Richard Elliott Friedman > Quotes

“Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.”
― Richard Friedman

“One of the logical consequences of monotheism is guilt.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“Gen 22:11–16a The story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac is traced to E. It refers to the deity as Elohim in vv. 1,3,8, and 9. But, just as Abraham’s hand is raised with the knife to sacrifice Isaac, the text says that the angel of Yahweh stops him (v. 11). The verses in which Isaac is spared refer to the deity as Yahweh (vv. 11–14). These verses are followed by a report that the angel speaks a second time and says, “… because you did not withhold your son from me….” Thus the four verses which report that Isaac was not sacrificed involve both a contradiction and a change of the name of the deity. As extraordinary as it may seem, it has been suggested that in the original version of this story Isaac was actually sacrificed, and that the intervening four verses were added subsequently, when the notion of human sacrifice was rejected (perhaps by the person who combined J and E). Of course, the words “you did not withhold your son” might mean only that Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son. But still it must be noted that the text concludes (v. 19), “And Abraham returned to his servants.” Isaac is not mentioned. Moreover, Isaac never again appears as a character in E. Interestingly, a later midrashic tradition developed this notion, that Isaac actually had been sacrificed. This tradition is discussed in S. Spiegel’s The Last Trial (New York: Schocken, 1969; Hebrew edition 1950).”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“We all know that there are harsh passages toward others in the Bible as well: dispossess the Canaanites, destroy Jericho, etc. But, as I said earlier, the evidence on the ground indicates that most of that (the Conquest) never happened. Likewise in the case of the destruction of the Midianites, as I described in Chapter 4, this was a story in the Priestly (P) source written as a polemic against any connection between Moses and Midian. It is a polemical story in literature, not a history of anything that actually happened. At the time that the Priestly author wrote the instruction to kill the Midianites, there were not any Midianites in the region. The Midianite league had disappeared at least four hundred years earlier. As we saw in Chapter 2, it was an attested practice in that ancient world to claim to have wiped out one's enemies when no such massacre had actually occurred. King Merneptah of Egypt did it. King Mesha of Moab did it. And, so there is no misunderstanding, the purpose of bringing up those parallels is not to say that it was all right to do so. It is rather to recognize that, even in what are possibly the worst passages about warfare in the Bible, those stories do not correspond to any facts of history. They are the words of an author writing about imagined events of a period centuries before his own time. And, even then, they are laws of war only against specific peoples: Canaanites, Amalekites, and Midianites, none of whom exist anymore. So they do not apply to anyone on earth. The biblical laws concerning war in general, against all other nations, for all the usual political and economic reasons that nations go to war, such as wars of defense or territory, do not include the elements that we find shocking about those specific cases. ...

Now one can respond that even if these are just fictional stories they are still in the Bible, after all, and can therefore be regarded as approving of such devastating warfare. That is a fair point to raise. I would just add this caution: when people cherry-pick the most offensive passages in the Bible in order to show that it is bad, they have every right to point to those passages, but they should acknowledge that they are cherry-picking, and they should pay due recognition to the larger--vastly larger--ongoing attitude to aliens and foreigners. In far more laws and cases, the principle of treatment of aliens is positive.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus

“The chief pagan god in the region that was to become Israel was El. El was male, patriarchal, a ruler.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“Investigators found that in most cases one of the two versions of a doublet story would refer to the deity by the divine name, Yahweh (formerly mispronounced Jehovah), and the other version of the story would refer to the deity simply as “God.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“Every biblical story reflects something that mattered to its author. Whenever we figure out what it was and why it mattered, we move a step closer to knowing who wrote a part of the Bible.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“10:10. to distinguish. Leviticus is concerned with orderliness. This orderliness is reminiscent of the creation account in Genesis 1. There are key parallels of wording, especially the term for distinction (lēhabdîl). As God creates by making distinctions, expressed in divine speech, in Genesis ("God distinguished between the light and the darkness"), so the function of the priesthood is described in Leviticius as "to distinguish (lēbabdîl) between the holy and the secular, and between the impure and the pure." Here the law is conceived as a reflection in the human realm of the order that was originally pictured in the cosmic realm.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“no word in the Hebrew language of that period for “religion.” Religion was not a separate, identifiable category of beliefs and activities. It was an inseparable, pervasive part of life.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“... P doth protest to much. It would be one thing if P were merely silent about Midian. But P is hostile to Midian. Its author tells a story of a complete massacre of the Midianites. He wants no Midianites around. And he especially wants no Midianite women around. This author buried the Moses-Midian connection. We can know why he did this. Practically all critical scholars ascribe this Priestly work to the established priesthood at Jerusalem. For most of the biblical period, that priesthood traced its ancestry to Aaron, the first high priest. It was a priesthood of Levites, but not the same Levites who gave us the E text. Some, including me, ascribe the E text to Levites who traced their ancestry to Moses. These two Levite priestly houses, the Aaronids and the Mushites, were engaged in struggles for leadership and in polemic against each other. The E (Mushite) source took pains, as we have seen to connect Moses' Midianite family back to Abraham. That is understandable. E was justifying the Mushite Levites' line in Israel's history. And it is equally understandable why their opponents, the Aaronids, cast aspersions on any Midianite background. That put a cloud over any Levites, or any text, that claimed a Midianite genealogy. We all could easily think of parallel examples in politics and religion in history and today.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus

“There are two different stories of the creation of the world. There are two stories of the covenant between God and the patriarch Abraham, two stories of the naming of Abraham’s son Isaac, two stories of Abraham’s claiming to a foreign king that his wife Sarah is his sister, two stories of Isaac’s son Jacob making a journey to Mesopotamia, two stories of a revelation to Jacob at Beth-El, two stories of God’s changing Jacob’s name to Israel, two stories of Moses’ getting water from a rock at a place called Meribah, and more.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“The document that was associated with the divine name Yahweh/Jehovah was called J. The document that was identified as referring to the deity as God (in Hebrew, Elohim) was called E. The third document, by far the largest, included most of the legal sections and concentrated a great deal on matters having to do with priests, and so it was called P. And the source that was found only in the book of Deuteronomy was called D. The question was how to uncover the history of these four documents—not only who wrote them, but why four different versions of the story were written, what their relationship to each other was, whether any of the authors were aware of the existence of the others’ texts, when in history each was produced, how they were preserved and combined, and a host of other questions. The first step was to try to determine the relative order in which they were written. The idea was to try to see if each version reflected a particular stage in the development of religion in biblical Israel. This approach reflected the influence in nineteenth-century Germany of Hegelian notions of historical development of civilization. Two nineteenth-century figures stand out. They approached the problem in very different ways, but they arrived at complementary findings. One of them,”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“19.2. be holy. What is meant here by being holy? The chapter that begins with this statement stands out because, perhaps more than any other in the Torah, it merges major commandments with so many different sorts. It includes most of the Ten Commandments, sacrifices, justice, caring for the poor and the infirm, treatment of women, of the elderly, food, magic, loving one's neighbor as oneself, loving an alien as oneself. If one had to choose only one chapter out of the Torah to make known, it might well be this one.

The strange mixing of so many different kinds of commandments may convey that every commandment is important. Even if we are naturally inclined to regard some commandments as more important than others, and some commandments as most important of all, this tapestry presses us to see what is important and valuable in every commandment, even commandments that one may question.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“25:10. a jubilee: you shall go back, each to his possession. In the law of the jubilee, YHWH commands that every fifty years all property is to return to the original owners. This appears to be an economic program designed to prevent the feudal system, common in the rest of the ancient Near East, from developing in Israel. That is, it functions to prevent the establishment of a class of wealthy landowners at the top of the economic scale and a mass of landless peasants at the bottom. Every Israelite is to be apportioned some land (described in the books of Numbers and Joshua), and the deity commands that in every fiftieth year the system returns to where it started. If an Israelite has lost his ancestral land as a result of debt or calamity, he regains ownership of it in the jubilee year. Land is unalienable. Individuals can suffer difficult times, but there is a divinely decreed limit to their loss, and the nation as a whole can never degenerate into a two-tiered system of the very rich and the very poor.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“3:14. the snake. Just a snake, not the devil or Satan as later Christian interpretation pictured. As the curse that follows indicates, the story has to do with the fate of snakes, not with the cosmic role of a devil. There is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“24:20 an eye for an eye. Perhaps the most perplexing of the ethical laws is the principle of justice expressed in the formulation "an eye for an eye" It has frequently been cited as evidence of the stern character of YHWH, but that is a misunderstanding. In its context in Leviticus it applies solely to human justice. YHWH Himself frequently follows a more relenting course than that, from the golden calf event to a series of reprieves for seemingly undeserving individuals and communities in subsequent books of the Tanakh. As for the meaning of this formulation for human justice, we must read it in its context, where the basic principle appears to be that punishment should correspond to the crime and never exceed it”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“2:9. tree of knowledge of good and bad. Not good and "evil," as this is usually understood and translated. "Evil" suggests that this is strictly moral knowledge. But the Hebrew word (rā') has a much wider range of meaning than that.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“20:13. murder. Hebrew, like English, distinguishes between "murder" and "killing." "Murder" refers only to the taking of human life, and it is subject to the death penalty only when committed with malicious intent. The cases of manslaughter, killing through negligence, killing in war, execution for crimes, killing animals, animals killing humans, and human sacrifice are all treated separately from this in the Torah, and terms other than "murder" are used.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“3:8. across the Jordan. This phrase occurs several times in Moses' speech in Deuteronomy. Ibn Ezra hinted at a secret implied by this and several other matters in the Torah, and added, "One who understands should keep silent." But scholars of later centuries no longer kept silent. The issue, presumably, was that the land in question is across the Jordan only from the point of view of someone writing in Israel. Moses, who never set foot in Israel, would not be expected to refer to the place where he was standing as across the Jordan. Of course might say that Moses says this phrase with a future audience in mind, a people settled in Israel. But Ibn Ezra's comments are important as being among the first hints that some of the traditional rabbinic commentators questioned whether Moses wrote the Torah. That question—how the Torah came to exist—has become a central concern of biblical scholarship in the last two centuries.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“when I have presented this subject in university classes, I have tried to be as sensitive to the feelings of my fundamentalist and orthodox students as possible. The goal was not to shake them up or produce faith crises.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View into the Five Books of Moses

