This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #422, on the subject of Are There Anachronisms in the Torah that Invalidate It?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
4. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?
5. In response to the fifth objection we wrote #420: Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?
6. The sixth objection asked and answered #421: Did Moses Write the Torah?

The article’s seventh objection is “There are many anachronisms”.

As I mentioned in the introductory article, I am not an Old Testament scholar; I am a New Testament scholar and teacher.  I can’t actually say to what degree there are anachronisms in the Torah–but I can give some principles that might help.

The article specifically targets the phrase “before any kings ruled over the sons of Israel”, claiming that it proves that the books were not written until a time after there were kings.  There are several points to make in response to this, but one is that Moses specifically predicted that Israel would have kings (see Deuteronomy 17:14ff and 28:36), and once that prediction has been made it is not unreasonable for the writer to say that these certain things happened before there were kings.

Further, in this connection and in connection with the statement that there are place names used that did not exist for centuries after the Exodus, two things must be asserted.

First, among those of us who hold to some form of inerrancy, the rule is generally that the Bible was completely correct in its original text.  I know a fair amount about New Testament textual criticism, the effort to establish the original text of those books; I also know that there are problems with applying these techniques to the Old Testament.  Chief among these is that the accepted text in the Jewish community, the Masoretic Text, was preserved over the centuries in a very unusual way.  Each copy was reverently and meticulously made from an older copy, looking at the next letter, writing that letter, checking that letter, then moving to the next, and ultimately when the new copy had been completed the old was reverently destroyed.  Of course, we have versions of the Hebrew text that are outside that tradition, plus early translations to other ancient languages, but the older the document in question the more difficult it is to establish the original text.  It may be that changes have crept into the Torah which we cannot correct.

The second point, though, is that it is not at all improbable that there were changes made in the early centuries.  Particularly with place names, if the original document recorded a city or a mountain or some other landmark by the name it had at the time the document was written, and then over time the name changed, it is not at all unlikely that copyists preserving the text for the next generation would have replaced the original name with that name which would be known by the intended audience.  It is similarly not at all implausible that the comment about events occurring before there were kings in Israel was a later accretion added so as to avert reader confusion.  We see this in the New Testament at times, that there is a short text in most of the earliest copies, and then a clarifying comment appears in a margin, and then copyists mistakenly insert that comment into the text believing it to be an editorial correction.  After all, these accounts were intended in large part to provide for the people an understanding of their past, and the fewer place names they recognized the more the story seems to become a fantasy.  Thus a copyist might well say, oh, that’s not called that anymore, now it’s called this, so we’ll update it.

Of course, the copyist could be wrong, and that would mean that an error crept into the text.  Most of us don’t have a problem with the possibility that the text we have is not absolutely accurately the one produced by Moses; the changes are undoubtedly going to be minor and not significant to our understanding of that which they report.

So ultimately the kinds of anachronisms that are claimed to be in the Torah are not a sort that would invalidate the assertion that the original documents date from the events they claim to report and over centuries minor accretions and corrections have adhered to the text without impacting the integrity of the core events reported.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #421, on the subject of Did Moses Write the Torah?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
4. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?
5. In response to the fifth objection we wrote #420: Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?

The article’s sixth objection is “Moses did not write any of the Torah”.

That sounds dramatic, but the questions really are, is that true, and is that relevant?

To approach this statement, one needs to get a bit of a history of theology lesson.  In the nineteenth century a major movement began on the principle (which we have already mentioned) that miracles never happened, and therefore any accounts which report them having happened are false, and have to be explained somehow.  People fumbled around trying to explain how the five books we call the Books of Moses, also the Torah or the Pentateuch, came to be.  Then near the end of that century a couple scholars named Graf and Welhausen proposed what they called the Documentary Hypothesis.  It is rather complicated, but in essence they divided the entire corpus into four documents which they asserted were written at different times by different authors and pieced together to create what we have.  The evidence for this was that there were differences in writing style and content that one could not only identify but also demonstrate were more primitive or more advanced, that is, that one document was clearly the oldest, another clearly the newest, and the remaining two fairly clearly positioned in sequence between them.

They named these the “Jahwist” or “Yahwist”, characterized by the use of the Tetragrammaton, the “Elohist”, using “Elohim” or “Lord” predominantly for the name of God, the “Priestly”, primarily concerned with rules and functions for priests and sacrifices, and the “Deuteronomist”, who invented all the regulations needed for running the society.  The “J” document, they asserted, was the oldest, possibly dating from the time of the judges, possibly from one of the tribes, while the “E” document came later, perhaps when the kings of Israel came to be, in the time of Samuel.  The “P” document was probably connected to Solomon and the building of the temple, and the “D” document was the last, probably the “lost book of the law” discovered according to II Kings 22 during the time of Hilkiah, which some suggest Jeremiah had a hand in composing.  The proof of the theory was supposedly that it was self-evident that these documents created by carefully dividing the text were from different periods of history, in the order JEPD.

