The Historical Torah
by
Daniel Thomas Andrew Daly
Copyright 6178 SC
http://noahidebooks.angelfire.com
Introduction
What is the 'Historical Torah'? Simply answered, it is that component of the written Torah, whatever that component may be, which is 100% genuinely historical in the detail it provides and the factuality and the truthfulness of the claims it makes.
Why the question? Simply put, this is a question from a soul (myself) and an organisation (The Historical Torah Society) who need greater understanding and clarity on this issue, ultimately, for the purposes of spiritual truth: for the gaining of wisdom and knowledge from that truth and for the application of any of God's divine principles of that truth which remain true at the end of our study. It is a real question to provide a real answer – what, in the Torah, are we supposed to observe.
What is the basis for this question? Simply put, the age old tradition of Moses as the author of the 5 books of the Written Torah was sufficiently debunked many years ago. The gradual development of the documentary hypothesis, which divides the authorship of the Torah into several strands, challenges the notion that all the Torah must be blindly obeyed and sworn allegiance to, simply because there are now reasonable questions as to the legitimacy of the information and how much is genuinely divinely inspired. Especially in the 19th Century, but particularly in the 20th, Biblical Criticism has developed to such a degree that the fundamentalist claims of an absolute literally divinely inspired Word of God in every detail have genuinely been shown to be false claims. What this implies for our purposes is that applying the legislation and principles of the Written Torah to ones life in every detail and attempting to teach that to others may 1) Not be necessary and 2) In fact be harmful for the often annoyance gained by those who dislike religion because of practices within that religion they find distasteful and reject.
Only the truth of God's faith can stand – if it is a system of knowledge defined by man which is shown, in time, to be corrupt, such a system must be ignored and replaced with the correct moral teachings. The Torah is so well entrenched in our society that many have taken for granted its acceptance regardless. But as we leave the 20th century, whose latter half saw a great increase in political correctness and biblical rejection, and we enter the 21st century, those of biblical faith are under greater attack than ever, and the bible more derided than any other time in its history.
The facts needed to be presented – clearly – not for the faith to 'Progress' but for the faith to be more firmly 'Established'. Only on the 'Truth' of scripture and the 'Truth' of divine revelation, can the faith hope to survive this century in any decent shape, and that of the generations to come.
Daniel Thomas Andrew Daly
Founder of the Historical Torah Society
Thursday 6th of February, 6178 SC
Macarthur, ACT, Australia
Chapter One
'Before we even Begin - Why the Torah is True Regardless'
"In the Beginning God Created Mankind. And then God created Reason. And with Reason mankind walked away from fables of snakes and floods and arks and commands, and realised nature was the answer, and that religion was a fowl invention of man."
While that fabulous quote is of my own invention, the rise of deism in America, belief in God without religion, is one the reasons our quest to find the genuine historical Torah is of importance. Deism does not so much deny the facts of scripture, as ridicule them as unworthy of any serious study simply because they appear to lack god given 'Reason'. The Miracles of scripture 'Defy Reason' and 'Logic' in the eyes of a deist, and God could in no way at all be the author of such confusion, which he obviously was, should he have authored such foolery.
Deism – belief in God without religion, based on one's own reason – is perhaps one of the greatest opportunities for evil there ever will be. For in the 'God of Nature alone' who will we be to one day ultimately judge what is 'Natural' and what is 'Unnatural'. For, as a Lion kills to eat, one day the deists might argue, as their morality crashes to even greater lows, that murder is a natural function of human society, and why on earth should we bother legislating against this fact? Simply let nature run its own course will be the accepted moral truth 'BASED ON REASON' that this movement will valiantly uphold.
Or they would.
If they ever got the power to do so.
They won't, though. The truth of El Shaddai will never allow such abominations.
You see, even the sinner kids next door, who see their dad boozing and hitting their mother can tell you murder is wrong, and even a sin. They see and know it every time he hits their mother. They see and know it every time he hits THEM. It is the cold hard fact of EVIL and in the end it is not the natural man which chooses this behaviour, but the man who has rejected knowledge of God and lawfulness, which has always been available from the creator, denies this very living God who rebukes him, and chooses to act, not in any form of reason of nature, but on the wicked choosings of the evil of his own heart and mind – HIS OWN CHOICES – and does evil.
