• Original picture by Tanner Mardis from Unsplash

Who wrote the Torah?

From ancient times, Moses has been regarded as the divinely inspired writer of the first five books of the Bible, known to the Jews as the Torah. Moses lived between 14 and 15 centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. The Bible records the account of creation, the Flood and the call of Abraham in the first 12 chapters. Abraham lived almost 2,000 years before Christ, around 400-500 years before Moses.

• A Jewish boy carrying the scroll of the Torah at the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah.
• This celebrates the completion of another yearly cycle of readings from the Torah
• Used on the front of the Light on a New World Volume 32.1

However, when you read commentaries from learned professors and scholars, you will often find reference to the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) being written much later in the post Babylonian era, thus ruling out Moses! Here is one example:

"Traditionally ascribed to Moses himself, modern scholarship sees the book as initially a product of the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE), from earlier written and oral traditions, with final revisions in the Persian period (5th century BCE)"

• Extract from Wikipedia on the Torah.

This view puts the Torah almost 1,000 years later than a plain reading would suggest.

If we accept that this view is correct, think of the implications for the Bible and its claim to be the Word of God. What they are saying completely undermines the history of the Jewish people, their origins, and the detail of the Law of Moses. It calls into question the role of Moses as writer and prophet, and indeed the whole validity of the content of the first five books of the Bible.

This so called "modern scholarship" flies in the face of the clear Biblical record. Consider these references:

"Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this for a memorial in the book and recount it in the hearing of Joshua."

• Exodus 17:14

"So Moses came and told the people all the words of the LORD and all the judgments. And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words which the LORD has said we will do.” And Moses wrote all the words of the LORD."

• Exodus 24:3-4

''"These are the journeys of the children of Israel, who went out of the land of Egypt by their armies under the hand of Moses and Aaron. Now Moses wrote down the starting points of their journeys at the command of the LORD."''

• Numbers 33:1-2

''"... Moses wrote this law and delivered it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who bore the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and to all the elders of Israel."''

• Deuteronomy 31:9

The words of Jesus himself:

''"For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?''"

• John 5:46-47

So, who are we to believe? Modern scholarship, or the Bible witness and Jesus Christ himself? The external evidence of early writing, quite apart from the Scriptures themselves, proves that Moses was well capable of writing down all the words God gave him. The evidence derived from Biblical archaeology, deserves our close attention.

When was writing invented?

In the nineteenth century, critics of the Bible said that Moses could not have written the Torah because writing had not been invented. However, cities of ancient Assyria and Babylon have since yielded thousands of tablets showing that reading and writing were advanced. But much earlier evidence exists. One unique example was the discovery in the 1890's, of hundreds of clay tablets in the abandoned city of Akhenaten in Egypt, known today as Tell el-Amarna. Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and his team uncovered undisturbed records of Amenhotep IV. They were reckoned to date from just after the time of Moses around 1350 BC. The information revolutionised understanding of the ancient world.

• Flinders Petrie
• Picture from Egyptian Exploration Society

They are known as the Tell el-Amarna tablets, and include the first external reference to the Hebrew people. Written in tiny cuneiform script, these clay tablets illuminate the political diplomacy of those times. Moses, of course, was brought up and educated in Egypt.

Moses lived some 450 years after Abraham, the founding father of Israel. Could Abraham read and write? Although there is no direct Biblical evidence, recent discoveries have shown that writing and translating the many different languages in written form was going on at least 400 years before Abraham. He almost certainly spoke a Semitic language that was already being scripted using an alphabet, each letter of which had its own sound!

Discoveries at Ebla

In the 1970's, archaeologists from the University of Rome, led by Paolo Matthiae, made discoveries which led scholars to re-think their theories about language, reading, and writing. A mound in Northern Syria turned out to be the centre of Ebla (see map below) a city state dating from some 500 years before Abraham.

• Ebla a city state
• From CC BY-SA 4.0 via wikimedia

The key discovery was a library of over 17,000 clay tablets all closely written in cuneiform script. The city state had its own language, distinct from surrounding states, and is known as "Eblaite" or "Western Semitic". This is a vital link, for Moses and Abraham, descendants of Shem (the son of Noah), were Semitic. The script is, therefore, an early form of writing related to Hebrew, sharing common words and a language that Abraham would have been familiar with. It seems highly unlikely that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph (who brought the family of Jacob into Egypt in the first place), spoke a language other than ancient Hebrew.

Astonishingly, one of the finds was a single slab with 42 comparative languages set out side by side. Nowhere else has such a thing been found, and of such antiquity. Why would they be fascinated with language? The Tower of Babel incident, recorded in Genesis chapter 11, that took place in this same era, may well provide the answer. From Babel(meaning confusion) or Babylon, a confusion of language caused peoples to disperse, each with their own language.

