Did God write Deuteronomy?[1] Bible critics, as is well known, insist that neither God nor Moses wrote Deuteronomy. Many of them contend that the essence of the book originated during the first Temple period in the reign of King Josiah (640–609 B.C.E.) and that it was organized into its final form during [...]
Ibn Ezra in Deuteronomy I mentioned in my prior essays on the famed thinker Abraham ibn Ezra’s Bible commentaries that although he was generally a brilliant rational thinking, he wasn’t always so, and some of his ideas are not rational. The same phenomenon occurs in his views on Deuteronomy, as seen in [...]
By Israel Drazin Judaism today is not Torah Judaism, but rabbinic Judaism. Virtually all Torah laws, if not all of them, were modified by the rabbis to meet the needs of the time when the alterations were made.[1] These changes are called Torah shebalpe, Oral Torah. While they are innovations, they [...]
By Israel Drazin (I changed the number of the Unusual Interpretations. The number 44 indicates that this is the 44th portion of the 54 biblical portions.) We will look at some things in this discussion on the portion Devarim that make us realize that what we think we know may not be [...]
