Types of Interpretation – Lecture 8

Table of Contents

• [0:00] Introduction: academic reading versus traditional learning
• [1:12] Duplications and the use of the divine name
• [2:33] The editor of the Bible: Ezra’s role
• [4:13] Early education and critical thinking
• [10:51] The text as a weave of different sources
• [12:18] Baruch Schwartz’s approach and the starting-point assumption
• [14:08] Evidence in the Talmud for documenting the sources
• [17:39] A 600-year shift in the historical theory
• [19:49] The difficulty of publishing research in Hebrew and in English
• [24:45] The challenge of Velikovsky’s dating theory
• [27:18] Ancient tradition and the loss of the Torah
• [28:49] The Holy One, blessed be He, wrote the Torah – Ezra the Scribe
• [31:05] Defending the tradition of five thousand seven hundred years
• [33:17] The 24-hour day – the problem of anachronism
• [35:47] Four ways of looking at the Torah according to Breuer
• [41:16] A synthesis of peshat and derash – “an eye for an eye”
• [43:51] Differences between compensation and punishment in tort law
• [46:39] Permanent ownership vs. time-limited ownership – the Jubilee

Summary

General overview

The text presents the tension between an academic reading of the Torah within the framework of biblical criticism and traditional learning, and argues that the scholarly conclusion about a weaving together of different sources seems almost unavoidable when one reads the text with fresh eyes in light of duplications, contradictions, and shifts in style and divine names. It describes how scholarship reconstructs “documents” and proposes dating and editors such as Ezra the Scribe, but criticizes the historical dimension as weaker and more speculative than the textual analysis. In contrast, a religious alternative is presented in the approach of Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, which accepts the textual findings but attributes the weaving itself to the Holy One, blessed be He, and from that develops the possibility of an interpretive synthesis that reconciles the rabbinic derashot and linguistic-editorial phenomena without giving up the tradition of the giving of the Torah.

The Documentary Hypothesis and biblical criticism

The prevailing scholarly approach describes the Torah as a complex weaving of four documents interlaced within one another rather than placed side by side. The duplications and contradictions, both in narratives and in commandments and the halakhic sections, lead to classification of the sources, and the central example is the distinction between passages that use the name Y-H-V-H and passages that use the name Elohim. Scholarship tries to reconstruct the editorial layers backward from the edited text, to build continuous sequences for each document, and then to conjecture when, where, and by whom the documents were composed and who combined them into the Bible as we know it.

The reading experience and a fresh look at the text

The text argues that habituation from a young age dulls the sense of strangeness and difficulty in the face of duplications and contradictions, whereas an adult reader encountering the Torah for the first time may experience a “strange” text, with wording that is not unequivocal and an order that feels mixed up. The speaker presents the conclusion that the text looks like a weaving of sources as a puzzle-solution with persuasive force, even if there are disagreements within scholarship itself. He quotes the Rebbe as saying that what destroys the ability to learn the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and Torah properly is “the kindergarten teacher,” and notes, as a factual description, that socially speaking many people hardly study the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) beyond the synagogue, alongside a new revival of study around Gush Etzion and the “929” project of Benny Lau.

The role of editing and Ezra the Scribe according to Baruch Schwartz

The speaker quotes an article by Baruch Schwartz, a Bible scholar who is observant, according to which Ezra, who edited the sources, took it upon himself not to touch the verses themselves but only to place and organize them according to rigid rules. The claim is that the way the integration was done hints that there was no free intervention in the writing, as though there was already something sacred back then that was forbidden to alter, whereas if an editor had allowed himself to “stitch” and homogenize the text, the result would have looked different. The speaker adds that there are certain indications in the words of the Sages for a conception of “documents by documents” or “sections by sections” over the course of forty years, as well as certain distinctions regarding Deuteronomy and the rabbinic interpretations based on adjacent passages.

Starting points, what is open to adjudication, and the problematic nature of the humanities

The text emphasizes that the gap between traditional and academic conclusions is not accidental but stems from differences in starting point, and that if one approached the matter only from the text itself without traditional assumptions, the scholarly conclusion would seem almost inevitable. It argues that in the humanities there is a tendency to accept “embedded” assumptions without examining them, and brings as an example Immanuel Velikovsky, who tried to challenge the accepted dating of the ancient Near East by shifting it about 600 years and claimed that the historical puzzle then “falls into place” differently. The story is described as including boycotts, struggles of agendas, and a comparison to wars between schools in archaeology and to ideological debates such as evolution, along with the sharp claim that in fields touching ideology and practice it is hard to trust the sources because there are biases and selective presentation of facts.

“The Torah of Moses” and the episode of finding the Torah scroll in Josiah’s days

The text presents the scholarly discussion of the expression “the Torah of Moses” that appears in books such as Joshua and Isaiah, and the difficulty of interpreting it as the edited Torah if one assumes the editing took place later, which leads to proposals such as identifying the expression specifically with Deuteronomy. The episode of finding the Torah scroll in the days of Josiah is described as being used in scholarship as proof against continuity of tradition, and even the possibility is proposed that the scroll was “found” in quotation marks, meaning actually composed then. But the speaker argues that a straightforward reading of the story actually carries indirect weight in favor of there having been an ancient conception of a “book of the Torah of Moses” that disappeared and then reappeared.

Rabbi Mordechai Breuer and the theory of aspects

Rabbi Mordechai Breuer is presented as offering an alternative that accepts the textual dimension of the Documentary Hypothesis but rejects its historical dimension. He argues that the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself composed four documents from different points of view and wove them together so that the Torah would contain several angles of truth regarding the same events and commandments, and the comparison is made to the answer given about fossils in a world created “already with” traces of process. According to this description, there is no passage that combines all four documents together, but at most three, and the fourth is identified with Deuteronomy as Moses our Teacher from another perspective. The main established book of the method is called Torat HaBechinot, published in Gush Etzion and edited by Rabbi Yossi Ofer and Rabbi Amnon Bazak.

A synthesis of peshat and derash: “an eye for an eye”

The text brings an example from Henshke’s articles in HaMaayan, 1977, on peshat and derash, applying the theory of aspects to explain rabbinic derashot. “An eye for an eye” is understood in its plain sense as literally taking out an eye, and in derash as monetary payment, and the connection between them explains an opinion in the words of the Sages according to which one assesses “the value of the damager’s eye” rather than that of the injured party, because the peshat creates a punitive claim against the damager and the derash converts it into money. The speaker adds that this connects to Maimonides’ understanding that tort payments have a punitive dimension, and that “free people have no price,” so the money given to the injured party is the product of a punishment that in practice also serves as compensation.

The contradiction between “he shall serve him forever” and the Jubilee, and the king’s expropriation

Another example is the contradiction between “he shall serve him forever” in Mishpatim and the release of slaves in the Jubilee in Behar, where the Sages interpret “forever” as meaning “until his Jubilee age.” The proposed explanation is that the two passages reflect two different aspects: the aspect of the laws of ownership, under which the pierced slave is acquired “forever” and the acquisition is an acquisition of the person himself, and the aspect of the laws of Jubilee, under which there is a social principle of divine expropriation—“the Jubilee is the king’s expropriation”—which does not stem from weakness in the ownership but from the power of expropriation. The combination of the aspects creates the concept of “ownership of the person for a limited time,” in the sense that the ownership is absolute from the perspective of the laws of ownership but practically limited by the mechanism of the Jubilee.

Kabbalah and documents: Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah

A claim is cited from Yossi Aviv”i, in an unpublished work found in manuscript form by the speaker, identifying the four documents with four kabbalistic aspects such as Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. The identification is presented as a systematic claim, “not just a nice insight,” with a connection also to the divine names, and as a possible understanding that the four viewpoints form an overall interpretive system in which all of them are true.

“These and those are the words of the living God” as a description of aspects

The text interprets the passage about the concubine at Gibeah in tractate Gittin as a place where the Talmud explains the meaning of “these and those are the words of the living God” through the words of Elijah the Prophet, where the Holy One, blessed be He, says: “Rabbi Yonatan says this, and Rabbi Evyatar says that.” The proposed understanding is that each opinion grasps a partial aspect of reality, and the full picture is created through a synthesis of the two aspects rather than by ruling that one of them is false. This model is presented as parallel to the difference between scholarship, which analytically separates layers, and the beit midrash, which seeks a unifying meaning for contradictions within a single text.

