Transcription
Hello friends Brian do here. I am making this video to tell you about one of the biggest bombshells in the history of Old Testament scholarship. It involves the question of the authorship of the Torah. Who wrote it? I say bombshell. It's a little bit, um, it's a little bit, uh, explosive, maybe to put it that way, because much of the fury around this has died down over the years, although it can flare up at various times. And I think it's still worth talking about.
The question here is, who wrote The Pentateuch? Who wrote the Torah? The traditional author is Moses, but there are going to be problems with that. Okay? So, before we get into it, first, let's, let's talk about how authorship works in the ancient world. How does author, yeah, yeah, come in? Oh, thank you. Sorry. You know, I'm not going to start over. I'm not starting over. That was too good of an intro. I've got my smoothie here. Um, I'm not starting over. Okay.
Authorship in the ancient world. I'm just going to eat this smoothie casually while I talk about this explosive issue. Okay. How does authorship work in the ancient world? Well, here's a clue: it doesn't work like we think of authorship today. We think of authorship on a very austere, individual model, the kind of lone genius alone in her room by candlelight, a tortured soul writing a thing out of the depths of their spirit. We should not think of authorship like this, uh, especially of complex texts in the ancient world. Instead, what we have to think of is a tradition, and we have to think of scribes who copy tradition, and we have to think of groups of people who treasure tradition through time. So, we're going to have to think about a community process whenever we think about authorship in the ancient world, at least as a starting place.
Um, do we have examples of this? Is there any proof that this is the way people thought about authorship in the ancient world? Yes. Let me give a couple of examples. One would be the Epic of Gilgamesh, um, maybe the most famous epic literary production from the ancient Near Eastern world in which ancient Israel was embedded. Um, we have the Epic Gilgamesh, the Epic of Gilgamesh, in many, many, many, many, many different copies through time. And to make a long story very short, one can trace the growth and evolution of that epic through really almost like 2,000 years in its various versions and recensions. Can you find an author of the Epic of Gilgamesh? Um, um, no, you cannot really find an author. You could maybe find someone who standardized it at a particular time period for a particular audience, but an original author, it doesn't really work like that, right?
Or you could think of, of Greek epic, of, of The Iliad and the Odyssey. We know that the Iliad and the Odyssey, uh, has, have a traditional author, Homer. But we also know, and, and classical scholars know, that this, that those stories grew through time. Um, they were probably told orally for a very long time and not written down. We have textual variance in the copies of these stories that suggests that they had a period of growth and of transmission, and that they were sure they were fixed, they were finalized at a particular point. But the final point at which those were fixed or finalized for epic performance in Athens in ancient Greece, you can't call that the moment of authorship or identify really an author at that point.
You can also look at, I'm like condemned now to have either holding this thing and not eating it, or eating it. I think, oh, this is really good. My daughter's made this. Um, I think I just have to eat it periodically throughout this video, okay, to like ease the tension. Um, we also have, like, in the Dead Sea Scroll community, for example, we have really, at least evidence there, in ancient Israel, a lot later than the Old Testament period, but still interesting, of the pro, of, of a group in the process of copying and transmitting a whole variety of texts, not even just biblical texts. And we see that they would make different versions of that text, that it would exist in, in various copies, in recensions. You might say, which one of those is the real one? And who is the author? Well, this becomes a very complicated question.
Maybe the most famous example of this, um, in the Old Testament is the Book of Jeremiah. We know that the book of Jeremiah existed in two, at least two, very different, um, types in antiquity. There was a Greek version of Jeremiah that had a particular order of the chapters and was a particular length. And then there was the Hebrew version of Jeremiah, what became the so-called Masoretic text, that had a particular order of chapters and is a particular length. It is the Masoretic text of Jeremiah that we have in Bibles today, translated. The Greek version, though, was a lot shorter and had different order, all kinds of things. Um, so it shows, yeah, maybe there was a personality and a speaker and an author in a sense behind this, namely the Prophet Jeremiah. But the way those words got copied and transmitted, we know, I mean, for a fact, empirically, for that book, we know that it underwent a process that really obscures this idea that there's some single author who, you know, single-handedly laid out what we now have. It just probably didn't work like that.
