Thursday, August 31, 2006

A rabbinic story

I firmly believe in taking advantage of the serendipitous. Just after writing about conflation and interpolation I ran across this story (in Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus).

Moses (in heaven) requested of God to visit R. Akiba's academy.
Permission was granted. He sat down in the back and listened
to R. Akiba exposit a law puportedly based on the Torah. Moses
didn't understand a word; "his energy flagged." At the end of
R. Akiba's discourse, the students challenged him: "What is your
source?" R. Akiba replied, "halakah lemoseh missinay" (It is)
an oral law from Moses at Sinai.' The story concludes that Moses
was reinvigorated, "His mind was put to rest." (1)

Whether or not Leviticus, or the other books of Moses, are written by Moses is not a question that determines inclusion in Scripture. The question that determines that is whether they are in the tradition, the story line, of Moses? Whether or not they are as God wants them to be? Whether or not we interpret the passages correctly (in light of the Holy Spirit)? Those are the questions that are important for whether a book is of God or not.





(1) Jacob Milgram, Leviticus: a book of ritual and ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2004), p. 2.

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