The 4 ^th Step: The "Five Books of Moses"

Throughout our relationship, S and I fought like cats-and-dogs. We were both proud, pig-headed, strong-willed, and unable to let the other have the final say. After my 'liberation' things got worse. I loved S, but was still too green to recognize the necessity of compromise, give-and-take, and benignity in the relationship. Still preserving my virginity, I also did not recognize the signs of a churning sexual frustration. After two years we broke up, although we still saw each other occassionally to 'hang out' or 'fool around'.

Around this same time I realized I could no longer continue at Northwest College. Having concluded the only moral stance for any good Christian to take would be to deny his-or-her salvation, I realized went against the 'enlightened self interest' as advocated by traditional Christianity and was therefore heretical. By taking the Christian message so thoroughly to heart I discovered I was actually starting to outgrow Christianity. Later I would run across a quote by Don Cupitt who said it best:

I was experiencing this paradox first-hand. I was still a believer, but could no longer consider myself a Christian. Because I didn't want to go to Heaven if anybody was in Hell had made me decidely un-Christian. I understood that if God was indeed a God of Love then the 'self-serving' message of Christianity ("You too can go to Heaven!") was inconsistent with the very notion of love. If I was willing to go to Hell without condition, then why wasn't God? Something was definitely amiss. Either the definition of the word 'love' was wrong or the definition of 'God'. It was a matter of knowledge and epistemology, language and linguistics, a mystery that needed ongoing investigation. It was a matter of philosophy.

I left Northwest College and returned to the University of Washington to pursue a degree in Philosophy. I was all too aware of my philosophical shortcomings and belief biases, and had about a million questions I wanted answered.

My first class back at the UW was a course in Critical Thinking. It blew me away. I had gone through thirteen years of public school and three years of college and had never been taught the processes of critical thinking.

I discovered that too often we confuse the notion of believing with that of knowing then further mistake knowing with emotional feeling. Many a religious person will claim they 'know' beyond any doubt their God exists simply because of the way they feel, yet they neglect to consider the organic phenomena of such feelings, the causal agencies impelling belief and behavior, the tendentiousness of knowledge, the outer processes that manipulate thought, or the inner workings of the human mind. Others profess belief in the Bible, Jesus, and Yahweh, or the Qurán, Mohammed, and Allah without really knowing why or how or without having scrutinized the sheltered focus of their belief 'outside the circle' whether beyond a book, church, school, township, state, country, even continent. Adherents of different faiths will proudly proclaim to know the truth without ever examining to any degree the nature of knowledge, the processes involved in inward learning, the acuity of self-awareness, or how and why they actually think the way they do. And therein lays another problem, a global lassitude seemingly woven inside the very fabric of humanity: Most people never take the time to reflect upon their own thinking or consider all the bad mental habits, false beliefs, and faulty reasoning they've accumulated along the way. Most people never assume to ask themselves whether they're thinking correctly or taking their thoughts for granted, but instead see them as things that just happen, and the world is worse because of it.

When was the last time we actually considered the way we think, the hows and whys, wherefores and whatnots, all the dissimilar operations involved (physical, biochemical, environmental, psychological, mental, cultural, emotional, intellectual, historic)? What do we really know about the way our minds work, our brains operate, our psyches function, and how would we go about analyzing and reconstructing our various thought processes? Where is the first place we'd start looking? Do we know where your thinking comes from, how it operates, what percentage of it is sound and practical and what percentage unsound and irrational? And what about that chasm looming in between? How much of our thinking is untried and untested, assumed, taken for granted, conflicted and contradictory, disconnected and confused, erroneous and imprecise, insignificant, prejudicial, illogical, off the wall? With all this going on, who's really in control of our thinking, our behavior, our will, our life itself? Or have we surrendered control instead, refused and denied it, given it away, and to whom? And for what reasons? If we've surrendered control or given it away, was it because of something somebody told us, something we read in a book, something somebody interpreted for us, convinced us of, shamed or frightened us into? Up to now, how would we describe the way we think, the precision of our thoughts, what we've learned when it comes to our cogitative ability, how everything fits together and functions, what it all means? Could we describe it? Put it into words? Explain it reasonably to another person? Would we know where to begin? Have we ever given your thoughts and beliefs any real consideration?

Like most people, I never paid much attention to my thought processes, thinking habits, and belief systems, just assumed they occured naturally and automatically like blinking or breathing. Taking the time to reflect upon thinking and study it seriously, to consider the interconnectedness that influences thought from the individual to society to the species as a whole, is an uncommon trait not shared by most people. Regarding and wrestling with my own mental habits was not something taught me at home or school. As a child I was not given instruction in how I think or why I believe, but rather in what to think and what to believe. I may have been told the hows and whys will come later, but if they came at all it was already too late. The neural channels had been long carved, paved, case-hardened in the flesh of my brain.

By the time we reach a certain age, belief and thought patterns have been deeply rooted along neural branches and we rely upon these patterns to complement reality by charging it with autonomic familiarity and coherence. When we deviate from these patterns by considering new or foreign ideas, our attempts to forge fresh pathways can induce very real physical reactions as the threat of the unfamiliar stimulates biochemical responses. Anxiety, shortness of breath, guilt, fear, blushing, accelerated heartbeat, ringing in the ears, nausea, confusion, a sense of panic—any of these can be symptoms of our straying, however slightly, from familiar avenues of belief, especially those instilled in us (or which we may have instilled ourselves as protective barriers or defense mechanisms) when we were small children.

From childhood to adulthood we have churned billions of thoughts, and everything we have done from then until now, everything we have ever wanted or felt or decided, has been directly influenced by our thinking. And yet, despite this preponderance of thought, in spite of being surrounded by it 24/7 (it even invades our sleep in the guise of dreams) most of us have shown very little interest in how and why we think the way we do or how our belief systems came to be constructed. In this way we are like idiot savants, childlike geniuses who can profess inspired words and articulate lofty arguments while lacking the appreciation and discernment of our speech-making in terms of meaning, motivation, and manipulation. With passion and steadfast resolve we believe and espouse, and while we can tell you in whom we believe or what we believe in, please don't ask us to explain how or why.

A small number of us, however, will eventually wander into the realm of how and why, and this alone takes a good deal of courage and determination. Simply stepping in that direction can produce errant fear and existential panic, the chiding of friends, the remonstration of family, and the rebuke of church-leaders and religious 'authorities' (whether person or book), yet by asking hard questions and seeking tough answers we gradually discover things about ourselves we never before fully recognized. Some of the things we realize are:

In discovering such things about ourselves, a smaller number of us will strive harder still to ask questions and seek answers, always foreshadowed by how or why.

Before dying a martyr's death in a gas chamber at Auschwitz, Saint Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) made the following assertion: "Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously." However reassuring this sentiment might be, any affirmation that considers the search for truth coequal to a search for a deity is doing a disservice to truth itself by assuming devotion at the offset then prejudicing its conclusion as already foregone. The search for truth must be, by necessity, sufficient unto itself and clearly evident, neither enticed by familiar presumptions and comforting expectations but a clean and simple tautology. Whoever seeks the truth is seeking truth, period. Not god, not belief, not salvation, not eternal life, not comfort, not hope, not peace of mind, but truth, even at the risk of losing everything or conceding the most disheartening conclusions. Without a willingness to risk it all, to forfeit one's most cherished beliefs and convictions, to hazard eternal Hell if need be, the search for truth is compromised at the beginning by fearfulness, denial, shortsightedness, self-service or self-deceit.

I realized most believers were unaware of the physical aspects of belief (its biochemical nature, the way the brain functions, how neural pathways are carved and memories retrieved) nor considered what it meant to believe, the often-prejudicial nature of the belief process or the vital differences between belief and knowledge, desire and truth, indoctrination and investigation. Most believers unquestionably believed in belief itself, as if belief alone was somehow veracious, self-evident, inherently trustworthy, or the very act of believing in something, in anything, was all one needed to ensure fidelity, reliability, and certitude. Untested and unreasoned, belief is reduced to a series of presuppositions that falsely predicate a foreknown conclusion, an initiatory assumption of the "way things are" that pursues no verification or validation. In surrendering to this way of thinking, by believing something true is all that's required to make it true, then verification and validation become unnecessary, are pointless and redundant, thank you kindly, end of discussion. When leisurely belief takes precedence over laboring after truth, then reason, rationality, even sanity, are coldly sabotaged and offered as sacrifice upon the stony altar of blind faith.

It seems there are two types of people in the world: those who need to believe in something, anything, even if it goes against everything we know about the way the world works, and those who aspire to know the truth irregardless of the final cost or outcome, with the former (believers) out-numbering the latter (truth-seekers) by a margin of ten-to-one. Outnumbered in this way, oftentimes feeling alone in his-or-her quest, the truth-seeker is motivated not by what he-or-she hopes to gain in the future (or desires to escape), but aspires only to know the truth even if nothing is gained and everything lost because of it.

For the truth-seeker, truth is more important than the promise of Heaven or the threat of Hell, hence he-or-she does not shirk from seeking truth even if doing so means flirting with horrific judgment. Come what may, the truth takes precedence over reward or punishment.

It became clear to me that truth-seekers were not motivated by self-interest or for selfish reasons, despite what some church leaders and apologists might have us believe. The truth-seeker does not want to be God, have his-or-her own way or play by his-or-her own rules. Being rebellious, unrighteous, or disobedient has nothing to do with what motivates the truth-seeker. The only thing the truth-seeker wants is to know the truth and do so through mindful honesty and by examining all the available evidence. Come Judgment Day (if such be more than an immoral metaphor) the truth-seeker can at least proclaim that he-or-she did not become a believer in order to earn a place in heaven, become immortal, be reunited with loved ones, be cured of infirmity, or escape hell, but aspired only to know the truth. In fact, given a choice between seeking truth and going to Hell or becoming a believer and going to Heaven, the truth-seeker will likely choose Hell over paradise since aspiring after the truth is deemed a more imperative commission than being rewarded all the gifts Heaven might offer. Truth is its own reward.

On rarified occasions a believer may find him-or-herself crossing the line and becoming a truth-seeker. Sometimes this process is slow and gradual and extended across several years, while other times it is lightning fast and propelled by either epiphany or event. Usually it is predicated by the believer finally finding the courage to start asking tough questions, to see what underlies the belief process in terms of meaning and motivation, to admit or 'fess up' to those nagging doubts eating away at the back of the mind. Anything can set it off:

• one too many contradictions between the arguments of faith and the evidence of science
• one too many contradictions between passages of the sacred writing itself
• one too many contradictions between the definitions of the deity and the actions of the deity
• one too many contradictions between
  • the translations of the sacred writing
  • the interpretation of the sacred writing
  • the versions of the sacred writing
  • the canon of the sacred writing
  • the doctrines of the sacred writing
  • the arguments defending the sacred writing
• one too many contradictions between
  • the sacred writing and other sacred writings
  • non-sacred writings
  • myths and legends
  • historical findings
  • archaeological findings
  • anthropological findings
  • scientific findings
  • biological findings
  • geological findings
  • astronomical findings
  • moral and ethical findings

Regardless how the ball of inquiry is set in motion, the first step the new truth-seeker might take is to examine the belief process itself and recognize the different ways beliefs are incurred and influenced by a broad array of sources. It was from this vantage point that I found myself embarked on a remarkable journey along a thousand avenues of inquiry. I applied the rules of critical thinking and began examining the claims of Christianity and the Bible itself, but always with the intention of getting to the 'truth' even if the truth was difficult, disturbing, disheartening, or distressful. In the little I began unraveling, I suspected I was in for a shock. What I did not know was how much information was actually 'out there' in almost any direction I looked. Why didn't I 'see' it before? Why didn't everybody?

I would later learn that the answer to this question was simple and yet had the potential to change the world.

After all my years in Sunday school, catechism classes, and Northwest College, I realized I didn't have any clear idea who wrote the Bible, how it was compiled, and how each of its books were deemed 'canonical' (i.e., considered the "official" the Word of God and not 'noncanonical', or not the Word of God). For a topic so important, I was somewhat surprised why it was never taught.

I should have known better.

As soon as I started investigating the historical creation, compilation, and canonization of the Bible, I began seeing it in an entirely new light. I began seeing it as a wholly synthetic and man-made collection of documents that were each 'given the nod' toward canonization through a convoluted and byzantine process that had more to do with political prepossession than spirituality. I was shocked and dumb-founded.

I should have known better.

In order to understand how the Bible was put together, appartently all I needed to do was to go to the library and do research under Biblical Canon to start unraveling the mystery of its construction. This led to the examination of:

• the Septuagint
• Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judeaus)
• Josephus (Flavius Josephus)
• the Masoretic Text
• the Talmud
• the Gnostics
• the Ecumenical Councils
• the Didache
• the Apostolic Fathers
• Constantine and the Constantinian Shift
• The First Council of Nicaea
• Caesaropapism

It seemed for each path that I took to understand the compilation of the Bible another dozen branches appeared. These increased incrementally until there were literally hundreds of paths to follow, a phenomenon I've since called A Thousand Avenues of Inquiry. It would have been dishonest of me to ignore all these various paths or pretend they simply did not exist in order to bolster my faith. Having opened so many doors to the potential of newfound information, I could no longer turn back and pretend these doors weren't there. Well, I could, but that would entail an egregious and glaring case of self-deception. If faith meant having to put on blinders in order to prevent seeing historical reality, then faith contradicted intelligence and reason. To claim faith in denial of all the facts and evidence seemed a kind of mental illness to me, a pathological sickness, the rejection of demonstrable reality. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, of pretending I wasn't pretending, of denying all my doubts. If the information was available to me, I was more interested in uncovering what was 'true' than to keep defending what could only be seen in language and words. As I searched the more it became evient to me that faith—all different kinds of faith—was really a kind of 'make-believe', of allowing yourself to get all worked up and passionate about things which simply do not occur in the 'real world'. I slowly began to realize that the language of faith—Soul, Spirit, God, Heaven, Hell, Eternal Life, etc—was just that. Language. Words. None of these things could be determined 'outside' the construct of words, that is to say that without the use of words you'd never have reason to believe in any of them. Was religion impossible—all religion—without the use of language?

Still, I was dedicated to the truth and continued my research.

Having discovered the books of the Bible were deemed 'canonical' through a series of political 'votes' cast over hundreds of years, I turned my attention to the notion of authorship. Who wrote the individual books of the Bible? How many authors were there? When was it written? Was it edited and redited? And how many times? What I'd come to discover would once again blow my mind.

And, of course, I should have known better.

I began by researching the first five books of the Old Testament called the Pentateuch (meaning the "five implements") or in Hebrew the Torah (meaning "instruction"). These five books—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—are also called the Law of Moses because tradition attributes their authorship to Moses himself. This much I learned in the Bible college before diving into the doctrine and dogma interpreted from the books themselves. At no time did the discussion venture into the actual creation of the books, the problems inherent in adhering to a strictly Mosaic ("of Moses") authorship, the various historical research and academic theories used in the analysis of Biblical authorship, or even a passing reference to the very important Documentary Hypothesis. Again I realized that evangelical/fundamentalist Bible colleges had as much an agenda of silence as the distribution of narrow religious church doctrine.

Although Christian tradition assumes—and fundamentalists hold as incontestible fact—that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament (although nowhere in these books themselves does the text say Moses was their author), even a cursory reading of the Pentateuch reveals problems with this assumption. There are numerous contradictions in the text. It reports events in a particular order and later lists those same events happened in a different order. It would say that there were two of something and elsewhere say there were fourteen of the same thing. It would say that the Moabites did something then later say it was the Midianites, two distinct groups. It would describe Moses going to a Tabernacle in a chapter before he actually built the Tabernacle. It even describes the details of Moses' death. Although it has been suspected for millennia that Moses alone could not have authored these five books, it was during the last hundred or so years that dedicated bible analysis has uncovered a wealth of historical, archaeological, and textual evidence that supports a contrasting view.

As far back as the third century CE, the Christian apologist Origen responded to critics who raised objections to the unity and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The rabbis of the centuries that followed likewise explained these contradictions as only appearing to be contradictions since they could be explained away with elaborate interpretation or with inventive suggestions not directly derived from the biblical text (e.g., because Moses was undoubtedly a prophet he could see into the future and therefore could write what was going to happen before it actually happened). Medieval biblical commentators, such as Rashi in France and Nachmanides in Spain, were especially skillful in the use of contemporary analogy or claiming Ruach Hakodesh ("spiritual inspiration") in their attempts to reconcile these contradictions, while other investigators sought to consider explanations that were less far-fetched and more down-to-earth.

Around this time, investigators still accepted the tradition that Moses was the author of the first five books, but were forced to concede that a few lines were added after the time of Moses. In the eleventh century, Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish court physician of a ruler in Muslim Spain, pointed out that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named kings who lived long after Moses died. For daring to make this observation, Isaac ibn Yashush was nicknamed "Isaac the Blunderer."

The man who labeled him "Isaac the Blunderer" was Abraham ibn Ezra, a twelfth-century Spanish rabbi. Ibn Ezra added “His book deserves to be burned.” But ironically, ibn Ezra himself included several enigmatic comments in his own writings that hint that he had doubts of his own. He alluded to several biblical passages that appeared not to be form Moses’ own hand: passages that referred to Moses in the third person, used terms that Moses would not have known, described places where Moses had never been, and used language that reflected another time and locale form those of Moses. Nonetheless, ibn Ezra apparently was not willing to say outright that Moses was not the author of the Five Books. He simply wrote, “And if you understand, then you will recognize the truth.” And in another reference to one of these contradictory passages, he wrote, “And he who understands will keep silent.”

In the fourteenth century, in Damascus, the scholar Bonfils accepted ibn Ezra’s evidence but not his advice to keep silent. Referring to the difficult passages, Bonfils wrote: "And this is evidence that this verse was written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it; rather one of the later prophetrs wrote it." Three and a half centuries later, his work was reprinted with the references to this subject deleted.

In the fifteenth century, Tostatus, bishop of Avila, also stated that certain passages, notably the account of Moses' death, could not have been written by Moses. There was an old tradition that Moses' successor Joshua wrote this account. But in the sixteenth century, Carlstadt, a contemporary of Luther, commented that the account of Moses' death is written in the same style as texts that precede it. This makes it difficult to claim that Joshua or anyone else merely added a few lines to an otherwise Mosaic manuscript. It also raises further questions about what exactly was Mosaic and what was added later.

In order to keep the Mosaic tradition intact, some investigators suggested that Moses wrote the five books but that editors went over them later, adding an occassional word or phrase of their own. In the sixteenth century, Andreas van Maes, a Flemish Catholic, and two Jesuit scholars, Benedict Pereira and Jacques Bonfrere, imagined an original text from the hand of Moses upon which later writers expanded. Van Maes suggested that a later editor inserted phrases or changed the name of a place to its more current name so readers would understand it better. Van Maes' book was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Catholic Index of Prohibited Books).

During the Rennaissance and later, investigators began concluding that Moses did not write the majority of the Pentateuch. The first to say this was British philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century. Hobbes collected numerous cases of facts and statements through the course of the five books that were inconsistent with Mosaic authorship. For example, the text sometimes states that something is the case "to this day." "To this day" is not the phrase of someone describing a contemporary situation, but rather the phrase of a later writer who is describing something that happened in the past but has endured.

Four years later, Isaac de la Pevrere, a French Calvinist, also wrote explicitly that Moses was not the author of the first books of the Bible. He, too, noted problems running through the text, including the words "across the Jordan" in the first verse of Deuteronomy. That verse says, "These are the words that Moses spoke to the children of Israel across the Jordan..." The problem with the phrase "across the Jordan" is that it refers to someone who is on the other side of the Jordan river from the writer. The verse thus appears to be the words of someone in Israel, west of the Jordan, referring to what Moses did on the east side of the Jordan. But Moses himself was never supposed to have been in Israel in his life. De la Pevrere's book was banned and burned. He was arrested and informed that in order to be released he would have to become Catholic and recant his views to the Pope. He did.

About the same time, in Holland, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza published a unified critical analysis, likewise demonstrating that the problematic passages were not a few isolated cases that could be explained away one by one. Rather, they were pervasive throughout the entire so-called "Five Books of Moses." There were the third-person accounts of Moses, the statements that Moses was unlikely to have made (e.g., Numbers 12:3 "Moses was the humblest man on earth"), the report of Moses' death, the expression "to this day," the references to geographical locales by names that did not exist in Moses' lifetime, the treatment of matters that were subsequent to Moses (e.g., the list of Edomite kings), and various contradictions and problems in the text of the sort that earlier investigators had observed. He also noted that the text says in Deuteronomy 34, "There never arose another prophet in Israel like Moses..." Spinoza remarked that these sounded like the words of someone who lived a long time after Moses and had the opportunity to see other prophets and thus make the comparison. (They also do not sound like the words of the "humblest man on earth.") Spinoza wrote, "It is...clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses." Because of his rational inquiries, Spinoza had been excommunicated from Judaism. Now his work was condemned by Catholics and Protestants as well. His book was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Catholic Index of Prohibited Books), within six years thirty-seven edicts were issued against it, and an attempt was made on his life.

A short time later in Frace, Richard Simon, a convert from Protestantism who had become a Catholic Priest, wrote a book that intended to be critical of Spinoza. He said that the core of the Pentateuch was Mosaic, but that there were some additions made by the scribes who collected, arranged, and elaborated upon the old texts. These scribes, according to Simon, were prophets guided by the holy spirit, and so he considered his work as a defence of the sanctity of the biblical text. His contemporaries thought differently. Simon was attacked by other clergy and expelled from his order. His books were placed on the Index. Forty refutations of his work were written by Protestants. Of the thirteen hundred copies printed of his book, all but six were burned. An English version of the book came out, translated by John Hampden, but Hampden later recanted in order to be released from his imprisonment in the Tower of London. The understated report by the scholar Edward Gray in his accountant of events tells it best: Hampden “repudiated the opinions he had held in common with Simon . . . in 1688, probably shortly before his release form the tower.”

The Sources

Simon's idea that the biblical writers had assembled their narrative out of old sources at their disposal was an important step on the way of discovering who wrote the first books of the Bible. Any competent historian knows the importance of sources in writing an ongoing narrative of events.The hypothesis that the "Five Books of Moses" were the result of such a combining of several older sources by different authors was exceptionally important because it prepared the way to deal with new items of evidence that was developed by three investigators in the following century: the doublet.

A doublet is a case of the same story being told twice. Even in translation it is easy to observe that biblical stories often appear with variations of detail in two different places in the Bible. There are two different stories of the creation of the world. There are two stories of the covenant between God and the patriarch Abraham, two stories of the naming of Abraham's son Isaac, two stories of Abraham's claiming to a foreign king that his wife Sarah is his sister, two stories of Isaac's son Jacob making a journey to Mesopotamia, two stories of a revelation to Jacob at Beth-El, two stories of God's changing Jacob's name to Israel, two stories of Moses getting water from a rock at a place called Meribah, and more.

Those who defended the traditional belief in Mosaic authorship argued that the doublets were always complementary, not repetitive, and that they did not contradict each other, but came to teach us a lesson by their 'apparent' contradiction. But another clue was discovered that undermined this traditional response. Investigators found that in most cases one of the two versions of a doublet story would refer to the deity by the divine name, Yahweh (formerly mispronounced Jehovah), and the other version of the story would refer to the deity simply as 'God' (Elohim). That is, the doublets lined up into two groups of parallel versions of stories. Each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity that it used (either Yahweh or Elohim). Moreover, the investigators found that it was not only the name of the deity that lined up. They found various other terms and characteristics that regularly appeared in one or the other group. This tended to support the hypothesis that someone had taken two different old source documents, cut them up, and woven them together to form the continuous story in the "Five Books of Moses."

And so the next stage of the investigation was the process of separating the strands of the two old source documents. In the eighteenth century, three independent investigators arrived at similar conclusions based on such studies: a German minister (H. B. Witter), a French medical doctor (Jean Astruc), and a German professor (J. G. Eichhorn). At first it was thought that one of the two versions of the stories in the book of Genesis was an ancient text that Moses used as a source and that the other version was Moses' own writing, describing these things in his own words. Later, it was thought that both versions of the stories were old source documents that Moses had used in fashioning his work. But ultimately it was concluded that both of the two sources had to be from writers who lived after Moses. Each step of the process was attributing less and less to Moses himself.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the two-source hypothesis was expanded. Scholars found evidence that there were not two major source documents in the Pentateuch after all—there were four! Two scholars found that in the first four books of the Bible there were not only doublets, but a number of triplets of stories. This converged with other evidence, involving contradictions and characteristic language, that persuaded them that they had found another source within the Pentateuch. And then a young German scholar, W. M. L. De Wette, observed in his doctoral dissertation that the fifth of the Five Books of Moses, the book of Deuteronomy, was strikingly different in its language from the four books that preceded it. None of the three old source documents appeared to continue into this book. DeWette hypothesized that Deuteronomy was a separate, fourth source.

Thus from the work of a great many persons...the mystery of the Bible's origins had come to be addressed openly, and a working hypothesis had been formed. Scholars could open the book of Genesis and identify the writing of two or even three authors on the same page. And there was also the work of the editor, the person who had cut up and combined the source documents into a single story; and so as many as four different persons could have contributed to producing a singlepage of the Bible. Investigators were now able to see that a puzzle existed and what the basic character of the puzzle was. But they still did not know who the authors of any of the four old source documents were, when they lived, or why they wrote. And they had no idea who the mysterious editor was who had combined them, nor did they have any idea why this person had combined them in this complex way.

The Hypothesis

To put it as succinctly as possible, the puzzle was as follows:

There was evidence that the "Five Books of Moses" had been composed by combining four different source documents into one continuous history. For working purposes, the four documents were identified by alphabetic symbols. The document that was associated with the divine name Yahweh/Jehovah was called J. The document that was identified as referring to the deity as God (in Hebrew Elohim) was called E. The third document, by far the largest, included most of the legal sections and concentrated a great deal on matters having to do with priests, and so it was called P. And the source that was found only in the book of Deuteronomy was called D. The question was how to uncover the history of these four documents...

The first step was to try to determine the relative order in which they were written. The idea was to try to see if each version reflected a particular stage in the development of religion in biblical Israel. Two nineteenth century figures stand out. They approached the problem in very different ways, but they arrived at complementary findings. One of them, Karl Heinrich Graf, worked on deducing from references in the various biblical texts which of the texts logically must have preceded or followed others. The other investigator, Wilhelm Vatke, sought to trace the history of the development of ancient Israelite religion by examining texts for clues as to whether they reflected early or late stages of the religion.

Graf concluded that the J and E documents were the oldest versions of the biblical stories, for they (and other early biblical writings) were unaware of matters that were treated in other documents. D was later than J or E, for it showed acquaintance with developments in a later period of history. And P, the priestly version of the story, was the latest of all, for it referred to a variety of matters that were unknown in all the earlier portions of the Bible such as the books of the prophets. Vatke meanwhile concluded that J and E reflected a very early stage in the development of Israelite religion, when it was essentially a nature/fertility religion. He concluded that D reflected a middle stage of religious development, when the faith of Israel was a spiritual religion; in short the age of the great Israelite prophets. And he regarded the P document as reflecting the latest stage of Israelite religion, the stage of priestly religion, based on priests, sacrifices, and law.

Vatke's attempt to reconstruct the development of the religion of Israel and Graf's attempt to reconstruct the development of the sources of the Pentateuch pointed in the same direction. Namely, the great majority of the laws and much of the narrative of the Pentateuch were not a part of life in the days of Moses—much less were they written by Moses—nor even of life in the days of the kings and prophets of Israel. Rather, they were written by someone who lived toward the end of the biblical period.

There were a variety of responses to this idea. The negative responses came from both traditional and critical scholars. Even DeWette, who had identified the D source, would not accept the idea that so much of the law was so late. He said that this view "suspended the beginnings of Hebrew history not upon the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings." And traditional scholars pointed out that this view pictured biblical Israel as a nation not governed by law for its first six centuries. Graf's and Vatke's ideas, nonetheless, came to dominate the field of biblical studies for a hundred years primarily because of the work of one man: Wellhausen.

Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) stands out as a powerful figure in the investigation into the authorship of the Bible and in the history of biblical scholarship in general. His contribution does not so much constitute a beginning as a culmination in the history of biblical scholarship. Much of what Wellhausen had to say was taken from those who preceded him, but Wellhausen's contribution was to bring all of these components together, along with considerable research and argumentation of his own, into a clear, organized synthesis...

The Wellhausen model began to answer the question of why the different sources existed. The first real acceptance of this field of study, then, came when historical and literary analysis were first successfully merged. This model of the combination of the source documents came to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis. It has dominated the field ever since. To this day, if you want to disagree, you disagree with Wellhausen. If you want to pose a new model, you compare its merits with those of Wellhausen's model.

Until the past generation, there were orthodox Christian and Jewish scholars who contested the Documentary Hypothesis in scholarly circles. At present, however, there is hardly a biblical scholar in the world actively working on the problem who would claim that the "Five Books of Moses" were written by Moses—or any one person. Scholars argue about when the various documents were written and about whether a particular verse belongs to this or that document. They express varying degrees of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the usefulness of the hypothesis for literary or historical purposes. But the hypothesis itself continues to be the starting point of research, no serious student of the Bible can fail to study it, and no other explanation of the evidence has come close to challenging it.

The critical analysis of authorship has also extended beyond the "Five Books of Moses" and has touched every book of the Bible. For example, the book of Isaiah was traditionally ascribed to the prophet Isaiah, who lived in the 8th century BCE. Most of the first half of the book fits with such a tradition. But chapters 40 through 66 of the book of Isaiah appear to have been by someone living about two centuries later. Even the book of Obadiah, which is only one page long, has been thought to be a combination of pieces by two authors.

In our own day, new tools and new methods have produced important contributions. New methods of linguistic analysis, developed largely within the last fifteen years have made it possible to establish relative chronology of portions of the Bible and to measure and describe characteristics of biblical Hebrew in various periods. In the simplest terms, Moses was further from the language of much of the Five Books than Shakespeare was from modern English. Also since Wellhausen's days there has been an archeological revolution, which has yielded important discoveries that must now figure into any research into the Bible's authors.

The Setting

The land in which the Bible was born was about the size of a large North American county. It was located along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, a natural meeting point of Africa, Asia, and Europe. It had a fabulous variety of climate, flora and fauna, and topographic characteristics. In the northeast was a beautiful freshwater lake, the Sea of Galilee. It flowed into the Jordan River to the south. The river flowed in a straight line south and emptied into the Dead Sea, which was as unlike the Galilee as two bodies of water can possibly be. It was thick with salt. It was surrounded by hot wilderness. According to the traditions of that region the Dead Sea area had once been a pleasant, fertile place, but the people who lived there were so corrupt that God rained brimstone ("sulfur") and fire (e.g., volcanic eruption) on the place until it was left hardly fit for occupation.

The northern part of the country was fertile, with plains, small hills and valleys. The center of the country had beaches and lowlands along the Mediterranean coast on the west, and hills and mountains on the east. The southern part of the country was largely desert. It was hot and humid along the coast, especially in summer. It was drier in the hills, still drier in the desert. It was cold enough to snow occasionally on the hills in winter. It was beautiful. The people could see the beauty of the sea, the beauty of lake, flowers, and fields, and the beauty of desert all within a few miles of each other.

As striking as the variety of the land itself was the variety of its people. The Bible refers to peoples from numerous backgrounds who mixed there: Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, Girgashites, Jebusites. There were also the Philistines, who stood out as different from the others, apparently having come across the Mediterranean from the Greek islands. There was also a circle of people around the borders of the land. To the north were the Phoenicians, who are usually credited with having introduced writing in that region. Along the eastern borders were Syria in the north, then Ammon, then Moab, then Edom to the south. Then of course there were the Israelites, the most numerous people within the boundaries of the land from the twelfth century BCE on, the people about whom most of the biblical stories are told. The land lay along the route of travel between Africa and Asia, and so there were the influences—and interests—of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the region as well. [For more information, see EAST OF JORDAN: TERRITORIES AND SITES OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES in PDF format]

The population was both urban and rural; it is difficult to say in what proportion. Certainly the percentage of city residents was large. There were times of considerable economic prosperity and times of hardship. There were times of great political strength and influence, and there were periods of domination by foreign powers. And, of course, there were times of peace and times of war.

The dominant religion across the ancient Near East was pagan religion. Pagan religion was not idol worship, as formerly it was thought to be. The archeological revolution of the past hundred years has opened up that world to us and given us, among other revelations, a new understanding and appreciation of the pagan religious worldview. At Nineveh alone—the greatest archeological discovery of all time—were found fifty thousand tablets, the library of the emperor of Assyria. At the Canaanite city of Ugarit, three thousand more tablets were found. We can read the pagan hymns, prayers, and myths; we can see the places where they worshiped; and we can see how they depicted their gods in art.

Pagan religion was close to nature. People worshiped the most powerful forces in the universe: the sky, the storm wind, the sun, the sea, fertility, death. The statues that they erected were like the icons in a church. The statues depicted the god or goddess, reminded the worshiper of the deity's presence, showed the humans' respect for their gods, and perhaps made the humans feel closer to their gods. But, as a Babylonian text points out, the statue was not the god.

The chief pagan god in the region that was to become Israel was El. El was male, patriarchal, a ruler. Unlike the other major god of the region, Haddu/Hadad (the storm wind), El was not identified with any particular force in nature. He sat at the head of the council of the gods and pronounced the council's decisions.The God of Israel was Yahweh. He, too, was male, patriarchal, a ruler, and not identified with any one force in nature. Rather than describing him in terms of nature or myths, the people of Israel spoke of Yahweh in terms of his acts in history.

The people of Israel spoke Hebrew. Other languages of the area were similar to Hebrew: Phoenician, Canaanite (Ugaritic), Aramaic, and Moabite are all in the Semitic family of languages. Hebrew and these other languages each had an alphabet. People wrote documents on papyrus and sealed them with stamps pressed in wet clay. They also wrote texts on leather and on clay tablets and occasionally carved them in stone or wrote them on plaster. They wrote shorter notes on pieces of broken pottery.

People lived in one- and two-story homes, mostly of stone. in cities the houses were built close together. Some of the cities had impressive water systems, including long underground tunnels and huge cisterns. Some houses had indoor plumbing. Cities were surrounded by walls. People ate beef, lamb, fowl, bread, vegetables, fruits, and dairy products. They made wine and beer. They made pots and jars of all sizes out of clay. Their metals were bronze, iron, silver, and gold. They had wind, string, and percussion musical instruments. Contrary to every Bible movie ever made, they did not wear kaffiyehs (Arab headdress).

There are traditions about the prehistory of the Israelites: their patriarchs, their experiences as slaves in Egypt, and their wandering in the Sinai wilderness. Unfortunately, we have little historical information about this from archeology or other ancient sources. The first point at which we actually have sufficient evidence to begin to picture life of the biblical community is the twelfth century BCE, the period when the Israelites became established in this region.

The Israelites' political life in their early years was organized around tribes. According to biblical tradition there were thirteen tribes, with considerable differences in size and population from the smallest to the largest. Twelve of the tribes each had a distinct geographical territory. The thirteenth, the tribe of Levi, was identified as a priestly group. Its members lived in cities in the other tribes' territories. Each tribe had its own chosen leaders.

There were also individuals who acquired authority in individual tribes or over groups of tribes by virtue of their position in society or their personal qualities. These persons were either judges or priests. The office of judge did not involve only hearing legal cases. It included military leadership. In times of military threat to a tribe or group of tribes, therefore, a judge could acquire considerable power and authority. A judge could be male or female. Priests had to be male. Usually priests had to be from Levi. The office was hereditary. They served at religious sites, presiding over religious ceremonies, which meant, above all, performing sacrifices. In return for their services, they received a portion of the sacrificed animal or produce.

One other type of person figured in a special way in the leadership of the community: the prophet. Being a prophet was not an office or profession like judge or priest. A person form any occupation could come to be a prophet. The prophet Ezekiel was a priest; the prophet Amos was a cowboy (shepherd). The word in Hebrew for prophet is nabi, which is understood to mean "called." The Israelite prophets were men or women who were regarded as having been called by the deity to perform a special task with regard to the people. The task might be to encourage or criticize. It might be in the realm of politics, ethics, or ritual. The prophet generally would deliver his or her message in poetry or in a combination of poetry and prose.

Shamelessly Cribbed From: Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman

I continued studying development of the Old Testament and discovered that most of what it contained had been inheritied from earlier middle eastern myths and traditions, appropriated from whatever influencing group the Israelites had been in contact, evolved over time to what came to be interpreted as the Jewish biblical tradition. Most of the ancient stories and themes of the Old Testament were adopted from earlier stories and themes that had been circulating and disseminated throughout the region (a comparison of Noah's Flood with the Ziusudra, Atrahasis, and Xisuthros Flood accounts and Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh is one example of such Israelite 'borrowing'. See Myth Making in the Bible and Ancient Near East: The Yahwist Primeval Creation Myth in PDF format). There was no doubting the evidence, and there was no going back to the naïve presupposition that the Bible was 'inerrant' and 'inspired' and not a 'man-made' aggregation of myths.

The story surrounding the birth of Moses is another clear example of Israelite 'borrowing'. According to Exodus the Egyptian pharaoh decided that all Hebrew newborn sons should be tossed in the Nile and killed. When Moses was born his mother beat pharaoh to it and secured him in a basket of papyrus made tight with dirt and pitch and placed the basket in the Nile herself where he was later found and adopted by the pharaoh’s own daughter (Exodus 2). On a clay tablet created a thousand years older (dated ca 2300 BCE), there is an identical story telling how the high priestess in the city of Azupia by the Euphrates gave birth to a son in secret since she as high priestess was supposed to live in chastity. She put her newborn son in a basket made tight with dirt and pitch, and placed it into the river (Euphrates). The child was found by Aqqi, the water bearer, and grew up to be a great king. The name of this child was Sargon (the true king) and he was one of the most important and influential Sumerian rulers and conquerors. His reign lasted for 56 years (2382 - 2327 BCE) and the myth of his birth and childhood was read in the schools of Mesopotamia and was widely known for centuries. Such origin myths were central to ensure the position and legitimacy of important persons, both real and fictional. The legend of the founders of Rome, the twins Romulus and Remus, has a similar theme. The twins were born in secrecy by a fallen princess, put in a wicker basket and send bobbing down the river Tiber. They were found and raised by a wolf and finally found by a shepherd (Faustulus). The Egyptian god Osiris was also sent floating down the river Nile in a basket as a child. This kind of mythical origin is a central factor which indicate that here we have a hero or possibly a godly person. Sargon was a real king, and we have historical evidence for this. If there ever was a real person behind the many myths of Moses, there is not a shred of tactile evidence to support this. Of course this is only one example of such Israelite 'borrowing'. An honest and rational examination into each of the Bible's stories reveals most were appropriated from thousands of pieces of preceding myths and cultural legends, far too many to simply write off as mere coincidence or examples of concurrence.

Having started an initial examination of the Pentateuch and Old Testament, I decided it was time to look into the biblical canon, those 66 books that make up the Bible (39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament) and considered to be the only books that were 'inspired by God' and meant to belong in the Bible. Despite my years in Sunday School classes, catechism classes, and the Bible college, I realized I had practically no idea how the 66 books of the Bible actually got 'picked' to go into the Bible. After I started my research I quickly began to understand why this information was not opted for public discussion from my church leaders and instructors.

And I should have known better.

• Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman If you read one book to supplement your understanding of the Old Testament, this is the book!
• The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard E. Friedman
• Sources of the Pentateuch: Texts, Introductions, Annotations by Antony F. Campbell and Mark A. O'Brien
• The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels
• Power, Politics, and the Making of the Bible: An Introduction by Robert B. Coote and Mary P. Coote
• Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible by Emanuel Tov
• The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica by Ernst Wurthwein
• To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application by Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes
• Handbook of Biblical Criticism by Richard N. Soulen
• The Creation of History in Ancient Israel by Marc Brettler
• Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction by Lawrence Boadt
• Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study by John Barton

• The Bible History Page
• Bible Origins
• Scripture Studies
• Early Christian Writings
• Resource Pages for Biblical Studies
• Links to Bible Resources
• The Fallible Gospels: Reasonable Observations on the Origins of Christianity
• Cygnus' Study: Debunking the Bible
• The Whole Bible: Analysis of the Canonical and Apocryphal New Testament Scriptures
• The Documentary Hypothesis (Wikipedia)
• Who Wrote the Five Books of Moses?
• The Literary history of the Pentateuch (Documentary Hypothesis) by John Barton
• Pentateuchal Studies Today by Gordon Wenham
• Old Testament Life and Literature by Gerald A. Larue
• Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible
• Source Criticism