Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [12]
First, researchers have learned that some of what appears in the most ancient sections of the Bible, including some of the stories in Genesis, was probably “borrowed” from other more ancient civilizations, particularly those of Egypt and Babylon. Various aspects of the Laws that God gives to Moses in Exodus are similar to Babylonian laws known as the Code of Hammurabi, which is a few centuries older than the Bible. The story of the infant Moses set afloat in a basket is similar to the Mesopotamian legend of an ancient king named Sargon. Some of the wisdom found in the biblical Proverbs sounds remarkably like the sayings of an Egyptian sage named Amen-em-ope who lived around the time of Solomon, the ostensible author of Proverbs. In other words, the authors of the Bible, like writers before and since, were not above liberal borrowing, or what modern writers call “fair use.”
The beginning of the actual process of writing down what Jews call the Tanakh and what Christians call the Old Testament dates back more than three thousand years to approximately 1000 BCE. The actual process of writing down the Scriptures followed an oral tradition that goes back at least another thousand years.
The oldest of the Hebrew scriptures are the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In Jewish tradition, these five are called the “Torah” (“Law” or “Teaching”). They are also known as both the “Five Books of Moses” and, in Greek, the “Pentateuch” (“five scrolls”). For a very, very long time, it was assumed that Moses himself had written the five books of the Torah. While many devout Jews and Christians still hold to that belief, a majority of scholars and theologians accept that the Five Books of Moses were transmitted orally for centuries before being set down on scrolls beginning some time after 1000 BCE—approximately the time that King David and Solomon are traditionally thought to have ruled Israel. This writing process was not completed until about 400 BCE.
Didn’t Moses write the Torah?
For centuries Moses was accepted as the author of the five books of Torah that are traditionally called the Books of Moses. The Torah stated that Moses wrote down what he was told, so this was not simply a scholar’s opinion but an unquestioned matter of faith for both Jews and Christians. Some editions of the Bible still assert that Moses was the author of Genesis, and there are earnest believers who hold that as an article of faith.
In the past, daring to question that “fact” took guts—and more than a little “chutzpah.” When an eleventh-century scholar pointed out that a list of kings mentioned in the Torah lived long after Moses died, he was called “Isaac the Blunderer” and his books were burned. Better his books burned than himself, Isaac undoubtedly mused. Four hundred years later, in the fifteenth century, new critics were raising awkward questions. Like: How could Moses write about his own death? Wasn’t it odd that he called himself the “humblest man on earth”? A truly humble man wouldn’t say such a thing. Besides recording his own death, Moses couldn’t know of other later events that are mentioned in the Torah, like the long list of kings from nearby Edom who lived after Moses died. Traditional scholars tried to argue that Moses was a prophet, so he knew who those future kings would be. Others said that Joshua, Moses’ successor, had merely tacked on a few lines after Moses died or that a later prophet updated the writings of Moses. But their arguments didn’t stop the questions.
By the seventeenth century, as Europe entered the era of the Enlightenment, when rational thought and scientific observations were elevated over blind faith, other scholars began to question the authorship of Moses. A French priest who raised questions about Moses was arrested and forced to recant his views. In the grand tradition of the Roman