Amanda Chaitt is the author of Crimson to White - My Call for Jewish Rebirth
PART ONE:
A nonobservant Jew with a limited Jewish education who has just read my upcoming memoir of spiritual return, Crimson to White: My Call for Jewish Rebirth, might think Well, good for her, but of what relevance is it to me? What, I’m going to go and change my life for something that isn’t true? Anticipating that possibility, I have marshaled all the evidence I could find proving that the Torah—believed (by some) to be antiquated, discredited, and cobbled together over centuries by various human beings with vested interests—is in fact a faithful reflection of the words of God given to the prophet Moses on Mount Sinai, over 3,300 years ago. Join me on this odyssey and see what you conclude at the end.
One eternal yet neglected truth—that God chose the Jewish people and gave us His Torah to uphold—explains a wide range of phenomena that have puzzled the finest minds for centuries. This extraordinary axiom is supported by clear, verifiable evidence. I hang my hat on one of the few useful concepts I retain from high school biology, Occam’s razor, otherwise known as the Law of Parsimony: if a single cause can account for many, many different effects, it is likely to be responsible for them.
But wait, you may laugh: haven’t you skipped the crucial step of proving the existence of a Creator? I recommend that clever skeptics read the succinct article “Smarter than Aristotle” on my website resource page. The piece argues that human beings have resented divine limits on their behavior since the dawn of time.
Moral freedom—identified in this essay as a “bribe”—is what motivates the insistence of the scientific community on wholly natural explanations for the universe, when the physical evidence doesn’t justify their conclusions. The hostility with which too many scientists greet discussion of Intelligent Design reveals that they are guilty of the same ingratitude displayed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As King Solomon wrote almost three thousand years ago: “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
A Creator Who has chosen to keep His existence in doubt suggests that there is more to the world than meets the scientific eye. The transcendental purpose of our lives is surely reflected in the insatiable human quest to answer existential questions of meaning.
So let us tackle the evidence for the more specific claim that God chose the Jews, gave us the Torah that we possess, and enjoins us to live according to its rules and values. If I can establish this foundation, the choice to believe in a Creator will be easier. For the sake of organization, I divide the phenomena that reflect this claim into evident and speculative, beginning with the former.
The first category of demonstrable evidence for the truth of the Torah tradition is the archaeological record, which continues to corroborate the Hebrew Bible. (For those who yawn at the mention of archaeology, plenty of contemporary topical evidence follows.)
Biblical Archaeology
In the modern history of biblical archaeology, academics shifted their stance over the last century. Until the mid-1900s, leading experts such as William F. Albright and John Garstang embraced the Book of Books as a solid guide to uncovering truth in the ground. Today, archaeologists, influenced by Julius Wellhausen and other biblical revisionists, hold the Bible in contempt as history. Unable to deny the evidence in the earth, the best strategy these biblical minimalists can employ to cast doubt on the Bible’s veracity is to date their findings one or two hundred years earlier or later in antiquity, so that they won’t precisely align with the biblical record.
For example, everyone agrees that the remains of ancient Jericho in Israel’s Jordan Valley correspond, with every detail, to the biblical description of Joshua’s conquest: collapsed walls; evidence of massive destruction by fire; and jars full of grain left behind, confirming that the Israelites obeyed their leader Joshua and did not plunder the city. However, British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon insisted on dating this destruction 150 years earlier than the biblical account, claiming that by the time of Joshua, there was nothing left to destroy. In the 1980s, American archaeologist Bryant G. Wood extensively analyzed pottery sherds found there, reestablishing the biblical date of Jericho’s devastation. Time magazine and New York Times both featured Wood’s discoveries.
Moreover, Tel Hazor in the upper Galilee shows evidence of Joshua’s widespread burning, and Cuneiform tablets found at the site identify by name the Canaanite king Jabin, whom Joshua defeated, as the Bible tells us. What is more, in 1980, Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal unearthed Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal in the Samarian hills, near the ancient site of the biblical city of Shechem (called by the name Nablus by Palestinians, today).
Recent decades have seen fascinating and definitive biblical-era remains uncovered—long after the revisionists closed the book on the Bible, declaring the debate won and the Bible, fiction. In 2005, digging at the City of David site where Kathleen Kenyon found a gorgeous intact five-foot-long proto-Aeolic column in the 1960s, Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar uncovered a massive Large-Stone Structure reinforced by a Stepped-Stone Structure underneath Byzantine remains in the exact location suggested in the Bible for King David’s palace, built by the king of Tyre! Excavated pottery dates the building’s foundation to approximately 1000 BCE—the reign of King David—and its desertion to 586 BCE, the year the Babylonians vanquished Jerusalem. Clay seals belonging to royal ministers Jehucal son of Shelemiah and Gedaliah son of Pashhur, who served together in King Zedekiah’s court four centuries after King David, have been found among the ruins, suggesting—if not proving—that succeeding kings of Judea occupied King David’s palace until the Babylonian destruction.
