The torah and the bible, PICK ONE, OR CHOOSE BOTH., FREE TO CHOOSE,

by | Feb 5, 2026 | AS THE WAR AGAINST EVIL RAGES ON, BENDER., C S LEWIS, consciousness, Designer & Creator, DESTROY GLOBALISM, EXISTENCE EXPLAINED, FIXING CHRISTIANITY, ISRAEL, ISREAL, KRUSENECK, QUANTUM PERCEPTIONS, Science & Christianity, SCIENCE VALIDATES GOD, STEPHEN MEYER, TERRORISTS, THE BATTLE IS NEVER OVER, Vern's Blog, www.vernbender.com, www.vernbender.com | 1 comment

The torah and the bible, PICK ONE, or choose both. FREE TO CHOOSE.

(IT’S THE SAME GOD.)

by  | Jan 5, 2025 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

  • A WHILE BACK/, GOD SAID THAT THE JEWS WOULD COME BACK TO  THE LAND HE HAD PROMISED THEM. THEY ACCOMPLISHED THAT IN 1948.
  • ALSO, SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, GOD SAID HIS PEOPLE WOULD NEED TO ACCEPT  JESUS AS THE ONLY ONE  HE WOULD BE SENDING.   
  • The Hebrew Bible vs. the Christian Bible
  • The Tanakh and the Bible are related. The Christian and Jewish religions share similar origins but are distinct faiths with different religious texts. Some mistakenly believe that the Hebrew Bible—that is, the Tanakh—is identical to what the Christians know as the Old Testament. But this is not the case. To help clarify what the Tanakh is, let’s take a look at the Tanakh and its various parts. Then let us consider and compare it to the Bible.
  • The ankh
  • The Tanakh has its own history and tradition separate from the Christian Old Testament, and it varies in the way books are categorized and divided. The name “Tanakh” or “Tanak” is an acronym for the three distinct divisions of the Hebrew Bible. These three divisions are the Torah, the Novum, and the Ketubim, which correspond to the letters “T”, “N”, and “K” in the word, respectively. At its core, the Hebrew Bible recounts the origins of ancient Israel and its people’s relationship with God throughout human history.
  • The Torah
  • The first significant part of the Tanakh is named the Torah. The name comes from the Hebrew word meaning “law” or “instruction”—the Torah, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
  • The intended meaning of the word “law” in this context varies somewhat from the way we often use it today. We tend to speak of laws in terms of legislation, officially sanctioned rules laid out and enforced by a governing body. The regulations laid out in the Torah are God-given and far more than a set of rules. Made up of narrative accounts and formalized guidelines for living, the Torah presents God’s plan for humanity and His relentless faithfulness to His people.
  • The second section of the Tanakh is the Novum or “prophets,” translated from Hebrew. This section of the Hebrew Bible can itself be broken down into two key parts: the Former Prophets (books such as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and the Latter Prophets (made up of the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve—a single book recounting the stories of 12 other prophets).
  • The Former Prophets primarily consist of historical narratives documenting the period from Moses’ death to the establishment of the nation and kingdom of ancient Israel. The Former Prophets interpret the Torah by placing the laws in context, making them an essential portion of scripture. The Latter Prophets tackle a period of turbulence for the kingdom of Israel, in which God continually calls His people back to Him. This subsection is further divided into the major and minor prophets. The designation of prophets as either “major” or “minor” is not a statement of their importance or worth. Instead, the so-called “major” prophets refer to the longer prophetic books. The Twelve presents the combined accounts of the “minor prophets,” each of whose individual writings is shorter.
  •   
  • The Katmai
  •  The Hebrew Bible includes the Ketuvim, named for the word meaning “writings” in Hebrew. This section contains 11 books across a variety of literary genres and styles, from history to poetic verse. The poetic books of the Ketuvim are Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, focusing on wisdom and commitment to God. The Ketuvim also contains the gullet scrolls (each corresponding to a particular Jewish holiday or festival), the prophecy of Daniel, and the history books of Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles. These last books focus on events during the Babylonian captivity and exile of the ancient Jewish community and their subsequent return home.

