Wrapping Up the Scroll: The Last Three Questions
If you have followed up to now, you realize that the Jews have a view of themselves and their Scriptures that don't match anything you learned in JW land.
You might also already sort of know, more or less, what the answer to the last three questions are (and why they are grouped together too), namely...
Was there a literal Exodus from Egypt to the promised land?
Is there any part of the OT that should be taken literally?
Are there any Jewish scriptures outside of the OT which were communicated directly by God to the Jews/Israelites?
We pretty much answered the last question already in that if the Jews don't necessarily recognize the Hebrew Scriptures as a product of a direct communication by God (or at least don't have a dogmatic answer for this), then they don't have an answer to the last question. In a way all of the religion of the Jews in inspired, but it doesn't mean the same thing to us that this means to JWs.
Did God directly communicate other Scriptures to other peoples, something like, again, the Book of Mormon to the people who once inhabited the USA? Did, as the song goes in the musical, The Book of Mormon, 'ancient Jews build boats and sail to America?' These other Scriptures were not the product of our people, so we can't judge one way or the other. You will have to decide for yourself. We don't have anything in our theology that goes about saying that this is an impossibility (though the arguments for the validity of the Book of Mormon being what it claims it is, is pretty low).
Is there any part of the Hebrew Scriptures that can be taken literally? Of course. Go back to the original illustration about The Miracle Worker. Is any of that literal? Indeed, yes. Which parts? You have to do the footwork yourself and compare the script to the actual life accounts. Which parts of the Hebrew Scriptures are literal and which are not? Well, I don't have the space to tell you all of that.
But there is a lot of less footwork involved since scholars have done a lot of the footwork for you. For a Jewish perspective on what is literal and what is not, you can start with the Jewish Study Bible. But don't be surprised if you need to dig further. Expect to. And you may be surprised that the Roman Catholic Church and mainstream Christianity have come to many of the same conclusions we have, but again you will have to do some work to see where this is so. I suggest the NRSV Oxford Annotated Study Bible and the NABRE. The New Jerusalem Bible is a good choice too, but make sure you have the edition with the full footnote apparatus.
And don't be surprised if you find that some Jews see some parts of Scripture as literal, and some do not. Remember, we are "Israel." We wrestle with God. We challenge the Scriptures, unlike Christians who attempt to make everything fit in with all the texts. You can't judge all Jews but what one Jew or some Jews say. You can only hear the various views and leave it at that.
Now, was there a literal Exodus from Egypt? Historians and archaeologists believe so, and this ancient aspect of our Jewish history predates the Scriptures. The evidence does support that under the reign of the Hyksos dynasty, Semites came to live in Egypt and eventually found themselves driven into slavery after the Hyksos were driven out. Some scholars believe the exodus of slaves came in waves, some suggesting three.
How many left? Probably a lot less than what is written in the Scriptures. Remember, the book of Exodus is not the source of the stories of our slavery and exodus from Egypt. This comes from our own history. Every nation in the ancient world had its gods, and we attributed our redemption from slavery to our God, just as any other nation or tribe would have done. In some ways the stories of my ancestors are merely typical of what you will find by examining any ancient history of any ancient peoples.
To conclude, like The Miracle Worker, our Scriptures are not pure fiction or merely mythologies borrowed from other nations of the ancient world around us (though some of what you find is fiction and some of it is borrowed). There are reasons for this.
The reason some of you reading this might find a lot of this surprising or hard to grasp or even accept is because of your exposure to the Jehovah's Witnesses. For them the Bible is a source of revelation from God. As such, the Bible must be the guide for all religion. If it is to be this guide, then its words must be true, and that truth must be fact. If they are not, then any religion based solely on the Bible can't ever be right.
Judaism has never based its beliefs solely on the Bible. We wrote the Bible. It came a long time after the events therein. And we didn't write the things down in order to have a guide for our religious beliefs and doctrines. If you were an ancient nation, you had religious beliefs and doctrines already. From what we believed came the Scriptures and not the other way around.
This may be fascinating, but at the same time it is also upsetting. Being so obsessed with the Bible should have made the Witnesses and their Governing Body equally obsessed with learning the facts behind the Book they believe to be the ultimate source of revelation from God. If they wanted to know what it meant, they should have at least considered the Jewish view first. Where they have done this in a few places, to a large extent this still has not happened. What I am writing here is not new, but some of you who have spent years studying the Bible as one of Jehovah's Witnesses are just learning of these things for the first time. In my opinion, you should have learned it to begin with. If the Bible is so vital to the Jehovah's Witnesses, none of this I have written should come as a surprise. No one, not even the one who composed the OP should have a question for me.
You don't have to be Jewish to know the Jewish perspective. And you can't understand the Scriptures correctly (even the New Testament) without having a grasp of that perspective to begin with. The idea that this is not the starting place or even any part of the Bible education of Jehovah's Witnesses is, for lack of a better word, sad. Even the Catholic, Orthodox, and mainstream Protestant study Bibles are filled with accurate information about the Jewish perspective (maybe not as deep, but it's there).
So that's it. I finished sooner that I expected. Feel free to ask any further question on the subjects presented. I will try to get back to each as soon as I can. Just remember, if you are seeking to discuss religion with me or even try to get me to consider your religious views on Jesus or the like, I don't think that is appropriate. Nobody comes here to get preached at, and I am not looking to make people into Jews either.
Hopefully now your eyes are a little more open to how blind and deaf you had been due to the failure of the Watchtower religion to teach people about the Scriptures of the Children of Abraham, the nation of Israel, the Jews.