Because the first books of the Bible are the foundation blocks of the whole Bible, the critics have spent a lot of time and effort attacking these books. One of their attacks has been centered on questioning the authorship of the books Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
The following are some good, solid replies to the critics:
Pent = five. Pentateuch = the first five books of the Bible.
1. Each of the books, except Genesis says it is the work of Moses.
Ex. 12:1-28,20-24,25-31,34.
Lev. 1-7,8, 13,16,17-26,27.
Num. 1,2. 4, 6: 1 -21, 8: 1 – 4,5 – 22, ch. 15, 19,27: 6 – 23, ch.28,29,30 and 35.
Dent. I – 33.
2. Every chapter lists attributes such as its author, i.e. Moses, in either its superscription or subscription.
3. Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s house, and was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” Acts 7:22. His learning must have included writing. He would have had access to several histories, since the Egyptians had extensive libraries, and the Hebrews too had carefully preserved records of their origins. Moses also had 40 years in Egypt in order to research things, and then another 40 years in the land of Midian to mull things over.
Qualifications to write the Pentateuch.
1. Moses was trained in the royal Egyptian court. That is, he was raised in a cultural atmosphere of education and learning and high academic disciplines. From archeological remains, even the women’s toilet articles are inscribed, which shows a wide-ranging use of literacy.
2. Moses must have received, somewhere along the way, the records of God’s earlier encounters with the Hebrews (Abram, Isaac and Jacob), since he was their leader and general. Not once was the charge ever brought against him that he was a ‘stranger’ to Israel, or a ‘foreigner’. It was Moses himself who argued against being the leader, and out of five excuses, not one of them was ignorance of the Hebrew’s past.
3. Moses had an intimate knowledge of the land, climate, languages, customs and religions of his time.
4. Moses was motivated to write an accurate record, for the sake of the nation – to give them moral and practical foundations. His record has been received unanimously by millions of Hebrews, and later Jews, down the centuries, as an account of integrity and accuracy.
New Testament confirmation of Moses’ authorship: Mark 12:19, John
1:17, Rom. 10:5, Luke 2:22, 20:28, John 1:45, 8:5, 9:29, Acts 3:22, 6:14, 13:39. 15:1, 21, 26:22, 28:23, 1 Cor. 9:9, 2 Cor. 3:15, Heb. 9:19, Rev. 15:3.
Jesus believed the Torah (The Law) was written by Moses Mark
7:10, 10:3 -5, 12:26, Luke 5:14, 16:29 – 31, 24:27. 44, John 7:19, 23. Especially see
John 5:45-47.
As with every attack on God’s Word, the critics have had to retreat, renounce their criticism, or wear themselves out fighting a lost cause. The Bible, like an anvil, has worn out many hammers.
Ex. 2:12. Moses slew an Egyptian.
Some critics have suggested that Moses was a murderer. From one point of view it appears that they are correct, but from another point of view they are wrong. As some TV crime show character has said on many an occasion, it is easy to make a judgment based on hindsight. But what we ought to do, in order to understand what happened, is to see an event within the context in which it occurred.
Moses the soldier.
If Moses was brought up as a prince in Pharaoh’s court, he would have been expected, after his education was completed, to fight Pharaoh’s wars, like his brother princes, in one part or another of Pharaoh’s empire. Rameses II had a lot of trouble in his border territories, especially along the fringes of the Delta, to the north. He probably began his royal career in Thebes, and from thence moved his throne to Memphis, and later, was forced to go further north to Tanis. Early in his reign, he conducted a fierce 15 year long campaign against the Hittites in Asia Minor. A Libyan campaign on the west of the Delta is also vaguely referred to in the inscriptions. The Ethiopians caused him sporadic trouble. Rameses may well have imposed on Moses the military missions which did not appeal to himself, or to the other princes. If Moses combined great-heartedness with the personal beauty which the Bible describes, Rameses may have found him so popular that the further away he could send him, the better. If all this is true, then Moses would have been innured against killing, and simply done instinctively what any soldier did under reasonable provocation.
Furthermore: the Bible depicts Moses as a soldier more than a lawgiver. Moses knew how to handle great masses, moving through difficult country. Once again. God used secular training to serve His purposes when he called Moses out of Egypt. Having spent 40 years training Moses, God then used this skill to great effect, giving Moses yet another army to lead.
It does not seem likely that with the quick blood and generous impulses which made the character of Moses (i.e. when he helped the Hebrew slave, and when he chased the Midianite men from the well), that he would have been content for any long period knowing that he was an impostor prince of Pharaoh. He went about, and saw the agony of the Hebrews, and probably felt more and more sympathetic towards them. All those years he had been Pharaoh’s man, and he had fought his wars for him, drank with him afterwards, possibly even jousted with him, hunted with him for birds and game . . . yet when he “saw an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren . . ,” something snapped.
