The Pentateuch - Fact or Fable?
The oldest extant texts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are those found at Qumran which date only to (by some estimates) two or three centuries before Christ. The oldest version before those were discovered was a Greek translation from about the same period! The earliest complete Hebrew text dates only from the tenth century AD! Something is wrong with this picture.
It is generally believed from textual analysis, that a very small part of the Old Testament was written about 1000 BC and the remainder about 600 BC. Biblical scholars generally date Abraham to about 1800 - 1700 BC. The same scholars date Moses to 1300 or 1250 BC. However, if we track the generations as listed in the Bible, we find that there are only seven generations between and including these two patriarchal figures. Four hundred years is a bit long for seven generations. Allowing 35 to 40 years per generation, which is the measure used elsewhere in the Bible, places Abraham at about 1550 BC and Moses at about 1300 BC. This obviously means that there are a few hundred years not accounted for in the text. Tracking back to Noah, using the generations listed in the Bible, one arrives at a date of about 2000 to 1900 BC. According to achaelogical findings, this dates back to about the time of the arrival of the Indo-Europeans into the Near East, so this would appear to be more accurate. The geological and archaeological records do not support a cataclysm at that time, though what could be described as a global discontinuity of cataclysmic elements is supported right around 12,000 years ago. In this case, we have lost 8,000 years, give or take a day.
As for the Pentateuch which records history from that era, there are many contradictions in the text that cannot be reconciled. In some places, events are described as happening in a certain order, and later the Bible will say that those events happened in a different order. In one place, it will say that there is two of something, and in another it will say that there were 14 of the same thing. On one page, it will say that the Moabites did something, and then a few pages later; it will say that the Midianites did exactly the same thing. There is even an instance in which Moses is described as going to the Tabernacle before Moses built the Tabernacle!
There are things in the Pentateuch that pose other problems: it includes things that Moses could not have known if he lived when he is claimed to have lived. And, there is one case in which Moses said something he could not have said: the text gives an account of Moses death, which it is hardly likely that Moses described. All of these problems were taken care of for most of the past two thousand years by the Inquisition, which also took care of the Cathars and anybody else who did not follow the Party Line of Judao-Christianity.
For the Jews, the contradictions were not contradictions; they were only apparent contradictions. They could all be explained by interpretation (often, these interpretations are more fantastic than the problems). Well, of course, tThings were beginning to be examined more critically with the arrival of Protestantism on the world stage and the demand for wider availability of the text itself. The Inquisition and assorted Catholic Majesties tried, but failed, to keep a complete grip on the matter. But, it s funny what belief will do. In this case, with the increase in literacy and new and better translations of the text, critical examination led to the decision that the problem was solvable by claiming that, yes, Moses wrote the Torah, but editors went over them later and added an occasional word or phrase of their own. Even so, it remains the infallible word of God.
In the 18th century, three independent scholars were dealing with the problem of doublets, or stories that are told two or more times in the Bible. There are two different stories of the creation of the world. There are two stories of the covenant between God and Abraham. There are two stories of the naming of Abraham's son Isaac, two stories of Abraham's claiming to a foreign king that his wife is his sister, two stories of Isaac's son Jacob making a journey to Mesopotamia, two stories of a revelation to Jacob at Beth-El, two stories of God changing Jacob's name to Israel, two stories of Moses getting water from a rock at Meribah, and so on.
Those who simply could not let go of the belief that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, tried to claim that these doublets were always complimentary, not repetitive nor contradictory. This explanation, however, didn't hold up against another fact: in most cases one of the two versions of a doublet would refer to the deity by the divine name, Yahweh, and the other would refer to the deity simply as God, or El. What this meant was that there were obviously two groups of parallel versions of the same stories, and each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity it used. Not only that, there were various other terms and characteristics that regularly appeared in one line of story but not in the other, and what this demonstrated was that someone had taken two different old source documents and had done a cut and paste job on them to make a continuous narrative.
Well, of course, at first it was thought that one of the two source documents must be one that Moses had used as a source for the story of creation and the rest was Moses himself writing! But, it was ultimately to be concluded that both of the two sources had to be from writers who lived after Moses. By degrees, Moses was being eliminated almost entirely from the authorship of the Pentateuch, even thougth he had been credited as the sole author for centuries!
The adoption of the belief that scribes had collected, arranged and elaborated on the textus receptus was, finally, going in the right direction. The great Jewish scholar, Rashi de Troyes, (1040-1105), makes the astonishingly frank statement that the Genesis narrative, going back to the creation of the world, was written to justify what we might now call genocide. The God of Israel, who gave his people the Promised Land, had to be unequivocally supreme so that neither the dispossessed Canaanites nor anyone else could ever appeal against his decrees. Rashi's precise words were that God told us the creation story and included it in the Torah to tell his people that they can answer those who claim that the Jews stole the land from its original inhabitants.
In the 19th century, Biblical scholars figured out that there were not just two major sources in the Pentateuch; there were, in fact, four. It was realized that the first four books were not just doublets, but there were also triplets that converged with other characteristics and contradictions leading to the identification of another source. Then, it was realized that Deuteronomy was a separate source altogether. Thus, after years of suffering, bloodshed and death over the matter, it was realized that somebody had created what Westerners know as the Old Testament by assembling four different source documents in an attempt to create a continuous history, designated at different times as Torah, as well as additional edited documents. After much further analysis, it was concluded that most of the laws and much of the narrative of the Pentateuch were not even part of the time of Moses, and that meant that it couldn't have been written by Moses at all. More than that, the writing of the different sources was not even that of persons who lived during the days of the kings and prophets, but were the product of writers who lived toward the end of the biblical period!
Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) synthesized all of the discoveries so as to preserve the belief systems of the religious scholars. He amalgamated the view that the religion of Israel had developed in three stages with the view that the documents were also written in three stages, and then he defined these stages based on the content of the stage. He tracked the characteristics of each stage, examining the way in which the different documents expressed religion, the clergy, the sacrifices and places of worship as well as the religious holidays. He considered the legal and narrative sections and the other books of the Bible. In the end, he provided a believable framework for the development of Jewish history and religion. The first stage was the nature/fertility period; the second was spiritual/ethical period; and the last was the priestly/legal period.
Nevertheless, analysis of the Bible has proceeded. The book of Isaiah was traditionally thought to have been written by the prophet Isaiah who lived in the eighth century BC. As it happens, most of the first half of this book fits such a model. But, chapters 40 through 66 are apparently written by someone who lived about 200 years later! This means that, in terms of prophecy, it was written after the fact.
New tools and methods of our modern time have made it possible to do some really fine work in the areas of linguistic analysis and relative chronology of the material. Additionally, there has been a veritable archaeological frenzy since Wellhausen. This archaeological work has produced an enormous amount of information about Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other regions surrounding Israel, which includes clay tablets, inscriptions on the walls of tombs, temples and habitations, and even papyri. Here we find another problem: in all the collected sources, both Egyptian and west Asian, there are virtually no references to Israel, its famous people and founders, its Biblical associates, or anything else prior to the 12th century BC. Yet the fundamentalist Orthodox Jews cling to these tattered references like straws in the hands of a drowning man. Oddly, the Fundamentalist Christians just simply close off any awareness to the entire matter by the simple expedient of the execution of the 11th commandment: thou shalt not ask questions!
The problem of the lack of outside validation of the existence of Israel as a sovereign nation in the area of Palestine finds reverse correspondence in the Pentateuch itself. The Pentateuch displays absolutely no knowledge of Egypt or the Levant during the 2nd millennium BC. The Pentateuch says nothing about the Egyptian empire spreading over the entire eastern Mediterranean (which it did); there is no mention of the great Egyptian armies on the march (which they were); and no mention of marching Hittites moving against the Egyptians (which they did); and especially no mention of Egyptianised kinglets ruling Canaanite cities (which was the case) at a time when the likes of David and Solomon were supposed to be on the throne.
The greatest event in the then known world, the great and disastrous invasion of the Sea Peoples during the second millennium, which re-designed the map of the Middle East, is not even mentioned in the Pentateuch. In fact, Genesis described the Philistines as already settled in the land of Canaan at the time of Abraham!
The names of the great Egyptian kings are completely absent from the Bible, just as the great Israelite kings are absent from everyone else's recorded histories. In other places, historical figures that were not heroic have been transformed by the Bible into heroes as in the case of the Hyksos, Sheshy (Num. 13:22). In another case, the sobriquet of Rameses II is given to a Canaanite general in error. The Egyptian king who was supposed to assist Hosea in his rebellion of 2 Kings 17:4 has suffered the indignity of having his city given as his name as did King Arad (Num. 21). Arad in the Bible is the royal town in the Negev, the modern Tell Arad (Israel), S of Hebron. The Pharaoh Shabtaka turns up in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10:7 as a Nubian tribe!
The errors of confirmed history and archaeology pile higher the more one learns about the actual times and places, the more one digs the more it appears that the writers of the Bible must have lived in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, or later, and knew almost nothing about the events of only a few centuries before them. Donald B. Redford, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, has published extensively on archaeology and Egyptology. Regarding the use of the Bible as an historical source, he writes:
For the standard scholarly approach to the history of Israel during the United Monarchy amounts to nothing more than a bad attack of academic wishful thinking. We have these glorious narratives in the books of Samuel and 1st Kings, so well written and ostensibly factual. What a pity if rigorous historical criticism forces us to discard them and not use them.
The problem with using the Bible as history is the lack of secondary sources. There is considerable material from the various ancient libraries prior to the 10th century BC, grist for the historian's mill, but these sources fall silent almost completely at the close of the 20th dynasty in Egypt. Thus, the Bible, being pretty much the only source that claims to cover this particular period, becomes quite seductive. The person who is using the Bible as history is forced, when all emotion is taken out of the picture, to admit that he has no means of checking the historical veracity of the Biblical texts. As Donald Redford noted, the scholars who admit, when pressed, that rigorous historical criticism forces us to discard the Biblical narratives, nevertheless will use them saying what else do we have?
As we have already discovered, what began as a search for answers about the puzzling contradictory passages in the Pentateuch led to the reality that Moses probably did not write them. This then led to the discovery that several widely divergent sources were combined into one, and that even this was done at different times, in different ways. Each of the sources is clearly identifiable by characteristics of language and content. New breakthroughs in archaeology and our understanding of the social and political world of the time have helped enormously in our understanding of the milieu in which this document was created.
The Old Testament is now accepted almost universally by the archeological and theological community as being a book that is a combination of several sources, J (Yahweh), E (lohim), D(euteronomy), P(riestly) and the final editor who combined all of these and added his own touches: the Redactor. It is theorised, based on the evidence, that the E version was written by a Levite priest advocate of the Mosaic line of priests of the northern kingdom (Israel) at Shiloh, and J was written by an advocate of the Aaronic line of priests of the southern kingdom's Davidic royal house (Judah) at Jerusalem. The conclusion is that they were each written down from oral sources of myth and legend with some history mixed in after the purported split of the two kingdoms, and then recombined after the Syrian conquest during the reign of Hezekiah. The author of J is estimated to have lived between 848 and 722 BC and the author of E between 922 and 722 BC. Thus K and E were compiled during the same era, with E probably the older document; J appear to represent a considerably a different perspective.