#15 How do we know the Torah is G-d given?
As usual, there are two ways to go about this basic theological question: as an outsider and as an insider.
NOTE: This is not to minimize the need to develop responses to challenges from outsiders. It often helps insiders get reassurance that there are convincing arguments that would persuade an outsider as well.
However, they should not form the bedrock foundation of one’s conviction about the fundamentals. Having one's fundamental axioms of life and existence contingent on the cogency of sophisticated intellectual proofs is not a good recipe for long-term commitment when the going gets tough. The best example of this in history is the defection rate of Spanish Jewry when the tragic choice was given to it to either convert, or be expelled and lose all social and financial status. The community with the most sophisticated intellectual connection to Judaism failed the test, and the community with the most visceral inchoate connection to the tradition remained steadfast.
From the outsider’s perspective we have the unlikely predictions of the Torah which came true and serve as the strongest body of evidence that the Jewish Torah was given by G-d vis-à-vis the alternatives of other religions or atheism.
1) Deuteronomy 28-30 regarding the exile and dispersion and eventual return to the land.
2) Deuteronomy 4 daring us to survey human history to check if any other people even made the claim of open divine mass revelation and mass exodus of one nation from under a dominating nation with open miracles and wonders.
To counter the claim that the Torah was a later myth authored in a later period and attributed to earlier period:
3) The precise chronicled history of all peoples and nations from the very first man.
4) The unusual fact that the Torah documents the military defeats of the nation and personal flaws of its patriarchs and leaders.
5) Lack of anachronistic details in the Torah (lifestyle portrayals, social/political/military conventions, geographical locations) that are a dead giveaway to most other ancient myths projecting backward in time.
From the insider's perspective, we have so much personal experience with the bearers of tradition, that to question the integrity of any link in the chain is rendered a non-sequitir.
