We Don’t Know Who Wrote Pentateuch and When
Kevin R. Henke
October 24, 2022
In Henke (2022bh) and Henke (2022b), I stated the following:
“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).
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.” [emphasis in original; my emphasis in italics]
Lundahl (2022t) is largely a response to my nine points. Actually, Lundahl (2022k) earlier responded to these same nine points when they were originally listed in Henke (2022b). I previously responded in Henke (2022bj and 2022bm) and Henke (2022ij through Henke 2022iq) to his comments on the first four points in Lundahl (2022k) and Lundahl (2022t), respectively. Here are Mr. Lundahl’s comments in Lundahl (2022t) on my italicized point #5:
“We don't see the first audience directly, hence the importance of a later first known audience.
Part of the objection is however a fairly recent fad of imagining Jews in exile copied Babylonic myths and then put their own twist on them.”
Although point #5 deals with the origin of Genesis 3, these discussions would apply to the entire Pentateuch (i.e., Genesis through Deuteronomy). Again, Lundahl (2022t) continues to spout off his worthless “first known audience” scheme as if it’s a reliable indicator of what is history and what is not. Why should we trust the judgement of ancient people on their history when these “historical” events supposedly occurred centuries to thousands of years before they were born? They would have had no idea on how their stories developed or how they might have changed over the centuries to millennia. I have repeatedly refuted the reliability of the “first known audience” scam, which includes my rebuttal in Henke (2022bn) to Mr. Lundahl’s initial response to point #5 in Lundahl (2022k). I’ve certainly demonstrated that the “first known audience” scheme is a worthless indicator in separating myths from history with situations that are centuries to thousands of years old. For examples, see the following:
Henke (2022b): "Responding to Lundahl (2022a-g): No Evidence for Demons Assisting David Copperfield’s Stage Shows, Nuclear Wars before Noah’s Flood, the Talking Snake of Genesis 3, God Helping Alexander the Great, and Other Claims"
Henke (2022bh): “Lundahl 2022k – More Nonsense Involving the ‘Earliest Known Audience’”
Henke (2022dn): “Tradition, ‘Collective Memory’ and the ‘Earliest Known Audience’ are Not Evidence of Adam or Moses. Mr. Lundahl Needs to Do Better”
Henke (2022ea): “Unfortunately, Fiction is Often Passed Off as History”
Henke (2022eb): “Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum Again. Why Should Anyone Blindly Trust the Bellum Gallicum?”
Henke (2022ee): “Another Baseless Appeal to the “Earliest Known Audience”
Henke (2022ei): “1st and 2nd Century AD Chaos and Uncertainty in the Development of Christianity: Lundahl (2022m) Makes Unsubstantiated Accusations and Ignores the Preservation Bias Problem”
Henke (2022ek): “Did William Tell Exist? Lundahl (2022n) Doesn’t Take the Issue Seriously and His ‘First Known Audience Rule’ is a Failure”
Henke (2022es): “How the 19th Century Roman Catholic Church and Lundahl (2022n) Took the St. Philomena Hoax as Fact”
Henke (2022ff): “No Comparison between the Evidence for Alexander the Great and Genesis 3”
Henke (2022fm): “Crater Lake, Oregon, USA: How Geology Used and Corrected an Earliest Known Audience’s Mythical Description of a Volcanic Eruption”
This scheme also cannot be trusted to accurately describe modern events, such as with the “first known audience” of Trump’s supporters and their views on the 2020 Presidential Election and the Russian “first known audience” and their views of “Ukrainian NAZIs” during the current war against Ukraine (Henke 2022cc).
Mr. Lundahl is also unfamiliar with the diverse views that skeptical scholars have about the origin of Pentateuch. Scholars date the various sources in the Pentateuch anywhere from the 2nd to the 10th centuries BC (Finkelstein and Silberman 2001, p. 13). For example, Finkelstein and Silberman (2001, p. 12) date the “J document” to about 970-930 BC and the “E document” to about 930-720 BC, or long before the Babylonian exile. Even though various scholars disagree about the dates, they all agree that the Pentateuch had multiple authors and that it was not written by Moses. Although I’m skeptical that the Pentateuch can be divided up into neat sections and precisely dated with the JEPD hypothesis, I agree with these scholars that the Pentateuch was written by various authors. I think that the writing of the Pentateuch could have taken as much as 1,000 years.
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.