Q&A: Yaron Yadan
Yaron Yadan
Question
In your debate with Yaron Yadan, he asked that there are major difficulties in the Bible. I heard you answer that your conviction to accept the book does not come from the book itself. That definitely answers one question: why accept the book even though no great wisdom is especially evident in it. But the problem is that it seems not divine. Like the examples he brought: extensive repetition about the work of the Tabernacle, and absolute silence about the laws of the Sabbath. Many times in the Bible there are strange duplications and neglect of central topics, and also unclear errors. And to that I didn’t hear any answer at all. For example, it says in the Bible that God says to Abraham, “Know for certain that your offspring will be strangers in a land not theirs, and they will enslave them and oppress them for four hundred years,” without any explanation why people have to suffer in the first place. I know it is not your way to deal with the Bible, but still, when I read the Torah I feel it is a strange, confused, unedited book, really a very odd book.
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. We weren’t dealing there with interpretive questions—how to understand this passage or that one. His claim was that these difficulties prove that the book is not divine, and to that I responded. As for your questions themselves, unrelated to the debate, as I said, I do not deal with the Bible.
Discussion on Answer
What kind of answer are you expecting? I said that in my opinion the difficulties are not all that troubling, certainly not to the point of proving that it is not divine. Are you expecting a more precise quantification?
A. The Torah was not said all at once, but over the course of years (even according to the view that the Torah was given sealed as a complete text; see Rashi on Gittin 60a), so it was not written as an orderly book from beginning to end.
B. The style of writing in the past was different, as can be seen from many books written over the years. It is quite apparent that the Torah was written in a style suited to that period, perhaps so that people would connect to it better (see the commentary of Ralbag at the end of Parashat Pekudei regarding the repetition of the work of the Tabernacle).
C. Almost everything in nature is built in a way that appears disorderly: the movement of the heavenly bodies, the human body, the topography of the earth, the world of animals and plants, many laws of nature, the system of justice and judgment in the world (“the righteous suffers”), and so on. On the other hand, tremendous genius is evident in them, dwarfing all human wisdom accumulated over thousands of years, which still touches only the edge of the wisdom hidden in nature. That means that the seemingly disorderly structure of a system does not negate its exalted source beyond human comprehension.
Your answer would only address a question of the type: that you don’t see that it is divine. But the point is that one sees positively that it is not divine, and on that I didn’t hear an answer.