APPENDIX 2

Research Methodology

Today orthodox Jews, as well as millions of Christians, still assume that God divinely inspired every word of the Torah. Yahweh communicated his wishes face-to-face with Moses from atop the sacred mountain and the prophet carefully transcribed every word. Archaeologists, after decades of exploration in Israel and throughout the Middle East, can find no convincing physical evidence for a vast exodus of thousands of people from Egypt as described in the Bible. Within academic circles there is considerable debate about the historical reliability of the books attributed to Moses and doubt as to whether the celebrated prophet even existed. We live in a time when blind faith and deep skepticism reign side by side.

For centuries several Jewish and Catholic scholars found solace in the notion that Moses was God’s sole scribe. Then some uncomfortable facts and contradictions began to nudge against the credibility of that view. How, for instance, if Moses was the author of the entire text, could he write an account of his own death? Why did he sometimes refer to himself in the third person? These and other thorny questions began to strain the belief that the prophet from Egypt was the sole author of the first five books of the Bible.

A Spanish rabbi, Isaac ben Jasos of Toledo (982–1057)^*56 focused his critical comments on the following verse: “And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.”¹

How could Moses know that the Israelites would someday adopt the institution of monarchy? The text didn’t fit with any rational chronology of events. And how did Moses know the names of kings who lived centuries after his death? Of course, to the true believer these questions were irrelevant since God is All Knowing and could easily pass knowledge of the future to Moses. But this response did not entirely satisfy and the suspicion that Moses was not the sole author of the Torah began to take root.

The Rabbi Ibn Ezra (1088–1167) was skeptical about Moses’s role but didn’t have the courage to declare that the prophet couldn’t have been the sole author of the Torah. His fears in proclaiming such a radical theory were obvious when he said, “he who understands will keep silent.”

Scholars were worried about questioning the validity of the authorship of God’s chosen prophet. Disagreement over theological issues was a serious affair. People could lose their heads or be burnt at the stake for voicing doubts about the content of the Holy Bible. When scholars eventually did summon the courage to point to problems in the text they were always quick to say that some other legitimate prophet, notably Joshua or Ezra, had added phrases that were divinely inspired. No one was ready to consider that ordinary men, with earthly motives, had tampered with the words of a prophet.

If the Torah was considered above reproach, progress in unraveling the hidden elements of the story was impossible. No one doubted that Moses lived a hundred and twenty years and no one questioned why he wore a veil over his face during the last forty years of his life. The Torah was the Work of God and His words were sacrosanct. The idea that there might be more than one author, let alone more than one Moses, was something scholars dared not contemplate.

Things started to change in the sixteenth century as more Christians entered the fray. In 1520, Carlstadt published an essay that argued that the style of writing found in the books immediately following the Torah seemed to be the same voice as that attributed to Moses. This raised the possibility that Moses was not the author and that the true author had lived long after Moses died.

In 1570, Andrew du Maes, a Flemish priest, published a commentary on the book of Joshua, the sixth book of the Old Testament. He noted that Moses mentions cities that had not been founded until after the Israelites conquered Canaan. Since Moses was prohibited from entering the Promised Land, how could he know the names of cities founded after his death? These were troubling questions but du Maes was quick to point out that the unknown “editor” had simply added phrases and altered names to make the Bible more contemporary. Du Maes saw no dark motives in the changes but his book was still considered heretical and was put on the “Catholic Index of Prohibited Books.”

Christopher Marlowe was called to answer for his blasphemy after he proclaimed Moses a second-rate illusionist and charged that the stories of the exodus were wildly exaggerated. Marlowe’s thoughts were only heard by the Queen’s Privy Council. They were never put into print so that scholars might debate them. The next day Marlowe was murdered by one of Queen Elizabeth’s secret agents.

By 1651 the cultural atmosphere had settled enough that the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes was able to write that expressions like “to this day” that are found throughout the Torah imply that the writer is describing events long past, casting more doubt upon Moses’s authorship.