Okay, okay. So that's, that's just a little background. Um, what does this have to do with Moses then as an author? Well, we do see Moses in the act of writing in the Torah a couple of times. Um, um, you know, you, you'll see a verse or a reference that says, "And Moses wrote this law." In in Deuteronomy 34, you know, ending the book of Deuteronomy, which is kind of like a capstone on the whole Torah, which maybe gives a sense, like, if you reflect back on it, that there's a claim there being made that somehow he wrote everything up to that point. One would do well to think, at least, at least to think about that claim.
Is that the claim that's being made there? Later in the Book of Joshua, I think in Joshua chapter 8, we see Joshua writing down the Torah of Moses, or the Books of Moses, or something like that, on a series of stones. And it's fascinating to think about how long the Torah as we now have it is, and what these stones are that are being spoken about. It just kind of doesn't make sense that that Torah of Moses, or these Books of Moses, would be the full Torah that we now have. That Joshua is then writing by hand on these stones physically as an act of writing, it doesn't make sense. So there's another place where we could reflect on this question of like, what is being implied by the Books of Moses already there within the Old Testament itself.
Okay. Now, you may know that by the time we reach the New Testament, we have "Books of Moses" or "Moses as an author" fully, fully set as, as a concept. I mean, Jesus refers in The Book of Mark, for example, to, um, to, you know, "Did Moses not write about," you know, in the burning bush story and so on. Um, again, I think, I think it's worth questioning what the level of the claim there is. Um, I mean, you might say, well, if Jesus knew Moses wasn't the author, why did he say it? Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know. That's above my pay grade. Um, um, I mean, I, I presume Jesus knew how to also make safe, clean nuclear energy as part of the Godhead. Like, why didn't you just tell us that? Or why didn't Jesus just make one unambiguous statement that we shouldn't have slavery and that everyone should ban that everywhere? It's like, well, okay. Um, I, I don't know the answers to those questions. Okay. But I, I presume they might be similar to this question. Um, Moses had simply gained a cultural status as, as the author, or as the personality, you might say, behind the Torah. And it was a traditional title. It may have even, and some scholars have suggested, that Moses was elevated by Jews of this time period as an author of the full Torah as a kind of cultural response to, to Greek-speaking, um, very cosmopolitan, smart people in the region who maybe were in debate with Jews about whose culture was better. People had these kinds of debates, you know, and Greeks could, could point to Socrates and to Plato and to Aristotle as these great philosophical, singular voices, right? And so maybe in conversation with those cultures, Jews of this time elevated Moses to a position of, of singular authorship, kind of like the everything figure. He's our author, he's our philosopher, he's the prophet, he's the, you know, everything that kind of an idea. So that's very possible.
Um, this is all, in a sense, you could say, background. Um, what, what kind of evidence might we have from the Torah itself about its authorship, aside from whether there's a claim or not in the phrase "And Moses wrote that Moses wrote that whole thing"? Well, there are a few things people have pointed to. I mean, some of this stuff is kind of ethereal, and then it gets more, more specific. Um, so, first of all, language. The language that we have in the Torah now is what we might call classical Biblical Hebrew. We know from inscriptions and other outside the Bible evidence that it seems to be a type of Hebrew that was probably popular and spoken and written during the 8th, 7th, 6th centuries BC. So the, the, you know, the 700s, the 600s, something like that. Um, it's hard to date these things with precision, but, you know, people are, people are working on it. Bright people are working on it. Okay.
Okay. So if you think of it that way, think of how different our language is today from the language of Shakespeare. Language just changes like that. I mean, it's just undeniable that it does. So when did Moses live? Well, hard to say. I mean, there were some older, conservative dates for Moses that would have had him living during the 1400s BC, and then others, if you see him as an historical character, that would have him living in the 1200s, let's say. That's, you know, that's a good, that's a good 700 years at most, maybe 600 years, maybe 500 years away from the style that we have. So at the very least, I think, at a bare minimum, if you said that Moses wrote the entire Torah himself, there was at least a pretty major spelling and language and grammar and syntax update at some point. I think that that's unavoidable. To what extent that would remove Moses from that authorship position, I don't know. But I think you at least have to admit that if you're a die-hard for Moses as an author of the whole Torah.