“Late” verses and traditional explanations

The text points to verses perceived as late, such as “These are the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over the children of Israel,” “to this very day,” and “in those days there was no king in Israel,” which seem like editorial notes addressing a reader from a later period. It argues that the medieval authorities (Rishonim) sensed the difficulty, and notes that Ibn Ezra refers to it in several places, that Rabbi Yehuda HeHasid and his student wrote about late verses that entered the Torah, and that there are hints of this also in Nachmanides. He recounts that Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was angry about the publication of the book HaTzioni, to the point of saying that the book should be burned, whereas Rabbi Menasheh HaKatan in Mishneh Halakhot argued that one should not disqualify HaTzioni in that way, since he belongs to the medieval authorities (Rishonim).

Divine inspiration, anachronism, and foreknowledge versus free choice

The text describes a traditional answer according to which verses with late language were written in advance through divine inspiration so that the Torah would speak also to readers in future generations, similar to the idea of embedded meanings and to an anachronistic description in human language. It argues that scholars will not accept such an explanation because it is not something that can be adjudicated, but someone who assumes that the Holy One, blessed be He, wrote the Torah and knows the future does not see this as any principled obstacle. When the claim was raised that this harms free choice regarding the very existence of monarchy, the speaker refers to the well-known discussion of divine foreknowledge and free choice, and adds that according to tradition the book of Judges was written by Samuel, who anointed kings, and edited it in order to explain the background to monarchy.

First of all, I want to bring maybe one more example and then wrap up the main part of this discussion about academic reading or study versus traditional study in the context of biblical criticism. The accepted view among scholars, as is well known, is that the Bible is a composite, what’s called the Documentary Hypothesis: a composition of four different documents woven together in some fairly complex way. It’s not one next to the other, but one inside the other in one way or another. What leads to that conclusion? Mainly considerations of duplications and contradictions. There are different passages in the Torah that have similar or overlapping content. First, there’s the problem of why it has to appear twice—duplications. And second, in most cases, sometimes in central elements and sometimes less so, but in most cases there’s also a difference between the passages. For example, the main difference from which this whole classification of the documents emerged is the use of the divine names. There are passages where the name Y-H-V-H appears, and passages where the name Elohim appears. And the claim is that this basically means there is some different dimension here, some different character to these two passages, even though they are basically saying the same thing. This applies both to narrative passages—things that happened, events—and to passages of commandments. Commandments also repeat in parallel places. The parts of the Torah that are commandments—it isn’t built like a codex, but the legal sections also contain duplications and contradictions. And so there developed, down to today, a view that says that in fact what we have here is a weaving together, as I said before, of several documents, each of which describes the events and the commandments from its own point of view, in its own language—traditions perhaps written by different people in different periods. And somehow, in the period of Ezra the Scribe, it is commonly thought that this is what happened: he edited the Bible as we know it today. He assembled these four documents in some way, and that is the Bible we know—mainly regarding the Torah, though it spills over into the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as well. The early parts of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) are an integral part of the Torah documents, and only at some stage did they decide to cut it off at the point where Moses died, on the threshold of entering the land. That is what is called Torah, and beyond that they left it as books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). But the claim is that these are really documents that continue onward historically into the entry into the land as well. Say, on the normative level, commandments given by Moses have the status of commandments from the Torah, Torah-level commandments. So it’s fairly clear why they cut it off at the time of Moses’ death.

Well, on the face of it, that really is a reasonable and natural conclusion. Meaning, if I were reading such a text—and it’s fairly sophisticated, there’s very interesting linguistic work there—you can argue with a lot of parts of it, and there are debates within the scholarly world too, but still, it’s basically a kind of puzzle. When you look at it—we got used to it too early in life. Einstein once said that what made him unique was that he matured late. We ordinary people internalize the concepts of time and space at age two, three, four, and then you still don’t have critical thinking; you get used to it and that’s what stays with you. Everything is fine, everything is clear, everything is understood. He said he matured late—he internalized it at age sixteen. And the Rebbe said that what destroys our ability to understand the Bible is the kindergarten teacher. I heard this in the name of some neighbor who was a Gur Hasid, that the Rebbe said what ruins our ability to learn the Bible and Torah properly is the kindergarten teacher. A similar statement—that we learn the Bible the way the kindergarten teacher taught us, and that this remains our mode of learning all the way through, and that it ruins things too—that’s already a judgmental statement. First of all, that factual description is in many cases true. Especially until the past several years, when Bible study was revived around Gush, this renewal, this biblical renaissance. Today there’s also that project of Beni Lau with the 929. But until then, who studied Bible? I mean, I think the last time you encountered it was in kindergarten. I mean, who studies Bible? You hear it in synagogue, the weekly Torah portion, and that’s it. Talmudic text—fine. But who deals with Bible? In any case, the claim is that we are a bit blasé about these problems because we’re used to this text from a very young age. So think about someone encountering this text for the first time, with no idea where it came from. He sees a book. And now he reads it at a point when he already has mature judgment—twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty, doesn’t matter, an adult, someone who already has the ability to analyze the text, to think about it, to understand its meaning. It’s a very strange text. Very strange. Full of duplications and contradictions, very unclear wording, not unambiguous.

Now, sometimes maybe it’s also a language issue. It could be that in that period that language was very clear, and in our Hebrew—or not even in Hebrew, but in a more modern idiom. Compared to what are you saying it’s strange? To a contemporary book edited in… No, when I read the Torah, that’s why I’m saying it. We don’t have alternatives from three thousand years ago, it’s something else. So maybe that’s just how literary works were made? Then it’s even stranger. So why do I feel it’s strange? Exactly—the opposite. After all, I grew into it, and it’s the only thing I know. I have nothing to compare it to. And still, each of us feels there are strange things there. That means there really is something strange there on the objective level. In other words, it’s not… On the contrary, sometimes I’d think that because we do have something to compare it to, like modern Hebrew, then I say, okay, it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t always work with modern Hebrew, so then I say, fine, that could just be because we’re biased toward modern Hebrew. But I think everyone feels it even apart from modern Hebrew, because I’m not talking only about the words or only about… Even by the linguistic standards of the Bible itself, there are anomalies in the Bible. I mean, I think also in editing, not only in language. For all sorts of reasons… Duplications and contradictions are an objective example; they’re not language-dependent. It’s something strange. The order gets mixed up, there is no earlier and later in the Torah, and then the Sages come and expound it and everything—we already grew up on that. But think of someone encountering this text for the first time: it’s incredibly strange. And when you ask yourself, with a fresh eye—not with a captive eye from age zero, but saying, okay, let’s see what this text says—and it cries out, I think, in a certain sense, for a solution like this, the scholarly solution, that there is some combination here of several original documents. And this is not a simple riddle—to try to reconstruct those documents, which parts belong to which document, to try to build each of the documents separately in a continuous form; that is, to reverse the editing process. To take the edited text and try to extract from it what the documents were from which it was edited. And that’s what people have worked on and are working on; there are some disagreements, they work on it, and so on. But that is basically the essence of the Documentary Hypothesis. And after that they also try to examine when each document was composed and from what angle, and through which angle also when each document was composed.

Here, in my opinion, it’s much weaker. Again, I’m not a great expert, but from what I’ve read more or less, if I understand correctly, this is what people in the field say. It’s much weaker. That is, there’s some priestly point of view, so they try to explain that this is some Temple period and so on, maybe the First Temple, because it’s the priestly point of view of people who worked in the Temple. Fine, I could also have suggested a hundred thousand other possibilities. That seems weak to me. But again, once we arrive at the conclusion that there are four documents, the historical question arises: where did they come from, who wrote them, when were they created, from what perspective, and of course who ultimately combined everything and created the Bible as we know it today. That’s more or less the move of the documents.

