Re: Moses definitely did not write the Pentateuch
Wavy Wonder1 said:
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".
wil said:
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.
bob_x said:
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
