n contrast, the historical Hebrew claim is this: that when Moses received the Law on Sinai, the Ten Commandments were communicated to him through direct prophecy, and further, the first two of the Ten Commandments (“I am THE L-RD” and “No idolatry”) were communicated to the entire mass of 600,000 Israelites through prophecy as well. Therefore, there could be no doubts that Moses was a prophet, for not only did they all see and hear him receive the Law, and hear the ‘Voice’ he heard, but each one of them individually received the Law through prophetic communication as well, as a public body. BAZOOM! Proof. Further, the historical Hebrew claim is that this experience constituted proof for succeeding generations as well. This is why the Code of Jewish Law quotes Devarim (Deuteronomy) in stating, “G-d did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, who are all here alive today.” This line, quoting Moses, was not addressed to the Hebrews who were slaves in Egypt and who stood at Sinai, but to the 2nd generation, after the 1st one had passed away in the desert. It was to this generation, who had never been there, that Moses said, “G-d did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, who are all here alive today.” As the 1st generation could surely have never faked such an event, even if they had wanted to, and as such an event could never be realistically fabricated by an individual and promulgated to the masses of Canaan (we were all slaves just 200 years ago, but then we all forgot, but luckily, Ari and Mendel rediscovered all this…), an indisputable historical tradition is treated in traditional Judaism as equivalent to a personal divine revelation, as far as proof is concerned.
What you have above is the Kurazirtic argument. It is an argument that is massively undermined by the Biblical and Talmudic texts themselves. There are occasions by the text’s own description where the entire tradition has been narrowly confined to a small set of people. 2 Kings 22 strongly implies that the entire Torah was essentially forgotten until a copy of the text was found hidden in a way. That doesn’t jibe with the claim of mass generation by generation transmission. There are similar (although not quite as extreme incidents) in the Talmud.
The Kuzaritic argument is interesting in that every major religion has many of the same apologetic tactics, and then they each try to use a small set of what they consider to be very strong arguments to flavor their apologetics for their own religion. The Kuzari’s argument is somewhat akin to the Trilemma. Neither is particularly persuasive and for surprisingly similar reasons.
It might help to ask how a divine being could actually demonstrate with a decent chance that it was actually some sort of genuine divine being to future generations. Of course, the most obvious is just intervening in later generations in an equivalently blatant form. But let’s say for some reason it doesn’t want to do that. There are still a lot of solutions. Here’s one example: Define a prime number and a power of 2, and then assert that 2^n-1 is prime for n= 2,3,5,7,13,17,31,61,89,107,127,521,607, 1279 and for no other n below 2000, and then include a really difficult to verify detail like the claim that the 35th such n is n= 1398269. That’s about a paragraph worth of stuff, and far more informative than long lists of begats, and has the obvious advantage that as the mathematical ability and computers advance, more and more of the sequence can be verified. By the time one gets to the last few claims one has to already be at an advanced enough technology level that one will presumably have a record that the text predated any advanced computers.
Of course, this isn’t the only option. Other options include things like saying “the sun is a star” or other similar claims. Yet curiously, no ancient deity, not the YHVH or Zeus or any other deity feels a need to try this approach.
However, though Judaism does not posit any intrinsically incomprehensible Mysterious Answers that are incapable of being logically deduced
If you think this, you may need to reread the Guide to the Perplexed. Maimonides certainly disagrees in the context in which his approach to talking about the divine revolves around negative theology. While he might have been controversial 800 years ago, for the last 600 or so, his philosophy has been dominant, and I don’t think you are likely to about to reject Rambam. (Edit: Oh, I think I see what you are trying to say here. It still doesn’t fit a lot of classical Jewish philosophy, but discussing why would be a very large digression.)
As to your comments trying to defend Jewish understanding of slavery and the eventual rejection of slavery, the problem here isn’t that later texts had more of an objection to slavery. The bottom line is that the basic texts are ok with it. And even the Talmud doesn’t outlaw slavery, it just lessens some of the effects (and not even that much- whipping slaves is fine according to the Talmud). The claim that the most basic revelation of God didn’t bother just including a blanket “oh, and that slavery thing is wrong” or even just not discuss slavery but rather actively gave rules for slavery, including a procedure for forcing marriage on captured women.
