Are the Five Books of Moses the verbatim text by God?

(The quotes from "Exodus")

 

 

For all people acknowledging the God of Abraham and His creation of this Universe it is of the greatest importance to know whether we have available anything tangible attributed directly to God. For example, if archeologists ever discovered remnants of the stone tablets which God gave to Moses (and Moses broke them), they would be a physical object made by God: the object of unique and ultimate significance for the entire humanity. Yet so far neither the first nor the second issue of those stone tablets have been found.


Not having any physical objects made by God, it would be also of a paramount significance if we had available some authentic texts directly attributable to God: say a true copy of the text that God curved for Moses upon the first issue of the tablets. Surely, any text coming from God directly would be the most unique among all texts available to the humanity. By its quality and content, the text coming from God must surely be of the ultimate perfection proper only to God. Do we have anything like this?


Well, according to the Judaic (and Christian) tradition, the Five Books of Moses (out of the rest of the books of Tanach) are attributed directly to God being the authentic word-by-word copy written down by Moses and authenticated by God.


However, there is nothing in Torah in support of this tradition: rather the contrary. Let's follow a few quotes from Exodus.

32.15 Thereupon Moses turned and went down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Pact, tablets inscribed on both their surfaces: they were inscribed on the one side and on the other.

 

   Note: the first issue of the tablets was two-sided.

 

32.16 The tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing, incised upon the tablets.

 

Note: this is the only place in the Bible were the expression "God's work" and "God's writing" is used, which indicates that the rest of the Five Books of Moses were surely not God's own writing. The Five Books of Moses therefore were a compendium written down later by Moses and his followers.

 

Those original God's written tablets were broken by Moses as soon as he confronted his people who had just betrayed God. Those original tablets written by God therefore are presumed lost forever (if their pieces are not miraculously discovered sometimes in the future).


Then, during the second summon to Mount Sinai ...

 

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34.1 The Lord said to Moses: "Carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shuttered".

 

These tablets of the second issue (to be written by God Himself) were for keeping them in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle. However, they had been lost later in the ancient times. Therefore, as of this moment, we do not have anything originally made or written by God.

 

However, in the following verse, God instructs Moses to write down His commandments (rather than writing them on His own, as it was mentioned in 34.1).

 

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34.27 And the Lord said to Moses: "Write down these commandments, for in accordance with these commandments I make a covenant with you and with Israel"

 

The number of "These commandments" given in the previous verses is larger than ten. It looks that God wanted Moses on his own to write down those additional commandments and the entire 40-day lecture.

 

34.28 And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he ate no bread and drank no water; and he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

 

Here is a controversy: in the verse 34.1 God promised to re-write the Ten Commandments on His own, while in the verse 34.27 God instructs Moses to write down the Ten Commandments and their extension. 

 

In either case, whichever was written by God Himself was lost. All that could remain from that time was a compendium written down by Moses: the first part written during the second session in the presence of God on mount Sinai, and the rest of it written later by memory and through the prism of a limited human understanding of Moses (no matter what God lectured him during the forty days). There are no indications as though God had ever proofread the Moses' writing.

 

 

Therefore, even in the best-case scenario, we have available only the texts written by Moses and his immediate disciples, rather than anything written directly by God or verified by God.

 

However, the original Mosaic writing could be lost too, or could be modified by his ancient followers which happened to be less bright than Moses – and, unlike him, had never listened directly to God's forty-day "course".

 

As of today, what we have available as the Five Books of Moses, is the so-called Masoretic scroll which has luckily survived and reached us over millennia and carefully analyzed by such scholars of Biblical Hebrew as Richard Elliott Friedman [1], who established that the Masoretic scroll is a compilation from several more ancient scrolls made in the time of Ezra. Therefore...

 

 

The tradition of Judaism (and Christianity) attributing the Five Books of Moses directly to God, or claiming as though they were approved by God (even if written by humans) is merely a wishful thinking or an act of blind faith. For example, such an act of blind faith is the items 8 and 9 of the 13 Principles of Jewish Faith by Maimonides, also known as Rambam (1135-1204) [2]:

 

Principle 8:  I believe by complete faith that the whole Torah now found in our hands was the exact same one given to Moses...

 

Principle 9:  I believe by complete faith that this is the Torah, and it shall not be changed and it shall not be replaced with another from the Creator…

 

The problem however is in that the Masoretic scroll in the ancient Hebrew available now presents a huge challenge for understanding and extracting the original sense from it. Its text contains many linguistic glitches, variety of possible meanings of some ancient words is lost, and meaning of some ancient euphemisms is lost too [4]. For that reason, a process of extracting the meaning from the source text in ancient Hebrew is ambiguous [4]. What was extracted happens to be controversial and contradicting to the contemporary hard knowledge [5]. The controversies and ambiguities in the source in ancient Hebrew only multiply in numerous translations into national languages made by different schools of religious thought.

 

Indeed, we all agree that from God we do not expect anything less than ultimately perfect. Therefore, to attribute such source text as we have to God is embarrassing and demeaning God.

 

That is why it is unreasonable to single out the Five Books of Moses from entire Tanach as though written directly by God (or supervised by God). We should rather admit that these Five Books (just like the other books of Tanach) were all man-written – thus inevitably contain the so noticeable "human factors" in them. Indeed, it is a very understandable wish to have God's commandments as authenticated text directly from God (rather than through His human prophets and scribes), however we must live with what we have because there is no alternative to living by truth.     

 

Alexander Gofen

 

1. Richard Elliott Friedman, "Who wrote the Bible"

2. Maimonides, Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith   
3. Dennis Prager, "Exodus: The Rational Bible". 

