Teaching Biblical Criticism: A Proposal To Yeshiva University

This past Shabbat, I had the privilege of hearing Rabbi Dr. Lawrence Schiffman’s lecture, entitled “Who Wrote the Bible? Biblical Criticism and Jewish Faith” at New York University’s Bronfman Center. This talk was captivating and enlightening, as it expanded upon some primary issues in Biblical literature which Documentary Hypothesis attempts to reconcile. Dr. Schiffman pointed out some erroneous claims made by Wellhausen and other proponents of Documentary Hypothesis in the eighteenth century, as well as some underlying religious convictions which can allow a traditional Jew to acknowledge biblical discrepancies while still believing the Torah to be a Divine text.

Dr. Schiffman began with a discussion pertaining to the observation of linguistic discrepancies throughout the Torah. A classic discrepancy is the use of the shem hamiforash, “yud hey vav hey” to reference God in some places, and “Elohim” to reference God in others. While Bible critics often take this to be an indication of various authors using their different parlances to refer to God, a traditional Jew can make an equally respectable claim that these two names for God are used in order to stress two dichotomous attributes of the Almighty, namely His mercy and His justice.

Additionally, Schiffman made the overarching observation that any reasonably intelligent person must be willing to acknowledge that there are such discrepancies in the Bible; whether one attributes this to multiple authorship or not is irrelevant to the initial acknowledgement of the linguistic variations throughout the text. This is, in and of itself, a bold and largely ignored fact in the religious community, in which it seems many people are unaware that the Bible’s style varies throughout. This is why Schiffman also proposed that all students should make it their business to read the entirety of the Torah, in order to truly know what it is they have been speaking and learning about their entire lives, what it is they truly hold to be the dearest book to our religion.

Dr. Schiffman made clear that the truly challenging claims in Biblical Criticism are not those which attack linguistic discrepancies, but rather those which question the Bible’s historicity, the historical accuracy and order of events as recorded in the Bible. He discussed the Bible scholar Wellhausen, a Protestant living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who, with some anti-Semitic undertones, claimed the Old Testament to be out of order.

Wellhausen explained that while the earlier parts of the Torah, the “J” and “E” sections, certainly preceded the “P” and “D” sections, he believed the “P,” or “priestly” sections of the Torah, these being Leviticus and portions of Numbers, should succeed “D,” or the “Deuteronomy” section, as well as even some of the Early Prophets. This claim is made, Schiffman explained, with the Chirstian polemic that the Old Testament, when its order is read in this new light, would properly document the Jewish people’s progressive abandonment of God through their “Rabbinism,” their emphasis on empty ritual and their de-emphasis of spirituality; and this would ultimately result in the Jewish people’s lack of acknowledgement for Jesus and his message of the spiritual over the ritual.

In other words, using Wellhausen’s model for the “proper” order of the Biblical canon, one would understand the Jews’ history to document a progressively worsening situation in which Jews strayed farther and farther away from what God really wanted, which was less ritual practice (i.e. priestly observance and Levitical service) and more spiritual observance. By explaining a current secular understanding of the “proper” order of the Bible in light of a profoundly Christian polemic used by Wellhausen, Schiffman was able to make audience members more aware of the origins of some classical claims in Documentary Hypothesis.

This lecture was fantastic and it illuminated a very interesting area of both Jewish and secular thought (and Protestant, for that matter). However, this lecture disappointed me in the fact that Biblical Theory is not taught as a proper course at Yeshiva University. In an undergraduate setting, we are asked by our professors to write papers, and to make critical and scholarly claims about things we have read and feel knowledgeable about. We make thesis statements, arguments that propound new ways of reading and understanding age-old ideas and pieces of literature and art.

As one of my professors has aptly pointed out, a teacher asks a student to research and write about something because the student, through their studies, has earned and merited the consideration of being somewhat knowledgeable on the subject, and of having something respectable to offer. At Yeshiva University, I can learn about musical composers, painters of the Renaissance, and African-American authors of the twentieth century, and about all these things, I am entrusted to study them with an open yet critical mind, and to come to my own thoughtful conclusions. Yet when it comes to Bible, an area in which I am certainly offered a variety of courses with some truly fantastic professors, there is suddenly no room for my opinion on Biblical Criticism. All of a sudden, the most powerful theory towards Bible in the last four hundred years is apparently to risqué and heretical for reasonably knowledgeable and thoughtful students.

After the lecture, Dr. Schiffman made himself available for questions from the audience, and Yael Roberts, a student at Yeshiva University, proposed that Dr. Schiffman offer a course at Stern College on Biblical Criticism, to which Schiffman, not dismissively, said he would have to give some consideration.

This would be a positive breakthrough for this university, which understandably prides itself in graduating mature and learned students each year. Why not have its students up to date with studies about their own religion, too? I believe it would be a fantastic idea to have learned, religious professors offer courses that could educate the undergraduates in matters of Documentary Hypothesis.

Yeshiva University, as it stands, is making a mistake in keeping its young minds unenlightened on this matter; for, when left in ignorance, people will educate themselves, and, without guidance, will be lead towards blatant acceptance of Critical Theory, and will not yield a thoughtful and nuanced religious response.

I ask of this school and its learned Bible professors, who guide my fellow students, my fellow Bible majors, and me, to please disallow our being kept in the dark, and to please offer a course in Biblical Criticism. It is a disservice to the educational establishment, and it makes a mockery of what we call a university. Our religion and its primary text is the center of this university’s identity, as it should be. However, by not disclosing key theories regarding this text, we come to shame a religion that prides itself on intellectual vigor as its way of praising the Divine.