A Taxonomy of Religious Jewish Approaches to Bible Criticism

In 1959, R. Mordechai Breuer published his groundbreaking Hebrew article “Faith and Science In Biblical Interpretation”, proposing a method for incorporating elements of Higher Biblical Criticism (HBC) into Orthodox Jewish Torah study and theology. One response to his proposal, written by comparative religion scholar R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, divides religious (Jewish and Christian) reaction to the critical enterprise into four typological groups: “fundamentalist”, “Catholic”, “Protestant”, and “dialectico-mystical”. Werblowsky situated Breuer in the fourth category all by himself, as he considered Breuer’s proposal revolutionary in this regard.

Since then, however, many new Jewish responses to HBC have been formulated, not all of which can be easily situated in Werblowsky’s four categories. In this paper, I first propose to refine his theory by showing how these categories are related to each other, forming a taxonomy, based on the level of acceptance of HBC on one hand, and the level of reliance on traditional sources on the other hand. This, in turn, allows me to posit a broad view of what Werblowsky calls the “dialectico-mystical” category, so as to include many contemporary approaches besides just Breuer. In addition, my proposed taxonomy allows a more nuanced view of the various approaches, differentiating between extreme and moderate examples of each category, and showing borderline cases that challenge a rigid distinction between the categories.