Moses And
Other Historical Fabrications
If you’ve elected to read the
preceding selections in this manuscript, you will have noticed that I often refer
to the first five books of the Bible as the Pentateuch.
In Greek, the term simply means “five volumes.” Scholars often refer to
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy using this collective term
because many of our predecessors
erroneously assumed for over 2000 years that Moses personally wrote the books.
Knowledge gained through modern scholarship and research, however, allows us to
ascertain the logical impossibility of this scenario being true. More than
likely, the Pentateuch is the work of several individuals, all of whom lived
well after the stories they present and had varying oral traditions of how
those events unfolded. Because of this societal concoction, the earliest
recorded history of the Jews is afflicted with oft-erratic variance.
In order to
consider an extraordinary event for inclusion in the modern canon of actual
history, we must either have remaining evidence indicating what took place or
obtain a record from a reliable eyewitness who documented the occurrence. We
generally accept common daily events as fact because we know that these
occasions are consistent and inconsequential in the grand scheme of human
history. Extraordinary events on the level of those Moses allegedly recorded in
the Pentateuch, on the other hand, should be thoroughly scrutinized before
canonizing them as fact.
Two
major biblical events that we should expect to be reasonably consistent with
coexisting historical records and modern archaeological discoveries
are the Exodus and Conquests. As you will see, however, these two hypothetical
milestones have little, if any, substantiating support. If we are to ignore
this contrary finding and just accept whatever the Bible says as truth, it
isn’t fair to confine ourselves to the accounts of only one religion. Thus, we
would have to accept any and all religious claims, regardless of their
absurdity. To avoid such a logical disaster, we must reasonably pursue evidence
for claims made by all beliefs in
order to determine which, if any, has the most reliability as the correct
religion. Christianity cannot simply trump other religions because it’s the one
in which the most faith has been placed. Awarding any belief system with this
favorable and prejudicial judgment should be an obvious act of intellectual
dishonesty. Besides, if Christianity is the one true religion, it should have
no trouble in avoiding claims that are disprovable by scientific and
investigative scrutiny.
For our study of who initiated the history
of the Jews, there’s no better place to start than the beginning. Thus, this
chapter will discuss the following: how the Pentateuch came into existence, the
standard reasons why Christians still maintain that Moses scribed it, why
Christians desperately cling to traditional authorship claims, the contrast in
writing styles among the multiple authors, and key pieces of information
allowing scholars to debunk the traditional dates placed on the writings.
If Moses
Didn’t Write The Books Of Moses…
Before we delve into much detail of how we
know who wrote what in the early Old Testament, you should have an
understanding of the different components combined to form the five books of
the Pentateuch. This “document hypothesis” states that there were probably four
authors and an editor responsible for the compilation. Since it’s currently
impossible to determine their hypothetical identities, we commonly refer to
them as J, E, P, D, and R for the reasons we’ll now discuss.
J received his name because he
consistently uses JHWH as the unpronounceable name of God. Issues relating to
humanity are the primary focus of his writing. J even extends this
humanity-based focus by portraying a uniquely human interpretation of God. This
author is compassionate and shows none of the bias against women discussed in Why Women And The Bible Don’t Mix.
Seeing as how J wrote a complete historical record of the Israelites from a
Judean perspective, he probably resided within the Southern Kingdom of
E, whose primary focus is morality,
acquired his name because he consistently uses Elohim as the name of God. E
commonly emphasized the second born sons of families because they were of
historical and personal interest to the North for symbolic reasons. Since E
left us with a complete account of the Israelites from the perspective of the
Northern Kingdom of Israel, historians generally believe that this was his
domicile. Thus, we already have two independent accounts of early Middle
Eastern history. Since the split of
P obtained his name because he was almost
certainly a priest. He identifies Aaron, the first High Priest, as his
spiritual ancestor. His manuscripts include rituals, laws, sins, chronologies,
genealogies, and other subjects of definite interest to a priest. In sharp
contrast to J, P doesn’t attribute any human qualities to God. The Hebrew terms
equivalent to mercy, grace, and repentance don’t appear once in P’s work, while they’re plentiful
in the compositions of J and E. Furthermore, P is often cold and harsh with his
writing unlike the more pleasant E. These interpretations and attitudes are
what we would expect from a traditional church leader. He doesn’t include any
mythical details, such as the ludicrous claims of talking animals, likely
interpolated into history by J and E as a result of popular urban legends. As
he was seemingly aware of the books of prophecy, while J and E never gave this
indication, P probably wrote his share much later around 700-650 BCE.
