Although I liked the thoughts there is one aspect it seems to miss: that people take details from the literal view and try and weave doctrines out of them, thereby concentrating on the wrong things…
Richard
- Given the nature of this thread, it isn’t important. But … perhaps you’ve given this thread too much thought and exhausted your imagination?
- Your opinion inspired me to google “Mosaic authorship” just to see if there was something in the term that would make me better informed. Much to my pleasure, I discovered that there is: there’s a pretty clear parallel between a person’s belief in “Mosaic authorship” of the Torah and a person’s belief in “Mohammad’s authorship” of the Qur’an.
- Briefly, … extremely briefly, IMO, Mosaic authorship, I’m told:
- “is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were dictated by God to Moses.” [Source: Wikipedia introduction to the topic: Mosaic authorship.]
- Obviously, at least to me, Mohammad’s authorship of the Qur’an had to be as divine as Moses’ authorship of the Torah and Jesus’ authorship of the Gospel. Also, I note, according to the Qur’an, the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an were all “books” that Allah, Yahweh, and God “gave” Mohammad, Moses, and Jesus. Each religion claims divine authority for its text, in Islam’s opinion, in more or less the same way. Rejecting or denying that divine origin is equivalent to rejecting or denying the relevant Scripture’s authority; Fighting words to “the Ultra-orthodox of each religion”. At that point, argument is useless.
- To be clear though, IMO, what is up for discussion in this thread is whether or not Genesis 1-11 was divinely revealed to Moses when he was between 80 and 120 years old. Anyone who does not agree is, bluntly, an unbeliever, and might want to run for cover.
- Now I’m jealous. Ha! Where’d you get your post-High School education?
- Do you realize that the OP’s author, a lay British Nonconformist has already declared elsewhere, that:
- So, a lay, Nonconformist Nonbeliever-in-Mosaic-authorship opens a thread to challenge anybody and everybody who thinks God revealed the words of Genesis 1-11 to Moses personally, and you want to quibble with me over my question?
I’d go even further: Mosaic authorship of the entire Torah is reasonable. And I accept God’s Spirit working through all the writers and editors who contributed to that mosaic.
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Before I make any assumptions in my reply, how do you define “literally” in this context? Do you mean “what the author(s) intended the text to convey”?
And could you also elaborate on this question please?
Do you mean like, “if you reject the obvious interpretation, do you realise you have no basis for your belief system?” or something else?
Thanks!
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I really like how this podcast addresses the issue:
In With the Old - Myths & Mistakes: Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch | RSS.com
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Hmm, that is not what I said. I never mentioned the authorship, or challenged the validity of Genesis 1-11. My only interest is in how people understand it.
Whether the text was dictated or not, it stands or falls by how it is understood.
Taken at face value. and assumed to be actual history. 6 days = Monday-saturday, with the seventh being the sabbath.
Eden is/was a place on earth.with talking serpent and trees that imbue knowledge or eternal life , Worldwide flood, etc, etc
If , for instance you reject a 6 day creation as written, or take the Eden stroy as allegory, or the flood as local. Therefore have rejected the basic literal interpretation
So there are people her who vehemently oppose YEC and a literal view of Genesis 1 but take the Garden as reality.
I am not claiming that you must believe anything. I am just asking how people reconcile an acceptance of the Garden as written, when they have rejected Genesis 1 as literal. (Or. why I am so wrong not to accept the Garden as any sort of reality.)
It seems that most, if not all the doctrines on sin rely on Adam being a real historic person.
I have yet to hear a legitimate means for diverse humanity to derive from a gene pool of one person (Eve is taken as a clone of Adam) By legitimate I mean excluding Nephalim as a viable infusion of DNA. If you are going to take the Garden as true then all the claims of heredity are included in that interpretation. The moment you diverge, you are picking and choosing what is real and what is not.ie all or nothing.
Richard
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In relation to what? I can’t think of anyplace where what the writer saw makes a difference; what counts is what he wrote – and most often there isn’t anything that was seen in the first place.
Well, Wikipedia screwed up big time on that! That’s a minority view – from a very small minority at that.
