Commentary on the Torah

by Richard Elliott Friedman

10:1. you shall make an ark of wood. It says “you shall make,” but in Exodus it was Bezalel, not Moses, who made the ark. Rashi and Ramban and others therefore say that there must have been two arks. In current critical scholarship, the apparent contradiction would generally be taken to be a result of the fact that this text in Deuteronomy and the text in Exodus were written by two different authors. But, even without raising such solutions that are arrived at through critical approaches, we can understand Moses’ words in Deuteronomy to be a brief account of what happened at Sinai, and so he speaks of himself as making the ark when he means that he directed Bezalel to do it. Likewise, he speaks of the ark as if it were finished and ready when he came down from the mountain when he knows that actually some time passed before the ark was made. J. H. Hertz proposed such an understanding as an alternative to Rashi’s and Ramban’s view even though Hertz harshly rejected literary-critical scholarship. This is important because an almost fundamentalist view of Rashi is growing at present in some communities, wherein it is practically heresy to question Rashi. This gives Rashi a status that I do not think he would have wanted for himself. And certainly the commentators of the generations that followed him, including his own grandson Rashbam, were prepared to question his comments. We respect and admire the great commentators of past generations, but we should never forget to distin...