Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel and Quran

PREFACE to TORAH

By Ellen Frankel

“In the beginning, two thousand years before the heaven and the earth, seven things were created: [first] the Torah written with black fire on white fire, and lying in the lap of God.”[1]

“[Then] God consulted the Torah and created the world.”[2]

            So central is the Torah to Jewish life and tradition that it has become synonymous with Judaism itself.  Although the word generally refers to a specific book—also known as the Five Books of Moses and the Pentateuch—it also functions as metaphor, symbol, and metonym, the trademark and crest of the Jewish People.  Dating back some 2500 years as a unitary written work and many centuries before that as a valued legacy of oral traditions, the Torah has served the Jewish People in many capacities: as constitution, foundational covenant, divine-human wedding contract, national narrative, ritual operating manual, lexicon and grammar, educational curriculum, and moral guidebook.  When Muhammed referred to the Jews as “the People of the Book,” it was the Torah to which he was referring.

            For much of its history, the Torah--as interpreted by Jews--has remained essentially unfamiliar to two of its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam.  In part, this is a consequence of prejudice and religious triumphalism, which for centuries marginalized Jewish and other minority cultures and communities. But the Jewish community also contributed to its own cultural segregation, as a way to safeguard itself from the threat of cultural absorption by the host societies.  In modern times, a new peril has emerged—critical Bible scholarship—which threatens to undermine historic devotional attitudes toward sacred texts.

            The current volume is meant to mitigate these threats: first, by presenting each faith tradition on its own terms, secondly, by highlighting kinship rather than contention among their scriptures, and thirdly, by addressing the issues of critical scholarship within a purely religious context.  So, for example, in the case of Jewish tradition, what the Christian community calls the “Old Testament” is here called by its normative Jewish names--the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh--a Hebrew acronym referring to the three traditional divisions of the Hebrew Bible--Torah, Prophets and Writings.   By renaming the Hebrew Bible the “Old” as opposed to the “New” Testament, Christianity effectively appropriated the authority of Jewish Scripture, supplanting it with its own new covenant.   Now, two thousand years later, this volume serves as a needed corrective to this ancient displacement.

            By publishing the Torah in the authoritative English translation of The Jewish Publication Society, alongside the sacred Scriptures of Christianity and Islam, this volume also acknowledges the unique identities of these three holy texts.  True, the Torah emerged first, passing on some of its own DNA to three branching traditions: Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism.  Indeed, by situating Zoroaster in the seventh century BCE, Brian Arthur Brown proposes Zoroastrian monotheism as the earliest of the three "daughter" religions deriving from Judaism, at least in terms of timelines of the published texts.  Once transmitted, that material took on a destiny of its own within its new scriptural context, and must be read by that tradition’s interpretive protocols. Though separated by as much as a thousand years, each Scripture serves as the rootstock of its own faith tradition.   

            Marc Zvi Brettler, a distinguished Bible professor and award-winning author, is eminently qualified to resituate the Torah within its authentic Jewish context.  As the Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies at Brandeis University, Brettler brings to this project an extensive knowledge of Near Eastern literatures and cultures, a facility with literary theory and method, a sensitivity to religious metaphor, and a commitment to new ways of reading biblical texts, including feminist approaches.  In addition to publishing numerous articles and books of his own, including the popular “How to Read the Bible,”[3] he has served as co-editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001) as well as of the "Jewish Study Bible" (2004), which won a National Jewish Book Award.

            My own background is quite different from that of Professor Brettler.  Earning my doctorate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University trained me as a careful reader of literary texts, although they were modern European, not ancient biblical texts.  Still, I became familiar with most of the tricks found in an author’s bag, most of which have been used in even the oldest literary works, including sacred scripture: figurative language, dramatic irony, suspense, word play, allusion, point of view, narrative voice, rhetorical strategies, to name only a few.  Employing most of these techniques, the ancient Torah resonates with literary virtuosity, which is part of the secret of its longevity and popularity.

            As an approach to literary works, the discipline of Comparative Literature has much to offer readers of ancient texts, especially those included in this volume, which call out for comparative analysis.  Literatures of neighboring cultures frequently cross-fertilize each other, borrowing motifs and techniques, and then put their own linguistic and national stamps on them.  So, too, the Torah, Gospel, and Quran, emerging out of a rich and permeable environment of oral and written texts, borrowed many narrative elements, themes, names, loan-words, ideas and literary strategies from these sources, and then adapted them to serve their own religious needs. 

