Fair enough. BTW, which book has Moses dying in it?
My fault for having facts rolling around in my head without knowing where they came from. But, suffice it to say, the Chinese save a lot of their old manuscripts, and, considering over history they have been about the largest contiguous group of people speaking basically the same language for millenia now, they have lots of copies of their most important cultural works strewn about the continent. So there is ample evidence that earliest manuscripts only had the first seven chapters and others were added over time.
I don’t know if Biblical scientists have similar evidence about the 5 books, but considering when they were finalized:
a) you could lie awake at night and count Israelites and finish before you fell asleep. With so few people speaking a language and with this people having been enslaved and uprooted and the like, the chances of finding preexisting docs are much more unlikely.
b) That was quite a few centuries before Chuang Tzu lived, so the chance of any such documents existing is even more remote.
c) Taoism doesn’t give the same sense of sacredness to their texts that Jews do. Any Orthodox Jew who did find evidence that Moses did not singlehanded create the 5 books would probably just destroy the evidence over the past 4000 years. Since few others would have been able to read Hebrew or cared one way or the other, no one would be the wiser.
So it is a really lousy comparison. I don’t know what evidence science has, nor do I really care. Could Moses have been rewriting or writing down an oral tradition of knowledge the Jews had before the slavery in Egypt. Why not? Could he have said it was the word of God to give it legitimacy? Perhaps.
Anyway, it is a good thing He picked Moses because if I’d been around back then I’d have called it quits after God dictated the 80th X begat Y verse in Genesis. Does it get better at some point?
You really ought to real the Talmud–all of it–before you spout off with your personal bias that everyone else in the world is dishonest. Jewish scholars have traditionally met any apparent internal challenges to their beliefs head-on.
It may be true that you would have changed or destroyed any evidence that did not support your views, but it is not valid to project your ethics onto another group of people.
FTR, Chaim’s views and mine are directly opposed regarding the creation of the Torah (and the rest of the TANAKH), but your unsupported accusation is out of line.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come across that way. My point was that differing versions of Chuang Tzu or many other ancient texts would not have that as a potential setback to modern day investigation of their origins.
What dilemma? If we were to assume that Moses took celestial dictation, then he already wrote about events in the past he hadn’t witnessed. Why not events in the future? He was a prophet. Prophesying is what they do.
Well, we believe they were finalized in approximately 1272 BCE.
I disagree. The fact that it’s a religious document that its believers believe contain the word of G-d means it’s highly likely it’ll be treated with greater reverence. Conversely, considering the kind of burdens that the Bible places on its adherents (mmm, pork), if someone had evidence that these things weren’t from G-d, they wouldn’t have been suppressed…they would have thrown it away. Heck, the Jewish people weren’t so obedient to it even though they did think it was from G-d.
They wouldn’t have believed it then. Check out the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses is speaking to the people whom he is giving the book and reminding them that they themselves heard the word of G-d and saw all the miracles. If that wasn’t true of them, they would have said, “What’s the old man talking about? We didn’t hear G-d’s voice and see miracles!”
Well, I’ll grant you it’s good he picked Moses. But I think that if, theoretically, you were taking this dictation from G-d himself, you wouldn’t be so easily bored, even by the begat stuff.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned there is no Genesis Chapter One in the orignal texts…
All one big chunk of scroll IIRC.
Later publishers figured they could make more dough by packaging them in book/chapter form, though in recent days they’ve all been lumped together again anyways.
And the point of Hebrew literary styles was entirely left out of this whole thread…
The Torah was always divided up into the five books they now consist of. You are correct, however, that they weren’t divided into chapter and verse as they are now.
If you look at a Torah scroll, you will notice gaps in the writings. These gaps are the eqivelant of “chapter breaks.” However, these do not correspond to the chapter/verse setup we currently have. That originated later, with medieval Christian authorities.
Not quite. What happened (this is all in Exodus 20, and is recapped by Moses in Deuteronomy, I think in chapter 6 or 7, which where I mentioned “He’s talking to them”) was that they all heard the Ten Commandments dictated. After that, they decided the experience was too intense for them to handle and they asked Moses to take the dictation for them from then on, their trust in Moses established by the rapport he clearly had with G-d at the time leading up to, and including, the giving of the Ten Commandments.
I’ve already said this to Zev in some other post, but I want to include Chaim, CKDex and Tomndeb as well.
I really appreciate you guys! Your scholarship and ability to respond with concise and understandable apologies is truly a blessing to me. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and considered opinions on this board.
Can anyone provide a link or a reference to back this up? I’m not trying to say I don’t believe you, just that if I say this in casual conversation (hey, it could happen), I’d like to be able to say something more than “this dude on my message board said so.” That doesn’t carry the greatest amount of credibility.
in Robert Heinlein’s ‘Job: A Comedy of Justice’, the character of Jerry Farnsworth (aka Satan) tells the main character (who is a born-again Xian/Saint) that (and I’m paraphrasing here) ‘the Earth is billions of years old… and that it was created 5000 years ago. Who’s to say that God couldn’t create it old? Things at the God level are more complex than human’s can imagine.’
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One of my favorite interactions in the book:
Alex: ‘The Lord our God is a Just God!’
Satan: ‘You never played marbles with him.’
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