Imagining the

Jewish God

Edited by Leonard Kaplan

and Ken Koltun-Fromm

LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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 Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Names: Kaplan, Leonard, 1941– editor. | Koltun-Fromm, Ken, editor.
Title: Imagining the Jewish God : edited by Leonard Kaplan and Ken
Koltun-Fromm.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2016] | Series: Graven images |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015835 (print) | LCCN 2016016269 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498517492 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498517508 (Electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: God (Judaism)
Classification: LCC BM610 .I43 2016 (print) | LCC BM610 (ebook) | DDC
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Printed in the United States of America

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 Contents

Introduction ix
Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm

PART I. PROLOGUE: INSCRIPTION

1  On the Poetics of the Jewish God 3
Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller
2  S
 eeing Divine Writing: Thoughts on the Drama of the Outside
within the Technology of Inscription 19
Lewis Freedman
3  Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin 23
Jonathan Boyarin

PART II. OUT OF LEVANT: BIBLICAL AND RABBINIC

IMAGININGS OF GOD
4  C
 lassical Jewish Ethics and Theology in the Halakhic Tractates
of the Mishnah 47
Jonathan Wyn Schofer
5  What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God 63
Kenneth Seeskin
6  The Bible as Torah: How J, E, P, and D Can Teach Us about God 86
Benjamin D. Sommer
7 
Job, the Levantine Book: A Beginning Guide through
Human Perplexity 103
Leonard Kaplan
v

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 vi Contents

 8  Two Endings, Three Openings 133

Alicia Ostriker

PART III. CLINGING TO GOD:

THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
 9  T
 he Repersonalization of God: Monism and Theological
Polymorphism in Zoharic and Hasidic Imagination 143
Jay Michaelson
10  T
 he Word of God Is No Word at All: Intimacy and the
Nothingness of God 163
Shaul Magid
11  Who Is God? 179
Lenn Goodman
12  Jewish Theology and the Transcendental Turn 205
Randi Rashkover
13  T
 he Perils of Covenant Theology: The Cases of David Hartman
and David Novak 227
Martin Kavka
14  Freud’s Imagining God 255
David Novak

PART IV. INSCRIPTION:

GOD IN JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
15  God of Language 267
Michael Marmur
16  Location, Location, Location: Toward a Theology of Prepositions 293
Rebecca Alpert
17  Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God 299
Noam Reisner
18  Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d 319
Elissa J. Sampson
19  “Don’t Forget the Potatoes”: Imagining God Through Food 347
Susan Handelman
20  Imagining the Jewish God in Comics 369
Ken Koltun-Fromm

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 Contents vii

PART V. POETICS: GOD IN LANGUAGE

21  God’s Inside/The Line of a Poem: A Philosophical Commentary 405
Zachary Braiterman
22  R
 econciling God, Revisioning Prayer, and Reaching into
the Spaces Between in Selected Works by Alicia Ostriker,
Marcia Falk, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis 431
Alison Creighton
23  Unimagining the Jewish God (Remix) 451
Charles Bernstein
24  Poems and Commentary 453
Laynie Browne
25  Poems 457
Clive Meachen
26  Select Parables and Commentary 459
Howard Schwartz
27  Poems and Commentary 467
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
28  Poems 475
Bill Sherman
29  Poems 477
David Weisstub
30  Poems 481
James Chapson
31  Poems 485
Jack Hirschman
32  Poems from The Days Between 493
Marcia Falk
33  Poems and Prose 497
Jeff Friedman
34  Poems 503
Gerald Stern
35  Poems 505
Michael Castro

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 viii Contents

36  Poems and Commentary 511

Jerome Rothenberg
37  Poems 517
Alicia Ostriker

Index 521
About the Contributors 543

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 Chapter Six

The Bible as Torah

How J, E, P, and D Can Teach Us about God
Benjamin D. Sommer

In his fine contribution to this volume, my friend and colleague Ken See-
skin raises the crucial question: What role—if any—can the Tanakh have
for modern Jewish theology? Given that we recognize the Tanakh comes
from a culture quite removed from our own and makes assumptions about
physics and metaphysics that were dated already a millennium ago, can it
really teach us anything about God? This question is central for all biblical
theologians, myself included, and Seeskin generously uses my book, The
Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel,1 to exemplify the challenges
inherent in any attempt to learn truths from such an ancient text. In what
follows, I would like to clarify the ways in which Seeskin and I both agree
and disagree. Before I do so, however, many readers will find a summary
of some aspects of my book helpful.

RECOVERING AN ANCIENT DEBATE

In The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, I present a view of
divinity that I believe can be found in the ancient Near East, according to
which deities differ from human beings because deities’ selves are fluid and
unbounded. In the viewpoint of ancient Near Eastern worshipers and reli-
gious thinkers, deities could have multiple bodies, located simultaneously
in heaven and in several earthly locations. (This becomes especially evident
from ancient Near Eastern ceremonies intended to bring the real presence of
a deity into its cult statue. The ancient texts that describe these ceremonies,
usually referred in Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts to as “mouth-opening”
or “mouth-washing” rites, make clear that their participants believed that
the god or goddess literally came to be embodied by or housed in the statue.
83

