Introduction to Penteteuch

Genesis — Steve Gregg

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Introduction to Penteteuch

GenesisSteve Gregg

In "Introduction to Pentateuch," Steve Gregg presents various arguments for and against Mosaic authorship -the belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament. While the documentary hypothesis suggests that the Pentateuch was written by multiple authors from different Jewish traditions, Jewish tradition, Jesus' own claims, apostolic writings, and internal evidence within the books themselves all suggest that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. The contents and themes of each book focus on the sovereignty, power, grace, holiness, and faithfulness of God, and while some aspects may not have been relevant to later Jews, the Pentateuch remains a crucial part of the Old Testament.

Transcript

In this lecture we have, I think, a very interesting subject to study, and that is the Pentateuch as a collection. We talk about the canon of Scripture. The canon of the Old Testament is the law, the prophets, and the writings.

The law is what we call the Pentateuch. The word Pentateuch means five books. It's Greek for five books or five rolls.

They had scrolls back then, not books. It's called the five rolls or the five books, and it's referring to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Now, the Jews don't call it the Pentateuch.

That's a Greek term. The Jews call it the Torah. As I mentioned in an earlier lecture, Torah literally means instruction or law.

And so you read about the law many times in Scripture, and it's the word Torah when it's in the Hebrew Old Testament. In the New Testament, the New Testament is written in Greek, so when you find the word law, they don't use the word Torah. They just use the word namas, the Greek word for law.

But Torah refers to the same thing we call the Pentateuch. Christian scholars virtually always call it the Pentateuch, and it refers to the first five books. The main thing I want to spend my time talking about in this lecture is the authorship of the Pentateuch because it's been disputed only in recent centuries.

The Jews always believed that the Pentateuch or the Torah was written by Moses, and it was called the Law of Moses. Jesus seems to confirm this, too. He says, Moses gave you the law.

And so the Mosaic authorship, we call it. The Mosaic authorship. It's spelled just like the word mosaic, M-O-S-A-I-C.

That refers to the authorship being by Moses. Now, the Jews always believed that, and Christians always believed that, and Jesus and the apostles apparently believed it, too, because they confirmed it. But only in the 18th century, in the 1700s, did some scholars begin to say that the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses.

Now, there was an original reason they said this, which is no longer considered valid, but they've nonetheless stayed with the theory. But if you want to know why does it matter, well, because on this new theory, it's not very new, it's been around a couple hundred years or more, the new theory is that the book was not written by an inspired man at all. The five books were written as a result of certain oral traditions that circulated among the Jews for centuries.

And, you know, being changed here and there, and, you know, nothing really you can count on. And then they were written down very, very late, as much as a century after Moses' life, I mean a millennium after Moses' life. So the theory is that Moses didn't write it, nor did any prophet write it.

Now, if Moses wrote it, he was a prophet, and therefore, obviously, if we accept the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, we recognize it is scripture, it is prophetic, it's written by a man that God inspired. If he didn't write it, and instead it came into being the way that some scholars have suggested, then it's not prophetic, it's not the word of God, and it might not even be very reliable. So this is an important question.

As we study the Pentateuch, we need to know, are we reading scripture or are we reading Jewish legends? And that would be really the two options. Now, the first reason that they had for suggesting that Moses didn't write it is they said writing was not invented yet in the days of Moses. Moses lived about 1,400 years before Christ, between 1,400 and 1,500 years before Christ, and about 200 years ago, scholars thought that people had not developed writing as a means of recording information yet that early in human history.

So, obviously, Moses could not possibly have written this material because writing was not an option. There was no writing. And this seemed to be the claim that initially undermined the biblical evidence that Moses did write it.

And so it was assumed that science has proven that Jesus was wrong and the Jews were wrong in thinking that Moses wrote it. However, that claim was made before the discovery of the Rashamritex and the Laws of Hammurabi. The Laws of Hammurabi were found in 1901 and 1902 by archaeologists, and the Rashamritex, or tablets, were found in 1958.

Now, the Rashamritex, they date from about the time of Moses. There are various writings that come from Palestine that archaeologists found. I don't believe they contain biblical material, but they are nonetheless written records from the time of Moses in Palestine.

