If I google “Richard Elliott Friedman,” the sixth match I come up with is an attempted refutation of Who Wrote the Bible by Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb. I plan to go through all this more thoroughly soon but for now – being relatively ignorant of Bible criticism myself – I was curious if y’all come to the conclusion that his arguments hold water. Here are some places where he talks about his views, I would be interested in your thoughts on any of these:
Friedman: It seems odd that, if Moses wrote the first books, he uses glowing descriptions when talking about himself, even when one of those descriptions is of “humility”.
Gottlieb: Moses transcribed the Bible. God wrote it.
Gottlieb is taking the a priori position that God exists and the book should be read on those terms. Friedman is taking the a priori position that God doesn’t exist and so anything where what is said in the book doesn’t jibe with logic is evidence of the book’s description being wrong.
Both of them have a perfectly reasonable argument that entirely refutes the opponent, if you make the same a priori assumptions.
But, in terms of something like a scientific approach to proof and refutation, ones a priori assumption should always be that what you’re looking at is a lie unless you can’t find any data which says otherwise. Minus any proof of a real God, the argument that “God wrote it” as a refutation doesn’t stand. You can’t use a starting assumption of God’s existence to prove God’s existence.
Since the OP will call for opinions, let’s move this to Great Debates from General Questions. I started to move it to IMHO, but I think the nature of the subject is better suited to GD.
I agree with Sage Rat. However, the default presumption should be, not the existence or non-existence of God, but the demonstrable existence of the collection of writings called the Bible, and what can be inferred from its contents and style regarding its origins – regardless of the existence or absence of the Deity supposed to have inspired it. In the opinion of myself and, I’m reasonably sure, that of Diogenes, that leads to the sorts of conclusions that are explicated in the Staff Report – even though where Dio and I stand on religious questions are 150 degrees apart.
I have dabbled in biblical studies, textual analysis, that sort of thing. By “dabbled” I mean I’ve only read about twenty books on the subjects, and them only in translation.
That section of the library should be gated, with an advisory notice saying “This is where many a great mind has splintered on the rocks of ambiguity. Are you sure you want to do this?”
For a brilliantly written summary of the arguments and history (at a macro level), see:
The arguments in favor of Mosaic authorship usually require “dictated by God” to explain away seeming internal contradictions. Then, each alleged contradiction or discrepancy needs to be explained separately, and has been over the centuries.
The arguments in favor of multiple authors handle all the contradictions or discrepancies in one fell swoop, with one explanation (“different authors at different times, sometimes over centuries”) and variant (“different oral traditions being brought together.”)
There’s no “evidence” or “proof” of one explanation over another, nor is it likely there ever would be. The only “proof” would be the discovery of a pre-1000 BC text, which would either be identical to our text (proof of Mosaic authorship) or would be a partial text (proof of multiple authors.) Otherwise, there’s no way of ever having “proof.”
Thanks Dex! I read that and it’s really because of you that I began to get a basic grasp of DH.
Still, I haven’t looked in depth into R’ Gottlieb’s various claims (hope to soon though!), so I was wondering what people more informed than I had to say about them.
But with historical documents, that can’t be done. If you find an old document that makes a specific claim, it’s not reasonable to assume that it’s either true or it’s false a priori. You have to evaluate it against other things that are known.
Other things that are known refute the Bible story. If Moses said, circa 1500 BC, that the Israelites are to be monotheistic, there’s no archaeological evidence that the Israelites started to embrace monotheism until 600 BC, nearly a thousand years later, for example. If Moses conquered Canaan around 1500 BC, there’s no archaeological evidence of it.
The tradition for Mosaic authorship of the Torah is totally unsupported be either internal or external evdience and is contradicted by both internal and external evdience.
Externally, the evidence against Mosiac authorship pretty much insurmountable except by the most facile leaps of magical thinking and a priori assumotion. For one thing, the Torah i written in Hebrew. The Hebrew language did not exist at the alleged time of Moses. For another thing, there never actually WAS any Moses. He is a completely fictional character. For another thing, the Torah shows clear evidence of multiple texts being syncretized into a single narrative.
Internally, the text never even makes any claim ITSELF that it was written by Moses, so what is the basis for assuming that it was? The text also shows historical anachronisms the prove it could not have been written during the allged time of Moses.
The burden of proof is supposed to lie with the person making the claim, so anyone wanting to assign a specific author to the first five book of the Hebrew Bible has the burden to prove it, especially since it’s not claim that the Torah makes for itself, but the tradition of Mosaic authorship happens to be completely unsupportable and refutable on any and all grounds anyone would try to defend it on, and the notion is not taken seriously within mainstream Biblical scholarship, not even within most religious Biblical scholarship. It is taken on faith by some religious scholars, but formally argued for in peer review because it’s utterly unsupportable. It’s a joke, to be perfectly frank.
