Why We Can Read the Torah, Fractures and All

I embrace the text with all its beautiful imperfections, and my concern is not to dismiss the idea that it has a history but to understand that history better. I want to encourage us to see the fractures not as barriers to reading but as protrusions of past textual landscapes that prompt us to read in two dimensions at once: vertical and horizontal, historical and literary.

See also The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

By Angela Roskop Erisman 
Independent Researcher
https://angelaroskoperisman.com
June 2025

We run up against it from the very beginning. In the first chapter of Genesis we read that “God created the man in his image; in the image of God he created him—male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27), but it’s not long before God creates humans again (Genesis 2:7). God tells Noah to bring two of every kind of animal onto the ark (Genesis 6:19–20), but later in the story it is seven pairs of animals that are fit for sacrifice and only one pair of the other species (Genesis 7:2–3). Moses ascends Mount Sinai in Exodus 24:9, only to have God tell him, just three verses later, to come up the mountain (never mind that he is already there…). The Israelites leave Sinai in Numbers 10:12, only to leave again in verse 33. Thanks to these and myriad other fractures—places where the narrative seems to be broken or dysfunctional—it has become commonplace in some circles to say that the Torah, or Pentateuch, is unreadable.

            This is hyperbole, to be sure. These narrative blips do not stop us from following the overall storyline. The danger is that we don’t notice them. Our brains tend to look for coherence and manufacture it even when it isn’t there. Yet these fractures are a very real part of reading the Torah, and they matter if we are committed to honoring the text as “part of the givenness of a world we did not make” instead of crafting it in our own image (Barton 2007, 182). To love a text is to embrace its imperfections along with its beauty and spend a lifetime getting to know it, even though it will always exceed our efforts to pin it down.

            The fractures in the text of the Torah have played an important role in how we read it, particularly since the seventeenth century, when Baruch Spinoza said the quiet part out loud. He was hardly the first to notice such problems, but he named the implication (and probably paid a steep price for doing so): the Torah was not written in one go but has a history, and these fractures are the residue of it (Nadler 2013).[1] Spinoza’s take on them is unsurprising when we consider that it was common in his time to understand the Torah as a work of history. He sensed that its author must have copied a diverse array of sources “and passed them on to posterity without examining them properly and setting them in due order” (Spinoza 2007, 130 [book 9, sections 130–31]). This insight gave rise to a vibrant conversation about the Torah’s literary history, one that is still going on today.

            It’s a tough conversation to follow. It involves getting into the weeds about what the text means and what makes a narrative coherent. We must also juggle multiple perspectives in order to do it justice, because some think the Torah is a compilation of independent sources, like Spinoza did, while others find a series of revisions, and wise voices remind us that the truth could involve some of both. Even for scholars actively involved in this conversation, it is helpful to see what a particular model looks like—how much the more so for readers looking in from the outside and wanting to learn more. There are basically two ways to do this. One involves marking up the text of the Torah as it stands, so that different versions appear in different colors and fonts; Paul Haupt’s “polychrome Bible” is perhaps the most famous example (Haupt 1893–1904). The other, which works only for readings that involve a source model, involves laying out the sources, which are thought to be more readable than the Torah itself, and “publishing” them independently of one another.[2]

            I want to illustrate two reasons why it is deeply problematic to say that the Pentateuch is unreadable and to spell out the implications for how we might address the desire to visualize proposed versions. Pushing back against this idea used to be the domain of those who wanted to defend the unity and perfection of the Torah against heretics hell-bent on busting it up: Those fractures? They’re not really there. That is not my goal at all. I embrace the text with all its beautiful imperfections, and my concern is not to dismiss the idea that it has a history but to understand that history better. I want to encourage us to see the fractures not as barriers to reading but as protrusions of past textual landscapes that prompt us to read in two dimensions at once: vertical and horizontal, historical and literary. When we insist that the Pentateuch is unreadable (or even when we say it a bit tongue-in-cheek), we blind ourselves to the opportunities these fractures afford us—to appreciate the rich depth in the literary terrain, and sometimes even to understand its basic meaning.

