LRR: What Happened at Sinai? Benjamin D. Sommer

In 1976, the Stephen Sondheim and Josh Biden musical *Pacific Overtures* opened on Broadway. The musical is set in Japan, beginning in 1853, and charts the tension and violence following the arrival of Western colonial forces. In one beautiful number, "Someone in a Tree," there are three rememberings of negotiations between Commodore Perry and the Japanese delegates. There's a warrior who could hear the debates from his hiding place beneath the floor of the treaty house. A young boy, he would see the action from his perch in the tree outside. And then again, the boy, now an old man, recalling that without someone in a tree, a silent watcher, history is incomplete.

"Happened at Sinai?" That is the question driving today's guest and his most recent work. The sometimes conflicting, often opaque voices faithfully preserved in the Pentateuch, like the onlookers in "Someone in a Tree," speak with and against each other, offering cacophony rather than unity. In response to that question, the debate and discussion held together in redaction moves simultaneously and yet without contradiction in two directions. It anchors law and law in the revelation at Sinai, but also destabilizes that authority by showing we can't actually be clear how the specific rules found at the biblical text came to Israel.

Now, what might this mean for a religious community and how it approaches authority and command today? As a question, we get into it. My name is Liam Miller, and this is *Love Rinse Repeat*. My guest today is Benjamin Sommer, professor of Bible and ancient Semitic languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His book, *Revelation and Authority: Sinai and Jewish Scripture and Tradition*, is at once a study of biblical theology and modern Jewish thought. It won the prestigious Goldstein-Goren Book Award in 2016. As one of my favorite books that I've read in recent times, please welcome Benjamin Sommer as we discuss what happened at Sinai and what that means for us today.

Well, welcome to *Love Rinse Repeat*. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

That's all right. So, we're today talking about your book, *Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition*. So, what's this, with the big, broad question, I guess? What were you hoping to achieve when you sat down to write the book? What was that itch, I guess, scratching at your back that you thought, "You know what? I have to devote a lot of time to writing a book"?

Thank you. So, I think, well, the book, first of all, it could have evolved over many years. It began, it really began as an adult education presentation at a university Jewish Student Union. Some years later, after I got my PhD, it evolved into an article. Another article came out of the first article, and eventually, I realized I should put a whole lot of stuff together and make it into a book. And I think that what was behind all of those projects, from the first presentation, you know, an hour-and-a-half-long presentation, until the, you know, the hundreds of pages of the book, what brought me to write that was trying to answer the question: How can I be both a traditional religious Jew and a modern biblical critic? A lot of people think that those are two identities that are in tension with each other, or that are in conflict with each other, or it's got to be an either/or. And for me, it's not an either/or. It's not a conflict. It's not even all that much tension. And I think that that was what I was trying to do is I was trying to explain why, why that's not a problem. That is why it's not a problem to be a biblical critic and a traditionally religious person. Why you can believe that the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it has holiness and authority, even if you think that the actual words that we find in the Bible were human beings.

That's great. Thank you. And we'll get into a lot of that further as we go along. So, you know, the book has, at one level, rest—it already begun to. You received awards and the finalist lists and the things like that. So, but that's certainly one level. Have you found the reception of the book since putting it out there?

You know, I have to say, the most, the most surprising part of the reception of the book is that people who are religiously further to the right have received the book. Some of them have received the book really, really well. I've been very surprised. Well, I should, my background, I should explain. Here in New Jersey, I belong to, my family belongs to what's called a Conservative synagogue. And somewhat confusingly, in the United States, the Conservative Jewish movement, where the capital C, is one of the liberal movements. But that's the way it is. So, I belong to one of the movements that's part of one of the liberal streams of Judaism. I teach at a rabbinical school of the Conservative movement, that is to say, it's a modern liberal religious school. And what surprised me, though, is that lots of Orthodox readers have responded to the book very, very positively. I've gotten a lot of emails from Orthodox rabbis. I've gotten a lot of personal feedback when I run into people. And yeah, so that's been the most surprising part is that people further to the right, who probably should think this book is heresy, have been very positive about it.

That's very good. And as someone who lives in a country where the Liberal Party is the Conservative Party, I understand the confusion of terms. So, moving into the book, keen to the book is the thesis that at the biblical text involving the giving of the law at Sinai, moves, as you say, simultaneously and without contradiction in two directions. It anchors law and law in the revelation at Sinai, but also destabilizes that authority by showing we, you know, we can't actually be clear, you know, how those rules or how much the people heard and exactly what role the human authors playing and what was revelation of verbal sense. So, I guess, what led you, you know, whether it was way back at that first seminar or somewhere along the way, what led you to be interested in this sort of nuance and then become in this dual movement seduction?

