September 6, 2019
What We Talk About When We Talk About Biblical Criticism
Higher criticism of the Bible is one of the major theoretical issues dividing today’s Jewish community. Many progressive Jews triumph the Documentary Hypothesis as a major achievement of modern scholarship, while traditional Jews typically dismiss it as heretical. We will go beyond the standard arguments regarding the Torah’s authorship by considering the dynamics of reading that underlie both traditional and modern critical perspectives. We will then offer a more fundamental analysis of what it means to make meaning out of a text, and suggest that traditionalists and text critics ultimately have more in common than meets the eye.
