At least until the 1970s, academic students of the Bible tended to disconnect it from Judaism. Thus, the founder of higher biblical criticism, Julius Wellhausen, made it his goal to find a Protestant inner core buried among later pharisaic, legalistic, and priestly accretions. Later Bible critics, writes Benjamin Sommer, “created a firewall between biblical religion and Jewish culture” by insisting “that it is illegitimate to use rabbinic lenses to look at the Bible, it is pointless to use rabbinic commentaries, and it is perverse to think about the Bible in terms of classical Jewish ideas or values.” According to Sommer, three scholars, all of them Conservative rabbis as well as academics, can take credit for breaking down this firewall and creating a biblical scholarship rooted in critical methods but capable of speaking to believing Jews:

Yochanan Muffs, Moshe Greenberg, and Jacob Milgrom believe[d] that it makes sense to study the Bible in a Jewish context, as part of an ongoing Jewish conversation. To achieve a deeper understanding of the Bible, scholars can and should utilize not only modern critical tools such as archaeology and linguistics but also rabbinic midrash [and] the work of medieval Jewish interpreters (many of whom were themselves superb linguists). Thus, all three of them brought the classical Jewish interpreters back into conversations about the Bible among modern scholars. In so doing, they made clear to their colleagues in the academic world that the Bible is (among other things) a Jewish book. At the same time, they demonstrated something crucial to their fellow Jews (and especially their rabbinic and educational colleagues): Jews who want to study the Bible as their scriptures have much to gain by turning to certain modern scholars. . . .

When one pages through any of Milgrom’s commentaries, [for instance], it immediately becomes clear that he perceives strong elements of continuity between the Bible and Jewish culture in the same way that modern scholars have long perceived continuities between the Bible and ancient Near Eastern cultures. For this reason, in his quest to understand difficult texts from Leviticus and Numbers, Milgrom utilizes comparisons and insights from both rabbinic literature and literature written in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Hittite (languages of ancient Mesopotamia, northern Canaan, and Asia Minor, respectively). . . .

By using insights he gleans from both types of literature, Milgrom places the Bible on a long trajectory that moves backward from the Bible to the ancient Near East and forward toward rabbinic Judaism. Milgrom shows that just as earlier literature is relevant for understanding the Bible (even though some of it predates the biblical texts by a millennium), so, too, rabbinic works edited a thousand years after the biblical era can enhance our understanding of the Bible.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.