In part one, we saw how modern ideas of inspiration often don’t fit with the way that the ancient authors probably understood inspiration. We noted examples of how divine law could be changed, could be seemingly arbitrary (not based on some universal logos or reason), and could be only for a certain group of people (not universal).
In this chapter we’ll compare the laws of the Torah itself, and see if there is evidence that it too developed over time. Before we go any further, it would make sense to consider what the Bible actually says that Moses wrote; however, that topic will mostly wait until a book on Mosaic origins of the Bible in this series. Suffice it to say here that entire swaths of the Torah have no authorial attributions, with Genesis having none, and Deuteronomy having the most mentions of the law of the YHVH being written by Moses. The strongest claims are found in the New Testament. But the idea that only some of their core contents came from one man, and were later edited, would probably not have been an issue for most ancients, who had no trouble calling them “Moses’” books, even with obvious signs of later editing, the topic to which we now turn.
Evidence of Editing
Out of Time
Anachronisms are one evidence for later editing, like a clock in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, or a Cadillac in the movie “Blazing Saddles”, which was set in 1875. The Philistines, for instance, almost certainly did not come to the shores of Canaan until the 12th century, around the collapse of late bronze age;[1] but we see them mentioned in the Torah, even as early as the time of Abraham, who would have lived around 1,900 BCE, based on the Bible’s chronology.[2] There are many other such anachronisms, such as place names that did not exist in the time of Moses, or mentions of the Chaldeans.[3]
Of course, some anachronistic names could have actually been updates, as the actual alphabet of the Bible was updated as it changed over the centuries. The original alphabet of anything written in the time of Moses would have had to have been some type of Proto-Canaanite script. Most ancient Hebrew writing would later be updated to an Aramaic script, which would not have existed in the time of Moses.
Some scholars don’t think Moses would have inserted his own death at the end of Deuteronomy; of course he could have, even without divine revelation; the pertinent question is whether this seems likely. We will skip this question. Scholars often mention camels as an anachronism in Genesis, as not being domesticated that early; it sounds so cut and dry when they say it, but when I dug into the actual evidence, I found that when the camel was domesticated in that region was not quite so clear. This discussion may appear in the later book on Moses. But let’s focus on perspectives of time and place that had to come after Moses.
There are several phrases in the Torah that were written from a later time. One later perspective is found in the Edomite kings list in Genesis 36 (another item that scholars place on the list of anachronisms, but which I intend to address later as not so clear). There is one phrase, however, that should catch your eye: in verse 31, we see that these kings ruled “before any king reigned over the Israelites.” This is a later perspective, for there were no kings in Israel before the 12th century BCE, by the Bible’s own chronology. Another later perspective is Deuteronomy 34:10, where we’re told that “there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses”. Genesis 12:6 says that “at that time” the Canaanites were still in the land; this suggests that the author/editor is living in a time when they weren’t, and the Bible tells us that the Canaanites did not even begin to be driven out until after Moses died.
Out of Place
Perhaps the most glaring “non-Mosaic” perspective is found in Deuteronomy, which we’re told contains some sermons that Moses preached to the people in the plains of Moab, on the east side of the Jordan, before his death and their crossing into the Promised Land. We’re told that the children of Israel also conquered land on the east side of the Jordan during the life of Moses. Over and over throughout the book, references to where Moses spoke to the people (in the plains of Moab), and the land that they had taken, all on the east side of the Jordan, are referred to as beyond the Jordan.[4] There are a couple of “beyond the Jordan” references from Moses’ perspective, such as when Moses asks God to let him enter Canaan.[5] But the others are definitely from the perspective of being in Canaan, which Moses never entered.[6]
Other Possible Editorial Content
So now that we’ve seen considerable evidence of later editing of the Torah, if not a total later composition, let’s now consider a few more examples of later editing and even redacting, which a bias of assuming total mosaic authorship will not now prevent us from seeing. These are only a small sampling, intended to help the reader see them in the future.
In the sermons of Deuteronomy, there are several comments that seem explanatory, as if they might not have been included in the original sermon. These are often placed by modern translators in parentheses. Some of the comments appear to be later updating of names for places so that a reader in a later time period would understand which location was being referred to. Here are only a few examples of comments which appear to be added by an editor: 2:10-12, 20-23; 3:9, 11, 13b-14; and 4:48b.
Throughout the Torah, in fact, there are frequent and often glaring interruptions of the flow of the text where it appears details were added. In Exodus 6:14-27, for example, there is an interruption of the narrative to list part of the genealogies of Israel, which is a clear repeat of the one found in Genesis 46, until it gets to Levi, at which point more generations are added to his lineage, as these will become important in the rest of the Torah, since they will be singled out to serve the house of YHVH. The narrative that was cut off at verse 13 picks right back up in verse 28 as if we didn’t just cover a genealogy. (Of course, original authors can use parenthetical comments, too, so this is no sure evidence of later editing. By the way, I don’t use an editor, in case you hadn’t noticed already….)