Holding to Mosaic authorship extends to maintaining that Moses wrote the core of it ; it doesn’t exclude sources, assistants, editors, or redactors. There’s some very obvious places where Moses couldn’t have been the writer, definite evidence of editing, and fair evidence for redaction.
That just shows that the Qur’an was written by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.
That’s a narrow view of inspiration that is motivated by wanting as little human input as possible. Even people who maintain total Mosaic authorship don’t necessarily believe that any of it was divinely revealed.
Indeed the opening Creation story practically screams that it wasn’t divinely revealed, unless you want to maintain that God purposely copied the Egyptian creation story for the framework of His account. That would only work if you maintain that God revealed the basic outline to the Egyptians.
Ooh – clever.
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None of it should be taken “literally” in the sense in which we understand the word. The ancients (writing literally millions of years after the “event”) didn’t even have the same concept of “history” as we have. They were writing a story, trying to explain the world as they saw it. That does NOT mean it has no place in scripture.
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And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said. 6He buried him a in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is. 7Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. 8The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over
I guess that was prophetic then?
Richard
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- Are you under the illusion that I personally believe that Moses himself wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviiticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy? Because if you are, I assure you, I don’t and haven’t since my pre-teen years.
- Focus, Bro. what’s this thread’s topic aboutI? I was just trying to get a handle on the thread topic.Riichard says it’s not about who wrote Genesis 1-11. Here it is again, in case you missed it the first time:
- Get invited to a lot of ecumenical “community building” conferences, do you?
- Do tell. I don’t expect this to impress you, but I just found out that the Wikipedia “definition” of Mosaic authority is an important conviction over at Answers in Genesis and has been since September 2021. Evidence for Mosaic Authorship of the Torah]
How is the inclusion of Moses’ death a problem if Genesis is a mosaic written by many different hands?
Change the capital letter, you change everything.
Richard
Right, which is why putting it at the beginning of a sentence concealed that change. You had to read the sentence after the ones you quoted to get the point.
But silly as this is, it does relate to Genesis 1–11. This part of Scripture loves wordplay even more than I do. And it takes its wordplays even more seriously. If we don’t read carefully, we’ll miss quite a lot it’s trying to say.
Thanks for the link! I just listened to their episode on The naming of Eve and found it quite helpful. One of their hosts takes a similar tack as I do, but he mentioned details from the Hebrew I wasn’t aware of.
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He did write at the end: “And I accept God’s Spirit working through all the writers and editors who contributed to that mosaic.” It was subtle at first but the end made it clear. I’m not sure any serious scholar in academia subscribes to Mosaic authorship anymore. There is so much evidence against the idea, it is dead in the water and only entertained by conservatives masquerading apologetics as history.
I don’t see the connection. Parables are known as parables and were used at the time. Jesus adopted this convention. Historical narration masquerading as myth, or vice verse is the problem. If Jesus said “here is a historically true story” but told a parable that would be a problem. As I said, for centuries–nay–millenia–the Bible has been seen as historical narration. I don’t mean modern history. I mean as describing events that really happened. Everyone might not have accepted every event but it was believed the Exodus occurred generally as described in the Bible. These patriarchs really lived and did what the Bible narrates. The stories about Daniel are true --as opposed to legendary court tales put together hundreds of years later in a different context.
Many of the accounts and stories inside the Bible themselves view the earlier accounts as actually happening and treat them as things God actually did. They are unapologetic about this.
Everything. Both are parts of the Pentateuch and the documentary hypothesis and have the authors with conflicting stories as found spread throughout all the material. The entire Bible is basically in the realm of legend until around the year 850 BC and only then, on historical grounds we can confirm its very broadest outline.
And the point is that problems of the same gravity as those found in Genesis 1-11 are found in the entire Bible. Who killed Goliath? David or Elhanan? All of these stories have been told, retold, worked over, shaped and adapted to later times. The issue is much bigger that “Genesis. 1-11.” its how far are we willing to go with the whole Bible.
Job is actually much worse and far more objectionable if literal. As a story about maintaining faith in tough times it works. But God purposefully destroying a man’s life over a wager with the Devil? That is reprehensible to me. Not only that but it’s all about that male property. If I remember correctly, he is rewarded with more family, livestock and such (property).
