IB World Religions 6.3.2. Composition and Collation: the Dual Torah and the Orthodox/non-orthodox Divide Notes

6.3.2. Composition and Collation: The Dual Torah and the Orthodox/Non-Orthodox Divide

The dual Torah

1. Traditional Judaism holds that the revelation at Sinai came in two forms at once, a written text and its spoken explanation, and calls the pair the dual Torah.
2. The two are held to be equally from God. On this account the Oral Torah is not later commentary added to the written text but part of the same act of giving.
3. The claim does real work. It explains why Jews keep practices with no biblical source, and why a rabbinic ruling can carry the authority of Torah.
4. A story in the tractate Menachot presses the point. Moses is shown sitting at the back of Rabbi Akiva's classroom, unable to follow the lesson, until Akiva tells his students that the law he is teaching was given to Moses at Sinai.
5. Composition, meaning how the text came to be as it is, is on this account not a process spread over time. The text and its explanation were given complete, and what followed was transmission rather than authorship.
6. Every Jewish movement inherits the claim, and the movements differ chiefly in how much of it they still make. That difference is the main fault line in Jewish thinking about scripture.

Torah from heaven

1. The Orthodox position is carried by the phrase Torah min ha-Shamayim, Torah from heaven. It holds that the words of the Torah came from God and that Moses set them down.
2. On the fullest version of this view Moses wrote the five books at God's dictation. The Talmud records a disagreement about the final verses describing his death, with one opinion holding that Joshua wrote them.
3. The text is held to have been transmitted without change. Orthodox scribal law treats a Sefer Torah containing a single wrong letter as unfit for public reading until a sofer corrects it.
4. Human authorship is reframed rather than denied. Moses is understood as the one through whom the words came, not as an author deciding what to say.
5. The same claim is applied to the Oral Torah. This is why Orthodox authorities hold that rabbinic law cannot simply be set aside once it becomes inconvenient.
6. Ultra-Orthodox and Modern Orthodox communities disagree about much else, including secular education, dress and Zionism, and they hold this claim in common.

Critical accounts of authorship

1. Non-Orthodox movements accept, in varying degrees, that the Torah was written by different human authors over a long period and edited together later.
2. The best known version is the documentary hypothesis, given its classic form by the German scholar Julius Wellhausen in 1878, which distinguishes four strands usually labelled J, E, P and D.
3. The evidence offered is internal to the text. God is called by different names in different passages, laws are repeated in altered forms, and some narratives appear twice with different details.
4. Later scholarship has revised Wellhausen heavily. Many critics now prefer to speak of layers and schools rather than four clean documents, and they disagree widely about dating.
5. Reform and Liberal Judaism generally accept a human and historical process of composition. Conservative Judaism, known as Masorti outside North America, largely accepts it too while holding that halakhah remains binding.
6. Orthodox thinkers answer on several fronts. They argue that the method assumes what it sets out to prove, that repetitions and varied divine names carry meaning rather than mark seams, and that the tradition's own testimony counts as evidence.
7. Some Orthodox scholars engage the arguments in detail rather than dismiss them, so the dispute runs inside Jewish scholarship and not only between Jews and outsiders.

Two ways of reading

1. The composition claim changes what a reader does when the text presents a difficulty.
2. On the traditional view no word is accidental, so an apparent contradiction is an invitation to interpret. Rashi and the midrashic collections spend much of their effort reconciling exactly such passages.
3. On the critical view the same difficulty is evidence of history. It marks a seam where an editor joined material from different times and places.
4. Both readings can honour the text. Non-Orthodox Jews who hold the Torah to be humanly written commonly also hold it to be divinely inspired, and they read it in synagogue with full ceremony.
5. The practical difference shows up in law. If every commandment is God's direct word, setting one aside is not available, while if the text records a people's developing understanding, later generations may judge some commands time-bound.
6. All movements still work from the same books. The Tenakh, the Hebrew Bible, and the Talmud are the shared inheritance, and the argument concerns their standing rather than their contents.

Oral before written

1. Collation, meaning the order in which the texts were gathered and accepted, is a separate question from composition. The tradition answers it in a definite order: material circulated by mouth first and was committed to writing afterwards.
2. The Oral Torah was kept unwritten on purpose. The rabbis held that its transmission belonged to teachers and students rather than to books.
3. Catastrophe changed the calculation. With the Temple destroyed in 70 CE, the population scattered and teachers killed, the risk of losing the tradition outweighed the rule against writing it down.
4. The rabbis justified the change with a verse. They applied Psalm 119:126, it is time to act for the Lord, they have broken your Torah, reading it as permission to write what should have stayed spoken.
5. The Mishnah was edited around 200 CE, the Gemara accumulated over the following centuries, and the Talmud Bavli was substantially complete by about 600 CE.
6. Critical scholars describe the written Torah as having a similar shape of history, with laws and stories carried orally before being fixed in writing. The two accounts agree about the direction of travel and disagree about the source.

Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim

1. The Hebrew Bible is called the Tenakh, an acronym built from its three sections: Torah (teaching), Nevi'im (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings).
2. That order is also the order of acceptance. The Torah was received as authoritative first, the Nevi'im afterwards, and the Ketuvim last.
3. Nevi'im holds the former prophets, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and the latter prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the book of the Twelve.
4. Ketuvim is the most varied section. It gathers Psalms, Proverbs and Job, the five scrolls read at festivals, and Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles.
5. Which books belonged in the Ketuvim was still under discussion in the rabbinic period, and the Mishnah records debate over Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. The section settled in the early centuries CE.
6. The ranking is permanent rather than merely historical. The Torah is read through from the scroll every year, the Nevi'im supply the haftarah read after it, and the Ketuvim have no comparable fixed cycle.
7. Jews therefore hold a graded scripture. The whole Tenakh is sacred, and the Torah carries an authority the other two sections do not.