One of the most difficult questions for modern readers of the Torah is simply this: Who wrote it? Modern scholarship of the Bible (both Jewish and Christian) suggests that the Torah is an edited or "redacted" compilation of the writings of many different authors. A close look at the biblical text supports this notion. Sections appear to be repetitive, obscure, even self-contradictory. If the Bible came from different sources, these discrepancies would make more sense as editing choices. However, for millennia traditional Judaism has taught that the Bible is not the work of human hands; rather, God revealed the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, and Moses simply acted as God's scribe and wrote it down.
For a modern religious reader, navigating between these disparate viewpoints creates tension. We could accept the claim that God gave the Torah exactly as written, but this ignores the work of critical scholars. On the other hand, if we accept the claim that the Bible is the product of several human authors, then the biblical text is reduced from divine revelation to a document of human imagination, not unlike a play by Shakespeare or a Greek epic. However, it is self-defeating to reject the Torah as merely a work of human origins and to assume that apparent paradoxes undermine its value. Perhaps the human authors were working under divine inspiration. Surely those who edited the Torah understood that there were so-called contradictions inherent in the text. Our challenge is to understand why these portions were left in and what their underlying message means to us.
The different Jewish movements have different positions on this issue. Orthodox Judaism treats the Torah as a text given by God through Moses on Mount Sinai. Therefore, from the perspective of Orthodox Judaism, the Torah is entirely the revealed word of God, and all of it is divine truth. Thus, much of the effort of Torah study is devoted to trying to follow the instructions of the Torah and to clarify whatever is unclear.
The Reform movement, on the other hand, does not accept the Torah as a document given by God at a specific time and place. The movement accepts the views of biblical scholars that the Torah is a composite document. Thus, aspects of the Torah have been taken as figurative rather than literal truth by Reform Jews. The founder of the Reform movement in North America, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, considered the Ten Commandments as the only part of the Torah that was, in fact, revealed by God.
Reform Judaism speaks of the Torah as "evolving revelation". According to this view, the writing of the Torah was the work of religious geniuses who encountered God and wrote about their experience. Evolving revelation suggests that God is still communicating with us, and the purpose of studying Torah is to discover how God communicated to our forbears so that we might be able to discern God's presence in our own lives.
For the most part, Conservative Judaism follows Orthodoxy, although its scholars apply the scientific method to their study. While the Reconstructionist movement is currently undergoing renewal, its classic position is more akin to the Reform movement in its understanding of the Torah. Reconstructionism does not acknowledge an immanent God; as a result, such a God cannot inspire the direct development of a text. What makes the text so important is that it is the collective history of the folk, the people of Israel – a core concept in Reconstructionist thinking.
