Do Jewish Scholars view the historical accuracy of the Bible differently to conventional acceptance due to theological differences?

by ThePokemonMan
gingerkid1234

I'm not quite sure how to answer this question. Which Jewish scholars, that's a big question, but view the accuracy differently...differently than who, Christian religious leaders or academic scholars of the bible? It's also not so much about history or historians, more about religion, so /r/judaism might be a good place to go.

In general, Jewish academic bible scholars have a similar view to non-Jewish ones. Certain sections of the bible are largely accurate, others are largely fictional, others are a mixture. Determining the borders between those is what biblical scholars spend a lot of their time doing.

In terms of religious scholars, things are fairly different. Christianity does not include as a core belief that the bible was directly authored by God with humans as scribes, generally they believe the books were divinely inspired to a large extent. Judaism (at least historically, and still today in many circles) believes that the 5 books of Moses were authored directly by God, with Moses as the scribe, while the prophetic books were divinely inspired. Second, Judaism believes that a body of traditions were also given to Moses, along with hermeneutical principles to derive non-obvious meanings from the text of the Torah.

This has several ramifications. First, traditional Judaism cannot accept that God inspired multiple authors to write the bible and then a redactor to redact it, according to the Documentary Hypothesis. Second, Judaism has a large body of written tradition in order to resolve, explain, and learn from apparent contradictions, difficult wordings, strange orderings, repeated events, etc., which are the backbone of what points scholars to the Documentary Hypothesis anyway.

In terms of plain historicity, religious Jewish scholars believe the bible is largely historical. They may not believe what a plain reading of a literal text is historical, but the text, through the lens of Jewish tradition, is. There are some exceptions for the earlier bits of genesis being metaphorical/true but missing important bits, with that increasing as you move left. Still, the traditional Jewish world believes in a historical Abraham and a historical Moses, and probably a historical Noah too.