Um, I guess I've always been very interested in the ways that... Hmm. Can you lay back up for a second? One of the, one of the main attributes of modern biblical criticism, whether we're talking about a biblical critic who's Christian or Jewish, religious, atheist, one of the main aspects of all modern biblical criticism has been to point out that what Jewish and Christian traditions say the Bible means is not always what the Bible meant in its original historical and cultural setting. And so, I think, kind of setting up a boundary between ancient Israel and then, let's say, medieval and modern Judaism, Christianity. That's a big part of biblical criticism. I guess I've always had a little bit of suspicion about that move. It is by Lord, it's a very intellectually honest move. It is the case, of course, that ancient Israelites had religions and cultures very different from modern ones today. And so, modern biblical critics have done something really good by allowing biblical authors to speak in their own voice. They've kind of recovered the voice of the actual biblical authors, as opposed to what Augustine or Aquinas in Christianity, or Rashi or Abravanel in Judaism, say the biblical authors are saying. But I've always thought that maybe we've gone a bit too far with that, and that areas of continuity between the Bible and post-biblical tradition have not always been recognized. And so, I think that I, as I read the work of some modern Jewish theologians about the nature of Revelation, and then I went back to a really close reading of the account of Revelation in the book of Exodus, in the book of Deuteronomy, I felt that there were some areas of similarity that were worth talking about. I noticed a couple of ambiguities in Exodus that are similar to the ambiguities that modern theologians, even though the modern theologians, sorry about them, even though the modern theologians themselves weren't always aware of some of these similarities. And so, for that initial presentation, you know, 25 years ago, I noticed a couple of ambiguities, and then I just kept on reading these texts closely. I really found that there was a pattern in which the text of the book of Exodus itself, at once claimed a very high level of authority, but also undermined its own authority, also seemed to want to warn us readers that we shouldn't necessarily accept every aspect of this authority. And I just thought that that was really riveting and kept on pursuing that.

Mmm. Yes. It's one of those threads that once you begin to pull, it's like, well, just how far does this go? Or where does it branch? Exactly. Exactly. I think, I think in a world that's being more and more, even more than 25 years ago, insists that everything's black and white, I've always been really interested in the complex ways that there's different kinds of gray and the different kinds of gray that track with each other. And so, I think that I was also interested in showing that the book of Exodus contains a lot of really productive and challenging gray. And it was another, in order to contain productive and challenging gray areas, and not just to give us black and black.

Well, since we're kind of, we're kind of in this, in this area now, talking about Exodus. So, in this chapter, you have a long chapter called "What Happened at Sinai," where you're kind of employing that these two kind of, the interdisciplinary nature of the book. There's the critical historical scholarship of biblical studies, and then there's also the Jewish theology of bringing in the voices of the medieval and modern scholars. And kind of exemplifying the how both schools kind of really advocate a very close reading of the text. And you kind of begin to look at, okay, so what happened at Sinai? And in this, in this destabilizing kind of voices, not necessarily agreeing, are given within the text. So, I guess the question then, really, is just simple: So, what happened at Sinai? And which, you know, don't give it all away, people need to buy the book. But perhaps, I guess the question is, do the voices themselves in the Bible want us to be able to answer that question?

I think that some of the voices don't want us to be able to think that. Some of them want us to debate the question and see religious value in the debates. So, Bible scholars talk about three or four main blocks of material that were put together to form the five books of Moses, to form the Pentateuch. This is called the Documentary Hypothesis. And we talk about these sources. First of all, when we go through most of the story of the revelation at Sinai, the revelation of the law in the book of Exodus, a lot of it comes from the book we call P. And I think that P, again and again, phrases things ambiguously so that we don't know whether the text of the Ten Commandments came indirectly from God to the ears of the whole nation Israel, or whether Moses read the Ten Commandments to the Israelites. If it's the latter, then we don't really know that the actual words of the Ten Commandments are God's words. They might be Moses' rephrasing or interpretation of God's of God's message. But we don't necessarily know that God even spoke using human words. Now, it would be very, very easy to write a text that makes it clear one way or the other. But what happens in the, in Exodus chapters 19 and 20 is that again and again, there are verses that are phrased just a little bit oddly to make it impossible for us to know whether the text of the commandments came to the nation Israel directly from God or from Moses. Now, if there is one or two of those ambiguities, might just be coincidence. But when there's five separate linguistic ambiguities, and all create the same question, I think we have to, we have to conclude the author wants us to debate this question. The author does not want us to know for sure. But the answer to the question is, there's some evidence of the authors planted there that suggests the people heard the Ten Commandments in human language directly from God. Through some evidence, sometimes in the very same verses, that suggests that it all came through Moses. And maybe when the Bible says God spoke, maybe the verb "spoke" or the verb "said" doesn't mean the same thing when God is the subject that means when a human being is the subject. And the text doesn't allow us to answer that question for sure. So, I think that the text really wants us to engage in this debate. This is one of those areas of gray where the text doesn't want us to think in black and white terms. And those, those ambiguities, they come pretty much from the E source of the books of Moses. So, one of the authors, I think, really wants us to engage in this debate. Another author, the P author, I think, has a similar point of view and might, might even in one particular verse, which happens to be in Numbers chapter 7, verse 89, might suddenly be saying, "There, you need to understand that whenever I say God spoke, that doesn't mean the same thing it would mean for a human being." Um, but the P author doesn't make as big a deal about it. There's just a few places where it suggests that, but it doesn't focus on that. But what I'm calling the E, the E author, really wants us to wonder. And then, I guess, what's interesting is we come to the book of Deuteronomy. The D author. And as I say, there seems to be a move that this voice kind of wants to clear the matter up for the people, like, "Look, let me set it straight. You heard it." And kind of move a brush aside. Yet. And so, you kind of talk about Deuteronomy as kind of maybe the oldest Jewish commentary on the material of the Exodus. So, it's already functioning in this way of interpretation and clarification.

