Is it possible to learn who wrote the Hebrew Bible – or when?
Faithful readers of this blog know that there are a few different versions of the Exodus stories in the Hebrew Bible (including three variants on the Ten Commandments, one of which has almost nothing in common with the other two). So where did these renditions come from? Who wrote them, and when?
“The Bible was written over hundreds of years by many different hands in a variety of genres and in several different languages,” says Jacob Edson, the editorial director of BibleGateway.com — a site that is home to one of the most comprehensive resources about biblical texts on the Web. “For most books of the Bible, there is a traditional popular view of who the author or authors were, and for many of them, there is a somewhat different guess based on modern (or ancient) research.”
As someone who is rewriting many of the Exodus stories myself, based on the most modern research I can find, I am most interested in who wrote the Books of Exodus and Numbers, where almost all of the tales are found — and, almost more importantly, when. Bible Gateway lumps all five Books of Moses, a.k.a the Pentateuch, a.k.a the Torah, into one brief span between 1446 BCE and 1406 BCE, adding that these texts “may have been mostly oral tradition until much later.”
But I need a lot more specificity than Edson provides. For instance, I want to have an at least somewhat plausible method of figuring out who won a battle between the Amalekites and the Israelites on the way to Mount Sinai. As this event is recounted in Numbers 14:39–45, Amalek is the victor because Israel did not have enough faith in the Lord. But the same clash is also described in Exodus 17:8–16, and in that version Israel triumphs over Amalek. I assume there must have been some kind of fight, since the story is related in two different books, but who actually prevailed? One would think that the earlier version, whichever it is, is more accurate.
The problem is that no one seems to agree on which parts of which books were written when or by whom. There are too many possible ways to divvy up the text, all of them reasonable-seeming and yet leading to differing conclusions.
One older way to distinguish among the strands of narrative found in the Bible is to look at how God is referred to. Is it Elohim, as in the Creation story in Genesis Chapter I, or Yahveh, as in Chapter 4 when Cain and Abel are born? What about when the deity is named both in the same verses, as in Chapters 2 and 3? Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of chronological clarity to be gained by this method.
Another, more recent technique is to apply machine learning to inscriptions found on archaeological discoveries of pottery shards, in order to divine (pun intended) when people speaking an archaic form of Hebrew and living in what we now call the Land of Israel might have developed sufficient literary skills to compose the Bible. This was the approach taken by a group of Tel Aviv University researchers in 2016, working with a sample of 16 inscriptions from the Negev Desert. They concluded that “already by 800 BCE, there was sufficient intellectual infrastructure . . . able to produce sophisticated historical and literary texts.” This pushes back the generally accepted date of 586 BCE, the year that the Babylonians razed Jerusalem and forced the Israelites into exile, for the Bible’s compilation into something approaching its current form. But even this AI-dependent methodology for evaluating the evidence is not without controversy.
Ultimately, I’ve decided to just consider the entire Torah as hoary beyond the written word and pick out the bits of narrative that are the most dramatic for my own novelistic reimagining. Maybe the stories told closer to whatever events inspired them aren’t as accurate to as many thousands of years as those of Australian aboriginal peoples, but I — like the Jewish scribes before me — am most interested in creating a fascinating tale.
Meanwhile, research published recently in Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology journal and covered by the Israeli daily Haaretz sheds light on the longevity of Egyptian political and cultural hegemony in Canaan. During at least two periods separated by several centuries and a good distance away from each other, Canaanites would bury a single ceramic lamp between two ceramic bowls under a floorboard of their homes. The earliest deposits of this kind were of items that bore no signs of use, indicating that they were some kind of sacrifice to ensure the well-being of the home and, presumably, the family that occupied it. Later on, the same items with traces of oils and foodstuffs were cached.
This practice echoed that of the Egyptians, who made “similar, although not identical, foundation deposits that were common in Egypt at the time,” according to Prof. Ido Koch of Tel Aviv University, who spoke with Haaretz and was the lead scholar on the archaeological study. “These included a set of tools, pottery vessels as well as amulets, such as scarabs, jewelry and inscribed bricks that were placed in the foundations of new buildings.”
This religious custom was practiced most often during the reign of Ramses II — who, for the purposes of my novel, is the pharaoh of the Exodus. (Pharaoh is never named in the Hebrew Bible.) What that fact says to me is that the Canaanites, whose origins are still somewhat mysterious to biblical scholars, were probably not the originators of the Exodus story. After all, if they had gone back to the Holy Land, they still would have been subject to Pharaoh’s rule. If the Canaanites who imitated Egyptian culture in what we know as Israel today had somehow escaped from building cities for Pharaoh, the Exodus stories wouldn’t have come down to us as exemplifying freedom from oppression.
So not only don’t we know who wrote the Exodus, or its version in the Book of Numbers; we don’t even know who experienced it and whether it was the same group.
Fertile ground indeed for fiction.
