Jeremy Rosen
The Sinai Revelation: Did it Happen?
Summary
In medieval times, when Judaism, Christianity, and Islam began to formulate theological criteria for their religions, they tended to agree on most of the broad fundamentals about belief in God. But the one area where they fundamentally all disagreed was on the issue of what we call revelation. Did God reveal himself, herself, or itself to the Christians in their way, to the Jews in their way, and to the Muslims in their way? To this very day, Judaism is dramatically split on this specific issue.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Yes, it is, indeed. But they are going back to the constitution, in the same way now, the Supreme Court makes decisions going back, as they see, it to the constitution. They are divided between the originalists who want to take, how did we understand it at the time, how did they understand it at the time, and the evolutionists who say, but how should we understand it now? So in every legal system, there is a progression from the original to the development which is made by humans. And not only that, but the Talmud actually records cases where they say God intervened in a debate between the rabbis and the rabbis replied, God, stay out of this. You gave us the original, now it’s up to us. So it’s we who make the decisions, not God anymore. That’s an example of midrash, but it’s mentioned in the Talmud and shows that the rabbis were conscious of the fact that they were the guardians and those who had to protect and advance the text.
It was fixed by the Masoretic texts. The Masoretic text was produced by scholars in Tiberias in roundabout the year 900, 900 to 100, this was appeared of the Masoretic text. But I want to say that the variation between the Masoretic text and earlier text is minute. It really is minute. There are odd words here, odd words there. There’s a difference in how some words were written with big and some with small. So there are very few variations. And even with something going back to the text of the Samaritans, which they claim goes back to 800 before the common era, the time of the Assyrian exile of the Northern Kingdom, even then the changes, and there are, are not that significant.
Well, the Torah, the Talmud answers this in two ways. The Talmud says, the last 12 lines of the Torah, which were written about Moses’ death, were written by Joshua. The other version is to say they were written by Moses, dictated by God, with tears running down his cheeks as he was writing about his own death. So in a sense, they were aware that this was a problem and they tried to find an answer to the problem that would satisfy them.