The Transforming Word Series, Volume 1: The Pentateuch: From Genesis to Deuteronomy

By Mark Hamilton

God reveals his true nature in the first five books of the Bible.

While the broader story of the Bible is known to many Christians, careful readers of the Pentateuch still have many questions. The origin story of the Jewish nation is one of hardship and loss. The Transforming Word will encourage you to examine the Scriptures and discover the God who sustains everything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684269518

Mark Hamilton

Mark W. Hamilton holds the Onstead Chair in the College of Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University, where he serves as professor of Old Testament.

Book preview

Reading the Pentateuch

Mark W. Hamilton

The first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, trace the story of Israel within the larger story of humanity. The stories converge when the redeeming God, who frees enslaved people from their cruel bondage, encounters their leader and gives him the law atop Mount Sinai. Moses, himself a double survivor of state violence, receives guidelines for both worship and all of human life. The way of Torah becomes the foundation for Israel’s life and, through Israel, the presupposition of the church’s existence as well.

That’s the big picture, anyway. But some of the details defy such an easy summary. Christians reading these texts today encounter all sorts of difficulties—and not just the strangeness of rules from another culture. For Western Christians, the very concept of needing liberation from political oppression seems distant, even if we can put aside the nagging thought that we might resemble the Egyptian masters more than the Hebrew slaves. So we struggle to connect to either the story of Abraham’s descendants, especially those who escaped Egypt and marched unsuccessfully to the Promised Land, or the collections of laws they received as guideposts for a life of freedom.

Christians have struggled with these texts for a long time, in part because after two or three generations of being primarily a Jewish movement with some Gentile hangers-on, the church became an increasingly Gentile group with few Jewish ties. However, even these Gentile Christians continued to read the Pentateuch as holy Scripture. They read it in different ways, responding both to the complexity of the biblical text itself and to the spiritual demands of their own lives.

One approach focused on the stories of famous men and women as models for the life of faith (or sometimes models of how not to live). For example, in his Letter to the Magnesians, written shortly after 100

CE

, Ignatius of Antioch notes that Jesus became the door through which even Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could approach God (Magn 9). A few years earlier, Clement of Rome used the fact that sacrifice could legitimately occur only in Jerusalem as an argument for Christians’ responsibilities to avoid disobeying God (1 Clem 41) and the story of Aaron’s budding rod as a warning against strife among leaders (1 Clem 43). Both of these early leaders read the Pentateuch typologically, with various characters in it standing in either for some reality in the life of faith for followers of Jesus or for the life of Jesus himself.

That style of interpretation goes back to the beginning of Christianity, and even earlier to the Jewish readings of the Pentateuch during the Second Temple Period. For example, the Apostle Paul invites the mostly Gentile church in Corinth into Israel’s story of faith:

Brothers and sisters, I don’t want you to be uninformed about how our ancestors were under the cloud and passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea. All ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them. And that rock was Christ. (1 Cor 10:1–4—translation mine)

He alludes to the most famous story in the Pentateuch, the crossing of the Red Sea by the now-liberated Israelites, and compares it to the Christian experiences of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Manna symbolizes the Lord’s Supper, while the Israelites’ experience of parted water as a sign of God’s salvation becomes a symbol of the church’s experience of God’s salvation signified by immersion in water.

The last bit of Paul’s riff, that rock was Christ, reflects a uniquely Christian view, but the idea of the rock that followed came from the preaching of the synagogue, for it appears in contemporaneous Jewish texts that could not have known about Paul’s interpretation. In other words, Paul and other early followers of Jesus drew nourishment from their Jewish roots while also sprouting new branches. This is why Jude quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 in Jude 14–15. Jews of various stripes read works like Enoch or the Assumption of Moses (quoted in Jude 9) for their depictions of the apocalyptic crisis facing them under the Hellenistic and Roman empires.

