By just addressing one of my arguments (TSR, January/February 2000, pp. 8-9), Roger Hutchinson previously tried to refute my claim that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. In the wake of his failure, he has struck back with a more thorough attempt to counter the abundant evidence I had presented, and he concluded by writing, "Skeptics need to do better than this." Gee, I'll try, but trying to persuade anyone with such an emotional bias as his is probably an exercise in futility.
First, Never-Say-Die Hutchinson returned to our original argument over whether Genesis 36:31 referred to the Egyptian pharaohs or to the later Israelite monarchy. He accused me of the fallacy of assuming what one wants to prove, which is something, to no one's surprise, he does himself. Notice how he derided me for refusing to use the Pentateuch itself as evidence that Moses wrote it. Now whether Moses wrote it is the very essence of the debate! If I accept the Pentateuch's claims at face value the debate is over, and nothing has been proven. Hutchinson asserted that I would show such reluctance only when it comes to the Bible, but, actually, authenticity is a valid concern for any historical document. I would be careful about attribution when it comes to any ancient text. For example, I have a strong suspicion that the extended dialogs of Socrates in Plato's writings may have been put into his mouth by Plato, who used him as his mouthpiece, but nobody's calling that gospel truth.
In my first rejoinder, I presented a firm case for the assumption that Genesis 36:31 was referring to Israelite kings. Hutchinson found it best simply to ignore this case, falsely characterizing it as "pure conjecture." This forced him to ignore the biblical evidence that identified two of the kings listed in Genesis (Bela and Hadar) as men who lived after the exodus. (If even biblical evidence won't satisfy Hutchinson, then this is an even more futile effort than I had suspected.) Bela was referred to as Balaam in Numbers 11:14, a time which was clearly not pre-Egypt, and Hadar was referred to in 1 Kings 11:14. I should point out here that the letter "r" in this spelling is a copying error. First Chronicles 1:30-50 confirms that the name was "Hadad." In Hebrew, the letters resh and daleth look very similar and were thus prone to be confused, which happened a good deal in the Hebrew text and was carried into English translations. That is something else for Hutchinson to explain in his "inerrant" book.
In discussing this item, I referred to a very conservative Bible dictionary that identified Bela as a postexodus Edomite king. Hutchinson concluded that "nonbiblical sources can be wrong" without even trying to demonstrate that this was so in this case. Hutchinson himself said, "He needs to offer proof," so he should take his own advice and explain why so many conservative exegetes have seen fit to interpret this passage in a way that he will not.
Once having revisited this particular item, Hutchinson attempted to dispense with several others from my original article, so it is incumbent on me to dispense with his arguments.
Hutchinson underestimated the number of historical records available on Egypt. In Egyptian archives, there is much more information on Egypt than was presented in the Bible, which was apparently unable to provide even the names of pharaohs until the much later Shishak. This is an important biblical omission that raises suspicions of a later authorship of the Pentateuch. Hutchinson suggested that Moses may have been deleted from Egyptian records and that it "appears" that such deletion was a common Egyptian practice. This is not only not what the Bible claims about Moses but is, to borrow a term from Hutchinson, "pure speculation." There is no evidence to demonstrate that the Egyptians generally did this. Hutchinson himself alluded to the problems with this argument when he said that "we do not know enough to prove anything" (page 6, this issue). Certainly, we don't know enough to prove his speculative assertion that Egyptian records are silent about Moses because all references to him were expunged. I repeat my suggestion that even had the Egyptians stricken Moses from official records (the Cecil B. DeMille theory), they would have had no control over unofficial records or popular memory. Someone as allegedly spectacular as Moses could not have disappeared without a trace, so Hutchinson must explain why a God who places such extreme emphasis on faith would have allowed all independent confirmation of Moses to be expunged, thus making faith more problematic. It seems like a cruel trick.
Hutchinson, as further excuse, also brought up the Red Sea story, which would provide material for an entire article. I'll briefly summarize the problems with this tall tale by pointing out that the Hebrew text refers to yam suph, which was probably not the Red Sea but the Sea of Reeds, a shallow body (as the presence of reeds would indicate) in which a stiff breeze could clear a path (Ex. 14:21-22). Legends do seem to magnify over time, and here it erroneously became the Red Sea. In biblical times, the "Red Sea" was a term applied not just to the Red Sea but also to the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqabah, so even if we consider that the "Red Sea" was just the Gulf of Suez, there would be enormous problems in this story. The Red Sea and its adjoining gulfs are part of the Great Rift, a giant fissure in Earth's crust that runs from Tanzania to the Dead Sea, and one cannot simply walk across a deep gorge! Meanwhile, note that yam suph lay directly between their home in Goshen and the Sinai, an indication that the Red Sea was not the proper body of water.
Other problems with this story are the decimation of the Egyptian army, which would not have occurred had the firstborn sons actually been killed in the final plague. We also have to wonder where the Egyptians got horses to pull their chariots and carry their soldiers in pursuit of the Israelites, since Exodus 9:6 claims that all the livestock of Egypt died in the fourth plague. I leave these problems for Hutchinson to chew on, but I am confident that he will refuse to acknowledge any difficulty.
A problem in Hutchinson's analogy: There is an interesting defect in Hutchinson's comparison of the scant mentioning of Moses in the Bible's history books to a hypothetical American history text on the Civil War that made only a few references to George Washington. The very capital the North protected, whose authority had to be reestablished over the entire land, was named after George Washington! This fact would establish beyond dispute that Washington had not only preexisted the Civil War era but had been important enough to have the national capital named after him. Compare that to Moses, who wasn't mentioned in Judges or the books of Samuel and Kings commensurate with his stature as God's emissary, so there is no evidence that such a person had had any palpable influence on Israel at that time in its history. Furthermore, we have no original-- or early--copies of these books to demonstrate that even incidental mentionings of Moses were part of the original texts, before the Babylonian Exile, which I hypothesize was when the Moses story was first presented to the people. That this is so is indicated by the fact that not just Moses but names like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were not given to Israelite children until the exile, after which they became common. As Paine observed, it is only natural that a people would name their sons after ancestors and great heroes, so the fact that no one used these names before the exile suggests that they were unknown until later than the traditional time of the Pentateuch's composition.
