Deconstructing Biblical Criticism: The Torah as Postmodern Text

Disclaimer (or: who am I to listen to astrophysicists and biologists, but not to academic biblical critics and archaeologists?)

  This essay is not a typical defence of Orthodox Jewish biblical interpretation against academic biblical criticism (higher criticism).  Instead, I hope to show that higher criticism is ahistorical, projecting nineteenth century methods of reading and writing into the past.  I intend to present an alternative model of biblical analysis, drawing from postmodern theory, which I believe shows that there is no reason to doubt that the Torah is a single document, composed in a style as complex and nuanced as the work of any great postmodern author.  I will use case studies of contemporary novels to show that the ‘multiple author’ hypothesis, if applied diligently to modern literature, would result in literary chaos, as scores of previously unknown ‘authors’ would be postulated lurking behind the names of well-known authors.

  It is worth noting at the start that any attempt to link postmodernism and the Torah is fraught with danger*.  Postmodernists tend to be sceptics and relativists and the postmodern critique of the meta-narratives of religion and nationhood would seem to rule out any description of the Torah as a completely postmodern document.  I hope to show that while the Torah is not absolutely postmodern, as it maintains an idea of absolute truth in the abstract and promotes a meta-narrative, it is postmodern to the extent that it encourages deconstruction, intertextuality and even a degree of relativism, acknowledging the existence of multiple meta-narratives.  This is a view that may not be popular in the Orthodox world, even on the ‘left’ of Orthodoxy, just as my attack on biblical criticism will be unpopular in academic and non-Orthodox circles.

* A good introduction to postmodernism theory, literature and art is Postmodernism A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Butler, a lucid account that notes the weaknesses of postmodernism as well as its strengths.

  The traditional novel (what Derrideans would call the “classic realist text”) is a complete world into which the reader can escape.  Many of the most enduringly popular authors wrote in this way.  While few went as far as J. R. R. Tolkien in literally creating a new world, complete with history, geography, mythology and languages with full etymologies, the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created worlds that endure in the popular imagination.  I can picture the Jane Austen milieu without ever having read one of her novels, and ‘Holmesian’ or ‘Dickensian’ London are arguably better known than the real nineteenth century London.  When reading a book of this kind, the reader expects a uniform style and a narrative full of consistent details.  The result should be a form of verisimilitude so convincing that one could place an almost religious degree of faith in it.  It is no surprise that Holmesians (Sherlock Holmes fans) talk of “the canon” written by Conan Doyle, and I have already mentioned Tolkien’s mythologizing.

  Readers of these kinds of novels also have certain expectations regarding the plot: things should constantly be moving on and developing, however improbably.  In his essay Charles Dickens, George Orwell complained of “the awful Victorian ‘plot’… the typical Dickens novel, Nicholas Nickelby, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Our Mutual Friend, always exists around a framework of melodrama… the crossword puzzle of coincidences, intrigues, murders, disguises, buried wills, long-lost brothers, etc. etc.”  Of course, not every nineteenth century novelist was as melodramatic as Dickens, but the traditional novel was one where things happened.

  The heyday of this kind of writing was in the nineteenth century.  It is no surprise that when nineteenth century biblical critics applied such standards of criticism to the Torah, they found it wanting.  There is no consistency of style or of subject matter.  There are lacunae in the stories.  There is ambiguity, contradiction and repetition.  The obvious conclusion seemed to be that there were multiple authors.  This seemed to be reinforced by similarities between passages in the Torah and earlier Mesopotamian myths and law codes, indicating possible literary antecedents.

  It is wrong to suggest that deliberate ambiguity, contradiction and lacunae had been absent from literature before the twentieth century, as the following quote (from Dorothy McMillan’s introduction to Macbeth in the Collins Classics Complete Works of William Shakespeare) illustrates:

Yet the most celebrated question asked about the play remains, I think, the much mocked enquiry of A. C. Bradley, ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’  L. C. Knights… rebukes this curiosity, claiming Macbeth as a text which may be examined like a self-sufficient poem.  Had Shakespeare wanted his audience to know how many children Lady Macbeth had he would, Knights believes, have included the information in the play.  But then, if he had wanted the audience to worry about it, he might have left it out.

