Naftali Zeligman’s Illogic

The Talk Reason website has a number of interesting articles, and challenges all aspects of Judaism, including the Written Torah. Most of the articles are aimed at orthodox “outreach” type rabbis, as well as the Intelligent Design movement.

One of the writers, a Mr Naphtali Zeligman, is an ex – Orthodox  yeshiva student, who raises many allegedly problematic issues for the Torah. I do not have a definitive set of answers to all of his points, but here is one where he seems to err in his zeal  to criticise the Torah.

The verse from Exodus 16 states:

35 And the children of Israel did eat the manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited; they did eat the manna, until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan.

Zeligman claims that Moses could not have written this, and he cites a Talmudic statement that suggests the manna stopped falling on the day Moses died, but they had reserves for another month or so.   However, Joshua 5 suggests that the Manna stopped falling the day after the Pesah –

“12 And the manna ceased on the morrow, after they had eaten of the produce of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more; but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.”

Even if the Talmud is contradicted by Joshua, which it most likely is, Zeligman’s question has not yet been resolved.  But, upon closer scrutiny of the verse in Exodus, we see that there is not really a problem at all.

Zeligman claims that since Moses writes in the past tense, this verse could only have been written after the Israelites entered Israel.  And he claims, that this is proof of Moses’ non-authorship, of at least the verse in question. This claim is flawed logically and textually.

Moses is only stating that up to the point where they reached the border of Israel/Canaan, the Israelites had eaten manna. He is not saying that it stopped at that point. Moses had time to view the Land of Israel, from the border, before his death, thus he had the opportunity to write this verse, before his death, and make a statement of what they had been eating.  Hence, Zeligman has misunderstood the text itself.  But his argument is also illogical. The claim that the verse is in the past tense and hence was doctored later on, is logically false.  It is in the past tense and is correct up to the point in time when it was written. It makes no statement about the future, i.e. what occurs in the period immediately after Moses’ death. He does not state whether they will continue to eat manna beyond the border, or if it will be Canaanite pizza. In fact, had the verse been written later on, it may well have concurred with the verse in Joshua 5. Hence, the evidence from Exodus 16:35 gives stronger support for its Mosaic authorship than of a later authorship.

And this kind of logical fallacy does occur often in such diatribes.  They are very frequently copies of previous such essays, and the authors rely on arguments that they have not thought through very carefully.