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 84 Benjamin D. Sommer

Because there were many statues of the same deity in various temples at
the same time, it follows that a god or goddess often had multiple bodies
that were physically—and not merely symbolically—present in more than
one house.) Further, a deity’s self could fragment into more than one local
manifestation. These manifestations or avataras (here I appropriate a strik-
ingly fitting Sanskrit term to describe an ancient Near Eastern theology) were
distinct from one another and could even be worshiped separately. Nonethe-
less, these local manifestations retained an underlying unity. While Ishtar of
Arbela and Ishtar of Nineveh are appealed to separately in religious and legal
texts, mythological texts speak simply of Ishtar. There are no stories of Ishtar
of Arbela or of Nineveh; rather, when myths narrate Ishtar’s acts, they are
speaking of all the local Ishtars. Similarly, separate cultic texts and cultic sites
are devoted specifically to Baal Ṣaphon, Baal Ugarit, and Baal of Heaven,
but when these three terms appear parallel to each other as the subject of a
sentence, the verb used of them is in the singular, indicating that they are all
the same deity, who is also known by the name Hadad. In short: There were
several goddesses named Ishtar who were ultimately a single being, many
Baals or Hadads who were one Baal Hadad.
This conception of divine selfhood, which I call the “fluidity model,” ap-
pears not only in ancient Mesopotamian, Canaanite, and Egyptian religions
but also in the Bible. It can be found in the J and E sources from the Penta-
teuch.2 Further, we can detect it in sundry passages in the Psalms, prophets,
and Samuel. It also appears in several ancient Israelite inscriptions discovered
by archaeologists in the past century, which speak of “Yhwh of Teiman” and
“Yhwh of Samaria,” just as biblical texts speak of “Yhwh in Zion” (Psalm
99:2) and “Yhwh in Hebron” (2 Samuel 15:7). In those texts the one God
Yhwh has multiple cultic bodies; Yhwh can appear in small-scale manifesta-
tions that on the surface seem separate from the heavenly Godhead yet clearly
overlap with It and never become autonomous beings. J, E, and related texts
use several terms to describe the multiple bodies of God housed in various
temples throughout ancient Israel. These include ‫“( מצבה‬stone pillar”), ‫ביתאל‬
(“betyl” or “divine house”), and ‫“( אשרה‬asherah” or “sacred tree, sacred
wooden pole”), the first two of which also refer to earthly embodiments of a
deity in ancient Near Eastern texts outside the Bible. It must be stressed that
J, E, and related texts from the Tanakh regard these multiple manifestations of
Yhwh positively; for them, these three terms refer to legitimate and beneficial
cultic objects. (Other biblical texts, we will see, use these terms disparag-
ingly.) These texts also speak of Yhwh’s multiple, small-scale manifestations
or avataras on earth. J and E often refer to such a manifestation as ’‫מלאך ה‬.
This term is usually translated as “Yhwh’s angel,” but in J and E it often re-
fers to a manifestation of Yhwh rather than a messenger sent by Yhwh.

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 The Bible as Torah 85

This entire way of thinking is completely rejected by the Pentateuch’s P

and D sources, whose authors insist that God has only one body. (Thus the
theological debate within biblical texts about divine embodiment was not
whether Yhwh has a body; all biblical authors who address the issue directly
or indirectly agree that God has a body.3 What they debate is how many bod-
ies Yhwh has and where they are, or it is, located.) According to P and the
closely related Book of Ezekiel, the divine body or ‫( כבוד‬kavod) came to dwell
in the Tabernacle and, later, the Jerusalem Temple. (Ezekiel 8–11 further nar-
rates God’s return to heaven shortly before the destruction of the Temple in
586 BCE.) D and the historical books from Joshua through Kings, which
follow D’s theology in many respects, also reject the idea of fluid divine self-
hood found in J and E, but in a different way. The D authors insist that there
is only one Yhwh, not several local manifestations in Temain and Samaria,
Zion and Hebron. D dismisses the idea of local Yhwhs most emphatically in
Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: Yhwh, our God, is one Yhwh!”4 This line
is directed against the view, popular among other Israelites, that there was
a Yhwh of Zion and a Yhwh of Teiman who were all manifestations of the
heavenly Yhwh; the famous first line of the Shema was originally directed, at
least in part, against the fluidity model. In this respect D resembles P; indeed,
D attacks the idea of divine fluidity even more strongly and openly than P
does. But, against P, the D authors further assert that God dwells eternally and
exclusively in heaven, never on earth. The Jerusalem Temple contains only a
symbol of God’s presence that D calls the ‫( שם‬shem) or “name” of God; the
Temple does not house God’s body. Unlike J and E, neither P nor D depict
small-scale manifestations, emanations, or avataras of God in their narra-
tives. The latter authors forbid Israelites from using the cultic items that J and
E accepted as embodiments of God in local temples—that is, the ‫( מצבות‬stone
pillars) and ‫( אשרות‬sacred trees or poles). In fact, both P and D require these
items to be destroyed (Leviticus 26:1–2; Deuteronomy 7:5 12:3, 15:21–22).
They insist that God’s presence (or, for D a symbol of God’s presence) can
be encountered only in a single Temple. Both legislate that sacrificial ritual
should be practiced only there.
P and D are the dominant voices of the Pentateuch; together they account
for about two-thirds of the Five Books.5 Further, the schools that produced
them edited several other biblical books into their current form. As a result,
it is exceedingly difficult to notice the Israelite fluidity tradition that they
attempt to suppress. (For this reason I needed to devote eighty-one pages of
Bodies of God to reconstructing it.6) But the fluidity tradition does not disap-
pear from Judaism. It re-emerges in new forms and with new terminology
later on. Examples from Late Antiquity include the notion of the heavenly
being Metatron as a “little Yhwh,” as well as some rabbinic texts’ conception

