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I disagree that the concept of salvation did not have a place within Judaism. Certainly, the concept was rather hazily conceived, with very little in the way of specifics. But David speaks of "salvation" constantly in the Psalms, and the idea crops up enough elsewhere in the Old Testament to see clearly that it was not unknown to the Israelites.

"Salvation" in the TaNa"KH does not refer to "salvation" as chr*stianity understands it. "Salvation" simply means rescue from a dangerous situation. Chr*stianity later spiritualized this concept as it has so many other things (Israel, Jerusalem, etc.). David praying that G-d restore "the joy of his salvation" is not a Calvinist prayer!

While Judaism does not know "salvation" in the chr*stian sense, it most certainly does not an afterlife. In fact, one of the most dogmatic concepts in Judaism is "resurrection of the dead" which is the subject of the second prayer of the `Amidah. However, an afterlife is not the same thing as "salvation." "Salvation" doesn't just mean that one goes to Heaven. It denotes (or at least connotes) that Heaven is the result of a rescue rather than anything connected with reward and punishment. And no, it is not that G-d owes man Heaven, but He rewards and punishes (in both this life and the next). In Judaism's more mystical teachings the soul actually descends from Heaven into the developing human body, so naturally at death it "reports" back to headquarters where some sort of judgment will be rendered. But the chr*stian concept of "salvation" is far more than simply an afterlife.

So, from a Christian POV, it seems fair enough to suppose that the revelation of an afterlife was very slowly manifested and with a deliberate incompleteness.

This is not the case. Unlike all other religions, Judaism is not based on "progressive revelation," ie, a revelation that begins at a very elementary, spotty, incomplete phase and then reaches a crescendo at some other time. The exact opposite is the case. In Judaism, the highest revelation comes first. The Prophets are not higher, but lower than the Torah, and the Hagiographa is lower still. In fact, the Prophets and Hagiographa will not always be publicly read as Scripture, but only until they are all fulfilled and thus served their purpose. Only the Torah (and Megillat 'Ester) will be read publicly as Scripture eternally because it serves an eternal purpose.

This means that the "absence" of teachings on the afterlife were not delayed in order to be revealed at a later time; instead these teachings are merely elucidated only in the Oral Torah (actually, all truth is alluded to in the Written Torah, but some of the allusions are buried very deep; they are explicated only in the Oral Torah). So the teachings were already there and were doubtless studied by the Israelites during their forty years in the Wilderness.

Well, again, I think part of your problem with Christianity is what you consider Biblical laxity among many of the people with whom you formerly associated. That's unfortunate, to be sure, but it doesn't follow that the Faith itself has similar official positions. Anyway, modern Judaism, if anything, has an even greater range of beliefs on the subjects of inerrancy and literalness, yet that fact doesn't stop you from allying yourself much more to their thought processes than to Christianity's. If you can get almost rabid in your disdain for most Christians, I wonder why you don't feel the same way about the legions of (effectively) apostate Jews in the world today. I guess I'm looking to understand what I see as a glaring inconsistency here.

This is a very good question. Actually, my feelings towards liberal Jews (especially the way they enjoy representing all Jews as decadent, world-weary Weimar intellectuals who divide their time between making dirty movies and organizing labor unions) could not be printed on this forum without being immediately yanked (yes, I'm lousy at mitzvat 'ahavat-Yisra'el!). However, religiously I identify only with Orthodox Jews, and believe it or not, almost all Orthodox Jews are much more literal than mainstream chr*stians are. They all believe (or at least claim to) that G-d literally wrote the Torah Himself before the world was created and then dictated it to Moses one letter at a time. They all believe (or claim to) that the Written Torah, compact as it is, in some mysterious way encompasses all truth and all reality. It's true that there are plenty of Orthodox Jewish evolutionists (mostly in Modern Orthodoxy, but some in the traditional insular world as well), but Orthodox Jewish evolutionists are very distinctive among all other "Theistic evolutionists" (they still believe G-d wrote the Torah, that the Hebrew language and alphabet was created directly by G-d and did not develop from earlier ones, and once Adam and Eve arrive on the scene they accept the historicity of everything recorded in the Torah, completely rejecting the concept of didactic mythology, much less the blasphemous assertion that the Torah was adapted from paganism). In other words, the vast majority of Orthodox Jewish "Theistic evolutionists" are only non-Fundamentalist for the first five days of Genesis One and then switch to literalism. Methuselah, Noah, the Tower of Babel--they are all accepted as literal history. Indeed, my greatest criticism of Orthodox Jewish evolutionists is the blatant inconsistency of listening to the voice of "science" for the first twenty-something verses and then refusing to listen to it any longer (since the same "science" that teaches evolution also teaches the documentary hypothesis, that the Torah contains mythology, and that the Hebrew language is a descendant of an older language). My experience is that, as obnoxious as they are ("We Jews don't believe in creationism!"), Orthodox Jewish evolutionists barely count as non-literalists at all. They are non-literal about so little that they really have no grounds to reject the literalness of any of it!

Go into any Orthodox synagogue and ask any of the men the name of Noach's wife. He'll tell you.

As for how Catholicism views this, I must admit that there is no "infallible" pronouncement on the subject beyond the fact that the Church affirms that the entirety of the Bible is the inspired Word of God. It is inerrant in the truths it seeks to convey, though it is not "required" of Catholics to believe that every word is 100% literal. The language employed in both Testaments "handicaps," if you will, the ability of God to transmit his truths in ways that humans can understand; the limits of human language cannot be stretched beyond a certain point, and the limits of man's prior knowledge (with with he makes sense of new information - in this case, revelation) are not boundless. This creates a situation, for example, where the notion that the earth is flat and supported by pillars seems legitimate according to Psalm 75:4. If one is to conclude that absolutely everything in the Bible is to be taken literally, then one is forced to conclude that the earth is sustained on pillars. Yet we know this is not so. So, is the Bible 100% literal or not? If only 99.9999%, can one suppose it's only 99.9998%?

