Q&A: What Did Moses Receive During the Forty Days?
What Did Moses Receive During the Forty Days?
Question
In your last lesson on dogmatics, you dealt at length with the question: after all, Moses our teacher received the Torah over the course of 40 days, and plainly that means the Five Books of the Torah (or at least four of them). If so, how could that be? Did Moses our teacher learn that he was going to strike the rock?! Did he teach the children of Israel that they were going to sin?! That doesn't sound reasonable.
But I didn't understand the question: plainly, Moses our teacher studied over those forty days the various laws—that is, the commandments and transgressions—and those he transmitted to the children of Israel. Where does the assumption come from that he studied the narratives of the books of the Torah?! I didn't understand. I don't think there is such an approach. In other words, even without your explanation, it is obvious that he studied the commandments, while the Torah text itself may have been written over the course of the events. Isn't that the plain and simple meaning?
Answer
I don't know what the plain meaning is, but the accepted belief and tradition are that the entire Torah was given at Sinai.
Discussion on Answer
Are you sure this isn't trolling? Do you really need a source for this?
Here is the opening of the eighth principle from Maimonides' Thirteen Principles:
And the eighth foundation is that the Torah is from Heaven. That is, we should believe that this entire Torah that is in our hands today is the Torah that was given to Moses, and that it is entirely from the mouth of the Almighty—that is to say, that it all reached him from God in a manner metaphorically called "speech," and no one knows the nature of that transmission except him, peace be upon him, to whom it came. And that he was like a scribe to whom someone dictates, and he wrote down all of it—its dates, its stories, and its commandments. Therefore he is called "lawgiver." There is no difference between "and the sons of Ham were Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan," or "and his wife's name was Mehetabel daughter of Matred," and "I am the Lord," or "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one"—all of it is from the mouth of the Almighty, and all of it is the Torah of the Lord: perfect, pure, holy, and true.
Is there any source in the medieval authorities for that accepted belief and tradition that you mention? I'm not asking provocatively; I really always thought that Moses received the Torah in the sense identified with the commandments and transgressions (the Oral Torah). I had never heard that he received the Torah identified with the Five Books of the Torah (or the four), in which case the above question would arise. I would genuinely be glad to know whether this is written anywhere, and where.