Now of course this move seriously calls the traditional view into question. The traditional view says that the entire Torah was written by the Holy One, blessed be He, given at Sinai, wholly ancient, transmitted by tradition, not edited by human beings of course, not written by human beings, certainly not. After all, we derive piles upon piles of Jewish law from crowns and decorative strokes on letters, an extra vav, and all kinds of things like that. For that, an extra letter or a word not entirely in place, something like that—immediately they hang mountains of laws on it. And the assumption in the background is that we have here some text that is supposed to be unified, given by the Holy One, blessed be He, entirely ancient from Mount Sinai, and there is a tradition that… Right. So these two outlooks really are outlooks that stand opposite one another. Here the traditional outlook versus the academic outlook seems to me to arrive at very different conclusions. Very unequivocally.

What is the point that distinguishes between them? Why do they arrive at different conclusions? Clearly there’s a difference in starting points. And it’s not an accidental difference. Two people approach a text—fine, different interpretations, each proposes his own interpretations, that’s okay. I don’t think it’s right to see it that way. It’s clear that if not for the starting point, it would be natural to say what the people of biblical criticism are saying. If I ask only the text itself—and we just talked about hermeneutic approaches—I look at the text itself. What does it say? I know nothing beyond it. What does this text say? This text looks like some weaving together of several sources. I think, again, it’s a sophisticated theory, but once you’ve gone through it, it seems pretty compelling.

What does the theory say about why they did editing that appears so crude? Why? What does the theory say the reason was for doing editing that looks so crude? Here, just now I read a very interesting article by Baruch Schwartz. He’s a Bible scholar, and he lays it out there—this is actually the main thing I relied on—he really describes the picture there pretty comprehensively, with the basic principles. He basically argues that the editing—and he’s also an observant Jew, meaning he’s committed to the sanctity of the text and so on—he argues that Ezra, who edited these sources, took upon himself, and not for nothing according to the traditional assumption, not to touch the texts. You can edit them and interweave them, but you can’t interfere with the writing. The writing was done with divine inspiration. Never mind, these are of course traditional assumptions; as a scholar he doesn’t have to write that, but I assume that’s what stands behind what he says. And therefore you can’t touch the text. What you can do is only organize it in some way so that it will become one braid, yes, all these threads together. The documents he relies on—are they human handiwork? Human handiwork, but perhaps with divine inspiration. They have some sanctity, they became sanctified. He doesn’t go into that there because it’s a research article, so I don’t know. But I assume that as a committed Jew—assume, and again not only him—he says this is probably the accepted conception regardless of the starting assumption, that Ezra indeed did not touch the verses themselves. These are not verses Ezra wrote. Ezra cut, joined, and pasted, while the original authors as well, the ones who edited each of the documents separately, apparently also did something not entirely natural. Meaning it wasn’t just the simple composition of a person who wrote it and that’s it, but there is indeed something there that is bound up with the word of God, I don’t know, divine inspiration. Of course many Bible scholars won’t say that, but in the description he offers there, there is great caution about touching the text, despite the picture being perhaps a bit frightening to a traditional eye. Still, he seems to argue—and he says this too is the accepted picture in the scholarly world. That is, he’s representing the scholarly world there entirely. He says, on the contrary, notice how far the scholarly world does not go. He says this is the accepted approach; he’s not presenting his own proposal. He describes the accepted approach there. And he says: notice how even the scholarly world understands that there was something here to which the Documentary Hypothesis does not really provide an answer. Because if a person had allowed himself to do whatever he wanted with this text, it wouldn’t have come out like this. Does that also relate to the consistency of the divine name? Yes, for example. He would somehow have stitched it, arranged the verses accordingly. No—there are fairly clear indications there that no one touched the verses. There are quite rigid rules for how Ezra integrated these passages from the different documents, and he did not allow himself to deviate from those rules. In that sense, this is actually a very interesting confirmation of the possibility that even if it was edited later and by human beings, there is something here that one does not touch, something that was already sacred back then, not something that only developed at a later stage.

In the Talmud itself there is a saying that says the Torah was given in installments, regarding the forty years, passage by passage, passage by passage. So yes, there are also indications of this in the Sages at certain points. The issue of the order of the passages, the way they are properly attached one after another. About Deuteronomy they already said that Moses our teacher wrote it, unlike the first four books of the Torah. From the mouth of God—and again there are all kinds of explanations why it too is divine—but there is a difference. Even in the rules we deal with concerning adjacency, “we derive from adjacency”: Rabbi Yehuda does not derive from adjacency in Deuteronomy, but in the first four books he does. Meaning there are different methods for handling the text in the last book as opposed to the first four books. For us all five books are one text. They obviously do not reach the level of radicalism, let’s say, of today’s Documentary Hypothesis, but yes, they were less cautious, let’s call it, or less conservative than we are.

And in the early commentators too, the phrase “the Torah of Moses” appears several times. In Joshua—“keep the Torah of Moses”—in Isaiah, and so on. Okay. So in all those cases, that would be a reference to this collection of documents that had not yet been edited as a text. The question is what is called “the Torah of Moses”; there are all kinds of disagreements about that, as I understand, among the scholars—again, I’m feeding off material I’ve just read, I’m not an expert—but there are debates about why it is called “the Torah of Moses.” Some wanted to say it’s Deuteronomy; others wanted to say no, it’s the entire Torah. But again, what does “the entire Torah” mean? According to the scholarly view, it can’t be the Torah, because the Torah had not yet been edited. It had not yet been edited; it wasn’t yet the Torah as we know it today as five books, what we today call “the Torah.” Notice how the whole business is built one thing upon another. That is, once you assume that this is the state of affairs, and you interpret the phrase “the Torah of Moses,” you can no longer interpret it as the Torah as we know it today, because that phrase appears before that happened, before that text existed. And then you have to ask yourself: so what is “the Torah of Moses”? Deuteronomy. Ah, so Deuteronomy is called “the Torah of Moses,” so he wrote that, and the others he didn’t. One thing built on another.

And often—and this is a problem in the humanities in my opinion, though it is also somewhat true in the natural sciences, but much more so in the humanities—in the natural sciences usually a person knows, someone who is expert in the field, he knows it from A to Z, he knows the whole development of it, its foundations and its conclusions. If it’s your field of expertise, you know the foundations of quantum theory and you know the applications, or the area in which you work, relativity or whatever. In the humanities there are often certain foundations that you never studied, and yet… Velikovsky is an excellent example of this. You know the story of Velikovsky, Immanuel Velikovsky? Yes. He was a Russian Jewish doctor who decided that the dating of the ancient Near East, based on all sorts of indications—some speculative, some less so—needed to be shifted by 600 years. The accepted dating today, which events happened in which year, is based on some historical timeline—that this happened in such-and-such year CE or BCE and so on. He says we need to shift this; there was some disruption, and the historical dating of the ancient Near East has to be shifted by 600 years. Now was his claim backward or forward? I don’t even remember, because I’m talking now about things I read a very long time ago. But the claim is that many things the scholarship has trouble fitting together—move them 600 years and boom, it falls into place like a puzzle. Now there were some interesting claims there. It stirred up a lot of controversy. By the way, it’s fascinating. I first encountered it when his son-in-law came to give a lecture at Bar-Ilan. Were you there? I think there’s an Israeli association that deals with this. That’s his daughter, Shlomit Kagan, Shulamit Kagan. This is already a story of ten years that sounds… No, longer. He already lectured to us then at Bar-Ilan when I was a student. I read the original books in English as a student at Bar-Ilan. Okay. But I think there are Hebrew editions now from the last ten or twenty years. He’s a neurologist in Givatayim today, here—I don’t know where exactly. He was already very old back then too. He came to give us a lecture and he told us a bit about how Einstein—they were friends—and Einstein answered him patiently and was very sympathetic and willing to listen to him, because he also had cosmological theories. He had all sorts of things—he made some synthesis there of many things. The comet, for example? Exactly. And all sorts of catastrophes reflected in the Exodus from Egypt, in all those things, the splitting of the sea, and all kinds of parallels in Inca culture. Yes, yes, that’s the idea, that’s part of what he used. A bit like Chariots of the Gods, but in a way that was not fantastical exactly. And he told us there about Velikovsky’s adventures, how no publishing house in the United States was willing to publish the books. People from academia threatened to boycott any publisher that would bring them out. That’s what he claimed; I don’t know. And the books didn’t come out. They didn’t come out. And at some stage it somehow broke through and was published in English. At that time in Israel no book existed when he lectured in Hebrew. No book. That is, in Israel it was impossible to get those books published. The books are fascinating. You can argue, you can say yes, you can say no. What do you mean again, lecturing in Hebrew? Velikovsky himself? No, his son-in-law. When was this? When I was a student at Bar-Ilan. I held Velikovsky’s books in my own hands. In Hebrew? In English. That’s what I’m saying. I’m talking about Hebrew. He described history. Exactly—that’s what I’m saying. He described that in the United States for many years they refused to publish. We’re talking about a period when the man was talking to Einstein in the 1950s. Yes. Now in English it wasn’t published; then at some stage it was published in English. In Hebrew it didn’t come out. When I heard the lecture, there were already books in English. But he said, in Hebrew you won’t manage to publish it. You won’t manage, because there is some monopoly here, it’s a small country, there are monopolies here; if you go against the accepted agenda, they won’t allow it. The Chief Scientist sitting in the class? Yes, exactly. Just look—he’s no small-time rambler, true, but the witch-hunt, the persecution that went on there was really dirty.

