Q&A: Wherever We Find “To This Day” in the Torah
Wherever We Find "To This Day" in the Torah
Question
Have a good week, Rabbi,
There are verses in the Torah in which the expression “to this day” appears. For example:
Genesis chapter 26
(33) And he called it Shibah; therefore the name of the city is Beersheba to this day.
Genesis chapter 32
(33) Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh-vein, which is upon the socket of the thigh, to this day, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew of the thigh-vein.
Genesis chapter 47
(26) And Joseph made it a statute to this day concerning the land of Egypt, that Pharaoh should have the fifth; only the land of the priests alone did not become Pharaoh’s.
Deuteronomy chapter 2
(22) as He did for the children of Esau who dwell in Seir, when He destroyed the Horites from before them; and they dispossessed them and dwelt in their place to this day.
Deuteronomy chapter 3
(14) Jair the son of Manasseh took all the region of Argob, as far as the border of the Geshurites and the Maacathites, and called them, after his own name, Bashan-havvoth-jair, to this day.
Deuteronomy chapter 34
(6) And he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no man knows his burial place to this day.
At first glance, it seems that there is a narrator here describing things that happened in the past, and that they still had an effect up to the day these words were committed to writing. I wanted to ask: what day is being referred to when it says “to this day”? And can one infer from this that at least parts of the Torah were written after the entry into the Land, or not by Moses, or not from the mouth of the Almighty?
Best regards,
Answer
Possibly. Several medieval authorities (Rishonim) already wrote this as well. Rabbi Amnon Bazak’s book To This Very Day is devoted, among other things, to this issue. I also commented on it in the second book of the trilogy, in the chapter on biblical criticism.
Discussion on Answer
I would be happy to know which medieval authorities (Rishonim) wrote that at least part of the Bible was not written by Moses?
Thank you
See Miriam Weitman’s article in the second book, p. 535 note 97 (Ibn Ezra; she argues that Nachmanides too, as well as Sefer Hasidim and HaTzioni). And others.
All the sources here can easily be interpreted as referring to the time of Moses writing the Torah and testifying that even today, hundreds of years after the events, these things still remain in force and relevant (and this has significance in terms of holding onto the inheritance and the like), except for the verse about the villages of Jair—which can also be interpreted as legal language affirming the holding of the sons of Jair in Transjordan—”to this day,” unless they fail to fight alongside the tribes in the war of conquest and lose their inheritance, which was conditional on that. Another possibility is that the sons of Jair conquered their inheritance hundreds of years earlier, during the days of the Egyptian exile, and these matters were well known (see, for example, the sources in the introduction to Chronicles in the Daat Mikra edition). The verse about Moses’ death could have been written by Joshua as part of the 12 verses of Ibn Ezra, or alternatively it was written in Moses’ time in order to say that “to this very day”—that is, any day on which any reader reads the text—the fact that Moses’ burial place will not be found remains valid.