Another mode of reading refashioned the biblical story, as when Matthew portrays Jesus as coming out of Egypt, overcoming temptation in the desert, and giving his instructions (his Torah) on a mountain to his sometimes-reluctant followers. In other words, Jesus took on the role of Israel, now faithful, and of Moses. The reader of the book of Matthew is not supposed to imitate Israel or Moses but to recognize God’s work in Jesus, who has lived into Israel’s covenant so that others could imitate him. Again, examples abound.

FOR READING TODAY

Obviously, then, the New Testament and other early Christian writings use the Pentateuch frequently and for many purposes. These include the modeling of moral or immoral behavior (1 Cor 10:14–22; Heb 13:1–6), witnessing to God’s mercy and justice (1 Pet 2:21–25), expanding Israel’s self-understanding to the church (Eph 4:7–16), and especially finding language suitable for describing the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth (Matt 1–4). The New Testament quotes Genesis alone about forty times, not to mention many allusions and echoes. Like all other Jews, the writers of the New Testament started with the Torah as the core of their Bible. And their Bible provided the most important and productive language for interpreting their existence as followers of Jesus on the road to God.

How might our study of the Pentateuch imitate that of the early church? Certainly, our ancestors in the faith had no intention of supplanting the older stories and laws of Israel. Even as extremely supersessionist a text as the second-century Epistle of Barnabas, which ridiculed a literal interpretation of the biblical food laws, still interpreted them as God’s Word. For that work, eating pigs was not a problem, but consorting with piglike people was. In other words, the biblical texts should be read allegorically, thought the author of Barnabas, but they should still be read (Barn 10). And that is an extreme case. More typically, early Christians thought like Paul, who said, The law is spiritual (Rom 7:14

NIV

) and Love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:10

NIV

).

In what senses is the Pentateuch spiritual or concerning love? This is the question. Many readers do not think so because they notice the allegedly restrictive nature of the law from Sinai and the undeniably terrible behavior of many of the characters of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Prejudice against the Pentateuch runs deep, not only among critics of Judaism or Christianity, but even in uninformed members of those communities. And yet, the text speaks consistently of God’s love for Israel. That love becomes the model for understanding God’s love for all creation. We should read this text through that lens.

In order to read the Pentateuch as a book about God’s love, Christian readers should remember several things:

The story of Israel and the laws of Israel are all cut from the same cloth. Israel keeps the Torah because the redeeming God has given it to them as a gift.

The basic demands of Torah remain in place for Jews, while Gentiles keep the moral code that the details of the Law try to create.

While many readers try to play off rules versus attitudes or love versus obedience, the Pentateuch does not. Being in covenant with God means living a life of trusting obedience. Our approach is that of a trusting child, not a fearful stranger.

The Torah assumes that human beings are part of a nested set of families. We are not strangers one from another, or at least we should not be. Our human nature requires us to make covenants with one another, for good or ill, and a covenant modeled on God’s with Israel promises a healthy life for us.

While these basic perspectives do not take the place of careful reading of the details of biblical texts, where every line and every word are important, they do give us a framework into which to place all the details of story and law, whether large or small. In so doing, they point us to a world beyond the one we see every day. In the Pentateuch’s world, despite all the evil humans do, the goodness of creation still prevails because a good God sustains it.

FOR FURTHER READING

Levenson, Jon D. The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Moberly, R. W. L. The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.

Muddiman, John, and John Barton. The Pentateuch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

INTRODUCTION TO

The Pentateuch

Mark W. Hamilton

CHAPTER CONTENTS

Textual Issues

The Structure of the Pentateuch

Literary Traditions before the Pentateuch

The Pentateuch as Literature

Authorship & Date

Theological Implications

For Further Study

Works Cited

The Pentateuch, traditionally also called the Five Books of Moses, or Torah, opens the Old Testament with the foundation story of the people of Israel and its fundamental practices. These five large books have been the cornerstone of Jewish religious reflection from ancient times until today. The 613 laws of the Torah and the story of Israel’s origins, redemption, wandering, and preparation to enter the promised land form a carefully interwoven whole. As the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards put it, History and law are everywhere so grafted one into another . . . that there is all appearance of their originally growing together (Edwards 441).