Does the value of the Exodus change if 90% of the details are known to be false or impossible and the historicity of the other 10% are unknowable but many other parts of scripture treat it as real? If the plagues are just made up polemic against Egyptian Gods and were later put together into one story? What if Moses wasn’t real and small group of enslaved people migrated out of Egypt or some other region centuries earlier and the story evolved into this? What do we make of the event then? What is Dan McCLellan is correct?
This, again, is why conservatives draw a hard line at literalism. They are not willing to just say Genesis 1-11 is myth because they know these same arguments end up applying the rest of scripture and this is a very messy can of worms that changes how the majority of Christians understand the Bible today and how the Church has understood it as a whole throughout history. We can pretend all the original audience knew Genesis 1-11 was myth teaching theological points all we want. There isn’t a shred of evidence most people did not accept A&E as real people. A primordial couples is as good of an explanation as anyone could come up with at the time based on real world observations.
And if Jesus didn’t actually say a lot of the sayings material in GJohn, what then? If Jesus didn’t say and do some of there things in the Gospels what then? Most historians think the Gospels can provide a broad overview of Jesus’s life, ministry and message, but the devil is truly in the details. Once they try to get specific there is hardly any agreement.
It is not just a matter of the wording and order being switched. That does matter to a degree. An eyewitnesses describing the temple cleansing happening so early when it contributed to Jesus’s death in the other gospels is peculiar indeed. But the synoptic Gospels share literary dependence and John probably depends on them in some form as well. The difference in wording and order are purposeful but we have no real way of historically vetting the original material. Stories about Jesus 40 years later in another language might not be the most historically reliable and when we look at the Gospels critically they show themselves to be both sober and creative at times.
Christianity wouldn’t make sense if God incarnate was a metaphor. If the resurrection of Jesus was a vision and his body rotted it would not make sense to me either. Well, what about Judaism of which Christianity is a branch. If Genesis 1-11 is myth and legend, if the Exodus didn’t happen and the material about the patriarchs is largely legendary? If hardly any of the stories can be deemed historically reliable, what then? How much are we willing to say is non-literal throughout the whole Bible before we decided its not really what we thought it was?
This is why I see the scripture in Christianity from a top down perspective. Rather than the Bible itself being written by God I would prefer so say God uses the Bible to mediate the sacred and transform lives. I certainly do not deny Him the possibility or moving over authors to write or putting thoughts in their heads or in moving the church to pick certain books. But my faith is in God in the here and now. Not in the book, but in God as I read the book. In the Holy Spirit to convict and lead me. The Bible just looks too human, has too many problems and so on from my persecutive, to view it any other way.
Dan McClellan put out this video which talks about 2 Tim and theopneustia and references a book by Poirier from 2017 (Invention of the Inspired Text). His argument is that before Origin, every use means life-giving and harkens back to Gen 2:7. He also makes valid points about oral vs written at the time. I know he pushes a Mormon agenda but his scholarship is often quite good and mainline.
I follow Joel Baden’s exegesis on the account "There are some aspects of this text that appear strange–repetitions, awkward transitions, apparent gaps–but these could plausibly be attributed to authorial style. The brothers seem to decide to kill Joseph twice, once described in narrative (“they conspired to kill him,” v. 18) and once in dialogue (“let us kill him,” v. 20). Reuben’s plan to save Joseph (“cast him into that pit,” v. 22–that is, instead of killing him with our hands) is identical to the brothers’ original plan to kill him (“let us throw him into one of the pits,” v. 20–that is, to dispose of his body after we have killed him). Judah’s argument for not killing Joseph (“let us not do away with him ourselves,” literally, “let our hands not be against him,” v. 27) is almost a duplication of Reuben’s (“do not touch him yourselves,” literally, “do not stretch a hand against him,” v. 22)–and when Judah proposes his plan, the brothers had already accepted, and even carried out, that of Reuben. These issues can perhaps be interpreted away on a case-by-case basis, but taken together they present a challenge to any reader.