And the conscience perpetually witnesses to this truth.
So, before we even really begin our study, in all my knowledge and revelation on life, I can already tell you this. You won't really throw out the Torah – or to be more accurate – the general message of the Torah, when all is said and done. Yahweh El Shaddai will triumph in the end, not even based on the Torah, for if you simply take it is as the writings of old Israel in a catalogue of a mishmash of historical legends, you can still understand, in the end, through reading its message, that whatever did go on historically in the end – whatever the truthfulness which IS in there about history – that the big guy presented within – GOD – really is the Creator God and that the morals he portrays, portrayed at a basic level, such as in the 10 commandments, really are true in the end anyway.
You don't need to know, ultimately, whether or not the bible is factual in every detail in the end, to not know in your heart, after an encounter with the text, that the creator of the universe is the one who is obviously being described in and that, whatever parts are legendary and whatever parts are true, they are still pointing to the creator of the universe and giving the essential message of the kinds of moral this creator emphasises and teaches for his human offspring.
Our own SELF-WILL and our own pigheadedness can interfere with this process. In our pride, which is the essential problem of deism and all false religions, we think we know better than God and can choose our own destiny. It is simply to choose freedom to do what we want, to have no superiors watching over us and lecturing us and, often, simply to bloody sin, that we are like this. We deny the God of lawfulness, because we don't want to be lawful. We want to do our own thing and have our own freedoms. We call the religious hypocrites because they don't justify all the lifestyle choices we want to make in our own lives. We say 'Live your own life' and 'Make your own choices' to justify this truth for our own belief in our own sovereign rights.
We all want to be our own God.
Yet, the morality which ultimately comes across from the Torah portrays a God who judges and makes rules, and this is the fundamental problem that deists and other objectors to the God of scripture and any moral truths being associated with scripture, have. They want their own freedoms and their own moral platitudes, often to play God themselves. Often to live the lifestyle choices they want to make, and there is nothing at all easier in simply finding a few biblical contradictions and off they go claiming the bible is all man-made and the religious are all hypocrites and you never have to worry about that old thing ever again.
And you know what?
That is probably the way God likes it.
Why? Because he is after the faithful and the servants. The moral and the truthful. Not ones who simply want to live as they please, and who will end up finding any old excuse anyway, regardless of how infallible or not the scriptures be, to justify their own choices.
And those choices usually end up being sin.
So, before we even begin, you will already find the Torah the truth, if you know the God of the Torah in your heart or have met him personally, and this study of ours will not convince you he isn't God, whatever the result. Yet, conversely, it may draw you a little closer, should you feel the bible is a pile of nothing more than vain traditions, when you understand a little more clearly how it came about and what portions are perhaps genuinely historical – or what ideas within those sources are genuinely historical in a divine sense as they claim – and in this understanding you might see a little more clearly the logic and truly rationale basis for believing in the God of scripture and why Jehovah has been part of mankind's history for so long now anyway.
Chapter Two
'The Canon is formed – the Tradition Begins'
The Council of Jamnia is a commonly held date for the timing of the canonisation of the Hebrew Tanakh. The idea of this council as an historical account was proposed by Heinrich Graetz in 1871. Before the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70 with the sacking of Jerusalem by the invading Roman Armies, in Jamnia there had been a school of developed phariseeism, founded by Yohanan ben Zakkai. Yohanan had gained permission from the Roman Authorities to form a school of Halakah (Jewish Law) in Jamnia and the school was formed, as well as the Sanhedrin being relocated there. Later on at the end of the second century CE with the formation of the Mishnah (which Orthodoxy terms the 'Oral Law', believing it an orally passed on set of extra legal rulings originating in the time of Moses which, until being written down in the Mishnah, were only passed on Orally), the Mishnah records the discussion of the validity of certain texts of the Kethuvim as scripture. Graetz taught on these passages and other references, that the canonisation of the Tanakh as a whole, through primarily the Kethuvim being sanctioned as the third book of the Canon in the Jamnian period, supposedly took place in the period of AD 70 to AD 90 approximately.
In New Testament writings, the event chronicled as the 'Transfiguration' was supposedly Jesus justification before God upon the 'Law' and the 'Prophets'. Yet the Law and the Prophets are the 'Torah' and the 'Neviim'. NOT the writings, or the 'Kethuvim'.
