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Ehave4ever said : " Thus, it is better, and required, for Torath Mosheh Jews and Orthodox Jews to stick to what we have historically and currently investigated and verified to be the truth i.e. Torath Mosheh with the (מסורת) Mesoreth, the texts, and the languages (עברית - ארמית) our investigations and verifications have found it to be correctly transmitted in … (post #441)
Clear replied :
"You indicated to @2ndpillar that the Jewish Orthodox religious movement desires to stick to the text that “we have historically and currently investigated and verified to be the truth” and that “our investigations and verifications have found it to be correctly transmitted in...”.
Can you explain what sort of historical investigation and verifications have been done by your religious movement that verifies the text your movement created is the correct text? (post #465)
Ehave4ever replied : "Concerning how one knows that the Torah that exists in all Torath Mosheh Jewish and Orthodox Jewish is the same as the Torah that Mosheh ben-Amram received from Hashem and transmitted to all Torath Mosheh Iraelis/Jews before they entered into Eretz Yisrael, see below links and see the attached" papers. (post #446)
Hi @Ehave4ever :
I had intended to go through all your links but cannot get past the bizarre nature of your first link. We have to discuss it.
The first link you gave me was NOT evidence of an authentic historical “investigation” and certainly not a “verification” of the biblical text created by the Rabbinic movement.
You claim that you have
knowledge that the version of the Torah your Jewish movement created is “
verified to be the truth” and your “
investigations and verifications have found it to be correctly transmitted…” (post #441) and that the version of the Torah created by your specific movement is “
the same as the Torah”
that Moses received from God and was transmitted to Jews “
before they entered into” the land of Israel". (all Bold and underline are mine)
Yet your first link that you offered does NOT show this.
For example, the author of the first blog site admits his evidence departs “
from the standard academic method” and instead simply assumes the text is correct unless one can prove it isn’t.
The author of the blog says :
“In addition to this, we will also depart from academics in the following. We will assume that, absent any evidence to the contrary, the text that is agreed upon by the Jewish community - the textus receptus that is claimed to be the Masoretic Text - is correct” (G. Student)
This is NOT a “verification” that the text is correct, but instead the author defines tradition as the criteria for acceptance. The paper admits there are many variations and mistakes in the Torah Scrolls but that no one can prove the Masoretic version is the incorrect one so it is to be accepted.
1) CONFLATING “MYTHS” AND “TRADITIONS” WITH ACTUAL “HISTORY”
Simply assuming the Masoretic text is correct is not a “
verification” that the Masoretic is correct, nor it is a verification that it is “THE” version Moses received from God.
Not only does the author admit that his claims
“depart from the standard academic method”, but the author conflates HISTORY with TRADITION and thus offers multiple dubious traditional myths as though they were actual history. For example, he says :
“One can only imagine the awe the king felt when he held and read from the Torah written by Moshe on the last day of his life.”
Such assumptions are not historical, but they are merely tradition.
It’s not just that Moses could not have written the entire Torah
in a single day, but such claims are made inside the reference that Josiah found three
DIFFERENT Torahs which conflicted with each other.
And, no one could tell which of the three would have been the one Moses wrote
“on the last day of his life.”
And they created a fourth Torah from the three versions.
Offering such incomplete and dubious traditions instead of actual history negates the blogs “information” as verification of your claim that any of these four versions OR the 5th created by the Rabbinic movement in the Medieval times are the words given to Moses and are correct..
The “history” presented here is full of holes and absent data and absent time periods and lacks facts and lacks a chain of events that creates credible history for a single text.
For example, the author says :
“What happened to this Torah of Moshe is unclear, although there are rumors of it resurfacing later in history. “
While it is true that no one knows what happened to this version of the Torah, the
“rumors” of it
“resurfacing” and the associated stories are not “history” they are Jewish “rumors” and “traditions”.
To his credit, the author admits Radak” said :
"the books were lost and dispersed and the sages who were skilled in Bible were dead."
However, Despite the fact that no one knows more than a miniscule amount of what these conflicting versions of the Torah said, Radak then irrationally suggested :
“it was at this point that multiple spellings and even word differences were introduced into the biblical texts.”
Since no one knows what these versions said (other than very few examples of their conflicting verses), no information is given that actually shows what “differences were introduced into the biblical texts”
at that point.
It is not a silly conclusion to admit that multiple changes have always been introduced into various versions, but
it is silly to assume changes did not occur in texts prior to that time in the face of having three different versions already at that time found in just one place and time.
Who know how many hundreds of versions and conflicts existed BEFORE Josiah and his four different versions?
The fact that there were at least three versions before Josiah had the fourth version created, means that such changes had taken place BEFORE that point in history.
The also doesn’t seem to realize the implication of creating a fourth version by “the rule of simple “majority”. (Where, if two agreed against the third, the fourth version simply used the text used by two version in agreement.)
This is a simple rule but it is a bad rule to create a text by.
Creating a text by the rule of majority undermines the claim that
“investigations and verifications have found it to be correctly transmitted…” (post #441) or that it is “
the same as the Torah” that Moses received from God and was transmitted to Jews
“before they entered into” the land of Israel.
Rather than any verification of the fourth text being the “correct” one, the rule simply confirms yet another version was created.
2) MORE CONFLATING MYTH AND TRADITION WITH HISTORY
This author claims that
“This Torah that Ezra wrote” had
“almost no differences” and ignores the fact that the history doesn’t tell us how many differences there were and what all of the differences were (though three examples are given us in tradition).
And, he makes this claim, despite having told us that :
"the books were lost and dispersed and the sages who were skilled in Bible were dead."
And having told us
“What happened to this Torah of Moshe is unclear…”
Perhaps he forgot these facts because he then then claims that this lost text
“has played a special role in history.”
And he then says : “
Some claim that it remained until medieval times. “
Statements such as : “
Some claim it remained” is hardly history, or “investigation’ or “verification”.
This is not a historical blog that is a verification of the text.
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