Another evidence of a later perspective, like the updating of place names, is the use of different names for people or places. Moses’ father-in-law is the most obvious example, first called Reuel in Exodus[7], but then Jethro in the rest of the book. However, Numbers and Judges call him yet another name, Hobab.
Similarly, the mountain where Moses received the law has different names, depending on what book you’re in. Sinai appears more than a dozen times in Exodus and Numbers, and four times in Leviticus. Horeb appears only three times in Exodus, but ten in Deuteronomy, which, as we’ll see, scholars suggest is a much later addition to the Torah. But even if they’re wrong about that, Deuteronomy has some very compelling differences in its actual law, which we’ll examine below.
Mixed and Repeated Stories
There are several stories in Genesis that appear to be very similar, such as the accounts of a wife who is taken or nearly taken by a king from one of the patriarchs,[8] or the stories of a man encountering a woman at a well.[9] Scholars call these doublets, and cite them as examples that multiple ancient traditions, which evolved into different stories, have been woven back together. One of the most compelling arguments for such doublets is that, very often, Elohim is used for God in one of the doublets, and YHVH in the other.
At first glance, such arguments are quite compelling, because there are many striking parallels between the stories, such as the detail of a famine at the beginning of two of the woman-at-the-well stories. I will argue in a later book that many such repetitions were intentional, and prove something else besides merely a cobbling together of documents, and that this is in fact is one more case of scholars failing to see the obvious, despite all their knowledge, due to bias.[10] But let’s stay on the topic of evidence of redaction of the Torah, and focus on a couple of the more obvious doublets for the moment. Some doublets are combined into one story, others are found separate. We’ll begin with an example of the former.
Same Story—Different Rebels, Motives, Places, and Punishments
Numbers 16 tells a story regarding rebellion against the leaders that YHVH has chosen, Moses and Aaron. However, upon closer inspection, it actually appears to be two stories combined. One group of rebels are Korah and 250 Levites; the other are Dathan and Abiram, and according to one verse, a man named On. Up through verse 4 or so, it looks like these two groups of people assemble together, against both Moses and Aaron, but seams start to appear in the story the further you read. The seams are maybe a little blurred in the Hebrew because of two words used for tent/tabernacle, but we should be able to see past this based on context, especially since the overlap of word usage is not so visible in translation. Upon reading the whole thing, Korah’s group, who are Levites, have a beef with Aaron’s exclusive right to the priesthood. Dathan and Abiram, who are Reubenites, complain against Moses that they’ve been brought into a wilderness, from Egypt, a “land flowing with milk and honey”. Judgment on Korah’s group happens at the Tabernacle,[11] which was said to be outside the camp,[12] and it is by fire from heaven. While judgment on Dathan and Abiram happens at their tents, via the earth swallowing them up. However, beginning with verses 24 and 27, the details start to jumble. The congregation is commanded to get away from the tents of Korah, Dathan and Abiram. But according to verse 19, Korah was at the tent of meeting. In verse 25, Moses and the elders had to travel to the Dathan and Abiram, though the tents of all three men’s names were mentioned in the previous verse. I suppose if you wanted to harmonize the verses, Korah would have had to go with them, leaving the 250 men at the Tabernacle offering incense. Or maybe it was just the family of Korah at his tent who were swallowed by the earth, and Korah was left at the Tabernacle to be burned. (We’ll come back to the topic of intergenerational punishment later, in case you’re wondering why their families were killed as well.)
You can actually read the two accounts separately. By formatting the text differently, Richard Friedman made each story readable by itself, in both his book Who Wrote the Bible, and The Bible with Sources Revealed. I recommend the reading the former first.
Ironically, this is one of those examples of something that matters to moderns, but probably not to the ancients. Odds are, they would not have cared whether this was one incident, or two accounts crammed into one. They did not have the same journalistic standards, and could be more artful with their words, which moderns often lack the literacy to see, even when it can be seen in translation. For instance, God tenting/dwelling with his people, in a special way, was a theme throughout the Torah.
