TALMUD AND AUTHORITY
by Avram Yehoshua
(Endnotes in red. Click on the number to go to the endnote. Click the BACK button on your browser to return to the article)
The Rabbis tell us that the authority of the Talmud
(and therefore their
authority), is derived from God Himself. The
progression goes like this: God
gave the Oral Tradition (the basis for the Talmud),
to Moses;
'Moses passed it on to Joshua. Joshua gave it to the
Elders. The Elders gave
it to the Prophets, and the Prophets gave it to the
Men of the Great
Assembly'1 (in Ezra and Nehemiah's day).
The Rabbis tell us that Talmud divinely supplements
Torah or teaches us of
things that the Torah fails to mention (like how a
Jew is to conduct himself
in certain situations or that he must wash his hands
and say the divinely
approved blessing before blessing the Lord for the
food and how the
sacrifice should be slaughtered; where to cut the
throat, etc.). And if they
don't follow Talmud, it is seen as sin. Allegedly
all Talmud is from Yahveh.
'According to Rabbi Pinhas Kehati, a modern Mishnaic
scholar in Jerusalem,'2
'The purpose of this opening statement (in Pirke
Avot), is to teach us that
every word cited in this tractate, as indeed the
whole of the oral Torah'
(Oral Law-Talmud), 'can in their systematic form be
traced back through the
Prophets to Moshe Rabbeinu' (Moses our Teacher),
'the father of all
prophets, who received the whole 'Torah, it's laws,
rules of inference and
interpretations, from the Almighty Himself.'3
The problem with this is that nothing can be traced
back to the Prophets and
therefore to Moses. The line stops at Babylon. The
Rabbis say that Talmud or
Oral Law came from Moses, who got it from Yahveh.
But there isn't one rabbi
(or anyone else), named in Talmud that goes back
before Babylonian
captivity, around 580 BCE. That's not to contest the
fact that the seminal
form of Talmud (Mishna), is ancient. But ancient
doesn't equal divine and
there's a long void between Moses and Babylon; about
900 years. There is no
authoritative connection between what Moses taught
and the Rabbis claiming
that their authority was given to them by Moses by
way of the Oral Law. The
Rabbis invented the story that says that Moses
handed down Talmud to them.
They did this to establish their own authority as
being derived from Moses,
who of course, got his authority from Yahveh.
Adding to that we find two major problems presenting
themselves to the
rabbinic assertion that Moses gave us Talmud. When
Hilkiah the High Priest,
under the direction of King Josiah, found the Torah
(Law of Moses), in the
Temple (2nd Kings 22-23), there is no mention of an
'Oral Law' accompanying
it or that an oral law even existed.4 When they
found the Torah, the
implication is that there was nothing of Yahveh that
they had before, to
lead them in His Way. If there was an oral
tradition, that should have
helped them. This happened about 630 BCE, about
forty years before the
Babylonian captivity.
The second concern is when Joshua led Israel in
reaffirming the Covenant at
Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal (Joshua 8:31-35). Verse 35
tells us that Joshua
gave them all that Moses had received from Yahveh:
'There was not a word of all that Mosheh had
commanded which Joshua did not
read before all the assembly.'
It states that only what was written was read or
mentioned, not recognizing
an Oral Law.5
Josh. 8:32: 'He wrote there on the stones a copy of
the Law of Moses which
he had written, in the presence of the Sons of
Israel.'
Josh. 8:34: 'Then afterward he read all the words of
the Law, the blessing
and the curse, according to all that is written in
the Book of the Law.'
There is absolutely no mention of any Oral Law that
had to be obeyed or that
was commended by Moses to Joshua. Finally, when
Joshua was encouraging the
people, just before he dies, he tells them to cling
to all that is written
in the Torah of Moses, so that good will come to
them. No mention is made of
an Oral Law that the people should have also
followed, if one existed.6
(Joshua 23:6-8)
Josh. 23:6: 'Be very firm, then, to keep and do all
that is written in the
Book of the Law of Moses, so that you may not turn
aside from it to the
right hand or to the left,'
The fact that no one named in Talmud lived before
the Babylonian captivity
and that King Josiah had no knowledge of any Oral
Tradition, and that Joshua
only points to a written Law confirms that Talmud
did not have its source
from Moses. This shows that the authority that the
Rabbis claim does not
directly come from Yahveh and that Talmud, as
helpful as it might be on some
occasions and as destructive as it might be on
others, is not divinely
authoritative.
END NOTES
- Ariel & Devorah Berkowitz, Torah Rediscovered
(Lakewood, CO: First Fruits
of Zion, 1996), p. 81. This is from the Mishna,
tractate Pirke Avot 1:1.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. p. 167. From Rabbi Pinhas Kehati, Mishnah:
Seder Nezikin, vol. 4
(Jerusalem, 1994), VII 7.
- Ibid. p. 85.
- Ibid. p. 86.
- Ibid. p. 86-87.
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