In any case, the point is: look, for example, at a dispute between archaeologists. A bit like the film Footnote—you see what kind of religious wars are going on there between different academic schools, and this characterizes mainly the humanities. I think we talked about that when we started the series. In the natural sciences too, in topics like global warming. Yes, things that have practical ideological implications. I brought you that dissertation about Orthodoxy. There it’s very emotional, very intense. Sometimes I envy them, how much the professional intellectual issue becomes an agenda to which you devote your life in a war for and against. Sometimes it takes ridiculous and irritating forms, but listen—they fight over ideas, and that’s beautiful. Like I mentioned that newly religious person whom I’m accompanying—he’s very disturbed by wars between rabbis. I told him: look, when things matter to people, they fight over them. Now, as a result it may get ugly and irritating and annoying, all true. But on the other hand, they’re not fighting over getting more money for themselves; these are real wars. A person believes the other is a heretic, harmful, I don’t know exactly what. So listen, appreciate him for the fact that it matters to him; he fights for what matters to him. Fine, I also don’t like some of these wars. The rabbinic prohibition that looks like a Torah-level one, or something like that. Yes, exactly.

So here too, in short, the point is that you see the wars between archaeologists, for example Ze’ev Herzog—what’s his name—the one who discovered the altar on Mount Ebal, Ze’ev something, I don’t remember his name, Finkelstein now, right, Adam Zertal. So he was ostracized in academia because he dared discover something suggesting the Bible is authentic regarding the settlement. In short, there are wars over this, and these are very problematic fields. It’s like evolution, by the way. You can’t believe anyone; everyone lies, really, from all sides, both scientists and creationists, everyone is a liar. Because everyone has to promote an agenda, and they slant the facts or always present them in a way that suits their agenda. So if you look for missing links or things like that, ask a scientist—what do you mean, there are plenty of missing links, you can find intermediate stages in the evolutionary process. Fine, usually when you look at the example you understand that this is really a question of interpretation. But it’s presented as though we’re long past that, and you’re asking yesterday’s questions. And the creationists say: what do you mean, there are no intermediate stages at all, they haven’t found them, there are huge holes in the theory. Now the picture is more complex, and each side presents it selectively in a way that fits its agenda. You have to be careful with fields that touch ideology and practice. These are terrible fields. If you don’t devote very significant time to becoming an expert in the field yourself, and you try to live off other people’s books, even professionals—you can’t trust them. You can’t trust them. Everyone lies. Not everyone, but many of them lie, and you don’t know who does and who doesn’t. Like the famous riddle of heaven and hell, you don’t know who is lying and who isn’t, so everyone is disqualified. You can’t—if you don’t know whether the person standing before you is lying or not, once there is a significant percentage of liars, that destroys the field.

Okay, how did I get to all this? Right. So the claim is that the Documentary Hypothesis essentially builds… I started talking about the humanities with Velikovsky and so on. So in this field of the humanities there is, say, the accepted chronology. Most scholars publishing today in these areas assume that chronology. They don’t know where it came from, who built it, and on what basis it was decided that this Pharaoh reigned in this and this year until that year, more or less, because there are lots of ambiguities and uncertainties, but roughly there is an accepted chronology. They don’t keep going back all the time to the theory on which the chronology is built—which is no simple theory, how the chronology was built—and it rests on many assumptions; you can argue with it. Velikovsky shook the dust off the basic chronology. He says: wait, wait, let’s reexamine the chronology itself. Today we say the chronology exists, and you try to fit various events into it and show what happened accordingly, but who said the chronology is correct? Almost nobody asks that. Whoever asks that is a heretic to the principle. A heretic to the academic principle, yes? And that’s why all the wars were there, because he wasn’t saying he was introducing some small innovation; he was trying to undermine all the foundations, the most basic dating systems of these fields, and therefore they fought him. And to this day there are debates—whether it’s right or not right. I’m not saying these are clear-cut cases, but there are interesting arguments there.

In any case, so too here, with the Documentary Hypothesis, there are all sorts of assumptions embedded within the academic process, within the academic picture that emerges, which people accept as self-evident, but it’s not clear that they themselves aren’t worth examining. For example, what I described earlier—when each document was written, or where, and by whom each document was written. At least from my impression, and I have to speak carefully here because I really am not… I’m far from being an expert—but my impression is that this is very speculative. What was the scroll of the Torah that Josiah, for example, read? So the question is whether it was Deuteronomy or not, or the whole Torah or not. No, but was it one of these documents or what? That’s the question. According to the scholarship, it can’t be the whole Torah. Exactly. In that sense, it actually supports tradition. The finding of the Torah scroll, which is considered one of the great refutations of the traditional view—because apparently the Torah scroll disappeared, so where is all the tradition and the Kuzari and all these things? The Torah scroll disappeared and then suddenly they found it in Josiah’s days. They put that “found” in quotation marks. What, that the Torah scroll was “found” in quotation marks? Yes, that they supposedly created it then. There was a claim that they actually created it then; that was one of the hypotheses, that the editing was not in Ezra’s days but in Josiah’s. Others say the “book of the Torah” was Deuteronomy. Never mind, there are all kinds of such hypotheses. But I think that episode does indicate that there was an earlier Torah. Because again, if I take that description—it could be fabricated, then I can’t know. But if I read that description as it stands, they find a Torah scroll and tell the people: friends, this is the Torah of Moses, this is the Torah. So from the text itself you read that everyone understood there had been something, and it was lost to them, and now they found it. So true, someone could have fabricated this and edited it himself and so on, but still it indirectly testifies to the fact that there was some earlier tradition that there was a Torah given to Moses and lost to us and we don’t know where it is, and now suddenly someone claims to have found it. Right? So that actually indicates that there was indeed an earlier tradition. Whether that is the scroll or not, you can argue.

Fine, not important. I’m only saying that the documentary view basically cannot accept that a Torah scroll was found there, because there was not yet a Torah scroll. So either it was edited there, and if it was edited in Ezra’s days then this was one of the documents perhaps, I don’t know exactly. In any case, it seems the accepted view there is that this was one of the documents; I don’t remember exactly which documents existed in the First Temple period.

In any event, to sharpen this point I’ll bring the famous words of Rabbi Breuer. Rabbi Breuer proposes an alternative of sorts—and again, without getting into whether there are also quite a few problems with it—but I want to suggest it only in order to show the difference in the mode of looking, and where the assumptions come in. It sharpens this very nicely, I think. Because Rabbi Breuer essentially proposed a suggestion that on the face of it sounds very revolutionary, but on the other hand preserves the entire traditional view and adopts the entire Documentary Hypothesis, at least its textual part, not its historical part, but its textual part. Breuer basically proposed that the Holy One, blessed be He, wrote the Torah; He was Ezra the Scribe. That is, He took four documents, each of which He Himself composed, each one describing the commandments and the events from a certain angle, from a certain point of view—priestly, religious, maybe even what is called Yahwistic, the Y-H-V-H name, the Elohistic name, and so on, according to the divine names customarily used; these documents have names. And because there are four basic forms of perspective, the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to give us a Torah that would contain all those angles of vision, so that we would know how to look at every passage from all those angles. And therefore He essentially did all the work that scholarship supposedly reconstructed historically, but this was not a historical event at all.