D received his name because he was the
author of Deuteronomy. It’s a good possibility that D wrote many of the
historical books as well. It’s an even better possibility that he wrote the
book of Jeremiah, which contains several carbon copies of statements made in
the book of Deuteronomy. If this is the case, the author could be Jeremiah’s
scribe, Baruch, or Jeremiah himself. D most certainly lived in
We designate the individual responsible
for combining the four accounts into one collection as R because he’s the
redactor (editor). The process finally came to a conclusion some time around
500-434 BCE, but may have begun as early as the Babylonian Exile of 587-539
BCE. R also adds bits and pieces of commentary to make necessary transitions
between the passages. The scholarly community consensually believes this
redactor is the biblical priest Ezra.
To illustrate the document hypothesis,
we’ll take a detailed look at the first eight chapters of Genesis. You may find
it helpful to locate and follow along in a Bible before proceeding further.
One creation story scribed by P appears
from Genesis 1:1-2:3. Notice that the first half of 2:4 doesn’t maintain the
flow and seems to segue into the second creation account found in 2:4-2:25.
That’s likely the redactor making a transition between P’s and J’s creation
stories. J continues to the end of the fourth chapter with some recollections
of stories centered on Adam and his children. Chapter 5 then hastily jumps in
with some genealogy from P or R, but verse 29, written by J, seems recklessly
tossed into the mix.
At the commencement of chapter six, J
regains control and supplies a few verses set in the time immediately prior to
Noah’s flood. This account abruptly stops following 6:8, and P’s story of Noah
begins with his lineage. Furthermore, this section by P is an obvious
repetition of the days before the flood, provided earlier in the chapter by J.
Genesis 7:1 seems to pick right back up where J left off at 6:8. Genesis 7:6, written
by P, appears haphazardly thrown in because it interrupts a cohesive story told
by J. Verses 7:7, 7:10, 7:12, 7:17-20, and 7:22-23 tell one full story of the
flood (J) while 7:8-9, 7:11, 7:13-16, 7:21, and 7:24 tell another (P). In
chapter eight, J likely recorded verses 2, 3, 6, 8-12, the last part of 13, and
20-22, while the remaining verses stand alone as another complete story by the
author P. If you happen to be carefully reading the texts in their native
Hebrew language, you may even notice the contrasting writing styles of the two
authors beginning to emerge.
How And
Why Was The Pentateuch Combined?
This part, we cannot say for certain. It’s
speculated that a number of Israelites fled south into Judea with the E
document in hand when the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE.
Consequently, the J document would now coexist with the E document in this
society prior to their combination. Around this time, P likely became a
widespread alternative priestly version of the J and E records. With these
three variant interpretations, no doubt would come arguing factions. R then saw
the need, or perhaps was elected, to combine the contrasting accounts into a
single cohesive document agreeable to all parties. Not wishing to eliminate any
essential parts of the respective documents, R would then combine the
contrasting stories into one quasi-harmonious account and do the best he could
to avoid contradictions, inconsistencies, and repetitions. Because the D
document doesn’t step on the toes of the other three histories, the redactor
likely tacked Deuteronomy onto the end for this reason. By 434 BCE, the
redactor had certainly compiled the modern version of the Pentateuch.