This was a complicated process.  There were places in which the duo removed one or two words from what they said was an elohist section of the text which they claimed was an addition from the hand of the deuteronomist, and similar adjustments.  Yet the theory was rapidly embraced, because it provided an explanation for the existence of the Torah that meant none of it was true, none of it was ancient, and none of the miracles ever happened.

Of course, it became the foundation for discussion, as other scholars wanted to participate in understanding this notion.  Some suggested that the elohist was more primitive than the yahwist, others that the deuteronomist predated the priestly, and over the course of time scholars put the four documents in every one of the twenty-four possible sequences chronologically.

In case you missed the problem, though, the proof that these actually were a valid four original documents redacted to create the Torah was that one was quite obviously the oldest and most primitive and the others clearly fell into place as the religion matured.  Yet if scholars can’t agree as to which is the most primitive, the basis for asserting that these documents have any validity at all collapses.

Still, the Graf-Welhausen Documentary Hypothesis in one form or another is the explanation for the books embraced by nearly all liberal scholars, because the alternative is to believe that Moses was responsible for writing them and that they are true, miracles and all.

The article, though, gives several quibbling reasons to support the assertion that Moses didn’t write it–that it sometimes refers to him in the third person, it never claims to be written by him, he could not be humble and write that he was, it reports details of his death, it speaks of a time before there were kings suggesting that it was written after there were kings, some people are identified by different names in different places, and there are geographical anachronisms.  The last of those is the next objection, so we will defer it.

When it is said that Moses wrote the five books attributed to him, it does not mean that he necessarily composed every word of it himself.  For example, the structure of Genesis strongly suggests that records had been kept by the eldest sons descended from Seth through Jacob and stored in the libraries of Egypt–both Joseph and Moses had connections to the royal house of Egypt and so could access those libraries–and thus that Moses primarily redacted those earlier writings, putting them into a format that could be taken with him on their departure.  It is also entirely likely that he dictated portions of the text and similarly directed others concerning what to record–it might reasonably be that the specific design of the tabernacle was described by Moses to those responsible for its construction, and recorded by scribes as it was accomplished.  Those scribes would have recorded some events that Moses performed, and completed the record with his death and burial.

As to the names, it was common for ancient persons to be known by different names, often because of their involvement with different cultures and languages.  Even as late as the New Testament we have several persons who are identified as being known by two or even three different names for various reasons.  Saul of Tarsus was eventually more famously known as Paul.  It is a mistake to think that Jesus changed his name–there is no record of Jesus calling him that in their brief encounter–and it is far more likely that the boy born in a devout Jewish household in a Roman city was given both a good solid Jewish name and a secular name for doing business with the world around them.

The reference to the kings connects closely to the anachronisms, which is the next objection to be addressed.

It might be argued that Moses himself did not actually write a word of the entire Bible.  Yet it is clearly true that Jesus did not actually write a single word of the entire Bible, either.  What matters is that their words were accurately recorded and, in the case of Moses, that he was responsible for the creation of the books later attributed to him.  Thus whether or not he put pen to paper (or stylus to tablet) is irrelevant to the question of whether the events reported about him are true.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #420, on the subject of Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
4. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?

The fifth objection reads “Unrealistic hygiene requirements,” and after citing the requirement that excrement be buried outside the camp the writer asserts that those in the center of the camp would have to walk miles to get outside the bounds, given the number of persons.

To illustrate the problem, the article provides an image of a modern refugee camp.  It is a plausible image, but not necessarily an accurate one.

We know, up front, that the Israelites were already divided into thirteen separate groups, the twelve tribes plus the Levites.  We are clearly told that when they camped, three tribes camped north of the tabernacle, three to the west, three to the south, and three to the east, with the Levites in the center.  The gut reaction is to envision a square–but that “three on each side with one in the middle” design only allows nine groups.  That means in order to have the design suggested, we have to push outward, which creates space between the camps of the tribes.  Someone who walked to the space between the Levites and, say, the tribe of Reuben, would be “outside the camp” in every meaningful way.

Certainly the tribes at this point are city-sized populations; but again, we know that they are divided into families, and there is no reason to suppose that given the vast area of the wilderness in which they were traveling that they crowded together like a refugee camp.  If there was space between the families within the tribes, there would be room “outside the camps” of the individual families that was within the tribal area.