In Numbers, there is a similar connection and condition for God’s dwelling/tenting with them, a theme and vocabulary which is repeated from beginning to end of the book. We first see God communing and dwelling (tenting) with them in the camp, so they must keep it undefiled.[13] Next in chapters 13-14, we see the Canaanites dwelling in the land, which Israel, with God’s help, are to remove from their dwelling so that they may dwell there. In the rebellion(s) of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram in chapter 16, we have a possible inflection point, where God purifies Israel, who he threatens to destroy entirely, but is convinced by their intercessor, Moses (another key theme reaching all the way back to Abraham, and all the way forward to the Davidic promise), at which point God’s solution is destroy the dwellings of these rebels, so that his dwelling may remain holy. The last half of the book speaks of the hope and threat to their (and the Kenites) future secure dwelling[14], especially the chosen Levites, with God in the wilderness and then in Canaan, which they must remain holy to experience. By the end of the book (35:34), we’ve come full circle, from God dwelling in their camp to dwelling with them in the land, but once again: as long as they keep it and themselves holy!
By placing the punishment of these two groups of rebels together, the theme of God’s conditional dwelling is knit together: both God’s tent/dwelling (the Tabernacle) and the dwellings/tents of his people will be kept holy. And any rebellion against Moses’ authority and to his law (Dathan and Abiram) or against God’s Aaronic priesthood (Korah) will be cleansed away, with fire and sheol.
In other words, the repetition of words for “tent” and “dwelling” is key to understanding the whole book, and especially in the central account of the destruction of the rebels. To miss this while trying to parse out original sources just seems silly.
To better understand ancient “journalistic” standards, let’s consider a few examples. In Plutarch’s (46-120 CE) Life of Caesar,[15] we see Caesar telling the Senate that if they believed that he was trying to be king, they could kill him. When Caesar spoke before the spectators at the festival of the Lupercalia, he rejected the title of king. In Plutarch’s Life of Antony (12:1-4), he reports that Caesar did both at the festival. We have here the same author, yet a difference in detail that many of the ancients would not have cared about, or considered evidence of a lie, especially since the two actions carry similar meaning. In fact, some of the ancient historians would make up their own dialogues for historical figures,[16] as something that seemed reasonable for them to say, and then tell their audience that that was exactly what they were doing. After all, most ancient people did not have voice recorders or stenographers sitting nearby taking down every word. And dialogue makes for better story. Likewise, if there were two incidents of rebellions against Moses, most ancients probably would have seen no impropriety in telling them at once, especially when they serve a literary function, as we’ve seen.
There are similar re-arrangements in the gospels of certain narrative details which are contradicted by the other gospels. Some of them can be explained by such poetic license that allowed the authors to make certain literary structures; however, others are more problematic, as we’ll see. We’ll come back to historiographical standards before the modern era in a later work, as it is very important to understanding the documents of the Bible.
For further explanation for at least some of the contradictions, see the last section in this chapter on non-statutory law and apparent contradiction.
Rock Beating
There is another doublet, found in two places, which is a good example of a story which appears to have been born from a single account. It is the account(s) of Moses striking a rock to bring forth water for the people in the desert.[17] When I was young and I heard these accounts taught in church, they were simply told as two different incidents, one occurring near the beginning of the 40 years of wandering, and the other near the end. As such, there did not appear to be any contradiction. They even became a moral lesson: in the Exodus 17 account, Moses was told to strike the rock, and he obeyed, and everything was good. In the Numbers 20 account, he was told to speak to the rock, and he disobeyed by striking it. Therefore, one should be careful to obey every command of God, for even Moses himself was excluded from entering the Promised Land because of this one slip-up.
There are a couple of problems with this understanding. The first is that we’re not actually told what Moses did wrong in the Numbers account. Maybe it was because he took credit when he said “shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” This explanation would actually better explain why Aaron received the same punishment, for he was standing right there and let Moses give himself and Aaron the credit; Aaron did not, however, also strike the rock like Moses. Maybe it was a combination of disobeying the command to speak to the rock, and their taking credit.
For our purposes, though, we only care about the second problem with this passage, and that is setting. Exodus places it’s water-from-the-rock incident in the second month after leaving Egypt, in the wilderness of Rephidim, though it says that Moses went with the elders to Horeb to do it. The place name was called Massah (“testing”) and Meribah (“quarreling”) from that time onward. Skip over to Numbers 20, and the setting is Kadesh, when Miriam died. If you’d like to see how these locations fall in the chronology of Israel’s wanderings, there is a “master” list in Numbers 33; see verses 14 and 36, which also seem to confirm the idea that these were in fact two separate incidents. (The sequence of places in Numbers 33 agrees mostly with details in Exodus and Deuteronomy, but not completely.) But then Numbers 20:13 says something intriguing: “These are the waters of Meribah, where the people of Israel quarreled with the Lord.” So if these are two separate incidents, they gave two places the same name. Note, though, that among these two accounts, Massah is only used in the Exodus 17 account, where Moses didn’t get into trouble, yet another hint that this was actually one incident.
