Transcription
So the earliest writings in the Bible, all right, let's see it, are the first five books. And these are the five books of Moses. So this is not true, and this claim is just based on the presupposition that every word of the Bible is true and every postbiblical tradition regarding authorship is true.
Specifically, this is based on the presupposition that Moses was the author of the first five books of Moses and that they were written around the time period of the Exodus. Whether you're talking about the early Exodus in the 15th century or the late Exodus in the 13th century, depending on where you date the Exodus, that's where you're going to date the composition of the five books of Moses.
If you're just presupposing that Moses was the author of all five books of the Pentateuch, of course, there are virtually no scholars today that are taken at all seriously that actually believe that. The overwhelming majority of scholars recognize that the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, are brought together from a variety of different sources. The Priestly source and the Deuteronomist are two of the most firmly established sources. Scholars still talk about the E source and the J source. That would be the Elohist and the Yahwist. But there are other scholars who say these aren't really full documentary sources. And so maybe it's best to just talk about non-P and then P and then D.
But these texts date across a wide window of time. Some of the poetic fragments that are preserved in the Pentateuch might be among the oldest writings in the Hebrew Bible. So maybe some of the blessings in Genesis 49, maybe the song of the sea in Exodus 15, maybe the fragment in Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9, the tradition about El Yon distributing the nations according to the number of the children of God. But then we have like the Song of Deborah in Judges 5, uh, Psalm 68. These also may be just as old, if not older, than a couple of the poetic fragments that we have in the Pentateuch.
Other parts of the Pentateuch come from much later. A lot of the narratives are being written down in probably the 8th, 7th centuries. But then it's really in the exilic and post-exilic period that they're being brought together to create the books as we know them today. The book of Genesis, the book of Exodus, and then combining the book of Genesis with the book of Exodus, maybe according to one theory in the 5th, maybe even as late as the 4th century BCE. So, it's taking many centuries for the Pentateuch to come together. And while there are a handful of verses that may go back to maybe the 11th century BCE at the very earliest, the five books of Moses as a collection are absolutely not the oldest writings in the Bible.
And they were written at the end of the 15th century BC. No, they absolutely were not. The Hebrew language didn't even exist at the end of the 15th century BCE. It wouldn't exist until the probably late 11th century BCE. So what we have now in the Pentateuch was absolutely not written anywhere within centuries of the 15th century BCE. This is just again arbitrarily presupposing every word of the Bible is true and every traditional attribution of authorship is true irrespective of the data on the ground. And in this case, the data on the ground make clear that these texts cannot have been written in the 15th century BCE because the language in which they are written didn't even exist yet.
And because they're the earliest writing in the Bible, they're often targeted by skeptics who are saying that they're largely mythology. Well, the mythological portions are the parting of the Red Sea, the talking snake, those kinds of things are mythology. But there are other parts that are just narrative. That doesn't mean they're historical, but they're the genre of historical narrative. So they're legends and their foundation myths and charter myths and things like that and ideologies, how the world got to be the way it is now. That's not necessarily mythology, but it's certainly not historical.
So there's a spectrum between verbatim actual true history and mythology. And the Pentateuch kind of occupies a few different points along that spectrum, but there is very little that is historical in the Pentateuch. And anything that might be historical is usually just going to be kind of broad-level references to the existence of certain nations, to the existence of certain cities, and maybe to the existence of maybe some rulers, but in the Pentateuch, probably not.
And so in, uh, the books of Moses, one of them, the book of Numbers, Moses talks about a seer named Balaam son of Beor. And, uh, at this time, the Israelites are camped out in the Jordan Valley on the plains of Moab. Balak, king of Moab, sends messengers to Balaam son of Beor to summon him to come and to put a curse on this people, Israel. And Balaam comes and, uh, as he goes to speak a curse on Israel, a blessing comes out instead because the Lord is speaking through him. So we have Balaam son of Beor, this seer in the Bible.
Excavations took place here at Deir Alla in the 1960s and they were directed by H.J. Franken and their most significant discovery here came in 1967. They were digging up here at the acropolis of the site and they found the remains of a monumental building which they interpreted to be a temple. And the walls of this temple had collapsed in. And as they were excavating down through these collapsed walls, they noticed, uh, pieces of plaster that came from the inside of the wall. And they noticed that on some of these fragments of plaster, there was writing in black and red ink. And so they did the best they could to get these different, uh, pieces of plaster that had writing on them and piece them back together. And the inscription that they preserved is one of the feature displays at the National Museum of Jordan in Amman today.
