The Rational Jew

Tanach is full of what seem to be errors. Not something you would expect from a divine document. I urge you to approach these errors with the perspective of someone trying to answer the question, is this a divine text?  If you come to the text with the assumption it is divine, you can obviously never conclude that it is not. Parallel Narratives Combined Into One One of the modern secular theories of the Tanach is that it was either composed of multiple source texts or was supplemented with addendums over time to create the patchwork text we have currently. I am going to quote some passages that make sense if they were:  originally multiple source texts that were spliced together edited over time written by an author who was happy to take artistic license  but are both confusing/convoluted or completely contradictory if thought of as a single source text presenting the literal truth.  Yosef sold to slavery Bereshit 37 25 And they sat down to eat bread; and they lifte...

 This is super todo, but I wanted to drop a source from the OU website that should get you thinking until I can make a better dive into this topic: https://www.ou.org/holidays/when_was_the_exodus At this page you will find the author grappling with the issue that before, during and after the accepted secular timeline of the exodus and the accepted Jewish timeline of the exodus, Egypt ruled Canaan as a vassal state. Yup.  This is on top of the fact that we have no evidence of the exodus followed by a mass conquering of Canaan by the Jews as presented by the Tanach's timeline, while we do have much evidence of Egypt ruling the small kingdoms at the time (correspondence between Canaan and Egypt is well preserved due to the meticulous record keeping of Egypt and the ideal climate of Egypt for archeological preservation). So how could the Jews have left Egypt, traveled to an Egyptian territory and conquered it given the archeological evidence? The author on the OU website seems to ...

This argument was actually the last holdout for me on my journey towards atheism. On its surface it appears rock solid, but with a broader understanding of history it is clearly bogus. I am bothered how this argument continues to make its rounds in Orthodox circles and it is the duty of truthful Jews to shut it down.  Claim The written/oral Torah relays the claim that the entire people of Israel witnessed God giving the ten commandments. Such a claim could have never been started. If the claim was started at the time or shortly after the time when such event supposedly happened, the false ‘prophet’ relaying such a claim would not be believed because the events would be easily verifiable. Not only did the supposed event just occur, but anyone being lied to would have easy access to others who supposedly witnessed it (everyone was there). If the mass revelation claim was falsely created many generations after the supposed event, the figure who introduced the claim would be recorded a...