Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [13]
What these generations of scholars all noted was that the Books of Moses, in which the Laws of God had been laid out, contained contradictions in time, place, and numbers of things, and names that couldn’t possibly belong in the time of Moses. Why were there duplicate versions of so many Bible stories, versions that did not always agree? Why, for instance, does Genesis open with two different versions of the Creation? Even more troubling, there were different names for God. If God had dictated these scriptures to Moses, why hadn’t God used the same name all the time? Why did Moses—who had spoken to God—use so many different names for God? And finally, how could Moses write, at the end of Deuteronomy: “Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command”? (Deut. 34:5)
These and other troubling questions raised by the mystery of Moses just wouldn’t go away. And as the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation chipped away at the pervasive power of the Church of Rome, the questions were asked by more and more people. No longer could church leaders explain away the numerous differences in style or the contradictions and anachronisms contained in the Torah as the “Word of God,” take it or leave it. As generations of scholars pursued this mystery, it became clearer that Moses was not the book’s author. They might be the Books of Moses, but they were not the Books by Moses. Equally important was the mounting evidence that the books attributed to Moses were composed at very different historical times. To many serious scholars, it seemed apparent that more than one author was at work. On many of these points, honest people still disagree. The difference is no one is being burned for heresy any longer.
If not Moses, then who?
Imagine taking apart an intricately woven tapestry and trying to figure out where each strand of thread came from, who had woven the cloth, and what they were thinking when they wove it. This is the seemingly impossible task that lay in front of biblical scholars trying to establish authorship of the Bible. As these scholars unraveled the threads of the Hebrew scriptures, they could see that very different strands had been woven together to tell the story. Often, these strands made references to events that happened much later than the events being described. Like the clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, there were obvious anachronisms. Empires that didn’t exist when Moses was alive were mentioned. A king of the Philistines was said to be around hundreds of years before the Philistines moved into the neighborhood. Camels were described in use before they were actually domesticated. In other words, it seemed obvious that some writers composed this material long after the events they described and added “details” that would be meaningful to the people they were addressing.
There are still many literalists who faithfully assert that the Bible is the “Word of God,” dictated verbatim to “divinely chosen” individuals. However, most scholars now agree that there were at least four or five main authors, or groups of authors, of the Hebrew scriptures. They believe that they were composed over a long time, stretching from sometime around 1000 to 400 BCE. The idea that the Torah evolved from a combination of various sources is formally known as the “Documentary Hypothesis.” This thinking gained such weight that, by 1943, even the Vatican under Pope Pius XII acknowledged