Judaic Miracles well-documented, irrefutable

David Saks

It is true, of course, that other religions also have their miracle stories. The crucial difference, however, is that whereas these purported miracles happened only to individuals, those key events recorded in the Torah were directly witnessed and experienced by the entire Jewish nation.

Such claims of mass revelation can hardly be forged after the fact. It entails convincing people that they (or alternatively their ancestors) themselves experienced something that never actually happened, an obvious impossibility.

The fact that throughout history, no other religion has even attempted to convince its adherents that either they themselves or even their distant forebears experienced miraculous revelations en masse, seems to me irrefutable proof that, at the very least, something extraordinary happened to our ancestors in the desert all those centuries ago. Put simply, if it is possible to fabricate traditions of mass revelation after the fact, then not only the Jews would have done it.

Regarding the theory that the Torah was cobbled together by multiple authors centuries after the events described, those advocating it have evidently fallen for the quasi-logical sleight of hand known as “assuming the conclusion”, whereby one at the outset assumes something to be true and then works backwards to “prove” it.

In the case of “Biblical critics”, it is taken as a given from the outset that Judaism’s sacred canon is a human cultural-intellectual construct that merely purports to be of Divine origin. Having thus already secularised Tanach, they then proceed to dissect, analyse and deconstruct about its meaning as they would any other piece of literature, and of course end up spinning every manner of academic theories about its origin and meaning.

At the same time, of course, they award one another PhDs and declare themselves to be the reigning scholarly experts, and the whole system becomes self-perpetuating.

Suffice it to say that the ever-growing numbers of Jewish youngsters in yeshivot and seminaries around the world have little time for this sort of thing. The more one delves into the Torah, the more its Divine origin becomes apparent.

Johannesburg