Criticizing biblical criticism

“A lost temple – new findings might shatter biblical archaeology paradigm” (October 31”) transported me back in time to an era when some scholars believed in the Documentary Hypothesis. I say “believed” because blind faith is an absolute requirement to take it seriously.

The hypothesis of Torah written by an abundance of authors at different times and in a variety of places – ultimately stitched together by an unknown editor who didn’t bother to remove contradictions and left in place many traces of his forgery and succeeded in getting a whole people, highly intelligent, to believe that this is the word of God – staggers the imagination.

The Hertz Chumash quotes the Earl of Halsbury, who in 1915 found himself compelled to declare, “For my own part I consider the assignment of different fragments of Genesis to a number of wholly imaginary authors great rubbish. I do not understand the attitude of those men who base a whole theory of this kind on hypotheses for which there is no evidence whatsoever.”

Yet Tsvi Koenigsberg suggests that Mount Ebal, not Mount Moriah (the other name for the Temple Mount) is the location mentioned in the Torah. Even Wellhausen, the high priest of biblical criticism, and his followers claim that the Book of Deuteronomy with the expression, “The place the Lord your God will choose,” appearing more than 20 times, has Jerusalem in mind. Therefore, Koenigsberg’s theory is a radical rupture with the “tradition” of the early biblical critics.

There is one serious problem that Koenigsberg must face. The vague description of Jerusalem as “The place that He will choose” is obviously meant to conceal the name of the place (much is written about that – see Maimonides in Moreh Nevuchim). Yet in the same Book of Deuteronomy, Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim are mentioned by name and their precise location is given: “...on the other side of the Jordan, far, in the direction of the sunset, in the land of the Canaanite, that dwells in the plain, far from Gilgal, near the plain of Moreh”

Yet in this same parsha, the phrase “The place that He will choose” appears no fewer than 15 times. Did the fictional editor not realize that at the beginning of the parsha he reveals the name of the place that he goes on to conceal 15 times?

This is strange. The resolution is, of course, that Koenigsberg is fiction and Torah is truth.

The bottom line is that “We believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses our teacher” (Rambam). RABBI DR. SHOLOM GOLD

Jerusalem