So, we know that writing existed in the days of Moses. But more importantly, the Laws of Hammurabi, which were found on a large stone they call a shtela, or stel, a large stone with writing on it. They found these in 1901, these laws of Hammurabi, etched in stone.

And Hammurabi was the king of the Mesopotamians around the time of Abraham, give or take a little bit, in roughly the time of Abraham. Now, Abraham was 600 years before Moses, and therefore Hammurabi's writings predate Moses by hundreds of years, and clearly writing existed if they wrote the Laws of Hammurabi some 600 or more years before Moses' time. So, the foundational argument for the critics, who said Moses couldn't have written it, was based on the assumption that writing was not invented yet, and they were wrong.

So, you'd think that the critics' arguments would be thrown out the window. But no, they had already done so much work on it. They had developed their theory of alternative authorship of the Pentateuch, so it didn't faze them.

When they found out that writing did exist in the day of Moses, they still had come up with a whole lot of arguments of their own to say that he didn't write this particular material. Let me tell you what the supporting arguments are for this alternative theory of authorship. By the way, the alternative theory is usually called the documentary hypothesis.

This term is used a lot, so it's a term you probably would do well to know. Documentary hypothesis it's called. If you read Old Testament commentaries, you'll find references to the documentary hypothesis.

This hypothesis is that there are four separate traditions, fairly early traditions, of the Jews that overlap each other in some points. There are two very early traditions that are found woven together in the early chapters of Genesis. And then in the rest of the Pentateuch, you find some of the other two traditions.

Now, the suggestion is that these traditions arose among different groups of Jews at different times. The earliest of these was thought to be about 850 B.C. It is called the Jehovah's tradition. Now, the reason it's called the Jehovah's tradition is because it is thought that the writings that preserve this particular tradition are the ones that use the name Jehovah.

In the book of Genesis and the rest of the Bible, you'll find the name Jehovah or Yahweh, it's the same name, different pronunciation. Yahweh or Jehovah. These are the principal name of God in the Bible, the principal proper name that God gives for himself.

And you'll find that some of the passages, for example, in Genesis speak of God as Jehovah or Yahweh, and others call him Elohim. Elohim is a word that, well, the word El, E-L in Hebrew, means God. And Elohim is kind of a pluralized form of that word.

I'll just give you a little simple information about the Hebrew language, not that I know much about it, but this I know. In Hebrew, when they want to make a noun plural, they add something at the end of it, like we do. When we want to make a noun plural, more often than not, we add the letter S at the end of it, and now we have not dog, but dogs, not boy, but boys, not table, but tables.

In Hebrew, they add something at the end of the word to make it plural, so that's the letter Im, I-M, Im. So, if you have one cherub, you have multiple cherubim. If you have one seraph, you have multiple seraphim.

Im makes the word plural. Now, the word El in Hebrew is God. Elohim is sort of an extended form of that word, made plural.

And therefore, the word Elohim, in some parts of the Bible, in certain instances, is translated gods, because the Bible speaks about the gods of the heathen, the gods of the pagans, and that was the idols. When those gods are referred to as gods, it's the word Elohim. Elohim means gods.

And so, the word Elohim technically seems to mean gods, but there's a special usage of it in the Old Testament, where sometimes Elohim is used with a verb form that requires a singular subject. This is awkward, because usually, in most languages, the verb form agrees in number with the subject. That means if you have a singular subject, there's a singular verb form.

If you have a plural subject, you have a plural verb form that goes with it. In some passages in the Old Testament, you've got Elohim, which is a plural noun, as the subject, and the verb form is singular, as if Elohim is a singular word in those uses. And in cases like that, our translators have translated Elohim as God.

Now, why God would be called Elohim instead of just El, has raised various theories, and of course, one theory is that God is Trinity. God is one, but He's also Triune, He's also three, and so maybe that's why a pluralized form of the word God is used, but a singular verb. It's only one theory.

It's one that Christians often feel pretty comfortable with, but it's not known if that's why God is sometimes called Elohim. But you find in Genesis and the Pentateuch passages where God is called Elohim, and passages where He's called Yahweh or Jehovah. And so these scholars decided, well, maybe one group of Jews at one time knew God as Jehovah, and others had a habit of calling Him Elohim.

