How To Study Tanach

As a follow-up to my previous post I would like to elaborate on what I think is the best way to learn Tanach.  I noted in that post that I think that learning Tanach (and again, I really mean Nach because learning Torah in-depth goes without saying and is already part of everyone's standard curriculum, I hope) would address a huge moral lacuna that is currently afflicting Orthodox Judaism.  Learning Talmud gives one a legalistic understanding of Judaism but to appreciate the big picture, to gain a real appreciation of the moral imperatives God wants of us one must learn Tanach.
Now the first stumbling block people usually point to when folks talk about learning Tanach is the idea that the text is so deep that without a really strong reliance on understanding how Chazal read the text there is a real danger of reading the Bible and coming to false conclusions and developing heretical understandings.  There is a legitimate concern that people will bring their own automatic assumptions to the table and read the text with those biases.  And I would agree this is a legitimate concern.
After all, modern readers suffer from this innate bias of assuming that our current secular moral system is the pinnacle of human civilization against which all other moral systems, Torah included, must be judged.  Many people also automatically assume that what they take for granted in terms of understandings of the universe and how it works were known to people living centuries or millenia ago.  Either that or they think that these people were simplistic idiots because of their lack of "modern" knowledge.  Reading the Bible without removing these biases can certainly lead to the wrong conclusions.
I'll illustrate with a famous and often-misunderstood narrative from the Bible - the incident of David HaMelech and BatSheva.  For those who haven't read the original, it goes like this.  One day David HaMelech sees BatSheva, a beautiful woman, bathing and decides that he wants her.  He summons her to the palace and they are intimate together.  There's only two problems - she's married to one of David HaMelech's soldiers, and the king got her pregnant.  So David HaMelech summons her husband, one Uriah, back from the battlefield ostensibly for an update on the military situation and then tells him to go home and spend the night with his wife.  Uriah, out of sense of duty to his comrades (and perhaps because he's a wee bit suspicious) refuses and goes back to the battlefield.  David HaMelech instructs his senior general, Yoav, to leave Uriah exposed on the battlefield whereupon the poor soldier is killed leaving David HaMelech to marry BatSheva.
To say that this scenario is problematic is an understatement.  The Gemara clearly wrestled with this and came up with various explanations to try and bring a less negative light to the story.  We are told, for example, that all of David HaMelech's soldiers left a get with their wives in case they didn't come home to avoid any agunah problems.  We are told that Uriah deserved death because he refused David HaMelech's order to go home to his wife.  And while some of these explanations raise an almost "Oh come on!" reaction a close reading of the text actually does support some of them.  A good peirush will point out that while David HaMelech faces God's wrath for his sins, when those sins are listed in detail adultery is not amongst them.  The text is otherwise complete in listing the misdeeds so why not, unless the Gemara's point about the get is correct?
One thing is clear: reading the text unaided or without a non-expect commentary will lead to superficial and incorrect understandings of the text, something we should always avoid.
However, a different problem develops when one goes too far in the other direction.  Trying to read Tanach only through the lens of Chazal and relying completely on their understanding while ignoring the pshat of the text is dangerous as well.  Yes we need to read Chazal's explanations but the pshat has value as well.  Without Chazal we run the danger of transposing our feelings and thoughts into the Tanach's narratives.  To use my example, we might see David HaMelech as an ancient Bill Clinton and not as the supremely important and pious figure that he is to us.  On the other hand we might see him dressed as a Satmar chasid, long curly peyos swaying as he shockles over his gemara while composing Tehillim and speaking in Yiddish to his courtiers.  Using either approach we would completely miss out on the brilliant, complex personality that produced a king favoured by God who was a scholar, warrior and poet whose exploits and writings would be unmatched in history.
But what of the fear that we will see him as all too human?  While this is often raised I would like to point out that Chazal might just have wanted us to appreciate that aspect of the characters in Tanach.  Recall that the Bible we have today did not evolve by chance but was extensively edited by Chazal.  If we have the text of Yechezkel's prophecies, for example, it is because Chazal decided not to hide them away for all time because of the controversial parts in them.  If we have Koheles' musings on life and death which seem problematic from an emunah point of view it's because Chazal felt we could, with proper study, understand them without devolving into kefirah.  If we know the story of David HaMelech and Batsheva it's because they wanted us to know about it in all its unseemly details.  Were Chazal worried we'd lose our appreciation of David HaMelech's holiness by reading that story then it likely would not have made the finally cut.
Chazal, you see, were far more understanding of how to transmit our history and moral lessons than their most pious defenders give them credit for.  David HaMelech's slip with Batsheva, for example, does not diminish his holiness and greatness.  He erred, as all humans do, but remains on a supremely high level because of everything else he did.  The world is not black and white.  A great man can sin but remain a great man nonetheless.  Chazal knew this, they appreciated that our ancestors were humans, great and holy but human nonetheless and did not try to shield us from this reality by censoring our history.
Therefore it's important to approach the study of Tanach carefully but from this realistic position.  Two basic commentaries can be recommended for introduction to the text.  In English, Judaica Press has a fantastic Nach series (they were 2/5 of the way through Chumash when the Artscroll Stoned Chumash came out and ended their plans) and in Hebrew Mossad HaRav Kook has produced a fantastic commentary, Daat Mikra. 
We are reading the stories of and the words of great people, people to whom God Himself spoke and relayed His messages to mankind.  We learn from their deeds and from their mistakes and even more importantly from how they responded to their mistakes.  We seek out the overarching moral priorities to better learn how to be more moral Jews and human beings.  Used in this way, the study of Tanach becomes essential to understanding how Judaism should work.