The document in question (the Torah) does not make the claim in question, and ,as it happens, the tradition of Mosaic scholarship can and has been completely annihilated by objective evaluation.
It’s really, really hard to get around the fact that Moses never existed, for instance.
Technically, if you presume the Exodus story to be a reference to the Hyksos Expulsion then you could say that there were some sort of Canaanite/Amoritic peoples who fled before the Egyptians and some branch of those settled South of Canaan and eventually called themselves the Israelites. Certainly it’s probably true that they didn’t call themselves “Israelites” at the time of the expulsion, but your phrasing has them suddenly appearing out of the clouds with no past in preference of assuming that, like everyone else, they came from somewhere, by some other name.
The Hyksos were chased back into Canaan and destroyed, according to Egyptian records, and they still were not Israelites, nor did they evolve into them. The distinct cultural group which is identifiable as Israelites arose from indigenous Canaanites around 1200 BCE (they didn’t come from anywhere, they were already there). While the evidence suggests they were a confederate of tribes (semi-nomadic, but still Canaanite), there is no archaeological or documentary evidence connecting them to the Hyksos.
The Exodus myth was probably based on the Hyksos expulsion, yes, but a itpertains to the tradition of Mosaic authorship for the Torah, the fact remains that Moses never existed, and so could not have written anything ever.
That’s not a fact. Just like you can’t use the presumption of the existence of God to argue for the existence of God, you can’t use a presumption of Moses’ non-existence to prove that Moses didn’t exist.
The Bible says that the ancestors of the Israelites came from Babylon by way of Assyria. The Amorites came to Canaan from Babylon by way of Assyria. The Bible says that the ancestors of the Israelites interacted with Egypt, South of Canaan. The Amorites interacted with Egypt, South of Canaan. The Bible has the ancestors of the Israelites fleeing from Egyptian territory. One can presume that when the Egyptians took back North-East Egypt and Philistia, that some groups of people fled before them, and others may well have decided to leave after they’d been occupied. There’s no particular reason to think that the ancestors of the Israelites can’t have been one of these groups. That doesn’t mean that they wandered the desert, it doesn’t mean that they walked along the bottom of the red sea, nor that they viewed themselves as a politically independent group from the Amorites/Canaanites or whoever at the time. It’s merely saying that to a limited extent the story in the Bible matches archaeology. There’s plenty of reason to doubt that this accurate, but since there is zero evidence of who the Israelites were before 800 BC outside of the traditions they told centuries later, it’s absurd to assert that they could not possibly have come from one of the groups who fled from the Egyptians. There’s no evidence one way or the other except the Bible. But, the story in the Bible is, minus all magic, tribal identities, and exaggerated histories entirely plausible. Of all possible histories before 800 BC, this is the most likely history of the Israelite’s ancestors. It’s not great odds. It’s equally likely that all their traditions came from outside sources, were made up, or whatever. 50/50 odds isn’t great, but again it’s simply absurd to assert that something is impossible when in truth the odds are more like 50/50.
And again, when and if the ancestors of the Israelites moved out of the way of the Egyptians, they almost certainly had a leader. Every group of humans always has a leader. It would be amazingly peculiar to presume that they didn’t. So, at the time that they shuffled on out of Egypt, they had someone who organized that movement and likely organized getting them settled down. That person was almost certainly a man, since most leaders of the time were male. The odds are greater that his name was Moses or a historic equivalent than that his name was something else. There may have been 1000 common mens names at the time, and that only means that the possibility that his name was Moses gets bumped from 1 in 1000 to 1.1 in 1000, but it’s still just ever so minorly higher. That doesn’t mean that he worked magic, was a priest, spoke about religion or cared about it. It simply means that at one time, it’s entirely plausible that there was a leader of a group of people who eventually became the largely fictional character of Moses. That doesn’t mean that he did exist nor does it even mean that it’s likely that he existed. Merely that it’s plausible. Asserting, with zero evidence, that someone did not exist when it is entirely plausible that they did is inherently fallacious.
I’m not, I’m using all the archaeological evdidence that shows the Israelites didn’t emerge from Canaanites until the 11th Century BCE and that they never left Canaan. No enslavement in Egypt and no Exodus = no Moses. Moses is most likely based on the Pharaoh Amose I (re-purposed from an Egyptian hero into an Israelite one), who overthrew the Hyksos, expelled them from Egypt and chased them into Canaan to kill them, but there is no possible way for the Biblical Moses to have existed since every defining thing about him is demonstrably ahistorical from the archaeological evidence.