It reminds one a little of those apologetics about fossils, where they say there are fossils that are older than six thousand years, and the answer is: no, the Holy One, blessed be He, created a world in which there are already fossils and everything, and He created it six thousand years ago. Okay. No, I’ll tell you—I can even give you a rational reason for that. What would be the reason the Holy One, blessed be He, would place dinosaur remains? I’ll explain. Because in the end, if you really understand that the world was created the way modern science describes it, only faster, because you want it to fit the traditional description, then you say: basically the processes that brought the world to its present condition are the processes science describes; they just happened much faster, they happened in six days. Say I want to preserve completely the picture of six days of twenty-four hours, and that includes the era of dinosaurs, yes, it just ran quickly. There are people who want to argue—you know, Carl Wien loves this—that because the world was… after all, time ran much faster when mass was denser, so when you translate it into today’s terms it comes out to five or seven hundred years, say, that the world more or less… whereas the real physical age is billions. Okay, never mind, all kinds of such apologetics; I’m not even getting into it. But I’m just saying, you can even find some kind of logic for it. The fossils really were there, there really were dinosaurs and they died and everything happened, because otherwise how was the world created? Think, for example, of a tree. When you have a tree as you know it today, with all the carbon rings, yes, the rings that indicate its evolutionary age, its geological age. So I say: this is a tree. When you want to create a tree of that type, say you created it now ex nihilo, do you understand that it will contain such rings? Because otherwise it wouldn’t be a tree. And that’s what’s called a tree; that’s how a tree is made. So how, when the Holy One, blessed be He, creates us, say—we discover today that inside the human being, in the brain stem, there are ancient evolutionary layers, of ancient evolutionary creatures. Deep in the brain stem there are layers that belong to earlier stages in evolution, and the outer layers are somehow… there are fingerprints there of the evolutionary process. Now assuming that all these things play a part in human functioning—meaning, a human being built this way is the human being we know, there is no other human. If those weren’t there, we would not be what we know; we’d be something else. Now if the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to create human beings like that, He has to create them that way. He has to create them with all those stages because that is what is required for our functioning. So from our side we give it a historical interpretation: there were evolutionary processes, and we emerged from those, and those emerged from those, and so on. But when the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to create a person, He creates a person that way. There is no other way to make such a person. Such a person is built that way; there is no other form. What are you going to do, make a tree without rings? Without rings it won’t be a tree, it’ll be something else. So you create it already looking that way.

And I don’t want to defend that theory, because I’m not all that bothered by the difficulty anyway, so it doesn’t trouble me. But on the level of… Why are you not bothered by the difficulty? Because okay, so it’s not six thousand years old—what’s the problem? I don’t understand how someone can claim that the first day—“and there was evening and there was morning, one day”—that that time, when there is not yet a sun, there is not yet an astronomical clock called the sun—how can one claim that this means our twenty-four hours? That’s anachronistic language. What’s the problem? You’re describing it in terms of a world that already has a sun. But why imagine that that took our exact twenty-four hours when that has no meaning there at all? They say “day,” “evening and morning.” But there is no Earth rotating around the sun? No, again, an anachronistic perspective. So what? There was a stage in creation that took exactly twenty-four hours by the clock, when in nature there is still no such astronomical clock? No, it’s the other way around. Why in creation is the clock twenty-four hours? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, wants a day to be twenty-four hours, therefore He created the sun rotating at such a frequency—or rather, we rotate at such a frequency. From His point of view, already on the first day He knew: He wanted a day of twenty-four hours, and that was His plan, so He built it into astronomy too; everything follows His plan. It didn’t force Him to do that? Nothing forced Him. That’s what He wanted. Everything so that the word “day” would be interpreted like our day. Why, I ask you, why does the sun—why does the Earth rotate once every twenty-four hours? Why not twenty-eight hours? Why not one hundred years? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, decided it would be twenty-four hours, from the traditional perspective I’m saying. Fine. So if He decided that He wants a day to be twenty-four hours, then what difference does it make that there is no sun? In creation too the day is twenty-four hours. He describes it to us in the language of evening and morning because He is speaking to us; He is speaking to us as human beings already living in a world with active astronomy. So in what language should He describe it to us? There were no hours then either; those concepts had no meaning then. Fine, so He says to us: okay, but when I look there, that’s the language in which I describe it. That doesn’t seem right to me. Okay, not important. I think that thesis has to be defended, not the thesis that a day can be… No problem, we’ll defend that thesis in the merit of tradition, because that’s what we received in tradition. Never mind, I’m not getting into whether it’s true or not; I’m trying to set up an alternative. Where does our tradition begin the five thousand seven hundred years—from what stage? From the sixth day, the creation of man. Fine, so you’re already getting into harmonizations. Fine, you’re already getting into harmonizations. Right. I’m not bothered by it either. That’s why I say there are those whom it does bother, and they think tradition must be interpreted literally, and that it’s five thousand seven hundred from the moment of creation. And after all, the Sages speak about this—five days before Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashanah was the sixth day, so five days earlier, and you do the calculation; the calendar is built on that calculation. When the sun was set in place, when the molad occurred, and there there are assumptions too, by the Sages and the medieval authorities (Rishonim), that this means twenty-four hours. And it’s not only in the sense of interpreting the text, but they make use of it. Now for me this is not important; it’s a use of myth. Exactly, it’s like a model for making a transformation. Exactly, exactly. Fine. But there are those bothered by it, so they construct this picture.

Now what does this actually mean? So I return to Breuer. Breuer basically says that there are four principal forms of perspective—or really three, and the fourth is a bit different—but three forms of perspective on… There is no passage that repeats four times in four different forms. No passage in the Torah. So there is no passage that involves all four documents. That’s what he writes—I’m not quoting exactly. Only three at most. Either a passage that appears only from the perspective of one document, or two documents, or three. And the fourth is Moses our teacher, mainly Deuteronomy; that’s something else. So the claim is that there are essentially different ways of looking at the passage, and the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted us to adopt these ways of looking, or at least to know that there are several ways of looking at this commandment or these events, and therefore He essentially did the editing of Ezra the Scribe. What Ezra the Scribe wanted to do according to the scholarly picture, the Holy One, blessed be He, had already wanted to achieve, and He wrote the Torah before the revelation at Sinai in this way, in order to achieve this complex perspective. And then Breuer basically wants to argue that one can adopt biblical criticism lock, stock, and barrel—the Documentary Hypothesis, its textual dimensions, that is, that it is composed of four documents, and this is a priestly perspective and this is a perspective and so on—without the historical interpretation. So the documents were not composed in the First Temple period, not edited by Ezra the Scribe—that is already a historical inference. Everything was given at Sinai by the Holy One, blessed be He, but all the textual meanings remain intact. That is, all of biblical criticism lock, stock, and barrel you can adopt as a believing Jew. And that is an enormous gain in that sense, because as I said before, common sense really seems to see that there is some complex text here. As I said earlier too, the historical hypotheses—not the textual ones—are much more speculative. So on that I’m willing to give up without paying much of a price.