But it goes beyond this. I mean, we have, we have some obvious non-Moses things that almost everybody, even people who think Moses that Moses wrote the Torah, don't think he wrote these things. Like in Numbers chapter 12, we have the statement that "Moses was the most humble man who ever lived." Kind of sounds like somebody's writing that who is praising Moses from a third-person perspective. If that statement could be inserted in there, why not lots of others? Why not whole books or chapters? Of course, at the end of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 34, Moses dies. There's a about where he's been buried and how no one can find the burial spot. Um, unless you want to really, really go die-hard and say that God somehow had Moses predicting that and writing it before he died, which just seems like you're really trying a little too hard to defend this idea of Moses writing every word. You would say that someone else wrote this about Moses, right? So there's that.
Um, but we have other things too. Um, um, we have anachronisms, things that are kind of out of their time and place. So, for example, the Book of Genesis. Um, at Genesis 12, it mentions at one point, um, this phrase, "Oh," he talking about Abraham traveling in the land, and they say, "Oh, at that time," the narrator says, "the Canaanite was then in the land." Using this Hebrew word, "o," I think, you know, referring to a past time period. What do you mean, "the Canaanite was then in the land"? When was the Canaanite not in the land? Well, the Canaanite would not be in the land long after Moses died. Well, not too long, but Moses dies, plot, plot spoilers here for the, for the Old Testament. Moses dies, and in the Book of Joshua, Israel comes in, and they fight with the Canaanites and basically remove them from the land. So this seems to be written from a perspective after that occurred, not from Moses's perspective before that occurred, right? You have other things like this. You have a reference to the Philistines, for example. When were the Philistines living in the land? Let's say maybe after Moses, as best we can tell. So where did they get that name from? Um, we also have, I think this is in Genesis 34, maybe 36. Maybe 36 rings a bell. There's a reference to, "These are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before any kings reigned in the land of Israel." Okay. When were there kings reigning in the land of Israel? Much, you know, a couple hundred years after Moses. So who's likely to have written something like that from that perspective? So you have things like that.
Now, getting, getting even more specific, I mean, to some of the more famous kind of things that people have pointed to. You have in Genesis 1 and 2, what just appears to be two different accounts of creation. Not incompatible, not contradictory, not horribly different, but just different, right? In Genesis 1, you have this sequence of seven days. You have all kinds of things, animals and plants being created before people. And then you have man and woman created simultaneously by speech at the same time, um, um, just before the Sabbath, right? In Genesis chapter 2, people are created before plants. And Genesis 2 makes a, makes a very specific point of this, that you can't have plants because there was no one to take care of the plants, right? That's the whole purpose for creating the people. You then have Adam created not by speech, and not at the same time as the woman, but rather created from dust. And then you have the woman created from the rib of the man as a secondary process, right? So something's going on here, right? Would the same author just have penned those two things? I mean, sure, maybe you could say Moses was a compiler of earlier stories. But if even if you see Moses as a compiler, you're now maybe not talking about Moses as an author the way that we think of of authors today.