-The reference in Kings II to the “Scroll of the Law” being rediscovered in the ruins of the Temple, refers to the Torah scroll that was considered to have been written by Moses himself personally and placed in the side of the Ark, described towards the end of Deuteronomy. The rediscovery in the Temple ruins by Hilkiah refers to this scroll having been hidden away by King Menashe in an earlier period, and its acceptance is similar to symbolic acceptance-ceremonies (for lack of a better word) scattered throughout the Tanakh. There is nothing in the text to suggest that it is anything more than this, and If the episode had been referring to the entire Torah as a published document and tradition, the compiler of Kings II probably would not have included the brief episode in Kings II in the first place, and it would probably not be nearly so brief as it is.
Further, while it is true that every major religion attempts to flavor its apologetics with unique claims, most of them still suffer from a common element, in that they are all inevitably be reduced to lone individuals performing acts that are easily falsifiable. Muhammad, for instance, cited his own illiteracy as evidence that he did not produce Quran on his own; but pretending to be illiterate, or secretly hiring a scribe to write for you would be fairly easy. Likewise with C.S. Lewis’ formulation of the Trilemma argument. The argument that Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or genuine, and that the first two options are unlikely, is weak (Lewis, for his part, thought it was obvious that the first two options were ludicrous), and even very few Christian theologians ever abide by it. In contrast, the Kuzaritic argument has been accepted by the mainstream of Jewry for most of their history, since it is taken from the Torah’s description of the Sinai event, and was of practical legal use in determining the statuses of prophets in ancient Israel. The Kuzaritic argument of mass generation by generation transmission is, I think, tougher to argue against, and I am not aware of any scholars of ancient Near Eastern history who have developed a good, internally consistent historical theory for how Judaism arose that really trumps it.
-True, a recurring blatant intervention would seem to be easiest, but such recurring intervention would have to violate the rule of yeridas hadoros, a principle of which is that Divine intervention becomes less-and-less obvious generationally (Ex. [Ten Plagues:Menorah Oil Lasts Really Long:We Had To Rebuild Our Own State Ourselves = Very Obvious Intervention: Moderately Obvious Intervention: Less Obvious Intervention]).
Further, for the Torah to state something like 2^n-1 along with a long series of possible outcomes, would only be accessible as a proof to the minority of individuals who would have the acumen to comprehend such a formula for themselves. The general, mass population would not understand it and would therefore not be convinced by it, unless they were to rely on mathematicians who do understand it, and then take their word for it, which would still require a leap of trust anyhow. Such a proof, though it would probably be genuine, would only be intellectually accessible to an elite; everyone else would have to take those elite at their word, and so would only constitute real proof for a minority of people.
In contrast, the prophetic announcements in the Torah and in Isaiah concerning the moral decline of Israel, the future suffering and persecution of Israel in legendary proportions, their exile from their land, the promise that neither they (as a national entity) nor their religion will ever be destroyed until even their Messiah comes, and the promise of an eventual return to their land, have always generally been a much more convincing form of proof for the later generations, given that these are all events that have been experienced by the whole group. These pronouncements cannot be taken to refer to the Babylonian exile alone; the pronouncements as they are articulated in Isaiah clearly refer to the whole span of history, leading up to some sort of Messianic redemption. It also compensates for the continuous lengthening of the gap between our generation, and the 1st generation’s experience at Sinai: the list of experiences keeps growing (Ex. the end of the physical exile from the land of Israel in the 20th century).
-The reference in Kings II to the “Scroll of the Law” being rediscovered in the ruins of the Temple, refers to the Torah scroll that was considered to have been written by Moses himself personally and placed in the side of the Ark, described towards the end of Deuteronomy
This is a common apologetic claim. It both doesn’t fit with the text and isn’t actually relevant. No claim is made in the text that it is a Sefer Torah from Moses. The priest just shows up with a book he says was found, and it is clear in the text that neither Josiah nor Shaphan have any idea what this object is. Shaphan refers to it just as a sefer not hasefer, it is a book, not the book. Neither Josiah or Shaphan seem to know much about it at all. How good was the tradition when neither the King nor one of his major scribes knows even what the text in question is?