But despite this, even epistolary novels, with multiple first person narrators, developed the illusion of a single editor who compiled the documents in an orderly fashion, so that the reader always knows who is writing at any given moment.  This is usually signposted clearly.  For example, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is compiled from a series of diaries, letters and newspaper cuttings, each clearly introduced and dated, for example, “Chapter II Jonathan Harker’s Journal (continued) 5 May…”.  The novel even explicitly explains how the different documents came to be compiled into a single text by one of the characters.  Some authors went to even greater lengths to keep the illusion of verisimilitude: Daniel Defoe threatened to sue someone who claimed that Robinson Crusoe was a fictional character!

  In the twentieth century, modernism and postmodernism challenged this style of writing.  Modernism challenged the idea of objectivity and introduced the unreliable narrator (see my post on The Aural Torah for the relevance of this idea to the Torah).  More importantly for my argument here, modernism introduced the idea of ‘found objects’ to art.  The first and most notorious example was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal exhibited in an art gallery.  However, the idea had parallels in the literary world too.  T. S. Eliot remarked that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”, and he followed his own advice.  For example, not only does The Waste Land contain numerous quotations, paraphrases and allusions to famous literary works, it also includes dialogue Eliot overheard on bus.

  The idea behind this is to challenge what we think of as art or literature.  Does art become art simply when exhibited in a gallery?  While we may argue over Fountain and its successors, in the case of literature it seems quite clear that ‘ordinary’ words become poetry when included in a poem – Eliot is the poet, not the women on the bus, because he had the poetic insight to take those particular words, of all the thousands that he heard, and insert them into that particular section of that particular poem.

  I would suggest that we can apply this idea to Tanakh.  Indeed, this is actually a mainstream Orthodox Jewish belief.  If even the introduction to the Artscroll edition of Divrei Hayamim/Chronicles can claim that it contains pre-existing secular genealogies that became holy when Ezra included them in the book, then the idea can not be considered too controversial in Orthodox circles.

  Can we apply the idea to the Torah in the narrower sense of the Pentateuch?  I would suggest we can.  I recently saw it argued that the genealogies in Bereshit/Genesis were from earlier genealogical records that God commanded Moshe to include, but I can not remember exactly where I saw that.  However, Rabbi A. I. Kook, first Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel wrote on this topic that,

Is it not a well-known principle that there were individuals in antiquity who were knowledgeable about God, prophets, and great men of the spirit, such as Hanokh, Shem, Ever, and others?  And is it possible that they had no effect on their generation, though their work did not receive the recognition of our father Abraham?  And how is it possible that there should be no traces of their influence left on their generation?  There is bound to be a similarity between these and the subjects treated in the Torah!

  As to the similarities in teaching, it was already made clear in the days of Maimonides, and before him in the teachings of the Talmudic sages, that prophecy reckons with man’s nature… Hence whatever educational elements there were before the giving of the Torah, which gained a following among the [Jewish] people and the world, if they only had a basis in morality and it was possible to raise them to a high moral level – the Torah retained them.

(in The Essential Writings of Abraham Isaac Kook translated and edited by Ben Zion Bokser)

In this vein, I have postulated, not quite seriously, the existence of The Book of Shem, a holy text, now lost, written by that devout son of Noach and containing an account of the creation and the flood narrative.  Perhaps God commanded Moshe to include part of this text in Bereshit, while Shem’s descendents in Mesopotamia kept a corrupted version of the story, necessarily changed as they became polytheists.  True, no such text has even been discovered – but then neither have J, P, E and D, the supposed biblical Ur-texts.

  Postmodernism took the idea of found objects and added to it the concept of intertextuality.  This disrupts the simple chain of cause and effect between source text and influenced text.  Instead, it assumes that the reader passes back and forth between multiple texts, regardless of whether any of the authors wanted this or not.  Anything can potentially be a commentary on anything else.  As the postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida remarked, “There is nothing outside the text.”  Far from being a passive reworking of its sources, a text opens a dialogue with earlier texts.