The second commandment: The second commandment states that one shall not make any image of anything that lives. Period. It says nothing about forbidding only those images used in worship, other images being okay. The fact that in practice all images were taboo among Israelites indicates that this strict interpretation was how it was understood. We should note that we have two different commandments here (1, no images; 2, no worship of idols), which is how Protestants have always taken it.
Hutchinson has difficulty understanding why a temple was constructed and a system of sacrificial rituals instituted in the absence of scriptural instruction, as I assert. The explanation is really simple: the Israelites were quite naturally performing the same sort of religious practices of other ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Judaism was in a very inchoate state then. Later the priestcraft, attempting to formalize and justify their traditional status, came up with the book of Leviticus. By then the religion had evolved into something we would recognize.
I would ask Hutchinson to explain why God would even instruct the Jews to perform sacrificial rituals, since, as Christians have stressed, such sacrifices were useless--the sacrifice of Jesus alone being efficacious in achieving redemption and forgiveness of sins. Isn't it horribly primitive and anthropomorphic to claim, as the Bible repeatedly does, that God enjoys the "sweet savor" of burning flesh? Couldn't he have done his own barbecuing without conning Jews into doing it under the fraudulent notion that they were earning forgiveness of sin?
If these verses are "difficult to understand" (an all-too-common problem), Hutchinson should also explain why the God who created the entire universe, in its immensity and magnificence, can't write more clearly!
The Chaldeans: Twice Hutchinson claimed that the Bible provides "additional information" that the Chaldeans were known, at least to the Bible writers, and inhabited Ur before secular history became aware of them, but he failed to provide this information. Historians agree that the Chaldeans, a Semitic people, started to move into the area sometime after 1100 BCE, following the Semitic Assyrians, and achieved dominance only by the 8th century. There is no evidence, biblical or otherwise, that they were there in the legendary time of Abraham, when the city was inhabited by the non-Semitic Sumerians. I found no historical record that there may have been four "Urs," as Hutchinson vaguely insinuated. Referring to Ur as Chaldean must indicate a later composition than Moses. Since Nehemiah is a postexilic work, as Hutchinson conceded, it is of no value in demonstrating the validity of Genesis, which is also postexilic. Of course, they would agree. They had gotten their story straight by then and may even have been written by the same man (Ezra).
The Ten Commandments: Unfortunately, Hutchinson assumed that I was referring only to the different accounts of the ten commandments. These commandments formed only a small part of the "Mosaic Code" of 612 injunctions, which were culled from a number of earlier documents. As I said before, they are presented in a highly disorganized manner unbefitting an omniscient god. Hutchinson accused me of providing no analysis to prove my point. I didn't want to bog down the article with a lot of dull details, but here goes. Reader who don't need to see the documentation are encouraged to skip ahead.
The Decalogue in Exodus 20:22-26 and into chapters 21, 22, 23 (1-11; 20-33), and 24 is referred to as the "covenant code" and contains much of known Mesopotamian origin, except for 21:12, 15-17 and 22:19-20, which is called the "participial code"; 22:29-30 is part of the "ritual/cultic decalogue" of chapter 23 (12-19) but is out of place. [You may want to read the passage in chapter 23 and then skip back to the two verses in chapter 22 to see the obvious association between two sections that became separated through editing.]
Chapters 25-30 contain the "priestly code," but verse 29:31 belongs after v:26, and v:43 after v:37. [Read them in this order to see the continuity.] Chapter 31:14-17 has decalogue material out of order, and 34:1-25 presents the "ritual/ cultic decalogue" that has nothing to do with the familiar "ten commandments," which Yahweh had said at the beginning of the chapter that he would rewrite on two new tablets of stone (like the first), which Moses had broken in anger after he had descended from Mount Sinai and found the people worshiping the golden calf. "Cut two tablets of stone like the first ones," Yahweh had said, "and I will write on these tablets the words that were on the tablets which you broke" (v:1). After Moses had cut the new stones and carried them up the mountain, Yahweh then launched into a spiel that was nothing like the words that were on the first tablets (Ex. 20:1-17). Then at 34:27, Yahweh, who had said that he would write the words on the stones, said to Moses, "Write these words, for according to the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel." This is quite a mishmash of confusion for an "inerrant book."
The priestly code resumed in chapters 35-40. Then later there is Leviticus, another priestly code, and the "holiness code," running from Leviticus 17 through 26. Deuteronomy, despite meaning "second law," actually incorporates the first attempt to create a law code by Israelite priests. Had it been perfect-- from God--it would not have been necessary--or divinely authorized--to produce any other.
Is that clear?
Conclusion: The claim that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible cannot be proven by just traditional claims that Moses wrote them or by allusions in the books to short works that Moses allegedly wrote. The anachronisms and discrepancies are so abundant as to refute not only Mosaic authorship but divine inspiration as well. Those who are emotionally committed to biblical traditions are not likely to acknowledge the textual problems that exist in the Pentateuch, and thereby reach the conclusion the evidence points to, i. e., Moses didn't write it. Instead, they come up with desperate rationalizations to explain away the problems. Hutchinson put more effort into his rebuttal this time, but it was not good enough. And he can't do any better.
(Stephen Van Eck, RR 1, Box 61, Rushville, PA 18839-9702)