If the episode had been referring to the entire Torah as a published document and tradition, the compiler of Kings II probably would not have included the brief episode in Kings II in the first place, and it would probably not be nearly so brief as it is
And the episode isn’t brief at all, the reign of Josiah is a major section of Kings. One and a half chapters are devoted to Josiah’s reign, and one isn’t talking about a text that at all gives details for major events. Moreover, the writer of Kings repeatedly references a non-extant more detailed text about the monarchs, (23:28 is one mention), so this is the set of events that the writer considers important. Frankly, I don’t think that the text in question was the Torah as we currently have it. But it doesn’t need to be: it just matters that something major (the text of Deuteronomy is a common hypothesis among scholars) was completely missing to the point where almost no one knows what it is. That strongly undermines any sort of Kuzaritic claim.
In contrast, the Kuzaritic argument has been accepted by the mainstream of Jewry for most of their history
This is both not true (the argument wasn’t popular until after the Kuzari was written) and essentially irrelevant. While I can see how a deeply religious Jew would think this matters (since halachah is frequently determined by tradition and the practice of Klal Yisrael as a whole), how commonly accepted a specific theological argument is has no useful bearing on whether or not it is correct unless one has already accepted pretty much all of normative Orthodox Judaism.
-True, a recurring blatant intervention would seem to be easiest, but such recurring intervention would have to violate the rule of yeridas hadoros, a principle of which is that Divine intervention becomes less-and-less obvious generationally
And this belief exists essentially to explain the apparent fact that the miracles get tinier and tinier. Nowhere even in the Biblical text does God ever say “oh, and I’ll use subtler and subtler methods as recording and history get better, and by the time you have things that can actively record sound and sight I’ll never do miracles.′ This is a universal throughout the planet- the further back in time one goes the more miraculous claims there are. One sees this in the mythology of China or Japan, or Australian aboriginal groups. The simplest explanation is the obvious one.
Further, for the Torah to state something like 2^n-1 along with a long series of possible outcomes, would only be accessible as a proof to the minority of individuals who would have the acumen to comprehend such a formula for themselves. The general, mass population would not understand it and would therefore not be convinced by it, unless they were to rely on mathematicians who do understand it, and then take their word for it, which would still require a leap of trust anyhow. Such a proof, though it would probably be genuine, would only be intellectually accessible to an elite; everyone else would have to take those elite at their word, and so would only constitute real proof for a minority of people.
First, this is exactly the state of things now. How many frum people can’t open and read a blat of Gemarrah? How many of them can even tell you off the top of their head which common midrashim are midrashim and which are actually in the Torah? Relying on the elite in this fashion is no different than relying on Moshe Feinstein or other more learned scholars to issue rulings and advice. Moreover, the math involved in my example is easy: most of it can be explained to a middle school student. And this is only one example of the many things a deity could do. I’ve got a lot of other examples, such as giving us the dates and times for when we will see supernovae. Since visible supernova to the naked eye occur every few hundred years and are not at all periodic, this would easily demonstrate things to the even ignorant masses. And I’ve literally only spent a handful of minutes thinking about what I might do if I were a deity, and I’m not particularly bright or creative.
These pronouncements cannot be taken to refer to the Babylonian exile alone; the pronouncements as they are articulated in Isaiah clearly refer to the whole span of history, leading up to some sort of Messianic redemption.
Or the writer of Isaiah thought that the end of the Babylonian exile was going to be the beginning of a Messianic era. And I really don’t think you want to try to point to fulfilled Biblical prophecies. That opens a whole different can worms starting with the prophesied destruction of the city of Tyre in Ezekiel that never happened.
Coming late… enjoying this discussion. I haven’t read much from Jewish apologists. Balofsky seems a cut above his Christian counterparts. But my question is about your mention of a non-extant history mentioned in 23:28. How do we know this is a non-extant history, and not a reference to Chronicles?
There’s some detailed scholarly issues about this. It looks like what he have as Chronicles may contains parts of the text that Kings calls Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. (To be precise, what Kings calls Divrei Hayamim and what is commonly translated at Chronicles. The Hebrew title of the extent book of Chronicles is also Divrei Hayamim).
So why do they seem to be distinct books?