• Word tablet slab from Ebla
• From CC BY-SA 4.0 via wikimedia
• From Gazetti Gianfranco

Scholars at Ebla were devoted to recording the various languages they came across. Is this merely a coincidence, or was this a "Babel effect"? Many place names, and also people's names, were initially identified with Biblical names, such as Abram, Jacob, Israel, David and, often, Yah (an abbreviated form of Yahweh). But such was the political opposition from present day anti-Zionist Governments that a groundswell of opposing theories was put forward. Any discovery outside Israel, where a connection is made with ancient Israel in any way, is fiercely opposed. Remember, that if Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, then Hebrew is necessarily one of the earliest languages. Discoveries at Ebla show that is the case. To undertake his work as outlined in the Exodus, Moses must have been able to communicate freely in a language or languages that both the Egyptian Pharaoh and Moses' Hebrew brothers would understand. He was either bilingual, or there was a common language available. The language at Ebla was written in syllabic cuneiform, which means each syllable was made up of a separate complex individual character (like Chinese script). Moses' Hebrew would have been a similar language but was written in a completely different form using an alphabet.

• The remains of "Palace G" at Ebla
• From Gazetti Gianfranco

• Sinai alphabet inscription found by Flinders Petrie

The Alphabet Further evidence to support Moses' literacy is that the Hebrew alphabet is now thought to have already been in existence. Flinders Petrie made an initial discovery in 1904-05 in the very area that Moses trod for 40 years – the Sinai desert; inscriptions dating from the time of the Exodus! The inscriptions were found in the Sinai Peninsula at Serabit el-Khadim and are among the earliest examples of alphabetic writing. This means that instead of a word or syllable being a complex composite character, each sound is represented by a separate symbol.

However, a discovery, even predating the Sinai script, was found much more recently at the Wadi el-Hol in Egypt (see map). Once again, theories were revised! First uncovered in 1993, the conclusions were announced in 1999 that put back even further in time the invention of an alphabet. A similar phonetic script to Sinai, these inscriptions strongly suggested the development of proto-Sinaitic writing centuries before Moses was born! The letters, in a Semitic language, carved in stone cliffs west of the Nile, were found by Yale University Egyptologist, Dr John Darnell, who dated them from around 1800 to 1900 BC − the time of Abraham!

• Map of Egypt and Wadi-al_Hol
• Map from map: NY Times

If this were not enough, this is what language historians say of the origins of the Hebrew Alphabet:

"... Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of their own Canaanite language."

• History of the Alphabet: Wikipedia

Putting it simply, the slaves spoke and wrote their own language based on sounds, a much simpler system than the complex Egyptian hieroglyphic pictograms which remained in the exclusive domain of the priests.

• Alphabetic inscription from Wadi-el-Hol

Hebrew is a Semitic language based on 22 phonetic characters. Remember that the Hebrews became slaves in Egypt . Moses, the prince and prophet, led the nation out of slavery in Egypt, living in Sinai for 40 years before the conquest of Canaan. This conclusion further reinforces the validity of the Bible's claim that Moses was the writer of the Torah in Hebrew, and that the people spoke and wrote early Hebrew.

Moses, brought up in the learning of the Egyptians, would have been familiar with, and capable of reading and writing the alphabetic Semitic language. Thus we conclude that Moses, being surrounded by, and familiar with alphabetic Semitic language, did write the Torah, just as the Bible tells us; it being the very first great work of ancient literature to use the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

The Book of Deuteronomy

The Book of Deuteronomy records Moses' last address to Israel. Chapter 28 sets out blessings for obedience to Yahweh, followed by warnings of scattering and persecution for disobedience.

800 years later, in the 18th year of King Josiah (622 BC), the Second Book of Kings tells us about the discovery of a lost book of the Law. The scroll, containing dire curses that would befall the people for disobedience, was read to Josiah. Realising that his father and grandfather had led the nation into idolatry, he wanted to know if and when the disaster predicted would happen. Huldah the prophetess was consulted, and she confirmed the words of Deuteronomy 28; but it would not happen in the lifetime of Josiah (see 2 Kings 22:8-20).

If the Book of Deuteronomy was rediscovered 36 years before the Babylonian captivity of 586 BC, how can we believe those who tell us that the five books of Moses were written in Babylon? Let us never mistrust the claims of Scripture, no matter what others may say. Their views are forced to change as new discoveries are made which prove their theories wrong. But the Bible does not change.

Advice from the Apostle Paul

In conclusion, we can do no better than heed this warning and advice from Paul to Timothy:

" But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work."

• 2 Timothy 3:13-17