Q&A: I Read Notebook Five
I Read Notebook Five
Question
Regarding the witness argument:
- Regarding the period of Josiah, which was about 600 years after the revelation, and we are told in the days of Josiah about the forgetting of the Torah and its rediscovery, and from this we proved that the very belief in the revelation did exist among them (they had only forgotten in their hearts the command and the knowledge) — can this be considered very far from the source, after all six hundred years? Certainly not such a long period as to distance it from the source entirely, but still it is a significant span of time.
- I asked about our earliest knowledge of a mention of the revelation: what is it, and when was our earliest provable knowledge that the event of the revelation was mentioned? (To explain myself better: which is the earliest book, from a scholarly point of view, that presents the revelation to us, and how many years is the gap between it and the date of the revelation — and is that already considered very far from the source?)
Answer
I didn’t understand a word.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t know how to answer a question like that. The speculations about the time of composition of the Book of Joshua seem dubious to me anyway, so I don’t see any point in building theories that take them into account. Tradition is transmitted orally too, not only in writing, and it starts with the Torah, not with the Book of Joshua. Hypotheses about later insertions can be raised even if the Book of Joshua were adjacent to the Torah. There was a later insertion into the book, and that’s that. This whole discussion seems pointless to me.
There is no connection between the Book of Joshua and the account of Josiah in Kings. You should first do your homework. A lot of material has been written on the website Da'at La'amin and on Yehoshua Enbal’s Ratio website.
And as for the question itself — the Song of Deborah already mentions, in a way, miracles connected to Mount Sinai, and according to scholarship it is considered one of the earliest texts in the Bible by pretty much everyone.
Thanks to everyone who answered.
The main point of my question was about the argument that a father passes on truth to his son, and that it is hard to forge when it is passed along link by link (Moses transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, etc.). But if someone comes and casts doubt on the factual origin itself, and claims that according to the earliest scholarly dating there is a gap of hundreds of years before we know of the first mention of the revelation — I was looking for a source that would compel the point and show how, even according to the scholarship, the time between the giving of the Torah and the mention we encounter is actually very short. That’s why I asked. And thanks for the answers.
When is the first time the world bears witness to the beginning of the continuity of the witness argument regarding the revelation at the giving of the Torah?
As a believing Jew, according to the words of the Sages, in the books of the Prophets we see continuity soon after the event (after Deuteronomy, the Book of Joshua [which Joshua son of Nun wrote], then Judges, etc.). It passed from father to son, from generation to generation.
But for someone who doubts the date of composition of the Book of Joshua and considers the possibility that it was written about 600 years after the life of Joshua son of Nun, then from his perspective, from the giving of the Torah until the first description of the revelation in the Book of Joshua, there are 600 years. So the question is: is 600 years a significant enough span that one could raise the hypothesis that maybe the revelation was inserted later?