Twenty years later, in Holland, the philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) devoted a great deal of his 1670 book Theologico-politicus to exposing numerous chronological embarrassments in the Torah. The work was published anonymously. He became convinced that Ezra, the scribe who brought the Torah out of Babylon and returned it to Jerusalem, was responsible for making changes to the book. Ezra reconstituted the Pentateuch from older documents he had in Babylon that have not survived to our times. The whole narrative was, in Spinoza’s words, “jumbled together without order . . . [and with] . . . no regard to time.”² This led him to argue that it is “clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses.”³ For his efforts, Catholics and Protestants banned his book and he was excommunicated from Judaism.

In 1682 a French priest, Richard Simon, published a book arguing that later prophets, divinely inspired and aided by older sources, had added to Moses’s works. His book was supposed to be an attack on Spinoza but that is not how it was received. He was expelled from his order. All but six copies of his book were burned. Father Simon’s notion of multiple ancient sources being brought together by prophets after Moses’s death laid the foundation for a more critical study. Hobbes and Spinoza had both commented upon the repetitive nature of some of the stories. Modern scholars call these “doublets.” For Simon and for the scholars that followed, the doublets constituted evidence of multiple sources. Scholars were finally boldly stating that Moses was not the sole author of the Torah.

In the eighteenth century the task of separating the various sources of the Torah from one another became an obsession for some. Almost simultaneously, several scholars came to the same conclusion: more than one ancient source was used to compile the work attributed to Moses. These authors enthusiastically set about the task of unraveling this ancient mystery.

TAKING THE PEN FROM MOSES

The mystery of who wrote the various parts of the Torah began to unravel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The subterranean story hidden within the book of Exodus was potentially open for all to see.

In 1753, the French author Jean Astruc (1684–1766) published Conjectures on the Reminiscences Which Moses Appears to Have Used in Composing the Book of Genesis. It was a landmark in the history of what came to be known as “source criticism”—the theory that the Torah was composed by various authors at different times. Astruc noted that different parts of Genesis referred to the Supreme Deity by different names. One source used the name Elohim (God) while the other used Yahweh (Lord). The implication was clear and revolutionary: the Torah was man-made.

In 1787, Astruc’s ideas were taken further by the German professor Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827) in his Introduction to the Old Testament. He identified different styles of writing in the text, those annoying repetitions that Goethe, Hobbes, and Spinoza had found so tiresome. Eichhorn argued that the doublets were different versions of the stories written by different authors who had lived long after Moses died.

The picture of Moses as author of the Torah was quickly fading.

In 1806, W. M. L. De Wette revealed reasons why the book of Deuteronomy might be considered a forgery. According to the text, the priest Hilkiah claimed to have discovered the book in the Jerusalem temple in 622 BCE. The priest presented his treasure to King Josiah who immediately accepted it as a long-lost book written by Moses. De Wette demonstrated that the contents of the “lost” book faithfully mimicked not so much the teachings of Moses but more the reforms urged by the very priest, Hilkiah, who supposedly unearthed it. De Wette called Deuteronomy a “pious fraud.”⁴

In 1865, K. H. Graf made a valiant attempt at dating the various sources. His work, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, was the end of the beginning of what would come to be known as the “documentary hypothesis.”

The scholar that brought together all the lines of investigation and created a synthesis that has stood the test of time was Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). His influential book was published in Germany in 1883. When Prolegomena to the History of Israel was released in English it had a profound impact upon the whole issue of Moses’s authorship of the Torah.

THE PRIESTLY AGENDA

Wellhausen carefully examined what each source assumed. He was able to tease out the order of the writings and identify their agendas. The earliest source (JE) assumed that worship could be performed in many places. Jerusalem was not a more sacred site in which to worship than any other. Wellhausen wrote “throughout the whole of the earlier period of the history of Israel, the restriction of worship to a single selected place was unknown to any one even as a pious desire.”⁵

JE was fond of spontaneous banquets with merrymaking and recognized no priests whatsoever. The mood was natural, free and optimistic. It includes Miriam’s joyous dance after her people escaped the Egyptians.