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 86 Benjamin D. Sommer

of the ‫( שכינה‬shekhinah, or “divine presence”) as a being who could have a

discussion with Yhwh.7 In the Middle Ages this theological intuition goes
further, especially in works of Jewish mysticism such as the Zohar and, in
even more intricate ways, in Lurianic kabbalah.8 Kabbalistic doctrines of the
‫( ספירות‬sephirot) constitute highly complex versions of the notion that the di-
vine can fragment Itself into multiple selves that nonetheless remain parts of
an ultimately indivisible whole. The sephirot are usually conceived of as ten
manifestations of God in the universe, as opposed to the utterly unknowable
essence of God outside the universe. While some kabbalists view the sephirot
as created beings distinct from God, most classical kabbalistic thinkers see
in them, as Moshe Idel puts it, “an organic part of the divine essence” whose
complex relationships with each other constitute “intradeical dynamism.”9
These ten sephirot interact in ways that seem to disclose a degree of indi-
vidual existence—for example, in sexual ways. Yet kabbalists maintain that
they are all part of the unity that is God. The whole doctrine of the sephirot is
a late reflex of the ancient Near Eastern fluidity tradition. From the point of
view of P, D, and, arguably, the redacted text of the Pentateuch, the Zohar’s
doctrines are not only wrong but dangerous. But when viewed in light of the
distinct theological voices of J and E, the doctrine of sephirot emerges as a
return to an earlier model, a massively ramified elaboration of a biblical idea.
As Seeskin mentions, I also admit that the existence of the Tanakh’s fluid-
ity tradition shows something quite surprising: Jews usually regard two core
ideas of Christian theology, the doctrines of incarnation and the trinity, as
polytheistic imports into a religion based on the Tanakh. In the eyes of many
Jews, to the extent that these polytheistic imports are central to Christianity,
that religion can be regarded as disloyal to the Tanakh’s monotheism. But
the existence of the fluidity traditions within the Tanakh itself shows that
doctrines of incarnation and trinity may be of native Jewish origin and need
not be seen as polytheistic at all. This is of course what Christian theologians
argued all along, and we Jews need to acknowledge that historically speak-
ing, they are right: The theological model these doctrines employ must be
regarded as legitimate from a Jewish point of view, even though we disagree
with all the specific claims of the doctrines themselves.
Jewish philosophical texts, however, pick up and extend the Bible’s anti-
fluidity tradition, especially as it manifests itself in D. In maintaining that
God has only one body, which is in heaven and never comes to earth, D es-
sentially renders God’s body basically irrelevant from the point of view of a
human being in this world. On a practical level it is but a small leap from the
view that God’s body is unrelated to our world to the view that God has no
body at all, a view that in Judaism first finds expression in the writings of the
medieval philosopher Saadia, and subsequently in the powerfully influential

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 The Bible as Torah 87

work of Maimonides. Of course, in making this assertion, Maimonides does

not consider himself to be joining a debate on the side of D against J and E;
Maimonides regarded Moses as the only author of the Pentateuch, and he
would have been appalled at the Documentary Hypothesis. But it is clear to
us, eight centuries after his work was written, in a way that could not be clear
to Maimonides himself, that Maimonides is a Deuteronomic writer. (Thus it is
quite appropriate that Maimonides cites Deuteronomy much more often than
any other biblical book in his philosophical work, Sepher Hammaddaʿ—more
often, in fact, than the other four books of the Pentateuch put together. The
same can be said of the Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, whose affinity
to Deuteronomy is even more pronounced.10)
My brief summary has not done justice to the fluidity or the anti-fluidity
traditions in the Bible. But I hope it has sufficed to exemplify the way I read
as a biblical scholar and theologian: I look for elements of difference and
discontinuity among the Tanakh’s constituent sources, and those elements
of discontinuity within the Bible sometimes lead me to uncover elements
of continuity between the Tanakh and later Jewish theology. Further, I read
biblical sources as products of the ancient Near Eastern culture that produced
them. Doing so allows me to notice whole worlds of thought that were at
best dimly evident to someone unfamiliar with the literatures of Babylonia,
Assyria, Egypt, and Canaan. Those thought-worlds turn out to link up in
surprising but clear ways with the ideas and outlooks of the classical rabbis,
the kabbalists, and medieval Jewish philosophers. The irony in all this should
be noted. Many religious Jews and Christians regard biblical criticism in its
source critical and comparative/ancient Near Eastern modes as fundamentally
irrelevant to religious reading of scripture, or even as inimical to it. But it
precisely those aspects of biblical criticism that allow us to see the tradition-
alism of both the Zohar’s theosophy and of Maimonides’s rejection of divine
embodiment—both of which might otherwise seem so radically new that one
might dismiss the Zohar or Maimonides’s thought as simply non-Jewish.11
Source criticism and comparative study link Torah from the mid-first millen-
nium BCE with Torah from the early second millennium CE, for of course the
Zohar and Maimonides’s Guide are Torah for religious Jews.12 (Throughout
this essay, I employ the term “Pentateuch” to refer to the Five Books of Mo-
ses, while reserving “Torah” to refer to Judaism’s sacred religious teachings
through the ages.)
Recognizing these links, then, helps to show that the teachings of J and
E are in fact Torah, as are also the counterclaims of P and D. Consequently,
appreciation of the varied theologies of embodiment in the Pentateuch can
encourage modern Jewish thinkers to grapple with aspects of God that they
otherwise might tend to ignore. For example, the fluidity traditions at once

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 88 Benjamin D. Sommer

emphasize and problematize the sacrality of space and hence the place
of the land of Israel, the city Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount in Jewish
thought. They also point at once toward the personhood of God (who has
a body and is in our world) and the utter otherness of God (whose embodi-
ment is incomprehensibly different from ours). Thus these traditions make
clear that God is at once nearby and impossible to grasp.13 Further, the very
fact that the most sacred of Judaism’s texts, the Pentateuch, includes both
the fluidity traditions and two different and to some degree contradictory
rejections thereof suggests the impossibility of our ever knowing, much less
articulating, the whole truth about God; the closest we humans can come
to apprehending the fullness of divine reality may involve accepting or
contemplating contradictory utterances. In short: an interpretation based on
source criticism is religiously enriching for a modern Jew.