And so the passages that call Him Jehovah stem from an early tradition of people who called Him by that name, and the passages that call Him Elohim are from a separate tradition that somehow got wedded with this when these final documents were put together in their present form. Now, to my mind, this does not give adequate consideration to the fact that there's many places in the book of Genesis where God is called Yahweh Elohim or Jehovah Elohim. The words are put together.

And of course, a conservative Jew or Christian who believes the standard Mosaic authorship would just say that God was known by both names from the beginning, and sometimes called Yahweh, sometimes called Elohim, and sometimes called Yahweh Elohim. Just like Peter sometimes called Simon, sometimes called Peter, sometimes called Simon Peter. It's not too far-fetched to suggest that the Jews knew God by both names and used them both in different settings.

But the documentary hypothesis began with the idea that the Jehovah's passages are the oldest, the ones that use the name of Jehovah. And therefore, that tradition is embodied in passages that use the name Jehovah, and that that tradition originated maybe about 850 years before Christ. About 100 years later, 750 years before Christ, they say, the Elohist tradition stems from, and that's the passage that uses the word Elohim.

So that's why they're called the Jehovah's and Elohist traditions, because one uses Jehovah, one uses Elohim. Now, there's no, by the way, there's no objective reason to set such dates, or to even say that these are different traditions. It's just a theory someone came up with, and it sounded good to someone, and they passed it along, and eventually it became kind of standard fare.

Then there's the, there's other passages that they say stem from the priestly era. They think the priesthood kind of came up late in Israel's history. And so the passages that focus on priests, like the book of Leviticus, or even some of the passages in Genesis and Exodus, and so forth, that they, they are from a later tradition where there was a focus on priests of Israel.

And they call that the priestly tradition. And then there's one other tradition they think they find, which they call the Deuteronomist tradition. Now, Deuteronomy, the word Deuteronomy comes from two words in the Greek.

Deutero means two, or second, really. It means second. And namas, which is the Greek word for law, namas, N-O-M-L-S, namas.

So, Deuteronomas, Deuteronomy, it means second law. And the book of Deuteronomy is called the second law, because it's the second time that the law is presented again. I mean, it's not a different law than before, but the law is originally presented largely in Exodus, in Leviticus, and in Deuteronomy, which comes from a time much later in Moses' life, he restates the law.

And so Deuteronomy is called, it's a restatement law, it's like a second law. Well, the fourth alleged tradition in the documentary hypothesis is the Deuteronomist, and includes almost all the contents of Deuteronomy, and some bits and pieces from other parts of the Pentateuch. So the idea is that these different traditions arose at four different times in history among the Jews, and the Jews who put together the Pentateuch were a little schizophrenic, and they kind of weren't sure which ones were true, so they kind of put them all together and kind of weaved them together, wove them together, and as a result we have the present work.

Now, of course, they believe the earliest of these traditions is from 850 B.C. That's a good, what, five or six hundred years after the time of Moses. So Moses didn't author it. But then they believe the Elohist tradition is like from 750 B.C., a hundred years later, and then the priestly would be, or the Deuteronomistic would be from 650 B.C., and the priestly from 450 B.C., which is a full millennium after the time of Moses.

It's sometimes called the Graf-Wellhausen theory, because two men named Graf and Wellhausen developed it in its early stages. It began really back in 1753 before Graf and Wellhausen. In 1753, which is about 250 years ago, of course, a guy named Jean Austreuch, a French physician of Jewish extraction, anonymously wrote a book that first proposed that there were perhaps multiple sources of the Pentateuch rather than Moses being the author.

That was the first attempt to raise something like this theory. However, it was developed into its present form by scholars like Professor K. H. Graf in 1866 and Julius Wellhausen in 1895 in Germany, where they identified, they thought, four different traditions. These are sometimes called J.E.D.P., Jehovah's Elohist Deuteronomistic and Priestly, J.E.P.D. or J.E.D.P. It was an Israeli historian, Yehexel Kaufman, in the 1950s, disputed the order and he put the last two in a different order.

So commonly they called it the J.E.P.D. theory or the documentary hypothesis or the Graf-Wellhausen theory. You don't need to know all that, but you're going to hear about it for the rest of your life if you ever talk to Christian scholars about such matters. Those are the terms they use.

Now, I want to talk to you about the evidence that they actually give for this theory. And some of it is kind of interesting. The supporting arguments are, as I pointed out, sometimes God is called Elohim and sometimes it's called Yahweh or Jehovah.

