The Antiquity of the Books of Moses

The first five books of the Old Testament -- Genesis to Deuteronomy -- are collectively known as the Pentateuch. Both Christians and Jews believe they are, in their present form, the work of Moses. This belief was unchallenged until two centuries ago. At that time a study called "Textual Criticism" gained popularity. Textual Critics asserted that most of the Old Testament was neither written by its supposed authors nor was it written at the times indicated by the text.

From this theory it was an easy step to suggest that much of the Old Testament narrative and history are legend and folklore put into written form, with little or no basis in fact. This supposition being carried into our own day gave rise to misconceptions about the Old Testament. Worse still, it eroded Bible authority in the common mind.

Archaeology has not favored Textual Critics. The fact that many archaeological digs have nullified most of the critic's conclusions has not yet filtered into popular thought. In fact, some of their confident 19th century pronouncements look downright silly in the light of contemporary understandings of ancient times. Those writers of the past century having committed their thoughts to paper have achieved a certain notoriety whether or not their words have been proven false.

Unfortunately, there are many young and impressionable Christians. They, in youthful enthusiasm, are easily impressed by what seems to be a show of scholarship. They often accept such scholarly presentations without knowing how out of date they really are. To this end, a brief review of the present position may be helpful.

In 1670 Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch-Jewish philosopher who held pantheistic ideas, published the theory that writing was unknown prior to the 8th century BC (roughly the time of Isaiah). He concluded that Moses could not have written the early books of the Old Testament. It was his theory that they had been composed by Ezra after the Exile.

After Spinoza came Jean Astruc, a French theologian. He published a book in 1753 in which he separated those passages in Genesis where the name for God is Jehovah from those in which it is "elohim." He suggested that Moses, in compiling Genesis, had two sets of documents or "sources" before him. These he called the "Jehovistic" and "Elohistic," today shortened to the "J" and "E" sources in scholarly circles. Later Johann Eichhorn, a German historian, produced his Introduction to the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha (1787). He endorsed Spinoza's views and invented the term "Higher Criticism." The seed sown by these three men flowered and bore fruit. A few decades later the theologians who accepted their views were known as "Higher Critics."

The first such of note was Abraham Kuenen. He was a Dutch theologian with a reputation as a devout and reverent scholar. He served as Professor of Old Testament theology at Leyden University from 1853 onward. Kuenen did more than any man of his time to establish the "science" of Higher Criticism.

Kuenen was supported by Edouard Reuss and Julius Wellhausen, both of Germany. Wellhausen was the only one of these men to live into the 20th century. By then the theory that the Old Testament was first committed to writing in the 8th century BC was almost universally accepted by so-called "advanced" scholars. True, in 1888 there were no known specimens of writing or of alphabetical inscriptions agreed to date earlier than the Moabite Stone and the Siloam inscription. Both of those date from the 8th century. So their conclusions seemed correct. No one alive in 1888 dreamed that before another half century would pass the walls of the world's museums would bulge with written documentation and tablets going back to twenty-five centuries before Christ, a thousand years before the time of Moses.

What were the principles upon which the case for the late writing of the Old Testament is built? There are five:

(1) That writing was unknown and had not been invented before the time of the Hebrew prophets (about 700-800 BC).

(2) That the religious thought of nations, without exception, started with polytheism in the earliest times and progressed to monotheism, the worship of one God, in later times, and not the other way around as Genesis has it.

(3) That the code of laws credited to Moses is too far advanced for so early a date. It must have been devised during the time of the Israelitish kings and Moses' name merely attached to them.

(4) That the levitical ritual is too sophisticated for a people just out of Egypt and must have been the product of a priestly class after the Babylonian captivity.

(5) That the historical events in Babylonia and Egypt recorded in Genesis are unhistorical and never occurred. They are merely a later compilation of old traditions and folklore, and many of the kings and notable persons referred to never existed.

Archaeology since 1880 has explored all of these assumptions. Assumptions they proved to be. It demolished all the theories regarding the Old Testament which had been painstakingly erected by the critics of the 19th century. To demonstrate this to the present day reader we will cite a few of the established facts.

The argument for the late invention of writing was nullified in 1888 when the El-Amarna tablets were discovered in Egypt. This was a large find of official correspondence between Egypt and Canaan which had been inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets. These records dated to the time of the Exodus (footnote 1). This find took the art of writing back to 1400 BC in one bound.