4. Alexander Gofen, "Controversies in translations (and the source) of Torah"

5. Alexander Gofen, Verse-by-verse analysis of Genesis  

 

Appendix

 

To illustrate the seriousness of the problem of authenticity of the available Torah, let see how a famous scholar and commentator of Torah Dennis Prager considers this issue in his book series "The Rational Bible". At the moment (May 2024) Mr. Prager published 3 of the planned 5 books of his commentaries: Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy.

 

Here is what he wrote on the issues of the origin and authenticity of the Bible. In the Introduction to Deuteronomy, we see a subtitle of the chapter

 

"The Torah is not man-made"                                                      (1)

 

In it, Mr. Prager wrote:

 

"I am convinced God, not man, is Torah's ultimate source".             (2)

 

This statement requires explanations because in statement (1) Mr. Prager is inaccurate. If he means the question who had written down the text of the Torah's copy available to us, the answer is that the Torah was man-made. A famous scholar Richard Elliott Friedman [1] in his book "Who wrote the Bible" clearly demonstrated, that the available now text of the Torah was compiled by Ezra from several ancient scrolls then available to Ezra. This man-made compilation contains contradictions and controversies.  More importantly, Exodus 34.27 (see above) clearly indicates that it was Moses, who wrote down what God lectured during the second 40-day seminar. Therefore, the text and content of the Torah is definitely man-written (if this is the meaning of the "man-made")!

 

As to the statement (2), though God was the ultimate source of the available Torah, there is no indication as though its text were verbatim words of God, or as though God had ever authenticated that man-written compendium of His lectures to Moses.

 

In the next chapter the title is "How was the Torah transmitted?" There Mr. Prager wrote:

 

"I take no position on how God revealed the Torah. What concerns me most is who authored the Torah. That is far more important than how it was written".

 

Not exactly! Who was the author (or inspirer) of the Torah is one thing, and who and how put the author's work on paper is the other thing, and both are important. In the case of the Bible, God commissioned recording of his lectures to Moses and scribes, yet He had never verified what was actually written down. Therefore, the final product is a compendium written by imperfect students rather than the authentic stenographic report.  

 

Then Mr. Pager wrote:

 

When you say "This part is divine, but that one isn't", you become your own Torah.   

 

Fully understanding Mr. Prager's concerns in such a situation, his skeptical note, however, does not resolve the problems of very real glitches in the Torah [3, 4]. Authoring the book series titled "The Rational Bible", what does Mr. Prager expect from rational readers encountering those glitches?!

 

Finally, Mr. Prager brings the following example of his conversation with a secular Harvard Prof. Dershowitz:

 

When Prof. Dershowitz differs with the Torah, he thinks the Torah is wrong, and he is right.

 

When I differ with the Torah, I think the Torah is right, and I am wrong.

 

This emphatic conversation, however, is a bit demagogic. It's not a matter of arrogance if a rational person "differs with the Torah". The copy of the Torah available now is not a God-given mysterious object. As a man-made book or a scroll (rather than an unknowable divine object), the Torah may and must be analyzed by readers. And then all its glitches are clearly visible. For example, Mr. Dershowitz may differ from the Torah because the Torah contradicts the hard science. In most of its translations, the Torah still refers to sky (rakia) as a "firmament" and presents the Universe geocentric. Does Mr. Prager really insist as though sky were a firmament and the Sun orbits around Earth? What did Mr. Prager do?

 

For hiding this particular controversy, Mr. Prager used the newly released Chabad translation, where Chabad (after thousands of years of "consensus" on "firmament" among the rest of religious community) finally "realized": wow, "rakia" must mean an "expense of space" rather than the embarrassing term "firmament", still used in other Bible versions (for example the Stone Edition). "Fixing" this in such a way, Chabad, however, had no choice but to leave the Geocentric view and other glitches of the Masoretic scroll intact: all its inconsistencies of "transmission" and translation.

 

For example, in [4] section 2(b) I quoted a correction of a translation of the Third of the Ten Commandments suggested by Mr. Prager in his article of 2014. Mr. Prager's translation dramatically differed from the traditional one – a prohibition of not mentioning God's name in vain – Exodus 20:7. According to Mr. Prager then (and Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi [4]) the Third Commandment must be read

 

"You must not commit evil in My name, because I will never pardon it",

 

which dramatically differs from the tradition! However, in 2018, publishing his Exodus, Mr. Prager reneged from his own earlier interpretation of 2014, writing that now he prefers the traditional translation "in vain" – though it makes a little sense! Mr. Prager had to renege, perhaps, under pressure of a majority of rabbis adhering to the old (erroneous) translation and the old (false) tradition to not mention and not fully spell the word God.

 

This is how one must "maneuver" in order to look rational writing "The Rational Bible" series.

 

There is no escape from the reality which is that any contemporary reader of Torah actually reads an ancient man-written compendium. This compendium, alas, contains humanly introduced glitches and contradictions, and by contemporary editorial standards, this compendium couldn't pass even a technical editing test.

 

However, this copy of Torah is our only compendium of what God had lectured to Moses. Therefore, we must live with this fact doing our best to extract the God's truth from what we have.

 

Recently Mr. Prager wrote this:

 

I have never accepted irrational religious beliefs. If something in my – or any – religion doesn't make sense, I don't accept it. That's why my five-volume commentary on the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is titled "The Rational Bible."

 

How does it go together with his earlier statement: "When I differ with the Torah, I think the Torah is right, and I am wrong."?