That, to my mind, is an extremely weak argument. As I said, it doesn't prove that the same author didn't write them, but that was the first observation they made. Then, there are twice in the book of Genesis where it says the Canaanites and the Perizzites were then in the land.

In Genesis 12, 6, when Abram first came into the land of Canaan, it says the Canaanites were then in the land. In Genesis 13, 7, when a dispute rose between Abram and Lot, it says the Canaanites and the Perizzites were then in the land. Now, the reason this is significant is because it sounds like it is written at a time when the Canaanites and the Perizzites were no longer in the land.

It sounds like it's reflecting back at an earlier time when the Canaanites were in the land, but now, from the standpoint of the writer, they aren't. He's writing to a later generation. He said, well, back then, the Canaanites were in the land, but of course, they're not now.

That's what's assumed. Now, of course, the Canaanites were still in the land when Moses died. It was Joshua, after Joseph's death, that went in and conquered Canaan.

So, they say Moses couldn't have written that because Moses would not speak of the Canaanites as if it was a past event. They were still in the land during Moses' entire lifetime. So, this is an argument against Mosaic authorship.

However, evangelicals have pointed out, it could be simply saying, even then, in Abram's day, the Canaanites were in the land. That is to say, even as now, back then, the Canaanites and the Perizzites were in the land, in case you didn't know, they went back that far. The Jews of Moses' day knew the Canaanites were in the land in their day, but they might not know that 600 years before their day, the Canaanites were in the land.

So, Moses could easily have said, the Canaanites were then in the land, by implication, even as they are now. It's entirely possible. Now, there's also another possibility, and we need to take that into consideration.

When we say that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch, we don't necessarily insist that he wrote every word of the Pentateuch. In other words, the Pentateuch, the books could have come down to us with some editorial additions. One of the obvious ones would be the last chapter of Deuteronomy.

Now, the last chapter of Deuteronomy tells about Moses' death. And some people say, well, maybe Moses wrote it prophetically, before he died. But I don't think so, because if you look at the wording of the passage, especially Deuteronomy 34.10, it tells us about Moses' death, and then it says, in Deuteronomy 34.10, But since then, there has not arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

That obviously is written after Moses died, and sometime afterward, the author says, Since Moses died, a prophet has never arisen like him. It seems clear that somebody added those last verses of Deuteronomy. Maybe Joshua did.

It doesn't matter who did. The point is, it's a little bit of Deuteronomy that Moses did not write. And some people think, including evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, who believe Moses is the author of the Pentateuch, they think that Moses is the substantial author of the Pentateuch, but that later editors would sometimes update information and stick in explanatory notes at certain points.

So they think that maybe a later Jewish editor added the words, The Canaanites were then in the land. Although the book of Genesis was written by Moses, some editors stuck in that note. But I'm saying Moses could have written it, if he intended to say the Canaanites were even then in the land, even that long ago.

So this particular occurrence of these statements, although on the surface they seem to give the impression that Moses might not have written it, they're not too difficult to explain in light of the thesis that Moses did write it. Also, in Exodus 16, 35, when it tells about how God started sending manna to the people of Israel every day to eat, it says in Exodus 16, 35, they ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan, which sounds like it's saying that they stopped eating manna after that. And in fact, we do read in Joshua that the manna did cease when they came to the border of Canaan.

But Moses actually lived to see them come to the border of Canaan. And so it's not impossible that Moses could have written that. He was alive still when they came to the border of Canaan.

And so he could testify that they ate manna until that point. So this doesn't prove Moses didn't write it. It just has the sound of being maybe written by someone after they'd come into Canaan.

But it doesn't necessarily say that's the case. Then there's another argument that's made from the fact that the sequence of stories sometimes seems to be out of order. For example, the law is given to Moses in Exodus chapter 20.

But in chapter 18, two chapters earlier, Moses is seen to be judging the children of Israel out of the law of God. Remember his father-in-law Jethro comes and says, what are you doing? He says, I'm judging these people out of the law of God. Well, where did Moses get the law of God? It was given at Mount Sinai and he hadn't gotten there yet.

