What Did Moses Write?

What did Moses write? This is a hotly debated question. Some might reply: “Moses wrote the first five books of scripture (the Torah) exactly as they appear in our bibles today.” Scholars scoff. Some go as far as to say:

Moses wrote nothing. He is a mythological figure who never existed. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were finalized a thousand years after the date when a supposed Exodus took place. There is no evidence for any of it.

Does it matter? I would say, “Yes and No.” If Moses wrote nothing and never existed, then the bases for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam sink into quicksand. Crack the foundation and the structures that rest upon it shake apart. On the other hand, because ancient cultures of the Middle East relied heavily on oral transmission, Moses still could be considered the author even if he didn’t directly put his words to pen. Furthermore, we would expect redactions, modifications, and additions to find their way into the written texts over time. This would in no way diminish either the inspiration or authority that the Torah holds. The question is: “Can we more than three thousand years later come to a balanced understanding of what could be true”? This is the first of a series of articles where I hope to lay out facts that perhaps can bring some clarity to this issue.

For now, I’ll assume that a group of ancient Hebrews did escape slavery in Egypt. Their leader (which we’ll call Moses) was at the center of this event. Is this a reasonable presupposition? Stay tuned for subsequent articles. For now, let’s investigate the writing technologies that were available at the time of Moses. Until the late nineteenth century many scholars speculated that writing was not even invented till the beginning of the first millennium BCE, long after the time of the Exodus.¹ As we will show, they missed by over a thousand years.

Writing Systems

Far back in prehistory, people discovered (probably the hard way) that fire ignited in trenches or holes covered by wood could reach high temperatures. So what? one might ask. Well, by 8000-6000 BCE, the technology found practical use. By molding soft clay into desired shapes and applying fire, primitive hardened pottery vessels were fashioned. Archaeologists find remnants of these all over the world. But progress never stops. Further advances led to kilns to stabilize the process. In ancient times, pottery making already was a well understood art.²

As far as we can tell, the birth of writing occurred some thirty-five hundred years before Christ. In Mesopotamia, perhaps some creative person discovered they could indent soft clay tablets with pictures representing objects/persons and marks representing numbers. When fired, these hardened tablets were perfect for permanently representing livestock inventory and for recording business transactions. This was groundbreaking, no less impactful to ancient cultures than the printing press or modern computers are to us. It was not long before the pictographic tablet notations began to not only represent objects but concepts. This led to cuneiform systems where marks were adjusted and simplified to correspond to syllables. Finally, proto-alphabetic systems emerged to reduce the thousands of cuneiform symbols to a few dozen. By 2100 BCE, an actual printing mechanism was invented for making identical duplicates. The one illustrated below copies a stone tablet; I’ve included its translation.³ One could argue that this was the world’s first Xerox copy machine. Well, one can’t keep this from the general population. They began to use this mode of writing as we use email today. Archaeologists uncovered many thousands of tablets addressing day-to-day issues. Examples include wives discussing domestic issues or husbands writing home. I’m sure that all of this felt quite modern to the people of the time.

Printing block of royal inscription of Naram-Sin, Sumer 2291-2254 BCE
	AMAR-SIN in NIPPUR called by ENLIL who supports the temple of ENLIL, powerful male king of UR king of the four quarters of the world.

Writing in Egypt contained all of the elements just discussed and more. In addition to clay tablets, pharaoh exploits were inscribed using hieroglyphs on pyramid walls. But there was more. Egyptians discovered that the papyrus plant could quickly be made into paper by a simple process shown below.⁴ They used reed pens⁵ for writing well before the time of Moses to record everything from religious texts to business transactions. The good news: writing was easy and fast. The bad news: papyrus doesn’t last like clay tablets. Fortunately, we have recovered numerous fragments that were preserved in dry low humid climates of desert regions.

Earliest books

A question we could now ask is “had writing progressed by the time of Moses to be able to express complex ideas and concepts such as we find in scripture”? The answer to this is yes. The Kesh Temple Hymn,⁶ the Instructions of Shuruppag⁷ date to about 2500 BCE. The famous Epic of Gilgamesh⁸ originated around the same time although the most complete copies we have are from much later. The Egyptian book of the dead dating to around 1600 BCE is another example.⁹

So, let’s conclude this section. According to the Bible, Moses was raised as the son of pharaoh’s daughter.¹⁰ He was schooled in all the wisdom of Egypt.¹¹ Surely then, he was quite familiar with the writing methods of the day, was multilingual, and fully capable of composing the Torah. This doesn’t prove that he did. I’ll address that possibility in upcoming articles.

Final Thoughts

As I was working through the details for composing this article, it occurred to me how God’s timing is different from ours.¹² If I was one of the Hebrew slaves, I’d surely be complaining as I labored under Egyptian oppression. “Why God don’t you act? Don’t you see the suffering? Don’t you care?” I would have no idea that he was planning to have a most unlikely Hebrew grow up in Pharaoh’s court as a prince. The thought that a royal daughter would be instrumental to cause this to happen would be incomprehensible. There is no way I could know that an underclass, despised slave could eventually receive the necessary training to write something as complex as the Torah. And what about the forty years of refinement needed to drive out the sense of entitlement and arrogance present when he murdered the Egyptian?¹³ How many other puzzle pieces needed to be in place that we even now don’t know as we look back? So, no! God did not delay one bit. He worked within our systems so, in the fullness of time, he could move the plan of redemption forward. It’s good to know that the Creator of the Universe has our backs even when we don’t fully understand his apparent inaction.

References

P.J. Wiseman, Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis, 13.
Scott Shannon, “The Complete History of Kilns.”
Schøyen Collection, “MS 5106.”
Destiny Nichols, “Cyperus Papyrus, Papyrus.”
James Anderson, “Uncovering the Ancient Roots of Writing: the Reed Pen in Egyptian History.”
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, “The Kesh Temple Hymn: Translation.”
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, “The Instructions of Shuruppag: Translation.”
Electronic Babylonian Library, Poem of Gilgamesh.
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, The Book of the Dead.
Exod 2:10.
Acts 7:22.
Isa 55:8–9.
Exod 2:11–12.

Thanks for listening,
Dan Harvey, author of “Experiencing the Apocalypse” and “Wrestling with Faith,” https://secondlooknow.com/

What Did Moses Write?

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