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1. The Orthodox Jewish view holds that God revealed his will to Moses at Mount Sinai in a verbal fashion. According to Jewish tradition, this dictation is said to have been exactly transcribed by Moses. The Torah was then exactly copied by scribes, from one generation to the next. Based on the Talmud (Tractate Getting 60 a) some believe that the Torah may have been given piece-by-piece, over the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the desert.
In either case, the Torah is considered a direct quote from God. However, there are a number of exceptions to this belief within classical Judaism. Over the millennia scribal errors have crept into the text of the Torah. The Masoretes (7 th to 10 th centuries CE) compared all extant variations and attempted to create a definitive text. Also, there are a number of places in the Torah where it appears that there are gaps and it has been postulated that part of the text has been edited out.
The modern, critical view of the origin of the Torah was anticipated by earlier scholars. Within Jewish tradition, individual rabbis and scholars have on occasion pointed out that the Torah showed signs of not being written entirely by Moses. Rabbi Judah ben Islam held that the final verses of the Torah must have been written by Joshua. (This is discussed in the Talmud, Bava Batra 15 a and Menachot 30 a, and in Midrash Sifrei 357. ), however Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai disagrees. The traditional view among Christians was that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, apart from a number of passages, such as the death of Moses, written by his successor Joshua.
However, a number of Enlightenment Christian writers expressed doubts about this traditional view. For example, in the 16 th century, Carlstadt noticed that the style of the account of the death of Moses was the same as that of the preceding portions of Deuteronomy, suggesting that whoever wrote about the death of Moses also wrote larger portions of the Torah. By the 17 th century, some commentators argued outright that Moses did not write most of the Pentateuch. For instance, in 1651, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, ch. 33, argued that the Pentateuch was written after Moses's day on account of Deut. 34: 6 ("no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day"), Gen. 12: 6 ("and the Canaanite was then in the land"), and Num. 21: 12 (referring to a previous book of Moses's deeds). Others include Isaac de la Peyrere, Spinoza, Richard Simon, and John Hampden. Nevertheless, these people found their works condemned and even banned, and de la Peyrere and Hampden were forced to recant. 2.
The main difference between the 13 principles of Maimonides and the Pittsburgh Platform lies in controversy between the thirteenth principle, The belief in the resurrection of the dead and the seventh paragraph of Pittsburgh Platform: We reassert the doctrine of Judaism that the soul is immortal, grounding the belief on the divine nature of human spirit, which forever finds bliss in righteousness and misery in wickedness. We reject as ideas not rooted in Judaism, the beliefs both in bodily resurrection and in Gehenna and Eden (Hell and Paradise) as abodes for everlasting punishment and reward. The Torah itself attests to the need of the body to return to the dust from whence it issued. "Dust you are, and to dust shall you return" (Genesis 2: 19). The very essence of the body is evanescent, and by virtue of its natural condition it dies and decays. Therefore, even while the body is alive, it is not a "real" existence in the Torah definition of the word, for the Torah equates all transitory existence with illusion and deceit. This is derived from the Talmud in its discussion of the waters that were allowed to be used for ritual purification in a mikvah.
Generally speaking, the water had to be drawn from a living spring. Among the water sources that were not to be used the Talmud lists a "deceitful" river, may hamekhazvot. What exactly is a deceptive river? The Talmud defines it as any river whose waters cease their flow even once in seven years. The water's cessation indicates that this is not a living spring, a real river. And although now indeed it is flowing, its present state deceives the eye.
It is not a "living spring, " but a false and lifeless illusion. Now, if something that expires is deceptive and valueless, what good is there in spending a lifetime in illuminating the body? Notwithstanding man's actions, it will revert to its previous darkness. This realization can be the cause of immense frustration and suck out the very life from the Jew who is dedicated to the purification of the body. It also serves to detract from one's understanding of the entire purpose for creation and the giving of the Torah.