There's things like that in the Pentateuch that sound like they're out of chronological order. And some of these scholars thought, well, see, that's evidence that these circulated as separate stories, separate traditions. And whoever put them together just put them in the wrong order.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, they could all have been written by Moses and still have been put in the wrong order by later editors. I mean, they probably were not all in one scroll. They may have circulated as individual chapters or documents that Moses had written, especially after the time of Moses.

After Moses died, they may have had portions of it written out separately. And then when they put together in their final condition, they could be put out of order. But in many cases, it's not important or even essential to say that they are out of order.

There may be some other explanation. We won't worry about it right now. But this is one of the original arguments they gave, that there are different traditions, because sometimes the editing seems to be missing the proper chronological order.

And then there's this one, and that is that there's a number of stories that seem to be similar to each other. The most obvious example you've already encountered is in Genesis. Abraham lies about his wife and says she's his sister.

In Genesis 12, he did this in Egypt with the Pharaoh. In Genesis 20, he did this in Gerar with Abimelech, the king of the Philistines. And those who propose the documentary hypothesis say, see, these are just two different traditions of the same story.

The details got changed in the individual telling of the story. So, one story has it in Egypt and one has it in Gerar. But, you know, they're so similar that they're probably just two different traditions that arose from one original account.

And therefore, they give evidence in multiple traditions. On the other hand, of course, Moses may have written it, and they may be two separate accounts, as they say they are. Just because someone thinks it's more likely that Abraham would only make this mistake once than that he'd make it twice, doesn't mean he didn't make it twice.

You've made the same mistake twice, I dare say, in one way or another, and Abraham could also have done so. Anyway, these are the arguments that they felt supported the documentary hypothesis. Now let me give you arguments against it, which I think are much stronger.

Well, first of all, one of the arguments against it is that the Pentateuch claims to be written by Moses. On page one of your notes, just above Roman numeral B, you see that Moses wrote substantial portions of the Pentateuch, as claimed repeatedly within the books themselves. Exodus 17, 14, Exodus 24, 4, Exodus 34, 27, Numbers 32, 33, 2, Deuteronomy 1, 1, and Deuteronomy 31, 9, all mention Moses writing down things.

Now, they don't say he wrote down everything in the Pentateuch. They just say he wrote down, Moses wrote this law, Moses wrote this song, Moses wrote the encampments of Israel. There's these different portions that say that Moses wrote certain materials.

These statements do not say he wrote the whole books in which the material is now found, but they do claim that Moses was a substantial author and source of this information. Furthermore, the New Testament writers, including Jesus, attribute the Pentateuch to Moses. That is to say, they attribute all of it except Genesis.

But Genesis is probably from Moses too, because it's always been treated as a part of the Pentateuch, and its historical narrative ends right where Exodus picks up and so forth. The reason I say that the New Testament writers don't tell us that Moses wrote Genesis specifically is because they do quote, even Jesus quotes, from Exodus and says Moses said. And he quotes from Leviticus, and he says to the leopard, go and offer the sacrifice that Moses said to give.

That's Exodus 13-14, Leviticus, excuse me. And the book of Deuteronomy is quoted by Jesus numerous times. In fact, when he was tempted in the wilderness by the devil, he quoted Deuteronomy three times, said it is written, and so forth.

But he didn't mention Moses there, but the other apostles do quote from it. Romans 10 quotes from Deuteronomy and says it was Moses, and so forth. You'll find in the New Testament all of the books of the Pentateuch except Genesis are attributed to Moses by Jesus and the apostles.

Now, by the way, Genesis is also quoted frequently in the New Testament. It's just not mentioned whether Moses wrote it or not. But you do have statements in the New Testament that says, did not Moses give you the Torah? You know, Jesus said that.

Did not Moses give you the Torah? And none of you keep the Torah. Well, to the Jew, the Torah was Genesis through Deuteronomy. And Jesus apparently accepted their tradition that Moses wrote the Genesis as well.

Anyway, besides the scriptural affirmations about it, we have internal evidence that I'd like to talk about as quickly as I can here. First of all, whenever animals and plants are mentioned in the wilderness wanderings and so forth, these are the kinds of species that are known to be in the Sinaitic region rather than in Palestine. Now, the reason that's important to note is because the documentary hypothesis suggests that these books were written centuries after the Israelites came into Palestine and Canaan.

