Can Modern Bible Scholarship Be Reconciled with Faith? https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/religion-holidays/2015/05/can-modern-bible-scholarship-be-reconciled-with-faith/

May 19, 2015 | Benjamin Sommer
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According to Benjamin Sommer, it can. In a recent book entitled Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition, he attempts to do so by arguing that the Hebrew Bible is the product of divine revelation even though the Torah is not the literal, word-for-word, Word of God. (Interview by Alan Brill):

Using modern critical tools such as history and philology to understand the Bible’s teachings doesn’t somehow render those teachings irrelevant to religion; using those tools simply means that I am able to get much closer to understanding biblical texts and their teachings the way their first audiences understood them. Why understanding the Bible more deeply and more authentically on its own terms should be thought inimical to accepting the Bible as sacred is utterly beyond me. . . .

[Furthermore], it seems inauthentic to me, as religious Jew, to separate what I know about the Bible intellectually from the ways I employ it religiously. It will not do to read the Bible serially, sometimes as [an historical] artifact and at other times as Scripture. Such a choice would require one to partition oneself, so that one has a secular mind and a religious soul co-existing uneasily in a single body but not communicating with each other. . . .

There really was an event at Mount Sinai that involved all Israel, and Sinai is not just a metaphor. However, [the Torah] is Scripture not because all of its words came from heaven, but because it contains the nation of Israel’s response to God’s real but non-verbal commands that came to Israel at Sinai.

Read more on Book of Doctrines and Opinions: https://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/interview-with-benjamin-sommer-on-revelation-and-authority-sinai-in-jewish-scripture-and-tradition/