That’s rather like saying that English didn’t exist in the time of the Anglo-Saxons, isn’t it? There were lots of Hebrew amd proto-Hebrew languages, all of which descended from Afro-Asiatic.
Thanks, Lib! I was contemplating how to make this point.
As far as the historicity and writing prowess of Moses goes, I suspect strongly that it would be difficult to prove anything about him to the standard we tend to use in here for consensus as “proven.”
Quite simply, IMO Moses is King Arthur. Not, of course, literally. But in the sense that a shadowy historical figure who may or may not have existed, but probably did, and may or may not have been important in his own time, became the grain of sand around which layers of nacreous legend accreted, to the point that it becomes difficult if not impossible to sort truth from legend.
Moses was the Lawgiver. But that may have been taken to mean that every law owed its origin to Moses, no matter when promulgated, and therefore was fittingly ascribed back to him. This is why he sometimes gets into nitpicky detail about life in a settled pastoral-agricultural setting while allegedly promulgating the Law to restive nomads crossing the Sinai or camped out at Kadesh-Barnea.
Syllogism that illustrates the above: James Madison and the Constitutional Convention of 1787 wrote the U.S. Constitution. The 25th Amendment is part of the Constitution, in every legal sense. Therefore James M. and the ConCon [yeah, band name] wrote the 25th Amendment.
Well, no, they didn’t. You’re swiching concepts in midstream there. Likewise Phinehas or Samuel, or Judge Reuel ben Ishyah of the tribe of Issachar, of whom no knowledge has survived to our day, may have found it necessary to rule on a legal point, and that ruling then joined the body of Law for the Israelite people – which of course was originally given by Moses.
Hebrew was a late developing Canaanite language but the point is that a piece of literature cannot be written before its language exists. We are talking about historical method here. The language of Genesis did not exist at the alleged time of Moses. Just like Chaucer could not have written Great Expectations, "Moses"could not have written the Pentateuch.
This is hardly the only reason to dispute the tradition of Mosaic authorship but it’s one of the simplest. There are also anachronisms in the text which show that it couldn’t have been written before the 8th century BCE…and I suppose it would be really churlish to point out the archaeological evidence showing that there was no Exodus and that Moses is an entirely mythical character.
OK, I stand corrected.
God had to grunt and gesture His description of Cosmology to pre-linguistic shepherds.
I don’t see how that changes the point I was making, all that much.
Tris
Just as it would be churlish of me to point out that rather, the archaeological evidence does not show there was an Exodus nor that Moses was a completely historical character, which is much different from what you said. 
I don’t think it does. As I said before, I assumed you were speaking of “Moses” as a metaphor for the Hebrew people, in which case I have no problem and I did not make a comment on your initial post. It was only after the second person mentioned Moses as the author of Genesis that I felt compelled to insert a factual correction. This is the SDMB, after all. It’s hard to correct things like this without coming off like a dick or offending people but the straight dope is that virtually nobody in Biblical scholarship except the most conservative traditionalists still accept Mosaic authorship.
I didn’t mean any offense and I wasn’t objecting to the substance of your post. I just wanted to correct what I saw as a factual error being repeated in the thread. I apologize for any unintended insult.
Divested of all the snideness, Diogenes, what you’re saying is that, if there was historically a theophanic event to a Moshe figure in ca. 1300 B.C., the language forms used were not those of the Yahwistic account of about 950 B.C., the Priestly account of ca. 600 B.C., etc. Right?
I think that’s something that most people without an axe to grind on the question and with a little knowledge of the source-text theories could agree with. This, however, does not rule out the possibility of such an event actually having occurred in some form or other, with the accounts of it having been reduced to writing much later and in the language forms of the time, very likely with extensive accretion, etc. (I’m not advocating this view, simply saying it isn’t ruled out.)
Contemporary translations of the Bible use modern 20th century English (and probably will, shortly, use 21st); thou art full well in mind of how such a writing differeth from that version commanded by the puissant King James. And that in turn drew on the Middle and Early Modern English forms of Tyndale, Coverdale, Wyclif, and others.
