Q&A: There Is No Earlier and Later in the Torah — What Does It Mean?
There Is No Earlier and Later in the Torah — What Does It Mean?
Question
Hello Rabbi, there is a well-known dispute among the Tannaim and also among the commentators on the Torah regarding the chronology of the verses: were they written in chronological order or not — what is called “there is no earlier and later in the Torah.” Could you expand on this principle for me, and especially on the meaning behind the dispute? I searched the site and didn’t find anything from you about it.
Answer
I don’t think I’ve written about this. Only in the context of the interpretive rules of general and particular, where the Talmud notes that you can expound this only according to the view that there is earlier and later, because otherwise you don’t know whether it is a general followed by a particular, or a particular followed by a general. There I explained that the question is whether the general-and-particular interpretations rely on the order of writing — in which case it doesn’t matter whether there is or isn’t earlier and later — or on the order of the speech and the events, in which case it does depend on whether there is or isn’t earlier and later. But that is a claim about the general-and-particular interpretive rules, not about the principle of earlier and later in the Torah itself.
Discussion on Answer
That each side draws conclusions according to its own approach is obvious. The dispute is about the basic way of looking at the Torah: is the description arranged according to the sequence of events, or is there editing based on other considerations — associations, analogies, and the like. This is a question about the literary form of the Bible. What kind of explanation are you looking for? Why write it one way or the other? Either things are described as they happened — and that needs no explanation — or they were edited based on other considerations (in order to teach different things).
Interesting topic.
If possible, I’d like to invite a post on the subject: what is the difference between apologetics and the explanation that there is no earlier and later in the Torah.
And in the post you can also write the arguments in reverse chronological order.
Yes — what are the considerations of someone who holds that the Bible is not written in chronological order? I know the explanations in some places on a case-by-case basis, but regarding the very non-chronological form of writing — what does it assume, and why does it accept that? Is this a philosophical dispute or an interpretive one that arose because there were so many difficulties in the Bible? Also, if there is no earlier and later in the Torah, then seemingly that undercuts any possibility of learning history in the sense of a sequence of events. I understand that this doesn’t bother the one who holds that there is no earlier and later, and mainly focuses the message of the Bible on the meaning of the events.
Thank you. Aside from the implication for the general-and-particular interpretive rule, what is the meaning of, or what stands behind, the rule “there is no earlier and later”? After all, each side explains or draws conclusions from the difficulties in the plain meaning of the Torah.