One of the six large sections of the Mishnah is called Nesikin in Aramaic, or damages in English,

and it deals with Jewish criminal law.

One of the ten large sections within Sederer Nesikin is about the Sanhedron,

named for the authoritative rabbinical assembly. It deals with questions of jurisdiction.

Within this tractate, Sanhedron, there is a chapter that discusses reward and punishment in the

world to come, and that chapter is known by its first word

chelik. That chapter, like the rest of the Mishnah, was compiled by Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi,

Rabbi Judah the Prince, at the beginning of the third century. Nine centuries later,

in the 12th century, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, Maimonides, wrote a comprehensive

commentary on the whole of the Mishnah, and in his commentary on that chapter, Helleck, in the

tractate Sanhedron, in the order Nezikin, the great medieval rabbi formulates what would become

known as his 13 principles of faith. Like much of

Maimonides' writing, it is generally considered canonical in the Jewish intellectual and religious

tradition. Maimonides' eighth fundamental principle is that the Torah came from God.

We believe, he wrote, that the whole Torah was given to us,

through Moses, our teacher, entirely from God. Then, in the ninth fundamental principle,

Maimonides asserts the authenticity of the Torah. This Torah, he says, was precisely transcribed

from God and no one else. The bedrock presupposition of

traditional Judaism is the fidelity of the written and oral Torah as faithful presentation

of God's word on earth. So, when scholars starting in the Enlightenment and continuing through

the 20th century and still to this

day propose historical or textual evidence to the effect that the Bible is written by human hands,

...