  In terms of the Torah, this means that the fact that certain stories and laws have parallels with ancient Mesopotamian texts is by no means an indication that they were lazily appropriated by the Israelites, with a few names changed to convert from a polytheist outlook to a monotheist one.  Instead, the reader is forced back and forth, comparing and contrasting similarities and differences.

  Moreover, the similarity of words and events does not indicate an automatic similarity of outlook.  One need only read that great postmodern text, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote by Jorge Luis Borges to realise that.  The story is a ‘review’ of Menard’s attempts to rewrite Don Quixote.  Not to copy it, nor to translate it, nor to use the characters in different situations, nor to move it to the present, but to independently write it identically, word for word.  An excerpt from Borges’ ‘review’:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and
adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

Written in the seventeeth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and
adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases--exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor --are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard--quite foreign, after all--suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

Just as Menard’s Quixote is completely different in meaning to Cervantes’ Quixote even though they use identical words, so too Bereshit may have certain similarities to other ancient creation myths, but that does not in any way indicate that they have the same meaning when examined in the context of their respective canons of texts, nor does it mean that the earlier texts are straightforward ‘sources’ for the later ones.

  Intertextuality exists because concepts only have meaning in relationship to each other.  Words do not refer directly to anything in real world, only to other words.  It is only through the noting of difference that the meaning of anything can be established (inasmuch as postmodernists think meaning can ever be established).  Derrida noted that texts are built around such conceptual oppositions (male/female; civilised/savage etc. – these are often implicitly politicised in terms of better/worse, even in apparently apolitical texts).  We can deconstruct the use of language to discover the conceptual oppositions on which the text rests.

  If this is true, then to talk about monotheism, one must talk about polytheism*.  Yet the Torah invariably resists the opportunity to caricature polytheism and polytheistic social structures except among the Israelites, who had entered into a unique covenant of loyalty to God alone.  Later rabbinic texts show a much more ambivalent attitude to non-Jews, probably as a result of the cumulative effect of persecution, but Tanakh itself steadfastly refuses to bolster its own claims to truth by inciting prejudice.  I may be wrong about this, but I do not think a single non-Israelite is punished for idolatry in Tanakh, unless that person interferes with the beliefs of others, whether by trying to impose idolatry, by deifying himself or by trying to eradicate Jewish monotheism.  Of particular note here is the first chapter of Amos, which is a series of prophecies following a stereotypical pattern in which the prophet says that God will overlook most of the sins of a particular nation, but that one sin is too great to be overlooked and must be punished.  This runs through the states that neighboured ancient Israel listing a variety of acts of treachery, oppression and physical brutality, but only when the prophet reaches the Kingdom of Judah does he say they deserve punishment for not obeying God, rather than for callous interpersonal behaviour.

*  One could talk about atheism or agnosticism in a contemporary text, but in ancient times these did not exist and, as mentioned above, the Torah uses language the ancient Israelites could understand.

  If the Torah was to talk about monotheism without directly criticising polytheism, it was necessary to let the major polytheistic belief system of time and region present itself to its readers.  As a result, where there were already common elements (see the comments of Rabbi Kook above), the Torah was presented in a way that highlighted both the similarities and the fundamental differences.  For example, the Code of Hammurabi has certain similarities to biblical civil and criminal legislation, yet it also has great differences.  In ancient Babylon, unlike ancient Israel, there was no equality before the law, for example.  Killing a slave was merely an offence against property, not murder.  Under biblical law no servitude was permanent, and even a foreign slave fleeing his master had to be sheltered, but under Babylonian law harbouring a slave was punishable by death.

