False prophets

God: According to Jewish tradition, God 'wrote' the Torah. That is to say, God is the author. However, even among most Orthodox, it was a human (usually identified as Moses) who actually penned the parchment. The 'midrash' very fancifully has God actually writing the Torah in very anthropomorphic terms. The point is, that if God is the author, (discounting scribal errors on the part of Moses, human secretary), the book is Divine. Divine authorship means that the text is perfect: no contradictions, no extraneous information, no mistakes. Anything that appears problematic is because of OUR limited understanding. If the Torah seems to contradict scientific knowledge, then either science will be proven wrong, or we do not understand the Bible properly. If the Torah is God's word, then every word and letter has deep meaning. The Torah is eternally valid, and speaks to today as much as it did to our ancestors. This is the traditional approach to Torah study.

People: Critical scholarship holds that the Torah is a human document, written over a period of time, by numerous authors. (This explains the apparent contradictions, repetitions, etc.) The Torah is a product of a specific time period, and the Torah (like a pot found at an archeological site) is an article that allows us to peek into a window of how the ancient Israelites lived and what they believed. Even the medieval Rabbis had their doubts about Moses being the sole author (like when the Torah writes, 'and Moses died.') But it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (along with all the other intellectual revolutions) that 'Mosaic/Divine' authorship was seriously questioned. The most famous proponent of this was the Graf/Wellhausen theory called the documentary hypothesis. Using literary style, names of God, and other clues, they identified four strains or sources they called J, E, P and D. This is the scholarly, 'critical' approach to Torah study.

Both: We can believe that both God and humans had a 'hand' in writing the Torah. If Revelation means that God revealed (communicated) the Torah to humans, then God AND people share in its writing. God inspired the people who wrote the Torah. That means we can find both God's eternal message, as well as layers of a historical process. (Which is which is sometimes a problem). This approach posits that God 'reveals' divine truth (in a way only known to God) that individual(s) wrote down, or passed down. This may have been much like the composer's or inventor's flash of inspiration. Another possibility is that the Torah is our response to historical events shaped by God's master plan. As modern liberal Jews, we have the option to try and balance both these approaches. Our Torah study can be sensitive the nuances of the text (as if God wrote it) yet aware of the historical processes and analytic tools of scientific criticism. This way we can synthesize both traditional and modern methods of Torah study.

No matter what our personal beliefs, two things seem indisputable: the Torah is a record of the ancient Israelites' encounter with the Divine; for thousands of years, Jews have read/studied the Torah as a way of connecting with that Divine voice.