Yeah, as you know, there's an important single verse in Deuteronomy 5:5 that kind of just contradicts the movement of everything around it. It's just like, "Now, just wait one second. Quick little aside. It's actually the opposite." All right, back to the main show. Like, and because of this, you kind of, you offer this suggestion that, you know, Deuteronomy can be kind of read as a rabbinical text where its own function of commentary and revision, and has in itself commentary and revision. I'm, like, playfully staying with this thread, you know? Yeah, it's a continued thread of exploring what happened at Sinai as becoming a debate within the text. And I guess how that helps to begin to move toward your later argument of, I guess, blurring the lines between Scripture and tradition.

Sure. I think it's really, really significant in Deuteronomy. That, first of all, Deuteronomy clearly notices and has been written a bit later, and Deuteronomy is reacting to and in a way commenting on the older parts of the five books of Moses. As it retells material from the flat books, the earlier four of the five books of Moses, it's also implicitly commenting on that material. So, Deuteronomy, I think, is first of all a commentary. And the genre of commentary is really, really central for Judaism, for the Jewish religion, I think, in a way that, like, the status that great theologians have in Christianity, in Judaism, it's commentators who have that status. People like Rashi or even Ezra, who write great commentaries on the Torah, they're the, they're sort of the center of Jewish religious curricula. So, I think it's really interesting, first of all, that Deuteronomy is commenting on Exodus. Deuteronomy clearly notices all of those the five ambiguities, because Deuteronomy has specific verses that clear up all the ambiguities. And clear it up, and what I would say is a more traditionalist way of thinking, and saying, "No, no, because the people really did hear language, human language, human words emanating from God." And that gives the, the Ten Commandments, and therefore the whole, the whole Bible, I think, kind of a higher and less fluid kind of authority. It's got a more static, more, more determined sort of authority. So, so right off the bat, Deuteronomy is acting as a commentary. What's interesting is that there's this one verse, Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 5, which for some linguistic reasons, other scholars had already suggested was an addition to the text. It's not by the original author. It's by a scribe who has added thirteen or fourteen verses in different parts of the book, Deuteronomy 3:8 to Deuteronomy. And this one verse, Deuteronomy 5:5, brings back the other point of view. As Deuteronomy 5:5 says, "Actually, what is Chet..." The verse numbers, Deuteronomy 5:4, if actually, if memory serves, says very, very specifically, "All the children of Israel heard all of the Ten Commandments directly from God without intermediation." And then Deuteronomy 5:5 comes along and says, "But of course, Moses was acting as the intermediary at that point in time." Completely contradicts the context. And so, in Deuteronomy, it's not only a commentary that reacts to an older religious text, it also contains within it another commentary that reacts to Deuteronomy itself. This is very, very typical of classical Jewish literature. Not only that, we have commentaries on commentaries that react to each other. So, open up one of these first numbers. All I can show you, you can sort of see here that there's different text here. The text of the Bible itself, an interpretive translation into Aramaic, and then over here, in these different columns, a variety of different commentators, some of whom react to each other. So, Rashi says something about Deuteronomy, and Rashi quotes the Aramaic interpretive translation, and then even Ezra reacts to what Rashi says. And then these two guys here on the bottom of the page are explaining even Ezra because he's kind of hard to understand. Well, what's happening in the text of Deuteronomy is that sort of a thing. Classical Jewish texts from the rabbinic and medieval periods are very conversational and very argumentative. Probably tells us something about the origin of certain Jewish cultural traits. So, what I'm noticing in Deuteronomy is that the same thing is true. Deuteronomy itself, one reaction kind of takes us away from the ambiguity of the book of Exodus, includes it up. It says, "No, no, people heard the whole Ten Commandments. There's a very high level of authority." And then this other verse comes in and says, "No, no, Moses was the intermediary. It all came through Moses." Not directly from God. And so, what was ambiguous back in Exodus leads to an argument in Deuteronomy, as the author of Deuteronomy tries to clear up the ambiguity one way, and then another voice comes in and tries to... That's really it. When I read that, so last year, I was leading a group. I got the Bible study group through my work. Then we're doing like a long series in the Pentateuch. And you know, I just was like, "Let's just read this." You know, the ten verses around there. And he would eat this stop and go, "Wait a second. Like, right in the middle there, it just goes the other way." Like, "Yeah, that's even more evidence." In the Hebrew, because in verse four, chapter five, verse four, it says that God spoke. And then in the norms of Hebrew narrative, you would then expect the word "le'mor," which is usually translated as "saying," but it really functions it's kind of as a comma, quotation mark. And you get that "le'mor" at the end of verse five. But then the all the rest of verse five is a parenthesis. There's this sentence. So, in verse four, has one more word to go, and it's interrupted. And we don't get to the end of that sentence grammatically until the last word of verse five. So, it really does interrupt the flow. And we get this other, we get this other voice with another opinion. And I guess what's what's interesting is we start to see is that there's, you know, the voice above the voices, which is the redactor. So, you talk later in the book that, you know, Deuteronomy and also Chronicles are books written to replace what's already there. It's like, "Look, let's clear it up. Let's give you a nice, easy, easy access here." But then when the book, when the Bible has been redacted, everything is kept in. Yeah. And, and it's, you know, even, I think, you know, the desire of the redactor seems to be much more to keep as much of the sources as possible rather than to create clarity. So, it replaces clarity with cacophony. Gives us argument, not univocality. Perplexity, not clarity. So, I guess if we've got this idea that we need to embrace the need to listen to these different and divergent accounts of revelation, a central thing in the biblical text, and not privilege one over the other, and, and, you know, to admit that we need to listen to the ones that we don't, we'd rather this be this one, if whatever school of thought we fall into. I guess how does that, in your mind, begin to translate into into religious life? Into the worshiping community? And perhaps, as we talked about before, into a life in a larger pluralistic society that still wants to bash out the gray?

