The school year has begun. Two years ago at this time, I did not know that I was to encounter a grave threat to my soul as a believer. It was September 2008, and I walked in the Public Affairs Center to go to my class—Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.
Jeremy Zwelling, the now-retired professor of that course, has contributed more to Jewish Life at Wesleyan than any other person. He has made significant contributions to the degree that Magda Teter, the new Jewish Studies administrator, was dubbed “The Jeremy Zwelling Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies”.
To this day, I value him as the teacher he was to me, and a guiding light. He was someone who challenged boundaries, and would examine Judaism (and religion in general) by going to its heart as well as to its fringes.
But from the first day on that syllabus, I was told not to look any of texts in any holy light. This is not an actual chronicle of events, said that syllabus, but an imagined history, referring to all of the Five Books of Moses, as well as Joshua and Judges. No Sinai. No Moses. No Exodus. No real reason to celebrate Passover, or any of the holidays. Nothing.
To make matters even worse, there were theories concerning the texts being four different ones, without a cohesive source. Then there was Israel Finkelstein’s notion that it was the Josiah reform that brought the compiled Old Testament into being—that the world’s best-selling book was a righteous forgery.
I was crushed. G-d was no longer in that text. It was entirely a human invention, made by elite humans for humans of lesser castes. How did I recover? I am still trying to find out how to do so…
But by NO means am I discouraging you from registering for classes related to Bible Scholarship (far from it, in fact). The truth be told, many notions of Bible Scholarship will reach many of us eventually, regardless of what courses we take.
But I did discover hope. Last summer, I discovered my notebook from the Introduction to the Old Testament class. The first thing that I was told: “don’t let your religious beliefs be harmed by what you hear”. The second thing, the most telling thing about Biblical Criticism I have heard:
Bible Scholars cannot search for absolute truths. It’s impossible. What this course, Zwelling said, will search for is…”local truths”.
There was only one Rabbi that I had the courage to bring up the question of Bible Scholarship with, and that was Rabbi Bernard Reichmann of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He told me something even more profound.
He said that secular education is indeed important. But no one said that you ever needed to believe everything you hear. Just take it in for the sake of getting the grade. Israel Finkelstein and the entire premise of Biblical Criticism could indeed be wrong. A secular education does not pressure you to believe. It only pressures you to listen, never to forcefully agree.
The more time I’ve had to think about it, the more I realize that we will never fully unveil the truth about any of these texts. The plethora of theories I found both in Zwelling’s class and in other classes made me realize that the absolute truth of the Bible can never come into being. Given that it is as ineffable as G-d Himself, that is enough of a “Divine Origin” for me to have confidence in.
But Biblical criticism can be more holy that it seems. The Rabbi Don Isaac Abravanel came to a conclusion that Deuteronomy was written prior to the other four Books of Moses. He was one who unequivocally espoused Divine authorship of the Bible.
Read the work of Israel Finkelstein and his research partner Neil Asher Silberman ‘72, and they too, come to the same conclusion that Deuteronomy came first.
This is because the line between a clergyman and a heretical Bible scholar is very, very thin.