  This hierarchical society was projected into the theological realm.  While the biblical and Mesopotamian creation stories have certain points in common, the Mesopotamian story sees the creation of mankind as a side-effect of the bloody warfare between the gods, unlike the Torah, which has God consciously create humanity in God’s image.  Likewise, as far as we can tell from surviving records, other ancient near eastern flood narratives have the gods plan to wipe out humanity because of anger at humanity’s noise or simply out of divine caprice.  Only the biblical story of Noach has humanity destroyed as a result of its wilful evil and violence – and even then the narrative tells us that the necessity of this action distresses God.

  If we assume that the original audience of Tanakh were at least aware of the other ancient near eastern myths (which is what the biblical critics assume, remember), then the biblical story must have seemed revolutionary.  While it might at first have seemed like a mere imitation, gradually the implications of the differences between the stories and law codes would have become apparent: not only that there is one God, not many, but that God is not capricious and unfeeling, and that God demands ethical interpersonal behaviour above all else, regardless of social distinctions.  In this way, the differences between the Torah’s world-view and that of the myths of the surrounding nations are illustrated by a direct comparison, not by any exaggerated caricature idolators within the biblical text.

  To give some idea of what the Torah’s story must have sounded like, consider the following:

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without logic and obscurantist, and superstition was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of Rationalism moved upon the face of the waters.  And God said, “Let there be empiricism,” and there was empiricism.  And God saw the empiricism, that it was good, and God divided the empiricism from the superstition.  God called the empiricism ‘scientific method’ and the superstition he called ‘myth,’ and the evening and the morning were the first day.

I have only changed about a dozen words from the first five verses of the King James Bible here (not a translation I would normally use, but I wanted the version most familiar to a wide audience rather than one I would consider accurate).  The effect is jarring and attention-grabbing, even to someone whose knowledge of Bereshit is second-hand, and it is the few differences that make the biggest impression and revolutionise the meaning of the text, not the many similarities.

  My ‘textual poaching’ neatly illustrates another aspect of postmodern literature.  As well as the idea of deconstruction, postmodernism has introduced a greater playfulness into the style of literature and experimented with the very nature of the text.  This is also useful in understanding the biblical text.  Two examples will show that the ‘oddities’ of the Torah that have drawn so much attention from biblical critics are all acceptable postmodern literary devices.  My case studies will be If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters by Julian Barnes.

  If on a winter’s night a traveller is almost impossible to describe.  The easiest way is to quote the very first line: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller.”  The story then continues in the second person as “you” try to read the novel, continually being interrupted and constantly starting new novels (themselves interrupted), each time in the belief that this is the continuation of the previous novel.  In between “your” adventures searching for a single complete novel (in the course of which you encounter a best-selling novelist with writer’s block, a stressed publisher, arguing academics, a bibliophile censor, urban guerrillas dedicated to spreading literary apocrypha, a potential romantic interest and her politically-minded sister) are a series of interludes in the first person, comprising the first chapters of all the works “you” start reading (“you” never progress beyond the first chapter).  These are written in a variety of styles, or at least a pastiche of them: thriller, romance, western, historical novel, high-brow quasi-pornography and who knows what else (the style often shifts abruptly – and excitingly – at the end of the chapter, just as “your” reading is frustratingly interrupted).  Just to further complicate matters further, the book also includes notes from the diary of the novelist “you” meet.

  A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters is easier to describe, at least superficially.  It is a series of short stories, linked by theme and sometimes by narrative (although some of the stories are contradictory, in narrative terms).  However, there are also a series of essays in the book, too.  The first story, The Stowaway, is a rewriting of the biblical flood story from the point of view of a woodworm.  The Visitors is a realistic tale of a cruise ship hijacked by terrorists.  The Wars of Religion is in the style of a medieval legal document, dealing with the ‘trial’ of some woodworms.  The Survivor tells the story of a woman who might be the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust, or who might simply be delusional.  Shipwreck first tells the (real) story of the wreck of the Medusa, followed by an analysis of Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa; a fold-out colour reproduction of the picture is included for the reader’s convenience.  The Mountain is a story about nineteenth century women looking for Noah’s ark.  Three Simple Stories contains (i) a first person narrative which eventually turns into a reported story about a survivor of the Titanic; (ii) an analysis of the story of Jonah and a comparison with later news stories and urban legends about people being swallowed by whales; (iii) a description of the real events concerning the ship St Louis, which ferried Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to the Americas, where they were unable to land, most being sent back to Europe.  Upstream! is another first person narrative, this time epistolary, dealing with the making of a film along the Orinoco, but changing subject suddenly in the final pages.  Parenthesis is the half-chapter of the title, an interlude in which a first person narrator (who deliberately raises the question of whether, “when I say ‘I’... I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented” but never answers it) muses on the nature of love.  Project Ararat concerns an astronaut who attempts to find Noah’s ark, and who may be delusional or a prophet or something else entirely.  Finally, The Dream is a first-person narrative set in the afterlife.