Hmm. So, I think it, I think it translates in a line of really important ways, including ways that are especially important, I think, for this cultural moment in societies. I think, first of all, that when the editors bring together these different texts in the Bible and they allow conflicting texts into into the canon, I think they're saying that a certain amount of discussion and argument and agreeing to disagree is a good thing. That's it. That's a good thing. We don't have to get things to be purely black or purely white. I'm going back and forth between polarities and taking a little bit here from this side and a little bit here from this side and creating something gray. That's actually, for a traditional Jewish point of view, that's religiously really positive. It's challenging because gray is harder, right? Gray is like a lot harder than black and white. Um, but I don't think that God had ever claimed that religion was supposed to be really easy. A religion is supposed to be challenging. And figuring out how to live alongside, I, you know, your fellow Jew who disagrees with you and still be part of one Jewish community, or have two Jewish communities that get along with each other in the same town, if there's more than one synagogue, that's not always so easy to figure out how to do that. And when to compromise, and when we kind of actually know that we gotta stick to what we really believe on this one. That's not easy to do. But I think that that's what the biblical model is suggesting we have to do. We've got to sometimes agree to disagree and not demonize our opponents. Even just, even just the book of Deuteronomy itself, the fact that we get a main voice, but there are 13 or 14 places that this alternate voice shows up as well, tells us that Jewish tradition didn't adopt the original book of Deuteronomy. We adopted it with these additional, well, these additional reservations. And that happens again and again in Jewish history. A particular text becomes a sacred text, an authoritative text, but it becomes that text in an edition that includes other opinions that disagree with it. The most famous case of that would be Maimonides, in many ways the most, from the most important Jewish philosopher, medieval Jewish legal authority ever had. He wrote an enormously influential, influential law code. I, in the 1200s, ultimately, though, that law code, which was a lot like Deuteronomy, I kind of wanted to sort of make everything clear and then univocal. That law code was adopted in Judaism in printed editions that include other opinions that disagree with Maimonides. So, in one way, like Maimonides, totally made it into a canon for those important, you know, speakers ever. But in some ways, he lost because Maimonides' edition of Maimonides isn't what became the canonical book in Judaism. It's an addition that includes all these other voices. And I think that that's that's that's the case for for modern people as well. That there's a lesson to be learned about agreeing to disagree and not assuming that purity of ideas is better. I think that's part of what really the Pentateuch is telling us when it puts together JEP and D. Purity of ideas is not the highest value. Allowing a number of different ideas into the tent and making them get along with each other, that's the highest value, even though it requires us to compromise on what we think is right. I think maybe there's also something of a theory of truth here. That maybe part of the idea is that what the Bible is telling us is that we human beings will never really know the full truth. That's just not something that God made us cognitively, neurologically capable of. But what we can do is approximate the truth by approaching it from a few different angles. So that the Pentateuch gives us four different angles. That sometimes gives us two or three reasons for different historical memories of the same event that don't always agree with each other. None of them is right on its own, but between the four of them, we get maybe as close as we humans are neurologically capable of getting to the truth. Maybe that's also a really good reminder that a human being, a religious person who thinks he or she knows the real truth, hey, that's really dangerous. But B, that's also really, really, that's just much too proud, but much too self-confident. And having a sacred text that has different voices reminds us never to believe in any one voice, even our own voice. That would be the sort of hubris that is actually really the opposite of what religion should should create.

