Torah and Blogs

Originally publisged by Godol Hador
January 31, 2006
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In the recent discussion on the Documentary Hypothesis (DH), some people accused me of hypocrisy. They claimed that my blog has many different styles, for example:

After reading your blog for 4 months, I have found 4 distinct styles of expression:

C - Cynical
H - Humorous
S - Songfull
P – Photographic

Now either these represent 4 different individuals or are products of what you ate for breakfast the day you wrote the text.

Yet my blog has only one author. (Actually, I was going to claim that my blog is really written by a team of people. But I decided against that since that would mess up my JIB votes, as I hold that multiple author blogs must divide their vote total by the number of authors)

Another commenter claimed that:

‘It is, in fact, rather odd for a blog which features so much repetition to see an argument against the single authorship of the torah based on its repetitions.’

Both these comments were cute, yet I am human. I have mood swings. I also sometimes run out of things to say and so repeat myself, or else I forget I already posted on that subject. Are these commenters really claiming that God has mood swings, that God forgets himself, that the Torah is in effect, God’s Blog (chas vesholom) !?*

Anyway, I still maintain that the DH is a bit of a red herring. Just read the Torah and tell me how it reads! You don’t need to be a rocket scientist (or a Bible critic) to see that it reads like a human book. Some parts are majestic, for example Genesis I, but other parts of very boring, for example Leviticus.

Orthodox Judaism has of course always maintained that there is a deeper meaning to the text. The Zohar goes so far to say that someone who thinks the basic meaning is the only meaning is a fool. Now you may be very skeptical of that position, but you really don’t need the DH to get to be skeptical. Just read the book.

For every DH based question, there is always a ‘frum’ answer. I highly doubt that there is any DH ‘bom’ kashyeh which doesn’t have an answer somewhere in Chazal, Rishonim or Acharonim. Chazal and everyone else noticed most of these issues in the text a long time ago and provided answers. It's not like modern analysis has uncovered some new text questions (except for the Science / Archeology / History questions). So it really boils down to which set of answers sound more convincing. And for most people, the answer to that probably boils down to which set of answers they want to find more convincing.

The Science questions however are more interesting since Science is new, so there isn’t 2,000 years of Rabbinical Biblical Exegesis dealing with it. With the Science questions, we get to make up our own answers and then debate whether they are kefirah or not. Such fun!

So is the Bible God’s blog? Could be. Or maybe it’s the Mesopotamian equivalent of Maven Yavin. I could live with that, as long as it was Divinely Inspired.

But I really hope it’s not the Canaanite Cross-Currents. That would be bad.

* Kudos to S for that phrase.
posted by XGH @ 12:40 PM