  What do these books have in common with the Torah and how do they meet the objections of higher criticism?  Let us review the evidence that causes the critics to argue in favour of multiple authorship of the Torah:

1) The Torah contains multiple genres: genealogy, narrative (usually creation myth or national foundation myth), ritual law, and social law.  There are also differences in style.  These are explained as coming from completely different traditions.

2) The Torah has characters with multiple names, most obviously for God, but occasionally for human characters.  Again, different names are seen as indicating different textual origins.

3) Laws and even narratives are apparently repeated with only slight changes (the most famous ‘doublet’ is probably the two accounts of the creation in Bereshit 1-2.3 and 2.4-25).  This is said to be a product of variant texts being merged by an editor who hesitated to remove any details, but simply appended one text to the end of another.

4) The Torah contains contradictions, sometimes obvious ones like certain laws being (apparently) in opposition to each other, but also in the sense that certain characters are portrayed positively in some places and negatively in others.  This is again said to be the product of the merging of different texts with different biases.

5) The Torah contains ambiguity and even apparent lacunae within stories, with important details missing.  Despite the fact that several of the above points depend on the ‘redactor’ who supposedly edited various different legends and texts together being so piously self-effacing, and so over-awed by the text that he refused to edit out obvious contradictions, this assumes that he sometimes over-compensated by zealously removing vital phrases.

6) Information is not always given in chronological order (for instance, the story of Yehudah and Tamar is interpolated into that of Yosef.  More subtly, Bereshit 11.26 states that Terach was 70 when Avraham (then called Avram) was born.  11.32 relates the death of Terach at the age of 205, while the next verse (12.1) relates Avraham’s call to go to Canaan, yet 12.4 states that Avraham was 75 when he left for Canaan, not 135.  The traditional Jewish answer is that the Torah is simply not always in chronological order, but academic biblical criticism prefers to cut-and-paste into multiple contradictory sources again).

(I am not dealing with the other obvious problem, the authorship of the verses dealing with the death of Moshe, as it is an accepted part of Orthodox tradition going back to the Talmud that these may have been written by Yehoshua (Joshua).)

1) The Torah contains multiple genres. I have put differences of style and genre together, as anyone who knows about literature will realize that style and genre are linked.  A law code simply can not be written in the same language as a narrative; they have different aims and so use literary techniques to achieve those aims.  Just looking at my own writing, I adopt a more informal style when writing about depression to my style when writing about Judaism; I can write a review of a Doctor Who story with a flippancy that would be tasteless in a post about a terrorist attack in Israel.  Likewise, it would be impossible to write the technical details building of the Mishkan in the “vivid narrative” style of the story of Moshe’s birth earlier in the same book (Shmot/Exodus), because it is not a vivid narrative.

  Both of the books I am using as case studies play with style and genre.  This is most obvious in Calvino’s pastiche of thrillers, romances, westerns, historical novels and more in his books-within-books, and more importantly in the contrast between the second person narrative of the ‘real’ novel and the first person narratives of the novels within the novel.  Barnes’ stories also shift from first to third person and change genre, including non-fiction (or apparently non-fiction) essays and a large colour picture.

