דעתו של רשב"ם בשאלת חלקו של משה בכתיבת התורה

A basic axiom of Judaism over the generations has been that the Torah is of divine origin and that it was written by Moses through the authority of the Holy Spirit. However, what was the nature of God's revelation to Moses that enabled him to write the Torah? Did God dictate the Torah to Moses word by word (a textual revelation)? Or was Moses, perhaps, given greater creative license to formulate the content of divine communication according to his own stylistic literary considerations? The author examines the opinion of R. Samuel b. Meir (Rashbam) on this matter. Rashbam did not deal explicitly with Moses' role in writing the Torah. Nevertheless he can be shown to have had a definite opinion about this issue. Rashbam assumed that Moses had certain creative freedom in writing the Torah, and that the Torah includes his own independent statements besides statements that he received from God. In the third and fourth parts of the article the author examines the causes and the intellectual conditions underlying Rashbam's view. In the fifth part the author shows that the findings of the previous parts of the article are not completely correlated with Rashbam's explicit methodological statements, and he suggests the reasons for this interesting complexity.