Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible

Introduction: Interpreting the Bible through a Bent Lens

1  Introduction Interpreting the Bible through a Bent Lens David Shneer It is the world’s longest running rerun, the best-selling book of all time, the foundational text of Western culture and the core of the Jewish religion. The Hebrew Bible, sacred to nearly half the world’s population, infuses the myths, politics, literature, art, and daily language of billions of people across the globe. Jews throughout the world gather in synagogues every Saturday, as they have been doing for two thousand years, to read together from the Hebrew Bible, what most Christians call the Old Testament. Indeed, reading the Hebrew Bible is one of the longest continuously running ritualized reading and performance of text in history. The Bible, known in some circles as “torah she-bikhtav,” the learning that was written down, is traditionally considered to be the word of God as transmitted to Moses on Mount Sinai, making it one of the world’s oldest divine texts. Within the Hebrew Bible, however, there is a hierarchy of holiness. Jews divide the Bible, or Tanakh, into three main sections that more or less correspond to chronology . The last section is called “Writings,” and contains such texts as the Book of Esther, read every Purim; the Book of Ruth, the classic text of Shavuot; and Psalms, traditionally understood to have been penned by the great kings of Israel. Preceding the Writings in both age and standardized textual order are the Prophets, the books whose stories form the main historical narrative of ancient Israel. From the judge Joshua to kings David and Solomon, this section of the Bible contains historical narratives and moralistic stories that continue to inform modern Jewish thought and Western culture generally. Moving back in time, and higher in the hierarchy of authority, comes the Torah, known variously as the Five Books of Moses, the Chumash, or in Greek, the Pentateuch . These first five books of the Bible are the most well known, the most interpreted , the most often retold, and the most important texts in Judaism. Although all Judaism’s sacred texts are open to commentary and analysis, none is more interpreted than the Torah. To this day, the Torah is considered so divine that its material form, a scroll of parchment known as a sefer Torah that replicates the structure of ancient scrolls, and a particular version of the Biblical text (known as the Masoretic Text, preserved by 2 David Shneer the early Masoretes or rabbis concerned with fixing a particular text) has been passed down almost miraculously with the utmost care in copying. Every letter of every part of the text is precise, perfect, and most important intended. There are no extra words, nothing missing, with every letter, every space, every repetition or seeming inconsistency thus inviting interpretation, or exegesis. The Torah has been interpreted and reinterpreted ever since it was canonized in the 6th to 5th centuries BCE. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jews were scattered throughout the Mediterranean and away from their physical center , the Temple in Jerusalem. Without a physical home in which a class of priests could manage Jews’ relationship to the divine, the text became the primary route to holiness. Rabbis in the first five centuries after the expulsion crafted a new religion, now known as Rabbinic Judaism, that used the Torah and other holy texts as the basis for laws and customs that would govern Jews’ lives wherever they lived. Temple sacrifice and elaborate priestly rituals gave way to prayer, synagogue services, and textual interpretation. That early heyday of Torah interpretation was so central to the future of Judaism that the interpretations and commentaries of these early sages were themselves canonized as the Talmud, the foundational text of Rabbinic Judaism. Such rabbinic interpretation of the text was so important that it earned the name Torah she b’al peh, the Oral Torah, thus elevating these rabbinic debates to a status just below the original Torah she’bikhtav. Although this moment of Torah exegesis became canonized, it did not mean the end of Torah interpretation. In fact, interpreting the interpretations of the interpretations became the primary way Jews adapted their rituals and customs in different times and different places. The system of textual interpretation that formed the basis of Rabbinic Judaism reigned supreme for a thousand years in Europe and in much of the world. But modernity , the Enlightenment, and the rise of reason did a funny thing to the text. The text that...