And therefore, the Jewish writers would be familiar with Palestinian fauna and flora, plants and animals, animals and plants. And yet, the animals that are named and the flora that are described are those of the Sinaitic region, which is where the story is taking place. And therefore, the author is familiar with that region, not with Canaan or Palestine.

Remember, Moses never came into Palestine. Moses died before the children of Israel went in. And therefore, he would not be familiar with the plants and animals in Palestine, but he would in Sinaitic.

And that's what we find references to throughout. Also, there's an interesting phenomenon of an Egyptian frame of reference of the author and his readers. Presumably, Moses wrote this for his own generation and it was kept afterward.

But in Genesis 13, 10, it says, And Lot lifted his eyes and saw the plains of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt as you go towards Zoar. Notice the writer believed that his readers were more familiar with Egypt as you go towards Zoar in Egypt. He assumed they're familiar with that.

He said, well, that's what the Jordan was like in those days. He assumes they don't know much about the Jordan region, which is in Israel, but they know what Egypt is like. These slaves that come out of Egypt with Moses, he could say, well, you know what it was like there is like, you know, Egypt, you know how it is on the way to Zoar in Egypt, it was like that.

So he assumes that his readers and himself are familiar with Egypt, but not with Palestine. That would not be true of a later generation of Jews if these stories originated later. Likewise, in Numbers chapter 13 and verse 22, it says, And they went up through the south and came to Hebron, where Ahimon, Shishai, and Talmai, and the descendants of Anak were there.

Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt. Now, by the way, Hebron, after the children of Israel came into the land of Canaan, Hebron was one of the most famous cities there was. And yet the author assumes his readers are more familiar with Zoan in Egypt than with Hebron.

That they would know when Zoan was built, but they didn't know when Hebron was built. Because Hebron is in Israel and they haven't taken it yet. They weren't familiar with that geography yet.

They were familiar with Zoan in Egypt, and so he makes that comparison. So there's this Egyptian frame of reference that would exist in Moses' day, but not afterward. Because Moses' generation was the last Jewish generation to live in Egypt.

Then there's Egyptian loan words. What we mean by that is that every language borrows from other languages. English, for example, borrows a lot from Latin.

And we have a lot of loan words from Spanish and from French and from German and so forth. Gesundheit is obviously German. We have French loan words.

We have a lot of Spanish loan words. Because of the intermixing of culture. And so English has taken on words that are called loan words from other languages.

The Pentateuch, unlike later books of the Bible, has lots of loan words from the Egyptian language. So there's a lot of evidence that the language of the Hebrews had been somewhat dependent on Egyptian in its vocabulary. And that again points to the time of Moses, not a later period.

Also, the Pentateuch is fascinated with the tabernacle. Which was a temporary tent that would have had no relevance to the Jews after the time of David. Or especially after the time of Solomon when the temple was built.

After Solomon's day, the Jews had the temple, not the tabernacle. And they wouldn't have this fascination. Look at all the detail.

If you read Exodus, almost half of the book of Exodus is excruciatingly detailed description of the tabernacle. And then in Leviticus and the other books, there's a lot of reference to the tabernacle. A generation living after Solomon's time would never have any interest in the tabernacle.

They might postulate there had been a tabernacle before there was a temple. But to give all that detail, that would be important for Moses' generation because they had to build it. They had to have the blueprints.

They had to have the description so they know what to do. But a generation living centuries later who didn't even have the tabernacle, why would they fill chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter with minute descriptions of how to build it, what size it was and all those things. This makes sense if it was written in the days of Moses when they actually built the tabernacle and used it.

It doesn't make sense that this content would be in the Pentateuch if it was written by many generations later, centuries after the tabernacle was no longer in use. Also, throughout the whole Pentateuch, there's no mention of Jerusalem. After David's time, Jerusalem was the capital of Israel and Judah.

After David's time, Jerusalem was the beloved golden city. It was the holy city. It was the infatuation of the Jewish people.

If I should forget Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning and may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, may my right eye rot in its socket, the Jews would say. They don't want to forget Jerusalem because that's a holy city. And Jerusalem is predominantly focused of the prophets and so forth.

By the way, the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, actually were written around the time that the documentary hypothesis says these other traditions came along. In other words, if the documentary hypothesis is true, then these books of the Pentateuch were written about the same time that the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and so forth were written. And yet, Isaiah and Jeremiah are preoccupied with Jerusalem as all Jews were after the time of David.