In my own experience camping in the wilderness, groups of several dozen campers would be clustered together, but there would be space (in my experience usually wooded) between those clusters, and it was typical to walk out of the campground into the space between with a shovel and a roll of paper.  This would be adequate to keep the requirement cited.

So the objection requires specific and unsupported assumptions regarding how the camps were organized and what the command actually requires.  No one would have to walk even the length of a football field to comply.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #419, on the subject of When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?

Turning to the fourth objection, we read “A load beyond measure,” followed by an accounting of that which the Israelites were reported to have with them over the months and years which followed.  This, we are told, is more than they could have brought with them.

Certainly this is problematic if we take literally the statement that they only took food wrapped in their shoulder sleeves and some treasure they obtained from the Egyptians, but our article doesn’t cite where we are told these and they probably should be taken as metaphoric indications of how much they left behind.  We also might see it as peculiar that slaves who lived in houses also owned tents, and there are some odd objects which were effectively scrounged by and from among the people in the days ahead.  Yet this objection seems to amount to saying that we don’t know all the circumstances of their departure or how much they actually managed to pack to take with them.  Nor do we know the circumstances of their enslavement–but we do know that it was very different from slavery in recent centuries.

First, the Israelites did not come to Egypt as slaves.  They came as members of the already wealthy family of one of the most powerful lords of the land.  They were given their own territory, and still lived there centuries later.  At some point after they were no longer a significant part of the Egyptian government, they were pressed into servitude–but they already owned homes and land and much more.  They were propertied people, living in their own homes, not housed in slave quarters.

Second, they came to Egypt as shepherds, bringing large flocks, and they left Egypt with many of them still shepherds with their own flocks.  Goshen is a fairly large region, and shepherding is a nomadic trade as sheep are moved from place to place for food and water.  At some times of the year they are kept on the fields at night.  It is not at all unlikely that shepherds who lived in houses would also own comfortable tents for those times when they were spending their days outdoors.

It appears that they had one day to pack, but that’s not entirely accurate.  Moses had been telling them for weeks at least that they would be leaving, and some at least would have begun preparing for the move.

As to the amount of firewood they brought, these people cooked their food and heated their homes with wood.  Bringing as much firewood as you can is a no-brainer.

O.K., some of the objects they had seem improbable.  So, what’s the probability that someone would have brought a large wooden beam?  One in a hundred?  In a thousand?  In a hundred thousand?  What if it’s a tent ridgepole?  And how many people left Egypt in the Exodus?  Improbable objects will have been brought.

As an aside, the article incidentally and unnecessarily takes a swipe at the belief that God’s home was above a solid floor in the sky which held back the rain and snow.&nbsp The Bible doesn’t actually teach this cosmology; it only uses the terminology to express aspects of reality in ways the people of the time would have understood.  Obviously something keeps the rain and snow from falling, and I dare say most people in the modern world don’t fully understand what that is any better than that there’s a firmament of some sort.

Two million people will have brought a lot with them, particularly as they knew they were leaving their homes with no plan to return.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #418, on the subject of Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?

The third objection in simple form reads “A really long line,” which is expanded, “Two and a half million people would have created a line well over 200 miles long (at eight abreast with only three feet between each row) along with their animals, of which the Bible says they had many.”

I notice that the number of people just increased by twenty-five percent, from an estimated two million to two and a half million; but it’s an estimate, so we’ll let it slide.  The issue seems to be that a column that long could not outrun Pharaoh’s charioteers.

However, we have a couple of assumptions here.

First, there’s no reason to assume that these people are walking in parade formation.  The author gets this outrageous length of the line by making it very narrow.  I think eight abreast would be roughly twenty feet wide, but we’ll call it twenty-five.  Twenty-five feet by two hundred miles creates a total area of less than one square mile–and there’s no reason to think these people were trying to follow a road or stay between the lines.  We have a mob.  If it formed a circle, it would have a diameter of about two thirds of a mile.

Obviously it’s going to cover a lot of area, and obviously it’s not going to do so efficiently, but the two hundred mile line is an artificial construct that is extremely implausible, created to make it seem absurd.

Of course, we are talking about hikers outrunning charioteers, but whether that can happen really depends on their head start.  We are not given that information.  We are told that when the Israelites departed Pharaoh was glad to see the back of them, but before they reached the water he changed his mind and pursued them.  We don’t know how long it took for them to reach the crossing; we are told that they camped along the way, but also that they traveled by day and night, so they were apparently eager to keep moving.  So given the lack of information on those details, it is not at all implausible that Israel could reach the crossing before Pharaoh caught them.