READING FOR UNITY VS. READING FOR DISTINCT VOICES

A fundamental difference between my approach to reading the Bible as a

source for Jewish theology and Seeskin’s approach involves the extent to
which we view the Tanakh or even just the Pentateuch as a unified work and
the extent to which we view it as a collection of diverse yet identifiable texts.
The very core of my method involves hearing ancient Israelite theological
voices distinctly. While Seeskin acknowledges that the Bible has “differ-
ent authors with different points of view,” by and large he does not attend
to differentiation among these authors when he discusses my book. Having
noted that the Bible does not use certain crucial terms univocally, he tends to
disregard the univocal use of these same terms within the Pentateuch’s three
main blocks of material (the J and E sources; the P source; and the D source).
Seeskin notes that kavod and shem are used so variously that a literal reading
of either term is unwarranted: for him, the equivocal or amphibolous use of
terms such as these may constitute a signal by the biblical authors that these
terms can have varied metaphorical meanings, or that what they intimate is
practical but not theoretical knowledge. As a result, Seeskin writes (in the
essay earlier in this volume),

One has to wonder whether the original authors ever dreamt that scholars from
a later age would comb the text in intricate detail trying to discern a coherent
theological doctrine. Perhaps all they wanted to do was establish laws for how
to worship God and direct people’s attention to the spiritual side of life. That
would explain why, given the standards established by later theologians, their
language appears flexible and multivalent.14

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 The Bible as Torah 89

My analysis of the terms in question moves in a different direction. I aver

that the terms shem and kavod are used consistently—not by the Pentateuch
as a whole, but by the individual Pentateuchal sources respectively. I attempt
to show in some detail that what P and the priest Ezekiel mean by kavod is
surprisingly systematic and constant: For them, this term refers to the one,
indivisible, incredibly effulgent body of God.15 This body has a particular
shape (similar to that of a human), but not a particular size; the kavod can be
gigantic enough to cover the whole top of Mount Sinai and to be visible to the
people some distance away at the foot of the mountain in Exodus 24:16–17 (a
P passage), yet it also can become small enough to fit onto the outstretched
wings of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle.16 Non-priestly
texts from the Bible, however, use this term in other ways, sometimes to refer
to a particular physical avatara or manifestation of God, sometimes to refer
to something more abstract or metaphorical, such as God’s honor.17 For D in
Deuteronomy 5:24 (a verse Seeskin cites to show the variety of meanings of
this term) kavod refers to God’s glory in the abstract sense, as the parallel
there with the word “greatness” shows.18 But in D this term never refers to
God’s self or to an avatara of the heavenly deity.
Something similar is true of the term shem: the D source and the deuter-
onomistic historians influenced by D use this term consistently and repeat-
edly in a way that departs radically from other biblical documents. Where
for many other biblical texts, God’s shem is an avatara that is God but is not
all of God, for D it is most emphatically not God at all; rather, it is a symbol
on earth of a God who dwells exclusively in heaven.19 If we look at a large
number of verses indiscriminately, we see a non-systematic hodgepodge of
uses that is of little promise for a theologian. But if we look at those verses
source-critically (that is, in light of the Documentary Hypothesis), we can
notice a theological debate unfold before our eyes. Delineating the contours
of that debate can be of great interest and utility to a theologian.
We can get an example of these contours by taking up a challenge Seeskin
poses when he writes:

To the degree that we adhere to the fluidity model, we will have a hard time
accounting for divine unity. Sommer insists that the fluidity model is perfectly
consistent with monotheism. But once again, questions arise. A modern jetliner
is one plane even though it contains millions of parts. My body is one even
though it contains over 200 bones, a dozen crucial organs, and millions of indi-
vidual cells. In what sense is Deuteronomy 6:4 using the term when it says that
God is one?20

When we read this verse from the Shema in light of the fluidity tradi-
tion, we realize that D means something different when it speaks of God as

16_298-Kaplan.indb 89 7/18/16 2:19 PM

 90 Benjamin D. Sommer

one than J and E (or the Zohar) imagine when they speak of God. The D
source agrees with Seeskin that the fluidity model is not as consistent with
divine unity as D requires right-thinking Israelite theology to be; indeed,
that is the very point of D’s anti-fluidity pronouncement in Deuteronomy
6:4. At the same time, attending to the considerable number of biblical texts
that espouse the fluidity model reminds us that God’s unity is not the core
of biblical monotheism; rather, the core of biblical monotheism is God’s
uniqueness—that is, God’s difference from everything else in the cosmos,
whether heavenly or earthly, and God’s utter non-subservience to nature, mat-
ter, and physics. This, of course, is precisely the definition of monotheism in
the first chapter of Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason Out of the Sources
of Judaism.21 It is also the definition of monotheism in Yehezkel Kaufmann’s
Toledot Ha-Emunah Ha-Yisraelit, whose lengthy treatment of monotheism
can be seen as a fleshing out of Cohen’s first chapter with historical, philolog-
ical, and comparative data.22 It is precisely the uncanny otherness of Yhwh—
which is to say: monotheism—that J and E are so successful in conveying in
their portrayal of the multiply embodied God. To be sure, as Seeskin writes,
“Because space is divisible, anything that occupies space must be divisible
as well. Anything that is divisible is composed of parts.” But the point that J
and E are making is precisely that God’s body is thoroughly and unimagin-
ably different from all other physical things: though Yhwh occupies multiple
spaces, Yhwh remains a single deity.

TORAH AS DOGMA VS. TORAH AS DISCUSSION

In my retrieval of varied biblical theologies of divine embodiment, then, I

construe the Bible as a work of Jewish theology in two senses, and decidedly
not in a third sense. First, I associate the varied theological voices found in
scripture with similar voices from rabbinic, medieval, and modern Judaism.
(Thus, the use of shem in non-D, non-P literature is a forerunner of kabbal-
istic ideas of God’s manifestations in the world, while this same term in D
leads toward the Jewish philosophical tradition.) Second, I read the Bible,
and especially the Pentateuch, as a record of debate and thus as prototypi-
cally Jewish. Indeed, we may regard the Pentateuch, with its unavoidable and
unresolved narrative and legal contradictions, as the first Jewish book. To
speak with greater precision: in its embrace of controversy and multiplicity,
the Pentateuch as recovered by modern biblical criticism can be described
as the first rabbinic work.23 To be sure, the Pentateuch, unlike the Mishnah,
does not identify the sages and schools of thought who express the varied
views it preserves, but, no less than the Mishnah, the Pentateuch presents us