I suspect strongly that a figure probably named or bynamed Moshe led a band of escapees from Egyptian serfdom across the Sinai, and had a religious experience in the process. I suspect equally strongly that we’ll never unearth precisely what the true story of that event was from beneath the accretions that have been piled upon it.
Dio, I’m not insulted.
I’m not disputing who murdered whom with what instrument in what room. I don’t even care who wrote Genesis. 
I’m just saying that the assertion, “The Hebrew language didn’t even exist in the alleged time of Moses,” is poorly worded at best, and wrong at worst. There have been, as I said, many Hebrew languages, including Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Biblical Hebrew, Samaritan, Mishnaic, Tiberian, Mizrahi, Yemenite, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Modern Hebrew spoken in the state of Israel. It is not the case that, one day, there suddenly appeared a Hebrew language, distinct from all others and descended from Canaanite. There were even various Canaanite languages, including Aramaic and Ugaritic. They were spoken along with Ebla and Akkad in the Levant (modern Lebanon, Syria, and Israel). Phoenician and Arabic influences also contributed to form a veritable Babel in a region where people all had migrated from Africa (including Egypt) to settle in the Middle East. With such a conflux of civilizations and trade, and without mass communication capability, it is no wonder that there developed so many languages and dialects. There was no “This Is Hebrew And That Is Not” to say that the language didn’t exist at the time of Moses but did at some other time. If you need cites, I can dig them up. But I’m correcting the record merely so that the record will be correct.
Just to clarify, the statement that **DtC **made about “all living species…” was a bit overly broad. Firstly, there are countless living species that have never even been seen, much less studied. Secondly, it cannot be said that scientists have analyzed the DNA of every KNOWN living species of organism either. What we can say is that the hypothesis concerning the descent of all living species from a common ancestor has stood up to considerable scientific scrutiny, and has never been shown to be incorrect, either by fossil or DNA evidence. In this sense, we say that the hypothesis has been proven to be factual.
I don’t think the concept that light, and EM in general, can be analyzed as either a wave or a particle is at all contradictory. And time passing slower or faster depending upon the velocity relative to that of light is not in any way contradictory. It seems to me like these are bad comparisons with the contradictions mentioned.
It’s more than just an absence of positive evidence, there is positive evidence against the Exodus. The Egyptians did not keep foreign slaves during or after the Hyksos era. There is no evidence that Hebrew people were ever enslaved in Egypt or ever left Canaan. There is no trace of their presence in the sinai desert. This includes Kadesh Barnea, an oasis where the Israelites supportedly camped for 38 of the their 40 years in the desert. Two million people supposedly camped around a single small spring for 38 years (raising logistical questions about access to the water. The spring was simply not big enough to allow even a quarter of that population to have access every day), without leaving a single sign of human habitation. Two million people is a city. Even Roman camps of a few thousand people for a few weeks leave signs.
Sanitation alone would be a huge problem and have to leave signs. To be blunt about it, human feces has to go somewhere and 2 million people shitting for 40 years would produce a literal mountain of feces. Where is it? Where is any sign of the Israelites. Why is there not a single potsherd or bone or tool or human artifact of any kind before the 7th century BCE? Why isn’t there any sign of digging, grazing, irrigation or any other attempt to adapt the environment for the habitation of a city of 2 million people?
There is also no sign of any influx of Hebrew people into Canaan from the Sinai and certainly no conquest.
The Exodus story seems to have been adapted from legends about the Hyksos expulsion and Moses (which is an Egyptian name, not Hebrew) may actually have been based on an Egyptian pharaoh named Ahmose who made some military forays into Canaan.
Poly, on preview, I would say that you’re correct in that I’m looking at the Pentateuch as a piece of literature and making necessary assumptions about thed dating of that literature based on language. You’re aware of the various documentary hypotheses of these books, so you know they were not the work of a single author.
I think I am drawing a distinction between the stories as stories and the Pentateuch as a specific compilation of literature. Even if the stories pre-existed the Bible (which some of them obviously did) the Torah, as we have it now, could not have been written in the traditional time of Moses.
