New Evidence on When Bible Was Written
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Theology Student Here - MY TAKE This is pretty Bogus Study in terms of these are Statisticians' work based on one outpost on one piece of pottery. Someone had to publish something to make use of the research money. This is also out of their domain. Seems like trying to try a new approach and this is all we get?
It is MUCH more complicated and the Oral Tradition of ANE (Ancient Near East) is pretty amazing. This also is not taking up the fact that the majority of the text have very different vocabs, writing styles and different mediums for delivering ideas (Think Epics like Noah and personal stuff like Job and politics like the kings) All very different writings.
I would say that Theology and Archeologist and other disciplines are more and more agreeing that the scriptures have more evidence for a much later date then 300 - 50 year ago "liberal" scholarship believed. Heck I remember old Priest saying the Gospels were written in 250 AD and nothing was written in the first century (To bad we have a bunch of manuscripts from the first century now) Heck Pontius Pilot (The Roman leader who sent Jesus to the cross was believe to be made up until 25 years ago when they found his name inscribed in an unearthed building. This is interesting times.
TL:DR Bad statistical work and very little meat. Nothing to see here.
A lot of scholars have the Torah being penned closer to the 600BC time frame.
Source? From what I can tell, most religious people disagree with this point.
Pro-JEPD camps point towards style analysis, dividing the pentateuch into four distinct dictions, each with their own (hypothesized) time frames.
Anti-JEPD camps tend to a) pick apart style arguments (with mixed success) and b) argue for a cohesion of content.
I tend to give the Pro-JEPD camps slightly more credit for their empirical approach; this is entirely my point of view.
In any case, "most religious people" will argue for Moses himself writing the Torah in its entirety. AFAIK there is absolutely zero evidence for a historical Moses. In fact, the strongest evidence is put forth by the Anti-JEPD camps themselves.
Contrast this to the Quran, which has cohesion of support around authorship by Muhammad (or in a religious context, transcription of the word of God via Muhammad) in its entirety; argument around authorship tend to revolve around modifications during oral propagation between Muhammad's lifetime and the earliest fragments we have (notably the Sana'a manuscript and the slightly later Uthman standardized version). There is simply not as much evidence for multiple authorship of the core text here, though not as much textual analysis has been performed here as the time period for revision is tiny compared to the bible and the torah.
Lack of evidence is not evidence of anything. The scientific method is good for eliminating the likelihood of a hypothesis being correct based on evidence...not the lack of evidence.
> "most religious people" will argue for Moses himself writing the Torah in its entirety
It always amazes me how many people have opinions about the Torah without studying the Talmud in it's entirety.
Why not defer to those Rabbis who have spent their lives studying the talmud instead of scientists who choose to ignore a massive body of research and discourse that is highly relevant.
I agree completely! But the claim that Moses wrote the Torah doesn't hold any water either, as you just argued, due to ZERO contemporary evidence. The same problem applies to e.g. the figure Lykourgos forming the pugnacious culture of Sparta: he's called out a few places, including Plutarch via Aristotle, but no contemporary evidence of him exists. Most likely he (Lykourgos) is a myth.
> It always amazes me how many people have opinions about the Torah without studying the Talmud in it's entirety.
What does the Talmud have to do with the Pentateuch authorship? I was not commenting on the authorship beyond Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. The Talmud also wouldn't present any contemporary evidence as it dates to several centuries after the earliest Pentateuch fragments and ~1.5k years after Moses would have walked around.
I'm very open to arguments that the Talmud IS relevant (it'd be pretty exciting to me, I'm a big fan), but I don't see it off hand. The Rabbis had every reason to present a coherent narrative regardless of its accuracy, and they were certainly not in a position to verify it themselves. If they did, I'd love to see how.
As someone who spent 10 years studying and only covered about 10% of the talmud, I can assure it that there is deep and complicated discourse on everything you can think of including the authorship of the Torah. There is nothing taken for granted. No one is given a free pass to "maintain a consistent narrative". There is constant dispute about every single letter written in the Torah (in fact, dispute on grammar, sentence structure, etc.. to the point that there are rules compiled for how to interpret every single word choice, letter, phrase, etc... in the Torah.)
