I read Ethan Dor-Shav’s elaborately detailed psychobiological reinterpretation of the early chapters of Genesis and found many of the comparisons insightful, enjoyable, and novel. The essential claim of this complex essay is that the stories of the Seven Days of creation and of the Garden of Eden are intricate, interwoven allegories for the biological evolution, embryonic development, and cognitive maturation of the human species. The Tree of Knowledge, for instance, is a spinal cord and the naming of the animals marks the Cambrian explosion; virtually every element of the narrative gets a similarly bracing reinvention.

Did he convince me of his case? I suppose that depends on what we say is at stake. Some of what Dor-Shav writes suggests he imagines he has cracked the code and finally revealed the single meaning of Genesis, which the text’s Author intended to hide at the time of its writing or revelation. He warns: “There is a hefty price to pay for seeing the biblical creation narrative in this light. . . . Insightful readings of Eden that we have come to love . . . may seem obsolete.”

Even if one were to agree that the goal of studying the Torah’s narratives is to deduce the one single most compelling interpretation, the one that obsolesces all others, it would be a very high bar for this new reading to meet. Indeed, it would be virtually impossible for an argument that relies on poetic intuition to analogize pieces of biblical verse alongside bits of technical understanding from neuroscience or paleontology. Nearly all the relevant technical experts who could properly assess the scientific elements of the argument do not study Torah or read ancient Hebrew, so how many people are competent to judge which analogies fail to land, and which seem irresistible once pointed out?

More importantly, though, those who study Torah deeply will be familiar with the notion introduced in Bamidbar Rabbah (appropriately, in the intoxicatingly subjective context of wine-drinking) that the Torah has shivim panim (70 faces). In other words, the true facets of the Torah’s meaning are as manifold as the perspectives of its interpreters, and as diverse as the works of Creation itself.

This tradition of creative exegesis is not meant to set in motion a fierce and relentless competition for the single most perfectly reasoned interpretation. Rather, the idea is that the profound truth of the text is, in part, the result of its ability to bear many compelling interpretations, like a kaleidoscope that hides different parts of the message in different rotations of the lens. In his landmark work of literary analysis, Mimesis, Erich Auerbach describes this distinctive quality of biblical scripture by contrasting it with the Homeric epics. In those canonical works of the Greeks, “men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear . . . are the feelings and thoughts of the person involved.” Whether we are hearing about the scenes depicted on Achilles’ shield, or the scar on Odysseus’ leg, the reigning principle is total illumination. Meanwhile, in the Hebrew Bible’s sparing and enigmatic way of recounting events, we instead have “the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity, . . . mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’” Thus the talmudic tractate Ethics of the Fathers insists that “it is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it.” The Torah invites a never-finished labor of speculatively filling in blanks, noticing subtle connections among spare and vital details.

This brings us to a vital question: why is this labor worth undertaking? In other words, what is the proper use for which the Torah text is intended? From a theological perspective, it would seem very odd if the hidden message of revelation was only meant to prove to us that the text knew things about science that we thought it did not. This idea—that Moses or the Lord would require vindication from modern scientists to verify the credibility of the text they provided the world with—seems to run counter to the Torah’s understanding of itself. We are not enjoined to “test” the Torah’s truth against things scientists write in other books. Rather, the function of the text—by its own account— is to enable God’s willing servants to serve Him better, according to His commandments and in light of an enigmatically incomplete and sometimes puzzlingly contradictory retelling of the past.

This does not preclude readings that address the workings of nature or incorporate insights from biology or physics; such interpretations ought to be welcomed under the “70 faces” umbrella. But the aim of such readings should be to help those trying to know God and keep His laws to do so, and always to do so better, understanding this as life’s unending work and purpose.

Here, most significantly, is where I am not sure I follow Dor-Shav. In his conclusion, he tries to suggest that “the purpose of an elaborate allegory of the evolution of man from aquatic protozoa to modern humans” in the Bible is to inform religious man that kabbalists were correct to learn from Greek philosophers that the soul has three aspects:  “the nefesh (roughly equivalent to the Greek term psyche), which represents the reptilian brain; the ruah (also the word for wind, and used in way similar to the Greek thumos), representing the limbic brain; and the n’shamah (the higher soul; in Greek the nous or mind), representing the neocortex.” I am still left asking, what should I do differently now that I possess this knowledge?

The Hebrew Bible and the commentaries of the sages recorded in the Talmud are notoriously uninterested in ontological theories seeking to describe the inner nature of what is, for its own sake. Instead, their accounts of the world focus on tangible reality as experienced in everyday life by individuals, and how people ought to conduct themselves as they seek proper relationship with their Creator. This is not to say that sophisticated methodologies of reasoning about nature are of no relevance to Torah study, of course. But the strong bias is towards their application to proper fulfilment of the divine command.

Tractate Niddah, for example, contains within it an elaborate treatise on how to develop an empirical predictive theory of a recurring pattern in time, demarcated by the motions of the sun and the moon. The sole purpose of this discussion from the perspective of the sages, however, is to assist married couples in deciding when to have intercourse, according to the laws of family purity. Such wisdom is best conceived of as a tool, good insofar as it is applied to a worthy pursuit.

By contrast, the Greeks seem often to have thought it was a good idea to start by giving a comprehensive account of what is, and then to work out afterwards all the implications of that knowledge. Auerbach describes this tendency in narrative literature, but it was a feature of Greek philosophy as well. We can thus see that there is something fundamentally un-Judaic about many statements made by Jewish mystics of the last thousand years. It is not by accident that Dor-Shav takes as the inspiration for his fascinating essay on Genesis the Sefer Yetsirah, widely understood as a core kabbalistic text.

Kabbalists are well-known for their ontologies and taxonomies of the supernal realm, from sefirot (emanations) undergirding creation to gilgulim (reincarnations) that establish which souls were whose in the biblical narratives, on through invisible klipot (husks) of obstruction that attach to improper spiritual practice. This habit of mind and speech is absent in Tanakh, which establishes the “need-to-know” basis of revelation quite clearly. Talmudic sages sometimes adopt the lingo and discursive style of Babylonian or Greek idolaters to make a point, but quite consistently explode these genres through parody (as when they deliberate over whether the soul can enter an embryo before the embryo is conceived, or when they say that God takes pity on those too “ignorant” to plan their medical appointments using astrology).

I must conclude by confessing that I have myself made many arguments about what the Torah might have to say about foreign-sounding subjects like dinosaurs or thermodynamics or Darwinian evolution. For example, I have argued that the signs given to Moses at the burning bush all touch on the physics of life, as a warning against the dehumanizing materialist view of biology that a labor-hungry Pharaoh sought to promote. I hope, when doing so, I always tried to suggest why God took up the subject as a way of helping His people to know better what He wants them to do. My challenge to Dor-Shav is that he do something similar here. A kabbalist may marvel at the idea that the soul has three parts, but Jews intent on learning how to serve their Master better should demand to know how such lofty concepts improve our understanding of God’s will, and how to conduct ourselves accordingly.