In a prior post I have argued that Jews should take the Torah seriously but not literally. I append below a brief essay on this subject excerpted from my Come Now, Let Us Reason Together.
It is evident that the insistence by some on a literal reading of the Torah distracts us from God’s message, and to illustrate this point, consider the creation narrative set forth in Genesis. Here, the Torah says that the world and everything in it were created in six days, and on the seventh day, “God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased . . . And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy.” According to Chazal, the Almighty did this—as of this writing—5,784 years ago.
However, if this is true, God must be, at best, some sort of strange prankster, intentionally warping or distorting the empirical evidence (or our understanding of it) to deceive the world’s leading scientists, who estimate the age of the universe at roughly 13.8 billion years. As will be seen, the Torah depicts humankind as curious, truth-seeking beings, so there is no reason to believe that the Almighty wished to subvert the scientific enterprise by deceiving humanity regarding the true age of the world. The biblical version may have seemed plausible 500 years ago, but today it invites mockery, thus diverting readers from the Torah’s spiritual and ethical values.
Accordingly, Genesis’s narrative of six days of creation followed by a seventh day of rest is not, in this interpretation, intended as cosmology. Instead, it is meant to instill in Jews such essential values as the imperative to emulate God to the best of one’s finite ability; the importance of periodically engaging in sincere reflection about conduct toward loved ones and the larger community; the sanctity of human life even above the sanctity of the Sabbath, as well as more esoteric insights. One example of the latter is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s (1907–1972), the famous Orthodox-trained rabbi, exegete, and civil rights icon, view that the Sabbath represents and proclaims the superiority of the realm of time (spirit) over the realm of space (material objects).
It is also the case that adopting an interpretative approach that regards the narrative portions of Pentateuch as moral philosophy in the guise of literature frees the reader from the futile effort to reconcile the text’s literal meaning with its radically open-ended hermeneutics. By way of example, if Abraham and Isaac are understood as literary characters employed allegorically, the reader need not accept that God actually demands the sacrifice described in the Akedah (the “binding of Isaac,” see Genesis, ch. 22). Accordingly, they may proceed to more abstract and penetrating readings, such as the one proposed by Professor Israel Knohl, a highly respected scholar of the Hebrew Bible, who opines that this story is intended to resolve a fundamental conflict in Judaism’s conception of God:
In this story, the rational and ethical dimensions of God, symbolized by the name “YHWH,” overrule the numinous dimensions, symbolized by the name “Elohim.” . . . the child intended for the sacrifice is replaced by the ram, and understanding the import of the story more broadly, the practice of child sacrifice can by replaced in Israel by animal sacrifice. The Akedah story can thus be seen as an allegory of this momentous change in the religion of Israel.
In the words of Howard Wettstein, one of Judaism’s leading philosophers, “The Bible’s theological concepts and implicit beliefs remain uncrystallized. They are formulated by way of literary tropes . . . poetically infused, not propositionally articulated.” In sum, nothing is gained and much is lost by insisting on a literal reading of the Torah.
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