Wednesday, February 16, 2011

We are the fundies who say 'cog-NI-tive dissonance'

From a commenter:

"As for me, I personally don't see the conflict with TMS vs DH. There are various solutions:

1) God wrote in multiple voices - this is R' Breuer's position. The textual analysis for DH is undeniable, but so is God's authorship - therefore there must be a resolution.

2) There was a Sinaitic revelation, but it was recorded by four+ authors, and re-edited together in the days of Ezra - this is the position of R' David Weiss-Halivni and a number of Conservative rabbis that I've run across. Weiss-Halivni may instead believe in a single original text which, in the absence of regular public reading, was degraded in four different ways.

3) My position: those I've encountered who vehemently propound DH tend to have an unstated agenda. For the 19th-C Germans, or Spinoza, it was a desire to undermine Judaism. For a number of moderns I've encountered on the internet, it's a faith position that prophecy does not exist. If there's no prophecy, there's no Divine Torah, so it must have been written by humans. Once that is your premise, DH is a reasonable solution to the multiple voices.

4) My cousin's position: Dr. Edward Greenstein, of Bar-Ilan (JTSA before making aliyah) - it doesn't matter about the origin, it should be treated as a singular text, because whether ancient editors redacted it that way or God wrote it that way, that is how it was meant to be treated. As Douglas Hofstadter might say, he unasks the question.

I'm sure there are others I haven't thought of."


This collection of "solutions" is laughable.

1) God wrote in multiple voices. Right. And he also wrote just like the Hamurabi and other ANE texts. In fact, he wrote the Torah exactly like you would expect it to be written had it been written by multiple people over hundreds of years and finally redacted in 500BCE. But hey, God wrote it so none of that is problematic.

2) The original Torah got degraded. Sure. I hear the original Koran got degraded too. And the original book of Mormon was made of Gold Plates and was awesome.

3) Makes no sense. So if its human, it must be multiple authors, but if its prophecy, then not? Huh?

4) Err, so the final redactor meant it to be taken as a singular text, therefore it is indeed a singular text? Amazing how that works.

These solutions are not solutions, they are as unrealistic, un-evidenciary and unbelievable as TMS is.

The truth is though that the DH has nothing to do with anything. It's entirely irrelevant.

The reason why it's irrational to believe that God wrote the Torah is NOT because there's evidence that multiple people wrote it. But rather it's because there's no good evidence that God wrote it.

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