The killing.
The context is crucial. A great many years of being an Egyptian had made Moses, then, much different from the Moses of the exodus. He had been, up till then, an Egyptian nobleman, with some of the nobleman’s indifference to the pain and death in less fortunate people. Possibly, he had been a witness to the slaughter of thousands of enemies to Egypt. Possibly, he had seen the massacre of prisoners of war. He had definitely seen monuments built to commemorate these great slaughters (‘victories’), and he had seen thousands of slaves, toiling in the sun, fainting, collapsing, working themselves to death. For Moses, to slay one Egyptian could not have been much more than a symbolic act. A moment of justice, which he had no idea would have such resounding repercussions.
Another point which we ought to consider is the hand of God. It was not ‘flesh and blood” which revealed the affinity which he had to the Hebrew slaves. It was a revelation. Suddenly Moses understood something which had been totally obscure to him for nearly 40 years. Suddenly he knew who he was and what he had to do. Like the “new birth” God gave Moses a new perspective, and Moses acted accordingly.
The Hebrew form of the word “John” is “Johannan” which signifies “the gift of Jehovah”. The Greek is loannes, which means “God (Jehovah) is gracious”.
The announcement of John’s birth was similar to that of Abraham and Sarah (Gen.l7:15) and to Manoah and her husband (Jud.l3:5). In all three cases the to-be mother was frustrated because she could not have a child, and in all three cases God graciously granted one.
When John’s father heard the angel say “in the spirit and power of Elias, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1:16917) he would have connected it with the very similar words of Malachi 4:6. Zacharias asked for a sign (as did Abraham – Gen.25:18; Gideon – Jud.6:30 and Hezekiah – 2Kings 20) but only he was kept in silence until the event.
Luke 1:20 “You shall be dumb” the finite verb and participle denote a continuous sense. Zacharias was silent continuously. Apparently Zacharias was completely deaf and dumb. When at last he was able to communicate he wrote on a table (tablet) “His name is John”, thus the first recorded words for the new dispensation were equivalent to “His name is the graciousness of Jehovah”. The first written words of the NT. After 400 hundred years of silence, God had finally ‘spoken* through the words on the tablet.
The background to John.
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, destroyed the City of Jerusalem and deported the last of the house of Judah – 2Kings 25:21 on, about the year 587 BC. About 539 BC Babylon fell, and a year later, Cyrus the Persian made a decree allowing some Jews to return to rebuild the Temple. Ezra and Nehemiah looked after these people. Many of these returned Jews were very zealous for God’s Word. They brought in many rules and regulations, which helped to keep the religious and nationalist fires burning. They rejected anything which challenged what they perceived to be the Law’s demands.
After Alexander the Great overthrew the Persian king – 334 to 323 BC his four generals divided his empire, and Palestine became a province of the Seleucid kingdom (306 BC) and various Hellenistic and Egyptian cults entered Palestine. Not only did the Jews reject them, but they also rejected the cult of Serapis, the hybrid of Osiris and Dionysius, and every subtlety of false worship.
When the Greeks came, God raised up the violent but zealous Maccabees to purge the nation. When Antiochus Epiphanes – 175 to 163 BC – tried to put a statue of Zeus in the Temple, Judas Maccabaeus drove him out. Then came the Roman legions, trampling Greece, seizing the Holy City in 63 BC, but still the Jews were incredibly strong in spirit – refusing to handle even coins with images on them, or to carry or have attached to their building Roman flags with eagles on them. In deference to the Jews, the Roman banners were kept out of the City.
Into this atmosphere of unconquerability came John, proclaimed as a prophet, preaching repentance.
Religiously, many of the Jews were stultified and formalised by their observances, but at the same time they were tense with anticipation. Because only the Holy Spirit can make sense of the many converging prophecies regarding the Messiah, His coming was not generally understood or appreciated until after He was crucified. A great warrior king was expected, but a carpenter’s son appeared, proclaiming his deity. The Personage of Psalm 2, fierce, righteous, powerful, was easier to envisage than a Messiah in common clothes, walking the streets in sandals. What a strange surprise it was to many when they thought back and remembered the time when a man called Jesus walked up to John and asked to be baptised.
John was a typical prophet. He identified with the others before him – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea, by crying out for repentance, by continual admonitions, by preaching charity, justice and mercy – Luke 3:10 – 14.
Jesus admired and loved the man. So should we. John was one of the most important people who has ever lived.