Basing Judaism on Truth: Does the Torah Lie?

This term is used in Barry W. Holtz, Textual Knowledge:  Teaching the Bible in Theory and Practice (NY: JTS Press, 2012); it has a more neutral ring than “biblical criticism.”

In his TABS essay, “Metempsychosis (Gilgul), Academic Study of the Bible, and the Meaning of Truth,” Isaac Sassoon also deals with the fear issue, and the problematic responses it engenders.

See David Frankel’s TABS essay, “Torah Narratives with Angels Never Actually Happened: Heretical or Sublime?” See also Gregg Stern’s TABS essay “Allegorizers of Torah and the Story of their Prosecution in Languedoc (1305)” See also my article, “The Bible as History,” in People of Faith and Biblical Criticism (eds., Yehudah Brandes, Tova Ganzel and Chayuta Deutsch; Jerusalem: Beit Morasha, 2015), 211-223 [Hebrew]. For more on this book see, “An Interview with Dr. Tova Ganzel.”

NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007, pp. 38-40.

For an example of a story in the Torah whose plot is based on a discredited scientific notion, see Zev Farber’s TABS essay, “Maternal Impressions: From Sheep to Humans – Jacob’s Ancient Scientific Trick.” See also Ziony Zevit’s analysis of the creation story, in his TABS essay, “Before the Beginning: Appreciating the Thought of an Ancient Cosmologist.” He comes at the account assuming that the author is trying to describe factually how creation happened and is still able to learn much about how the Torah thinks about God and the universe and notice intersections with modern cosmology.

For more on this see Hartley Koschitzky’s TABS essay, “The Chronicles of Divine Justice: Why God Destroyed the Kingdom of Judah.”

See Menachem Kellner’s TABS essay, “Must we have Heretics.”

See Steve Bayme’s “Embracing Academic Torah Study: Modern Orthodoxy’s Challenge,”  Eric Grossman’s “Bible Scholarship in Orthodoxy,”  and Zev Farber’s, “Can Orthodox Education Survive Biblical Criticism.”