Sinai and we do not pay attention to a Heavenly voice because the Tora has already said ' You incline your decision towards the majority ' ( Exodus 23. ). Rabbi Natan met Elijah and said to him ' What did God do at that moment ?' He said ' God smiled and said 'My children have defeated me ' . The rabbis show their right to decide law on the basis of a majority decision and in a sense, Almighty God is not allowed to intervene. What could be a clearer statement of the fact that the after the initial revelation , it is the oral tradition that carries the power to decide, invested in human beings. Sinai allows the tradition to evolve.

This need not affect the integrity of the original revelation. It simply indicates how that revelation was taken further. There is another narrative that appears to challenge the idea of everything having been given in pre-digested form at one moment is the one concerning Moses being shown around heaven and wondering why God is busy putting little crowns on the letters of the Torah ( itself showing the evolution of the script ). God tells him it is because one day a Rabbi Akiva will deduce whole piles of laws from the nuances of the script. He wonders why he rather than Rabbi Akiva was chosen to be the medium of Divine revelation. 'Rav said that when Moses went up on high he found God tying crowns on to the letters ( of the Torah ). He said ' Why are You doing this?' He said ' In the future , after several generations, there will be a man called Akiva Ben Yosef who will deduce piles of laws from every little spike on every letter'. He said' Show him to me'. He said ' Go to the back.' He went and sat eight rows back and did not understand what they were saying. He felt weak. Then one of the pupils asked where a law came from and ( Rabbi Akiva ) replied that this was a Law ( Tradition ) from Moses on Sinai and he ( Moses ) felt better ' . Using Rashi for clarification, he says that ' He felt better... Because he had been quoted even though he had not received ( that particular law )'. So a tradition attributed to Moses might well have been something that Moses knew nothing about. Rashi felt no compunction in contradicting the midrashic tradition that everything was given, even future laws. The issue is more one of trying to promote reverence for the tradition than its exact chronological provenance.

Not only were the rabbis aware of some of the problems with the original process but they also accepted that many traditions may have been lost over the years. At a later date, this is how the Talmud and Maimonides indeed, explain the various conflicts over major legal issues, even biblical ones and the different and often contentious debates between the schools of thought of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. But they also projected this process of uncertainty further back, right to the moment of Moses's death. 'It was taught that one thousand seven hundred deductions, comparisons of texts and points of the scribes were forgotten while they were mourning for Moses. Rabbi Abahu said that they were all reinstated through the logical deductions of Othniel Ben Kenaz ' .

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The question is whether this is a zero sum issue. Do you have a choice simply between believing or denying ? The skeptics will point to the discovery of a book of law at the time of Josiah to support the contention that the law evolved and that what came to be accepted as the text of the torah was something that came about over time. King Josiah led a revival of religious life and repaired the Temple that had fallen into disrepair. In the course of the work a book was discovered a Sefer Torah . The king reads the book and tears his clothes in despair when he realizes how far the people have strayed. He gathers everyone together and reads what is called ' Sefer HaBrit' The Book of The Covenant which is similar to the terminology used in Exodus to describe the book that Moses read before going up to Sinai. It is a symbolic renewal of the Sinai covenant ( or as some might argue, the initiation of it ). The king commands the nation to celebrate Passover together ' as written in the Book Of The Covenant ' . The Book Of Kings goes on to say that ' No Pesach had been celebrated like this since the time of the Judges who Judged Israel and all the days of the Kings of Israel and Judea ' . This also echoes the language of the Book Of Joshua talking about the circumcision ceremony after crossing the River Jordan and the initial conquest . Here too comes the statement that no one had been circumcised before during the forty years in the wilderness. This seems surprising given Moses's own experiences when he did not circumcise his children . One can take these statements at face value but one can also understand them to be making a polemical point. So Josiah may have discovered a new book altogether. One possibility is that it was the book of Deuteronomy because the Passover in Exodus seems only to have applied to the freed slaves whereas in Deuteronomy it is clearly for the future generations. Another possibility is that the Torah had been preserved by a few elite ' sons of the prophets' and was an esoteric text rather than a public one. Another possibility was simply that there had been a really long period of backsliding and idolatry, something the text seems to bear out. But what this shows is that it depends on one preconceived position as to which of the options one is likely to choose.

Some respond to this by saying that it does not matter how the Torah came about. What matters is that the Torah is the basis of Jewish religious life today. If one wants to experience Jewish religious traditions and feel the integrity of at least a two and a half thousand tradition then one has to participate in a religious tradition that takes Torah as its core. It matters not, says this position, whether it is a matter of spiritual men trying to discover what God wants or God telling men how to transmit what He wants. Even if the tradition is man made, it still has a constitution and even if one can challenge the constitution and try to get it changed one still has to support and try to propagate the tradition as the particularly Jewish contribution to society.

The traditionalists want to preserve the Divinity of the Torah. Amongst them are those who love to find computer codes that are said to confirm the perfectly integral authorship of the Torah. Sadly ( or not ) Christians and Muslims can do exactly the same with their texts too. But being committed to the Divinity of the Torah can also be based on the experience of reading the Torah itself. There is a very special poetry and feel to the text that strikes some people as indicating it is very special. Its law and its language is so remarkable, so unlike any contemporary or near contemporary alternative text that this too strikes one as exceptional. Similarly the resilience of its principles and the fact that its moral message has not been bettered or an alternative to the Ten Commandments been found, also point to its supernatural origin. And then there is the experience of the life lived according to Torah and the way it creates an atmosphere and a framework for spirituality ( when followed in depth and not superficially ). These all combine to provide an experience of Torah that suggests its Divine origin as opposed to a literary or historical analysis that seeks to dissect and suggest its primitive origins contrast with a supposedly more progressive scientific culture that looks for different criteria of excellence, consistency, structures and simplicity. A spiritual and a mystical outlook is concerned more with intensity and experiential criteria. It will indeed depend on what one is looking for. To quote the English historian J. Collingwood, 'There is no such thing as History, only Historians.'

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The fact is that the rabbis disagree both as to the actual nature of what happened on Sinai and to the content of the revelation. Therefore one is bound to ask how they could insist on people being asked to assent to something so imprecise. When one is asked to assert something , one needs to know clearly exactly what it is that one is being asked to assert. Whether intentionally or not, the rabbis left these details vague. Even if one agrees that every jot and tittle was given, the question remains ' In what form ?' and ' In how much detail ?' This is why it seems to me that the rabbis were much more definite about denying the possibility of revelation. Denial requires, intellectually, a great deal more certainty or arrogance. It is possible that the very vagueness of the terms ' Torah from Heaven' and ' Torah from Sinai' and the fact that they can be interchanged, is a further indication of the importance of the general principle rather than the precise details.

This is not to suggest that there was no revelation or that the importance of the Torah as the lodestone of the tradition is any less. My purpose is simply to point out that insisting on acceptance of Divine revelation was more a matter of accepting the authority of the tradition than it was an actual statement about the historical event of revelation. About this we cannot speak. We were at the bottom of the mountain, not up on top to witness the actual transmission. Once again, the rabbis show philosophical genius in not expecting a theological formulation. They are concerned with the practical commitment to a way of life and a particular way of understanding and interpreting Torah. The issue is not what happened so much as what is and how authority is perceived and protected. The authority that God adds, works both to emphasize the mystery, sanctity and the greatness of Torah and indeed to protect it from manipulation and transience. Obedience and commitment do not necessarily require blind acceptance but they do require an agreement to engage with Torah and to try to feel the presence of God in it. The principle is that at a moment in history a people is granted a revelation and the result of this is its religious constitution.