16_298-Kaplan.indb 90 7/18/16 2:19 PM

 The Bible as Torah 91

with passages that openly disagree with one another. Further, the Pentateuch
does not attempt to hide those disagreements. On the contrary, the Pentateuch
begins with two famously divergent accounts of the creation of the world, and
each of these accounts begins with the classical syntax of an ancient Near
Eastern creation epic: a temporal phrase (Genesis 1:1 and 2:4b), a parentheti-
cal clause (1:2 and 2:5–6), and then a main clause (1:3 and 2:7). This same
syntax is found in the opening of the Babylonian creation epics Enuma Elish
and Atraḫasis. To someone familiar with norms of ancient cosmological nar-
rative, the Pentateuch seems to begin twice in rapid succession. By using this
syntax not only in its first narrative passage but a second time very shortly
thereafter, the Pentateuch presents itself from its opening as an anthological
work rather than a unified one. In one sense, the Pentateuch’s transmission
of disagreement is even more extreme than the Mishnah’s: whereas the
Mishnah often tells us which opinion is to be regarded as correct and which
as incorrect, the Pentateuch provides no guidance on how to resolve its con-
tradictions or how to decide which opinion to follow. In both the Pentateuch
and the Mishnah, what we have before us is a record of ‫מחלוקת לשם שמים‬, of
disagreement for the sake of heaven (to borrow a phrase from m. Avot 5:19).
In both cases, the disagreement occurs within specific boundaries: The views
of Israelite polytheists (of whom, scripture tells us, there were many) are not
included in the Pentateuch.24 Similarly, the views of Sadducees, Essenes, and
followers of Jesus as messiah are not included in the Mishnah except when
they are specifically rejected. But within these bounds, blatantly opposite
points of view are given voice in both the Pentateuch and the Mishnah.
But there is a third sense in which one could construe the Bible as a theo-
logical work, and it is important to note that I do not construe the Bible as
theology in this sense. I do not turn to biblical texts—or, for that matter, to
rabbinic literature, or works of kabbalah, or texts from medieval or modern
Jewish philosophy—with the expectation that they always give me proposi-
tional statements that convey accurate knowledge. Rather, the Bible’s propo-
sitional statements, its allusive, associative discourse and its rich debates on
crucial issues constitute the beginning of a discussion. Further, the Bible sets
an agenda for future Jewish theology, though of course this agenda is sub-
ject to expansion and some revision over the centuries. For Jewish theology,
specific propositions (whether made by the Bible’s authors, by later voices
in the tradition, or by ourselves) are of less import than the process of dis-
cussing these propositions. After all, what Deuteronomy 6:7–8 command us
and what Joshua 1:7–8 and Psalm 1:2 recommend is that we should repeat
Torah, learn it and meditate on it, but not that we must acknowledge every-
thing Torah says as true. Similarly, accepting propositional knowledge is not
the thrust of the oft-repeated verbs “teach” and “learn” in Deuteronomy; in

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 92 Benjamin D. Sommer

almost every one of its seventeen occurrences in that book, the verbal root
‫ למ’’ד‬is concerned either with learning that results in awe toward God or with
observance of the commandments. It is never associated simply with assent
to a particular claim. The Pentateuch requires a process of reading the words
of Torah, murmuring them, reciting them, and, by extension discussing them.
Rabbinic texts, in turn, explicitly draw that extension. That discussion, to be
the fullest Jewish discussion it can be, should include Israel’s earliest voices.
This does not mean that a religious Jew must accept everything the Bible
says as true, but it does mean that everything it says must be considered and
demands a response.25 In short, the Bible, like the Mishnah or The Guide of
the Perplexed or The Star of Redemption, is Torah, guidance (that is the basic
meaning of the noun ‫תורה‬, just as the verb ‫ להורות‬means to teach, to guide, to
send in a direction, to aim). All these works point us in specific directions,
but precisely because of their variety they cannot serve as sources of propo-
sitional statements that must be affirmed.26
And here Seeskin’s views and my own converge. He writes,

What makes the Bible foundational is not that it provides us with definitive
answers to questions but that it establishes an intellectual trajectory of which
we are still a part.
Instead of just reflecting the views of the culture that produced it, it points the
way to something different, something powerful enough to sustain a religious
tradition for millennia to come.27

It follows that my main disagreement with Seeskin may be limited to the

title of his essay (“What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us About
God”). The crucial issue for constructive Jewish thought is not what the Bible
teaches us, but how the Bible teaches us. In affirming that the Bible is sacred
scripture, I am forced to accept the challenge of recognizing all its voices as
my teachers. When J and E insist on the multiple and fluid embodiment of
my God, they have something to teach me. I need not literally accept what
they really did believe—that Yhwh was found at specific times and places in
this world and not others. But I can recognize an insight about the uncanny,
mysterious, and yet personal nature of God in these texts—an insight that
guides me to embrace God’s human-like personhood and, no less, God’s
wholly otherness.
The views of J and E—and also of P and D and Maimonides—are crucial
not because they are correct but because, even when missing their mark, they
point us in appropriate directions. The question then becomes: if, as Seeskin
rightly avers, we are on the trajectory that begins with the Bible, is this trajec-
tory supersessionist or cumulative? That is, having moved forward on the tra-
jectory’s path, do we regard the earlier texts as incorrect and hence irrelevant,

