Question

One of the major claims raised as proof for the transmission of the Torah from generation to generation is the historical chain. There are names in every generation, all the way back to Moses. But in my opinion this is not a good argument, because if so, you have to rely on some pretty questionable people to transmit the Torah to you… What will you say about Shamgar son of Anath? And about Samson? It doesn’t seem to me that they were busy with questions like whether an innocuous ox pays damages from its own body, but rather with battles and striking onlookers with a donkey’s jawbone. Beyond that, we do not find any culture of study and formulation of Torah law anywhere in the Bible in any way… Of course, the biblical figures do not especially convince me that they transmitted laws to us from Mount Sinai… This is a claim that after one reading of the Bible you can quietly laugh at… Unfortunately, there is no connection between the Torah of Moses and the Torah of the Sages. On the contrary, their interpretations only develop over the years. This is evident in the study of verbal analogy: how in earlier generations there was verbal analogy between passages with identical content, and little by little things developed into interpretive absurdities that look blatantly tendentious. As much as I tried to immerse my mind in the Sages and their words, I could not bridge the enormous and alarming gap between the Hebrew Bible—its character, and in general the character of its central actors—and the character of the Sages, and all the more so the character of the later rabbis. In my view, there is nothing to the claim of tradition. Jewish tradition is the perfect proof of the lack of seriousness in transmitting this information.