Most modern scholars would express reservations with Edwards’ statement, because the Pentateuch appears to preserve several streams of tradition that did not necessarily originate at the same time and place. Yet he is right to argue that law and story belong together as an organic whole. The law guards the people rescued from slavery, in Egypt or elsewhere, from the patterns of life in which some humans command while others merely obey. The story feeds the collective memory and moral imagination of a people that repeats it at their major festivals and on other occasions.

For Christians, reading the Pentateuch presents more than merely a literary or historical challenge. It also presents a theological one. While Matthew’s Jesus (Matt 7:12) and Paul (Rom 13:8–10; 15:4) argue that followers of Christ must read Torah in moral and spiritual terms, and while the New Testament contains numerous quotations of and allusions to stories in the Pentateuch (for example, 1 Cor 10:7–10; 2 Cor 3:1–18; Gal 3; 2 Pet 2:4–10; Rev 2:14), Christians have never raised these texts to quite the same level Jews have, since Jesus is to Christianity as Torah is to traditional Judaism. Still, early Christians saw Genesis–Deuteronomy as far more than a series of edifying stories. The Pentateuch offered them a framework for life under God.

TEXTUAL ISSUES

The Pentateuch existed in several forms in antiquity: the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Septuagint (

LXX

), translated from a Hebrew original and the immediate ancestor of the traditional Jewish Masoretic Text (

MT

). All five books are represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fragments of twenty manuscripts of Genesis, seventeen of Exodus, seventeen or eighteen of Leviticus, seven of Numbers, and twenty-eight (possibly thirty) of Deuteronomy have survived in the caves near Qumran. Commentaries and retellings of the stories of the Pentateuch also exist, as do the rules of the Qumran community, which quote extensively from the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

The Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritans regard only the Pentateuch as Scripture, though they use other books, including a version of Joshua. Their edition of the five books makes minor alterations to the Hebrew text, most obviously in identifying the place where Yahweh will choose to set his name as Mount Gerizim, the location of their ancient temple. The sect apparently broke with other Jews in the second century

BCE

.

The stories of the Pentateuch also figured in Jewish art and literature. The third century

CE

synagogue from Dura-Europos in Mesopotamia, for example, contained a fresco with many scenes from Genesis, Exodus, and the historical books of the Old Testament (see Schreckenberg and Schubert 162–88). (Similar artistic motifs show up in the earliest Christian catacombs a couple of centuries later.) As early as the third century

BCE

, Jewish texts such as Jubilees and the earliest parts of 1 Enoch retold the stories of Genesis, filling in gaps, explaining the actions of characters, and applying the stories to the moral needs of their own readers. In the second century

BCE

, a Greek-speaking Jew named Ezekiel wrote a play in Greek poetry based on the book of Exodus, thus making the ancient story available to a broader audience.

Like Hellenized Jews, early Christians knew the five books primarily in Greek. Church fathers of the second and third century quote Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy extensively (and Leviticus and Numbers less often) to argue with heretics, train young Christians, and otherwise do the work of the church. The earliest sustained Christian commentaries on them come from the third century in the form of homilies by Origen (died 254

CE

). As the opening of the Christian’s two-part canon, the Pentateuch offered a set of moral examples and spiritual insights usable to the new faith.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PENTATEUCH

To understand the theological import of the Pentateuch for its ancient and modern readers, it is important to pay attention to its structure. It consists of several narrative and legal blocks of material and can be outlined as follows:

