Henke 2022bn

Dating Genesis 3 and Who Wrote It

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I stated that:

“In Lundahl (2022d), Lundahl (2022f), Lundahl (2022b), and in several of his emails, Mr. Lundahl makes a totally unwarranted assumption that if the earliest known audience believed that Genesis 3 or another claim in an ancient text was historically true, then the claims must be true. Of course, this assumption is nonsense for the following reasons:

1. People lie and make up stories.

2. People misinterpret natural events and sometimes credit them to supernatural forces (e.g., volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, severe storms, draught [sic, drought]).

3. The history of Mormonism, Scientology, etc. demonstrate that lies can become accepted by thousands or even millions of gullible people in a short amount of time, perhaps in no more than decades or a century.

4. Even if ancient historians (such as the five ancient biographers of Alexander the Great, Section 6.0) were sincere and honest, they still may have included inaccurate information, false rumors and misinterpretations in their works.

5. We don’t know who wrote Genesis 3 and when it was written.

6. The Dead Sea scrolls have the oldest known fragments of Genesis. This was about 1,000 years after Moses supposedly wrote the book. So, how could the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls have reliably known anything about events that occurred perhaps a thousand or more years earlier? How does Mr. Lundahl know that Genesis 3 is not a fabrication that may have been additionally altered or rewritten long before the Dead Sea scrolls? Why should anyone trust the claims in Genesis? Lundahl (2022c) assumes that God would have protected Genesis from corruption, but this assumption is totally without merit.

7. The biology of snakes is incompatible with them talking and there’s no evidence of either a supernatural or biological Talking Snake ever existing.

8. As further discussed in Section 5.0 and Henke (2022a), Hypotheses #3 and #4 on the origin of the Genesis 3 Talking Snake are rational, but Hypotheses #1 and #2 are not.

9. Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that the claims in Genesis 3 and elsewhere in the Bible are factual.

Mr. Lundahl fails to realize that ancient histories by themselves cannot be trusted, especially if they were written centuries or millennia after the supposed event that they are describing or if the documents are copies of copies of copies of copies... and not the originals Even if an ancient history happens to be an original copy describing an event that occurred at the time that the document was written, unless a claim in an ancient history is confirmed with independent external evidence, either in another manuscript or from archeology, there’s no reason to accept it as reliable history. There’s a big difference between an historical claim and a reliable historical claim.” [my original emphasis in italics only; my current emphasis in bold]

Lundahl (2022k) makes the following comments about point #5 in Henke (2022b) about who wrote Genesis 3 and when:

“First known audience considered it to have been written by Moses, and considered Genesis 1 to be based on a vision granted him on Sinai. They are not known to have made a parallel claim of prophecy for the parts that could be historically transmitted. This means, Genesis was finished as book after the Exodus event, and by Moses, who had access to revelation for a limited part of it and historic traditions and documents for the rest.”

Here, Mr. Lundahl is again making groundless proclamations that have no evidential support whatsoever. So, where’s the archeological evidence that Moses ever lived? If he did happen to exist, how do we know that he wrote anything? How do we know when Moses lived, if he lived at all? Why should we trust the traditions of ancient Israelites? How can we trust the beliefs of individuals that lived about a thousand years after Moses supposedly lived and many more thousands of years after Adam supposedly lived? To be exact, the archaeological results in Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) and other 21^st century sources provide good evidence on the origin of ancient Israel and the Moses story is baseless. Lundahl (2022k) needs to look at the evidence and not just blindly trust groundless Hebrew speculation and myths. Finkelstein and Silberman (2001, pp. 10-24) and many other experts also present good evidence that the Pentateuch was written by multiple authors and not all at once. Various individuals, including conservative Christians and secular archeologists (e.g., Finkelstein and Silberman 2001), have thrown out dates on when the Pentateuch or various parts of it were written. None of these dates are well verified.

Reference:

Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts: The Free Press: New York, USA, 385pp.