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  • From: Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] daughters jacob never spoke of
  • Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:30:52 -0500

Dear Shoshanna,

Except that's not what happened. Yigal explained it very well


HH: I wrote what I did before Yigal said anything, but in fact claiming authority to give truth that is not in Scripture can obviously lead to perversion since people may have few ways to check whether you are telling the truth. Even the prophets themselves verify to such corruption of God's word by men in positions of authority:

Jer. 8:8 How can you say, “We are wise,
and the law of the LORD is with us,”
when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes
has made it into a lie?

HH: And the idea that every interpretation about the quality of the behavior of everyone in Genesis has been passed down from Moses seems to go beyond what Yigal said. He spoke about there being no need for subsequent additions to the written Law, which I understood to concern how people where to act and live. Of course, a rebuttal to Yigal is that no Oral Torah is needed for this since the Written Torah is sufficient in itself. Certainly, there were things not included in the written law. For example, there were accepted ways of slaughtering animals, but that does not have to be a matter of God-given law. God accepted the ways that the people already had of doing many things. I am not saying that tradition is not good or important. I am saying that it is not necessarily God-given law. We go to Scripture to check whether something is God-given law, and that is what God intended that we do, since Yigal is right that the law was given in one period of time.

HH: The claim that Rashi's view necessarily represents the view of Moses of course shuts down disagreement. But Rashi is just a man who lived in the Middle Ages (1040-1105 C.E.) and tried to understand the Tanakh the best he could, just as the rest of us do. He was an outstanding commentator, but his views are not automatically right, nor do they automatically go back to Moses. The fact that the rabbis and wise men disagreed about all sorts of things and contradicted one another at times ought to show that they do not necessarily speak from Moses.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard


The idea that there is an oral law equally as authoritative as the
written law is highly dubious to me. You say that this prevents
mistranslation, but it allows the importation of every kind of merely
human idea and even perversion of God's word. God warns against adding
to his word, and a proposed "oral law" does just that. It presents
something as having the same authority as the written word, from what
you say, and thereby adds to God's word.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard






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