Genesis 1–11 · The story of humankind

Genesis 12–50 · The story of Abraham’s family

Exodus 1–15 · The exodus from Egypt

Exodus 16–Numbers 36 · Israel in the wilderness and at Sinai

Exodus 16–19 · The first wilderness treks

Exodus 20 · The Ten Commandments

Exodus 21–23 · The Covenant Code

Exodus 24–31 · Instructions for Building the Tabernacle, Part 1

Exodus 32–34 · The Golden Calf Episode and the Second Revelation of Torah

Exodus 35–40 · Instructions for Building the Tabernacle, Part 2

Leviticus 1–16 · The Laws of Sacrifice and Cleanness

Leviticus 17–27 · The Holiness Code

Numbers 1–10 · Rules for the Camp of Israel

Numbers 11–25 · Stories of Conflict

Numbers 26–36 · Laws and Stories on Worship and Inheritance

Deuteronomy 1:1–34:4 · Instructions on the Plains of Moab

Deuteronomy 1–11 · Homilies on Israel’s Past and Future

Deuteronomy 12–26 · Laws

Deuteronomy 27–31 · Concluding Homiletical Material

Deuteronomy 32–33 · Hymns

Deuteronomy 34:1–4 · Conclusion

Deuteronomy 34:5–12 · The Death of Moses

This structure interweaves narratives of many types with laws, songs, and genealogies. The stories, especially in Genesis 1–36 and Numbers, relate to each other fairly loosely, often lacking clear chronological sequencing and occasionally repeating the same themes or similar events (for example, Gen 12, 15, 17). At the same time, the Pentateuch includes a number of internal cross-references that show an effort to form the pieces into an integrated work, such as the foreshadowing of the exodus in Genesis 15:13–14 or the reflections on it in Deuteronomy 1–3. That is, the Pentateuch as a whole does not seem to be merely a hodgepodge of ancient stories but rather an intentionally (although loosely) structured work.

Although ancient people thought of books differently than we do and did not necessarily expect to read them straight through with every loose end tied up (see van der Toorn), the Pentateuch transcends the chronicles, law codes, and ritual texts from the ancient Near East that serve as its model, rising above them to a new level of sophistication. The division into five books, incidentally, reflects the word limits of scrolls (no readable, manipulable scroll could have contained all the Pentateuch). However, Exodus 1 and Deuteronomy 1 clearly start new sections of material. Leviticus 1 flows smoothly from Exodus 40.

LITERARY TRADITIONS BEFORE THE PENTATEUCH

Within this overarching structure, the Pentateuch uses many kinds of literary material. Ancient Near Eastern societies produced several genres that served, in part, as literary models for the Pentateuch. Some, such as king lists and prayers, are attested before 2000

BCE

, while others probably existed in oral form long before being written down.

Such literary types found in the Bible and in Mesopotamian, Canaanite, or Egyptian texts include: King lists (Gen 36:31–39; Sumerian King List); stories of dreams (Gen 28:10–17; 40–41; Aqhat); stories of wise experts at a royal court (Gen 38–50; Ahiqar); creation narratives (Gen 1–2; Enuma Elish; The Song of the Hoe; The Memphite Theology); law codes (Exod 20–23; Lev 17–27; Code of Hammurabi; Middle Assyrian Laws); rules for sacrifice (Lev 1–10; The Marseilles Tariff ; rituals texts from Ugarit); judicial rulings (Exod 18; thousands of receipts and contracts from ancient archives); death scenes (Gen 48–50; Deut 34; Aqhat); hymns (Deut 32–33; Hymn to Shamash); speeches (Deut 1–3; Epic of Gilgamesh, column 3); travel stories (Exod 2:11–22; Sinuhe); and war songs (Exod 15:1–18; Num 21:27–30; numerous semi-poetic royal inscriptions). To read translations of some of these ancient works, see the large collection in Hallo and Younger or the excerpts in Matthews and Benjamin.

The Pentateuch & Ancient Near Eastern Law Codes

Beginning in the late third millennium

BCE

, Mesopotamian kings began to inscribe collections of laws on stone monuments. These lists were not codes, strictly speaking, in that they did not attempt comprehensiveness, nor did judges rigidly follow them. The most famous of these is the Code of Hammurabi, named for the seventeenth-century king of Babylon by that name. His code has numerous similarities with Exodus 21–23, indicating the existence of a regionwide legal culture in antiquity.

