But why do we have to keep on pretending that the Israelites knew of only one god? They heard two voices at Sinai (at least before the editors at Yavneh corrupted the text of Exodus). Indeed let's stop this pretending right now. The greatness of the Pentateuch isn't that it is the best written prose in the history of the world (it is not). Nor is it the 'greatest story told.' Far from it. What makes the Torah so great is that it was deliberately constructed in such a way that the true story - the actual reason the text is great - is hidden beneath the surface.
For white people of course, any inkling of 'kabbalah' or 'Jewish mysticism' came to them when they encountered Gershom Scholem for the first time. Yet even then this interest in numbers and letters seems just downright 'weird.' The 'real story' that their ancestors told them to pay attention to is the 'moral' lessons of the Bible - its 'ethics.'
Of course Celsus hit the nail a long time ago. It is hard to really hard to hold up the Torah as an example of 'ethics.' What Yahweh wanted from his people above all else was to fear him so much that they would cleave to the ten utterances. Then and only then he would send his chesed down to the people. The fact that chesed has a numerological value of 72 doesn't enter into the equation for the white people - because of course they don't read the text in Hebrew. But 72 is of course a very significant number in the Pentateuch. It appears in the three 72 letters verses that make up Exodus 14:19 - 21 - a section of text which Jews and Samaritans knew hid the secret name of God - i.e. that he was Gevurah or 'might' (a word which has a numerological value of 216 or 3 x 72).
In kabbalah of course the workings of Gevurah and Chesed are interwoven. But they are specifically interwoven like the numbers 72 and 216. The idea that the Torah is great because Abraham lies about his wife being his sister (ignore the later addition of the marginal note at Genesis 20:12 that later became embedded in the text), that Isaac and Rebekah demonstrate themselves to be the worst parents in history, Jacob the embodiment of 'the bad man' as Philo referred to him who learned from his parents how not raise children and then applied it on an even grander scale with a family of twelve boys. Even Moses makes his failings clear to the reader right at the outset of the Exodus narrative.
Developing a narrative about a cast of sad sacks is not the reason why the Pentateuch is the greatest book ever written. The real reason is that almost two thousand years of white exegesis have failed to grasp what the text is really about it. The real god of Israel - the one who redeemed them from Egypt - is a hidden power buried in marginalia and gematria throughout the text. Indeed what really makes the Pentateuch so amazing and awesome is that the narrative is untranslatable. It cannot be understood in Greek or Latin or English. For the true god of Israel disappears as soon as the text is interpreted out of Hebrew.
Indeed what strikes me as utterly incredible is how utterly clueless white people are about Jews, Israel and its divinity even after two thousand years of trying so hard to make sense of it all. We are further behind today than we were in the second century, that is for sure. Celsus wasn't clueless about the Jews and Christians. He sounds so strange to us today because we have become estranged from the truth, not the other way around.
The universities are not helping us know the truth. There are too many bad books being written by people who don't know the oral traditions. All this speculation and 're-interpretation' - how do you get away from the fact that the real god of Israel was hidden by Ezra, embedded in the letters written on the page? Apparently for some people, as fast as they can ...
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."