There are, however, problems in the text that cannot be easily resolved, problems that preclude any straightforward reading of the plot. These derive from the narrative presence and action of both Ishmaelites and Midianites in the sale of Joseph. When we read the text as it stands, according to its plain meaning, these two foreign groups are the source of great confusion. The Ishmaelite traders arrive on the scene first (v. 25), leading Judah to persuade his brothers that rather than kill Joseph, they ought to sell him; they will be just as effectively rid of him, and even profit in the process (vv. 26-27). Before the transaction can take place, however, the Midianite traders pass by, and though it was the brothers who had planned to sell Joseph to the caravan of Ishmaelites, it is the Midianites, according to the plain reading of the text, who pull Joseph from the pit, and it is the Midianites who sell him to the Ishmaelites. The Midianites, therefore, appear to frustrate Judah’s plans, as it is they who reap the benefits of selling Joseph to the Ishmaelites. If the brothers are present for this, they are strikingly silent.
Far more difficult is the notice at the end of v. 28 that the Ishmaelites, upon purchasing Joseph, brought him to Egypt. This is expected in light of what preceded in v. 25, where the Ishmaelites are said to be heading toward Egypt. But it is expressly contradicted by what follows at the end of the chapter in v. 36: "The Midianites, meanwhile, sold him in Egypt to Potiphar."5 If this were not problem enough, Genesis 39:1 states that Potiphar bought Joseph “from the Ishmaelites who had brought him there.” [The Composition of the Pentateuch p 3-4]
I think it is fairly obvious from a careful reading of the text itself we have multiple versions of the same story with conflicting details here.
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That is an interesting theory. So you are saying God split an androgynous being into a male and female? Is there any other stories with the same from antiquity? I am reminded of logion 14 of the Gospel of Thomas and some Christians at the time arguing for a return to a genderless, primordial state. This story can go so many ways. Israel/Judah, in the context of the Babylonian Exile, suffering in the world, the origin if humans and genders, the absence of the gods, read in light of other myths. But also, its interpretation would change over time and from place to place, complicating things. Oral vs written… Is there even a univocal meaning to it? I doubt it. I honestly don’t think there is a singular interpretation of the Garden story that is correct. I think it means a lot of things to a lot of people at different places and in different times. The least correct one I would say is the latest one dealing with the alleged transmission of “original sin.”.
I think this happens much earlier. Is the absence of god in earthier myths a thing? Were they not once more intimate with humans in some stories? Is it correct to say that God’s original creation seems flawed in Genesis 2? It was lonely and needed to be split. There was already a gulf of misunderstanding between God and Adam evolving. I always find Armstrong’s interpretation to be helpful. She writes:
The ancient myths asserted that at the beginning of time, human beings lived in close intimacy with the gods. They talked with their deities, who gave them advice and rescued them when they were in trouble. But this clearly changed. The gods became remote from the affairs of humanity; they seemed careless of their plight. Other writers in the Near East, such as the Babylonian author of the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1250 BCE), were also concerned with this problem. When had the gods started to retreat from our world, and why had they done so? J made this the theme of his account of the early history of humanity, which we find in Genesis 2–11. He believed that once the creative process got under way, separation from God was inevitable. At a very early stage—before the appearance of the serpent and even before the creation of Eve—God had already begun to lose touch with adam. He could see that Adam was lonely: it was not right that he should live alone, and in an attempt to rectify the situation, J says, God created the animals. Like Adam, they were created from the earth (adamah)t so God assumed that they would have much in common with Adam. But he had forgotten that Adam was also created in God’s image and had been the recipient of the divine breath. There was a gulf between Adam and the animals that their common origin in the earth could not bridge. When God had finished creating the animal kingdom, he paraded them all before Adam. One of Adam’s tasks was to give the animals names. Like God, the man had to create a meaningful world for himself by means of language; like God, he had the power to assess the natural world from the outside. But God’s purpose was also to find a mate for Adam from among “all cattle,” “the birds of the air,” and “every animal of the field” (2:20). It is a comic picture. Like an eager matchmaker, God presented the inexperienced Adam with one animal after another. Bison? Elephant? Kangaroo? We are not surprised to hear that at the end of the day, “for the man there was not found a helper as his partner” (2:20).