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 The Bible as Torah 93

except as historical artifacts (similar to archaeological finds on display in a

museum) or as objects of eisegesis (by which we force our “less primitive,”
“more enlightened” views into it)? Or do we acknowledge that when heard in
their own voice, they still have something to contribute, even when we don’t
agree with significant claims that they make?
Clearly, one Jewish answer to this question is that revelation is cumulative;
the Bible is still worth studying for its ‫פשט‬, for the contextual meanings that
emerge when we hear it in its own voice. If I am right that some sacred texts,
understood in their own cultural settings as their first audiences understood
them, put forward the fluidity model, then we need to acknowledge that the
fluidity model has something to teach us. This is true even though the fluidity
model is a minority opinion. The Mishnah and Talmuds preserve Shammai’s
views because they are somehow valuable even though with exceedingly rare
exceptions we do not follow his legal rulings. We can note something similar
of Maimonides as his works have come to be canonized as sacred texts in
Judaism: The Mishneh Torah did not become an authoritative legal code in
the way the Shulchan Arukh did; it is preserved and studied in editions that
include the ‫ נושאי כלים‬and the Rabad, commentators who often disagree with
Maimonides and who fundamentally undo his project of composing a sum-
mary of the law without the debates that produced the law. Yet the Mishneh
Torah as it functions in Jewish religious culture—a Mishneh Torah that in-
cludes Maimonides’s texts and the words of later authorities who reconstruct
what he intended to supersede28—is still canonical, not in the sense that it
provides norms of belief and behavior but in the sense that it shapes Jewish
identity and helps form the conversation that is Torah.29 Precisely the same
is true of the fluidity tradition, and of the varied texts found in the Bible as
a whole: they are part of Judaism’s formative canon, though not part of its
normative canon. We all agree that the Bible is not the last word in this con-
versation; no less crucially, it behooves constructive Jewish thinkers to recall
that the conversation never leaves behind discussion partners and teachers
whose surprisingly vivid and forward-looking voices have been recovered by
modern biblical scholarship.
The open-ended nature of the conversation that is Torah as I have de-
scribed it raises further questions. How do we know which opinions or texts
are part of Torah and which are outside it? As we look toward the past, the
answers seem clear: the opinions of Israelite polytheists and of Sadducees
and Essenes are part of Jewish intellectual history, but they are decidedly
not part of the ongoing sacred conversation that generations of Jews have
accepted as Torah. But what of the varied voices of Jews in the contempo-
rary world? Can we decide which voices of our own day are out of bounds?
Can an older work that was not Torah become Torah today? Can voices that

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 94 Benjamin D. Sommer

were excluded or simply not heard by the scribes and sages who preserved
Torah in the past, such as those of Jewish women, be reconstructed and thus
admitted to the formative canon?
A practical answer to one of these questions—“Which contributions to
constructive Jewish thought in our own day are Torah?”—is quite straightfor-
ward: Come back in five hundred years and look around. What are religious
Jews doing? What are they studying? What shapes who they are? That is
Torah. Which contributions of twenty-first-century Judaism have they dis-
carded? Which ones have they never even heard of? That is not Torah.30 In
the year 50 CE, there was no criterion that allowed one to say which forms of
Judaism were the right ones. On a purely theoretical level nobody could prove
that the traditions of the Pharisees and the earliest rabbis were Torah, while
the writings of the Qumran sect and the teachings of the Sadducees were not.
But by the year 600, it had become clear that this was the case. There is no
conclusive way to explain why the philosopher Philo’s first-century attempt
to fuse Plato and Judaism did not become Torah while Maimonides’s twelfth-
century attempt to fuse Aristotle and Judaism did; but there is no denying
that Philo’s writings (which were not preserved by Jews but came down to
us because they were copied by Christian clerics) are not Torah while Mai-
monides’s writings (despite all the opposition to them during his lifetime) are.
This approach suggests answers to the other questions just posed. It seems,
at least in theory, that views that were once outside the bounds of Torah could
come into it, if communities consisting of committed Jews adopt them as
such, and if those communities successfully reproduce themselves over the
generations.31 I see little reason to anticipate the entry of the Books of Enoch
or the Dead Sea Scrolls into twenty-first Judaism’s formative canon, but it
would be perfectly possible for committed Jewish communities to begin to
study them not merely as interesting historical artifacts but as Torah. While
this is unlikely for books that were placed outside the canon in antiquity, such
a restoration is much easier for texts that were at once incorporated in the
canon and obscured by its breadth—that is, for texts such as J and E. Jews still
chant passages from J and E aloud; Jews have always studied these passages;
some of their theological views, as we saw earlier, reemerged, albeit in new
garb, in works of Jewish mysticism. As a result, their distinct voices, recov-
ered by biblical critics, can be not only studied by academics as examples
of literary history but embraced by religious Jews as providing guidance.
Similarly, one of the most prominent elements of Jewish learning in the past
several decades has been the attempt to recover and, more often, to re-create
or imagine voices that are largely missing in classical Jewish texts, especially
the voices of women. That attempt has not only occurred in the academy but
has made inroads into a variety of religious Jewish settings as well.32

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 The Bible as Torah 95

Not every contribution of contemporary Jews, in short, will become Torah.

According to a famous passage in Shemot Rabbah 47:1, the questions Jewish
students ask their masters in every generation are Torah; they were already
revealed to Moses at Sinai. At the same time, parallels to this passage in y.
Pe’ah 4a [2:6], Wayyiqra Rabbah 22:1, and Qohelet Rabbah 1:29 and 5:6 in-
dicate that only some answers students provide are Torah—specifically, those
stated by keen-witted or experienced students in the presence of their mas-
ter.33 Answers from less experienced students and comments made outside
the hierarchical community of Jewish learning are not included in what God
showed Moses.34 Together, these sources prompt the realization that there are
no illegitimate questions—and this realization has much to teach contempo-
rary Jews on the right. These sources also acknowledge that there are answers
outside the bounds of Torah—and this acknowledgement has much to teach
contemporary Jews on the left. Both groups, further, are forced to admit that
all contemporary answers are, for the moment, merely potential Torah; only
future generations will know what the canon will absorb and what it will
reject. None of us will live to see the answer to the question, “Which con-
temporary voices are Torah?” But finding the answer is not expected of us.
Our task is only to nurture, protect, and create Torah with as much honesty as
possible, to live that Torah, to teach it, and to pass it on. We cannot complete
that task, but we are not free to desist from it.