In 1905 the famous Egyptologist Prof. Flinders Petrie showed that the Serabit inscriptions in Sinai dated to the period of the 12th Egyptian dynasty, about the time of Abraham (footnote 2). Previously they had been thought to date from early AD times. In 1907 Winckler found records of the Hittite empire in modern Turkey. When they were deciphered in 1919, they were dated at about 1800 BC. In 1932 records were discovered of the Canaanite people at Ras Shamra near Sidon, their date: 1400 BC. Eclipsing all these are the thousands of cuneiform tablets found in the ancient cities of Babylon, Assyria, and Sumeria, extending to [about two millenniums BC]. Some of the records date [earlier] in a kind of picture writing.

The celebrated Sumerian epic, the Enuma Elish, sometimes called the Babylonian story of creation, contains astronomical allusions which show that it was originally composed when the sun was in the constellation or Aries (between 2000 and 2500 BC). One Sumerian tablet refers to the "writings of the ages that were before the flood." As far as man can be trace the art of writing was known. Schultz, in his Old Testament Theology had said in 1891 "Of the legendary character of the pre-Mosaic narratives, the time of which they treat is sufficient proof. It was a time prior to all knowledge of writing." Similar statements had been made by all the leading critics. Later discoveries have shown their conclusions to be mistaken and valueless in this field.

The clever critics never gave up. The British scientific journal Nature, a mouthpiece for the "modern scholarship," commented upon the impact of the Ras Shamra discoveries. This is what it said in its September 12, 1942 issue: "It would now seem that many of the patriarchal stories of the Old Testament were not mere oral traditions collected by authors of the time of Solomon and later, but were part of a written heritage derived from the Canaanite Bronze Age" -- anything is better than allowing Moses the credit -- but the grudging admission was at least a concession to obvious fact.

The idea that polytheism preceded monotheism has been effectually refuted now that so much is known about early civilizations. Prof. Stephen Langdon, one of the leading Assyriologists of the 20th century, said "The history of the oldest religion of man is a rapid decline from monotheism to extreme polytheism ... it is in a very true sense the history of the fall of man."

Many Babylonian and Sumerian epic poems have survived to our day. The further back they go the nearer they approach monotheistic thought. In fact, many of the "gods many and lords many" (1 Corinthians 8:5) that were revered by the ancients have been found to be deified men. A notable example is the great Babylonian god Marduk or Bel, who is now known to have been a pre-dynastic hero who lived about five hundred years before the rise of the Sumerian city states. This person is mentioned in Genesis under the name of Nimrod. Dr. Frankfort, who excavated Eshunna in 1930, found evidence of third century BC worship of gods under different names as varying manifestations of the one God. It is now supposed that this is how polytheism developed.

The idea that the Mosaic Laws were too advanced for "primitive" human thought has been abandoned. In 1902 the laws of Hammurabi of Babylon and Urakagina of Lagash were discovered. These legal codes belong to 1800 BC and 2200 BC respectively (footnote 3). Neither of these two equal the Mosaic Laws, but they represent the capability of wise and just lawmaking in those distant times. They prove the credibility of the Mosaic authorship. This is apart from the fact that Exodus claims that Moses received the fundamental principles of his laws from God himself -- not from human lawmakers.

The Levitical ritual of the Pentateuch too has found a companion ritual similar in style and date. In 1932 a system of belief was discovered which was used in ancient Phoenicia at nearly the same time as the Levitical rituals were being used in Canaan. The Phoenician rituals governed the worship of pagan gods as detailed in some of the Ras Shamra tablets. Again, there is no relation between the two rituals. The fact that the tablets exist disposes of the argument that men were not sufficiently developed at that time to devise such rituals.

The assertion that the historical events related in Genesis lacked external confirmation and never really occurred is now disposed of by the vast accumulated history of ancient civilizations now available for study. Not one statement of fact in Genesis has been disproven. Many records of people and events for which the Bible was the only authority for thousands of years have now been established indisputably true by contemporary written tablets and documents.

In establishing the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the origin of the documents now composing Genesis has still to be explored, because the entirety of those events was narrated long before Moses' lifetime. Regarding the other four books, Exodus to Deuteronomy, the position is different; they deal entirely with matters personally connected with Moses. There can be no doubt that these books were completed in written form during the Exodus. It is probable that this occurred during the thirty-eight years that Israel spent at Kadesh. The final chapters of Deuteronomy with their account of the death of Moses were probably added by Joshua or Eleazar. Dr. A. S. Yahuda, a leading authority on ancient Egyptian and Hebrew languages, pointed out that these four books were written in an Egyptianized form of Hebrew which demanded that the writer thought as much in Egyptian as he did in Hebrew. That writer, of course, was Moses, brought up in the courts of Pharaoh and "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians."