Did the Kethuvim exist separately as its own book in the time of Jesus? Were the books of the Kethuvim part of the Prophets? For example, Jesus quotes the book of Daniel and claims Daniel as a prophet, yet the book of Daniel features only in the Kethvim in today's writings. Was Daniel part of the Neviim, though, in some traditions in the time of Jesus? Yet what of the Psalms? The New Testament quotes them constantly? Were they canon yet? Were they in the process of becoming canonised?
The information we have dates the origin of all the books of the Tanakh well before the time of Jesus of Nazareth, yet the New Testament writings shed no clear data on there being 3 parts of the Tanakh, nor do the early writings in the Mishnah show clearly their canonisation origin.
It is a matter of speculation, as more recent commentators since Graetz have objected to the Council of Jamnia being the time for the canonisation of the Tanakh as a whole. For example, Jack P Lewis wrote a critique, which was published in the April 1964 edition of 'Journal of Bible and Religion', in which he challenges what had become a consensus amongst many that Graetz hypothesis was practically proven.
According to Lewis:
The concept of the Council of Jamnia is an hypothesis to explain the canonisation of the Writings (the third division of the Hebrew Bible) resulting in the closing of the Hebrew canon. ... These ongoing debates suggest the paucity of evidence on which the hypothesis of the Council of Jamnia rests and raise the question whether it has not served its usefulness and should be relegated to the limbo of unestablished hypotheses. It should not be allowed to be considered a consensus established by mere repetition of assertion.
It is clear, though, that in the early centuries of the Common Era, a consensus of what the scriptures of the Tanakh WERE did become established so that by the time the Mishnah and the Babylonian and Palestinian Gemaras are complete (The Twin Talmud's from each of the schools rabbinic thought and discussions) the Hebrew Bible was officially canonised and accepted.
This was the view of Orthodoxy and Pharisaical Judaism. Karaite Judaism emerged later on in the first millennium CE under the initial impulses of Anan Ben David, which rejected the Talmudic literature as man-made, but did not disagree with the Talmudics on what constituted sacred scripture, the same 39 titled volumes of the Tanakh as we have them today, which are classified as 24 books.
The formation of the Tanakh seems to have progressed from first acceptance of the Torah, second, acceptance of the Torah and the Neviim, and third, acceptance of the Torah, Neviim and finally the Kethuvim also. It is hard to be completely precise with the data we have historically, for the canonisation or acceptance of various parts of the Hebrew Bible may have been done by this or that spiritual leader amongst the people and in Karaite tradition, the Sadducee's may or may not have accepted just the written Torah, meaning there was debate all along as to what was accepted as scripture and what was not. Thus to precisely date a time for the accepted canonisation of the official canon at an early date is not really available on current data, yet, we do know that by the time of the completion of the Talmud and with the origin of Karaism, the idea of the Tanakh as it stands today had been accepted as canon.
It was always accepted and believed that the Torah section of the Tanakh was written first, and that it dated back to Moses, the believed author. This is clearly the idea of the Pharisees and the Rabbis and the Karaite community upheld this also. To this day Orthodox Judaism, the inheritors of the Pharisaical rabbinic assemblies, and Karaite Judaism, uphold the general tradition of the written Torah originating in the time of Moses.
There are likely many opinions as to the final dating for the formation of the Torah, which is part of our job in this study, yet what we can know is this: When the canon ultimately did become formed, and by the time Karaite Judaism emerged, it was believed, and still is, that the written Torah was the work of the prophet Moses himself, that it represented the embodiment of the divine will of God, that it was flawless, without error, the perfect guide from God for man, and that it was, in all ways, the truth, and the answer to the meaning of life, and, in essence, the word of God.
Nothing less than that.
And this tradition lasted, and has lasted, and became law and became fact and became the book of the judgement of Israel and the book of the Judgement of the Kingdom of God.
And then a voice cried out.
And the cracks started to appear.