Finding the Fractures

The first problem with saying that the Pentateuch is unreadable is that reading is how we determine that it is unreadable in the first place. We don’t find a fracture and only then start reading; we are already reading when we notice that something might be amiss with the text. If Meir Sternberg is correct that “the task of decomposition calls for the most sensitive response to the arts of composition,” it matters how well we read (Sternberg 1985, 16). Historical criticism is fundamentally a hermeneutical task, and the strength of our judgments about how the text developed over time is inevitably linked to the strength of our literary interpretations.

            Let’s look at an example. As the Israelites are leaving Egypt, they encounter a major obstacle—the sea—and they turn around to see the Egyptians in pursuit. They are trapped, and, quite naturally, “they were very afraid.” What happens next is usually read as a fracture in the story: “The Israelites cried out to the LORD, and they said to Moses: ‘Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you took us into the wilderness to die? What have you done, bringing us out of Egypt?!’” (Exodus 14:10–11). Are the Israelites afraid or angry? Who is their leader, God or Moses? Do they cry out for help, or do they lash out in blame? These different responses and the different characters involved are taken as signs that we are reading a composite text, one that would ostensibly be more readable in its priestly (P) and non-priestly (J) versions.

            What drives these interpretive judgments? There is a sense that fear and anger are incompatible emotions, and that crying out and lashing out are different responses to finding oneself in dire straits. There is also a sense that the story can have only one leader at a time. These judgments seem reasonable. If we’re on the hunt for fractures, this looks like a good one. The consensus that two nearly complete versions of the sea episode have been combined is therefore not surprising; this is a rare case in which scholars who adopt different models for the literary history of the Torah tend to agree.

            And yet. Is the sea episode really unreadable here? Let’s take a moment to think about what reading involves.[3] We bring knowledge of the world to any act of reading in order to help us make sense of the text. This can be knowledge of literary conventions, of history, of human nature. In this case knowledge of human emotions proves highly relevant. Fear and anger are different emotions, but they are deeply intertwined. Like all emotions, they have in common a vulnerability with respect to something in the world that is significant for our well-being. Fear involves a threat, or the potential for a wrong to occur, while anger is a response to a wrong that has already occurred.[4] The Israelites’ predicament in this story involves both. Threat of death faces them in either direction. No wonder they’re terrified. And Moses’s command to turn back to the sea exposed them to this threat. No wonder they’re furious. They cannot trust him to act in the interest of their well-being—or so they think at the beginning of the story.

            Reading also involves looking at how a feature such as this emotionally complex characterization of the Israelites is knit into the fabric of the narrative. This task goes well beyond identifying a coherent plot; we must also look at how character and theme develop along with the plot. The Israelites undergo a profound transformation in this story. Their terror of the Egyptians becomes awe of what God can do as they witness the parting of the sea and come to realize that salvation was possible after all. Their anger dissolves and is replaced by trust in Moses as he helps them to see this possibility and they realize that they misjudged him. The sea episode proves to be a story about how fear can lead us into error and the potential for our tragic undoing—if the Israelites had been able to act on their desire to return to Egypt, it would have sealed their doom—and it teaches us the difference between terror and fear of the LORD, a “metaphysical vulnerability” or awareness that our survival depends on access to perspectives we cannot immediately see and trust in others who can guide us to them.[5]

            The roles of God and Moses are equally bound together. The Israelites rely on Moses to mediate God’s instruction for them, but in this instance Moses’s command has led them to what appears to be certain death. Although they address God and Moses differently, they do not trust God any more than they trust Moses. They cry out to God in desperation, but their cry is open-ended; they cannot seem to envision that salvation might come from God. As the plot progresses, Moses and God work together to repair their trust. God engineers the means of salvation, while Moses, rather than provoking a downward spiral of conflict by defending himself against the Israelites’ misguided accusations, makes room for a transformation within them that, along with God’s act of deliverance, can restore the trust that has been so badly broken. Together, God and Moses save the Israelites not only from their predicament but also from the potentially tragic consequences of their own thoughts and actions.[6]

