Series: Why You Are Misquoting Moses | Part 1
Scholars on the Misquoting Moses podcast begin with Genesis but miss the living chain of Torah. Discover why the enlarged first letter, six alefs, and oral tradition of Israel reveal a text that cannot be fully understood outside the Jewish people.
3 Million People in the desert and 40 years in Grammar School and Jewish History
When Bart Ehrman asks his students how much they know about the Bible, he is testing a certain kind of knowledge: the academic kind. He is not testing whether they can open an unvocalized Torah scroll, chant it according to the ancient cantillation, or apply the hermeneutical rules that have governed Jewish reading for millennia.
The podcast Misquoting Moses, featuring Yale’s Professor Joel Baden, begins with the first chapter of Genesis precisely because that is where modern critical scholarship has been trained to begin—looking for sources, seams, and contradictions.
It is not Dr. Baden’s fault that he begins there. He is a highly trained academic in the modern Western study of the Hebrew Bible. But that training is not the same as the continuous reading tradition of the people to whom the text was given.
Our Bible is not a collection of ancient documents reconstructed by professors. It is the living chain of the Torah of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings—preserved by a people who still exist, who still speak the language, and who still inhabit the land.
The Problem of Reading Without the Chain
The original Torah scroll contained no vowels. Every generation of Jewish scholars and teachers has known this. The vowels, the cantillation marks, the division into verses and sections, and the authorized readings (keri) were transmitted orally alongside the consonants.
When a scholar claims to know “what the Hebrew means” while relying primarily on printed editions with vowels already supplied, he is already working one step removed from the text as it was received.
More importantly, he is working outside the hermeneutical systems that Judaism developed to derive both narrative meaning and practical law (halacha). These systems—midrash, the thirteen principles of Rabbi Ishmael, the rules of gematria, and the careful attention to anomalous letters—function as guardrails. They keep interpretation from becoming pure speculation. Outside that community of practice, those guardrails do not exist.
The First Letter of the Torah
The very first letter of the Torah is enlarged: the bet of Bereshit.1 This is not a scribal flourish. It is a deliberate feature preserved in every kosher Torah scroll for thousands of years. Why enlarge the first letter? Traditional teaching offers several interlocking answers.
One is that the Torah begins with bet, the second letter of the alphabet, because the first letter, alef, belongs to the divine Name and to the future. Another is that bet means “house,” pointing to the creation of a world that will one day house the Divine Presence through Israel.
A reader who does not know this tradition—or who treats the enlarged letter as a mere curiosity—has already missed the first instruction the text gives about how it should be read. The letter is enlarged because the Author controlled every stroke. Moses wrote only what he was commanded to write. The enlargement is part of the communication.
Six Alefs and the Timeline of Creation
Traditional readers have long noted the presence of six alefs in the opening verse of Genesis.2 In Jewish numerical thinking, six is the number of the days of creation and of the physical world. The alef, whose numerical value is one, represents the divine unity that underlies and directs the six. The verse is not merely describing the beginning of the cosmos; it is signaling that the Creator is already operating according to a precise timeline that will unfold in history—down to specific dates, events, and covenants.
Does the scholar trained only in comparative religion or source criticism know this? Does he know the numerical value of each letter and the traditional calculations applied to this verse for centuries? If he does not, then his reading of “what the text says” is incomplete by design. He has been trained in a method that treats these layers as later midrash rather than as part of the original communication.
What Bereshit Actually Means
The word Bereshit does not simply mean “in the beginning” in the flat sense most English readers assume. The preposition be- can mean “with,” “in,” or “for the sake of.” Midrashic reading, already reflected in Rashi’s commentary, understands the verse as declaring that God created the world “for the sake of” something first—the Torah, Israel, or the first fruits of humanity’s relationship with God.3
This is not an arbitrary reinterpretation. It is grounded in the language itself and in the larger biblical claim that Israel is God’s firstborn (Exodus 4:22) and the first of His harvest. The opening word of the Torah is already telling the reader for whom and for what purpose the book exists. It is a letter written for the sake of Israel and, through Israel, for the sake of Adam. A scholar who begins by looking for documentary sources is looking past the address line on the envelope.
The Living Chain Versus the Academic Reconstruction
The people who received this text are still here. Abraham was called to Lech Lecha roughly four thousand years ago. The national revelation at Sinai was experienced by an entire people, not by a single individual whose private vision later needed to be verified by scholars. That people have preserved both the written text and the oral tradition that explains it. They have a recorded history, a land, and a language that continue to the present day.
A Book Like No Other
When academics treat the Torah as a set of human documents compiled over centuries, they are performing an act analogous to taking someone’s private correspondence, removing the author and the intended recipients from the conversation, and then declaring that only outsiders can correctly interpret the letter’s meaning. The Torah itself repeatedly instructs its readers to ask their fathers and elders (Deuteronomy 32:7). It does not instruct them to ask professors who were never part of the chain.
This is not a claim that academic tools have no value. It is a claim that those tools are secondary. The primary key to the text is the living community that has carried it, argued over it, and lived by it without interruption. Until scholars are willing to treat that community as a necessary partner rather than an object of study, they will continue to misquote Moses—not because they lack intelligence, but because they read a family letter as if the family no longer exists.
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Footnotes
- The enlarged bet of Bereshit is one of the traditional large letters preserved in the Masoretic text and in every kosher Torah scroll. See standard lists of otiyot rabati.
- Traditional enumerations of the six alefs in Genesis 1:1 vary slightly in counting method but are part of a longstanding Jewish numerical reading of the opening verse. The point is the deliberate presence of the letter alef (unity) within the description of the six-day structure.
- See Rashi on Genesis 1:1, drawing on earlier midrashic sources that parse Bereshit as “for the sake of the first” (Torah, Israel, etc.).
Key Takeaways
- The podcast ‘Misquoting Moses’ highlights the disconnect between academic understanding and the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Torah.
- Academic methods often overlook essential oral traditions, hermeneutical systems, and the communal context of biblical texts.
- The enlarged first letter of the Torah and the six alefs in Genesis convey deeper meanings linked to creation and Jewish thought.
- The understanding of ‘Bereshit’ goes beyond its literal translation, signifying a purpose tied to Israel and a divine relationship.
- The living chain of Judaism preserves the Torah’s meaning, countering academic reconstructions that disconnect the text from its community.