There’s nothing novel about forming
multiple author theories for the Moses biography. The first known hypothesis
was proposed nearly a thousand years ago when it was discovered that a list of
kings in the Pentateuch included some who apparently reigned following Moses’
death. Although the suggestion that Moses didn’t write this passage seems to
bathe in common sense, the churches of the Middle Ages weren’t exactly known
for embracing such heretical theories. Centuries later, biblical scholars began
to propose that prophets and editors may have had limited involvement in the
compilation. Scholars fortunate enough to live during the age of Enlightenment
in the eighteenth century concluded that different authors recorded the
passages conspicuously appearing twice because one writer would use the name
JHWH and the other would use the name Elohim when referring to the same god.
Triplet passages, the beginning of the P discovery, were soon uncovered in the
years to come. Later still, historians determined Deuteronomy has a style
distinct from the ones found in the four preceding books. Presently, we have a
four author and one editor hypothesis. This will no doubt undergo alteration as
well if subsequent research provides further evidence relevant to the
authorship issue. On the other hand, regardless of what evidence researchers
discover, the Christian community may indefinitely hold onto a Moses
authorship.
While we’re certainly not fully able to
explain the origins of the Old Testament with 100% accuracy, we can conclude with great certainty that
the Pentateuch is a set of conflicting passages scribed 500-3500 years after
the events it purports. Ask yourself how much oral tradition can change in a
few years; then consider the subsequent alteration of details after 3500 years.
Of course, this proposal assumes that an omniscient deity offered no input to
this particular set of writers. Since we should be unanimous in deciding that a
“wonderful” and “loving” God would have no part in the orders of rape, slavery,
and the various other acts of extreme brutality contained within the Old Testament,
we should also decide that these hundredth-hand stories were highly unlikely to
be scientifically or historically accurate. Similarly, we see the inclusion of
ridiculous fallacies in the form of Adam and Noah working unpaid overtime at
discrediting their own reliability. Furthermore, we have upcoming
archaeological evidence indicating that the Exodus and Conquests didn’t unfold
the way they were recorded, if at all. Thus, we can certainly challenge the
existence, or at least question the true nature, of the people on whom the
authors based these stories.
There’s ample reason why Christians feel
the absolute necessity for Moses to have been the sole author of the
Pentateuch. First, we have inclusions of several passages indicating Moses did
a lot of the writing. For example, “And it came to pass, when Moses had made an
end of writing the words of this law in a book…” (Deuteronomy 31:24). There are
also several biblical passages outside the Pentateuch insinuating that Moses
was responsible for its compilation. Paul demonstrated his conviction that
Moses was an author when he said, “For Moses describeth the righteousness which
is of the law” (Romans 10:5). Even Jesus implies that Moses wrote the books:
“All things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses” (Luke
24:44). However, there’s no passage in the Pentateuch directly implicating
Moses as the one and only author of the present compilation. I also fail to
recognize any quotes concretely indicating that the New Testament characters
were certain of Moses’ solitary authorship. The contemporaneous belief of the
New Testament authors may have very well been that Moses only provided a
foundation for the Old Testament writings.
For the past 2000 years, the church has
merely gone on assumptions when making the attribution of the Pentateuch to
Moses. In fact, there wouldn’t be any additional errors in the Bible if someone
completely debunked the traditional hypothesis. The importance of the
authorship question lies with determining the credibility and reliability of
the authors, not with demonstrating an additional biblical mistake.
Evidence
Clearly Pointing Away From Moses
The best
evidence we have supporting the position that Moses didn’t write the entire
Pentateuch is the description of his death and burial in the last chapter of
Deuteronomy. Almost all Christians will make this small concession by admitting
that Joshua may have finished the works, but some actually believe that God
told Moses what to write beforehand. Nevertheless, the possibility of a second
author for the final chapter isn’t exactly destructive to the traditional
author hypothesis. The more critical discoveries arise from the widespread
presence of contradictions and inconsistencies contained within repetitions of
stories, such as the creation and flood. A single author would have known
better than to write a certain passage, only to contradict it a few sentences
later. However, these variations are, indeed, present and lead us to believe
that the traditional single author hypothesis is completely discountable.
