256 Marc Zvi Brettler
and what is less important, what is time-bound and what is eternal.” Th e
sages, for example, determine which of the various attitudes toward the
“other” should be normative and negate, in essence, Deuteronomy’s depic-
tion of the ban or proscription (Hebrew: h.erem) which insists that every
person from the nations of Canaan be killed. He states this principle con-
cerning the validity of rabbinic interpretation most clearly in a Hebrew
essay on teaching Bible in school: “Th e rabbis are the ones who clarifi ed,
from among never-ending possibilities that had developed, which aspects
of the biblical world-view would become Judaism.”36
Th e Bible Has a Central Status within Judaism
For Greenberg, the Bible is “the books,” the etymological meaning of the
word Bible. He recognizes the importance of postbiblical works that are
independent of the Bible, but the Bible’s role is tantamount as the Jewish
“foundation document”: it is the “basic document that both edifi es the
community and enables it to retain its identity through continuity with the
past,” “the source and resource for Jewish culture.” He wants his Israeli au-
dience to “respect the Bible as a national treasure and as the foundation
document of the people — a component of its identity.” In talking to a nov-
ice teacher, he similarly emphasizes that “the Bible is the source of Jewish
identity” and is the “beginning point of thought and of self-perception.” In
outlining “An Agenda for an Ideal Jewish Education,” he lists fi rst “Love of
learning Torah (i.e., the fundamental books and their off shoots)” and com-
ments on “Judaism’s near deifi cation of the Torah” and the crucial Jewish
concept of “(the study of ) Torah for its own sake” (torah lishmah),37 which
“brings one into contact with something inherently valuable — the literary
record of the encounter of Jews with a realm that transcends the visible,
the earthly.” He is critical of a narrow application of the historical-critical
method, its “disinterested objectivity,” which leads to the neglect of the
Bible by emphasizing that it is not merely ancient but antiquated.38
Th is central nature of the Bible for the Jewish community is already
evident in Greenberg’s earliest scholarly publication written in modern
Hebrew, in a volume honoring Israel’s prime minister David Ben-Gurion.
Th ere, he speaks of Ezekiel “determin[ing] the practice [Hebrew: halakhah]
for generations of exile.” Greenberg uses the word halakhah, the rabbinic
term for normative legal practice (typically based on biblical precedent),
suggesting that for Greenberg the entire Hebrew Bible may be normative.39