NOTES

1.  Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
2.  I refer here to the theory, widespread among modern biblical critics, known as
the Documentary Hypothesis. According to this theory the Pentateuch combines sev-
eral different sources that existed independently in biblical times. Scholars refer to the
four main sources as J, E, P, and D; according to the Documentary Hypothesis, these
documents told roughly parallel stories of Israel’s origins and early history and pre-
sented their own versions of Israel’s covenantal law. The P document was composed
by Judean priests and the D document by Levites. The authors of J and E cannot be
ascertained. The dating of the documents cannot be known, though the language of all
four is pre-exilic. We can be sure that P and D crystallized over generations, and the
same may be true of J and E. Some contemporary biblical critics propose new theories
of the origin of the Pentateuch that jettison the notion of discrete J and E sources while
basically accepting the distinction between P and D traditions. These scholars speak
of non-P, non-D traditions where classical Documentarians speak of J and E. For my
purposes in this essay, this difference is of no importance, since within the Pentateuch
the fluidity tradition is found specifically in the texts outside P and D, however one
names them. Because I find the Documentary model far more convincing than the

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 96 Benjamin D. Sommer

more recent theories, I use the terms J and E, but an adherent of the later theories
can substitute the term “non-P, non-D” for “J and E” without any significant change
to the history of ancient Israelite religious ideas that I put forward. For elegant and
convincing presentations of the Documentary Hypothesis, see Baruch Schwartz, “The
Torah—Its Five Books and Four Documents,” [Hebrew] in The Literature of the He-
brew Bible: Introductions and Studies, ed. by Zipora Talshir (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi
Press, 2011), 161–226, and Joel Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing
the Documentary Hypothesis, AYBRL (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). For
the more recent theories, see Jan Christian Gertz, et al., T&T Clark Handbook of The
Old Testament, trans. by Linda M. Maloney (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 293–360, and
Konrad Schmid, The Old Testament: A Literary History, trans. by Linda M. Maloney
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 79–95, 107–16, 131–40, 153–56, 173–77, 196–
202. On the debates among proponents of these approaches, see the especially helpful
discussion in David Carr, “Controversy and Convergence in Recent Studies of the For-
mation of the Pentateuch,” Religious Studies Review 23, no. 1 (January 1997): 22–31,
as well as Ernest W. Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy
of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1998), and Thomas
Dozeman, Konrad Schmid, and Baruch Schwartz, eds., The Pentateuch: International
Perspectives on Current Research (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).
3.  For a brief discussion, see Sommer, Bodies, 1–10. On the thoroughly anthro-
pomorphic conception of God throughout the Bible, see further Yehezkel Kaufmann,
Toledot Ha-Emunah Ha-Yisraelit, [in Hebrew] 4 vols. (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Bialik
and Devir, 1937–56), 1:221–44; Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 2 vols.,
trans. by D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962–65), 1:145, 219, 237,
287, 366; Mark Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic
Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87–
88; Ronald Hendel, “Aniconism and Anthropomorphism in Ancient Israel,” in The
Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in
Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. by Karel van der Toorn (Leuven: Peeters,
1997), 207–8; Yochanan Muffs, The Personhood of God. Biblical Theology, Hu-
man Faith and the Divine Image (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005), 31. On the
consistently anthropomorphic conception of God throughout rabbinic literature, see
Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” HTR 87
(1994): 171–95; Yair Lorberbaum, The Image of God: Halakhah and Aggadah, [in
Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2004), 14–22, 292–335; cf. Gershom Scholem, On
the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 34–35.
4.  For a discussion of the translation of this line, see Sommer, Bodies of God, 
220–22.
5.  By my colleague Joel Baden’s count (personal communication), P accounts for
47 percent, and D for 17 percent. Disagreement concerning a verse here or a phrase
there will not change these figures substantially, even for recent scholars who reject
the Documentary Hypothesis; those scholars, we should recall, nonetheless largely
accept the existence of P and D corpora in the Pentateuch.
6. Sommer, Bodies of God, 12–57 and 179–213.

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 The Bible as Torah 97

7.  Ibid., 126–29.

8.  Ibid., 129–32.
9.  Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988), 138–40; the quoted phrasing is from p. 139.
10. On Maimonides’s use of Deuteronomy in Sefer Hammadaʿ (that is, the first
section of his Mishneh Torah), see Moshe Greenberg, Studies in the Bible and Jewish
Thought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 422–23. Similarly, Mai-
monides cites Deuteronomy approvingly more than any book in the Guide. He cites
Genesis roughly as often as Deuteronomy in the Guide, but in a great many of those
cases, his purpose is to explain away Genesis’ many anthropomorphisms, whereas he
cites Deuteronomy for more positive reasons. See the indexes in Moses Maimonides,
The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines, introduction by Leo Strauss
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 646–54. On the philosophical context
of Cohen’s demythologizing reading of Deuteronomy (a reading that succeeds at
understanding D’s ‫)פשט‬, see Kenneth Seeskin, Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 163–64.
11. In his essay in this volume, Seeskin writes: “Sommer argues that by denying
that God has a body, Maimonides was trying to create a whole new religion. The truth
is, however, that Maimonides was responding to the same challenge as that faced by
biblical authors of whatever persuasion. . . . If Sommer is right, then Maimonides’s view
represents a departure from that of his predecessors, but a departure is not the same as
a new creation.” Seeskin is correct that in The Bodies of God I significantly overstate
Maimonides’s disturbing newness. My assertion about the roots of Maimonides’ anti-
anthropomorphism in D’s insistence that God’s body is never in this world should have
led me to phrase my point more moderately and more accurately, which is to say, the
way Seeskin phrases this point. On Maimonides as a Jewish thinker despite his surpris-
ing views of God, see my more sensible phrasing in Benjamin D. Sommer, Revelation
and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition, ABRL (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2015), 250, where I use the rabbinic idea of ‫ פוק חזי‬to acknowledge
Maimonides’s status in Judaism; on ‫פוק חיז‬, see ibid., 126 and 247.
12.  For other examples of how compositional analyses allow us to discern paral-
lels between biblical and postbiblical Jewish thought that otherwise are obscured, see
Sommer, Revelation and Authority; Benjamin D. Sommer, “Reflecting on Moses:
The Redaction of Numbers 11,” JBL 118 (1999): 601–24; Benjamin D. Sommer,
“Dialogical Biblical Theology: A Jewish Approach to Reading Scripture Theologi-
cally,” in Biblical Theology: Introducing the Conversation, ed. Leo Perdue, Library of
Biblical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), 43–50; Israel Knohl, “Between
Voice and Silence: The Relationship Between Prayer and Temple Cult,” JBL 115
(1996): 17–30. For especially fine introductions to the multivocality of biblical texts
and its religious import, see John Goldingay, Theological Diversity and the Author-
ity of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), and Michael Carasik, The
Bible’s Many Voices (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2014).
13. On theological implications of the fluidity traditions, see Sommer, Bod-
ies, 137–43. On the comparison to Friedrich Hölderlin I imply in my phrasing above,
see 143.