It is highly relevant and these discussions are beyond my capabilities to address fully other than to know to defer to the several dozen people alive today that are truly deep experts, or the several thousand others who at least completed the entirety of the talmud.
It's simply ignorance to have an opinion on the Torahs authorship without being a talmud expert. (Too many people dismiss it because they have no idea whats actually in it!)
I see no way anything written in the talmud would have any effect.
Interested, just not knowledgable to address them fully.
>I see no way anything...
I presume this is because you dont actually know whats contained in the talmud. While modern science tools may not have existed, smart scientisits, mathmeticians, liguists, historians, etc... did and in fact, they discuss at length the authorship of the torah.
You wrote previously that the rabbis wanted a cohesive narrative. This is patently false. There is even a concept within torah study called "eilu ve'eilu" which means we can disagree, and still both be right. My point being that there is nothing cohesive or narratove based in the talmud other than a rigorous search for Absolute Truth.
Pretty much every word mentioned by someone in the talmud is followed by an aggressive quest to disprove it...and many things are even left unanswered...
Without taking a peek into the talmud, it is not intellectually honest to dismiss it...especially invoking modern science without even seeing if its consistent with that science or not.
A), i have read some of the talmud; i do not believe i have the collected texts in their entirety.
B), i meant to say it is in the interest of the rabbis to propagate the cohesive narrative of Moses authoring the pentateuch, NOT that the talmud itself has a cohesive narrative.
Perhaps there was some confusion about the word "torah"--I was refering to the pentateuch, ie the original five written texts, not the broader meaning including the rabbinical texts. To my knowledge, authorship of the latter is entirely a different topic of which I do NOT have much knowledge or interest--not because it is not interesting, but because it is orders of magnitude more complex and (personally) I just enjoy reading it and the authorship does not play into my enjoyment the way the authorship of the pentateuch lends it meaning. Can you understand how it would be different written by the patriarch of an entire ethnicity vs some unknown goat herders? The text means entirely different things under these interpretations, so the argument over authorship is worth the pursuit. Personally, i dont think it means any less in either interpretation; i think the pentateuch is invaluable regardless of your beliefs, ethnicity, or stance on JEPD. Genesis itself just might be the greatest text ever written in my humble opinion--I see new things every time I read it, and it is the closest we will ever get to understanding the the, erm, human experience of civilization itself.
Sorry for the confusion!
> the cohesive narrative of Moses authoring the pentateuch There is a disagreement in the Talmud about this point.
When you say you read talmud, have you ever studied it in a Yeshiva, while learning the commentary, or just read an english translation of part of it?
I think the point that seems to be lost in this discussion is the following. Picture a conversation on reddit like this... redditor1: my opinion is the truth. redditor2: source? redditor1: here is the link redditor2: but three years ago you said this competing theory. redditor3: those opinions are consistent because of differing circumstances... redditor4: what this other thing he said that is the same circumstances as the old post but supports the new one. redditor3: I guess i was wrong. I am stumped. redditor4: it makes sense because if you look at the sentence structure, they are really the same thing said in two different ways.
Now imagine a conversation like that trying to determine the veracity of every single word in the Torah, every single law and theory mentioned in the talmud and mishna, etc...
Studying the talmud is not some text some guy wrote down. It is an intense and deep analysis that considers math, physics, science,logic, language analysis, etc... all with the goal of finding the truth about the torah and mishna...not to support a theory about G-d giving over the Torah to Moses who than transcribed most of it.
What I am trying to say is that while I don't know the relevant discussions around the pentateuch authorship other than the link I shared earlier from Ohr.com ... These scholars who analyzed the text to determine if there were multiple authors, etc... really need to look at the explanations in the talmud for why one sentence is written one way and another is written another way...
It seems intellectually dishonest to me to analyze these things without consulting the talmudic experts who have studying the relevant sections...As there might be discussion and context that is very relevant.
I tend to prefer arguments that stand on their own, and i highly doubt that the persuasive aspects of the talmud's authorship discourse are disjoint with the academic discourse. It would be shocking to me to find parallel communities discussing the same topic unaware of the other's existence. Regardless, at this point i am willing to admit I am out of my depth and cannot devote the time to pursuing the topic without enrolling in yeshiva myself; much of my interest focuses on its historical context and its relation to abrahamic religions, not just rabbinical judaism. I will have to settle for comiserating with you: it is indeed a shame that I have not consulted the talmudic experts. Perhaps soon. :)
I cant cite specific sources off hand but style analysis and diction is analzyed at length in the talmud and every word choice and sentence structure is examined.
