Q&A: Evidence from the Content of the Torah About Its Origin
Evidence from the Content of the Torah About Its Origin
Question
You said in the debate with Yadan that, from your perspective, the way you relate to the Torah—whether it is divine—does not depend at all on its content.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I understood you to mean that you simply cannot bring any evidence from the content regarding whether the book is divine or human.
Why not? Surely you have some expectation about what the content of a divine book should be like (of course, nothing can be known with certainty, certainly not about God, but at least one can make some level of educated guess), and likewise you have some expectation about the content of a human book. If so, if the book looks more like something God would write than something human, then that is evidence of its divinity. And if the opposite is true, then that is evidence for the other side.
Answer
You are indeed mistaken. I did not say that one cannot determine a book’s divinity from its content. If I were to find there brilliantly ingenious contents that a human being could not write, then perhaps one could conclude that it is divine (as the proponents of the Bible codes claim). I am only arguing that here that is not the case. Therefore, my conclusion about the divinity of this particular text does not stem from its content. If I have reached the conclusion that it is divine for good reasons, then it would take very strong arguments to dislodge me from that conclusion. Problems in the text usually will not have that kind of force, since the gates of interpretation and resolution have not been closed.