How could God have imagined for one moment that Adam would find a mate in this way? The God who appeared to be so omnipotent and omniscient in Chapter 1 was now unable to fathom the desires and needs of his creature. God and man were already becoming separate and incomprehensible to each other.
A part that I have often overlooked is also pointed out by Armstrong:
When God finally got around to creating Eve from Adam’s rib, Adam seemed to express a certain irritation. Why had it taken God so long to work it out?
“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.”Eve was thus at a further remove from the divine source. God’s creation was beginning to drift away from him. The cause of this separation was not sin but had been inherent in the creative process from the very beginning. As the division between humanity and God increased, sin would become a possibility, and sin, in turn, could only accelerate the dynamic of separation and estrangement.
The turn from God seems to begin with Adam. It seems an inevitable part of creation itself. There seems to be a lack of understanding between God and a lonely Adam that later culminates with the exile from the Garden after Eve is made and the forbidden fruit is eaten.
The idea that the first human was not sexed and sexuality only came about with the split may only go back to Phillys Trible’s 1978 book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. But much earlier, Jewish readings held that Adam was made with male and female sides stuck together (based on Genesis 1 where God creates adam male and female), and those sides were later separated to form the man and woman.
Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve gives a summary of some of these views:
In the second century CE, Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eleazar concluded from the phrase “male and female He created them” that the original Adam was a hermaphrodite. The third-century rabbi Samuel ben Nahman interpreted the description to mean that “When the Lord created Adam He created him double-faced, then He split him and made him of two backs, one back on this side and one back on the other side” (p. 15).
And later, summarizing the view of Judah Abravanel (c. 1464–1523):
And the human said to God, “How am I supposed to be fruitful and multiply? I am a single creature, made in your image. All the other creatures, the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth, are in pairs, male and female distinct and separate from one another. I see them mate with each other, and through that act they are fruitful. But I am one, both male and female. How can I fulfill your command?” And God took a knife and split the human in half, as an apple is split, making two where there was once one. And God drew flesh over the wounds he had made and left on the belly of each half the mark called a navel as a sign of what he had done. And God said “Now you will be able to multiply and to conquer the earth.” After the cut was made, the two parts of the human, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces. The man and the woman were fruitful and multiplied and conquered the earth. But they always felt the wound of their original division and the impossibility, even in their mutual embraces, of healing the wound completely (pp. 308–309).
It’s not the earliest Jewish reading of the text we have, but it’s early enough that it can’t be written off as beholden to evolutionary science or feminism. Jewish readers considered it one valid way to read the text among many.
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I love the Spinoza part! It’s something that jumped out starkly when translating in Hebrew class.
I regard Wellhausen’s JEDP scheme as circular reasoning; he assumes what he set out to show. But they’re right that “documentary hypothesis” has developed into a number of proposals – though not as bluntly as one of my grad school profs who called it a “circus”.
Superb point that the Pentateuch never claims an author! (except in a few brief instances)
BTW, the speaker is 100% wrong about Luke 24: Jesus doesn’t say a thing about authorship. Thinking He’s referring to authorship when He says “Law of Moses” is an error of misunderstanding how works were referred to.
And Genesis 5:1 doesn’t say anything about a previous document it just uses a standard phrase introducing an account of something.
Nope – you go with the genre the writer selected. “All or nothing” is both a false dichotomy and lazy thinking.
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AIG predictably concludes with lying slander:
The simple fact is that scholars who reject the Mosaic authorship of the Torah are as unwilling as the Jewish leaders (John 5:40) in not wanting to listen to the words of Jesus on this subject.
But that is all that I hear. Because such and such is real, so must the other. The Bible is a collection of documents put together for convenience and cohesion. It is split into chapters and verses for convenience and reference, but people treat it like one book and they treat each verse as it if is a stand alone statement. They claim similarities where there are none. And harmonise hermeneutics across from one section to another as if they were always connected.
So that if anyone starts disbelieving a view of Genesis 2-5 they are automatically doubting the whole Bible! All or nothing!
Richard