How Three Conservative Jewish Scholars Reclaimed the Bible for Judaism

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: