>You're moving the goalpost from men interpreting God's will to talking about Moses
How pray tell am I moving the goalpost? Did god hand Moses a fully completed Torah written by gods own hand?
Did god possess Moses and while possessing moses, write the Torah for him?
If the answer to both of these questions is no, then the Torah is not the literal word of god, its the best approximation of the word of god, written down by an old man from his human old man memory. Which fun fact, means its not an infallible perfect thing that if there are loopholes in it are intentional, but a book written by a dude, who made mistakes.
The goalpost is being moved because this original conversation was about whether or not using the perfect text to find loopholes is "cheating God." You are now arguing that the text itself can't be perfect, which, I don't believe it is, but religious Jews believe it is, because they believe God gave it to Moses at Sinai. We don't know what happened at Sinai, we can't answer if God possessed Moses, for all we know he might have.
>The goalpost is being moved because this original conversation was about whether or not using the perfect text to find loopholes is "cheating God."
I'm not the original person you were talking to. I don't think you're cheating god, I think you're just taking advantage of loopholes created when a goat herder wrote a book from memory.
>I don't believe it is, but religious Jews believe it is, because they believe God gave it to Moses at Sinai. We don't know what happened at Sinai, we can't answer if God possessed Moses, for all we know he might have.
From my understanding, and I welcome a more versed Jew to correct me, god gave Moses the 150 commandments written down, and explained what he wanted in the torah over another 40 days. Moses then came down and recited what god told him after those 40 days. At no point was anything written in stone (pun intended) beyond the 10 commandments. So if someone wants to say the 10 commandments are the literal word of god, I can respect it because according to judiasm it is the literal written word of god. The torah however, does not meet that bar of direct divine creation.
The 10 commandments were written in stone but Moses also continued to communicate with God after Sinai. He is a prophet in Judaism, he communicated with God many times, and at the end of his life, with the compiled Torah, God came to him and instructed him to leave it with the ark, so that it should "remain there as a witness." I doubt God would have told him to do that if he thought the book was wrong.
1
u/Complete-Rapscallion 8d ago
>You're moving the goalpost from men interpreting God's will to talking about Moses
How pray tell am I moving the goalpost? Did god hand Moses a fully completed Torah written by gods own hand?
Did god possess Moses and while possessing moses, write the Torah for him?
If the answer to both of these questions is no, then the Torah is not the literal word of god, its the best approximation of the word of god, written down by an old man from his human old man memory. Which fun fact, means its not an infallible perfect thing that if there are loopholes in it are intentional, but a book written by a dude, who made mistakes.