The way to explain this is to understand that the Bible is not a science book, and God was not obliged to give us scientific knowledge of things in His creation. He left it to us to "fill the earth and subdue it" in Genesis, and, I dare say, scientific discovery through our own sweat and effort is part of "subduing" the earth. The exact methodology of how God created the heavens and the earth is way beyond the scientific and linguistic capacities of the Israelites who hear Moses' account; God described it in a way they could understand. As it is, very little of either Testament is even "eligible" to have this non-literal approach applied to it. In Revelation, for example, one can imagine the beast with seven heads and ten horns is very likely to be symbolic of something, and not literal. No one would follow such a grotesque monster if it literally looked like that. But the overwhelming majority of Scripture relates history in a credible way when taken literally, and there's no reason to suppose such history is not literal.

Ah, now we come to the crux of the matter! And thank you for providing me an excuse to discuss my views at a greater length than I usually do.

The idea of a "woodenly literal" or "word-for-word literal" or "one hundred percent literal" interpretation of the Bible is a complete red herring, since no one, including the most literalistic Fundamentalist, does such a thing. My experience is that such things as "the four corners of the earth" (figure of speech), "G-d" having a beard of sheep in Song of Songs (an allegory that doesn't even mention G-d), and anthropomorphisms/anthropopassisms are invoked dishonestly as an excuse to deny the historicity of certain episodes in which either the supernatural comes into play, or else the laws of nature are plainly not the same as they are now.

Please allow me to explain.

A "wooden" or "100% literal" interpretation of the words of the Torah at several points would imply that the penalty for certain sins is to have one's eye plucked out, hand cut off, etc. The commandments of the Torah, though spelled out at a very deep level, are simply not described on the surface of the text, and the Oral Torah is absolutely essential in order to understand them at all. I am not and have not been for a long, long time an advocate of soul competency or Scottish common sense philosophy when it comes to such matters in the Bible.

In fact the true interpretation of "eye for an eye" etc. is that the wounded party is recompensed a monetary amount equal to his eye (or hand, or foot, or wound) which the aggressor has to pay him, and this has always been the interpretation. Nevertheless, the written text, when read carefully enough, plainly alludes to this when it uses the word "give" (why would one give someone an eye which he could never use, or why would one "give" him an additional wound?). It is not merely the narrative, but the very letters themselves (along with their sizes, shapes, and names) and even the spaces between the letters that allude to these deep matters.

So the first thing to be understood is that I do not claim that anyone with "one eye and half sense" can read the Torah and then construct a tabernacle and perform the service (the Torah at various times commands that some offerings be "heaved" and others be "waved," but never says a word about how these rituals are to be carried out). What I am insisting upon, absolutely, is the accurate facticity of all the events and people mentioned. The universe was created in six days. Adam lived 930 years. The Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Exodus, the talking donkey, and the Biblical chronology of history all happened exactly as written. These are historic events, not mitzvot.

Another thing that must be kept in mind, as I said much earlier, is that the TaNa"KH contains three stages of revelation. And while there are four modes of Torah interpretation, the literal sense of the episodes of the Torah are always true and not mere parables. So if the Torah says something happened, no one should dare to say it did not (and this is what makes so many "reverent" chr*stians seem so irreverent).

But what about the rest of the TaNa"KH? And here I am going to say something very, very sensitive. Whether or not any of the other stories in the Bible actually happened is not a matter for "new knowledge" of any kind, much less that "discovered" by atheists and heretics. Only the Ancient Tradition is competent to say that a story or episode in the non-Torah part of the Bible didn't actually happen but is merely a parable. And as it happens, there is one and only one Biblical story on which there is even an opinion (either one out of nine or one out of ten) in the Talmud that it is a parable. Can you guess which one it is? It ain't Jonah (which so many chr*stian eviscerate). It ain't Esther. It ain't Ruth. It ain't Daniel (any part of it). It ain't the sun standing still for Joshua. No, the only Biblical book about which Ancient Tradition entertains such an opinion is the Book of Job (which is in verse, anyway).

And please note this very carefully: this possibility takes place within the context of discussing exactly when the events in the Book of Job actually happened. If I recall correctly, there are eight different opinions as to when the events occurred, spanning from the time of Moses to the return from Babylon. Then there is a ninth opinion that the story did not actually happen, but is a didactic parable. Now note that this is an opinion rather than a dogma, and it is only one of nine. But there is a reason for this. The non-specificity of when the events occurred, and even whether or not they actually did occur is actually part of the lesson of the Book! And that is why the Tradition preserves that opinion along with the other eight. The haziness of when or whether they events took place is itself didactic!

Once again, let me reiterate that this is ancient tradition that makes this comment. "Modern scripture scholars" are utterly incompetent to declare that "we now know" that such-and-such could not have actually happened.

And btw, the tradition is that Moses wrote the Book of Job (under Divine inspiration), and the fact that the events described may have been yet hundreds of years in the future at that time in no way whatsoever mitigates against Mosaic authorship, because that's how Divine inspiration works!

I hope that the matters I have discussed here will not only for all time demolish the "ever word literal" red herring, but maybe even the general belief that I consider myself my own highest authority in these matters.

Thank you again for this dialogue.