“The ritual and the ethical are two components of religion—and of Leviticus—that do not justify each other, but rather unite and produce mutual support. Indeed, it is instructive that Leviticus, a book that is so fundamentally concerned with distinction, does not make any explicit distinction between its ethical and its ritual laws. Sometimes they are mixed together, but they are never identified as two distinct categories of law.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“Could it not be that Moses and/or the Levites just came to it on their own?! Scholars have a tendency to take any parallel between ancient Israel's culture and assume that Israel took it from the others. Why? I see no good reason at all. Did Moses get this religion from the Midianites? All right then, where did the Midianites get it? Did Moses get if from Akhenaten? All right then, where did Akhenaten get it? If Ahkenaten thought of it on his own, why could an Israelite not have done it on his (or her) own as well? Is it a far-out thought that sometimes more than one person thinks of an idea--without influencing each other, without knowing each other?

And we have another crucial consideration. The difference between Israel's monotheism and whatever preceded it is more than arithmetic. It is not just one god versus many. Biblical religion involves a different conception of what this one God is. In pagan religion, the gods and goddesses were identified with forces in nature: the sun, the sky, the sea, death, fertility, the storm wind. Even in Akhenaten's religion, whether it was fully monotheistic or not, Aten was identified closely with the sun. In Israelite religion, no force in nature can tell you more about God than any other.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus

“4:3. the anointed priest. Hebrew hakkōhēn hammāšîaḥ. This is the first occurence of the word māšîaḥ, meaning "anointed" and commonly translated elsewhere in the Tanakh as "Messiah." In the Torah māšîaḥalways refers to the high priest and not, as it later came to mean, the king.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“We do a disservice when we interpret ritual matters in terms of ethical justifications. We move ourselves even farther from the appreciation of ritual and the awe before the holy. Similarly, when we say that the Hebrew word qādōš means a neutral kind of "separate" rather than meaning "holy, sacred," we further lose our feeling for holiness. And perhaps we err similarly when we say that Hebrew ḥātā means "to miss the mark" rather than "to sin," to do something wrong that places us in a state that needs to be remedied through atonement and/or sacrifice and/or compensation.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“20:4. statue. Pagan religion in the ancient Near East, as in Greece, was not idol worship. The statues of the gods and goddesses were icons, symbols that represented the deities' presence. They provided a direction for prayer, a feeling of awe, a sense of one's god's closeness. But pagans did not believe that the statue was the god.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“26.11. my soul. Does God have a soul? This is the only place in the Torah that refers to the deity's nepeš (although a related verbal form, wayyinnāpaš, ocurs in Exod 31:17). Elsewhere, the word refers to the living quality in humans and animals and is associated with breath. It is usually understood to mean soul, person, being, and life. It might possibly help us to understand what is meant by creation in the image of God, but that seems unlikely since animals are said to have a nepeš there as well, but they are not said to be in the divien image (Gen 1:24-27). We must be cautious in using the word's occurrences here to conclude anything about the Torah's conception of God, because both of these occurrences are in the phrase "my soul will scorn." This phrase may simply have been a known expression.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“6:4. YWHH is one. In comparing Israel's monotheism to pagan religion, we must appreciate the difference between one and many is not the same sort of thing as the difference between two and three or between six and twenty. It is not numerical. It is a different concept of what a god is. A God who is outside of nature, known through acts in history, a creator, unseeable, without a mate, who makes legal covenants with humans, who is one, is a revolution in religious conception.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed

“missîm. The term missîm in Hebrew refers to a sort of tax, not of money but of physical labor. Citizens owed a month of required work to the government each year.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

“7:14. blessed. This word in the Torah generally refers to being well off. Here it is explicitly connected with fertility and good health. So when it says that Israel will be more blessed than other peoples if they keep their covenant, it does not mean that Israel will have some special status, but rather it means that God will bless them with well-being.”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah

“Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918)”
― Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?