            Our initial reading of the Israelites’ response to their situation at the sea thus proves to be rather thin. A thicker reading forces us to rethink the literary history of this episode. Once we go beyond initial perceptions and work to ground our sense of narrative coherence (or lack thereof) in the fabric of plot, character, and thematic development, the idea that two independent versions of the sea crossing have been combined begins to unravel. This has an important implication for how we might illustrate the results of pentateuchal scholarship. Whether they mark up the existing text in color or isolate a proposed source document so it can be read on its own, these efforts do nothing more than capture a consensus. This is not a mark against them. It is what they are designed to do, and they perform an important service.[7] Yet consensuses will inevitably shift—and should shift—over time as we acquire new information, gain new perspectives, read more deeply, and come to see possibilities that were not present to us before. A text like the Haupt polychrome preserves our ability to engage with and potentially read beyond the consensus it captures, because one can ignore the colored print and imagine how the text might be marked up differently.[8] A text that presents one source in isolation from the others hides other possibilities from view. As it turns out, an “edition” of J or P would give us only half the story of the sea episode, with no means of seeing how incredibly rich and profound the whole story might be.

Reading the Fractures

The second reason why it is problematic to say that the Pentateuch is unreadable is that even the fractures can be readable. This is not always the case; sometimes they are nothing more than the inevitable residue of compilation or revision. Yet there is often meaning to be found in them, and I want to show how important this can be by talking about one instance where reading the fractures helps us solve a long-standing exegetical problem.

            Why does Moses have to die in the wilderness? The reason is allegedly the fact that he struck the rock to produce water when God commanded him to speak to it (Numbers 20:1–13). This sin seems trivial and the consequence profoundly unjust, so much so that readers have long grasped for a more satisfying way to account for Moses’s death. As Samuel David Luzzatto long ago noted, “Moses our teacher committed one sin, but the commentators have piled upon him thirteen sins and more; each of them has invented a new offense.”[9] Yet the nature of the sin is explicit (“You did not trust me”) and it is not a mistake, as Moses raises his hand to strike the rock, a sign of intent, if not defiance. The problem is the gap in logic between sin and punishment. The situation feels very contrived.

            Indeed the whole episode feels contrived. Why does God instruct Moses to speak to the rock? Why does God tell him to take the staff if he is not meant to use it? This story has a sister narrative, and that one makes a lot more sense, as the LORD’s command to take the staff prepares Moses to follow his instruction to strike the rock with it (Exodus 17:1–7). In fact, the command to speak in Numbers seems all the more arbitrary in the wake of the command to strike in Exodus. Why the shift? Perhaps we were not meant to see it. Double narratives have long been viewed as a sign that the Torah consists of independent sources that were never meant to be read together but are now uncomfortably juxtaposed thanks to a compiler with a preservation instinct. Yet we can understand why Moses has to die in the wilderness only when we read them in conversation with one another.

            That shift in command is the key. In the first rock-water episode, Moses’s staff is a symbol of kingship, and Moses is characterized as an obedient king, one who acts in a way that is consistent with God’s instruction. God’s command to take the staff in the second rock-water episode directs our attention to the one back in Exodus and signals that Moses still plays that same role, but now he wields his royal power in a way that is out of sync with divine mandate. He does not trust the LORD enough to obey his command but acts independently. This is a significant failure for a king, especially because exile is attributed to just such failures on the part of the kings of Israel and Judah.[10] Reading the two episodes together allows us to see that the second rock-water episode is a story about the failure of kingship, embodied by Moses. God’s command shifts because the historical context has changed. Israelite kingship is dead, and Moses must die with it.