Why isn’t this brought up in every description of the giving of the Torah, if that’s the truth? What? That four sections were written, and this was not… We received the Torah as it is. Why isn’t that written? We received the Torah as you know it today at Sinai. The Holy One, blessed be He, in heaven wrote four documents, joined them, organized them—I don’t know if He did it in this exact order. He did all that work. And now He gives us the Torah as He gave it to us, just like the regular tradition that says we received the Torah letter by letter as it is today. And where did the four sections get into the land? The Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah. What do you mean? Just like the traditional view. No, simply: the Torah is physically written at the giving of the Torah; it does not express four sections. It does. At Sinai the Torah was already given as we know it today. Take it out of the ark—that was given from Mount Sinai. Obviously. But it was an editorial work done in heaven, so to speak, before the Torah was given. All this was done by the Holy One, blessed be He, when He wrote the Torah. What, including the events of the fortieth year? The sin of the spies? That’s just a question, and the commentators discuss it. How can the Torah describe events that were after Sinai, especially Moses’ death? So on that there is the famous Talmudic statement that Joshua wrote it, or that Moses wrote it in tears. Fine, so the commentators already discuss that. But on the principled level—yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, did all the work as in the traditional picture: He edited it, but all this with four documents and four perspectives.

By the way, Rabbi Breuer created from this a very interesting picture, and it is completely parallel to the example I brought last time about wave and particle. The relation is exactly the same, because it’s beautiful. Rabbi Breuer basically wants to claim—and here he goes one step beyond scholarship—that if this is so, it means that all these different angles of perspective are all true, and together they must constitute our complete picture of the Torah. A scholar doesn’t do that. A scholar says this belongs to that document, this belongs to that document; he has done the archaeology of the text, the textual layering, deciphered it, and that’s it. For him these are separate, contradictory texts, but each from a different point of view. Now Rabbi Breuer takes exactly what I did with Shammai, with Aharon Shemesh’s article—that is exactly what he does. He takes the scholarly decipherment, done systematically and orderly. And then fascinating things come out, really fascinating. And you can argue with Rabbi Breuer’s theory, but beautiful things come out of it, and it explains quite a few very puzzling statements of the Sages. And his claim is that the Sages looked at it this way too. That’s really interesting. That’s what he claims.

I’ll just give you one example that I think I mentioned, from his nephew Henshke. Today he is a professor of Talmud at Bar-Ilan; then he was a very young fellow. I think I mentioned this article already—in HaMa’ayan, in 1977 he has a series of articles on peshat and derash. He was nineteen then. But Breuer’s “aspects theory” is from the 1950s? Yes, fine. He brings an example there—he brought there the… I don’t know exactly when the “aspects theory” was, but fine, it existed before then, yes, it was already around.

So he says, for example—let me give you an example I remember from there. “An eye for an eye,” for instance. “An eye for an eye”: the Sages interpret it as money. The plain meaning, of course, is to take out the eye—“an eye for an eye,” right? So “under, under” is a verbal analogy, and therefore it means money. So he says: then why doesn’t the Torah write “money for an eye”? Why does it confuse us? No, because there are two aspects, like Breuer. There is the aspect of the peshat and there is the aspect of the derash, two ways of looking at this passage. Unlike the scholar, who would say: okay, there is the plain sense perspective that belongs to source A, and the midrashic perspective that belongs to source B. Two different outlooks; there is a dispute here. Fine, it’s a disagreement or two conceptions. The traditional learner says: no, both conceptions are true. And these are indeed two conceptions—he entirely accepts what the scholar says. These are two conceptions, but for me both are true. And both were written by Moses our teacher or by the Holy One, blessed be He, not in different study halls or by different angles of vision. Rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, wrote them all; He wanted us to look through both these conceptions together. That’s what He wanted when He composed the Torah. So what does that mean?

Here is an example. The Sages say—one opinion, it is not ruled that way in Jewish law—but one opinion is that you assess based on the eye of the damager, not the eye of the injured party. You pay the value of the damager’s eye, not the injured party’s eye. That’s very odd. If you want to compensate him, compensation should be according to the damage assessed. That is, you caused him the loss of his eye, so assess how much his eye is worth. Why on earth would you pay the value of my eye? So Henshke says: very simple. “An eye for an eye” in its plain meaning means to take out your eye. Besides that, there is the derash. The derash says: no, you don’t take out the eye; you take money instead. Fine, but why is the plain meaning written? The plain meaning says they wanted to take out my eye, and the plain meaning remains in force; it too is binding. Exactly, as a premise. And then he says: let’s connect the two. The full picture is both together. What does that mean? In place of your eye they take out my eye—that’s the plain meaning. And the derash says yes, but my eye isn’t actually taken out; instead, money is taken. But money in place of my eye, not in place of your eye. And that is exactly the combination of peshat and derash. Simply to look at these two ways of seeing and say: the overall picture is both together; it’s not a dispute. A scholar would say: this is a dispute. These think one should take out an eye, and these think one should pay money. The traditional learner makes a synthesis—we spoke about this, wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. He makes a synthesis between the options that scholarship itself raises. That’s why I said there is some complementarity here. On the contrary, scholarship can greatly help traditional learning if you are willing to adopt it. Then afterward, think about what the different aspects are that scholarship separates from each other, what they mean, and whether one can make a synthesis between them.

But even after you make the synthesis, it still isn’t so logical. Why? To assess according to the eye of the one who blinded you—what’s the logic, in terms of tort law? Why? Because it’s ransom, it’s punishment. It isn’t compensation. It isn’t damages. It’s punitive payment. And Maimonides also writes in several places that damages are a punishment. There are no compensations. “Free people have no monetary valuation.” “Free people have no monetary valuation”—the simple meaning being that for the blood of one who was murdered, you don’t pay compensation to the family. Why not? Because in these criminal wrongs there is no civil dimension in the halakhic conception. That is, it is only punitive payment. Of course the punishment being paid in money goes to the victim and thereby also compensates him, but fundamentally it is punitive payment. And that also has very deep moral significance. Because when you give money in exchange for damage, monetary compensation, then the person is measured like a factory, like something functional. Yes, like reparations—people objected to that. Here you say: no, a person is not something that can be monetized objectively. Especially the idea that free people have no monetary valuation. And you also remember all the time that in truth you deserved to be harmed in the same way. Even when you give those fifty thousand shekels—the value of your eye—you say: this is atonement for my eye, which really should have been taken out, because this is criminal, not civil. This is really the way to punish me; it is not the way to compensate the other person. That, by the way, is in Maimonides too, and I think he brings that Maimonides. Later authorities (Acharonim) had a lot of difficulty with that Maimonides because in Maimonides it sounds as if it’s a fine or ransom or something. And the injured party remains without compensation? What? And the injured party remains without compensation? No, we say that this punitive payment goes to the injured party. That’s his compensation in the… Yes, exactly. Not only the calculation—according to this view also the essence. But in practice there is compensation too, because the money doesn’t go to the Temple, it goes to the injured party. It reminds me of a sentence Rabbi said in the previous class, that from “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood,” what the Torah wants is that I not remain indifferent. It doesn’t care so much what happens to him; the issue is not saving him, the issue is that I not remain indifferent. Like that same Turnus Rufus who asks Rabbi Akiva: if the Holy One, blessed be He, loves the poor, why doesn’t He support them? So that we may be saved through them from the judgment of Gehenna. That is, the Holy One, blessed be He, can save him too if He wants, but He doesn’t do so because He wants us to perform the act of rescue or to give charity or something like that.

In any case, another example perhaps. There is also a very odd interpretation in tractate Kiddushin. The Torah in the portion of Mishpatim speaks about the pierced slave, and it basically says: “and he shall serve him forever.” Wait, just one more question about the eye. But there is still a school among the Sages that says the valuation should be according to the eye of the injured party. Of course—that is the halakhic ruling. What? Jewish law does not rule according to the eye of the damager but according to the eye of the injured party. Okay, so how does that fit with those who hold… So he explains it there too; he brings that as an example. There it’s easier to show it; on the other one you have to get into all those Maimonides passages and show that this really is punitive payment and not damages, or not compensation. But I’m bringing it only as an example to show the mode of thought.