We also have in the flood story, Genesis 6-9, a number of things that people have pointed to, just little details that kind of make it sound like maybe there were a couple of different versions of the story that somebody at some point was kind of weaving together, not wanting to really overwrite or erase one of the stories, but kind of weaving them together. Um, Genesis chapter 7, for example, famously has Noah. Did I just say Moses before? I meant to say Noah. Now I can't remember. Well, Noah obviously, Noah is the hero of the flood story. I meant to say Noah. If I said Moses, I was just talking about Moses. Okay. Um, man, these videos are hard to make without editing, especially. This one's getting very long. I know this is longer than my normal video, but this is a harder topic than normal. So bear with me. In Genesis 7, Noah brings animals on the ark. How many does he bring on? As you know, uh, two by two, they come on the ark, right? Well, no, there's a little insertion that says he then brought seven pairs of clean animals on the ark. When does this distinction between clean and unclean animals come up in the Torah? Well, it comes up, of course, in The Book of Leviticus, after Mo, after Moses. Now we're to Moses, um, and others, um, come in there and do all this kind of stuff. So would Noah have known about a thing that was only revealed by God at Mount Sinai to Moses? At least Moses lived after that. So you don't have the anachronism point, but it sounds like maybe some author imputed that idea into the story later because there was a kind of reasoning that was going on, which was, well, if Noah was to do proper sacrifices, he would only be sacrificing clean animals. And if he sacrifices clean animals while he's on the ark, he's going to kill off the clean, the clean animals because they're only two of them and they won't survive. Okay? So anyway, you get some complexity there that now makes you think, huh, yeah, sounds like there's a, there's something going on there, right?
Things like this could be multiplied. I don't want to just pile on things. Um, um, but I want to drive this point home that people have seen these kinds of things. Um, in Exodus chapter 6, there's an interesting statement where God speaking says, "I revealed Myself by My name Yahweh," or "the Lord," or "Adonai," this personal four-letter name of God, Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh in Hebrew, at Yahweh. "I reveal Myself, um, to My name by My name Yahweh, you know, just at the burning bush here. But I did not make Myself known by that name to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob. I called Myself something else, you know, El Shaddai or El Olam or something like that." Well, the problem is, we can find like 10 or 15 or 20 examples in the Book of Genesis in speech where characters are using the personal name of God, right? So like, what's, like, what's going on there, right? It would look, minimally, it looks as though there are different levels, different layers here. And this issue of the names in particular, in some passages, seems like they're referring to God as capital G God, Elohim. In other passages, uh, Adonai or Hashem, Yahweh, the Lord. Were there different groups that maybe use different names at different times for different purposes? And those are like levels or layers in the texts that all kind of came together through time, like a quilt, you might think.
Okay. So there's a lot of stuff like this. We could just go on and on and on and on and on. Already in the medieval period, there were Jewish intellectuals, like, like this guy named Abraham ibn Ezra, who noticed some of this stuff. And he would have been censured, or, or maybe even excommunicated by his community if he had brought it up really specifically or outwardly. So he, he kind of wrote about it in riddles. And he wrote out some of these verses, even the ones I just mentioned, like he was like, "Hmm, the Canaanite was then in the land." And he wrote some other things. And he said, "Let the, let the wise reader understand." It was kind of like a coded way that he was communicating to anyone who might read later, maybe after he died, that he at least was recognizing that maybe Moses wasn't the single author of the Torah.
Um, you had then during the Enlightenment, people like Hobbes and Spinoza, um, um, 1600s, 1700s, saying things like, "Yeah, it's pretty clear that Moses isn't the author." And then you could have a battle about this, right? During the 1800s, and particularly the early 1900s, this really took off. And there came to be a kind of a famous scholarly theory about the authorship of the Torah. If it wasn't Moses, who wrote it? We clearly, you have it, somebody wrote it, right? So who wrote it and when? There's so much detail here and so many different ways that this has been formulated. There's no way I can just give you one way. But I'll say what is a very common kind of understanding, cobbled together from lots of different authors and sources. Often an idea like this is most famously attributed to a German scholar named Julius Wellhausen. Wellhausen lived in the second half of the 19th century, the 1800s, and the early 1900s. And he kind of popularized a certain view that was coming to be, um, um, um, embraced in his place in Germany at the time, which we sometimes refer to as the documentary hypothesis. Meaning that the hypothesis that the Torah came together from a series of different documents which were patched together through time. Sometimes it's called source criticism. Sometimes it's called the JEDP theory, um, for a reason that I'll reveal now, namely, the theory goes like this.
