Commentary Has a New Blog
I think I will be spending time there. Right off the bat I found a very interesting review of a review of the Bible. I think it is David Gelernter who has written this piece. The blog doesn't make it clear, but I saw his name in the URL belonging to the entry.
What does a person get out of just sitting down and reading the Bible with no background, no context, and no Rabbinic commentary? A secular, uneducated Jew reads The Book and gives his impressions. Gelernter, an observant and learned Jew, comments upon them. As a half-educated Jew, I can understand enough to wince at my own glaring errors. Before I send you on to read the rest, here are the last two sentences of the essay which you may want to keep in mind: "Blogging the Bible is illuminating in more ways than one. Enjoy it, but read at your own risk."
In an ongoing, multi-part series called Blogging the Bible on Slate, David Plotz offers comments on his first reading of large parts of the Hebrew Bible. At his best he is superb. He is selling innocence and a new viewpoint—two commodities you might have believed the world was fresh out of when it comes to the Bible, the mightiest text of all, most famous and most exhaustively-studied book known to man. Yet, amazingly, it is all new to Plotz, and his loss is our gain: we experience his fascination, excitement, and occasional joy alongside him as he discovers the narrative genius and moral profundity of the good book.
...his most serious error is to misrepresent the very process of Jewish Bible reading. He calls himself a “proud Jew” (more power to him); he acknowledges the immense quantity of rabbinic Bible commentary (in the Talmud and midrash) of which he is ignorant. But he fails to grasp that normative Jewish authorities do not read the Bible alongside the Talmud but through the Talmud. Thus he includes, for example, the usual tiresome stuff about all the death sentences imposed by Biblical law. But as Judaism reads these verses, there are no death sentences in the Bible: the Talmud (for better or worse) erects such elaborate procedural protections for the accused in capital cases that it virtually rules executions out. Which has been pointed out innumerable times before.
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