I encourage you to reach out to a talmudic expert...perhapd at ohr sameach or aish hatorah and ask for their take on these positions. They can cite specific talmudic sources better than I can.
Well my reading in Seminary was anywhere from 2,00-14,000 pages per class. There is NO WAY I could read the complete Talmud (What length is it? At LEAST 5,000 pages and it is difficult to get the order right with the writing)
Time - Well I would place it from what 200 BCE to 500 CE and that is way out of from the writing of the Torah.
Big Error - We treat writing from ANE with the eyes and genres of 21th century people. We try to fit them into our mold. There would be no concern what so ever about the authorship being true or not just like how Pseudepigrapha works were also very much accepted with the full knowledge that another author wrote that work. Clearly Enoch didn't write the Book of Enoch but that didn't keep people from reading it and accepting it. Heck The Book of Enoch is quoted in Jude.
Deut 34:5 And Moses the servant of the LORD died there in Moab, as the LORD had said.
I think it is pretty clear someone also had their hand in writing that line and the rest that followed :) Most hyper-religious stances are relatively new. Heck their is very little literal 7 day creation support through most of the history of Jewish and Christian theology.
It is a talmudic discussion about this question.
The talmud literally covers every question people have, yet they dismiss the opinions of those who spend their lives studying the Talmud... and instead rely on lack of evidence...without actually studying the discourse around these issues.
On the JEPD theory, though, Umberto Cassuto's scholarship presented significant challenges to the JEDP theory as early as the first half of the 20th century. Continued scholarship suggests Wellhausen's theory was based on incomplete assumptions on the evolution of language common to his time (the late 19th century). The 20th century produced vast amounts of philological research unavailable in Wellhausen's time (late 19th century).
More recently, John Sailhamer has done some very interesting research into the Torah (Pentateuch). His research suggests the seeming fragmented inclusions are not the result of numerous authors, but a single author using existing sources to weave a single narrative, similar to the Gospel of Luke. His incorporation of both Higher Criticism, Canonical Criticism, and liteary research manage to harmonize compelling elements from the various competing theories. Would highly recommend his recent(ish) book, "the Meaning of the Pentateuch".
I do agree that a) the grant money might have been spent better elsewhere and b) the conclusions are anorexic.
Well, 16 pieces. Although how it ties into Biblical dating I don't really follow.
It's more likely that their religious practices were limited to the priesthood, and it wasn't until the exile that they were written and compiled into a standardized format.
In fact, this theory isn't foreign to Jewish tradition, nor to how other religions have operated throughout the years.
Nine out of ten surviving Babylonian tablets are financial records.[1] There are surviving financial records from Ur two millennia older than Christianity.
Welcome to biblical studies.
This is relevant because people have traditionally argued for later dates based on literacy rates; this provides shaky evidence against that argument. It's more like the null hypothesis than firm dating data in itself.
"A Revolutionary Discovery in China" by Ian Johnson http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/revolutionary-dis...
The manuscripts’ importance stems from their particular antiquity. Carbon dating places their burial at about 300 BCE. This was the height of the Warring States Period, an era of turmoil that ran from the fifth to the third centuries BCE. During this time, the Hundred Schools of Thought arose, including Confucianism, which concerns hierarchical relationships and obligations in society; Daoism (or Taoism), and its search to unify with the primordial force called Dao (or Tao); Legalism, which advocated strict adherence to laws; and Mohism, and its egalitarian ideas of impartiality.
...
Do these old texts matter today? They do in several ways. One has to do with the antiquity of China’s written culture. In the West, many classic texts, for example by Homer or stories in the Bible, are widely accepted as having been oral works that later were written down—a view of history picked up by Gu and the antiquity-doubters of the early twentieth century. Even though Gu was sidelined in China, his heirs in the West have tended to dismiss traditional views that important works in China were written down early on, or even composed as written texts. For many of these skeptical Westerners, Chinese efforts to prove the antiquity of their culture is closet chauvinism, or part of a project to glorify the Chinese state by exaggerating the antiquity of Chinese civilization.