Gender? I think that's really good. And it starts to get towards, you know, what you were saying at the beginning, critical biblical studies being this of benefit to a religious person. And you kind of bring this into discussion later in the book with kind of canonical criticism. So, for the Christians, with no revered childs, and Jews, it's friends Rosenberg, who, you know, admit that, yep, there's different voices, or, yeah, but Moses didn't write all of that. But yet, what we're still trying to do is, is read the scripture canonically, read it with like, there's a central theme. And because of that, we can use that theme to kind of smooth over, let's move over, but just like, move beyond these different voices and try to look for the, the canon within the canon of the main voice of the book or the section of the scriptures. And, and here, though, we see that, no, that we don't have to necessarily, like, we can look at the trees for the woods. We can, we can look at these individual voices and not necessarily think that the redactor voice needs to be the one that we privilege. We, there is the religious value to reading these voices for themselves, or at least acknowledging, very, their disparity, because it brings us into conversation with the, you know, the oldest ancestors, or some of the oldest ancestors of that, of the religious community. Bringing it together. So, there's an interesting way that, yes, this, this is part of the, the piety of reading, of the engaging, the start with critical method.

Mmm-hmm. Yeah. I think that there are, there are some modern religious people who don't deny the validity of modern biblical criticism. I think that makes them a little bit either uncomfortable or at least dissatisfied. So, the great German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, um, he didn't deny that the biblical critics had read historical and valid historical clues to make. But ultimately, I think he felt that finding some sort of more unified message from the text is what religious readers should do. I think that, to some extent, Rosenzweig sort of acknowledged biblical criticism, but said, "But we can ignore it." I think that the great Protestant biblical theologian Brevard Childs was a bit more subtle. He, much, he really was a biblical scholar and big knowledge isn't it? Just acknowledge, um, the findings of modern, of the criticism. He wants to also acknowledge that there aren't a lot of different voices at play. But he too, does ultimately privilege the final editor, the final redactor, the final canonizer. I just find myself wondering, well, why? Why do we necessarily have to do that as religious individuals? Why does the last voice of the Pentateuch, which is the one that brings the text together, why does the last voice have more authority than the first voice, or the third voice, or the voice of commentators who came 500 years later, or a thousand years later? So, at some level, I think that as both as a historian of ideas and as a modern religious view, I sort of want to just listen to a conversation. And who comes first and who comes second doesn't really matter to me. I want to hear JEP and D. I want to hear Isaiah and also Deutero-Isaiah. I want to hear the canonizers of the, I want to hear the rabbis who commented several hundred years later on the Bible, medieval authorities, and modern theologians. I think that we just have a conversation with all of these voices. Part of my job as a Bible scholar is to help recover some of those biblical voices. And I think it's part of my job as a Jewish theologian is to show that having this debate itself is a sacred activity. That is in Judaism, I think engaging in the study of Torah, the sacred literature, and having these sort of discussions is actually a form of worship. In Jewish thought, especially in rabbinic thought, and it may even be a higher form of worship than in prayer. Shouldn't say the prayers are unimportant. But ultimately, most rabbinic authorities, I think, would say that you better pray three times a day, but you also have to study every day. Study Torah every day. And studying Torah doesn't mean always coming to a conclusion about the Torah. Doesn't mean being sure about anything. It just means participating in this conversation. Before you're doing is participating. You don't necessarily have to have a pure black or white voice. You don't have to come down always exactly on one side of an issue or another. Maybe we can sort of play with these different voices. And just the engaging with them itself is a form of worship.

