My article “A Torah with 70 Different Faces” has been read by more than a dozen academics including Luca Arcari Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, Simeon Chavel
 University of Chicago, Hanoch Ben Pazi Bar-Ilan University, Cyrus A Zargar University of Central Florida, Ronit Meroz Tel Aviv University, Mathieu Ossendrijver Freie Universität Berlin, David Rudolph The King’s University, Viacheslav Kuleshov Stockholm University and Steven M. Wasserstrom Reed College.

Every four years hundreds of people win olympic medals. Every year less than a dozen people win a Nobel prize. Yet more Jews win Nobel medals than gold medals. How come there is such an advantage for Torah type thinking?

Credit it to the rabbinic concept of many perspectives and thus many answers to life’s questions. Every verse in the Torah has 70 different facets asserts a 13th century mystical text: the Zohar. Anyone who studies the Hebrew Scriptures from a Rabbinic Bible is struck by the number of different commentaries that surround the few lines of the Biblical text on each page.

Most religions that have a sacred scripture, have editions that come with a commentary. Occasionally they have an edition with two or three commentaries.

The standard Jewish study Bible usually comes with at least 5-10 different commentaries. All of this traces back to a verse in the Book of Psalms: “One thing God has spoken; two things have I heard” (Psalms 62:12) and its gloss in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 34a). In other words, multiple interpretations of each verse of Scripture can be correct, and the word of God, even if they contradict one another.

The term for this concept of pluralistic interpretation is; Shivim Panim LaTorah (each Torah verse has 70 different facets)

The earliest source for the term Shivim Panim LaTorah is in an early medieval text, Midrash Bamidbar Rabba 13:15-16. The term was used by........

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