2) Characters have multiple names.  This should really need no explanation, as it is obvious that a person has multiple names and titles according to whom he is talking.  He may be on first name terms with friends, Mr [surname] to his boss, ‘Daddy’ to his children and so on.  In writing, this becomes even more obvious, as an author can refer to a character by a variety of names indicating his characteristics and relationship to other characters.  In the Jewish tradition, the names of God are simply attempts to describe the changing ways in which we perceive God, so assuming that the priests had one name and the royal scribes another is to make a lot of unwarranted assumptions about the sophistication (or otherwise) of ancient Israelite theology and sociology i.e. it assumes that each sub-culture had only one way of understanding God, rather than assuming that everyone had a multi-faceted understanding of God.

  Nevertheless, I promised to show that each of these pieces of ‘evidence’ for multiple authorship can be found in serious postmodern literary fiction, so I will simply note that one character in If on a winter’s night a traveller has as many as four names (Lotaria-Gertrude-Corinna-Ingrid).

3) Repetition.  If on a winter’s night a traveller has a continually repeated motif of “you” starting to read books and being interrupted.  Furthermore, many of the books-within-the-book parallel each other, with repeated names and recurring motifs of a sense of growing danger and impulsive love-affairs that lead to complications.  A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters has boats in many stories, perhaps as a metaphor for the human condition, and the pains of romantic love are explored in several stories in different ways.  There are two retellings or analyses of biblical stories and Noah’s ark appears in three stories.

4) Contradictions. Here it must be noted that to an Orthodox Jew, contradictions in law simply do not exist.  The oral tradition, which we believe is as old as the written one, reconciles such apparently problematic verses.  Of course, an oral tradition leaves no mark in the palaeographic record until it is written down, which in this case did not happen until the compilation of the Mishnah in the second century, so academic scholars are entitled to express their scepticism as to whether this reflects the original interpretation of the text.

  Nevertheless, it should be noted that If on a winter’s night a traveller makes frequent use of intentional contradictions, with Ludmilla’s constantly changing preferences in literature – and uncertainty whether this represents authorial comment or not – as well as the contradictory views on literature expressed in chapter 11, one or more of which may again represent an authorial comment.  Moving from my case studies, Franz Kafka (a modernist rather than a postmodernist) made frequent use of deliberate contradictions in his writing, although it is difficult to argue that the effect he achieved (a feeling that meaningful communication between people is impossible and an almost solipsistic uncertainty regarding the universe as a whole) is shared with the Torah.

  As for the idea that certain characters (Aharon, Yosef etc.) are presented in a positive light in some parts of the Torah and a negative light in others, this would only imply multiple authorship to someone with the a priori assumption that an ancient text must present characters as either heroes or villains (or at least as victims) for pedagogic, adulatory or mythologizing purposes.  Like all great literature, the Torah tends to paint not in black and white or even in grey, but in a wide variety of colours.  People are not innately good or bad; rather they have their strengths and flaws and sometimes they make mistakes.  Only someone looking for simplicity and annoyed not to find it would pick the text apart into simple myths (Aharon the righteous High Priest vs. Aharon who built the golden calf and criticised Moshe).  People with a sophisticated understanding of human nature and of literature can accept complexity and nuance when they see it.

5) Lacunae. The Wars of Religion, the third chapter of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters is deliberately (and amusingly) cut short.  The story The Survivor leaves the reader uncertain as to whether the main character is delusion – or rather, as to what, if anything, is real and what delusional, and similar questions can be asked of the main character in Project Ararat.  The half-chapter Parenthesis raises the question of authorial voice (“when I say ‘I’... whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented”) but deliberately avoids answering it.  There is a similar ambiguity regarding the first of the Three Simple Stories.

  The ‘lacunae’ in If on a winter’s night a traveller are even more obvious.  Every chapter of the books within the book are unfinished.  The writer Silas Flannery is introduced, but his story (by which I mean both the story of the character, rather than the novel he is trying to write) remains unfinished.  The story of apocryphal guerrillas is not resolved or even explained properly, while the question of which books are ‘real’ and which ‘fake’ is deliberately not answered.  There is also a significant jump between the final two chapters, which by implication contain events suitable for a novel in themselves.  Above all, there remains a massive ambiguity from the first line to the last: are you, the reader, “you, the reader”?  Do you really experience all these events or are you merely reading through the eyes of a reader who experiences them?  This deliberate question, both ontological and epistemological, goes some way beyond any ambiguity in the Torah.