The Bible is wrong. The Israelites were indigeneous Canaanites. They came from nowhere. They were already there. Again, this is clear from the archaeological evidence. They were Canaanites first.
The Bible is wrong about all of this. None of it happened.
The Israelites were Canaanites, so what would make them descendents of these purely speculative people anymore than any other Canaanite?
What archaeology? You are presenting pure speculation.
This is simply incorrect. They were Canaanites. We know this for a fact.
There was only one group that was recorded as having fled from the Egyptions. That was the Hyksos, and the Egyptians detroyed them. There would be no REASON for any other group to have fled from Ahmose. He was a liberator, not a tyrant.
You are mistaken in this. The archaeological evidence is quite persuasive.
It demonstrably did not happen. The Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt., Neither were the Hyksos for that matter. There was no Exodus. The Israelites never left Cannan. There is no space for any Moses in any of this.
Apologies, but you are simply misinformed. The archaeology shows the Israelites slowly emerging from Canaanite culture around the 11th Century BCE. The Hebrew language arose from Canaanite. The ancient Israelite pantheon was Canaanite. Everything about them was Canaanite. They were just plain old, garden variety Canaanites. They did not migrate into the area, they were indigeneous.
You’re building speculation on top of speculation. There were no ancestors of the sraelites being chased out of Egypyt. Ebnd of story. The ab=ncestors of the Isrraelites were
You don’t seem to have much understanding of burdens of evidence, but as it stands, all of your speculation is either completely unsupported or flatly contradicted by archaeological evidence. There were never any Israelites enslaved in Egypt. There were never any ancestors of Israelites enslaved in Egypt. Not even the Hyksos were enslaved in Egypt, and the Hyksos were destroyed by Ahmose. You haven’t made an argument for how any ostensible ancestors of the Israelites could be distinguished from the ancestors of any other Canaanites from whom the Israelites emerged. Nothing you’re saying makes plausible sense with the archaeological evidence.
Incidentally, you still have the problem that the Hebrew language did not exist at the time of the Hyksos expulsion, so how could the leader of your speculative group have written a book in a language that didn’t exist yet?
That the Exodus, as depicted in the Torah, never occurred can be asserted from archeological evidence.
That there was never a person named Moses, (or something like it), who played a roll in the migration of some group, (however mangled the story has come to us), cannot.
That no possible group could have ever fled Egypt at some point and brought a story that was later embellished by the proto-Israelites is you projecting your beliefs that everything that we have discovered is the sum of all that happened.
That if such a group had ever existed, they could not have been led by a man with a name sililar to Moses, is you projecting your own beliefs.
Even using your own words, we can speculate that the Hyksos might have included a leader with an Egyptian name similar to Moses and that the tale of their departure, (cleaned up to look good), was the basis for the tale we read as Exodus. A blanket assertion that “Moses never existed” is not supportable, while an assertion that the Biblical figure of Moses could not have done the deeds portryed in Exodus is supportable.
Your tendency to simply assert as fact those things that you have come to believe tends to weaken your assertions.
The Moses of the Bible never existed. Any speculative historical “Moses”-figure as the leader of a purely speculative group of fleeing, non Hyksos Canaanites (speculation utterly without support or plausibilty, and he couldn’t have been a Hyksos leader since the Hyksos were destroyed) is not the Moses of the Bible. If Moses cannot be defined as a leader of an escaped group of Israelite slaves across the Sinai and back to Canaan, then what is left? Moses is an Egyptian name, and parts of his myth are recognizably Egyptian motifs as well. What’s more plausible, that an attested Egyptian hero with the same name, connected directly with the Hyksos expulsion was re-configured as an Israelite hero (and the bullrushes story is a classic mythological method for changing claims on the ancestry of a given hero), or that a completely speculative and archaeologically unsupported string of events gave rise to an Israelite hero legend that just coincidentally sounds a lot like a garbled version of Ahmose and the Hyksos?
It’s not just me showing hubris, by the way. You won’t find any acceptance for Moses as a real historical figure anywhere in the mainstream of ANE or Egyptian scholarship or archaeology.
Now this time I also have a nit with Diogenes, but the moment one speculates is the moment one enters also the “not supported with evidence” territory.
Still yes, a blanket statement is taking it too far, but in this case Diogenes is closer to the mark when even serious researchers admit that the exodus tale was an archetype.
Speculation is how people decide where the best spot to set up an archaeological dig is. With all alternate options on a story being very unlikely, you’re still best to bet with the also unlikely option that is never-the-less slightly more likely than its competitors. And if someone asks you why, saying that it’s the leading historical view is completely accurate though one would hope that they’d point out that leading doesn’t mean likely.