Concepts of Scripture in Mordechai Breuer 269can be traced to divine authorship but also that they cannot be ascribed to
one human author working alone. Such complexity in a human author may
be unusual, but to me it is not implausible, and surely it is not impossible,
as Breuer would have it. One may therefore learn a great deal from Breuer,
and identify with other elements in his intellectual and theological frame-
work, without subscribing to this strand in his background.
In fact, most Orthodox writers indebted to Breuer, including myself,
do not adopt his quasi-Kantian outlook. Like Breuer, they are intrigued by
some of the literary questions raised by the critics. However, the evidence
for multiple authorship, or for the relative dating of texts, is not the uni-
fi ed and assured result of a systematic science, which must be embraced or
rejected as a whole, but a collection of insights, interpretations, and specu-
lations, sometimes more plausible, sometimes less so. We understand the
considerations that lead scholars to ascribe Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 to dif-
ferent authors. We believe that the data leading to these considerations are
worthy of being incorporated into any cogent interpretation of Genesis. Yet
few, if any, would endorse Breuer’s sweeping assertion that assuming the
human authorship of the Torah entails, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that
the human author of chapter 2 lived earlier than the author of chapter 1.
Breuer himself, early in his career, acknowledged the Kantian impact on
his outlook but played it down aft erward. In later years, he was more likely
to explain his unwillingness to challenge the conclusions of the academy,
within their circumscribed orbit, on pragmatic grounds, as a householder
would acquiesce to the competence of an electrician within his narrow
professional sphere. Th e unqualifi ed affi rmations of the Documentary Hy-
pothesis in Breuer’s programmatic essays can be ascribed, fi rst, to a fi xa-
tion on the consensus prevalent at the time he fi rst devoted careful study to
Julius Wellhausen (the deeply infl uential German Protestant biblical critic
who lived from 1844 to 1918 and in whose work the Documentary Hypoth-
esis reached its apogee) and scholars associated with him and, second, to
a reluctance to reexamine it in detail. Nonetheless, the “two domains” ap-
proach to the general question of science and religious truth associated
with his uncle remains in the background.
Second, Breuer’s early programmatic essays are explicitly grounded in
kabbalah, which devotes enormous attention to diff erent sefi rot within
God, that is to say, diff erent aspects in which He is experienced and the
dialectic between them. Breuer claimed that the need to assimilate biblical
criticism prior to combating it was fi rst suggested to him by his colleague