First the extant book called Chronicles contains description of events after the time of Kings, so whatever Kings is talking about had at minimum to refer to something else. In particular, Chronicles includes the decision by Cyrus to let the Jews return and Kings ends with events happening about forty years before. (There are some complicating issues- the chronology in both Kings and Chronicles as well as other later books of Tanach doesn’t fit well at all with the Babylonian or Persian records when talking about the time period of the first exile. Exactly which bits are temporally reliable are not clear.) Now, one could say to this that it is possible that the book of Kings actually refers to an earlier version of Chronicles and that our text has sections added at the end. There is, as I understand, linguistic problems with this. In particular, the end of Chronicles_extant uses a pretty consistent language and style, but I don’t know enough about the linguistics to evaluate or comment on that claim in detail.
Second, Kings seems to be referring to multiple distinct books as Chronicles, one for the Judean kingdom and one for the Israelite kingdom. (For most of the First Temple period there are two distinct kingdoms). See for example 1 Kings 16:5, and the verse cited above. And in fact, Chronicles_extant makes a similar pair of references to two books of kings, although it isn’t completely clear that the author is talking about the same thing. See for example 1 Chronicles 9:1 and 2 Chronicles 16:11.
Third, Kings and Chronicles have very different attitudes about the same kings and events, and sometimes gives them different names. See in particular 1 Kings chapter 15 and 2 Chronicles chapter 13 for a glaring example. That strongly suggests that neither source had access to the other source.
What you have above is the Kurazirtic argument. It is an argument that is massively undermined by the Biblical and Talmudic texts themselves. There are occasions by the text’s own description where the entire tradition has been narrowly confined to a small set of people. 2 Kings 22 strongly implies that the entire Torah was essentially forgotten until a copy of the text was found hidden in a way. That doesn’t jibe with the claim of mass generation by generation transmission. There are similar (although not quite as extreme incidents) in the Talmud.
The Kuzaritic argument is interesting in that every major religion has many of the same apologetic tactics, and then they each try to use a small set of what they consider to be very strong arguments to flavor their apologetics for their own religion. The Kuzari’s argument is somewhat akin to the Trilemma. Neither is particularly persuasive and for surprisingly similar reasons.
It might help to ask how a divine being could actually demonstrate with a decent chance that it was actually some sort of genuine divine being to future generations. Of course, the most obvious is just intervening in later generations in an equivalently blatant form. But let’s say for some reason it doesn’t want to do that. There are still a lot of solutions. Here’s one example: Define a prime number and a power of 2, and then assert that 2^n-1 is prime for n= 2,3,5,7,13,17,31,61,89,107,127,521,607, 1279 and for no other n below 2000, and then include a really difficult to verify detail like the claim that the 35th such n is n= 1398269. That’s about a paragraph worth of stuff, and far more informative than long lists of begats, and has the obvious advantage that as the mathematical ability and computers advance, more and more of the sequence can be verified. By the time one gets to the last few claims one has to already be at an advanced enough technology level that one will presumably have a record that the text predated any advanced computers.
Of course, this isn’t the only option. Other options include things like saying “the sun is a star” or other similar claims. Yet curiously, no ancient deity, not the YHVH or Zeus or any other deity feels a need to try this approach.
If you think this, you may need to reread the Guide to the Perplexed. Maimonides certainly disagrees in the context in which his approach to talking about the divine revolves around negative theology. While he might have been controversial 800 years ago, for the last 600 or so, his philosophy has been dominant, and I don’t think you are likely to about to reject Rambam. (Edit: Oh, I think I see what you are trying to say here. It still doesn’t fit a lot of classical Jewish philosophy, but discussing why would be a very large digression.)
As to your comments trying to defend Jewish understanding of slavery and the eventual rejection of slavery, the problem here isn’t that later texts had more of an objection to slavery. The bottom line is that the basic texts are ok with it. And even the Talmud doesn’t outlaw slavery, it just lessens some of the effects (and not even that much- whipping slaves is fine according to the Talmud). The claim that the most basic revelation of God didn’t bother just including a blanket “oh, and that slavery thing is wrong” or even just not discuss slavery but rather actively gave rules for slavery, including a procedure for forcing marriage on captured women.