            In addition to my literary training, I learned early on how to read between the lines of a text, a skill I acquired almost as soon as I began Jewish study as a young girl and have continued to hone to this day.  Cutting my teeth first on traditional Torah commentary and then on Midrash and Talmud, I learned to read as the ancient Rabbis did, looking for interpretive opportunities hiding in the white spaces between the Torah’s words.  For these sharp-witted Rabbis, contradiction, grammatical mistakes, redundancy, inconsistency, and inexplicable silences stimulated them to fill in the blanks and keep the stories going, to renew Scripture by eisegesis—reading themselves into the text—as much as by exegesis—listening to what the text has to say for itself.

            My most recent period of training as a reader of Jewish texts has extended over the past two decades, during which I published my own commentary on the Torah, The Five Books of Miriam; three books on Jewish symbols and folktales; and two illustrated Bible editions, one for a general audience and one for children.  Researching and writing these books filled in many lacunae in my Jewish education.  So did my “day job” as Editor-in-Chief and CEO of The Jewish Publication Society.  Among the 200 Jewish books I acquired and edited were many by renowned Bible scholars—including Marc Brettler, covering a wide range of topics: the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jerusalem, and Torah cantillation; rabbinic and modern Bible commentaries; a graphic novel edition of Esther, a gender-sensitive Torah translation, and feminist Midrash; essay collections by leading Bible scholars; an interactive electronic Bible; and the list goes on.

            I feel privileged to participate in this current ground-breaking project.  Three Testaments has the potential to break down walls and to launch a fruitful dialogue among members of three great world religions.  The last time such a three-way conversation happened was during the so-called Golden Age of Spain, in the period known as la convivencia (“the coexistence” between the 10^th and 12^th centuries), when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in relative harmony, fraternizing with each other, studying and even writing books together.  The world is long overdue for a reprise.

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            Unlike the classic works of ancient Near Eastern cultures—the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi, the Hymns to Inanna, and other literature of Sumer, Akkad, Ugarit, Babylonia, and Canaan—the Torah has survived as living scripture for twenty-five centuries and remains the core text of Judaism to this day.  Even in this digital age, Jews continue to chant, just as their ancestors did, from an unvocalized, hand-written parchment scroll of the Torah during worship services three times every week and on all Jewish holidays.  Every time the Torah scroll is returned to the Holy Ark after being read, the congregation stands and sings the verse from Proverbs 3:18: “She [the Torah] is a tree of life to all who hold fast to it, and all of its supporters are happy.”

            Throughout the world, synagogue websites post weekly the Torah portion (lectionary reading) for the coming Sabbath.  Many rabbis, teachers, leaders, and even congregants blog about the weekly portion online.  In thousands of pulpits, thirteen year old boys and girls offer their own interpretations of the weekly Torah reading as they become bar and bat mitzvah.  Rabbis of all stripes base their sermons on the weekly portion as do members of numerous Jewish non-profit boards.  At a time of increasing balkanization within the Jewish world, one common thread continues to unite all Jews the world over: the Torah.  The calendar of Torah readings is universally synchronized—in Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Katmandu, and Jerusalem. 

            To paraphrase the Russian Jewish writer, Ahad Ha’am, who once wrote that “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews,” history has proven that the Torah has kept the Jews alive. Even the most marginal Jews, if they connect at all with formal Judaism, will inevitably encounter the Torah-- a few of its words at a bar mitzvah or wedding, a passage from the Haggadah at a seder, an epitaph on a Jewish gravestone. 

            The Torah has served both as a central organizing principle of Jewish culture and as a symbol of Judaism itself.  Through these two means, the Torah has kept Judaism and the Jewish People alive during two thousand years of exile. How has this been accomplished? 

            Although the ancient Rabbis of Israel and Babylonia did not want to serve as religious innovators, history gave them no choice.  In 70 CE, the Roman Empire destroyed every institution essential to Jewish life:  the Holy Temple with its sacrificial system and priestly infrastructure; the city of Jerusalem, royal and economic capital of Israel; the sanctuary of a homeland, complete with language and culture; a measure of political and legal autonomy.  To weather this national catastrophe, called in Jewish tradition the churban (Hebrew for “total destruction”), the handful of rabbis who remained in Israel after the Roman conquest invented a radical survival strategy.  Their secret weapon was the biblical prooftext. 