D was a source with a mission to establish one central temple in Jerusalem. Wellhausen wrote: “In that book the unity of the cultus is commanded; in the Priestly Code it is presupposed.”⁶ D was much more formal than JE and with him we begin to see the makings of the Israeli priesthood. D would argue that contemporary events mimicked events in the past and he insisted on this point even when it wasn’t true. D has a different chronology of events, most notably in Moses’s address to Reuben, Levi, and all the elders of the tribe of Israel other than Simeon.

P (the Levite scribes) did not feel the necessity to argue for one temple. They assumed it. The temple in Jerusalem was the sole sanctuary for sacrifice and worship. No debate. No doubt. No questions asked. Wellhausen wrote: “The assumption that worship is restricted to one single centre runs everywhere throughout the entire document. . . . One God one sanctuary, that is the idea.”⁷

P was obsessed with rules and regulations and regarded merrymaking as sinful. This was the very thing that the JE authors loved so much. The Levites had a deep need to elevate their ancestor to the highest position. Wellhausen notes that P was “unable to think of religion without the one sanctuary, and cannot for a moment imagine Israel without it, carrying its actual existence back to the very beginning of the theocracy, and, in accordance with this, completely altering the ancient history.”⁸

The Levite scribes rewrote much of the Torah to suit their agenda. It was P who invented a sacred tent that served as a surrogate temple for Moses: “For the truth is, that the tabernacle is the copy, not the prototype, of the temple at Jerusalem.”⁹ The Priestly agenda was one that favored the Levites and was hostile to some of the beliefs of the earlier sources.

P assumed that Judaism could not exist without priests, yet it was they who finalized the need for them. P inserted all the begats into the text. P insisted on the vast time between the age of Joseph and the rise of Moses. It was P who went on and on about the Egyptian bondage. P hated Egyptian magicians. And it was P who would clip, edit, and conceal the true genealogy of Moses.

The passages that dealt with Joseph’s death were also changed by the Levite scribe. They distorted the text so that they could claim Moses as one of their ancestors. And by denying Moses’s true heritage they took a final swipe at the child of Israel that Levi most hated, Joseph.

THE EDOMITE SCRIBE

In 1941, Harvard’s Professor Robert H. Pfeiffer (1892–1958) wrote Introduction to the Old Testament, in which he suggested the existence of another oral tradition that had made its way into the Torah around 430 BCE inserted by a biblical editor from Reuel’s homeland, Edom.^*57 Pfeiffer suggests that many of the stories the Levite scribes wished to suppress were inserted by an Edomite scribe before the text was finally set. It is precisely these S stories,^†58 ascribed by Pfeiffer to an Edomite priest, that have allowed us to unravel the role Reuel played in the murder and impersonation of Moses. It is from them, for instance, that we learn that the father-in-law of Moses (Reuel or Jethro) was from Edom, a fact that is central to our attempt to recapture the Moses stories repressed by the scribes.

The S stories also include unflattering sections about the Levites such as Simeon and Levi’s murder of Shechem, his father, and the males of the village after the “rape”; Reuben’s incest; and Reuel’s family tree.

Without these revelations our story could not have been told.

METHODOLOGY

Our method of dealing with the various sources in the Torah was to create a version of the text that identified each passage by source. We color-coded the text for our purposes and took everything written by the Levite scribes (P) and put it to one side. In the writing of this book we relied primarily upon the epic sources (E, J, JE, and S) augmented by D to correct for P’s false timeline. We only relied upon P when the equivalent epic sources were missing.^*59

The purpose of this appendix is to give a brief description of the documentary hypothesis as it was understood by Wellhausen, Noth, and Friedman. Subsequently, the so-called supplementary hypothesis was developed by John Van Seters (b. 1935). Van Seters’s scholarship determined that Deuteronomy was the oldest source of the Torah. Deuteronomy places Joseph and Moses in the same time period and supports what the Romans and Egyptians long asserted: that Moses was the third son of Joseph and Asenath. This in turn, places the “first” Moses inside the Heliopolis Temple where the prophet’s father-in-law was High Priest of a secret continuance of the monotheism of Akhenaten. This corrected timeline resolves Freud’s dilemma of not being able to place Moses inside the Temple of Heliopolis where monotheism was born.