But the new discoveries should give pause to this skepticism. Allan argues that the texts were indeed primarily written down, and not transcribed oral tales. Besides the Daodejing, only a few of the texts excavated over the past twenty years have mnemonic devices or rhyme. She writes that even the texts that claim to be speeches of ancient kings originated as literary compositions. And as the Guodian texts show, works like the Daodejing took a written form earlier than skeptics believed, possibly even as early as the traditionalists have always claimed.
Don't they have any quality control? It's time to finally root my phone and install an adblocker.
I won't hold my breath but increased meaningful discussion can only be a good thing.
I may have been in the Toyota factory and even met the engineers who designed the cars. That doesn't mean I understand the full intent of Toyota's board of directors.
> That seems to remove the possibility to know anything from a written text including science, history, autobiographies, and other forms of non-fiction.
Things aren't true because they're written, they're true because they can be verified as true; writing merely adds the possibility to pass on the knowledge required to verify a truth. Absent re-verification, nothing is true simply because someone wrote it down.
Guilty as charged...so take my bias with a grain of salt...but this article really doesn't present any science to support the title or claim.
It basically makes a bunch of assumptions about literacy levels and some how makes a massive leap to when the bible was actually written down in it's present form.
The lack of evidence has never been proof of something not existing.
The author writes... One of the longstanding arguments for why the main body of biblical literature was not written down in anything like its present form until after the destruction and exile of 586 B.C. is that before then there was not enough literacy or enough scribes to support such a huge undertaking.
It's hardly science, and I wonder if your bias is also prevalent in your post.
As far as the study is concerned, here it is: http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2016/04/05/1522200113.DCSu... It looks like they had to develop new techniques because of the condition of the writing, for the purpose of processing the images, and analyzing them. I will have to read more before I can form an adequate to my own taste, but my preliminary opinion is, that they are filling in too many blanks in order to form a meaningful conclusion.
Interesting correlation to the Book of Mormon, which originates ~600 BC in Jerusalem. In fact, page 1, verse 2 says:
> 2 Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.
And further discusses how Lehi "hath written many things which he saw in visions and in dreams; and he also hath written many things which he prophesied." Lehi was of a priestly order, of which there were at least hundreds, if not thousands, of members, which also correlates well to this finding:
> But if the literacy rates in the Arad fortress were repeated across the kingdom of Judah, which had about 100,000 people, there would have been hundreds of literate people, the Tel Aviv research team suggests.
So anyway, the linked article and this source seem to corroborate each other.
Edit: Okay, lots of down votes. How does this comment not contribute to the discussion?
I never said it was published 600 BC. It was indeed published in 1830, but story within it originates ~600 BC. Very different things.
When you used BYU as a source, it became about beliefs. Religious institutions are not staffed by real academics, they're staffed by believers which disqualifies them as sources.
How do you explain this then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brigham_Young_Universi... - BYU scholars have just as much impact for good in this world as any other accredited university. I've had BYU professors who are not Mormon. How do you explain that?
Anyway, I merely intended it as a friendly jab. :)
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/do-scien...
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
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I'll also note that science generally relies on empiricism rather than induction. Sure, scientists will expect the future to be similar to the past (because the present is like the past, and the past was like the more distant past, etc.), but they will also test that expectation with continued experiments.
I don't disagree, but how does that change my point? Empiricism and Induction both need the uniformity of nature to work. How would you prove that nature is uniform without appealing to the belief that nature is uniform?
You watch nature for a while, and if it behaves uniformly, then you can safely act as if it is uniform. Science doesn't operate with "proof" in the same sense as logic or mathematics. There is no "proving" that the universe didn't spontaneously come into being twenty nanoseconds ago, precisely primed for us to believe we were having this conversation. But the evidence available to us very strongly suggests a wholly materialistic universe, to the point where there is basically no practical scientific value to consider otherwise.
Do you have evidence suggesting that nature is not uniform, that physics and chemistry behaved somehow differently somewhere or somewhen else?
If you believe something that can't be proven, what do you call it?
How would you test falsifiable theories and predictions if nature weren't uniform?