In 2007 in Judea’s Elah Valley, Khirbet Qeiyafa—a compound holding a walled fortress and royal palace with unusual double gates—was found. Pottery and charred olive pits tested for carbon-14 at Oxford University date the structures to the reign of King David. While scholars debate whether the site is the biblical Sha’arayim (literally “two gates”) or Neta’im, the fortified buildings and their massive casemate wall prove—concludes archaeology professor Yosef Garfinkle of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—that “the kingdom of Judah existed already as a centrally organized state in the tenth century BCE.” Many features identify Khirbet Qeiyafa as Israelite, including the absence of both pig bones and graven images, as well as the discoveries of a miniature shrine resembling King Solomon’s Temple and an ostracon inscribed with Hebrew biblical references.
During Saul and David’s kingships, the Israelites waged war with Philistines who had settled beyond the Elah Valley in Gath; the kings’ legions likely built the nearby garrison fort of Khirbet Qeiyafa. In fact, in 2005, a tenth-century BCE ostracon was found in Gath, etched with the biblical name of David’s Philistine foe, Goliath.
Archaeologists Garfinkle, Mazar, and Zertal were not engaged in religious quests, but driven instead to uncover the truth. Because agenda-driven biblical nihilists such as Israel Finkelstein and Thomas L. Thompson have dominated postmodern archaeological discourse, outstanding discoveries like these go ignored, unrecognized, or disputed on trivial grounds by the new academic “establishment.”
Although biblical minimalists claim that the Bible’s account of the Davidic dynasty reflects no more than wishful thinking on the part of purported “biblical redactors,” how can they explain the references to Israel and the Davidic monarchy found in the monument inscriptions of ancient Israel’s hostile neighbors? Such astounding antiquities include the Tel Dan Stele (Aram-Damascus, discovered in 1993), the Merneptah Stele (Egypt), the Kurkh Monoliths (Assyria), and the Mesha Stele (Moab). Each of these foreign relics provides extra-biblical testament to the historicity of ancient Israel and her kings… Visit www.antisemitismanswers.com to read the rest of the fascinating biblical archaeology section, abridged here.
Thanks to the extraordinary ever-increasing volume of archaeological evidence of Jewish history in the Land of Israel, the Hebrew Bible is the essential reference text for the State of Israel’s professional tour guides. The contiguity, if not identity, between eponymous contemporary Israeli cities and 3,500-year-old biblical cities roots modern Israel firmly in the soil of her Bronze Age matriarchs and patriarchs.
Biblical archaeology is, then, the first category of demonstrable proof of the Torah testimony. The second is the accuracy of biblical prophecy.
Biblical Prophecy
Throughout the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses exhorts the Jewish people to remain loyal to their covenant with God. But before the people even enter the Promised Land, God reveals in the text that amidst prosperity in our homeland, the Jews will stray from the covenant, be punished with exile, and suffer in the lands of our dispersion.
Mark Twain eloquently testifies to the ruins he found during his visit to the Holy Land in 1867:
“... [a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse.… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.… We never saw a human being on the whole route.… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”
Yet we are also told in the Bible, God will eventually redeem His people, gather us from every nation into which we were flung, and restore our national sovereignty.
Jewish history has unfolded according to the exact words written in the Bible by the prophet Moses over three thousand years ago. The only possible explanation for this can be that an infinite, omniscient mind—that of the world’s Creator—authored our Scripture. Which human being could have three thousand years of foresight or the audacity to make such sweeping correct predictions!
Two and a half thousand years ago, after the first Jewish exile to Babylon, Zechariah prophesied: “Thus said the Lord of hosts: There shall yet be old men and old women sitting in the streets of Jerusalem, every man with his staff in his hand for old age; and the broad places of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets” (Zechariah 8:4-5). Anyone walking through Jerusalem today can vouch for the fulfillment of this prophecy (and so many others found in Hebrew Scripture).
The renowned medieval scholar Nachmanides (1194-1270) declared that the refusal of the Land of Israel itself to rejuvenate until its restoration to Jewish sovereignty would prove that the Jews are the land’s true heirs. With divinely inspired prescience, the Talmud identifies the worldwide Jewish return and the greening of the land as the harbingers of the final redemption. After two millennia of exile, the Jews have come home. We are once more fruitfully cultivating the land that was occupied without prosperity by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British. In a postmodern miracle, tiny Israel—half of whose land surface is desert—exports millions of flowers to spacious verdant Europe! See Part Two appearing next…
(Author Amanda Chaitt invites readers to visit her website www.antisemitismanswers.com to receive at no cost the entire essay, “Cracking Open the Jewish Code,” deemed “compelling” by Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Rosh HaYeshiva (Dean) of Ner Yisrael Rabbinical College in Baltimore, MD. Readers will find the essay documented with ample interesting references.)