Louis Jacobs
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781874774587
- eISBN:
- 9781800340305
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781874774587.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter considers in greater detail how the historical critical method sheds light on the term “from” and whether the position can be considered to be in any way traditional. It talks about the ...
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This chapter considers in greater detail how the historical critical method sheds light on the term “from” and whether the position can be considered to be in any way traditional. It talks about the doctrine that the Torah is from Heaven, emphasizing that every word of the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, was communicated directly by God to Moses during the forty years the Children of Israel journeyed through the wilderness. This demonstrates that there are faint glimmerings in talmudic statements that enable non-fundamentalists to claim new theological formulations. The point of quoting talmudic and similar references from the past is to show how much more flexible the rabbis were in matters of dogma than whose stark formulation is often hurled against the legitimacy of the “liberal” approach. What is involved in any new formulation of dogma is a greater awareness of the real history of Judaism.Less
This chapter considers in greater detail how the historical critical method sheds light on the term “from” and whether the position can be considered to be in any way traditional. It talks about the doctrine that the Torah is from Heaven, emphasizing that every word of the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, was communicated directly by God to Moses during the forty years the Children of Israel journeyed through the wilderness. This demonstrates that there are faint glimmerings in talmudic statements that enable non-fundamentalists to claim new theological formulations. The point of quoting talmudic and similar references from the past is to show how much more flexible the rabbis were in matters of dogma than whose stark formulation is often hurled against the legitimacy of the “liberal” approach. What is involved in any new formulation of dogma is a greater awareness of the real history of Judaism.
