Q&A: The Weakness of the Witness Argument
The Weakness of the Witness Argument
Question
Regarding the witness argument, does Judaism cut off the branch it is sitting on?
I’m not sure about this (which is why I’m asking), but I understood that there were fairly long periods in which the Jewish people were complete sinners and forgot what had been done for their forefathers. I’ll take a very well-known example: Josiah’s reform. The Hebrew Bible confidently tells how a Torah scroll was found and Josiah was horrified by it (the plain sense seems to imply that he himself had not heard of it before, hence the horror). Josiah saw that it said disasters would happen to the Jewish people if they did not keep the commandments, and so he carried out a huge reform of worship. A reform in favor of the Lord and against the idolatry that had been widespread.
It is also told that Josiah spoke to the inhabitants of the kingdom and to the elders in Jerusalem, and basically brought them back to the God of Abraham.
So I’m asking: before Josiah’s reform, was most of that generation sinful and unaware of what had happened in Egypt, for example?! If so, and Josiah’s reform brought the people back to their path, then it follows that there was a situation in which a very small number of people spread such a story among the nation and people believe them to this day.
The witness argument says that such a thing is not possible, and therefore what is told must necessarily have happened.
Do Josiah’s reform or other periods of sin show that it is in fact possible to implant such a story, even according to the religion itself and the Hebrew Bible (which completely contradicts the witness argument)?
Answer
I answered this in The First Commonplace and also here in the past. In brief, the story of Josiah clearly shows that there was an ancient tradition about the Torah. The people recognized that this was the Torah scroll they knew about, even if they were not actually familiar with it in practice. There are also claims that it was only the Book of Deuteronomy and the like, but I won’t get into that here.
The witness argument is an argument whose validity is fairly limited, in my opinion. Only when attached to a broader general argumentative framework does it fit in and contribute its part to the overall picture. I explained this in detail in The First Commonplace, in the fifth conversation.
Discussion on Answer
He found the scroll open to a specific verse,
and he saw that as a message and so was alarmed.
That’s at least what I remember from school.
Can you provide a source for that?
It feels like baseless speculation to me…
I looked into the sources just now,
and see what I found in Radak…
“They expounded that Ahaz burned the Torah, and one Torah scroll was hidden from him, and they hid it under the paving stone. And now Hilkiah found this Torah scroll. But this is unlikely, for Hezekiah, who came after him, spread Torah throughout Israel — how did they not bring it out? And how many Torah scrolls did Hezekiah leave at his death? Rather, Manasseh reigned a long time, for he ruled fifty-five years, and he did evil in the eyes of the Lord like the abominations of the nations, and built altars for idol worship in the House of the Lord, and he caused the Torah to be forgotten from Israel, and no one turned to it, for they all turned to other gods and to the statutes of the nations, and in those fifty-five years the Torah was forgotten.”
But even though I can’t find it right now, I’m pretty sure there is an interpretation like that, that it was open to a specific verse.
The interpretations aren’t relevant. There are dozens of interpretations for every verse in the Hebrew Bible.
I’m writing the post (and I’m the questioner from the previous time you answered this), and I just want to emphasize that the very fact that the people and Josiah didn’t know the scroll (and that’s clear from the plain meaning, when he was horrified and still had to tell the people about it) puts a big question mark over the witness argument — if this worked, then how unlikely is it really that planting such a myth among the people would succeed?? In any case, the Rabbi agrees anyway that the witness argument isn’t all that strong, and his view was already clarified the previous time.
I think you didn’t understand what I meant.
If you didn’t notice, I quoted Radak to you explicitly saying that the Torah was forgotten.
I’m not an apologist…
Regardless, there’s the above interpretation.
I’m in the middle of reading The First Commonplace, and I’m pretty sure I’ll understand the Rabbi’s opinion from there 😉
Ohad,
Rabbi Michi noted that he addressed this. And indeed he did.
If you don’t have access to the books, you can find Michi’s discussion of the issue in the lectures on faith that were uploaded to YouTube.
Michi starts dealing with the witness argument in lesson 36.
In lesson 40 he addresses what you raised.
The people didn’t know it. Josiah too was very alarmed and explicitly horrified, so he read it aloud to the people.