  • The Christian Bible. Although it is made into a single book, the Bible is actually a collection of books compiled to best sum up the Word of God. The Christian Bible consists of two main parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. Some versions of the Bible also include more than just the two parts, including other religious texts and books added later. The Oral Law, known as “Torah shabbily Peh” in Hebrew, is an integral part of Jewish tradition and complements the written Torah. It encompasses the teachings, interpretations, and explanations passed down orally from generation to generation alongside te written Torah.

  • The first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch or the “Torah,” are cherished and revered by Jews and Christians, as they form the foundation of all Scripture. People have pored over the content of these books for millennia, debating many aspects of them, including their authorship.
  • Traditionally, the Pentateuch is read as one work, by one author—hence the popular name “The Five Books of Moses.”[2] And yet, already in the 17th century, certain Bible scholars began to question whether the text was a unified composition or showed signs of multiple authorship.
  • This approach to the study of Pentateuch (and other biblical texts) has grown over the past two centuries into a vital subfield of biblical scholarship called “source criticism.”[3] By paying close attention to elements such as cohesiveness or non-cohesiveness within a story, changes in terminology or outlook, doublets and contradictions between texts, source criticism attempts to delineate the contours of sources and indications of their authorship and approximate dates of composition
  • Pushback against Source Criticism
  •     

    They believed that God had made a covenant, or promise/ binding agreement, with Abraham and his descendants. The Torah = first five books of Bible. Prophets of Israel preached a strong code of ethics, or moral standards of behavior.