Reading the Bible

One of the big divides between authentically observant Jews and the Orthoprax is how to understand the Torah and other parts of the Bible.  The former group sees the Torah as the divine word of God, pretty much unchanged since the original copy was deposited by Moshe Rabeinu, a"h, in the original Aron Kodesh at the end of his life.  The letter see it as a hodge podge of various writings that were sloppily redacted together in what must pass for the worst editing job in history.
The core reason for this difference in approach is due to each group's view of the origins of the Oral Law, that huge section of the Torah that didn't make it into the orignal Chumash but is considered just as divinely created.  Observant Jews believe that the Oral Law has been an indivisible part of the Torah since it was handed over to Moshe Rabeinu.  The Orthoprax and friends believe that it was an invention designed to give "the rabbis" control over Jewish life and religious practice.
The reason this difference of opinion is so important is because it affects how one reads the Torah and draws conclusions from it.  For the Orthodox, variations in the text are clues to corresponding areas of the Oral Law.  Wording is, far from terse, highly specific and meant to be read in only certain ways.  Omissions, changes between two repetitions of the same narrative, all these things hint towards the deeper layers of the Torah, the ones contained in the Oral Law.
For the non-observant, however, the lack of an authentic Oral tradition dating back to Sinai means these changes in the text contain no deep legal or spiritual significance.  As a result, they are wrongly interpreted as mistakes, errors or proof of multiple authorships.
As a result, when an observant Jew reads the Torah he is doing so from its perspective as a book whose purpose is to impart God's plan for the world and the laws by which He wishes us to live.  He sees a cohesive whole which comes together through the lens of the Talmud and which has relevance down through the ages.  When a non-observant Jew reads it, he sees part of it as a history book, part of it as an ethics manual and part of it as a legal text.  For him, the history is inaccurate or downright wrong, the ethics are questionable and the laws archaic.
On Rav Gil Student's blog, there has been a recent posting regarding that hero of the Orthoprax, James Kugel.  Kugel is famous for his book How to Read the Bible which is yet another entry in the never-ending blather that is biblical criticsm.  In it he purports to show how the Bible should be read in light of modern scholarship's analysis of the book.  However, there are two problems with this approach that he does not, to my understanding, address.
The first is the essential difference between the Torah and the rest of the Bible.  While Torahs have always been prepared and copies according to very strict rules, the rest of the Bible cannot make claim to this.  Unlike the Torah which was put finished and completed into the Aron Kodesh at the end of Devarim, Biblical books were written in parts during the lifetimes of their subjects and only later edited and assembled.  As a result, there is a fidelity to the text of the Torah that is lacking in the rest of the Bible.  This should not shock anyone.  The Torah, as the revealed word of God, had to be keep intact to act as a proper companion to the Oral Law.  The rest of the Bible is on a lower level than that.  If one of David's tehillim went missing over time, Jewish life could continue on.  A missing or changed verse in the Torah would have incredible ramifications and couldn't be afforded.
The second is that Kugel does not give validity to the belief that the Oral Law is contemporary with the Written Law.  Well, why should he?  He rejects Sinai which is the easiest way to get around having to deal with the Oral Law in the first place.  As a result, he can only approach the book from the position of scholarship and cannot see the "errors" in the text for what they truly are, those hints to something deeper.
Several months ago, Climategate revealed that the science of climate change is not what its proponents would like people to believe it is.  Instead of admitting these limitation however, those proponents led by high priest Al Gore continue to soldier on repeating the same mantras and discredited statements.  A recent piece by Al Gore even referred to Climategate as irrelevant because it is so "obvious" that climate change is happening.
Biblical Criticism and modern scholarship on the subject are nowhere as definitive as the scholars would like it to be.  Despite oozing confidence, there are huge holes in each and every one of the theories which, in turn, are based on evidence-free assumptions.  Scholarship might explain a thing or two on the obscure sections of the text but it cannot disprove the legitimacy and integrity of the Torah.  The only reason scholars can continue to do so is because, like their climate change fellows, they dismiss all opposition as unworthy of debating with so that they don't have to confront the weakness of their position.
As a result, there is no point from our perspective in debating with them.  As the old saying goes, one does not try to teach a pig to sing.  It wastes one's time and annoys the pig.

