THE TORAH: ONE DOCUMENT OR A SERIES OF SOURCES?

A broad understanding of the Torah as a document in and of itself will engage not just with the perception of Torah in Israel’s historic, mythic, religious and sacred memory, but also with the critical-historical understandings of the Torah as offered through academic discourse. In addition, it is beneficial to be aware of the progression of theoretical frameworks as they have developed in biblical scholarship. Frank Crüsemann describes the beginnings of historical-critical research into the

In later Jewish literature, the Sabbath is seen as a Bride in and of itself. Other personifications such

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as that of a Queen find their place in the dearth of Jewish poetry and song, and in later Polish Jewish literature particularly arising out of persecution and displacement, Shabbat becomes personified as a Mother. See Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Polish Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art). (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 190

For a treatment of John’s use of biblical marriage texts in relation to a developing bridegroom-

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Messiah theology, see Jocelyn McWhirter, The Bridegroom Messiah and the People of God: Marriage in the Fourth Gospel (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Pentateuch as relying on a methodology which focused on dismantling the text as a whole in order to extract possible older documents from it. This led to the 346

development of the ‘Documentary Hypothesis’ (or ‘hypotheses’ as there are more than one) which analysed different strands of the Bible in order to isolate possible sources and thereby theorise as to its formation. The Documentary Hypothesis 347

was especially popular in the 19th century as the historical-critical method of study the Bible and its sources began to find traction, and could thus be described as the ‘late blooming flower of the Enlightenment’. Julius Wellhausen, a prominent 348

German biblical scholar in the 19th and early 20th century, built on previous documentary hypotheses to establish the ‘New Documentary Hypothesis’ which became one of the most influential theories of source-criticism in modern biblical scholarship. One challenge, however, with the development of the documentary hypotheses and biblical-criticism as a method of study, is that much of the scholarship upon which it relies was conducted by German Protestants with little or

Crüsemann, The Torah, 7

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The Documentary Hypothesis specifically analyses the Pentateuch in light of four proposed source

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documents, the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly sources. The other main hypotheses about the development and emergence of the Torah as a single text in Israel’s national consciousness include, the Fragmentary Hypothesis (the Torah is a final collation of what ere originally fragmentary Israelite documents), the Supplementary Hypothesis (the Torah consists of one core document which had been added to and revised/redacted), and finally Traditional Authorship, which according to traditional Jewish, Christian and Islamic interpretation ascribes Moses as the primary author. The first three hypotheses emerged, in part, out of a growing movement which began approximately 160 years ago, in German, Scandinavian, American and British divinity schools, who were attempting to develop a ‘scientific’ reading of the Bible. (of course there were earlier attempts at biblical criticism in the 16th and 17th centuries, exemplified through the work of Baruch Spinoza for example, and Thomas Hobbes). In this vein Crüsemann writes, “The unified gift of the Torah, which remained valid during all pre-critical interpretation, was reduced to a series of self-contained, independent law books”. See Crüsemann, The Torah, 7. See also, James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), xi-xiv, 41-42; Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible, (Kindle Edition: 2013),and Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library), (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2012). See also http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mvz/bible/doc-hyp.pdf. Retrieved December 10 2018

George Robinson, Essential Torah: A Complete Guide to the Five Books of Moses (New York: Schocken

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no consideration toward the reception history of these texts within the Jewish community. In addition, anti-Jewish sentiments were at least a partial influence on 349

some of the conclusions drawn. As such, these hypotheses were described to be a form of a ‘Higher Antisemitism’, entrenched in the presupposition that the later sources which comprised the Pentateuch ‘reflected a degeneration of spirituality into a compulsively legalistic fixation on the details of a sacrificial cult’. 350

While biblical-criticism and the development of biblical scholarship has transformed the fields of biblical studies and interpretation throughout the 20th century, Jewish- Christian dialogue has a vital role in ensuring that such important and sensitive scholarship is rooted in mutual respect, with a consciousness of the reception history of those texts within a given community. 351 Nostra Aetate and the subsequent emergence of a Christian-Jewish dialogue which includes multiple Protestant denominations, has re-affirmed the Christian connection to Judaism and helped to shed some of the unhelpful assumptions toward Jews and Judaism which featured in 19th and 20th century biblical scholarship. Indeed Philip Cunningham maintains that

Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976) for example, stressed the antithesis between the teachings of Jesus

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and Judaism. See Stephen Westerholm’s chapter “The “Righteousness of the Law”: Bultmann, Wilckens and Sanders”, in Perspectives Old and New on Paul: the “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 150-154

Solomon Schechter, a rabbi who was a rough contemporary of Julius Wellhausen, described it as

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such, in relation to the Wellhausian assertion that the Pentateuch is ‘the calcified Jewish form of once lively Israelite faith’. Schechter is synonymous with the discovery of the Cairo Geniza. See Kessler, Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations, 129 See also Crüsemann, The Torah, 2

Crüsemann notes the significance of the revision of certain literary-critical approaches to the

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Pentateuch, drawing attention to the fact that classical source theory was ‘uncontestable’ for a century. Crüsemann, The Torah, 7-8

in the light of NA, “the adoption of biblical-criticism in the Catholic community has opened up new possibilities for a fresh appreciation of the Jewish tradition.” . 352

Michael Fishbane, writing on ‘inner-biblical exegesis’, emphasises the act of

Vergegenwärtigung, that is the act of making ‘the pastness of texts present to us and part of our ongoing cultural lives’. While traditional authorship would be 353

emphasised by the rabbis in relation to the formation of the Torah, the fact that classical Jewish hermeneutics offers space for and encourages reinterpretation, in some ways does not stand in direct opposition to the various documentary hypotheses. This could be said insofar as we are constantly rewriting ourselves into scripture through the very act of interpretation, the innere Kraft at the suggestion of Franz Rosenzweig, which releases an inner dynamic of the text through a live reading. Therefore the Torah offers, as suggested earlier in this thesis, an 354

opportunity to dialogically engage with the ‘epic past’ of the text, as well as with its present as refracted through our own lives. 355

Philip Cunningham, Seeking Shalom, 33

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Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: essays in Biblical Hermeneutics, (Bloomington & Indianapolis:

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Indiana University Press, 1989), ix-x Ibid., x

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Ibid., 106. Fishbane emphasises ‘the acts of speech’ involved in producing Torah text, highlighting

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the fact that it is not simply the product of an aesthetic act of writing, but ‘actualises a present dialogue with an epic past’.

III. SACRED OPENINGS: CONSTRUCTING THE MODEL