The twelve essays I have written for Reform Voices of Torah on the Book of Genesis should not be confused with a commentary. Those desiring a verse-by-verse approach to the text or a broad summary of its contents should consult with any number of works, including the commentary published by the URJ Press, The Torah: A Modern Commentary (W. Gunther Plaut, ed., Revised Edition, 2005) and the recent The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea L. Weiss, eds., 2008). Unlike verse-by-verse commentaries, my goal is to explore the ideology that shaped the text’s final form, while also excavating some of the concerns that predate the final form. I am interested in the ideology of Torah and its potential uses for contemporary Reform thinking on a variety of issues (see the excursus, “Methodology and Biblical Interpretation”). In some contexts I shall argue that we, as modern Jews, can no longer sustain the ideas put forth by the Torah writers; in other contexts I shall marvel at how well the Torah writers grasped aspects of the human condition that continue to occupy us today. While I bring to the text extensive formal training and a well-documented track record of scholarly publications, these essays convey my personal understanding of key issues at this time. They are not the opinions of any movement or school of thought, and the reader should relate to them for what they are: readings based on scholarly methodologies that are at once personal (subjective) and individual (without institutional backing).

The Book of Genesis is the first book of the Torah’s five, known in Hebrew—as were all books in antiquity—by its first significant word or phrase: B’reishit. The reason Genesis occupies slot number one of the Torah is because its subject matter is chronologically prior to the subject matter of the books that follow. In fact, in printed versions, the books of our Hebrew Bible, from the Torah through the historiographic books, are sequenced on the basis of the historical eras they cover. However, this does not imply that they were written in the order they now occupy. There are materials in the Books of Judges, Samuels, and Kings whose composition likely predates any number of stories that concern, for instance, Abraham, the first Israelite.

The Torah we now have took its current form after the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem—that is, after 586 b.c.e. Exactly when cannot be established with certainty. Among scholars there is a wide array of hypotheses, spanning from the 450s b.c.e. down into the third century b.c.e. While many who hold religiously conservative approaches to Torah are ready to acknowledge a post–586 b.c.e. redaction of the text, most traditional Jews still insist that its content—its stories and laws, its characters and ideology—date from the period of the First Temple, even stemming back to King David’s era (tenth century b.c.e.). Yet others still remain committed to the notion that the Torah’s contents stem from Moses’s own lifetime, which would ostensibly situate it in the fifteenth century b.c.e. Advocates for this position fear that if the narratives, or at least the “traditions” contained in the Torah, were not authentic to the eras and personalities it describes, its status would be diminished.

We have no objectively verifiable means for establishing the antiquity of any given tradition narrated within the Torah. All we can do is work with the evidence that suggests when things were written down. The oldest manuscripts of the Torah (and the other biblical books) were found in the region of Qumran by the Dead Sea in Israel (and hence, they are called The Dead Sea Scrolls). The biblical materials discovered there date to the second and first centuries b.c.e. We are quite confident that these are not the original scrolls of the Torah, but copies that were collected and deposited in a library, along with many other books that were found in the caves of the region. The library itself was probably hidden just after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 c.e. Someone had the foresight to place these works there so that they would not be lost to history. While some of the non-biblical books found there did manage to survive in other contexts, many of the writings found near Qumran only exist today by virtue of having been deposited in those caves.

As far as hard, physical evidence goes, there remains quite a gap between these oldest manuscripts and when most scholars believe the literature was actually written. And then, for some, there is a gap between its presumed date of composition (let’s use the fifth century b.c.e. as a more conservative hypothesis for the moment) and its origins. Despite this lack of hard evidence, many insist that the traditions reflected in the literature existed in some oral form for many centuries prior to being committed to writing. The argument for oral tradition has become ubiquitous and conventional, appearing unquestioned in college textbooks and adult education courses alike. The insistence on the orality of our traditions emerged as a part of an attempt to ascribe antiquity to something for which there was no conclusive evidence of antiquity. There is simply no way to establish the existence of “oral traditions” because, by their very natures, such things leave no trace. As that is the case, the supposition that traditions existed orally prior to being written is open to neither verification nor negation, and therefore does nothing to further a secure conclusion about the antiquity of a given passage in our Torah.

The argument for orality also involves various political motivations. One might ask, doesn’t dating the Torah to the fifth century b.c.e. make it old enough? Being able to say that our literature is (perhaps) from the time of Homer, written prior to Plato and Aristotle, strikes me as rather impressive. It still precedes the advent of Christianity by many centuries, and the appearance of Islam by more than a millennium. Where is the shame in this adjusted date? The insistence on ever greater antiquity developed hand-in-hand with the fading of Torah’s original purpose and the emergence of a revamped usage: historiography. That is, once Jews began to relate to their literature not as literature, but as strict history, the quest for antiquity was intensified. But I have gotten ahead of myself a bit. Let me turn first to what Torah was meant to be. Then we can return to the politics of contemporary interpretations. I will offer here a very concise description of the Torah’s history of composition (those interested in greater detail and depth can consult bibliographic works offered in the references).¹

The Torah was written as a solution to a historical problem—the destruction of the Temple in 586 b.c.e. and the emergence of a diasporan Jewish community whose identity could not be based exclusively, or even predominantly, upon the salience of the Land of Israel in Jewish life. Without a crisis in identity or religious ideas, there is no reason to create documents that focus on nurturing cultural distinctiveness. But a historical crisis of astounding magnitude is precisely what faced the authors of Torah. The Torah does not speak of a king; rather it posits clan leaders as rulers at a local level, and a prophetic leader (Moses) as the highest authority. Moses, as a character, fits no paradigm of leadership known in any other Israelite or ancient Near Eastern literature. He constitutes a brilliant solution to what should have been an insurmountable problem: survival in an era after conquest. The pattern with which we are most familiar is quite simply this: when a monarchy is removed and the central administration of an ancient society is obliterated, a nation is integrated into the jurisdiction of the conqueror. Israel somehow managed to defy this paradigm of ancient life, and it did this by creating its Torah. In this sense, the Torah represents among the most creative solutions to a historical problem ever proposed: the creation of a civilization through literature.