Now another example he also brings there—he brings several examples there. In the portion of Mishpatim it says that if the slave does not want to leave: “and he shall serve him forever.” He remains a slave forever after six years; after all, a Hebrew slave goes free, and if he doesn’t want to go free, “and he shall serve him forever.” In the portion of Behar it says that the pierced slave goes free in the Jubilee, not forever. The Jubilee year comes and all the slaves go free. Okay? So the Sages expound this in tractate Kiddushin: forever means until the forever of the Jubilee. “And he shall serve him forever”—what does forever mean? Until the forever of the Jubilee. There’s a wordplay here. What does “until the forever of the Jubilee” mean? It says forever, and afterward you say he goes out in the Jubilee? “Until the forever of the Jubilee.” You said words and stayed alive, meaning there’s a contradiction here. What do you do with that contradiction? So he suggests an explanation that I find wonderful. His claim is that once again these are two documents, two aspects. The pierced slave, in terms of property law, becomes the master’s permanent slave. Practical consequence: permanent ownership is ownership of the body. Temporary ownership, according to most medieval and later authorities almost, is ownership of fruits, not ownership of the body itself. That is, if for example there is land that belongs to me for five years, after five years it returns to its original owner, and he sold it to me entirely—it’s not a rental, it’s a sale for five years—fine? Then what belongs to me is only the produce, not the body of the land. I’m not allowed to dig in a way that destroys the land and things like that. Why? Because ownership for a period is ownership of fruits. There is a Ran in tractate Nedarim 29 and in Gittin and elsewhere; this is the accepted approach of almost everyone—not everyone agrees, but this is the accepted approach. By contrast, permanent ownership is ownership of the body. If it is mine forever, then it is all mine, the body is mine. “Ownership of fruits” means in principle ownership of the uses, not the thing itself, and “the body” means ownership of the thing itself, with the practical implication being whether I can destroy the thing itself, use it in a way that ruins it.

So he says this: in terms of the ownership I have in the slave, it is ownership forever. The slave doesn’t want to leave; he remains a permanent slave. Consequence: his body is owned. I have ownership in the body; it is permanent ownership, not ownership for a period. That is the portion of Mishpatim. The portion of Mishpatim describes the legal perspective, the perspective of property law: he belongs to me permanently. Maybe that’s the meaning of the piercing—I did something to his body, to express the fact that now I am the owner. Yes, it could be. Now the Torah in the portion of Behar comes along. In the portion of Behar they aren’t dealing with slave law and property law, they’re dealing with Jubilee law. Jubilee is a social matter, not a matter of property law. It’s a matter that says: “for the land is Mine.” As the Talmud says, Jubilee is “the King’s expropriation.” That is, the Holy One, blessed be He, expropriates all human property—land and slaves, not all property but land and immovable assets—He expropriates them and restores the original situation in the Jubilee. Why? That’s His concern. It has nothing to do with my rights in the slave.

I’ll give you an example. Say I sold Ido a piece of land for ten years. We said that’s ownership for a period, and therefore not ownership of the body but only ownership of fruits. The body remains mine. Okay? Now suppose I did something else: I sold Ido the land permanently. The king then comes after ten years and expropriates it from him for public needs, I don’t know, to pave a road there. A king can expropriate. Really, right, where there’s a need. Was Ido owner of the body during the ten years it was with him? For a period. But after ten years they took it from him. In the second case yes; in the first case no. Why in the second case yes? Because the ownership I transferred is permanent ownership. The ownership did not say from the outset: you have rights for ten years. Ownership for a period means an ownership that by its essence is conditional—you have it only for a set time. So it is a weak ownership, partial ownership. Here I sold it to you completely; I sold you everything I had. After ten years the king could just as well have expropriated it from me as he expropriated it from you; that’s irrelevant. The expropriation applies to your ownership of the body. Exactly, exactly. But the expropriation is not built into the sale itself; it’s not that the sale was for ten years. The sale was forever. After ten years the king comes and expropriates. So there it’s clear that it’s ownership of the body, right? And that’s what the Torah says. The Torah says that the owner has in his slave ownership of the body for a period. Ownership of the body for a period? How can that be? After all, ownership for a period is not ownership of the body. It’s like the King’s expropriation. The Talmud says that Jubilee is the King’s expropriation in the chapter Chazakat. What does that mean? That Jubilee should be understood not as part of the laws of acquisition of the slave. This is really Rabbi Chaim’s “two laws.” In terms of ownership law, the slave is mine forever. In terms of Jubilee law, he goes free in the Jubilee. But that is not because I no longer have rights in him after the Jubilee. Here it’s a bit different, because when the king expropriates, when I sell it I still don’t know he will expropriate. No—here you do know. You know in advance. And therefore it will also be reflected in the price. More than that, the Talmud says it is reflected in the price. Yes, but in advance that fixes it as time-limited, as if it becomes ownership of fruits. I’m saying that the fact that it is reflected in the price is because the Jubilee expropriates. Because when I sell you land and I know there will be a Jubilee in another five years, or if there will be a Jubilee in another forty-nine years, the price of the land will be different. The Talmud says this; that is, clearly we know in advance there will be a Jubilee. But the legal definition of Jubilee is different: it is expropriation. That is, I sell you everything I have, and afterward the Holy One, blessed be He, takes it from you and returns it to me. He does that. I made the sale as a complete sale. It is a fully complete sale.

That’s what he wants to say. He wants to say that the portion of Mishpatim and the portion of Behar are two documents or two aspects. Each of them describes a different aspect of the issue. There is the aspect of property law, and from the standpoint of property law, the slave wants to remain mine, I want to acquire him, we acquired him, he is fully mine, mine forever. The portion of Behar is not connected to Choshen Mishpat; it’s connected to Yoreh De’ah in general—to Sabbatical year, to the commandments dependent on the land. It is not connected to the legal matter at all. Rather, there is a rule that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not willing that there be permanent ownerships; so when Jubilee comes, He expropriates everything. Okay. So basically these two aspects, once again like “an eye for an eye,” combine and create one picture. Because the Torah could not have told me this in another way. The Torah says: look, you have ownership of the body over the slave for a period. Meaning, the idea is that he is completely yours, but know that he will be expropriated from you in the Jubilee. And you can’t say that unless you write two different passages, each of which has an absolute perspective, as if it knows nothing of the other passage. I, as one who reads the Torah as a whole, understand that both passages are true, both angles of vision are correct, and I construct the picture by means of a synthesis of the two points of view. And the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted me to derive, or to view the topic, from all the points of view. That is why He wrote it this way.

Now this is very beautiful. We get things that explain statements of the Sages brilliantly—really, to put Rabbi Chaim into biblical criticism in such a way, it’s a masterpiece of Talmudic craftsmanship. What’s the name of Rabbi Breuer’s book? It’s not one specific book; he has several books. But the book that best establishes the method is called Torat HaBehinot, published in Gush Etzion by his students, Rabbi Yossi Ofer and Rabbi Amnon Bazak. Breuer? Which Rabbi Breuer? Who is Rabbi Breuer? No, Mordechai Breuer. No, Henshke Breuer wrote articles about peshat and derash, but there he basically brings in his uncle’s conception of biblical criticism. But what Rabbi was admiring just now was from Breuer. From Breuer? Henshke is one of the… there are others; not only Henshke did this. I simply remember his article. But many people have shown various interpretations and how we really make a synthesis of these two ways of seeing.

Because you should understand that the scholarly perspective really is very dry and leaves the… it is very analytical, that is, it separates very sharply. Like I spoke about in previous sessions, it says: this is a passage that sees it this way, this is a passage that sees it that way, and that’s it. These are two separate passages, they contradict each other. Ezra wrote this one and Josiah wrote that one; they have nothing to do with each other, these are two contradictory things. And now you’re left with that. You’re left with torn documents. So someone joined them—fine. But what is the meaning of that joining? A scholar doesn’t ask, because he doesn’t care about meaning. The essence of the text. He deals with justiciable facts. What can I tell you about the text objectively? Okay? And therefore now the study hall comes and says: okay, let’s profit from this scientific work, yes? We’ve been captive to this since age two. A scholar comes with a fresh eye that is easy for us to miss. Suddenly he sees that it’s a combination of several texts. So let’s use what he’s doing; after all, it’s persuasive. The Documentary Hypothesis has argumentative force. It’s not something you can just ignore. But then look—suddenly when you succeed in making a synthesis, and that synthesis has interpretive consequences. It’s not just saying okay, so I gathered everything together and that’s it. No. You gathered everything together, and therefore suddenly you discover treasures. Real treasures. These are wonderful things. And are there also combinations of four passages, meaning a synthesis of all four? There aren’t even four in the Documentary Hypothesis. There is no passage that appears from four perspectives. There simply is no such example in the Torah. There are passages that recur in one, two, or three documents. Because the fourth is Moses our teacher—it’s another perspective, something else.