As to your idea about Moses leading an escape from Egypt, there are various logistical problems with this (For instance, Canaan was still under Egyptian control at the time so it wouldn’t have really been an escape) and the numbers, at least, could not possibly be accurate, but I think that Exodus is a compilation of several different traditions, one of them deriving from some sort of association with a Volcano in the Sinai. I won’t speculate as to the origin of the tradition (except to say the name YHWH may well have been a tribal name for a God associated with this mountain) but I will say that the possibility of a theophanic “receiving” of a legal code by a historical tribal leader cannot be ruled out, but I would suggest that he has been combined with other characters to create the Biblical Moses.
This understanding by Moses apparently included an account of his own death and burial.
From the Fifth Book of Moses, Called Deuteronomy (KJV):
34:5 So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD.
34:6 And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over agains Beth-pe’-or: …
[notices hand waving in back of room]
How one determines which parts to believe, and which parts to chalk up to “cultural influences” or “folkloric exaggeration” and to ignore:
Common sense, basically.
If the issue (or passage) touches upon a point of basic Christian doctrine–Jesus was the Holy Spirit incarnated and Mary was a virgin when He was born; Jesus proved He was God by performing miracles; Jesus rose from the dead; sin can be forgiven; God is all-powerful–then we take it literally.
If the issue has nothing to do with doctrine–God created everything in “how many days?”; Jonah was in the belly of a “whale?” for “how many?” days; Goliath was “how tall?”; how many men did the Holy Spirit tell Peter were coming to see him in Acts 10:19, was it 2 or 3 or none?–we ignore it. Because ultimately whether or not only eight people survived a global flood has nothing to do with sin or salvation or the nature of God–it doesn’t change anything doctrinally speaking if there were nine people who survived, or if the rain lasted 39 days and nights instead of 40. Or if the whole thing never happened. No matter how the story of Noah may or may not have gone down, we still have to go one-on-one with God as regards our souls, whether Ham had sex with his mother, or whether he just saw his dad’s nekkidness.
Where you run into problems and endless theological wrangling, of course, is deciding what’s “doctrinal” and what isn’t. Some folks feel that Paul’s attitudes towards women are “doctrinal”, some dismiss his attitude as “cultural male chauvinism” and ignore the verses that say things like, “I suffer not a woman to each, nor to usurp authority.”
There’s a similar split on the issue of homosexuality.
But generally speaking, for Christianity overall, if the issue or Bible passage doesn’t touch on the eternal verities like the salvation of the soul and the nature of God, it’s considered non-doctrinal.
I think the core is love. Without it, salvation, faith, belief, and all the rest is worthless. Whatever contradicts love is a lie — in the Bible or otherwise.
Lib, what you are naming is Semitic languages (along with some Hebrew descendants) , not Hebrew languages. I think you have your classifications mixed up. Biblical Hebrew is one Semitic language of many and it didn’t exist at the alleged time of Moses. There were prior Semitic languages but not Hebrew ones. Calling Moabite a “Hebrew” language is like calling Italian a “French” language.
I won’t hijack this thread into a theological debate along those lines, but I have to say that I find that explanation to be circular in nature, since all those things are still just written in the same book. Someone rising from the dead isn’t any more or less common sensical than someone surviving in the belly of a whale. Ultimately you have to admit that you just believe what you believe for no other reason than that you choose to do so. Call it faith or whatever, but it isn’t any more justifiable than that.
side comment: As a question of doctrine, isn’t the virgin birth pretty much NOT accepted by most Protestant denominations?
Anyway, feel free to respondor not if you like, but I won’t take this thread further in that direction since it’s too much off topic.
No, it’s like calling both Italian and French Romance languages. Semitic is only a sub-family of Afro-Asiatic.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/H/He/Hebrew_language.htm
I’m just saying that your assertion is controversial. Why you don’t simply admit that is unclear.
They do accept it. Even Islam accepts it. In fact, 80% of Americans do, which exceeds the total number of both Christians and Muslims in the US.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/virgin_b.htm
It’s modern “liberal” theologians who reject it.
"What to believe" and “what to take literally” are not the same thing at all.
For example, Jesus says that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” I don’t take this literally: I don’t think he’s talking about the physical location of the organ that pumps my blood. But I do think he’s saying something true.