I’ll put my comments into two parts, too:
-The reference in Kings II to the “Scroll of the Law” being rediscovered in the ruins of the Temple, refers to the Torah scroll that was considered to have been written by Moses himself personally and placed in the side of the Ark, described towards the end of Deuteronomy. The rediscovery in the Temple ruins by Hilkiah refers to this scroll having been hidden away by King Menashe in an earlier period, and its acceptance is similar to symbolic acceptance-ceremonies (for lack of a better word) scattered throughout the Tanakh. There is nothing in the text to suggest that it is anything more than this, and If the episode had been referring to the entire Torah as a published document and tradition, the compiler of Kings II probably would not have included the brief episode in Kings II in the first place, and it would probably not be nearly so brief as it is.
Further, while it is true that every major religion attempts to flavor its apologetics with unique claims, most of them still suffer from a common element, in that they are all inevitably be reduced to lone individuals performing acts that are easily falsifiable. Muhammad, for instance, cited his own illiteracy as evidence that he did not produce Quran on his own; but pretending to be illiterate, or secretly hiring a scribe to write for you would be fairly easy. Likewise with C.S. Lewis’ formulation of the Trilemma argument. The argument that Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or genuine, and that the first two options are unlikely, is weak (Lewis, for his part, thought it was obvious that the first two options were ludicrous), and even very few Christian theologians ever abide by it. In contrast, the Kuzaritic argument has been accepted by the mainstream of Jewry for most of their history, since it is taken from the Torah’s description of the Sinai event, and was of practical legal use in determining the statuses of prophets in ancient Israel. The Kuzaritic argument of mass generation by generation transmission is, I think, tougher to argue against, and I am not aware of any scholars of ancient Near Eastern history who have developed a good, internally consistent historical theory for how Judaism arose that really trumps it.
-True, a recurring blatant intervention would seem to be easiest, but such recurring intervention would have to violate the rule of yeridas hadoros, a principle of which is that Divine intervention becomes less-and-less obvious generationally (Ex. [Ten Plagues:Menorah Oil Lasts Really Long:We Had To Rebuild Our Own State Ourselves = Very Obvious Intervention: Moderately Obvious Intervention: Less Obvious Intervention]).
Further, for the Torah to state something like 2^n-1 along with a long series of possible outcomes, would only be accessible as a proof to the minority of individuals who would have the acumen to comprehend such a formula for themselves. The general, mass population would not understand it and would therefore not be convinced by it, unless they were to rely on mathematicians who do understand it, and then take their word for it, which would still require a leap of trust anyhow. Such a proof, though it would probably be genuine, would only be intellectually accessible to an elite; everyone else would have to take those elite at their word, and so would only constitute real proof for a minority of people.
In contrast, the prophetic announcements in the Torah and in Isaiah concerning the moral decline of Israel, the future suffering and persecution of Israel in legendary proportions, their exile from their land, the promise that neither they (as a national entity) nor their religion will ever be destroyed until even their Messiah comes, and the promise of an eventual return to their land, have always generally been a much more convincing form of proof for the later generations, given that these are all events that have been experienced by the whole group. These pronouncements cannot be taken to refer to the Babylonian exile alone; the pronouncements as they are articulated in Isaiah clearly refer to the whole span of history, leading up to some sort of Messianic redemption. It also compensates for the continuous lengthening of the gap between our generation, and the 1st generation’s experience at Sinai: the list of experiences keeps growing (Ex. the end of the physical exile from the land of Israel in the 20th century).
This is a common apologetic claim. It both doesn’t fit with the text and isn’t actually relevant. No claim is made in the text that it is a Sefer Torah from Moses. The priest just shows up with a book he says was found, and it is clear in the text that neither Josiah nor Shaphan have any idea what this object is. Shaphan refers to it just as a sefer not hasefer, it is a book, not the book. Neither Josiah or Shaphan seem to know much about it at all. How good was the tradition when neither the King nor one of his major scribes knows even what the text in question is?