That's really good. And that kind of leads to another key thesis of the book, that it's all oral Torah. So, what I put another way, the Bible is tradition. So, I was thinking as I was reading this of my own, my own Christian tradition, which comes out of my kind of Wesleyan, so has the Wesleyan quadrilateral, which is the Reformation, fourth factor: Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason. And your chapter is kind of blurring these lines, or particularly the lines of the first two. They're collapsing the Scripture into into the larger category of tradition, which, as you point out, is in many communities an upgrade. Right? Now, what benefits, I guess, have you found in this age of the of this move? So, what benefit can this move, particularly in this age, I guess, where, as you point out, the big issue with for some people for approaching the Bible is not all that there's how many animals were on the ark, it's, "What? God just told them to wipe these people out?" Or even, I guess, you know, what's the benefit of this move? Because that, you know, I know I don't know how it is so much in your community, but in in church communities, often debates just become to people saying, "Well, our position is biblical." When they're saying, "True," clearly different things. So, there might be an us problem. But I guess, what have you found this the benefits of this kind of collapsing of the categories?

There's a few, a few benefits of collapsing tradition and Scripture, as Christians to call it, or oral Torah and written Torah, as Jews call it, and acknowledging that, in a way, the Bible is simply the oldest part of tradition. One benefit is that, well, actually, one benefit I think is that when you have the debate that you just described in your community, and each side is saying, "Well, our position, our position..." Well, one of the things about tradition, because tradition mixes human and divine elements, is that tradition can disagree with itself. That is, you know, Wesley is, Dennis is part of Christian tradition. Maimonides is part of Christian tradition. And Augustine is part of tradition. By Christian tradition, even for a Catholic, Augustine and Aquinas are all part of Christian or Catholic tradition. Everyone agrees that they can disagree. That's not a big deal. Well, you know, we really should just acknowledge that, yeah, Isaiah can disagree with Deutero-Isaiah, and both of them can disagree with the book of Joshua. That within the book of Exodus, this verse is from E, and this verse is from P, and they just have different religious approaches to the issue at hand. And so, it may be the case that both positions in a debate are biblical positions. It's just that neither one is *the* biblical position, but both biblical positions. And so, just appealing to Scripture, that doesn't end the debate right there. There's other factors that have come into the debate. Just the fact that you've got a verse on your side, that doesn't end it. I think that's one of the brilliant, brilliant things about the West. It's not just finding the verse. It's because we also have to apply our own reason to the issue of tradition. Look at the issue. There's a number of different factors that have come in. So, that's one benefit. I think at the same time, criticism has been perceived as very destructive to traditional religion, must be both among Christians and Jews. Biblical criticism is viewed as kind of the enemy that undermines things. And I think that part of what biblical criticism does is it can show us that... Let me rephrase that. I think that part of what my approach does when it says that the Bible is really part of tradition is it acknowledges that tradition is always important and sacred and authoritative. At least in Judaism, I think also very freely, the Phallus in the majority tradition, tradition is sacred and authoritative. But we all acknowledge the fact that there is a human element of tradition. And wherever there's a human element, there is error. That's inevitable. The fact that tradition sometimes makes errors doesn't take away from its authority. It means that tradition has to continue to evolve, and you've got to be a little bit flexible in how we apply tradition in any given situation. The fact that it acknowledges that it sometimes makes, if your errors, doesn't mean that anybody throws, throws tradition out. Um, tradition can remain authoritative, even though we know it errs. Christians and Jews can agree on this. Once we realize that, well, the Bible is really part of tradition, we can realize that sometimes the Bible does err too. And so, when the book of Deuteronomy commands us to kill all the Amalekites, to wipe the Amalekites crowd, there's no way that I can think of that verse as emanating from a God who is just, or a God who is merciful, much less about both just and merciful. Now, if I think, "Well, Scripture is perfect. It has to be perfect. It's the absolute simpler of religion." And then I realize that there's a moral flaw in Scripture, that's really, really important and really damaging. Well, Scripture's no longer perfect. And that means Scripture is no longer Scripture. And if my whole religion is based on perfect Scripture, then I'm going to have no religion. And that's why I think that many Jews and Christians have looked at biblical criticism as threatened, between say, other minor errors on the part of biblical errors or errors. But it's the same problem. That there's no Scripture, then even though no religion. What I'm saying is, we've got tradition. I mean, we've always acknowledged that tradition can make some errors, and it does evolve to one degree or another. Even if the errors are rare, and the evolution is slow, we agree that rabbinic tradition, for example, it doesn't have a very strong human element. Saying of the Bible that it too is his tradition means that when we find the occasional error, it doesn't shatter the entire category. That doesn't destroy the whole religion. That that just says, though, the Bible is one of many different pillars that Jewish tradition stands on. And none of these pillars is perfect. But between all these, but among all of these different pillars, um, Judaism is still very, very strongly anchored. So, in a way, admitting that tradition includes Scripture, I think, inoculates traditional Judaism from this. This works very, very well for Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. I think for a lot of Protestants, this is probably better, because there, that's where you get the idea of Sola Scriptura. I think that Wesley is, it's the theologian, and Albert Luther was the Wesleyan theologian, both were supposedly on this. You know, they really give a tool in the past. The traditions and also I think allows one to overcome this fuller emphasis just monster. Yeah, I agree. I think it's, it was really helpful way of putting the way you developed the argument in your book. So, I definitely recommend my first and friends to check it out. And I guess, kind of from this, you know, people might start to hear us talking about all this human error and this is human voice within it, and that revelation shows is collaborative and participatory. And, and we talked earlier than this, maybe this idea of nonverbal revelations and translated. And people might be like, "Whoa, okay, so I guess it doesn't have any binding on our life?" And your book very much rejects that idea. And you know, you kind of to do this, you kind of go into Rosenzweig's view of a divine, divine command, get off, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but the divine command and specific law, like Exodus. Now, the first, the divine command is kind of the revealed, you know, God's commanding presence, the election of Israel, and the core tool of God. And then have all laws and teachings follow this event, a kind of a response. Yet, this isn't meaning like a nominal or antinomian position. There's there's still law. Law is central, you know, and really, the, in some states, the only way to engage the debate is to be someone who is following the law, who is walking the way. So, so yes, I guess how, what was it important again to make sure that this was a big stressor? And then where the book kind of leads to earn a lot of sense, you know, and how does this, I guess, get worked out in again, in the community as it goes forward, you know, acknowledging, as we've just been saying, that there's error or potential error or things that we need to revise and explore, and we ourselves become part of the tradition in that movement, you know, making. So, acknowledging that while also clinging to, well, we have to follow is essential.