Chapter Three
'Rise of the Heretics – the First Biblical Critics'
The 17th century of the Christian era was an era which was highlighted by the continued dominance of the established Christian Church in Europe and the emerging new spiritual energy of the Protestant reformation. Yet equal to the zeal for biblical tradition, was an emerging zeal for biblical historical fact. Thus, while Martin Luther on the 31st of October 1517 sent his 'Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences' to Bishop Albert of Mainz, which came to be known as the 95 theses, probably only in legend nailed to the door of a catholic church, only 133 years later, Thomas Hobbes, in his work 'Leviathan', cited several passages of the holy writ of the Lawgiver Moses to demonstrate, in the pure historical simplicity of the scripture meaning what it says, that when Deuteronomy 34:6 teaches, of Moses, that 'No Man Knoweth of his Sepulchre to this Day' and Numbers 21:14 says 'Therefore it is said in the Book of the Wars of the Lord what he did in the Red Sea and in the brooks of Arnon' and Genesis 12:16 'And the Canaanite was then in the land', it becomes clear through observation of the historical context from which the subjects of each scripture are viewed from that it is a much latter date, well after the time of Moses.
The essential crux of Hobbes point is that Mosaic authorship of the entire Torah is obviously historically untrue. How could Moses write 'No man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day' in reference to his own grave, if he is still alive? And 'To this day' strongly suggests a fair passage of time has occurred. In a similar way 'It is said in the Book of the Wars of the Lord what he did in the Red Sea' appears to quite obviously be referring to a book known to the readers of the passage, about Moses, written at a latter time period. And, when it says 'And the Canaanite was then in the land' it becomes so obvious that it is set in a post conquest of Israel time period, after the sacking of the promised land under the warmanship of Joshua. The logical conclusion of Thomas Hobbes was that none of these passages were written by Moses.
Baruch Spinoza, born on the 24th of November 1632 and died on the 21st of February 1677, was a Dutch philosopher who has come to be considered by many as one of the great rationalists of 17th century philosophy. He was a figure instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and for our purposes, one of the early leading voices in biblical criticism.
Baruch was a Jew. Yet he was also a critic, and he viewed the scriptures as true and factual and the word of Hashem or, what he gradually found out with his studies, fallible and, the religion he was living by, ignoring the plain facts of biblical and other passages to justify their tradition. In July 1656 the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam issued a writ of excommunication against Baruch, which was not an uncommon practice of Jewry of the period. The essential claims of the Congregation were that Baruch was a heretic, taught abominations and committed monstrous deeds which had been clearly demonstrated. This translation of the official record of the censure illustrates the congregations concerns regarding the person of Baruch Spinoza.
The Lords of the ma'amad, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavord by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of the matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable chachamin, they have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in front of these holy Scrolls with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the boys, and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave unto the Lord God are all alive this day. We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.
The exact reasons for the issuance of the censure appear to be: he was teaching radical theological views, that the Amsterdam Jewish community was uncomfortable with such viewpoints which could affect their relationship with the Christian community of Amsterdam, and lack of contribution to the life of the Amsterdam community as he had already withdrawn himself and was no longer financially contributing. One would hope that a firm conviction on the authority of scripture were the main issues of concern for the community and that Baruch's outspoken views on the issue were the primary reason for the censure, yet I wonder how much the latter possibilities are closer to home.
Later, Spinoza addressed the congregation in an apology written in Spanish, to the elders of the Synagogue, were he quoted the medieval biblical commentator ibn Ezra regarding the passage Genesis 12:16, which ibn Ezra had called a 'mystery' and exhorted those who understand to keep it silent' amongst various other biblical passages, and made the claim, as had Hobbes, that Mosaic authorship of the written Torah as a whole was patently untrue.
He was excommunicated at 23, died at 44, yet his legacy remained an enduring one.
Others of the early 'Heretics' included Isaac de la Peyrere, Richard Simon and John Hampden, who came to similar conclusions, yet their works were condemned and several of them were imprisoned and forced to recant.
These were the biblical critics – the heretics – the forerunners of enlightenment, who knew the cry of today's politically correct that the bible was full of bongers, and that the religious hierarchy maintained their order through holy censure and holy writ, and that while you may 'Rage Against the Machine', in the end 'The bastards would have their way' because 'The majority would have its say'.
The biblical critics started the cracks.
But the faith remained, withstanding these early shots.
Big things started happening the following century as enlightenment dawned.
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