Mosaic authorship
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 1:40 am
I REALLY hesitate to answer your first question because it is so fraught with religious implications and my answer here will probably set off a war of words akin to the crusades! This is bound to become the very definition of a “flame war.” This is really a can of worms!!!!! Asking if it is generally accepted that Moses wrote the pentateuch is akin to asking if “global warming” is generally accepted or if the theory of evolution is generally accepted. Or asking 500 years ago if the heliocentric view of the solar system is generally accepted. Yours has largely become a religious question rather than an historical one.Stephen Hughes wrote: Is it generally accepted that Genesis was written down by Moses? What were the light-weight and durable materials available to write on at that time?
Therefore, let me answer the second question first because it is easier. If we accept that there was a person named Moses in the mid second millennium BC/BCE who wrote “the Torah” (as it is called in Jewish tradition) or “the Pentateuch” (as it is called in scholarly Christian tradition), he may have had available to him papyrus. There are extant examples of papyrus texts from this period in Egypt. (E.g. the “Edwin Smith medical papyrus,” the “Ebers medical papyrus,” the “Turin erotic papyrus” etc. See an ostensibly accurate list of extant first and second millennium BC papyri at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_an ... ian_papyri) There are no extant papyri from Israel from the mid second millennium BC, but because of a wetter climate, it is likely that if they ever existed in this region, they have perished. From the centuries just before the NT period, there are some extant papyri among the so called “Dead Sea Scrolls.” The climate around Qumran is similar to Egypt. I would not therefore consider papyrus “durable” though it is lightweight
Also among the Qumran texts (AKA. “Dead Sea Scrolls”) are some texts on leather. I do not recall any leather texts from Israel earlier than the dead sea scrolls. A text the size of the Torah would physically require over 100 of feet of parchment! (The Isaiah scroll from Qumran is nearly 25 feet ((734 cm) long and Isaiah is only 66 chapters in the MT of the bible.)
There are written texts on ostraca (broken shards of clay pottery) found in Israel dating from a millennium or so after the period we are assigning to Moses for purposes of discussion. However, if Moses wrote on ostraca, the Torah texts would require over 5,000 ostraca even if one whole verse were written on each one! (The average verse is much longer than the average length of text on an ostraca.)
There exist no examples of Hebrew written in cuneiform. But if we postulate Mosaic authorship at this period it would be possible/likely? that these texts would have been written in some form of Hebrew in a script like Ugaritic on clay. This also would have required hundreds or more likely thousands of tablets.
It is conceivable that Moses would have written on clay, stone, papyrus, parchment, or ostraca and then the texts were hauled around palestine for centuries by nomads during the early wars of the Israeli’s occupation as recorded in Judges, Samuel-Kings etc., but this stretches the limits of credulity and therefore should probably be called a religious/faith-based belief and not an historical/scholarly one. It is not generally accepted in non-religious scholarly circles that Moses wrote the Torah.
Many religious scholars who believe the Torah was given by God to Moses believe in the Mosaic authorship thereof. Most secular scholars no longer hold this belief. Authorship of the Torah is generally placed as much as a full millennium later than the period Moses would have lived
Let the flames begin!
Ray