So, here's one of those areas where I'm sort of rejecting the black and white thinking that is just so pervasive and damaging throughout Western thought nowadays. When I look at the Bible from this biblical critical point of view, and I'm trying to hear these different voices describing where the Bible itself comes from, on the one hand, it's really clear to me as a biblical critic that the four main sources of the Torah, what we call JEP and D, are remembering this debate, and remembering that event, excuse me, in very different ways. Where it happened, exactly how it happened, even what the law that came out of it was. Different JEP and D each have their different versions of what the law is supposed to be. But it, it seems extremely significant to me that they do agree that revelation was law-giving. There have to be the case. You can easily imagine an idea of divine revelation that is not necessarily law-giving, but it's not commanding. Um, the divine revelation just may be an event in which God and somebody else, or some group, can have an I-Thou experience or a relationship with each other, a deep relationship. But none of the biblical sources say that that's what God did with the nation Israel. All of them agree that a law came out of this event, even though they disagree on what the law actually was. And that tells me that law is sort of central to Judaism. I think you can't have an authentic Judaism without covenant, or covenant, the law at its center. But from the get-go, from the Bible itself, from the book of Exodus and Deuteronomy themselves, it was the case that there were different versions of the law. And so, they all agree that there was a divine command. But the specifics of the law, that apparently is open to debate. And I think that that was the case in ancient times, and not continues to be the case today. If the specifics of the law, from the very beginning, were to a great extent written by human beings, the legal corpus as a whole remains authoritative, but individual elements are subject to debate and revision. And that really shouldn't be such a such a surprising position. I mean, here in the United States, we've got laws, no, but but but that we do have laws. We do have various mechanisms for changing the law. And the highest law is the Constitution. But the Constitution itself creates a mechanism of amendment that allows the Constitution to be amended, can be changed. The, the fact that a community can slowly and carefully amend laws doesn't mean that that community doesn't have a concept of law. Um, we all agree that the state of New Jersey, where our city at the moment, our amendable paisa. Similarly, all I'm saying is that from the get-go, the specifics of Jewish law were subject to debate and revision. But the system as the whole remains authoritative. I think that's, I think that's really, really helpful.

And, and as you mentioned, this, the slowly-slowly aspect and the worked out in community aspect. And it's interesting as you get to the end of the book, there's, I can't think of too many books which are basically saying, "So, if you want to know if I'm right, check back in 500 years. And if the community is still messing around with these ideas and their debates, then there was something to it. And if not, well, sorry." But there's that sense of, you know, well, what has become the tradition is what's around. There were debates, and, you know, sometimes I'd got, you know, "Nah, that's not what got picked up." And then another one did, or it got picked up, as you said earlier, with disagreement within. So, as you kind of say, there's this process. We're kind of throwing into this thing, as you said, it's not meant to be easy, it's meant to be something that we have to work out in community. And we can't necessarily know whether this voice is one of the ones that needs to be brought in, hill or in paradox, or whether this is the one that needs to go away out of, whether this is one that needs to, you know, become stronger. You know, it's this thing that, yeah, time and a community that is committed to covenant is, is the kind of material.