Examples of these contradictions can be found in the next chapter.
The inclusion of city names and tribes yet
to exist at the time of Moses’ death, approximately 1450 BCE, is equally
devastating to the traditional Mosaic authorship claim. Genesis 11:31 says that
the Chaldees lived in the city of Ur during the life of Abraham, but historical
records tell us that the Chaldees didn’t even exist as a tribe until well after
Moses was dead. In addition, they didn’t become a prominent enough group to
occupy a city until the sixth century BCE.
Genesis 14:14 mentions the city of Dan,
but the city didn’t acquire this name until it was seized one thousand years
later via conquest. Genesis 37:25 mentions traders with spicery, balm, and
myrrh, but these weren’t the primary trade products of the region until the
eighth century BCE. Isaac visits King Abimelech of Gerar in Genesis 26:1, but
Gerar didn’t exist until after Isaac’s death and wouldn’t have been powerful
enough to require a King until the eighth century BCE. Genesis 36:31 says that
there were “kings that reigned in the land of Edom,” but there’s no
extrabiblical record of Kings in Edom until the eighth century BCE. Exodus
13:17 details Moses’ apprehension toward entering the land of the Philistines
in Canaan, but there’s zero evidence that indicates the Philistines occupied
Canaan until the thirteenth century BCE. In addition, they couldn’t have
sufficiently organized in threatening numbers until a few hundred years later.
Moses references Palestine in Exodus
15:14, the only known mention of that name for hundreds of years. In
Deuteronomy 3:11, Moses also mentions the city of Rabbath and Og’s location
within the city, but no one outside of Rabbath could have held this information
until it was conquered hundreds of years later. Jacob is called a wandering
Aramean in Deuteronomy 26:5, but the Arameans didn’t have contact with the
Israelites until the ninth century BCE. Some particular names mentioned in
Genesis 14 and 25 (Chedorlaomer, Kadesh, Sheba, Tema, Nebaioth, and Adbeel) are
consistent with names of people recorded by the Assyrians as living during the
sixth through eighth centuries BCE, not a thousand years prior. The writers
never provide the names of Egyptian Pharaohs even though Moses would have
readily known this bit of information.
The Pentateuch authors claim that many of
the leading Genesis characters, such as Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, rode
camels. However, there’s no archaeological evidence indicating that anyone domesticated
these animals earlier than 1200 BCE. Again, this was hundreds or thousands of
years after the deaths of these alleged biblical camel riders. Furthermore, no
known person trained camels to carry people and other heavy loads until many
years later.
Someone making these aforementioned claims
in 1500 BCE would have had no ability to appreciate this futuristic information
and no reason to present the information in a fashion identifiable only to a
specific group of people living in a specific region during an arbitrary future
time period. On the other hand, someone in 500 BCE would have had access to
this information but lacked a way to know that the stories presented were
historically invalid. Not only do these facts indicate a more recent authorship,
they also suggest fabrications or alterations of actual events. Finally, many
of the passages state that certain aspects of the Hebrew society are still the
same “unto this day” (e.g. Genesis 26:33). This wording greatly implies that
the complete record was finished well after the purported events took place.
The
Exodus: Timeline Inconsistencies
Now let’s turn to the particular account
of the Exodus and consider the possibility of such a magnificent event taking
place. First, we should recognize the plethora of peculiarities concerning the
approximate time that the authors say the enslavement and subsequent Exodus
took place. We arrive at the aforementioned 1500 BCE estimate for the Exodus
because the three different chronologies used to date it differ by about 150
years but tend to center around the designated 1500 BCE date. We commonly use
the most accepted and latest possible date of 1447 BCE because it’s the easiest
to derive.