Since you have a lot of questions and I don't really have the time to give a history lesson in science philosophy, you should read Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper if you are genuinely earnest with your inquiries to learn more.
Popper's view essentially boils down to: "Science can't prove anything, theories can only be corroborated." So we just have a list of theories, where some are firmer than others, correct?
My complaint with Popper is that true knowledge is impossible with this set of axioms. One can't know anything with certainty--and yet everyone actually lives as if they can know something.
I find people that subscribe to Popper's (and Hume and Russell before him) to be hypocrites as they interact with the natural world. Operating with a set of theories that could never be 100% certain, yet acting as if they were.
How sure are you that you're correct and I'm wrong? 40% or 60%?
Scientists need nature to be uniform for the scientific method to work, correct?
Has a scientist been able to prove that nature is uniform without appealing to the uniformity of nature?
If so, whom? And how?
If not--would you say a scientist is exercising "faith" that nature is uniform?
Science and faith do not go well together, and nothing scientists do requires faith.
Edit: Appealing to the authority of academics seems a poor strategy when those academicians' dinners rely on toeing the party line.
The Book of Mormon was written in 1830. Am I missing something here?
Backing up that it was published in 1830? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Mormon#/media/File:The....
And that the account within it originates ~600 BC? See page 1 of the text.
Of course not, that isn't even remotely controversial.
>And that the account within it originates ~600 BC? See page 1 of the text.
Page 1 of what text? Surely you're not suggesting people take the Book of Mormon's own text as evidence, that would be ludicrous. Page 1 of the wikipedia article wouldn't be credible either, so I don't know what text you're referring to. Although Wikipedia does point to a lot of pages questioning the Book of Mormon's authenticity as having an ancient origin, I haven't found any which actually validate it. Of course I'm not going to look very hard, since I already know that evidence doesn't exist and I strongly suspect you're trolling.
No, I'm asking that you point to actual manuscripts which were incorporated into the the Book of Mormon which originated from ~600 BC, tell us where they were excavated from and by whom, and in what museum or university those documents currently reside. Independently verified evidence as to its antiquity. And don't cite any sources actually connected to the Mormon church.
The Book of Mormon is not evidence for itself; without other accounts from non Mormon sources, there's little reason to believe anything stated by the book of Mormon is anything but fiction. The same applies to all holy books; they cannot be evidence of their own truth.
Star Wars took place a "long time ago" but we don't try to prove it either way -- it's just the setting of the story, whether or not it really happened.
BUT it doesn't matter because it wasn't actually written down (and/or "revealed") until the 1800s, right?
Is there a good academic treatment of the origin of the stories in the BoM?
> BUT it doesn't matter because it wasn't actually written down (and/or "revealed") until the 1800s, right?
Right, but that's still 186 years before this article was published. A text that's almost 200 years old still has historic value, whether or not one believes its contents. So there is an interesting link between this article and the book, regardless of personal beliefs.
> Is there a good academic treatment of the origin of the stories in the BoM?
There are some excellent resources at http://publications.mi.byu.edu/periodicals/jbms/. Yes, it's a religious university, but these topics are treated from a scholarly perspective. Also, https://bookofmormoncentral.org/ has some great resources -- it's a fairly new resource with less technical articles but scholarly citations, and its faculty is made of scholars in near-eastern studies and related fields.
Is there scholarship on the legitimacy of the Lehi story, and, can you provide a link to the 101 version instead of a database?
(I know, lazy, but you're probably used to the burden of proof being on you on this topic.)
This article is interesting specifically because of the evidence it presents about when the original texts of the bible were written. The historic value of the BoM is only linked to this article if it has a similarly distant origin. If the BoM is only 200 years old (i.e. the 600 BC origin is incorrect), then it's irrelevant to the discussion.
It is only with personal belief that the BoM is 2600 years old that there is an interesting link between the article and the BoM.
But if we're going to accept religious discussions on HN we have to accept all of them. It is entirely unfair to give credence to one sect while demeaning another.
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Edit: Okay, lots of down votes. How does this comment not contribute to the discussion?
Like many other comments in religious discussions, you are assuming facts not in evidence. But it is unfair to single you out. However, it would also be inappropriate for you to interpret the opposition you are seeing as confirmation of your position.
That's delusional bullshit.