Jewish Apologetics Tier List

Assessing Arguments from an Insider's Perspective

Millions of religious Jews and Christians alike believe the literal meaning of the Old Testament is the inerrant word of God. This requires believing the following:

• God created the universe in six days less than 6000 years ago.

• Humans used to reliably live to be up to 969 years old.

• A worldwide flood occurred around 2400 BCE, killing almost all humans and land animals, without leaving a trace of evidence in the geological, archaeological, or paleontological record.

• All of humanity spoke the same language until ~2200 BCE, when God scattered them around the world and distinct languages formed, contradicting all evidence from historical linguistics.

• Giants and a leviathan exist.

I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. Usually, teenagers leave Orthodox Judaism because they want to be able to use their phone on weekends, vape, and hook up with girls. But I wasn’t cool enough for any of that.

Me in my formative years.

While they hooked up with girls, I thought about the conflict between Old Testament literalism and the scientific consensus. When I was 15, the contradictions reached a boiling point. I read every book on Jewish apologetics I could get my hands on, but I wasn’t able to find satisfactory answers.

To this day, I have never met anyone else who left Orthodox Judaism because they actually thought it through. The only other person I know of who’s done this is Eliezer Yudkowsky. Though losing my faith was hard, it was all worth it so that I could make this tier list of works in Jewish apologetics.

Tier E

The Coming Revolution by Zamir Cohen

This book is on the shelves of ~half of Orthodox Jewish families’ houses. The pages are so gorgeously designed that they make the book’s arguments seem much more compelling than they actually are.

In some sense, The Coming Revolution isn’t actually a book of Jewish apologetics. Zamir Cohen doesn’t try to systematically defend Judaism’s core empirical claims. Instead, Cohen finds an ambiguous verse in the Old Testament:

God made the expanse [the sky], and it separated the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. — Genesis 1:7

Water above the sky, you say? Did you know that some asteroids contain water? And aren’t asteroids above the sky? The Old Testament is vindicated!

Before the silver cord snaps, and the golden bowl crashes, the jar is shattered at the spring, and the jug is smashed at the cistern. — Ecclesiastes 12:6

A silver cord, you say? Parapsychologists have found that when people have out-of-body experiences, they sometimes see a silver cord connecting their astral self to their physical self. Boom, baby—the Old Testament is vindicated once again!

I would call The Coming Revolution confirmation bias pornography rather than genuine Jewish apologetics. If a Biblical literalist is looking to feel good about themselves, they can read this book. But if someone has genuine questions, this book is unlikely to help them feel better.

Tier D

Torah, Chazal, and Science by Rabbi Moshe Meiselman

Rabbi Meiselman comes from the Haredi branch of Judaism. Haredis believe not only in the inerrancy of the Old Testament, but also in the inerrancy of the writings of the rabbis up to 625 CE. This means Rabbi Meiselman has to defend claims like the following:

And Rabba bar bar Ḥana said: I have seen a certain frog that was as large as the fort of Hagronya. And how large is the fort of Hagronya? It is as large as sixty houses. A snake came and swallowed the frog. A raven came and swallowed the snake, and flew up and sat in a tree. — Bava Batra 73b

I appreciate Rabbi Meiselman for actually trying to defend the Haredi position to non-Haredis, as opposed to doing what most Haredis do (just avoid the outside world). However, since there’s an enormous amount of material Rabbi Meiselman has to defend, he has to resort to sweeping and implausible principles to bat aside entire categories of criticisms:

• “Nature changed”: When the rabbis said that lions have a gestation period of three years, or that salamanders generate from fire, this was true at the time, but nature has since changed.

• “The rabbis have been misinterpreted”: Sure, it really seems like the rabbis before 625 CE believed that mice and insects spontaneously generate. But they were being figurative, and everyone since 625 CE has been misinterpreting them.

• “Pre-flood evidence is inadmissible”: The universe was conveniently fundamentally altered by the Biblical flood, such that all scientific inference about the pre-flood era is invalid.

It’s clear that Rabbi Meiselman starts by assuming the conclusion that the Old Testament and the rabbis are always inerrant, and then tries to come up with broad principles to bolster that conclusion. The motivated reasoning throughout Torah, Chazal, and Science gives it a D.

Tier B

The Kuzari by Judah Halevi

My friend Bentham’s Bulldog finds the Kuzari “surprisingly convincing”. Tyron Goldschmidt articulates its main argument as follows:

A tradition is true if it is (1) accepted by a nation; and describes (2) a national experience of a previous generation of that nation; and (3) the national experience would be expected to create a continuous national memory until the tradition is in place.