1 Kings 6:1 says that Solomon’s fourth
year as ruler was concurrent with the 480th anniversary of the Exodus. Given
that Solomon began his first year of rule in 970 BCE, his fourth year as ruler
would have been in 967 BCE. Consequently, the Exodus must have taken place 480
years prior in 1447 BCE. Establishing the exact date isn’t as important as
obtaining a period to which the events must be bound in order to compare it to
established historical events.
According to the Bible, the Israelite
slaves were used to build the Egyptian cities of Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11).
Since the Exodus took place no later than 1447 BCE, the Israelites would have
at least had to start construction on
Raamses by that time in order for the story to remain reliable. In a great
setback to Christian apologists, there wasn’t even a Pharaoh named Raamses
until 1320 BCE, 127 years after the Exodus. For an additional dagger in the
heart of biblical inerrancy, consider Egypt’s own records. These archaeological
findings state that Egypt’s own people built the city and not until it came via
order of Raamses II who reigned from 1279-1213 BCE. A Hebrew writing a story of
his origins several hundred years after all these events had long played out
would have had no way of determining when Raamses was constructed without
committing to a thorough investigation of Egypt’s historical records. Needless
to say, the author didn’t have such access and made a poor guess on when the
city was actually built.
The
Exodus: A Valid Counterargument From Silence
Upon the Israelites’ alleged escape from
their forced construction duties, Moses parts the Red Sea so that they can
cross and escape from the pursuing Egyptians (Exodus 14). This was supposed to
be the last that Egypt would see of them, and it was as far as the Bible is concerned. Moses seemingly marches his
people straight through the other Egyptian regions without contest because the
author was no doubt ignorant of the soldiers stationed in the surrounding
cities. As you might have subsequently guessed, there are no Egyptian reports
of such a massive group crossing these outposts.
The story then purports Moses leading the
Israelites into the vast wilderness for forty years of aimless wandering.
According to the biblical account, Moses freed 600,000 men in addition to the
safely presumed multitude of women and children. If we assume only one wife for
each man and only one child for every other couple, which is a very low
estimate, there’s a total of one and a half million escapees in addition to the
“mixed multitude…of flocks, and herds, even very much cattle” (Exodus
12:37-41). After forty years, the count probably swelled to three million, a
number in agreement with many religious Jewish sources.
Since we have millions of mouths to
contend with, let’s look at the problem of finding something to feed them.
We’ll assume that the Israelites were always proximate to a large water source
unless stated otherwise. An average individual requires at least a half pound
of food per day to meet typical nourishment requirements. In order to just
barely survive, we’ll assume that the Israelites had half that amount over the
course of forty years. If each person ate a quarter pound of food every
twenty-four hours, the entire camp would need 375 tons of sustenance every day. While we know that they primarily
survived off manna, a dried plant material (Numbers 11:6-9), it’s ludicrous to
believe that they could obtain this much nourishment day after day without
supernatural intervention. From what we’ve learned about this god’s true lack
of interaction with the people on earth, such unsubstantiated circumstances
were highly unlikely to have ever taken place.
Considering that the Bible provides some
precise locations of the events surrounding the desert journey, archaeological
evidence of three million people wandering around in a confined area for forty
years shouldn’t be too difficult to locate. In fact, we know that the
Israelites were in Kadesh-barnea for most of their long journey (Deuteronomy
1:19). However, not one piece of evidence of an Israeli encampment or occupancy
has ever arisen from the multitude of undertaken excavations. In contrast,
civilizations with populations less than three million over their entire time
of existence have left behind considerable amounts of remains that inform us of
their cultural facets. Furthermore, archaeologists weren’t necessarily looking
for any evidence from these people; they casually stumbled upon the initial
discoveries due to the sufficient number of artifacts large groups tend to
leave behind. Asserting that unfound archaeological evidence exists for an
Exodus is an absurdly difficult position to defend.
Similarly, we have no evidence for three
million people invading the land of Canaan and destroying the inhabitants’
possessions forty years after the Exodus (Numbers 33:50-54). Archaeological
findings in the form of bodies, waste products, documents, and clothing tell us
that the population of Canaan was never greater than 100,000. Thus, we can
reasonably dismiss the possibility of a group in excess of one million ever
conquering and inhabiting the region.