6) Chronological errors.  These should need no explanation.  Virtually every mystery story or thriller ever written depends on the author restructuring the narrative to withhold important information from the reader until near the end.  In these books, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters keeps important information from the reader until the end of the stories The Stowaway (where the very last word casts new light on the whole story), The Survivor and Upstream!  In all these cases, Barnes has made a deliberate decision to manipulate the way information is presented to the reader, distorting it so that the reader finds things out in a different order to that which they occurred to the characters.  While the Torah does not relate information in something other than chronological order for the sake of suspense, it does so for other reasons, such as to structure its halakhic, ethical or theological arguments.

  It can now be seen that the Torah’s style, while presenting problems to the critic weaned on the traditional novel, built on verisimilitude, seems far less unusual for those familiar with the literature of the twentieth century.  There is no reason to believe that the Torah had a multitude of authors, any more than we assume that 'Julian Barnes' and 'Italo Calvino' are pseudonyms for a variety of authors.  This is just using the example of two postmodern novels I happen to know fairly well and to like; doubtless people better-read than I could cite many more such works, modernist, postmodernist and other.

  If we assume that the Torah does share certain features with postmodern literature, we must ask whether it could be understood by the ancient Israelites.  While it would not be entirely problematic, from a theological point of view, to say that the Israelites could not understand all the nuances of the Torah, it would make more sense if they could comprehend it.  Fortunately, while the ancient Israelites did not have the critical and philosophical vocabulary of contemporary postmodernists, they did show an understanding of the key aspects of postmodern literature.

  Chazal, the sages of the Talmud, seem to have had a keen understanding of the postmodern aspects of the Torah.  This is clear from the ancient rabbinic literature.  Midrashim deliberately present multiple, often contradictory, ways of plugging holes in the biblical narrative.  The lacunae are seen as an integral part of the text, so all attempts to fill them are equally tenable.  There is no need to restore a ‘perfect’ text, because the ambiguities are all deliberate.  As with Lady Macbeth’s children, it is more important that we speculate about what is missing than that we know for certain.  The multiplicity of solutions only emphasises that deliberate ambiguity and, in a sense, canonises it.  Taking the Torah apart to produce a variety of separate ‘sources’ misses its point entirely.  Indeed, Chazal went so far as to say that there are seventy facets to the Torah, meaning that there are multiple, equally valid interpretations of it.

  One might also note the way that the haftarot, the readings from the Nevi’im (Prophets) after the weekly Torah reading, a practice dating back to the second Temple era, are sometimes used to provide a commentary on the biblical text and in apparent opposition to it.  For example, Toldot (Bereshit 25.19-28.9), which deals with Yaakov’s selection as the bearer of the covenantal mission instead of Esav, has a haftarah (Malakhi 1.1-2.7) that begins by stating God’s love for Yaakov, but goes on not to praise the Israelites or criticise Esav’s descendents as one might expect, but to criticise the Israelites for not serving God as well as the other nations of the world.  Likewise, the sedra of Tzav (Vayikra/Lev. 6.1-8.36) deals with the laws of sacrifices, yet the haftarah (Yirmiyahu/Jer. 7.21-8.3, 9.22-23) is critical of sacrifices offered without being accompanied by obedience to God’s commandments.  Chazal may not have had a postmodern vocabulary, but they clearly understood the postmodern use of intertextual juxtaposition to highlight a multiplicity of opinions.