And the episode isn’t brief at all, the reign of Josiah is a major section of Kings. One and a half chapters are devoted to Josiah’s reign, and one isn’t talking about a text that at all gives details for major events. Moreover, the writer of Kings repeatedly references a non-extant more detailed text about the monarchs, (23:28 is one mention), so this is the set of events that the writer considers important. Frankly, I don’t think that the text in question was the Torah as we currently have it. But it doesn’t need to be: it just matters that something major (the text of Deuteronomy is a common hypothesis among scholars) was completely missing to the point where almost no one knows what it is. That strongly undermines any sort of Kuzaritic claim.
This is both not true (the argument wasn’t popular until after the Kuzari was written) and essentially irrelevant. While I can see how a deeply religious Jew would think this matters (since halachah is frequently determined by tradition and the practice of Klal Yisrael as a whole), how commonly accepted a specific theological argument is has no useful bearing on whether or not it is correct unless one has already accepted pretty much all of normative Orthodox Judaism.
And this belief exists essentially to explain the apparent fact that the miracles get tinier and tinier. Nowhere even in the Biblical text does God ever say “oh, and I’ll use subtler and subtler methods as recording and history get better, and by the time you have things that can actively record sound and sight I’ll never do miracles.′ This is a universal throughout the planet- the further back in time one goes the more miraculous claims there are. One sees this in the mythology of China or Japan, or Australian aboriginal groups. The simplest explanation is the obvious one.
First, this is exactly the state of things now. How many frum people can’t open and read a blat of Gemarrah? How many of them can even tell you off the top of their head which common midrashim are midrashim and which are actually in the Torah? Relying on the elite in this fashion is no different than relying on Moshe Feinstein or other more learned scholars to issue rulings and advice. Moreover, the math involved in my example is easy: most of it can be explained to a middle school student. And this is only one example of the many things a deity could do. I’ve got a lot of other examples, such as giving us the dates and times for when we will see supernovae. Since visible supernova to the naked eye occur every few hundred years and are not at all periodic, this would easily demonstrate things to the even ignorant masses. And I’ve literally only spent a handful of minutes thinking about what I might do if I were a deity, and I’m not particularly bright or creative.
Or the writer of Isaiah thought that the end of the Babylonian exile was going to be the beginning of a Messianic era. And I really don’t think you want to try to point to fulfilled Biblical prophecies. That opens a whole different can worms starting with the prophesied destruction of the city of Tyre in Ezekiel that never happened.
Coming late… enjoying this discussion. I haven’t read much from Jewish apologists. Balofsky seems a cut above his Christian counterparts. But my question is about your mention of a non-extant history mentioned in 23:28. How do we know this is a non-extant history, and not a reference to Chronicles?
There’s some detailed scholarly issues about this. It looks like what he have as Chronicles may contains parts of the text that Kings calls Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. (To be precise, what Kings calls Divrei Hayamim and what is commonly translated at Chronicles. The Hebrew title of the extent book of Chronicles is also Divrei Hayamim).
So why do they seem to be distinct books?
First the extant book called Chronicles contains description of events after the time of Kings, so whatever Kings is talking about had at minimum to refer to something else. In particular, Chronicles includes the decision by Cyrus to let the Jews return and Kings ends with events happening about forty years before. (There are some complicating issues- the chronology in both Kings and Chronicles as well as other later books of Tanach doesn’t fit well at all with the Babylonian or Persian records when talking about the time period of the first exile. Exactly which bits are temporally reliable are not clear.) Now, one could say to this that it is possible that the book of Kings actually refers to an earlier version of Chronicles and that our text has sections added at the end. There is, as I understand, linguistic problems with this. In particular, the end of Chronicles_extant uses a pretty consistent language and style, but I don’t know enough about the linguistics to evaluate or comment on that claim in detail.
Second, Kings seems to be referring to multiple distinct books as Chronicles, one for the Judean kingdom and one for the Israelite kingdom. (For most of the First Temple period there are two distinct kingdoms). See for example 1 Kings 16:5, and the verse cited above. And in fact, Chronicles_extant makes a similar pair of references to two books of kings, although it isn’t completely clear that the author is talking about the same thing. See for example 1 Chronicles 9:1 and 2 Chronicles 16:11.
Third, Kings and Chronicles have very different attitudes about the same kings and events, and sometimes gives them different names. See in particular 1 Kings chapter 15 and 2 Chronicles chapter 13 for a glaring example. That strongly suggests that neither source had access to the other source.