There's not a single reference to Jerusalem as a significant thing in Genesis. If anything, it's alluded to as the city where Melchizedek was in a passing reference. But apart from that, the absence of any reference to Jerusalem as a significant place certainly points to a time before David's time and therefore not the time the documentary hypothesis suggests.

Also, this is significant too because after the time of David, one of the predominant forms of worship that David introduced was music. David introduced musical instruments, singing priests. He divided the priests into 24 courses that would sing continually before the Ark of the Covenant.

Later on in Hezekiah's day, he restored all these Davidic forms of worship with music. Leviticus, in the Pentateuch, is a detailed description of how worship is to be conducted. There's not one mention of music in the whole thing.

If this was written after David's time, certainly you'd expect there to be the institution of musical instruments and so forth, which had become normative after David's time. But this is clearly written before David's time. There's not even a suggestion of music in the tabernacle or among the priests or in the worship of God in the Pentateuch.

Also, last point on this, is that the name Yahweh Sabaoth, which means the Lord of Hosts. It's translated the Lord of Armies, Lord of Hosts in modern translations, English translations. Yahweh Sabaoth was the most common name for God in the time of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah.

You'll find that scores of times they refer to God as Yahweh Sabaoth. All the literature of the Jews from that period of time called God Yahweh Sabaoth. And yet the documentary hypothesis claims that the Pentateuch originated at that time, but there's not one use of that term in the Pentateuch.

It would seem that the Pentateuch was written before the term Yahweh Sabaoth became a popular way of speaking of God. But in the time later where it is claimed it was written by these critics, it was used all the time. But you don't find one time in the Pentateuch that Yahweh Sabaoth appears, which is the most common name for God in the later literature of the Jews.

Alright, we're about done, but let me just quickly say that the evidence, therefore, that Moses wrote it is as follows. Jewish tradition, Jesus' own claims, the apostolic writings claim that Moses wrote it, and the internal evidence of the book seems to indicate it too. Therefore, the documentary hypothesis is simply not that well established, and it first originated on a false premise that Moses had not access to writing in his day, but they were wrong about that.

Now you can see under Roman numeral three on the back of your notes, there's the contents and theme of each book. Real quickly, Genesis covers the history from the creation to the family of Jacob migrating into Egypt in Joseph's day. Exodus through Deuteronomy contained the lifetime of Moses.

Exodus has Moses' first 80 years. His birth, his 40 years of exile in Midian, his 40 years... I take that back, yeah, he was 40 years old when he went into Midian, then 40 years he was in Midian. He was 80 years old when he came back and delivered the people of Israel, and that's how old he is when Exodus closes.

It takes us to the giving of the law at Mount Sinai and the erection of the tabernacle. Leviticus is just kind of a code book for the priests. It's a handbook for the priests about how to offer sacrifices and do the stuff they have to do.

Numbers covers 38 years of the Jews wandering in wilderness from Sinai to the time they came into the Promised Land. They spent a whole year at Mount Sinai. And then Deuteronomy is probably occupied maybe just a day or two.

It contains four sermons that Moses gave at the end of his life to remind the second generation of Jews who had come out of Egypt about the things that God had commanded them to do and so forth. And so that's the contents of each book. The themes of the book are, one could say, the sovereignty of God as seen in Genesis, his sovereignty in creation, his sovereignty in choosing Abraham, his sovereignty in orchestrating the things that got Joseph into power.

Certainly the sovereignty of God is the predominant theme of the book of Genesis. Exodus, we could say, God's power in saving grace, how he could overcome the most powerful kingdom in the world, Egypt. And by grace, which the Jews did not deserve by their own merits, God saved them.

Leviticus would be the holiness of God. Certainly that is the dominant theme in Leviticus. The word holiness, I am holy, I am holy, be holy for I am holy, is common throughout the book of Exodus.

And the goodness and the severity of God in numbers. That is God's grace and his punishment of Israel when they sinned against him during those 38 years wandering in the wilderness. And Deuteronomy, we could call it the theme of the faithfulness of God, where Moses, looking back at the Exodus and the time in between, recalls how God has been faithful to what he promised and will be faithful to give them the land as they go in.

So that's our introduction to the Pentateuch. And that brings us to the end of our morning lectures today. Thank you.