By the way, there’s an article by a Jew named Yossi Avivi. He studied in Gush there, right? In Ma’aleh—I don’t remember which cohort, first or second. He was already dealing with Kabbalah while still in Gush itself. He was always occupied only with Kabbalah. And to this day he is a very big expert in Kabbalah. And he has a work—I have a manuscript of it; it was never published, I don’t know why. And I got hold of his manuscript, a kind of stencil copy, in which he argues that these four documents are actually four kabbalistic aspects—Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, probably. And his claim is that each such perspective corresponds to a certain kabbalistic world. He tries to show this in a very—by the way, he is someone with strong scholarly awareness, even though he learns in a traditional way, but he is known in the scholarly world of Kabbalah as well. And he has that awareness. He does it systematically, meaning it’s not just a nice homiletic idea. He basically shows in a very close reading of the text how, when you reconstruct the documents the way scholars do in the Documentary Hypothesis, you get a perspective that really fits what in Kabbalah is called the perspective of Atzilut, or the perspective of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. That’s interesting. It’s interesting. The divine names too, by the way. The divine names are a clear identifier. The names of Y-H-V-H correspond to Atzilut. Fine. There you see it very clearly. In any event, it’s altogether fascinating, because it basically says there really are four angles of vision here, they all exist, they are all true, and you have to look at these issues from all those angles of vision in order to get the full picture.

I think we once talked about “these and those,” right? The fly he found and didn’t care about; the hair he found and did care about—the Talmud there in Gittin, where there is a dispute about the concubine in Gibeah. “These and those are the words of the living God.” The Talmud says there that Rabbi Yonatan and the other one, I don’t remember—Evyatar, I think?—argued there about what happened in the concubine in Gibeah, why he got angry at her. Did he find a fly in her food or a hair? Fine? So one asks—Rabbi Yonatan meets Elijah the prophet and asks him: what topic is the Holy One, blessed be He, engaged in now? The concubine in Gibeah, of course. Well? And what is He saying? We have a dispute here on earth about what happened there. What does the Holy One, blessed be He, say? He says: Rabbi Yonatan says this, and Rabbi Evyatar says that. That’s what the Holy One, blessed be He, says. He said to him: Heaven forbid! Is there doubt before Heaven? Does the Holy One, blessed be He, not know what happened there—does He need us to know? He said to him: these and those are the words of the living God. He found a fly and did not care, he found a hair and did care. What does that actually mean? If you think about the meaning, this is the only place where the Talmud explains what the meaning of “these and those are the words of the living God” is. What does it mean? It’s exactly Breuer’s aspects theory. It means that both are partially right. Each one grasped a certain aspect of what happened there. The full picture is that there was both a fly and a hair. Meaning the great anger that erupted there came from the combination of these two aspects together. Each one by itself is only a partial picture. Neither one really describes the whole matter. And if you want to understand all that happened there, take Rabbi Yonatan and Rabbi Evyatar together and create some kind of synthesis from them. Then you will understand what happened as a whole. It really seems to me to be the logic of traditional learning as opposed to academic learning.

In other words, it’s exactly the same as what I did in the previous class with prohibition and positive commandment—he classifies the phenomena, here they grasped the prohibition and positive commandment this way, there they grasped it that way, and in the end you say: wait a second, what’s the significance? What is similar between these two conceptions? Make a synthesis between them.

Now here, for example, you can see how something like Breuer’s naturally irritates the scholars. They don’t accept it. Now why don’t they accept it? Their own hypotheses really are threading an elephant through the eye of a needle. In other words, they are very airy hypotheses. The historical dimension—not the textual one—when it was composed and so on, is really speculative. But on the other hand they won’t accept something like this. Why? Because it’s not on their playing field. How do you judge something like whether the Holy One, blessed be He, wrote it or not? If you raise a historical hypothesis, you can examine it. If you raise a historical hypothesis, you can see whether it fits the outlook that existed there, maybe check other writings produced in that environment to see whether there’s some connection, whether something was borrowed from somewhere. You can play with that on the scholarly field, and that is precisely justiciable. As I said at the beginning of all this—the issue of justiciability. That is justiciable. So that starting point essentially forces you to arrive at the scholarly picture. On the other hand, a different starting point leads me to Breuer’s picture, and that too can work if you adopt that point of view. And therefore it is all a question of starting point. It is not a question of facts. He adopts all the facts—that’s exactly the point. So it’s not facts, it’s only interpretation.

And I’ll say more than that—or something even earlier. Another problem biblical criticism raises is all sorts of verses that look like late verses. “Until this day,” verses of that type. “These are the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel,” at the end of the portion of Vayishlach. What king over Israel? There was not yet a king over Israel; we are talking about the Torah given at Mount Sinai. So there is no king over Israel yet at Sinai. So what does the verse mean: “These are the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel”? It is already addressing a reader who understands that there is already a king in Israel, and it is describing for him what happened in Edom, who the kings were who reigned before your period. Right? That is clearly a late verse. Or another verse: “Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sciatic nerve to this very day.” What does “to this very day” mean? Or “until this day”—it appears many times. These are late verses. Or, for example, “in those days there was no king in Israel.” Meaning you’re speaking to a reader who understands there is now a king in Israel, so you’re giving him an editorial note. You’re telling him: know that in those days there was no king in Israel; therefore every man did what was right in his own eyes, or something like that. In other words, all kinds of verses like that, that again—we’re used to them, so usually we don’t notice. But when you look at it objectively, it really is problematic. Late verses.

So what do the commentators say? They felt it. The early commentators already felt it. So what do they say? That these are verses that were added. Ibn Ezra refers to this, and so on. Rabbi Yehuda HeHasid, by the way, writes that these really are late verses inserted into the Torah later. And his student too says that there are late verses inserted into the Torah later. The medieval authorities (Rishonim) write this. Nachmanides hints at this, Ibn Ezra writes it about several things. In other places he fights with tremendous fury against anyone who wants to make such a claim. And that’s interesting. And Rabbi Yehuda HeHasid wrote it in Sefer HaTzioni, by a student of his, who also wrote it. And Rabbi Moshe Feinstein got so angry when they published Sefer HaTzioni that he said it was all a forgery, that the book should be burned, and who is this Tzioni anyway? “This Tzioni.” “This Tzioni.” But Rabbi Menasheh Klein, in Mishneh Halakhot, says: what do you mean, Sefer HaTzioni is well known—how can you dismiss it like that? He’s one of the medieval authorities (Rishonim). In short, there are some sources saying that certain verses are later, but most commentators are unwilling to accept that late verses were added into the Bible. So what do they say? That it was written with divine inspiration. The Holy One, blessed be He, when He gave the Torah at Mount Sinai, gave it in a way that could also be read by a reader in later generations. So He inserted prophetic comments, as it were, in anachronistic language, like embedded remarks, exactly, like embedded remarks. Okay? Now clearly scholars will not accept such a thing, because it is not justiciable, it is speculation. But on the other hand, someone who assumes that the Holy One, blessed be He, wrote it and knows what will happen in the future—there is no principled obstacle to this. Again, it is only a question of point of view. The question is what assumptions you start from; that is what will give you the result. It harms free choice. If you say this to the people of Israel, then according to that there will be no choice whether they have a king. Okay, that takes us into foreknowledge and free will. That’s the story everyone knows.

In the book of Judges it says, “in those days there was no king in Israel.” According to tradition, the book of Judges was written by Samuel. And Samuel anointed two kings during his lifetime, and he edits the book of Judges in a way that explains the reasons for which… Okay. So I’m saying, here too once again, the starting point dictates the conclusion. And that’s the point. And again, one side separates and the other… one says these verses are like this, those verses are like that, each appears from a different place, and the other makes a synthesis. All the comparisons I made earlier between the academic perspective and Breuer’s perspective really stand here as an example.