How Literally Do Jews Take the Hebrew Bible?

Taking the Bible literally is, as everyone knows, the hallmark of a religious fundamentalist. Of course, terms such as “literalism” and certainly “fundamentalism” have their origins in certain debates within American Protestantism, but that doesn’t stop people from applying them to Orthodox Judaism. Such usage has always bemused me, since a major tenet of rabbinic Judaism is that the Bible is not to be taken literally. Ancient and early medieval rabbis quite consciously saw this as what distinguished them from rival Jewish sects.

That might surprise some readers, but one need not know much about Judaism to know that it is true. Two examples will suffice: the Talmud and other contemporary works insist that the lex talionis—“an eye, for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, . . .”—refers to monetary compensation. Nobody’s eye should be gouged out; rather, like American courts today, rabbinic judges were supposed to assess the cost to the plaintiff of the injury through a set of formulas and compel the tortfeasor to pay accordingly.

A second example is the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” Straightforward though it sounds, the rabbis take this to prohibit any consumption of meat and milk together (even if they come from different species, let alone unrelated animals), to mandate the use of separate dishes for meat and dairy, and so forth. This is hardly the sort of reading that liberal Protestant theologians who reject literalism would come up with, but it is by no means a literal interpretation. When it comes to more arcane cases of sacrificial ritual, the talmudic rabbis are quite explicit that their readings differ from the more literal interpretations of the Sadducees—and record intense strife over these issues.