In most cases, the parallels between the Pentateuch and texts from outside Israel are loose, with three exceptions. First, an inscription on plaster from Deir Alla in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan tells the story of a seer named Balaam son of Beor; the language is not Hebrew, and the site is not Israelite. Second, the story of the birth of Sargon of Agade, a third-millennium ruler of Mesopotamia, describes him being drawn from a basket floating down the Euphrates, in a manner similar to the infant Moses. The story in this version comes from the first millennium

BCE

. Third, the flood story in Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh portrays Utanapishtim, the equivalent of Noah, sending forth a dove and then a raven from his boat. On leaving it, he offers sacrifices to the gods. There are several possible explanations for these similarities, but it seems most likely that Israelites were seeking to read well-known stories through the lenses of their own theology. In addition, Deuteronomy uses some of the elements of ancient treaties (oaths of loyalty, sanctions for loyalty and disloyalty), though it significantly alters them.

In assessing the fact that the Pentateuch uses widespread literary techniques and occasionally even entire stories, it is important to recognize two things. First, what the Bible omits is almost as interesting as what it includes. For example, although one of the most popular scholarly genres in Mesopotamia was the omen list, in which diviners or astrologers collected examples of their own work for the guidance of their successors, the Bible consciously omits such material, even though its authors had some knowledge of the practices involved (see Ezek 21:21). Since Yahweh controlled the flow of information about the future, such practices were illicit. Second, any text must engage readers with ways of communication to which they are accustomed, even if it uses them in new ways. The Pentateuch does so masterfully and from the point of view of its major theological ideas.

The Pentateuch & Contemporar Literature

Unlike many ancient texts, the Pentateuch contains no story describing the origins of God (theogony), activities in heaven, or conflicts with other supernatural beings. That is, it radically curtails the mythological element so prominent in non-Israelite religions.

THE PENTATEUCH AS LITERATURE

In reconfiguring ancient genres for new purposes, the Pentateuch places them in the service of an overarching story of Yahweh’s interactions with the human race through the people of Israel. Although many of the stories in Genesis especially seem to fit the sort of oral culture of Israel’s life as farmers and shepherds—in short, to be what we would call in any other context folklore—their apparent artlessness and detachment from one another mask the extraordinary care with which they were collected and organized.

Torah or Law?

The Hebrew word torah literally means "instruction." Ancient Israelites and, later, Jews conceived of torah as far more than merely a list of rules which one either followed or broke at the risk of punishment. Torah was a way of life, a window into God’s vision for the human race, and a manifestation of the divine wisdom that informs all creation.

Here it is important to consider several elements of the Pentateuch as literature. First, most of the narratives in Genesis–Numbers consist of brief episodes, usually told with a minimum of detail and leaving open to the reader’s imagination all sorts of elements. Consider, for example, the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. The author does not tell us why God decided after so many trials to test Abraham again, nor why Abraham accepted the test unquestioningly. We hear nothing of the internal state of any of the characters. The story does not tell us how old Isaac was, his level of awareness, or his subsequent reaction to near death. Although the common ancient Near Eastern custom of child sacrifice lies in the background of the story, Genesis itself neither endorses nor explicitly condemns the practice. Isaac’s binding serves as a model for no subsequent act, either positively or negatively. The point of the story comes at its end when the narrator speaks of Yahweh as the provider who now knows Abraham in some new way and can thus share with him a level of intimacy that gives new meaning to the older promise of chapter 12 and its fulfillment in Exodus.

Second, the reticent, underspecified technique of storytelling evident in Genesis 22 and many other parts of the Pentateuch forces the reader to ask how a given episode connects to all those around it. Why, to continue this example, should the God who promised an heir to Abraham and Sarah three times (Gen 12, 15, 17) attempt to kill him? What does such an event say about the divine promise, the election of Israel, the nature of faith, and other major aspects of Israel’s religious views? Only by juxtaposing one story upon another can the total picture become clear.