  Of course, this is all post-biblical.  However, I would suggest there is one clear example within the Torah of a passage that demonstrates that the ancient Israelites did understand their texts in the way that I am suggesting.  This is the sedra of Balak (Bamidbar/Num. 22.2-25.9).  For the bulk of this narrative, the point of view suddenly switches.  Up until this point, we have been focused first on particular righteous individuals, then on the Israelite nation as a whole.  The narrative up until this point has schooled us to think of the Israelites as an argumentative, often rebellious group of freed slaves who have still not quite shaken off the slave mentality.  At this point they have been wandering in the desert for nearly forty years, and although they have repeatedly fought off their attackers, the narrative has concentrated more on their internal discontents and ritual observance than on their military victories.

  Suddenly, we are presented with the view of the Moabite and Midianite nations, who see the Israelites as formidable enemies, intent on conquering them.  This is not true (indeed, the Israelites were to be specifically prohibited from attacking Moab), but the narrative is presented first from the Moabite viewpoint, then from that of the prophet Bilaam, summoned by the Moabite king to curse the Israelites, and they did not know this.  In the end, Bilaam fails, but only because God prevents him from cursing; the Israelites are oblivious to the matter.  The entire story of Balak and Bilaam sees the Torah deconstruct (in the Derridean sense) its own assumptions and oppositions, challenging the reader to reassess who are the ‘heroes’ and the ‘villains’ in the narrative and why we side with one against another.  Even though God thwarts their plans, at no point are Balak and Bilaam labelled as ‘evil’ by the omniscient narrative voice (indeed, the Torah rarely assigns morally descriptive adjectives to people, good or evil).  It is left to the reader to decide whether or not their actions are justified.

  If I were dividing the Torah with the aim of literary purity, the very first thing I would do, long before worrying about the names of God or repetitious passages, would be to completely excise this section, which would seem to come from some non-Israelite text.  Actually, biblical critics pick the narrative apart into J and E, although some wonder if this passage was accidentally (!) added to the narrative, while others argue that the narrative was a literary device used purely to allow the Bilaam’s poems to be added into the text.  Nevertheless, by ascribing the text to the supposed source documents J and E, the biblical critics implicitly accept that the ancient Israelites were capable of understanding a text with multiple viewpoints (either that or they believe they were so stupid that they could not realize that the narrative viewpoint had suddenly shifted – and if we are going to assume stupidity on that scale, then the entire edifice of scholarship, religious and secular, collapses because no consistency or literary technique can be expected, and anything we note is likely to be accidental).  If it is accepted regarding this story the that the ancient Israelites were sophisticated enough to understand such a text, there is no reason why we can not posit that the whole Torah is a single, complex document, produced by a single author (or Author).

  This raises the question of why the Torah is written in this complex style.  I would suggest that it avoids the two main pitfalls organised religion, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

  Firstly, it avoids fundamentalism or fanaticism, where the believer thinks he has sole and total access to word of God.  By writing a complex document, the individual can never be certain he has grasped it in all its details.  The reader must confer and debate with others.  It also makes the reader aware of the ontological divide between God (who grasps the text in all its complexity at once) and humanity (who must slowly build an incomplete understanding of the text, one opinion at a time).

  In addition, as my analysis of the narrative of Balak and Bilaam shows, the very nature of the Torah makes one aware of things that fundamentalists try to avoid: that different groups have their own internally coherent perspective on reality, even when that perspective is completely wrong.  The Torah’s use of unreliable narrators (see my post on The Aural Torah) also makes the reader aware that speech does not, and in some cases should not, correspond exactly to reality.  This suggestion of the perspective-based and limited nature of the human perception and communication of truth, enshrined in Jewish law (which commands majority voting to settle legal disputes, for example) is an inherently anti-fundamentalist idea.

  There is a more positive aspect to this style too.  It helps to avoid spiritual complacency.  We should constantly be surprised by the Torah, even bewildered, because only then can find new meaning in its words.  Studying Torah should not be easy, as it would be if it were easy to read; it should be challenging, confusing, even shocking.

  It is now clear why the Torah has so many stylistic elements in common with postmodernist literature.  The Torah has certain aims in common with the postmodern movement: a degree of relativism (albeit not to same extent); a desire to draw reader into engagement with and discussion of the text rather than passive reading; even a desire to shock the reader and to make him aware of the limits of his own comprehension.