Brief reflections on time, the Documentary Hypothesis, and barbarism in the Bible. This article is a series of disjoint thoughts, rather than a cohesive narrative.
The only parts of the Bible that ever really struck me as wise or profound are Ecclesiastes and maybe Job.
Ecclesiastes seems to have been written by something of a nihilist, which is kinda funny. Job is interesting in its grappling with the problem of evil but the answer given is ultimately pretty unsatisfying.
I read Genesis and most of Exodus as a young child and was similarly struck by the horror of it. I recall reading about the killing of the first-born children in the final plague in Exodus and imagining myself as one of those children, killed for no fault of their own by god. It was very distressing, and I suspect my moral horror had more to do with my apostasy than the logical contradictions.
I’m interested — do you find this influencing any of your other thoughts on the likelihood of weird religious stuff being true? (For me, and good number of us, learning the real history of the Bible was a step toward the end of our religious beliefs.)
I find myself appreciating more and more your idiosyncratic views — it’s nice to see arguments argued by someone other than the usual peeps arguing those views (even when I happen to disagree with them).
Can you clarify what you mean by weird religious stuff being true? I think that the fact that the Bible is riddled with errors makes Judaism and Christianity much less likely than they'd be otherwise. If the Bible contained no errors, I'd be a Jew or Christian.
Absolutely — I guess I was mostly thinking about flying/levitating monks. (Thank you, by the way, for helping push this into the mainstream discussion; I’m really looking forward to reading the big book about it.) Though I’m also curious whether this changes your thoughts as to how strong the Kurazi principle should be considered.
I'm not too sold on the Kuzari, and the flying monks stuff isn't, in my view, that decisive. It's one aspect of the world that God makes a bit better sense of, but not a huge cost to alternative theories.
While I agree that the Torah wasn't written by Moses for the reasons you mentioned, I think the Documentary Hypothesis as typically formulated (specifically the distinction between the Yahwist and Elohist sources) is probably false. For reference, you might be interested in Umberto Cassuto's lectures on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Documentary-Hypothesis-Composition-Pentateuch-Lectures/dp/1590459164/ref=sr_1_3
In short, there are often genuine stylistic reasons for preferring one of YHWH/Elohim over the other, there's often rapid swaps between the use of each name in the same sentence, and the idea of a redactor copying excerpts from several source documents with little to no editing is pretty weird and doesn't have a strong precedent.
Yeah, I'm not super wedded to the documentary hypothesis over the documentary hypothesis or something like it--involving multiple authors, and non-Mosaic authorship.
The only parts of the Bible that ever really struck me as wise or profound are Ecclesiastes and maybe Job.
Ecclesiastes seems to have been written by something of a nihilist, which is kinda funny. Job is interesting in its grappling with the problem of evil but the answer given is ultimately pretty unsatisfying.
I read Genesis and most of Exodus as a young child and was similarly struck by the horror of it. I recall reading about the killing of the first-born children in the final plague in Exodus and imagining myself as one of those children, killed for no fault of their own by god. It was very distressing, and I suspect my moral horror had more to do with my apostasy than the logical contradictions.
I’m interested — do you find this influencing any of your other thoughts on the likelihood of weird religious stuff being true? (For me, and good number of us, learning the real history of the Bible was a step toward the end of our religious beliefs.)
I find myself appreciating more and more your idiosyncratic views — it’s nice to see arguments argued by someone other than the usual peeps arguing those views (even when I happen to disagree with them).
Can you clarify what you mean by weird religious stuff being true? I think that the fact that the Bible is riddled with errors makes Judaism and Christianity much less likely than they'd be otherwise. If the Bible contained no errors, I'd be a Jew or Christian.
Absolutely — I guess I was mostly thinking about flying/levitating monks. (Thank you, by the way, for helping push this into the mainstream discussion; I’m really looking forward to reading the big book about it.) Though I’m also curious whether this changes your thoughts as to how strong the Kurazi principle should be considered.
I'm not too sold on the Kuzari, and the flying monks stuff isn't, in my view, that decisive. It's one aspect of the world that God makes a bit better sense of, but not a huge cost to alternative theories.
Seems like the post is cut off at the end?
While I agree that the Torah wasn't written by Moses for the reasons you mentioned, I think the Documentary Hypothesis as typically formulated (specifically the distinction between the Yahwist and Elohist sources) is probably false. For reference, you might be interested in Umberto Cassuto's lectures on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Documentary-Hypothesis-Composition-Pentateuch-Lectures/dp/1590459164/ref=sr_1_3
In short, there are often genuine stylistic reasons for preferring one of YHWH/Elohim over the other, there's often rapid swaps between the use of each name in the same sentence, and the idea of a redactor copying excerpts from several source documents with little to no editing is pretty weird and doesn't have a strong precedent.
I personally am more partial to the supplementary hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_hypothesis
Yeah, I'm not super wedded to the documentary hypothesis over the documentary hypothesis or something like it--involving multiple authors, and non-Mosaic authorship.
Oops fixed!
Yep, Mosaic authorship is one of the most clearly false things that Orthodox Jews believe. Some historical Orthodox Rabbis, such as the Ibn Ezra, recognized the difficulty of these passages and seemed to secretly believe that at least some parts of the Torah weren't written by Moses: https://www.thetorah.com/article/authorship-of-the-torah-the-position-of-ibn-ezra-and-yehuda-hachasid