             A prooftext is nothing more than a citation from the Bible, mustered to validate a rabbi’s statement or argument.  The talmudic Rabbis endowed that citation with extraordinary authority.  Based on the creative fiction that their own religious innovations and reinterpretations were not new but rather originated in the Bible, they set about redesigning biblical Judaism to suit the new post-Churban realities. Practically all Jews of the 21^st century are Rabbinic Jews, heirs to the new Judaism created by these Rabbis. The only pre-rabbinic Jews who still survive—although they long ago diverged from the Jewish mainstream--are a few thousand Karaites, living primarily in Europe, Israel, and the San Francisco Bay Area, who rejected the Talmud in the 8^th century. 

            The genius of the ancient Rabbis was to recognize that the Torah must remain the indisputable foundation of Jewish law and tradition, but that it had to change to meet the changing needs of its adherents.  By anchoring their own readings, stories, legislation, moral teachings, and ideas with authoritative biblical prooftexts, the Rabbis provided continuity to the scattered people of Israel.  Fashioning a portable Judaism out of linked texts and stories, they ensured that the inevitable diversity born out of Diaspora—cultural, linguistic, culinary, musical, and sociological—would not fragment the Jewish People.  The Torah would act as a unifying force, providing a framework for a dynamic, ever-changing supranational culture.

            As a result of the Rabbis’ bold gambit, Judaism and the Jewish People continued to thrive and develop in exile, accommodating controversy, diverse points of view, intellectual creativity, and religious flexibility—all because of the canny stratagem of the prooftext.  As long as all Jews could claim a common patrimony, the Torah, they could regard themselves as members of the same family, descended from the same clan.

            Between the 7^th and 11^th centuries CE, a dedicated group of scribes centered in Tiberias, known as the Masoretes (from masorah meaning “tradition”), strengthened the Rabbis’ plan by stabilizing and standardizing the Torah text, adding vowels, cantillation marks, punctuation, decorative crowns, mysterious dots, and readers’ notes to the unadorned ancient text.  Today there exist two rival variant manuscripts of the Masoretic Bible, known as the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, but their differences are minimal, and mostly involve punctuation.  Recently, a new edition of the Masoretic text, known as the Jerusalem Crown, has been published in Israel, which artfully merges Aleppo and Leningrad (along with a few other variant manuscripts).  This edition appears to be on its way to being recognized, at least in Israel, as the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible, supplanting earlier codices.

A more serious challenge to the Torah’s continuing role as unifying principle has come in modern times.  The Documentary Hypothesis, which disputes the single authorship of the Five Books, threatens to create a rift between traditional and liberal branches of Judaism.  After two thousand years, it seems that the Rabbis’ ingenious stratagem is being put to the test.  

             The Rabbis themselves were careful to make a distinction between their own authority and that of Scripture, which is why their idea of the prooftext so quickly gained acceptance in the Jewish community.  They asserted that a teaching which was d’oraita, “from the Torah,” overrode that which was de-rabbanan, the teachings of the Rabbis.  No Jewish figure of authority openly dared to question the divine character of the Torah, which according to Jewish tradition was dictated whole and perfect to Moses at Sinai.

            But beginning in the 17^th century with Baruch Spinoza and then fully developed a century later by Julius Wellhausen and German “Higher Criticism,” European scholars began to unravel the documentary strands making up the Hebrew Bible, claiming evidence of multiple hands at work.  It was not long before certain German Jewish intellectuals followed suit, leading to a schism within the Jewish community--and the birth of Orthodox and Reform branches of Judaism.  Today that rift continues to widen, although there is also some movement the other way as many traditional Jews are exposed to critical Bible scholarship in college and through the media.  The jury is still out as to whether the Torah can continue its historic role as unifier.  If it cannot, it is possible that the Jewish People will splinter.

* * * * * * * * * *

            In the minds and hearts of the Jewish People, the Torah is much more than a precious document.  It is also a sacred talisman. Throughout the generations Jews have risked and sometimes given their lives in order to teach Torah or to save Torah scrolls from desecration.  According to Jewish tradition, ten revered Talmudic sages, among them the great Rabbi Akiva, defied Hadrian’s decree in the second century CE against teaching the Torah and were publicly martyred.  One of the ten, Hananiah ben Teradyon, was burned alive wrapped in a Torah scroll, crying out in death that he saw the Hebrew letters flying up to heaven.

            During the Crusades in the 12^th century, the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th, and countless pogroms throughout Europe, Jews risked and sometimes gave their lives to save Torah scrolls.  During World War II, the Nazis seized more than 1,500 Torah scrolls from Jewish communities, intending to display them in Hitler’s infamous “Museum of an Extinct Race” in Prague.  Now most of these “Holocaust Torahs” serve as memorials in synagogues throughout the world, proxies for whole communities destroyed.

            But it is as a positive symbol, a Tree of Life, that the Torah is most often regarded.  In the Jewish worship service, the Torah is arrayed as royalty, dressed in a velvet mantle, silver crown and breastplate, and bearing a silver scepter ending in a miniature human hand, which readers use to follow the lines in the parchment scroll as they chant.  When the scroll is taken out of the ark and again when it is returned, it is marched around the sanctuary in a royal procession. As the Torah passes by, congregants salute or kiss it; no one sits until the scroll is set down.  At the end of the Torah service, a congregant raises the open scroll aloft for all to see, and another dresses it for its recessional to the ark.

            Another sign of communal reverence for the Torah’s physical body is the manner in which a new Torah is written.  Jewish law prescribes precise rules for preparing the sheets of parchment, making the quill and ink, and calligraphing the Hebrew words.  The trained scribe, who spends up to eighteen months writing a Torah scroll, must not only be accomplished in scribal skills but must also be pious and learned.  If the scribe makes a mistake when writing the name of God, the entire sheet of parchment must be cut out of the scroll and buried; a new sheet is then sewn in and a new text penned. 

             Tradition dictates the precise shape of each letter.  Illustrations or artistic decorations are strictly forbidden, except for a prescribed set of special markings. Among the 304,805 letters contained in a Torah scroll are about 100 letters that are non-standard in size, placement, or orientation. These special characters must be reproduced exactly.  In addition, seven letters of the Hebrew alphabet are decorated with three-pronged “crowns” known as tagim, which are found only in the hand-written scroll, not in printed editions of the Torah.  Finally, there are ten places in the Torah (and five more in the other two divisions of the Bible) where a mysterious series of dots is added above or below certain Hebrew words.  An ancient tradition dating back almost two thousand years, the meaning of these unusual features remains a mystery to this day.

* * * * * * * * * *

            The Rabbis well understood the need to balance a reverence for immutable Scripture with the need for interpretation and new understandings of ancient teachings.  And so, as much as Jews have respected the Torah and preserved every jot and tittle in the parchment scroll, they have also been encouraged to add their own readings to the text so that it remains intelligible and usable in their own lives.

            A well-known midrash illustrates the Rabbis’ thinking about this balancing act:

            When Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, he found God busy decorating the letters of the Torah with elaborate crowns.  He asked God what these crowns meant.

            God told him, “In later years there shall live a man named Akiva, who will fashion a mountain of laws based on every dot crowning these letters.”

            Moses said, “Show me this man!”

            So God transported Moses to the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, and he took a seat on one of the back benches.  He listened to the master and his students discussing the law, but could not follow a word they said. 

            One of the students asked Rabbi Akiva, “Master, how do you know that this is so?”

            Akiva replied, “This is the law given to Moses on Mount Sinai.”

            In this simple and ironic tale, the ancient Rabbis reveal their sophisticated understanding of the dynamic of constancy and change in religious tradition.  Clearly, Akiva was inventing something new, but he knew he needed to root it in the old.  And so, he called upon Moses’ authority to bolster his own, and in so doing, appropriated the former’s authority as his own.  Yet this midrash is not intended to demonstrate the cleverness of the Rabbis at the Torah’s expense.  Rather, we are meant to learn from it that we own the past as much as it owns us, and that only in dialogue and dialectic with it do we honor those who came before us.

            This volume is designed to encourage members of three faith traditions to read each other’s Scriptures and to open a dialogue between their own Scripture and those of these other traditions.  Although Jews and Christians have been studying each other’s sacred texts for centuries, especially in more recent times, neither community knows very much about the Quran, nor are today’s Muslims generally familiar with the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in their own right.  This project holds great promise to advance the cause of interfaith understanding. 

            Let me end with an ancient teaching from the Talmud.  Commenting on the constant legal quarreling between the students of Rabbi Hillel and those of his rival Rabbi Shammai, the Rabbis state that Hillel and Shammai always argued “for the sake of heaven,” i.e., to achieve the highest good, which is why both their viewpoints will last forever.  Boldly, the Rabbis declare: “Elu v’elu divrei Elohim hayim.  The words of both are those of the living God.”[4] So, too, are the words in this book.  May we who engage with them do so for the sake of heaven.