Maybe the earliest level of this literature was a source, kind of a written source, picture like a document that Wellhausen and and others called J. By the letter J. Why J? Well, because in, in German, the word Yahweh started with a J. In German, J is pronounced like a Y. So Yahweh with a J. So they call it the J source. It's like the Yahweh source. It's the source where authors use the word Yahweh, which they assumed in this, in this theory, was like the earliest kind of recension, the most primal. And then they associated other things with this source too. Like they started to notice in this source that the way they talked about God and things like sacrifice, it was very kind of primal. Like in the J source, supposedly, when people do sacrifices to God, you can just do a sacrifice anywhere. You just sacrifice an animal. It's like, don't get too complicated about this. You just sacrifice the animal. It's kind of like everybody's just around a fire, you're just having a good time, you're worshiping the Lord. It's beautiful. There aren't too many rules. There aren't any pre, okay, not too much legalism going on in this source, by this way of thinking. Um, and this is going to come up later, so I, I, I use that language intentionally. It's just very primal, you know, you eat the animal, be with each other, it's great. That's the earliest source, maybe. Who knows? Maybe it was Israel's earliest source. Maybe it was even written around the time of David or Solomon, around like 1,000 BC.
The next early source they called E, and they used E because they said that, um, in this source, the name Elohim was used. Elohim. And in this source, maybe there's an emphasis on sites in the northern part of the country, whereas in the J source, you know, the sites are in the southern part of the country. In the E source, they call God Elohim. Uh, God reveals himself by dreams a lot in the E source, like the Jacob, the Jacob stories in Genesis are are classic E source material. So you got these sources, and how do they come together? Well, maybe at some point early on, someone fuses them, right? And now we've got a longer, we've got a shorter thing and a shorter thing, but now we've got a longer thing fused together.
The next source in the scheme is D for the, for Deuteronomy, for the Deuteronomist. It's basically just the book of Deuteronomy. Um, and the Book of Deuteronomy, in this way of thinking, maybe came together during the reign of King Josiah in the 600s BC. In other words, a long time after Moses. In other words, in this theory, this is what the bombshell is, right? The Moses who's speaking in Deuteronomy is not the historical Moses. It's somebody else writing in the mouth and in the words of Moses, by the authority of Moses, and patching that together with the Torah to kind of give it legitimacy and divine authority to speak as Moses would they would have, as Moses would have spoken, or as they would have wanted Moses to speak in a later period, right? So they patch that together as well.
And then you have a final source, very interesting. This is called the P source, or the, the Priestly source. In this final source, and this one would be the last of all, maybe coming in in the 500s or the 400s BC. This would be after Israel's exile in Babylon, maybe after they returned. This would be like The Book of Leviticus and Numbers, and maybe even parts of Exodus, right? Where they have all the legal materials. The idea here being, and, and this is, I'm going to set this smoothie down, okay, because I need both hands for this point. Okay. Gosh, this video is getting long. Okay. Okay. If you've hung in there through these 23 minutes, I, I bless you. Okay. Um, why is P last? Well, in the thinking of maybe someone like Julius Wellhausen and his contemporaries, the idea might be that this final source, they were careful to say, there's nothing bad about this source. There's nothing bad about it. It's a very legalistic source. They were really into lots of rules. They really loved rules. They really led priests, and they kind of got really complicated. It was all so last. It was all so last. Let's just be clear. It was last. It was not part of the original thing. You know, in the 1800s in Germany, in the 1900s, certainly, you had, you had in Europe, really since the Reformation in Europe, you had this, this tension, this collision between Catholicism and Protestantism, right? Protestantism representing, you know, maybe simpler times. And who, and Protestants could accuse Catholics of being very legalistic and having too many priests and too many layers between humans and God, you know. Um, these were the kind of stereotypes. And of course, Wellhausen and many of his university contemporaries who were doing this theorizing, they were Protestants, right? They were Protestants. Germany, of course, the home of the Protestant re, you know, the Reformation. Um, so people have looked back on this theory and said, "Hmm, it's fascinating that you say that this P source comes last, and that it sort of sidles in at the end." You know, it's, in other words, it's Judaism. It's the law, right? It's that part. It's not really the stories of creation and Jacob and the Patriarchs and all that and The Exodus. That's like J and E. But it's this other stuff that kind of gets attached to it in the theory. It's very fascinating, of course, and I don't mean to make light of this, but it's, you know, it's, it's worth pointing out. People have pointed out that in Germany, um, you know, there was a problem with Jews and Judaism in the 20th century, before the 20th century, right? And this idea of making P last kind of makes all that was was the heart of Judaism and its ritual code, very much like a kind of historical afterthought to the Torah.