Fortunately, the Egyptians were much less
fond of including hyperbole in their historical records. Of the thousands of
fourteenth century BCE Egyptian records uncovered at el-Amarna and Boghazkoy
detailing the governments, armies, religions, trade routes, and everyday lives
of the people living in the region, none pay any respect to the millions of
Israelites allegedly moving about like nomads in Kadesh-barnea. In fact, we
don’t posses a single mention of Israel made prior to the creation of the 1207
BCE Merneptah Stele. The inscriptions on this essential historical artifact
inform us that Pharaoh Merneptah had recently entered Canaan and easily
defeated the Israelites. Curiously, just seventy-eight years earlier, Pharaoh
Raamses recorded his army as numbering only 37,000. Although Egypt is widely
acknowledged to have been the most powerful country in the world at that time,
how could an army the size of a small city go on the offensive and defeat three
million inhabitants in a region with
nearly one million men of fighting age? If Merneptah did defeat the enormous Israeli army, why didn’t he acknowledge
such a remarkable, unrivaled victory in his writings, and why does the Bible
neglect to mention this humiliating defeat?
The Exodus:
Bogus Solutions
Because attempts to justify the number of
Israelites have consistently fallen flat, apologists have often sought a way
around this perplexity. Sound familiar? The Hebrew word used to describe
thousands is eleph. In a couple of
the five hundred or so instances in which the Old Testament authors utilize the
term, it meant an army or clan. If this was one of those highly unusual cases,
apologists could claim that Moses freed six hundred families instead of six hundred thousand men. This gives us roughly
1500 people escaping from Egypt. Even if we allow the convenience of the word
just happening to mean something else at the whim of the apologist, the tale
still has unanswered problems. The archaeological evidence and Egyptian
historical records for this smaller group of people are still absent. More
importantly, there are no longer enough of them to invade and take the land of
Canaan. When one difficulty is resolved, another takes its place.
As a way of solving the Egyptian silence,
Bible defenders have proposed that the records did include the Israelites’ stay in their country. A writer named
Manetho of the third century BCE wrote that, according to some mythical books,
a group of people known as the Hyksos invaded Egyptian land and took over the
leadership for five hundred years before Pharaoh Ahmose ejected them in 1570
BCE. Some apologists looking for any loophole claim that the Hyksos are a
reference to the Israelites. However, several reasons why this isn’t the case
should already be painfully obvious. The dates are way off; the Israelites
didn’t invade Egypt; they didn’t stay five hundred years; and Ahmose didn’t run
them off. While the stories are in no way congruent, the Egyptian tale may help
explain the provenience of the biblical legend.
Another difficult aspect of the accord for
an apologist to defend would be the Israelites’ total lack of faith in their
god’s abilities. After God frees his people from captivity and performs all the
plague miracles to ensure their freedom, they still don’t trust him. Since they think that they’re going to die
when the Pharaoh decides to chase after them, they complain about the method
used to release them from Egyptian custody. Consequently, God has Moses part
the sea in order for them to cross and lure the Egyptians into their watery
graves. Just a few days later, they complain about an onset of dehydration.
Consequently, God provides them with water. Forty days following that incident, the people complain about
having no meat. Consequently, God sends them a multitude of quail. A while
later, the Israelites once again think that they’re going to dehydrate even
though God provided them with water on the previous occasion. Consequently, God
provides them with water once again. When the people complain again about not
having any meat, the divinely delivered quail fly in once more. Later still,
people start complaining about having no land to call their own. When God is
about to provide them with some land, they doubt that they can defeat the
multitude of inhabitants to obtain it. Instead, they all desire to return to
Egypt as slaves rather than fighting and dying in the wilderness.