Hence, it is here that we can appreciate the central importance occupied in Judaism by the belief in the belief in the resurrection of the dead. The belief in the resurrection of the dead expresses the absolute truth that the expiration and corrosion of the body is but only a temporary phenomenon. The truth of the matter is that the body is a very sublime entity, in fact an eternal one. Rabbi Shneur Zalman explains in the Tanya (chap 49) that the Torah statement of G-d having "chosen us from every other nation and tongue" (Daily Morning Prayers) applies to the body which "bears in its corporal state an identical resemblance to the bodies of the nations of the world" (Tanya, chap. 49). G-d did not chooses the Jewish soul at Sinai, but the Jewish body. What Rabbi Shneur Zalman means to say with this radical pronouncement is this: One cannot contend that the element of the Jew chosen by G-d is the soul, for what kind of choice could there possibly be with a soul.
The nature of real choice is that it can only exist amongst identical, or at the very least, extremely similar objects. If one is told to choose between a pile of ashes and a pile of gold, is there really a choice? Must one enter into any conscious or even subconscious to determine which one should select? Real choice exists only where the objects to be chosen are alike. Thus, the quality of "chosen" possessed by the Jewish must pertain to the body and not the Jewish soul. For the Jewish soul, by virtue of its inordinately high spiritual character, made a choice between it and another spiritual form impossible.
The Jewish soul is said to be a part of G-d Himself. What choice could there be? What emerges from this proof is that the body is the possessor of sublime virtue and is the chosen of G-d. G-d's choice has lent to it the quality of permanence.
G-d chose the body not for seventy or eighty years, but for all time. And although the body may die and disintegrate, this is only a provisional state. In the messianic epoch the body will once again rise in the resurrection and will exist for ever and ever. The belief in the resurrection of the dead forms a basic foundation of the Jewish faith. Thanks to this belief, one knows that the physical body, to which one dedicates one's entire effort in Torah and mitzvot, and for whose elevation one toils eighty or ninety years, is an eternal entity.
One's struggle on behalf of the body will never be in vein. The body dies temporarily, only to reawaken to everlasting eternal life. As the famous principle of Talmudic law teaches, "Any change that reverts back to its original condition is not considered to be a change at all" (Bava Kamma 67 a; Sukkah 30 b). Thus, the ongoing battle to purify, refine, and uplift the body and all of material existence has an eternal result. As one can see the Pittsburgh Platform is much more humanistic and tolerant to other religions. 3.
The formation of Holy Scriptures of Christianity, Judaism and Islam was influenced by many political and social events. Many scientists suggest their origins to be not the divine inspiration but the borrowing from older ones and adapted to the particular region and epoch. The sacred books that make up the anthology modern scholars call the Hebrew Bible - and Christians call the Old Testament - developed over roughly a millennium; the oldest texts appear to come from the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. War songs such as Exodus 15 and Judges 5 are very archaic Hebrew and celebrate Israelite victories from the time preceding the Israelite monarchy under David and Solomon. However, most of the other biblical texts are somewhat later. And they are edited works, collections of various sources intricately and artistically woven together.
The five books of Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy), for example, traditionally are ascribed to Moses. But by the eighteenth century, many European scholars noticed problems with that assumption. Not only does Deuteronomy end with an account of Moses' death (a tough assignment for any writer to describe his or her own demise), but the entire Pentateuch shows anomalies of style that are hard to explain if only one author is involved. By the nineteenth century, most scholars agreed that the Pentateuch consisted of four sources woven together. This notion of four sources came to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis, and, in various forms, it has been the prevailing theory for the past two hundred years. Israel thus created four independent strains of literature about its own origins, all drawing on oral tradition in varying degrees, and each developed over time.
They were combined together to form our Pentateuch sometime in the sixth century BCE. By this time, many of the other biblical books were coming together. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings form what scholars call a "Deuteronomistic History" (because the work's theology is heavily influenced by Deuteronomy), a history of the Israelite states over a five-hundred-year period. This work contains much of historical value, but it also operates on the basis of a historical and theological theory: i. e. , that God has given Israel its land, that Israel periodically sins, suffers punishment, repents, and then is rescued from foreign invasion.