Um, now, I, I had many Jewish professors throughout my education, and particularly my PhD program. And one of them, who was most influential to me, um, was, was really, he was very, he wanted to be very clear. He was like, "Look, you can't just dismiss documentary hypothesis, JEDP, and say it's anti-Semitic. That's not fair. That's not fair. It's not even clear that Wellhausen himself was anti-Semitic or, or any of these scholars." I do think it's fair to kind of look at the deep background of all this, though, and be like, "Hmm, we started off with a beautiful, pure religion, J and E, sacrificing wherever you want, and it's just great, and everybody's together, everybody's kind of a priest, we're all priests, you know, all in our own way. And then the religion kind of degrades through time down to these strict rules, and don't do this, and don't do that, and don't wear, and don't eat that, and you can only sacrifice here, and, you know." Um, so I think that dynamic is worth thinking about. Does it invalidate the theory? Does it invalidate any of the points I was making about anachronisms, or about language, or about some of these things that seem to not make sense? No, I don't think it does. Um, and in the 20th century, there was a serious reckoning with the potential anti-Semitic, or at least anti-Jewish tones, that the source critical theory in its classical form might have had. People tried to make it better. There were lots of other theories. Some people took P and said, "No, the language of P, as you find it, actually is earlier, and it could be the same date as J." But still recognizing it as a separate source. This can just get so complicated. I'll put a couple of sources down in the, in the YouTube notes below, in the description. And if you want to do a deeper dive into some of this and where scholarship has gone with it, you can certainly do that. It's very, very, very complicated.
But I wanted to take this time to make this video at least to explain, just give a giant sweeping explanation of this whole issue. And so, um, when you read, as you, as you, as you no doubt might, if you're interested in any of this, you might see references to the documentary hypothesis, or even to these sources. Sometimes scholarly authors will just use them without describing them or anything, just assuming that you know what J or E or D or P is with relation to, to the Torah or the Pentateuch. Um, and you can find lots more details on this, um, through doing research on your own. But at least wanted to give you this kind of background so that you'd know what people are talking about and some of the reasons why, why they say it.
To me, I mean, you know, maybe at the very end of all this, you're like, "Okay, okay, Professor, what do you think? What's, what's the verdict here?" Okay. Um, I think it's very clear that the Torah is, is comprised of many different sources. Might be many more than four, even. I don't know whether Moses wrote literally any of the Torah or not. Um, I tend to think, I'm, I guess I'm kind of conservative historically, at least in the scope of scholars of the Hebrew Bible. I think that Moses was likely an historical person, and something like The Exodus did happen. Um, we'd have to get into a much more detailed conversation about history and how history works, maybe we'll do that in another video, to really get into what we mean by that. Um, but I don't think this has to imply Moses as a kind of author in a, in a, in a modern sense of the Torah. I think you can very nicely see Moses as a kind of sponsor or an authority figure behind the Torah, with whom the Torah is associated. I think that works very well, even as a spiritual idea. Kind of like, like in the Psalms, we see David. A lot of those, the Psalms that have the David superscription, um, we know that those superscripts were added, we were very, pretty pretty sure that they were added later in a lot of cases. But there was a Davidic, um, of the Psalms, making David a kind of spiritual sponsor of the Psalms in that sense, a kind of authority figure behind them. And I think as a parallel process, thinking of Moses that way for the Torah is not a bad idea at all. And it's, I think it's a very good Christian way to read the Torah and to think of, and to affirm Moses, in a sense, after all that, to even still affirm him in a way as a kind of honorary author of the corpus. So that's maybe more the way that I would think of it. But clearly a lot of sources there, clearly a deep background to the Torah and, and all of the documents that went into it.