The Israelites obviously have zero faith
in God even though he performs unbelievable miracles for them on a consistent
basis. Why, then, are they so skeptical of a god who has provided them with so
many blessings in the past? Why would they later turn their backs on such a
powerful confederate? It doesn’t make any sense for the Israelites to be so
thoroughly convinced that they were going to die when the supernatural
interventions of God save them time after time after time. This is another
great reason why the story is probably an exceedingly ridiculous fable with an
intended moral, much like the repeated enslavement story discussed in the
previous chapter.
The
Conquests
As I mentioned in The Flat Earth Society, God grants Joshua’s request to make the sun
cease its motion so that he can defeat his enemies in the daylight. Since no society
with astronomers recorded this unique event, the ball really started to roll on
determining the legitimacy of events claimed in the conquest accounts of the
Pentateuch and historical books. Subsequent thorough scientific analyses turn
up some very interesting facts relevant to these biblical endeavors.
The size of the army Joshua used to
conquer his enemies is astonishing even by today’s standards. As I alluded to
earlier, the greatest nations of the era had no more than 50,000 soldiers
serving simultaneously. The military that Joshua claims to be under his
command, however, even outnumbers the current United States Army. While there
was an astounding amount of soldiers numbering in the hundreds of thousands
during Joshua’s conquests, there were over one and a half million enlisted by the time David was King. Such an outlandishly
sized army could have easily conquered the entire ancient world unopposed if
the enlisted men so desired. However, there’s no contemporaneous record of an
existing force even a tenth of that
size. In addition, the population problem arises once again because the
Israelites could not have possibly grown to this size over such a short amount
of time when you necessarily take the subpar living conditions of the era into
consideration.
The consensus of archaeological findings,
such as the nearly exhaustive collection of proposals reviewed by William
Stiebing in 1989, points away from Moses or Joshua ever conquering the cities
claimed by the Bible. We know that the conquests directed by Moses had to have
taken place during the time that he and Joshua lived concurrently
(approximately 1550-1450 BCE), while the conquests following the Pentateuch
must have taken place between Moses’ death and the lifetimes of his various
successors (approximately 1450-1200 BCE). Of the four cities that the
Israelites take via force in Numbers 21 (Arad, Hormah, Heshbon, and Dibon),
none exhibit any clear evidence that they were occupied during the required
period. Areor’s remnants, another city claimed to have been conquered while
Moses was still alive, offer no credence to the claim that the city was
occupied any earlier than two hundred years following the alleged victory
(Deuteronomy 2:36).
Although Joshua’s most famous battle takes
place in Jericho long after the death of Moses, there’s overwhelming
archaeological evidence that suggests the city was destroyed before Moses would
have even been born (Joshua 6). Likewise, impartial archaeologists aren’t ready
to conclude that the cities of Ai, Gibeon, and Hebron had occupants at the same
time that this so-called historical book claims they were destroyed (Joshua 7,
9, and 10, respectively).
Occupational eras of the remaining cities
will vary according to different sources, possibly putting their demise around
the time of Joshua’s conquests. However, the fallacies presented about the
other cities demonstrate the need to seriously question the Bible when
attempting to place an accurate date on those remaining towns. Even if future
findings confirm the dates provided by the Bible, there’s no evidence that any
“Joshua” was doing all the conquering.
Unless there’s compelling evidence to the
contrary, we should always give reliability and precedence to correspondence
written at the time of the event rather than propagandistic records compiled
hundreds of years afterwards. You should realize by now that the Bible is
anything but compelling evidence. The
blatant signs of a more modern authorship, the lack of documented eyewitnesses,
and the obvious embellishments clearly indicate that we should take the
aforementioned accounts with a handful of salt.
The
Significance Of Moses’ Absence
Since Moses didn’t write the outlandish
stories found within the Pentateuch, we must consider the fact we only know of
his existence through oral tradition a millennium in the making. With this in
mind, could he have been a legend based on a real person? Is it possible that
he’s a complete work of fiction?
