de bene esse: Reconciling Modern Biblical Scholarship With Traditional Orthodox Belief

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Who wrote the Torah? An unlikely group of Orthodox scholars has launched a website that gets to the heart of Jewish tenets.

(Sarah Lazarovic)

“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.”

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“The eighth fundamental principle [of faith] is that the Torah came from God,” wrote Maimonides over 800 years ago in his classic exposition of the 13 tenets of Jewish belief. “We are to believe that the whole Torah was given us through Moses our teacher entirely from God.” In the next principle, he elaborated: “The ninth fundamental principle is the authenticity of the Torah, i.e., that this Torah was precisely transcribed from God and no one else.”

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Even more radically, Rabbi Yehuda he-Hasid, the leading 13th-century German-Jewish pietist, claimed that entire passages in the Pentateuch had been inserted by subsequent authors. The suggestion was so scandalous that some declared those portions of he-Hasid’s writings to be heretical forgeries. The controversy highlighted a tension between two exegetical impulses: the desire to preserve the Maimonidean notion of revelation, and the drive to explain the Torah’s textual anomalies.

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But in the 19th-century German academy, these ancient questions got some startling new answers. Building off earlier work by Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and more recent contemporaries, Protestant scholars like Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen offered a radical reimagining of the origins of the Pentateuch. In their account, the reason the Torah seemed to contain retrospective insertions, internal contradictions, and duplicate narratives of key stories and laws was that it was the product of multiple authors over time. Rather than the record of a single revelation at Sinai, the five books of Moses, they asserted, were written long after their namesake’s lifetime—if, indeed, such an individual had even existed—and later woven into a whole from disparate documents.

The response from Jewish scholars to this “higher criticism” was largely rejectionist. “We believe that the whole Bible is true, holy, and of divine origin,” wrote Rabbi David Tzvi Hoffmann, a leading Orthodox academic and head of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary, in 1905. “We must not presume to set ourselves up as critics of the author of a biblical text or doubt the truth of his statements or question the correctness of his teaching.” To buttress his argument, Hoffmann penned a two-volume refutation of the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis drawing on his vast secular and religious learning, as well as an entire biblical commentary significantly devoted to demonstrating the unitary nature of the Torah.

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