16_298-Kaplan.indb 97 7/18/16 2:19 PM

 98 Benjamin D. Sommer

14.  See Seeskin’s essay in this volume.

15. Sommer, Bodies of God, 68–78.
16.  The Holy of Holies measures ten cubits by ten cubits (roughly five meters by
five meters); the space on top of the outstretched wings was some fairly small fraction
thereof. See Sommer, Bodies of God, 71–72.
17.  Ibid., 58–62.
18.  See my discussion of the term in ibid., 64.
19.  Ibid., 62–68.
20.  See Seeskin’s essay in this volume.
21.  Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, introduc-
tory essays for the second edition by Steven S. Schwarzschild and Kenneth Seeskin,
translated with an introduction by Simon Kaplan (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press,
1995), 35–49, esp. 35.
22. Kaufmann, Toledot, 1:221–417, and the shorter version in Yehezkel Kaufmann,
The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. by and
abridged by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960), 7–149.
For a lengthy defense of Kaufmann’s thesis (in a somewhat modified, more flexible
form), see Sommer, Bodies of God, 145–74 and 259–75, and, more briefly, Sommer,
“Monotheism,” in The Hebrew Bible: A Princeton Guide (edited by John Barton;
Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
23.  On the link between rabbinic exegesis and the complex layering of biblical
texts as recovered by modern biblical scholars, see Moshe Greenberg, Al Hammiqra
Ve’al Hayyahadut [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oveid, 1984), 345–49, and Jon Levenson,
The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism. Jews and Christians
in Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 53–56.
24.  The possibility that a verse or two slipped through the ideological filters of the
biblical authors and editors or were filtered only partially (Genesis 6.1–4, perhaps, or
at least 6.1–2 and 6.4) does not overturn this statement. Nor does the observation that
some texts are amenable to both monotheistic and polytheistic readings (e.g., Exodus
15.11; Psalm 82). Within the context of the Tanakh, it is clearly the monotheistic read-
ing that is intended. See further Sommer, Bodies of God, 172 and 270 n. 99
25.  Cf. Norbert M. Samuelson, Revelation and the God of Israel (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2002), 219.
26.  As Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism
(New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1955), 213, teaches: “The root of Jewish faith
is . . . not a comprehension of abstract principles but an inner attachment to sacred
events; to believe is to remember, not merely to accept the truth of a set of dogmas.”
See further Carasik, Bible’s Many Voices, 17, who notes “the many places . . . where
the Bible seems to demand that it be questioned.”
27.  See Seeskin’s essay in this volume.
28.  For the view that Maimonides intended his legal code to render the Talmud
superfluous, see Moshe Halbertal, “What is the Mishneh Torah? Codification and
Ambivalence,” in Maimonides After 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influ-
ence, ed. by Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for Jewish

16_298-Kaplan.indb 98 7/18/16 2:19 PM

 The Bible as Torah 99

Studies, 2007), 81–111, and, even more strongly, Shamma Friedman, “Rambam and
the Talmud,” [Hebrew], Dinei Yisrael 26–27 (5769–70): 315–26.
29.  In other words, the Mishneh Torah is, to use Halbertal’s terminology, forma-
tive canon rather than normative canon. On this important distinction, see Moshe
Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 3–6. We may add that the same is true of the Bible.
30. On my use here of the talmudic dictum, ‫“( ופק חיז מיא עמא דבר‬Go out and see
what the people are doing,” b. Berakhot 45a, b. Eruvin 14b, b. Menaḥot 35b), see
further Sommer, Revelation and Authority, 125–27, 247–48.
31.  Indeed, as scholars have increasingly come to realize, it was precisely in this
way that the Jewish biblical canon accepted for the past fifteen or so centuries crys-
tallized: not through the decisions of authoritative scholars, but through the de facto
decisions of various communities that endured, while other versions of the biblical
canon (such as that of the Hellenistic Jewry responsible for the Septuagint) died out
along with the less long-lasting Jewish communities that produced them. For this
view of the development of the biblical canon, see esp. John Barton, Oracles of God:
Perception of Ancient Prophecy in Israel After the Exile (London: Darton, Longman
and Todd, 1986), 13–95.
32.  For examples of such inroads in various locations on the contemporary Jew-
ish religious spectrum, see Andrea L. Weiss and Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, eds., The
Torah: A Women’s Commentary (New York: URJ Press, 2008); Ellen Frankel, The
Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s, 1996); Tamar Biala and Nehamah Weingarten, eds., Dirshuni: Midreshe
Nashim, [Hebrew], Sifre Ḥemed (Tel-Aviv: Yedi’ot Aḥaronot and the Jewish Agency,
2009); Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and
Accommodation (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007); and Tamar Ross,
Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham, MA.: Brandeis
University Press, 2005).
33.  On the notion of the keen-witted student in this rabbinic tradition, see David
Golinkin, “The Meaning of the Concepts Watiqin, Watiq, and Talmid Watiq in the
Book of Ben Sira and Talmudic Literature,” [Hebrew], Sidra 13 (1997): 47–60.
34.  Scripture, when not learned from an authoritative master, is arguably not scrip-
ture at all. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 138 and 144. Cf. Franz Rosenzweig’s recollec-
tion that as a youth he read the Bible “without the help of tradition, hence without
revelation.” See Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. by Nahum Glatzer
(New York: Schocken Books, 1961), xxxvii.

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