Experts on ancient languages have substantiated that the last fourteen chapters of Genesis contain a significant number of Egyptian words. These are the chapters which detail the story of Joseph in Egypt. The first eleven chapters of the book (from creation to the death of Terah) contain a number of Akkadian and Sumerian words. The Akkadians were descendants of Shem and the Sumerians were descendants of Ham. Both races dwelt together in the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates from whence Abraham came. It is evident in these two facts that the history of Joseph was recorded first by Joseph or his fellows and that these documents (quite likely written on papyrus and in Egyptian) came into Moses' possession. The records of the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and the twelve sons of Jacob in Canaan, might well have been recorded either on goatskins, parchment, or clay tablets. All of these writing methods were used in Canaan. They would have been preserved in the archives of the heads of the tribes -- and so likewise would have come to Moses.

In the case of the first eleven chapters internal evidences point to their having been compiled, in the form in which they came to Moses, by those persons who had firsthand information concerning their own times. We quote from P. J. Wiseman, a notable archaeologist who points us to the key to understanding the authorship of this first eleven chapters as well as the balance of the book:

The unique use of this one phrase casts the entire book into a framework which is marked off into eras by its recurring use.

The expression is used to describe history, nine histories to be precise. It becomes evident that the clue to its use is that it points backwards in the story to the origins of the family history and not forward to a later development through a line of descendants.

What we find, then, is this:

Chapters 1:1 to 5:1 -- written by Adam

thence to 6:9 -- by Noah

thence to 10:1 -- by the sons of Noah

thence to 11:10 -- by Shem

thence to 11:27 -- by Terah

thence to 24:12 -- by Ishmael

thence to 25:19 -- by Isaac

thence to 36:1 -- by Esau and beyond to 36:9

thence to 37:2 -- by Jacob

Those first eleven chapters we find were written by five authors, each receiving the work of their forebears and appending to it their own. Were it not for the fact that archaeological finds now demonstrate that civilization springs into view all at once and fully developed (rather than gradually as erroneously hypothecated by evolutionists), such a conclusion would be hard to understand. One might reason, how did those early men possess the skills to record their own history? We forget that in this regard we are not talking about some civilization hidden for thousands of years from contact with other men. We are told by the Bible itself that man was created in the image of God. Commensuate abilities ought to be expected rather than to be thought shocking.

Among the evidences that we find for their having been written by those involved with their own story are the facts that the geographical names are those in current use at that period and that some of them had passed out of use or been replaced by other names by Abraham's day. The proper names are derived from Akkadian or Sumerian originals and in many cases incorporate the names of their gods. Many words of Akkadian or Sumerian origin appear in the text of these eleven chapters. Thus the primeval home of the first man was Edinu in Sumerian lore (Eden in Hebrew) until about 2200 BC when the legends changed the name to Dilmun, which lingered as the name of an island in the Gulf -- no longer in existence -- into historical times.

Similarly, the land which Genesis chapter four names as the home of Cain in his exile was the eastern shore of the Gulf, known at Nadu (Hebrew: Nod) until about 2200 BC when it became known as Manda (still surviving in the name of its principal river, the Mand). Instances such as these show that Genesis chapters two to four (at least) were composed by a dweller on the Euphrates not later than about 2300 BC. Certain grammatical errors in dealing with some Sumerian words indicate that the compiler was more familiar with the Semitic Akkadian language than with the Hamitic Sumerian tongue. This strengthens the supposition that he was one of the ancestors of Abraham, perhaps Eber. He must, even at this early date, have compiled his narrative from pre-existing records, and almost certainly had two separate accounts of previous times before him, one Semitic and one Hamitic, which he combined into a continuous story.

So the sacred book of the Christian and Jewish faiths had its origin, not in folklore and legends of ancient times collected and edited by some priestly dignitary in the 8th century BC, but in the painstaking work of men of God who lived in the dawn of history. They set down their stories in archaic forms of writing which had to be repeatedly translated and copied into new and different characters even before Abraham saw them. It has been abundantly proven in our own era that the stories of the Old Testament are factually true, the work of men who knew the facts and lived within measurable time of the events they recorded.

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(footnote 1) Recently David Rohl, in Pharaohs and Kings, 1995, made a compelling case that this actually dates to the time of Saul and David.

(footnote 2) Recently David Rohl, in Pharaohs and Kings, 1995, made a good case that the 12th Dynasty actually dates to the time of Joseph. See also "Chronology of the Second Millennium BC," a paper by James Parkinson, 411A Arden Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 91203.

(footnote 3) David Rohl's work suggests these dates should be brought closer about two and a half centuries.

(footnote 4) New Discoveries in Babylonian about Genesis, Marshal, Morgan & Scott.

(footnote 5) Ibid, page 51.

(footnote 6) Ibid, page 51.