116 R o b e rt A. H a r r i s
narration, interrupt the fl ow between the fi rst-person narration that begins
in verse 1 and continues with verse 4 and following, Eliezer comments,
And I saw visions of God. . . . I looked, and lo, a stormy wind . . . : Ezekiel’s
words did not continue from the beginning, and even his name he did not
make explicit, since the context of the book will make it clear below. 34 . . .
And, relying on this, he allowed himself to abbreviate. . . . But the redactor
who wrote all of his words together added to what [Ezekiel] had left un-
clear and abbreviated, in these two verses.Th is comment attributes two biblical verses to a sofer, which I have trans-
lated as “redactor” since Eliezer claims that this person “wrote all of Eze-
kiel’s words together.” On the surface, this is less radical than it might oth-
erwise seem; aft er all, the Babylonian Talmud had attributed the author-
ship of the book not to the prophet Ezekiel himself but rather to the “Men
of the Great Assembly.” However, just beneath the surface is the striking
observation that God had not revealed God’s own self to this “redactor”
(nor to “those Men”); the “redactor” was not a prophet! At least, none of
the medieval exegetes who refer to sofrim, sadranim, kotevim, ba’alei ha-
sefer, and so on (some of the preferred medieval designations for “redac-
tors”)35 ever refer to them as possessing prophetic status. Th e implication
ought to be clear: R. Eliezer and other exegetes attributed portions of the
biblical text to people with whom God did not “speak” — and none of these
exegetes considered that the sanctity of the biblical text was in any way di-
minished by this consideration. Th us, to at least a certain degree and in
certain particular circumstances, the northern French rabbinic exegetes in-
cluded in their “conception of Torah” texts that were manifestly composed
by human beings and not God.
Lest one think that observations such as these are possible with pro-
phetic texts but not Torah itself, I conclude through consideration of one
fi nal text. Th is is part of Rashbam’s comment on the opening verse of the
Torah, Genesis 1:1. You may recall that I began this study with a citation
of Rashi’s comment on the Torah’s fi rst verse: lo hayyah tzarikh le-hathil et
ha-Torah, which though it is usually translated as “the Torah only needed
to have begun,” I instead deliberately translated using a transitive verb
(as had Rashi), “He ought to have begun the Torah.” Rashi had thus con-
sidered the process of writing with an active verb and a singular subject
(though it must be admitted that the subject of Rashi’s imagination, being
left unstated, could as easily refer to a Divine Author as it could to a human