Third, this style of storytelling owes a great deal to the oral world behind the written text. Oral stories tend to consist of short episodes. Oral storytellers remember the basic structure of the story and tell it with catch phrases and stock expressions that skilled bards easily remember. The same themes appear repeatedly, as for example when Adam and Eve lose their chance at immortality (Gen 3), just as Gilgamesh does (see Blenkinsopp 93–96). Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Numbers certainly have an oral stamp. But at the same time, they are written texts and they preserve a higher level of order than one might expect from a purely oral tradition. These books result from the careful blending of oral tradition and a careful, artistic work of written composition.

Fourth, the structure of the oral tradition provides the skeleton for the Pentateuch’s storyline, but not every episode in it. This becomes apparent from Exodus 15:1–18, an ancient text that all modern scholars agree uses the oldest Hebrew in the Bible. The hymn must date to sometime before 1100

BCE

. It follows a basically three-part structure: Yahweh rescued Israel from Egypt, brought them to the holy mountain (Sinai/Horeb or the promised land), and made the nations afraid of them. Exodus–Numbers expands on this basic storyline, while Genesis explains how Israel got to Egypt in the first place. Deuteronomy knows the storyline (see Deut 1–3) but embeds it in a series of theological and legal reflections.

Fifth, the Pentateuch does not consist simply of stories. It also contains other types of literature. The stories provide the framework, but the other genres, especially law, provide a large part of its substance. The laws may take the form of either apodictic (thou shalt not) or casuistic (if . . . then) statements and in some cases may become fairly elaborate to reflect the complexities that arise from their implementation (see, for example, Exod 21:28–32).

The 613 laws of Torah fall into seven major, and partly overlapping collections, or codes:

The Ten Commandments (Exod 20; Deut 5),

The Covenant Code (Exod 21–23),

The Ritual Decalogue (Exod 34),

The Levitical Code (Lev 1–16),

The Holiness Code (Lev 17–27),

The Deuteronomic Code (Deut 12–26), and

The Curses Code (Deut 27:15–26).

Although the individual laws often resemble those of other ancient Near Eastern collections, the overall biblical collections take on a larger life. As Deuteronomy 30 makes clear, the laws function as guides for those in covenant with God. Israelites keep the law with joy, not grudgingly, because they remember their liberation from slavery.

Moreover, the laws of the Pentateuch challenge the power structures to seek the rights of all members of the society, not just the powerful. Thus Deuteronomy radically limits royal power (17:14–20), and rules on tithing, landlessness for the priesthood (Num 35), and the periodic redistribution of property during the Jubilee (Lev 25) ensure a relative equality of goods and status. As Levinson (118) puts it, law does not merely enshrine or reflect the existing social order but provides a vantage point independent of it. Lawmaking presupposes an attempt to find a particular kind of order and meaning in life. Law makes arguments as to what is moral or immoral, just or unjust. To some extent, the laws help determine which stories get told (Freedman), just as the stories Israel remembered shaped their understanding of their laws.

AUTHORSHIP & DATE

In reading the Pentateuch, it becomes obvious that several different points of view shape the text. To take a small example, Torah forbids the erection of unhewn stones (Hebrew matsevot) as funerary or cultic objects (Lev 26:1; Deut 16:22), although Moses (Exod 24:4) and Jacob (Gen 28:18, 22) both do so. Or, again, Abraham and Sarah eat non-kosher meals (Gen 18:7–8), Joseph practices a form of divination (Gen 44:5; but see Lev 19:31; Deut 18:19–14), the number of festivals varies by text (three in Exod 23:14–15; six plus the Sabbath in Lev 23 and Num 28–29), and the number of the cities of refuge may or may not depend on the extent of Israelite territory (Num 35; but Deut 19).

Such minor differences in perspective indicate that the Pentateuch contains material of varying sorts. It records a dialogue, not a monologue. Yet readers have been more troubled by what seem to be logical problems or outright discrepancies. Thus, although ancient traditions ascribed all of the Pentateuch to Moses, its most important human character, as early as the fifth century

CE

, the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Bathra 15a) wondered how Moses could record his own death, concluding that Joshua wrote the book which bears his name and [the last] eight verses of the Pentateuch, although it also reports the guess of one Rabbi Simeon that from Deuteronomy 34:5 on, God dictated and Moses wrote with tears, that is, he predicted his own death.

In the Middle Ages, the commentator Ibn Ezra listed five historical problems: the end of Deuteronomy; the statement Moses wrote (Deut 31:22) referring to Moses in the third person; then the Canaanites dwelled in the land (Gen 12:6), as though from the point of the author they no longer did so; Genesis 22:14, which he apparently understood to refer to a future appearance of God in Jerusalem, long after Moses’ time; and the reference to the iron bed of Og as a museum piece until this day, again implying some time lag between the time of Moses and the time of writing.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to notice the same phenomena, as well as others. Among many other examples, they recognized that the mountain on which Moses received the law was in some instances Sinai and in others Horeb; he brought forth water at Massah/Meribah, which could be at Rephidim (Exod 17:8) or Kadesh (Num 20:1), and so on. Sometimes God was called Elohim, sometimes Yahweh, and, rarely, Yahweh Elohim. Genesis 1 lays out a clear week-long pattern of creation through divine decree, while Genesis 2 speaks of the day that Yahweh Elohim made the earth and the heavens and connects the growth of plants to human activity. Abraham twice tries to pass his wife off as his sister, while Isaac does so once, all with the same results. Exodus 6:2–3 notes that God revealed a new name to Moses, the divine name Yahweh, which the ancestors did not know. However, Genesis uses the name 131 times, sometimes in the mouths of the patriarchs. (Some scholars try to explain away this data by noting that one can know a name without knowing its power, but such a magical view of names has little basis in the Bible and fails to explain the actual occurrences in Genesis.) Numbers 12 calls Moses the humblest man in the world, an odd statement if Moses wrote the Pentateuch himself! And so it goes.

Traditional Jewish Commentary

Several medieval Jewish commentators left valuable works on the Pentateuch. The greatest of them, the French rabbi Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac; 1040–1105) combined careful language study and attention to the literal reading of the text with traditional Jewish homiletical interpretations, all in a clear, straightforward style. Ibn Ezra (1092–1167) also offered a careful literal reading of the text. Both of their works are frequently reprinted even today.

Most significantly, early modern scholars noticed that some patterns of word use tended to cluster and to coincide with changes of style and approach in various texts. They thus began to ask how to explain this evidence. Over the past two centuries, scholars have thought of the origins of the Pentateuch in several ways. No hypothesis is entirely satisfactory, but each deserves some attention.

THE DOCUMENTARY HYPOTHESIS

The most common explanation has been to think of four major sources, combined together by an editor. In the early nineteenth century, scholars identified these sources as the Older Elohist (or E; using Elohim as the divine name), the Younger Elohist (using Elohim until Moses’ call to be a prophet), the Yahwist (or J; using Yahweh—Jahweh in German, the language of these scholars), and the Deuteronomist (or D, consisting mostly of the book of Deuteronomy or some version of it). Later scholars changed the name of the Younger Elohist to the Priestly Source (P).

For much of the nineteenth century, scholars debated the sequence, extent, date, and purposes of the sources. The most influential presentation came from Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). His 1878 book, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, accepted the sequence of sources JEDP, which he dated to about 850

BCE

, 750

BCE

, 620

BCE

, and 550

BCE

respectively. More significantly, Wellhausen believed that, if one could date the sources correctly, they could serve to reveal the development of Israelite religion. For him, the faith of Israel began as a beautiful nature religion, which the law fossilized and caused to deteriorate. The thoroughness of his arguments made his book the definitive work for nearly a century.

Despite the brilliance of his work, several problems have surfaced with Wellhausen’s overall scheme. First, his belief that the material in Leviticus presupposes Deuteronomy is not altogether persuasive. In some cases, the influence appears to go in the other direction (for example, see Weinfeld). Second, Wellhausen’s view that the law was a degenerate form of religion simply reflects the biases of his German setting, in which several forms of anti-Semitism were prevalent. Third, the dating of his sources is debatable, with some recent scholars dating the Yahwist last (Van Seters) or arguing that it is not a single source at all (the studies in Dozeman and Schmid). And, finally, it is not clear that the various layers of material in the Pentateuch should properly be described as sources that existed independently of each other until an editor combined them. None of this challenges the basic assumption of prior scholars that the Pentateuch consisted of material coming from many times and places, but it does mean that contemporary scholars are working hard to resolve old problems formerly thought solved. The combination of completely independent documents does not explain the literary evidence sufficiently well.

THE DEFENSE OF MOSAIC AUTHORSHIP

In response to the previous view, a minority of scholars, Jews and Christians, have defended some form of the idea that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or at least was responsible for its basic shape. These scholars have pointed out that some proponents of the documentary hypothesis assume that Israel’s religion was purely human and espouse low views of the Bible’s inspiration (see Archer 113–18). They also note that some features of the Pentateuch, such as the name of Moses himself (Mose is an Egyptian name common during the second millennium

BCE

), are very old, that the atmosphere of Exodus through Numbers is unmistakably that of the desert (Archer 122–23), and that, in short, many of the customs in the Pentateuch have parallels in second-, not first-millennium texts. They show that Wellhausen and his predecessors ignored archaeology and the rapidly increasing knowledge of ancient Near Eastern languages (Harrison 509; however, Wellhausen was one of the most accomplished scholars of Arabic in modern times).

Some arguments for Mosaic authorship rest on theological assumptions. For example, Archer (and Edwards, much earlier) claims that the historicity of the Pentateuchal characters and stories is essential to their value. He also cites an example like Matthew 19:1–9, which portrays both Jesus and the Pharisees assuming Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy 24 (Moses says; Archer 30).

Those who approach the problem in this way raise important points, especially with regard to the need to pay careful attention to the archaeological and literary evidence that bears on the interpretation of the Bible. They are surely correct that Wellhausen and some of his immediate followers were overly skeptical. However, serious problems remain with their own arguments. First, arguing from the New Testament proof texts seems to be a logical fallacy, a case of begging the question. Second, and even more seriously, Archer and others misrepresent what the New Testament actually says. For example, the Pharisees in Matthew 19 did not ask Jesus who wrote the Pentateuch but rather how a person should live based on Scripture. For them and for Jesus, the author of the Bible was God, and arguments for or against Moses’ authorship were irrelevant.

Third, archaeology rarely bears directly on a given story in the Bible or elsewhere. Archaeology can tell us about customs, but many of them remained in practice for millennia, and often later generations remembered earlier, obsolete practices (see Ruth 4:7; 1 Sam 9:9). Fourth, we do know that many ancient texts arose through the combination of discrete sources, and many were revised multiple times in the course of their transmission. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a good example. Fifth, it is not at all clear that the documentary hypothesis necessarily undermines a high view of the inspiration of the Bible. A theory of inspiration should arise from the evidence of the text, not the other way around. Sixth, volumes like Archer’s read more like a lawyer’s brief than a careful analysis of the literary shape and flow of the text of the Pentateuch. There is no substitute for close reading. And, seventh, it is not quite true that arguing against Mosaic authorship means breaking with the long history of Christian reading of the text, since earlier generations focused primarily on the theological import of the text, that is, on its claim on the life of the church.

OTHER ALTERNATIVES

In contemporary scholarship, many of the old battles for the Bible have become passé as new concerns and more creative solutions have arisen. For example, in the early twentieth century, numerous scholars began to argue for a process by which many small elements came