Yeah, I think you don't decide something just now. That is really important as part of this, which is the idea that the evolution of the law is worked out in community. It's not some workout on an individual. Um, if an individual just starts saying, "Okay, I like this one, they don't like that one. I hear God speaking to me through this one. I don't believe that one." If individuals are making all those choices, well, then the law is actually no longer a law. It's a lifestyle. Um, for the law to be law, we have to accept the law, but with what philosophers called heteronomy, not autonomy. Autonomous, if I'm making all the decisions about my religious status as an individual by myself, I'm picking and choosing what I want to. Well, then the law isn't the law. The law is just kind of a menu. What I mean, a menu that I can choose from. It's no longer a law. So, I, I think individuals in Judaism can't make too many of these legal decisions on their own. We've got to be subject to something bigger than ourselves. And in any given generation, that thing that is bigger than ourselves is the tradition. As but I think that the community as a whole can, and in fact, historically always has, made some choices. The community as a whole forces the law to evolve. Allows the law to evolve. And that's a perfectly valid thing for the community doing. The community doesn't need to be embarrassed, better, in denial about that, or pretending.

It's not happening. Um, but but it is really important to me that it's done by the community, as or released by communities. Different Jewish dinners, but differently. And then over time, some communities' opinions end up enduring more than other community mins. But that is an important point.

Some critics of my book have said that I'm suggesting they sort of pick and choose Judaism. That is, um, if already the biblical authors don't go to each other, how cool is that? Inevitably, we have to be picking and choosing. And certainly in traditionalist Jewish circles, Jews that that's an insult. Words, you're saying that he's advocating Judaism that was pretty clearly an attack. But my careful, my book shows that's not at all the case. I'm not saying that individuals pick and choose. I am saying that over generations, Jewish communities, you've introduced individuals are subject to those choices, and that watch the true law.

But the specifics of the law have always been human in origin, with the big extent. And so communities slowly over time, you pick and choose to improve the law, do bring the law in new directions, and inevitably at times make mistakes and to make changes to the law that were a bad idea that eventually this generation. Hmm, yeah. I think that's really a really important thing. And and and as you kind of point out, like, you know, sometimes it is, it's it's it's correcting that people maybe just didn't get God right at the time, didn't understand it fully. And and God journeys with the people and and, you know, continues to give opportunities for the community to find find the true lure again. Certainly, all of us failed to hear God's voice as clearly as we might. Hold communities get stuff wrong. It's also the case that there are communities or people at a given point in time who aren't yet ready to hear part of hundreds of viewers for a new idea to begin to really come into its own and emerge. I don't think that God makes God's voice available in its fullness and imperfection all at once. God might say things that only generations later we begin to fully understand. Why God choose to do things this way? Why God didn't just easy for us? Just because he sees the whole truths and all of the truths and perfect truth, you know, three thousand years ago, this I cannot answer that. It's a given. We all acknowledge that God didn't do that. Members are seized with a theater for a long time before God came to general. We are putting it, or if you're a Muslim for a long time before takis the final perfect revelation from the hama. Hmm, matter where we're coming from, we all agree that our species was around for a while and not doled out truths. If I bit, why we don't know. But once we were forced to acknowledge is the Bible and the Christian model and the Quran, all four sisters now acknowledge that God is making truths available to us. It doesn't matter whether we think that the first human lives 6,000 years ago or three thousand four hundred thousand years ago. Revelation has always been partial, partial both temporarily in time, also geographically in terms of who gets what, what that is the case, I don't know. But once acknowledged that continuing to allow for God's voice to become clearer and clearer over the generations through the evolution of our religions is not something that should be upsetting to us. Managing that that's the way that it works. Um, that's a part of the system to begin with. That's excellent and a very good place to close out our discussion. The book is Revelation and Authority: Sinai in the Jewish in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. Go and check it out now. Find it wherever you find good books. Benjamin, some of thank you for joining us. Then labyrinths repaid, is there any way? Is there any way people can connect with your work or anything you want people to be aware of? Um, I suppose are curious to see more. There's always my academia site. If people know the website, www.fawziacademy.com, you know, in every still different academic field, if you go to that and that website, I could edu, you can look me up and find other articles, also reviews of my book by a number of different Jewish and Christian scholars. So that would be a way to kind of follow up a bit more. Great. Well, thank you very much. And yeah, I encourage people to go and do that and check out the book and your other work. So thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much. I've delighted to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks.