Did Moses write the frist 5 books of the bible?

[bananabrain]

how is it a "violation of common sense"? doesn't that mean that the whole Torah is "a violation of common sense" (due to supernatural or non-scientific events)? either that or it's perfectly feasible for a prophet. what is difficult to understand about foreseeing the events of one's own death? i can foresee that i'll die. if i was talking to G!D before going up on top of a mountain to die, why couldn't i write that down? besides, the tears bit is rashi, probably based on tanhuma or something.

b'shalom

bananabrain

[bob x]

Originally Posted by bananabrain

doesn't that mean that the whole Torah is "a violation of common sense" (due to supernatural or non-scientific events)?

Lots of it, yes. What I was inquiring about is what makes you accept one thing rather than another. The notion that the Torah was written by Moses, for example, is not a claim made anywhere in the Torah; what is it that inclines you to it?

[Wavy_Wonder1]

I've casually studied the Documentary Hypothesis, its nuanced views (such as whether J and E should be treated as separate, or whether P is pre-exilic, post-exilic, or both), and competing theories (like the Fragmentary Hypothesis as suggested by Whybray). But generally in scholarship Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is not a good theory. It's a tradition, possibly originating in 2nd Temple Judaism, and has no support from the Pentateuch itself. The evidence from the Pentateuch, on many grounds, is actually against Mosaic authorship. There's a plethora of consilient evidence from many disciplines--linguistic, historical, etc.--that undercut Mosaic authorship. The Pentateuch is demonstrably post-Mosaic (filled with anachronisms), contradictory in many respects, and interspersed with confused traditions. There's little doubt that Moses did not write the Pentateuch.

Thanks,
Eric

[bananabrain]

Originally Posted by bob_x

What I was inquiring about is what makes you accept one thing rather than another. The notion that the Torah was written by Moses, for example, is not a claim made anywhere in the Torah; what is it that inclines you to it?

trust. faith is very much related to trust, of course. what i am saying is that the sages and the other custodians of the tradition to the present have proved their trustworthiness over centuries, over millennia - compared to the level of trust i feel is deserved by some nebulous academic consensus. i actually attended a lecture recently on the current state of scholarly thinking on redaction and biblical crit by hugh williamson, regius prof of oriental languages at christchurch college, oxford and came away from it with the surprising but distinct impression that consensus was quite a lot more fragmentary than i had previously thought. of course if you a priori exclude the supernatural, it's never going to stack up, but i don't do that, so there's no serious issue here for me. the tradition is perfectly happy with reading things into the text in the same way that there aren't any Torah laws for getting married (as opposed to divorce) so i don't have a problem with the tradition's position on mosaic authorship.

Wavy Wonder1:

i'm so pleased that your casual study of the DH has led you to such a comfortable conclusion. don't mind us jews, we've only been delving into this text for 2500 years - and that's if it's only post-exilic! how about casually delving into traditional interpretation and learning a little bit about it before you so blithely dismiss it?

b'shalom

bananabrain

[Wavy_Wonder1]

Originally Posted by bananabrain

Wavy Wonder1:

i'm so pleased that your casual study of the DH has led you to such a comfortable conclusion. don't mind us jews, we've only been delving into this text for 2500 years - and that's if it's only post-exilic! how about casually delving into traditional interpretation and learning a little bit about it before you so blithely dismiss it?

b'shalom

bananabrain

I dismiss the tradition because it does not hold up in the pungent face of criticism and the irrefutable manuscript evidence. There's little that can be taken to remotely support Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The evidence against Mosaic authorship is simply overwhelming.

Thanks,
Eric

[wil]

Namaste BB,

I hear ya, thanks for the response.

Here is my issue. I'm ok with the metaphor and allegory, I can understand that. But how and where does one draw the line?

I mean when you say Moses wrote all the books, is that Allegory? Is Moses a metaphor?

From what I've heard/understand over the years the arguments as you say go on and on...

Egyptians have some fairly detailed records yet, no Moses, no Pharoah's kid leaving his title for the Jews...and with all the records of who they conqurered and when, no Jews shown as slaves and they even ruled Canaan for the centuries of the exodus, so how could Egyptian land be the promise land?

Then we have archeological digs that can find all sorts of stuff but no kingdom of David or Solomon, domestication of the camel was about 1000 years after biblical references.

Has not various digs and the likes of Professor Ze'ev deconstructed more than just the walls of Jericho?

[bob x]

Originally Posted by bananabrain

trust...

I can understand that. But to me, "trust" is really an issue for cases of (claimed) personal knowledge or research: if somebody says "I saw a dog walking down the street with bright pink fur", I might think it odd but take his word for it, or assume it is a joke, or think he is making up a tall one, depending on who is speaking.
But here, you trust the people you've learned from, yet they don't know anything more about it than you do; they are just repeating, in all sincerity and good faith, what they were told by people they trusted, and may have had good reason to trust, yet those people knew nothing more about it than they did, were just repeating what they heard from others they trusted... and where did the story about Moses writing the books himself ultimately come from? From somebody making it up, or from somebody making what seemed to him a reasonable guess? You don't know.
It does not go back to whoever assembled the text, which makes no claims about who wrote it all down. I might contrast, say, the Gospel of John, which unlike the others has a claim that a personal favorite of Jesus "is the one who told us these things, and wrote them down, and his testimony is honest". Confronted with such a claim, I can decide on the basis of the text whether I trust that the assembler got it straight from an eyewitness who was telling everything honestly (that text does not inspire that level of trust in me, as you know). But in the case of "Moses wrote the Torah", we have a claim that does not start from the assembler of the text, and we do not know which intermediary started it: you, of course, would say something like "The first person to say 'Moses wrote the book' must have been Joshua, when he said to the elders something like, 'See this book? Moses himself left it to me, and it's in his own handwriting'" -- but, we don't have Joshua telling us that.
I, of course, don't believe that the theory of Mosaic authorship started particularly early. In the "Nakh" we have only a few references to what "the book of the law" may have been. In Kings, it is just "found" during the reign of Josiah, and we are not told what conclusions the finders reached about its provenance, or what basis they might have said. And there is the passage in Jeremiah we had some go-rounds about before, something to the effect (I don't have my Tanakh in front of me, pardon any inaccuracy in paraphrasing), "How can you say, 'We have the book of the Law', when the lying pens of the scribes have handled it falsely?"

[bananabrain]

Originally Posted by Wavy Wonder1

I dismiss the tradition because it does not hold up in the pungent face of criticism and the irrefutable manuscript evidence. There's little that can be taken to remotely support Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The evidence against Mosaic authorship is simply overwhelming.

pungent, eh? so, according to you, traditional jews around the world are simply a bunch of intellectual hypocrites, then? is it at all possible you might have missed something that we might have noticed in our thousands of years of engagement with every aspect of this text, at all? our civilisation is based on a lie, is that it? it's astonishing that our great sages weren't "overwhelmed" by this "evidence".

Originally Posted by wil

I mean when you say Moses wrote all the books, is that Allegory? Is Moses a metaphor?

er, no. moses' family's DNA are still knocking about in the person of the priestly caste, the kohanim - everyone you've ever met with the surname "cohen", for a start.

as for whether moses wrote all the books, the traditional position is that they were Revealed to him at sinai by G!D and written down over the next few decades during the wandering of the israelites in the desert. whether that makes him the author or a scribe is largely, therefore, a matter for belief rather than evidence; traditionally-minded jews, where they do, as i do, consider the evidence, usually don't consider that the evidence makes the traditional view untenable. moreover, the evidence we consider is quite different.

Egyptians have some fairly detailed records yet, no Moses, no Pharoah's kid leaving his title for the Jews...and with all the records of who they conqurered and when, no Jews shown as slaves and they even ruled Canaan for the centuries of the exodus, so how could Egyptian land be the promise land?

yes, isn't it odd that a military theocracy didn't record a version of events that didn't show it to its best advantage, how it wanted history on reflection to appear? isn't it odd how pharaoh didn't record his defeat and the destruction of his army. as for ruling canaan, it's probably a bit like the reason there aren't any chinese imperial records of an independent tibet. it's a lot easier to say you run a place than to actually run it.

Then we have archeological digs that can find all sorts of stuff but no kingdom of David or Solomon

and if it did find this stuff, would anyone believe it? you're also talking about events taking place somewhere that has been thoroughly destroyed over and over and over by some of the most comprehensive conquerors in history. destruction of the evidence is nothing new - unfortunately it is still almost certainly going on under the auspices of the palestinian waqf on the Temple Mount, to serve political ends.

the domestication of the camel was about 1000 years after biblical references.

really? i've never heard this. who says? someone said something quite similar about the "iron bedstead" of og, king of bashan, iron not being known at the time of the conquest and when i asked about it, i was told that the word could be taken to mean any "hard metal", not necessarily the element Fe.

Originally Posted by bob_x

to me, "trust" is really an issue for cases of (claimed) personal knowledge or research

er, it's about whether someone gives you good information and/or acts in your best interest and/or does what they say they're going to do and/or makes representations that can be relied upon. at least, that's what i think.

you trust the people you've learned from, yet they don't know anything more about it than you do; they are just repeating, in all sincerity and good faith, what they were told by people they trusted, and may have had good reason to trust, yet those people knew nothing more about it than they did, were just repeating what they heard from others they trusted...

the chain of tradition is certainly pretty established, yes, but my point is that going on the sages' way of doing it has resulted in the survival of judaism and the perpetuation of the Torah and, if you like, the implementation of the Divine Plan for humanity; therefore it can be relied upon. by the same token, academic study of these texts has given us some excellent insights, but it has not helped in a teleological sense, because that just isn't what academics are about. what jews are about is the execution of G!D's Will. academics have done nothing for my spiritual well-being, despite my enormous respect for their intellectual achievements - the sages have. i have learned a fair bit from your interventions, as you are probably aware, but that doesn't lead me to adopt you as the exemplar for my spiritual development.

and where did the story about Moses writing the books himself ultimately come from? From somebody making it up, or from somebody making what seemed to him a reasonable guess? You don't know.

yes, but neither do you. you are speculating, of course based upon the evidence as you understand it, but you're not experiencing it the way i am. and i'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but you're not privy to my perspective just as i am not privy to yours. what i do not accept and have never accepted is that the *approach* you take is the only valid one, but that will hardly be news to you.

I might contrast, say, the Gospel of John, which unlike the others has a claim that a personal favorite of Jesus "is the one who told us these things, and wrote them down, and his testimony is honest". Confronted with such a claim, I can decide on the basis of the text whether I trust that the assembler got it straight from an eyewitness who was telling everything honestly (that text does not inspire that level of trust in me, as you know).

right, which brings us back to the issue of "who do you trust?", don't it?

But in the case of "Moses wrote the Torah", we have a claim that does not start from the assembler of the text, and we do not know which intermediary started it: you, of course, would say something like "The first person to say 'Moses wrote the book' must have been Joshua, when he said to the elders something like, 'See this book? Moses himself left it to me, and it's in his own handwriting'" -- but, we don't have Joshua telling us that.

if i recall, that only really becomes important when authority is necessary.

And there is the passage in Jeremiah we had some go-rounds about before, something to the effect (I don't have my Tanakh in front of me, pardon any inaccuracy in paraphrasing), "How can you say, 'We have the book of the Law', when the lying pens of the scribes have handled it falsely?"

that's right - and i think we established that you and i interpret it completely differently. but that's OK, as long as you're not saying that your interpretation is necessarily correct and mine is necessarily wrong. remember, i am perfectly happy with both Torah and Nakh being extremely rude about the israelites and our historic sinfulness and general bad behaviour. in fact, i consider it a support of their trustworthiness, precisely because they are so unsparing of our failings, which is, i think, quite an unusual feature of any culture's sacred history.

b'shalom

bananabrain

[Wavy_Wonder1]

Originally Posted by bananabrain

pungent, eh? so, according to you, traditional jews around the world are simply a bunch of intellectual hypocrites, then? is it at all possible you might have missed something that we might have noticed in our thousands of years of engagement with every aspect of this text, at all? our civilisation is based on a lie, is that it? it's astonishing that our great sages weren't "overwhelmed" by this "evidence".

And if most traditional Jews refuse to see the evidence against Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, surely they interested either, 'great sages' notwithstanding.

That's the nature of religion. Many of the faithful would rather cohere to their tradition than open up their minds. Fortunately, the picture is not so bleak as you depict it. Richard Friedman said it best:

Those who write on the Bible as literature and those whose interest has been the religious study of the Bible--i.e., the Bible as sacred literature--have rarely put this knowledge to use. This was due in part to a perception that this kind of analysis would be threatening to religion...The threat to religion never materialized...Many--probably most--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy have now been learning, and teaching, this subject for over a century and have managed to reconcile it with their beliefs and traditions. (Who Wrote the Bible? Second Edition, 1997, p. 243, brackets mine)

Thanks,
Eric

[wil]

Namaste BB,

I've never heard the over thirty years it was written...I kept hearing over and over he came down off the mountain with the books completed.

The Egyptian record of who they conquered and who beat them at battles is fairly extensive evidently along with who they enslaved and that is where the record lacks...they never conquered, enslaved Jews...but it could be wrong as well?

Yes there have been wars and distruction of cites etc. But what happened back then is every new city/fortification was built on top of the last destroyed fortification and as they dig down they go straight thru time looking at the pottery etc. and time dating it all. They learn societal norms, what they ate, how they worshipped, who they traded with, and what animals were domesticated. I've not done this research nor validated any of it, but that is what I'm understanding they are teaching in Uni in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem today...no evidence of Solomon or David's kingdom existing, not just no evidence, proof it didn't exist when and where it is mentioned to have existed...

[bob x]

Originally Posted by bananabrain

our civilisation is based on a lie, is that it?

There's a difference between something not being true, and its being a "lie", which requires the additional element of knowingly perpetrating the untruth. Geocentric astronomers were wrong, but not "liars"

Originally Posted by bananabrain

yes, isn't it odd that a military theocracy didn't record a version of events that didn't show it to its best advantage, how it wanted history on reflection to appear?

Ah, but they did. We know that Egypt fell into decades of humiliating disorder after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, that the Middle Kingdom was conquered by the Hyksos, that the New Kingdom fell to Libya and then to Nubia, because the Egyptians recorded these things.

Originally Posted by bananabrain

er, it's about whether someone gives you good information and/or acts in your best interest and/or does what they say they're going to do and/or makes representations that can be relied upon. at least, that's what i think.

They can't give you any more information than they have. A person may be very sincere and have your best interests at heart, and make representations that are completely untrue because they don't personally know anything about it and are relaying what was passed to them in the same way.

Originally Posted by bananabrain

the chain of tradition is certainly pretty established, yes

Huh??? No it isn't. We have late claims in the Talmud that transmission goes all the way back, but from Moses to the Hasmonean period it is all filled in with anonymous placeholders. Sources from that great time-gap contain no indication of any belief that "Moses wrote the books himself".

Originally Posted by bananabrain

my point is that going on the sages' way of doing it has resulted in the survival of judaism and the perpetuation of the Torah and, if you like, the implementation of the Divine Plan for humanity; therefore it can be relied upon.

The pragmatic utility of a belief has no bearing on its truth. Plato thought it would contribute to the stability of the ideal Republic to convince the underclass that philosophers are hatched from golden eggs, but did not think the usefulness of the story was evidence for it. India has survived rather longer than Israel, but that is not good evidence that king Rama really did get crucial help from an army of monkeys. Generations of parents have found it helpful to persuade youngsters that a Fairy wants to purchase loose teeth.

Originally Posted by bananabrain

yes, but neither do you. you are speculating, of course based upon the evidence as you understand it

PRECISELY!

Originally Posted by bananabrain

right, which brings us back to the issue of "who do you trust?", don't it?

When there is a claim to personal knowledge, then there is the issue of trust. I don't think you quite got the point of my bringing up the author of "John": there, we have an actual colophon "we got this from an eyewitness", and we can ask if we trust the people who wrote that. It is completely irrelevant to ask if I trust bananabrain, or the kindly rabbi down the street, or Maimonides, or the authors of the Talmud, because none of you know anything more about the circumstances of the Torah's writings than I do. If you want me to trust the complete chain of transmission, you have to name them all, and I would have to have trust in each and every one of them: as it is, I have no reason even to believe that such a thing as the chain of transmission exists.

Originally Posted by bananabrain

that's right - and i think we established that you and i interpret it completely differently. but that's OK, as long as you're not saying that your interpretation is necessarily correct and mine is necessarily wrong.

Fine. That was not really the point. The point was that we get nothing from before the Second Temple period that indicates anybody believing in "Moses wrote it all". WHO, exactly, first started believing that?