The Law of Moses, supposedly handed down by God himself in Exodus, is
probably patterned after the Code of Hammurabi, which was written well before
2000 BCE. This date places the code’s origins several centuries prior to Moses’
trek up Mt. Sinai. Both codes of conduct contain similar guidelines along with
similar punishments in lieu of following the established rules (murder, theft,
perjury, adultery, etc.) Simply put, several moral codes existed in the Middle
East prior to these unoriginal directions from Moses.
Aspects
of Moses’ birth are likely to be a copy of King Sargon of Agade’s early years
as well. Like Moses, Sargon was also said to have been placed into a basket on
a river as a baby. The important difference is that Sargon’s story was
purported a thousand years prior to the same affair Moses
allegedly endured as a child (Exodus 2). Is it possible that the original
tellers of the story could have based the legend of Moses on this historical
figure? Minor details like these add up to further challenge the legitimacy of
Moses’ existence, and we should not honestly dismiss such parallels as mere
coincidences.
Implications
Of A Fabricated History
If no “Moses” or any other individual from
the contemporaneous era wrote anything in the Pentateuch, how do we really know
that God carried out and ordered all the monstrous deeds preserved in those
books? We can’t be certain of the records for two simple reasons: the stories
are utterly ridiculous, and we can scarcely consider hundredth-hand accounts to
be reliable. That’s why we must analyze the veracity of even the simplest of
claims made in the books of Moses to render a verdict on their proper place in
history.
The truth is that Moses couldn’t have
realistically written the books, and we have no reason to believe that he was
an actual historical figure. Because the majority of the Old Testament was
critically inaccurate in its detail, we cannot conclude that the events
contained within are factual and accurate without further evidence. Since the
required evidence is completely absent, we should only conclude that the books
from Genesis to Job are mythological or greatly exaggerated legends.
The balance of the Old Testament is
nothing but songs and prophecies of a god no longer in contact with anyone but
a handful of prophets who, as we will see in A Different Future, also display a total lack of credibility. By
the time the Israelites had a compiled history of their origins, no one ever
claims that God had such liberal verbal and visual contact with anyone. All of
a sudden, God seemingly ceases to exist from the observable world, a world in
which no supernatural events take place. No known Hebrew authors make
extraordinary claims in the multi-century span between the documentation of
these events and the beginning of the Common Era. In fact, the Israelites
existed pretty much as we do now: living normal lives and never recording any
verifiably miraculous acts.
How It Came To Be
One man under the divine inspiration of
God didn’t write the Pentateuch; it was the product of several different
perspectives of a common legacy passed down by fallible oral tradition for
hundreds of years. When we analyze the texts, we clearly observe the Pentateuch
as a convolution of several works from different authors with interpolated
segues to signal subject transitions. Considering these observations, we cannot
possibly anticipate the Pentateuch to be 100% accurate in its detail.
Following the Assyrian invasion and
Babylonian Exile, conditions were certainly indicative of a rising necessity for
a cohesive religious society. Perhaps these tales arose from the necessity to
instill fear into the hearts of Israel’s stronger enemies. Consequently, it
would be very likely that these bits of propaganda were intended to be nothing
more than methods of keeping superstitious enemies at bay so that such forces
wouldn’t overrun the demonstrably inferior and ill-equipped Israelites.
Exaggerated oral traditions and urban
legends during this highly superstitious era no doubt played a large role in
forming the first draft of the Old Testament. The seemingly countless number of
horrible acts carried out by God, recorded in the Old Testament, and discussed
in the previous three chapters of this book weren’t the result of angry divine
interactions. Instead, these tales of unfathomably enormous armies and insanely
angry deities were undoubtedly the product of a vivid human imagination. Thus,
we cannot reasonably attribute the earliest writings of the Bible to an
omniscient deity, much less the “wonderful” and “loving” Christian god. In
short, the historical account left by the Hebrews is a problematic report
filled with wild, unsubstantiated, ridiculous, and extraordinary claims without
a shred of evidence to back it up.