Meribah and Massah are both referenced many other times through Scripture, for it was a very important lesson(s) for Israel. All of the passages that reference Massah only refer to the people testing God, so they cannot necessarily be pinned to Numbers 20.[18] However, it should be noted that Deuteronomy references both Massah and Meribah together (33:8), as only found in Exodus 17; and Meribah and Kadesh together (32:51), which corresponds to the Numbers 20 account. Every other reference outside the Torah that can be tied to one account or the other only ties to the one where Moses got in trouble, Numbers 20.[19] So we have no definite proof that these were one incident turned into two, but there sure is a lot of overlap.
One theory for such doublets is that the divided kingdoms of Judah and Israel had their own versions, and when Israel began to fall before the brutal Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE, there was a massive influx of refugees who brought their versions of the accounts, and some politically astute individuals wove these holy national stories together. Scholars’ main theory for the reason for the alterations in the Numbers 20 story is to give more importance to Aaron, as they were trying to reinforce central control of the priestly offices in Jerusalem.[20] Below, we will consider more evidence of political motive couched in many of the alternate readings of the Torah. And we’ll also consider examples where it looks like there is an amalgamation of Torah law with purposes that seem to actually preclude their coming from differing sources.
For the next part of this chapter, comparing differences in the various law collection inside of the Torah, check out my book here.
[1] This is actually a fascinating phenomenon for those who want to understand real apocalypses; I recommend Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. He also has some good lectures on Youtube on the topic.
[2] E.g., Genesis 21:32, 34. The astute reader may notice that some of these anachronisms suggest that the writer not only wrote from a later time, but also seems to have gotten some facts wrong.
[3] Genesis 15:7. Our earliest evidences for the Chaldeans comes from the Kaldu, a group believed to have migrated to the area around 10th century BCE (“West Semitic”, Glottolog 2.2., by Sebastian Nordhoff, Harald Hammarström, Robert Forkel, and Martin Haspelmath, 2013). However, the Hebrew word used may not actually be an anachronism here, despite the fact the Chaldeans are almost universally given as a certain anachronism by scholars. (Britannica, once again, makes a categorical statement that is actually not certain, that the two names refer to the same group; see “The Genesis narrative in the light of recent scholarship of Abraham”.) The word for Chaldean is used in the later Greek Hebrew Bible, but the actual Hebrew word Kasdim is actually debated among some scholars as referring to the Kaldu, and may be a reference to the descendants of Abraham’s nephew (Genesis 22:22), and/or it may derive from the Babylonian root kasadu, meaning to capture; in other words, plunderers (cf. Job 1:17) (“Chaldea”, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Online).
[4] Deuteronomy 1:1, 5; 3:8, 20; 4:41, 46, 47.
[5] Deuteronomy 3:25; see also 11:30.
[6] I use biblegateway.com for such word searches. Their search tool works better than some other free online Bibles, and allows searching by book. For this one, I simply typed in “beyond the Jordan”, and immediately had all such references from Deuteronomy. Such a search is limited, however, as translations can sometimes render even the same phrase or word in Hebrew differently in the various places where they’re found.
[7] 2:18; 3:1; Numbers 10:29; Judges 4:11
[8] Compare Abraham and Pharaoh in Genesis 12:10-20; Abraham and Abimelech in Genesis 20, and Isaac and Abimelech in Genesis 26.
[9] Genesis chapters 24 and 29. Even Exodus 2:15-17.
[10] While it seems that the majority of scholars take the doublets as simple evidence of different sources, my view that they often serve literary functions has long been recognized by a minority.
[11] Miskan (Stong’s 4908) and ohel (168) both are used to refer to the tabernacle/tent of God, which was the one outside the camp, at least according to some passages (see below); compare verses 9, 18, 19. But, both these Hebrew words, or similar forms of them, can also be used for the tents/dwellings of individual people; compare verses 24, 26, 27. Again, to see the English with the Hebrew, I use biblehub.com/interlinear, with book/chapter selection at the top of the page. Each Hebrew word is hyperlinked to its Strong’s definitions and uses through the whole Bible.
[12] Exodus 33:7; again, other passages place the Tabernacle inside the camp, to be examined later.
[13] 1:1; 5:3
[14] E.g., 23:9, 24:21; 33:55; 35.
[15] 60.3-6; 61.1-4, quoted by Michael R. Licona, in his book Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?”, pp. 83-91.
[16] As admitted freely by Thucydides at the end of chapter 1 of History of the Peloponnesian War.
[17] Exodus 17:2-7; Numbers 20:2-13
[18] Deuteronomy 6:16; 9:22; 33:8; Psalm 95:8
[19] Psalm 106:32; Ezekiel 47:19; 48:28
[20] Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Friedman, p. 180.