       The overwhelming consensus among Bible scholars for the past two centuries has been that the Pentateuch is a composite text, composed of multiple sources written by different people or groups at other times. Nevertheless, some scholars have challenged this consensus.
  • For example, Joshua Berman, a Bible scholar from Basilan University, recently wrote an article, “The Corruption of Biblical Studies,”[5] in which he questions “whether some of its central conclusions really deserve the high pedestal on which they have been placed.” He contends
  • [An accurate guild of source critics could not develop a canon of best practices and accepted norms in pursuit of the putative earlier stages of a biblical text’s development… [T]he debilitating consequence is that very little is a matter of professional consensus. According to Berman, this is the case because source critics “rely on frankly intuitionist justification for its methods—a reliance that has led it into confusion and professional crisis.” He concludes that source critics are basically engaged in an “elusive search for the sources of the Pentateuch.” He believes that source criticism is in this crisis because of “the fatal inability of the discipline to self-correct,” and this is “perpetuated by a species of denial.”
  • Thus, Berman considers source criticism of the Pentateuch to be bereft of consensus and therefore defunct in the absence of suitable methods. Gleason Archer Jr. (1916-2004) of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is one of several Christian scholars who use similarly strong language in his assessment of source criticism, especially the “weaknesses and fallacies of the Williamson Theory,” i.e., the Documentary Hypothesis—the theory that the Pentateuch is a combination of four documents.]
  • It is very doubtful whether the well-used hypothesis merits scientific respectability. There is so much special pleading, circular reasoning, and questionable deductions from unsubstantiated premises that, indeed, its methodology would never stand up in a court of law. Berman and Archer both believe that “liberal bias” is a key factor in the dominance of the otherwise failing discipline of source criticism. Archer explicitly advocates for single authorship of the Torah in the wilderness period by Moses, arguing:
  • [Hon all the data of the Pentateuch text have been carefully considered, and all the evidence, both internal and external, has been fairly weighed, the impression is all but irresistible that Mosaic authorship is the one theory that best accords with the surviving historical data.[7] Berman contends that “perhaps the truest answer… is that we may not know when it was written.” Nevertheless, he has also written, “The first person in the Hebrew Bible to probe the Torah of Moses was Joshua,” a statement of Berman’s that some might understand as a rhetorical flourish and some might understand as a putative attribution of authors he certainly believes that scholars who contend for a biblical text’s “unity and coherence,” or “historical accuracy,” or “antiquity” are viewed as conservative and are marginalized within the guild of biblical scholars.
  •   
  • The idea at the basis of source criticism, namely, that the Pentateuch was written based on earlier sources and incorporates these sources or parts of them, fits with what we know about biblical books from their own testimony. The Pentateuch itself refers to “the Book of the Wars of YHWH” (um 21:14), suggesting the writer was using this as a source.[8]
  • The Hebrew Bible is filled with sources upon which various biblical texts are ostensibly based or which the biblical authors knew of and read:
  • “The Book of Bashar” (e.g., Josh 10:13; 2 Sam 1:18); “The Book of the Acts of Solomon” (e.g., 1 Kings 11:41); “The Books of the Annals of the Kings of Israel” (1 Kings 14:19; cf. also 2 Chron 33:18; 2 Chron 20:34); “The Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah” (1 Kings 15:7); “The Records of Samuel the Seer” (1 Charon 29:29); “The History of Nathan the Prophet” (2 Chronicles 9:29); “The Records of Shemaiah the Prophet and Kiddo the Seer” (2 Chron 12:15); “The Annals of Jehu the son of Hanani” (2 Chron 20:34); “The Records of Hozai” [or “the Seers”] (2 Chron 33:19).[9] Some contend that these putative sources are fictional and that these statements are merely placed within these biblical texts to create an aura of historical accuracy. That is an important debate, of course. But even if these statements are not factual, it is evident that the authors of these texts presupposed that it was acceptable for them to use sources.
  •    .   
  • Besides explicitly referenced works, the presence of sources may be inferred from an inductive reading of specific biblical pericopes that are repeated in other biblical books. This demonstrates dependence on a shared source or dependence of one biblical book on another biblical book as a source:
  • The narratives about the siege of Sennacherib (Isaiah 36-37 and 2 Kings 18-19);[10] The conquest of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar (2 Kings 25 and Jer 52); Large swaths of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles (passim); David’s prayer “after being saved from Saul” (2 Sam 22 and PS 18); The list of returnees from exile (Ezra 2:2-64 and Neh 7:7-66). These texts do not cross-reference each other or claim to use sources, but since we have both versions, we know at least one is (perhaps both are).
  • Code of Hammurabi: A Pentateuch Source We can make a similar observation about the biblical lex talionis (law of equals), “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” found in Exod 21:24 (also Lev 24:20 and Deut 19:21). This same rule, with the exact phrasing, is found in Akkadian law collections such as the Code of Hammurabi (196-200), which was chiseled into stone centuries before Moses was even born (cf. Code of Hammurabi, paragraphs 196-200). Thus, this ancient Mesopotamian legal principle. These observations demonstrate that source criticism has its roots in the Bible itself and, at least in theory, does not contradict single authorship, since authors, including ancient authors, often draw on sources. In fact, one of the key fathers of source criticism referenced by Berman, the French physician Jean Astruc (1684-1786), believed that Moses combined the two documents he identified as the sources of Genesis.
  • Nevertheless, even if we were to accept that the Pentateuch had a single author, would the default really be Mosaic authorship and a 13th-century date? I think the evidence from the Pentateuch itself, taking the book at its word, is a resounding “no.” To understand this point, we must look at how the Pentateuch presents itself.
  • Mosaic Authorship: Traditional View. Ancient traditions often assume or imply the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.[12]
  • The books of Joshua (8:31-32, 23:6) and Kings (1 Kings 2:3; 2 Kings 14:6, 23:25) refer to the Torah of Moses, or the scroll of the Torah of Moses—though these are likely references to (some form of) Deuteronomy, not the entire Torah in its current form.[13] The much later books of Ezra (3:2, 6:18, 7:6), Nehemiah (1:7-9, 8:1, 14, 9:14, 10:30, 13:1), Daniel (9:1, 13), and Chronicles (2 Charon 23:18, 30:16, 34:14) also refer to “the Torah of Moses” or paraphrase laws from the Pentateuch as laws of Moses.[14] In the New Testament, Luke (2:22.
  •