Whether Abraham or Moses, Aaron or Joshua, were actual people upon whom the Torah stories are based cannot be established. What is written about the biblical characters has very little to do with history and everything to do with the ideological agenda of the authors. Thus, even if these were all real historical characters, we are left with the literary representations of the Torah’s authors, who readily fabricated personal conversations, reflections on inner thoughts, and images of intimate moments, none of which could ever have been available to a “historian.”

For many people, this is disturbing. Disturbance over such a portrayal of Torah’s origins derives from cultural prejudices and misconceptions about the relationship between fiction and truth. We regularly understand literature—even fictional literature—to have the potential to capture and convey profound truths that no other medium can manage to express. In fact, some of the most powerful confrontations with history itself take place through the medium of literary fiction. Elie Wiesel wrote Night and Dawn and Gates of the Forest to tell the story of a Jew’s experience during the Holocaust—each of these is a novel. If I really wanted someone to understand something about the Holocaust, I would never think to recommend first and foremost a history textbook; rather, I’d have someone start with Wiesel, or perhaps Thomas Keneally’s novel, Schindler’s Ark (1982). And then what of Steven Spielberg extraordinary adaptation of this novel, in Schindler’s List (1993)? Do you know of anyone who remarked, upon leaving Spielberg’s film, that they considered it inadequate because it was nothing more than a reenactment based upon a novel? Do you know of anyone who discredited the importance of these works because dialogs and scenes were merely imaginative reconstructions of private or secluded moments that endeavored to capture the reality of the horrors of real-life history? Quite the contrary: we understand that the medium of a novel (and in this case, film), which can be shaped on the basis of an author’s imagination and ideology, and which need not be a slave to time or place, can capture truths about the human condition and history itself that cannot be captured otherwise.

Torah is an anthology of literary materials shaped to provide a future on the basis of a vision of the past. Torah is allegorical. It uses real-life circumstances, as well as many fanciful events, to convey the culture’s understanding of life and history. Its words are not meant to be read as literal representations of history; rather we are to read its words for the meanings they ascribe to history. Relating to Torah as allegory was standard practice at various points in our history. It is only recently in history that we have lost our ability to read Torah for what it really is. The midrash starts from the premise that the Torah does not mean what you think it means at a literal level; rather, its meanings emerge through the midrashic imagination, which constitutes a literary interpretive process of remarkable creativity. The allegorical interpretation of Torah reached its zenith in various works of the medieval world, especially the kabbalistic Zohar (published around 1300), which has no use for literal or historiographic senses of Torah.

I remember reading an abridged version of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a child. It was wonderfully entertaining, but no child can possibly understand the sharp satirical approach to human nature and politics, or the parody of the travelogue genre that motivated Swift—and I was surely no exception. It was only as an adult that I began to recognize Swift’s cutting wit and critical insights. While Torah is not predominantly satirical or parodic (it does, however, contain passages of both), like all texts, it can be read at multiple levels, some befitting children and others of increasing sophistication. Since its inception, Reform Judaism has maintained that ideology should not trump the learning we gain through methods that involve credible means of verification and negation (sometimes called “the scientific method”). Our religious convictions, then, are to be formed on the basis of the best information available. When it comes to dating the origins of the Torah, there is no reason to assume that the core elements contained in the literature precede the redaction process by more than a couple of generations. Should we, some day, find materials that help us grow certain of a more ancient venue for the composition of any given story, we shall be glad to embrace the new parameters. But our critical learning also helps us understand that its qualities as a non-historical narrative—at least, non-historical in our modern sense of history—does not diminish its value as a religious object. History writing does not have a monopoly on meaning.

Finally, a word about the “sanctity of the text.” Over the years, I have heard people react to critical analyses of Torah with concern for how they might undermine the sanctity of the text. Sanctity is a human product. No thing is intrinsically holy. Sanctification requires an activity—that is, it is not a passive state of being. I do not believe it is at all a stretch to say that our critical engagement with Torah is an act of sanctification. We make very concrete our commitment to the dialectics of our people when we decide to study Torah. The fact that we bring to that study contemporary insights and critical sensitivities should not have a deleterious impact upon the text. All it does is confirm how worthy we believe it is of our attention and energies. Or as George Steiner has expressed it, the study of text “liberates the life of meaning from that of historical-geographical contingency. In dispersion, the text is homeland.”²

1. My own approach to the history of composition can be found in Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (New York: T & T Clark, 2006). See also E. Theodore Mullen, Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations: A New Approach to the Formation of the Pentateuch (Atlanta: SBL, 1997); Mark Zvi Brettler, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (London: Routledge, 1995); S. David Sperling, The Original Torah: The Political Intent of the Bible’s Writers (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

2. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) p. 40, italics added.

David H. Aaron received his doctorate from Brandeis University and ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. He is professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Interpretation at HUC-JIR, CIncinnati. His most recent book is Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (T & T Clark, 2006).

© 2008 David H. Aaron