A Fascinating Find

I once read an awful book, Acts of Faith, mostly to impress a girl I wanted to date at the time. Terrible stuff, really. The frum Jews were all evil or stupid, the non-frum all enlightened and noble. One scene I recall was a confrontation between an atheist Jewish college professor and the frum yeshiva bochers who were taking his class in Jewish history. The bochurs insisted that our ancestors were pure in their worship of God. The atheist insisted, based on all his historical evidence, that they worshipped idols. Well, didn't that send the bochurs into a rage? How dare he say such slander against our ancestors?

Except that it's true. All you have to do is open a Tanach and read it. Pick a book, any book: Judges, Shmuel, Kings 1 & 2, and any of the Prophets and what do you find? Ethusiastic widespread idol worship constantly plaguing Jewish society.

That's why this article from The Jerusalem Post caught my eye:

The 2.1 x 1.8-cm. elliptical seal is engraved with two bearded priests standing on either side of an incense altar with their hands raised forward in a position of worship.

Dr. Eilat MazarPhoto: Dr. Eilat Mazar Expedition
A crescent moon, the symbol of the chief Babylonian god Sin, appears on the top of the altar.
Under this scene are three Hebrew letters spelling Temech, Mazar said.
The Bible refers to the Temech family: "These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city." [Nehemiah 7:6]... "The Nethinim [7:46]"... The children of Temech." [7:55].
The fact that this cultic scene relates to the Babylonian chief god seemed not to have disturbed the Jews who used it on their own seal, she added.

Well of course not. A quick read of Jeremiah and Ezekiel quickly reveals that idol worship was essentially the state religion in the dying days of Judea. Far from causing anyone discomfort, this revelation should be a source of comfort - the words of the Bible once again prove to be accurate in their recollection of contemporary history.

I can't wait until someone finally unearths David haMelech's Visa card.