This cycle of sin and redemption shapes the work's way of writing history and gives it a powerful religious dimension, so that even when the sources behind the biblical books are "secular" accounts in which God is far in the background, the theology of the overall work places history in the service of theology. The last edition of the Deuteronomistic History, the one in our Bible, comes from the sixth century BCE, the time of the Babylonian Exile. In this context, it offers an explanation for Israel's poor condition and implicitly a reason to hope for the future. Another section of the Hebrew Bible consists of the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the twelve "minor, " i. e. , brief, prophets).
Here again, it's important to understand how these developed. In the book of Isaiah, from which Jesus quotes, the original Isaiah of Jerusalem lived in the eighth century BCE in Jerusalem, and much of Isa 6 - 10 clearly reflects the political and social events of his time. Another part of the book, however, comes from a prophet who lived two hundred years later: Isaiah 40 - 55, famous in the New Testament (early Christians thought the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 was Jesus) and prominent in Handel's Messiah, speaks of the Persian king Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BCE), and so the text must come from that time. Other parts of the book of Isaiah are even later, and the entire book was carefully edited together, perhaps by the fifth or fourth century BCE. The extraordinary poetry of the book offers the reader hope in a God who controls historical events and seeks to return his people Israel to their own land. In addition to the prophets, the Hebrew Bible contains what Jews often call the "Writings, " or the Hagiographa, hymns and philosophical discourses, love poems and charming tales.
These include Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (or Qoheleth), Song of Songs, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. These books were the last completed and the last to be received as Scripture, although parts of them may be very ancient indeed. The books of Psalms, for instance, contains many hymns from Israelite temple worship from the monarchic period, i. e. , before the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE; songs such as Psalm 29 may be borrowed from the Canaanites, while Psalm 104 closely resembles Egyptian hymns.
In its current form, the 150 psalms fall into five "books, " modeled on the five books of the Pentateuch. Proverbs also has many old parts, including one apparently translated from the second-millennium BCE Egyptian text the "Instructions of Amenemope" (Proverbs 22). The remaining books in this part of the Bible are somewhat later: the latest is probably Daniel, which comes from the mid-second century. 4. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all peoples of "the book, " that is, Scripture believed to be the revealed word of God. What defines each of these religious cultures, however, is not only their common heritage in the Biblical past but the distinctive traditions that each of them has developed for interpreting the Bible and what they believed to be its message and meaning.
Indeed, it is the different ways in which they have interpreted the Bible that have decisively shaped the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And all too often, perhaps, their different understandings of the Bible have also determined and complicated the tangled relations of these religious communities with each other. Historically, the distinctive character of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Biblical interpretation is reflected not only in the substance of their exegetical traditions but equally so in the material forms through which their authors have recorded and transmitted their interpretations. These have ranged from modes of oral recitation to scrolls to books of many different kinds. In some cases, in fact, particular religious groups consciously adopted new or different material forms for transmitting their sacred Scriptures or exegetical traditions precisely in order to distinguish and differentiate themselves from each other.
In other cases, the similarity of their material forms belies the oft-repeated claims of each tradition to absolute originality and uniqueness, and demonstrates, in fact, their frequent dependence and shared qualities. Actually, it is the different traditions of interpretation that created the different congregations in Christianity as well as in Judaism and Islam. The results of such differences are conflicts and wars between the representatives of different religions and even between the congregations. Bibliography: Brock, Sebastian P. , et al.
A Classified Bibliography of the Septuagint. Leiden: Brill, 1973. Catholic Biblical Association. Old Testament Abstracts. Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1978 Gorman, G.
E. Theological and Religious Reference Materials, Vol. 1: General Resources and Biblical Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Ben Hayyin, Jacob. Biblia Rabbinica: A Reprint of the 1525 Venice Edition. 4 volumes. Jerusalem: Major Publishing, 1972. Klein, Michael.
The Fragment-Targums of the Pentateuch According to their Extant Sources. 2 Volumes. Analecta Biblical 76. Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1980. Don Richardson. Secrets of the Koran: Revealing Insight into Islam's Holy Book. Gospel Light Pubns, 2003.
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