So in general, this inscription is very fragmentary, but the first line of it is very clear and when translated reads, "The sayings of Balaam son of Beor, the man who was a seer." So compare that, for example, to Numbers 24:3 that says, "And he spoke his message, the prophecy of Balaam son of Beor." So the same person, the same seer that is talked about in the Bible is also now found independently of the Bible through archaeology, through the excavations in this site. Found inscription independent of the Bible.
So what does this mean? It means that the places and the events and the people that the Bible is talking about are real and that the truth claims of the Bible are not based on mythology but on history. So this is not a valid conclusion to draw from these data, and this apologist seems to be omitting a very critical detail. Now, I don't know if this video that has been posted on social media has been edited down from a longer video where this apologist does share these data, but this inscription and the building it was in date to the late 9th century BCE, probably around the year 800 BCE. And that has been entirely omitted from this discussion. And that is a critical datum because that is 6 to 700 years after the events of the Exodus are supposed to have occurred according to this apologist's timeline.
So that raises a question, when according to this inscription did this individual live? The inscription doesn't say this just happened. The inscription also doesn't say this happened 650 years ago. The inscription just starts off with this tale about this seer. And it does have kind of a mythological flavor to it. But at best, what this inscription establishes is that around 800 BCE, stories about a prophet named Balaam were in circulation in this area.
Now, here are some other data to take into consideration. There was no such thing as a kingdom of Moab in the 15th century BCE. So there is no Balak, king of Moab, who could have sent Balaam to do anything to any ostensibly historical Moses or Aaron or nation of Israel because there was no kingdom of Moab. The kingdom of Moab most likely began between the 12th and 11th centuries BCE when there were a number of territorial or secondary states that began to pop up in the region as a result of the easing of Egyptian hegemony.
So we cannot say that there was a Balaam in the 15th century BCE. There was not a Moab in the 15th century BCE. At best, there was a Moab around the 12th or 11th century BCE. But we first get a clear and demonstrable witness to a nation called Moab in the middle of the 9th century BCE. So around the time that this inscription would have been executed and put on this building. And that's the Mesha inscription where Mesha boasts of throwing off vassalage to the nation of Israel and of defeating Israel in battle and carting off the instruments of the worship of Adonai. And that is dated to probably the 3rd quarter of the 9th century BCE. So around 850 to 8:25ish BCE.
So we have the most acute confrontations between Israel and Moab around the same time. We have stories of Balaam as a prophet circulating. And this happens to be around the same time that most scholars think the historical narratives from the Pentateuch are beginning to be written down, at least in their most basic form. So we had the convergence of multiple different data on the late 9th century BCE as the origin of these stories, as the origin of this conflict between Israel and Moab, as the origin of circulation of the stories of Balaam. Which suggests that at best, what these data show us is that this story was probably written around the end of the 9th or beginning of the 8th century BCE, or at least the tradition began to be circulated around that time period. It might have been committed to text centuries later.
But what this leads us to conclude most likely is not that Balaam was an actual historical figure in the 15th century BCE. Nothing at all about this inscription confirms or even suggests that. It suggests that these stories were in circulation in the late 9th century BCE, which is the point at which a bunch of different data converge on the likely composition of the story of Balaam being hired to go curse Israel. So, uh, we get no confirmation whatsoever that this actually happened in the 15th century BCE. That there was any Balaam in the 15th century BCE. There was no Moab in the 15th century BCE. There was no Hebrew in the 15th century BCE.
So this apologist is glossing over a lot of details that they don't want you to know or don't know themselves in order to try to fool you into thinking that this is evidence that the story is actually historically true. And that's just not the case. And if you would like more detail on this inscription, I would go back to 1976, "Aramaic Text from Deir Alla." This is, uh, one of the better discussions. We also have Joann Hackett's discussion of the Balaam text from Deir Alla. And then 1991, "The Balaam Text from Deir Alla Re-evaluated." This is a collection of papers including responses, uh, based on the original publication of the Deir Alla inscription. And then more recently, "Balaam in Text and Tradition" discusses more broadly what's going on with Balaam.
And as you're going to see when you look at all of this, none of this inscription in any way, shape, or form whatsoever constitutes actual evidence that this actually happened anywhere near the 15th century BCE. Again, at best, it is evidence that stories about Balaam were in circulation around the same time period that Israel was confronting Moab and around the same time period that scholars believe the traditions of the Pentateuch were beginning to take shape. So, the most likely conclusion from all of this is that it is around 800 BCE that the tradition that is now found in Numbers 22 took shape. And the fit for this video, it's been Spider-Punk.