            The story of Moses’s sin and death feels contrived because it is contrived. Yet the shift in God’s command from “strike” to “speak” is more than just a gotcha. In a world with no more kings, leadership must be transformed, and Moses becomes a mediator of divine instruction, of torah. His new job is to tell the Israelites what God commands, and that requires him to speak with integrity. The second rock-water episode thus straddles—is the pivot between—two versions of the Torah. For the space of this episode, Moses embodies both the old and the new roles so that human kingship can be written out of Israel’s story in favor of a new model of leadership. The implausibilities, or fractures, in the story direct our attention to the transformation that is taking place. The same is true of Moses’s death, which is simultaneously punishment for the sin of Israel’s kings and an effort to mythologize him to that he can remain a generative figure within the Jewish literary imagination.[11]

            Thinking of the Torah as unreadable thus not only makes it harder to identify the basis for historical-critical work (because that requires good reading), it also dissuades us from finding meaning in the fractures themselves. Often we will look in vain for such meaning, and in those situations it should not be forced. But when we do find it, it can be powerful. Such moments can make sense of otherwise thorny exegetical puzzles. They also teach us how to read the Torah. It is not enough to read horizontally, to track an unfolding linear plot. We must also read vertically, attuned to meaningful transformations of the text, which is in one sense a record of Israel’s creative efforts to grapple with its past and shape its future.

            Herein lies the tragedy of publishing independent sources in isolation from one another. It is one way to help us visualize our models for the Torah’s literary history, and those who produce such works mean well. Yet, unlike marking up the complete text, it pins the Torah down in a particular way, inhibiting its ability to exceed our efforts by placing the rest of the text out of sight, out of mind. This amounts to remaking the text in our own image, because “publishing” an “edition” of a postulated source or version gives material form to a “text” that does not actually exist as anything other than a scholarly construct, at least not until we find an ancient mauscript of it. I say this not to discount scholarly constructs but to remind us that they are not material objects, and that they are only as good as they are helpful in understanding the Torah that does exist in the manuscripts we have inherited. We can read that Torah, and our understanding of both Israel’s literature and its history depends on our conversations about it being as open and dynamic as possible, with room to grow.

References

Barton, John. 2007. The Nature of Biblical Criticism. Westminster John Knox.

Bloom, Harold, and David Rosenberg. 1990. The Book of J. Grove Weidenfeld.

Cornill, C. H. 1899. “The Polychrome Bible,” Monist 10, no. 1:1–21.

Erisman, Angela Roskop. 2025. The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge University Press.

Feldman, Liane. 2023. Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source, from Creation to the Promised Land. World Literature in Translation. University of California Press.

Green, W. Henry. 1899. “The Polychrome Bible,” Monist 10, no. 1:22–40.

Haupt, Paul, ed. 1893–1904. The Sacred Books of the Old Testament: A Critical Edition of the Hebrew Text Printed in Colors, with Notes, 20 vols. J. C. Hinrichs, Johns Hopkins Press, and David Nutt.

Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Legaspi, Michael C. 2018. Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition. Oxford University Press.

Nadler, Steven. 2013. “Why Spinoza Was Excommunicated,” Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/article/why-spinoza-was-excommunicated.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press.

Sanders, Seth. n.d. “Founding Documents of the Bible: The Priestly Tradition,” https://pentateuch.digital.

Spinoza, Benedict de. 2007. Theological-Political Treatise. Edited by Jonathan Israel. Translated by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

Sternberg, Meir. 1985. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Indiana Literary Biblical Series. Indiana University Press.

Yoreh, Tzemah. 2014a. J: The Book of Mercy. The Creation and the Patriarchs. The Bible as It Was 1. CreateSpace.

_____. 2014b. J: The Book of Mercy. The Life of Moses. The Bible as It Was 2. CreateSpace.