Is the Hebrew Bible Divine?

 Yehuda HaLevy lived from 1045-1171.  He was a poet and an early Zionist.  Legend states that he ultimately left Spain and came to Jerusalem where he was killed by a Crusader.  The period from about 1000-1200 is known as the Golden Age of Spain.  Southern Spain was under Muslim control.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims studied philosophy together.  The teachings of Aristotle was revised through the commentaries of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198).  Maimonides (1135-1204), the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, and to some, of all time, studied them and attempted to reinterpret Aristotle through a Jewish lens, as Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) did for Christianity.

Halevy wrote a book, The Book of the Khazars, in which he attempted to demonstrate the superiority of Judaism over Christianity and Islam.  The Khazars were a Turkish people who established a commercial empire in the 6th Century between the Black and Caspian Seas.  In the 8th Century, it appears that the king of the Khazars converted to Judaism.  It is not know whether it was just the royal family or the entire people.  Halevy used the conversion of the king as the basis for his book.

Halevy relates that the king had a dream from God in which he was told his intentions were good but not his practices.  When the dream is repeated, he interprets it to mean that God wants him to change his religion.  He decides to question a philosopher, a Christian and a Muslim.  After rejecting all three of them, he reluctantly brings in a rabbi.  He is convinced by the rabbi of the truth of Judaism, and converts.  The rest of the book is the rabbi explaining the concepts of Judaism.  

Halevy compared the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran.  Only the Hebrew Bible is accepted by all three faiths as divine.  Jews reject both the New Testament and the Quran as being divine, the Christians reject the Quran, and the Muslims do not accept Jesus and the New Testament as divine.  Christianity and Islam are dependent on a divine Hebrew Bible.  In many places in the New Testament, the actions of Jesus fulfill the prophecies of the Hebrew prophets.  Muhammed is the greatest of the  prophets and the culmination of prophecy, which includes Abraham, Moses and Jesus.  The Reformation of Judaism starting in Germany following the Enlightenment and continuing in the United States, established that Judaism can still exist without a divine text.  

Halevy did not prove that the Hebrew Bible is divine.  He just demonstrated that it was accepted by all three faiths as being so.  The rabbis, whose interpretations of the Hebrew Bible created Judaism, accepted it as divine, and used it as a criteria for including texts into the Canon of the Hebrew Bible.  A text had to be seen as either divine or written under divine inspiration to be included.  The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are texts that were not accepted.

My dilemma is:  how can I prove the text of the Hebrew Bible to be divine if I cannot prove the existence of God?  To do that, I think we have to see if the text itself could qualify as divine.  If it is a fiction, as some scholars maintain, then it is clearly not.  To be divine, then, it must be historical.  To be historical, it must be true.  However, there are more truths than just historical.  Let's look at scientific.  The Hebrew Bible opens with an account of the creation of the universe.  It is easy to pass off the account as unreliable, because we know the universe is about 14 billion years old.  The process of its creation did not take six days, and it did not happen 5,784 years ago.

In his philosophical text, The Guide for the Perplelxed, Maimonides points out that words are equivocal.  They don't always mean the same thing, especially when they are used to describe God.  The word "day" is equivocal.  Is a day the entire 24 hour period, or is it just the time of light, as opposed to night, the time of darkness?  This means that a day is comprised of day and night, somewhat misleading.  We look at Psalm 90:4:

כִּ֤י אֶ֪לֶף שָׁנִ֡ים בְּֽעֵינֶ֗יךָ כְּי֣וֹם אֶ֭תְמוֹל כִּ֣י יַֽעֲבֹ֑ר וְאַשְׁמוּרָ֥ה בַלָּֽיְלָה׃

For a thousand years in your eyes are like a day of yesterday that passes, and like the watch during the night.

I have no problem understanding each day of creation as thousands, if not billions of years, so the use of the word day does not trouble me.  There is an issue as well in the order of events.  In particular, days three and four.  How could the earth and vegetation exist on day three before the sun, moon, and starts on day four?  Rashi (1040-1105), the pre-eminent rabbinic commentator, gives an explanation.  Even though the events are ordered sequentially, Rashi contends that they are happening simultaneously.  The order of days is just a way to show that God has a plan and the universe is unfolding according to that plan.  

The order of events is also in parallel.  Day one, light, is paralleled by day four, the luminaries.  Day two, the expanse separating water above and below, by day five, the creatures of the expanse, fish and birds. Day three, dry land and vegetation, by day six, the creatures of dry land.  Since no one witnessed the creation, a model had to be chosen to describe it. In other words, God is building a palace. The first three days, the materials are assembled, the last three days is the actual construction.   In the texts coming from the ancient world, a victorious god builds a palace for himself.  In that case, God is building the palace not for God, but for humanity.  So it is very earth-centric.

Tomorrow, we will continue, with my attempt to show that this account could be seen as scientifically true.