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Book Excerpt from Permission to Receive

Permission to Receive: Four Rational Approaches to the Torah's Divine Origin By Lawrence Kelemen Read this fascinating work for the honest intellectual, and be granted permission to believe that the Torah/Bible was revealed by God himself at Mount Sinai. Buy Permission to Receive at a special online price at www.targum.com

The Ten Plagues and Exodus narratives present a novel genre of claims. Here the bible makes the unprecedented proposal that all of ancient Israel witnessed large-scale miracles. Of course, rational explanations for many these narratives can be proposed. A "bloody" Nile might have been caused by a sudden infestation of reddish, marine microorganisms. The invasions of frogs, lice, and locusts, along with the national outbreak of boils, might also be attributed to some ecological fluke. Stampedes of wild beasts, livestock pestilence, wildly destructive hailstorms, and "darkness" might also happen naturally - although the biblical report that Jewish settlements exclusively were untouched by these plagues is unusual, as is the report that only first-born Egyptian citizens and animals perished in the final plague. The "splitting" of the sea, just in time for Israel's escape, and the serendipitous return of the waters at the moment of Egypt's crossing, if true, are exceptionally bizarre events.

Skeptics must therefore resort to a more radical rejection of these reports. They must theorize that the biblical text evolved over several generations, and by the time these manufactured details found their way into the narrative, only a vague national memory of the events remained.

Even this historical-literary approach falters when we focus on the Exodus' climax - the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. More than a dozen biblical passages describe how all of ancient Israel experienced simultaneous prophecy. According to the text, millions of men, women, and children heard God speak. Furthermore, the sounds they supposedly heard were not similar to thunderclaps, or volcanic rumblings; rather, they were "rules and laws." Several verses explicitly quote portions of the prophecy, like, "God spoke all these words, saying, 'I am God your Lord, Who brought you out of Egypt, from the place of slavery; do not have any other gods before Me.'" For a complete list of the Torah's revelation narratives, see Appendix II.

Could the Sinai Account Be False?

The Torah claims that ancient Jewry experienced simultaneous, national prophecy. What are the odds that such a claim is untrue?

If Judaism is a lie, then it must have been launched several generations after the events the Torah describes. After all, people of Moses' generation would know if they had been enslaved in Egypt, seen Egyptians suffer ten plagues, escaped miraculously through a split sea, seen the Egyptian army wiped out in the returning waters, heard God utter commandments at Mount Sinai, and eaten manna in the desert for forty years. Moses certainly would have failed had he approached even the most primitive nation and tried to persuade them that they or their parents were the people described in his book.

Skeptics must therefore theorize that the Torah took its current form generations after the events it describes supposedly took place. Ancient Israel might have possessed a vague mythology about enslavement, escape, and supernatural events at the foot of a great mountain; and one or several charismatic leaders, maybe even over a period of generations, filled in details and created the Jewish people's official history. Maybe the details were recorded as the leader(s) formulated them, or maybe they were maintained orally and written down by later leaders.

Regardless of the precise scenario, this theory proposes that some Jewish leader introduced into history the previously unknown fact that God spoke to all Israel. Thereafter, this assertion was recorded in writing and appears throughout the Torah (see Appendix II).

The Unbelievable Lie

Until that Jewish leader (or group of leaders) made this announcement, the evolving story of the Jewish people was indisputable. Anyone who suspiciously claimed ignorance of a new detail in the official mythology could be silenced with assurances that the leader(s) possessed more information about Israel's history than did the masses. However, with the proclamation that the entire nation heard God speak, every Jew was suddenly granted equal access to this historical tradition. Not only the leader's ancestors were there; everyone's ancestors were there. Suddenly the masses could legitimately question any innovation in the story: "If that is true, why are you the only one who knows it?"

Moreover, the most difficult sort of detail to introduce would have been "all Jewry heard God speak." People intuitively sense that traditions like that aren't easily forgotten by every member of a nation. National memories of volcanic eruptions, eclipses, and other extraordinary experiences typically linger on for generations or centuries. We can imagine the masses turning to their parents and grandparents to seek confirmation that they descended from prophets; and we can imagine the reaction if not a single living Jew (besides the individual or group making the announcement) recalled hearing of the event.

Any Jewish leader who tried to introduce a mass-prophecy into Jewish history would thus face this dilemma: If he would claim that the mass-prophecy happened many generations earlier, the masses might appreciate why no one remembers that all of their ancestors heard God speak - but they would also wonder how the leader could possess clarity about such an ancient event. On the other hand, if the leader would claim that he possessed clarity because the event was fairly recent, then the masses would wonder why they and their parents never heard of this fantastic happening. To appreciate this difficulty, imagine that the pope decided to announce today that God once spoke simultaneously to all Italians. Where in history could the pope place such an event and get away with it?

Here we arrive at a critical distinction between the Jewish and Christian incunabula - that is, their beginning stages. The most significant difference between Christianity's and Judaism's founding is not in the numbers - that only a few thousand of Jesus' followers witnessed his miracles while millions of Jews heard God speak - rather, the significance is in the percentages.

Only some Jews and non-Jews saw Jesus' miracles, but every Jew experienced the Sinai prophecy - 100 percent of a large and easily identifiable population. Early promoters of Christianity claimed thousands of nameless witnesses, and skeptics couldn't dispute such claims; but early promoters of Judaism claimed that all the ancestors of the very people they were preaching to experienced prophecy. Skeptics could easily poll vast numbers of the population - the descendents of the purported prophets - to test the leadership's story.

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