If the argument goes through, then the Old Testament is a reliable record of events that took place thousands of years ago. For the time the Kuzari was written (1140 CE), I think the argument is quite persuasive. However, I think the argument grows much more tenuous when the “national experience” contradicts the findings of geology, archaeology, and paleontology. Eventually, we have to accept that the tradition was exaggerated over time, or combined with mythological details, such that it’s hard to know which parts of the modern tradition comprise the original authentic core. At that point, the claim that the Old Testament is the inerrant word of God becomes so diluted that it’s hard to know what it implies about how we should live our lives today.

Genesis and the Big Bang by Gerald Schroeder

MIT-educated physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder has a creative idea for reconciling God’s creation of the universe in six days with the scientific consensus. He claims that if one views the Earth from the perspective of the point of origin of the Big Bang, Einstein’s equations of relativity indicate that time dilates by a factor of ~1 trillion. If the universe is 15 billion years old, then Earth would appear to have just completed its sixth day. If you compare the midnights of each of the six days from the perspective of the origin of the Big Bang to the Biblical narrative (the creation of planet Earth, biological life, plants, birds, land animals, etc), there is a rough correspondence.

I think Dr. Schroeder’s idea is ingenious and imaginative. However, there are still problems. Using an age of 13.8 billion years for the universe rather than 15 billion, then the Earth would have just begun its sixth day, and Dr. Schroeder’s timetable goes out of sync. Even if we assume 15 billion years, the midnights only somewhat match up with the Biblical narrative.

Tier A

The Great Partnership by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion brings things together to see what they mean. — The Great Partnership

Rabbi Sacks forcefully argues against both the New Atheists who consider religion valueless and harmful, and religious fundamentalists who ignore the findings of science. To Sacks, just as science is necessary to improve the human condition, religion is crucial to understanding human behavior.

I don’t disagree much with Sacks’ thesis. However, I think the truth or falsity of empirical claims a religion makes matters. If the Old Testament’s empirical claims are false, that is evidence that it is not divinely inspired. If it’s not divinely inspired, then while it may contain useful lessons about the human psyche, we can distill these lessons without living by the religion it mandates.

Sacred Monsters by Rabbi Natan Slifkin

Many religious Jews believe mermaids, unicorns, griffins, dragons, phoenixes, and other fantastic creatures exist, because the Old Testament / historical rabbis can be interpreted to have implied their existence.

Slifkin is here to wreck these guys with facts and logic. He guides the reader through the Biblical/rabbinic references to each creature and through the (lack of ) evidence of the creature’s existence. He concludes that none of these creatures exist. If historical rabbis believe they existed, that’s because they were wrong.

This approach gets harder when a fantastic creature is referenced directly in the Old Testament, because then the reference needs to be shown to be metaphorical, allegorical, or mistranslated. For example, Slifkin claims that the “giants” discussed in the Old Testament were ordinary humans who were extremely tall, on the edge of what’s genetically possible (9 feet ≈ 2.7 meters).

Overall, Sacred Monsters is a deeply insightful and entertaining read, and it even convinced me that some places where I thought the Old Testament attested to the existence of mythical creatures (e.g. the phoenix and the leviathan) were poetic rather than literal in nature.

Tier S

The Challenge of Creation by Rabbi Natan Slifkin

[We hope that] the author who has spread this heresy will burn all of his works and publicly retract all that he has written. — Censure of Slifkin’s books by Haredi Jewish authorities

Slifkin won’t drink the Kool-aid. He’s read Torah, Chazal, and Science and doesn’t buy it. He’s read Genesis and the Big Bang and doesn’t think it works. To Slifkin, we can either accept the Biblical creation narrative or accept the scientific consensus, and he chooses the latter.

The Biblical creation story isn’t true. It’s doesn’t even map vaguely onto true events. It’s just an allegory we can take lessons from. What about the Biblical flood? Well, the geological and paleontological evidence shows that it can’t have been worldwide or as miraculous as a plain reading of the Old Testament would suggest. Perhaps there was a large local flood in the Middle East.

For many Orthodox Jews, this is an extremely unusual take teetering on the edge of heresy. Slifkin has received vicious attacks and censure. However, I think if there’s any way to reconcile the Old Testament with modern science, Slifkin’s approach is the most intellectually honest there is.