From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Re: more of ...can of worms....
Date: 26 Aug 92 16:02:17 GMT
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department

In article <#xan4b.strnlght@netcom.com> strnlght@netcom.com (David Sternlight) writes:
>
>Herman Rubin uses what I think is the classical sophistry of the rationalists
>to enable themselves to pick and choose among the commandments when he
>says:

>"Reform Jews do not accept the statement that God literally wrote even
>the written Torah, so the question of just what is a Divine
>Commandment, and what was possibly incorrectly written by people
>thinking that that was the Mitzvah which God meant, is an ever-present
>problem."

>The notion that something as important as a Mitzvah would have been
>written down "incorrectly" does not stand the slightest scrutiny
>when  one considers that Jews have been observing those Commandments
>via continuous tradition; by the time of the destruction of the temple
>(so that some could no longer be observed) they had been written
>down to codify actual observance. Moreover, the rules for Torah
>scribes are so strict that an error which would be propagated
>is pretty inconceivable.

>The only way Rubin's argument could be valid is there there were a
>period when there was no observance, all copies of the Torah
>worldwide were destroyed, and then the Torah was reconstructed from
>memory. Nobody has ever suggested this as a part of the history of the
>Jewish people.

>Alternately, one might (but I don't) argue that Moses somehow got (or
>allowed the scribes to get) some of it wrong and didn't correct it nor
>notice that the practice and the writings didn't match. That kind of
>hubris is analogous to saying "I don't choose to observe Mitzvah
>X because I (ME, THE GREAT MYSELF) have decided that Moses had it
>wrong (or allowed it to be written wrong)." I think not.

You are making the assumption that, at the time of Moses, a Sefer Torah,
as a complete manuscript, was written down, either by God Himself, or by
Moses, or by a team of scribes under the explicit direction of Moses.

Also, if it were written by, or under the direction of, Moses, that he
got everything right.  

In either of these cases, everything in the Torah must be exactly so,
except possibly the pre-Adam part, where the timing may be off.  That
means that, for example, Eden was located where Genesis says it is, 
and the rivers coming out of Eden were as described, or at least that
was the situation a few thousand years ago.  That means that the order
of evolution of living things is reasonably accurate.  That means that
God must have really done a major job of moving animals around after
the flood, in a manner unknown to Noah and his descendents.  That means
that, somehow or other, there were very large groups of humans which do
not seem to correspond to any of the descendents of Noah listed.

It is not a single item which causes the questioning, but the entire
pre-Abraham "history" "does not compute."  Even much afterwards has 
problems.  I do not believe that there have been many copying errors
since a final agreed-upon version of the Torah came about, but what
about before then?  Was there even a copy of the entire Torah before
the time of Solomon?  Some claim that Josiah only found a planted
copy of Deuteronomy.

According to our prophets, there were times when few were observant,
especially before the return from Exile.   The project started by
Ezra may very well have produced the first real Sefer Torah.  While
it may have been prserved since that time, this says nothing about
the earlier period.  This does not make it all nonsense, but it also
strongly questions the Divine or even Mosaic authorship.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)  
{purdue,pur-ee}!pop.stat!hrubin(UUCP)