Between man, as he has been described in our last chapter, and the transcendent God of the Bible there is a gaping gulf. God is God, and man, man. The ways of God are as distant from man's ways, and God's thoughts from man's thoughts, as arc the heavens from the earth. (Isaiah 55 :8-9.)

But this biblical attitude would never have become biblical religion had not the recognition of the existence of this gulf been supplemented by the certainty that it can be bridged, and by the knowledge that, on occasion, the gulf has been bridged. The metaphor must not be misunderstood in the sense of obliterating the boundary lines of two distinct entities: God and man. They never merge, neither by an apotheosis of man nor by an ‘incarnation’ of God. But God, remaining God, makes Himself known to man, who remains man. That is the role of revelation. Basically, revelation, as seen in the Bible, is of two kinds: it is a ‘vision’ or a ‘sight,’ and it is the ‘Word of the Lord,’ or ‘Torah,’ that is, divine guidance.

Rabbinic Judaism was, therefore, quite faithful to its biblical prototype when, instead of using an ambiguous term like ‘revelation,’ it spoke, as the occasion demanded, either of gilluy shekhinah, the ‘revealing of God's Presence,’ or of mattan tor ah, the ‘giving of divine guidance.'

The Pentateuch, of course, was, for Rabbinic Judaism, the Torah document par excellence, possessing a higher authority than the canons of Prophets and Hagiographa. Yet, far from letting this role of the Pentateuch lead them into an almost inevitable espousal of literalist Fundamentalism, the very Rabbis who thus elevated the Pentateuch to a position of supreme arbiter in matters of doctrine and practice also insisted that God's total revelation was not confined to the Pentateuch-or even to the Bible as a whole.

They did so by teaching the dogma of the ‘Twofold Torah,’ which meant that, in addition to the Written Torah, given by God to Moses in the form of the Pentateuch, God also revealed an Oral Torah by means of which alone the Written Torah can be properly understood. The Oral Torah, to be transmitted from master to disciple through the generations, was never meant to be set down in writing.