Thursday, February 10, 2022

Roy E. Gane on the Historicity of Moses

  

Of course, nobody can prove that Moses or another prophet or a group of priests wrote Lev 1-16 or other parts of the Pentateuch. Conversely, however, neither can anyone definitively rule out any of these possibilities as an assured result of scholarship. In this section, I probe some weaknesses of the pseudonymous authorship theory in relation to the question of a historical Moses. My goal here is to question the confidence of those who assume that the Pentateuchal narrative could not possibly be factual.

 

First, why do ANE scholars accept the historicity of Gudea, the ruler of Lagash about 2100 BC, but biblical scholars reject the historicity of Moses, whom the biblical narrative framework places over half a millennium later? A detailed Sumerian composition on two cylinders of Gudea recounts his building and dedication of a new Eninnu temple for the god Ningirsu, in which he claims to have received communication from his deity Ningirsu to build a temple. This does not make him legendary or fictional or use of his name pseudonymous. So what is the difference between him and Moses who is said to have received analogous information from his deity YHWH (Exod 25:8-9, 40)? To be consistent, this should not be enough to neutralize or diminish real existence of Moses as a historical person. There have been plenty of other prophets or alleged prophets from biblical times up to the present who are readily accepted as historical.

 

It is true that we have the original cylinders that date to the time of Gudea and other early artifacts pertaining to him, most notably a number of well-crafted black diorite inscribed statues of this ruler. By contrast, “currently there are no existing nonbiblical contemporary sources that specifically mention Moses and the exodus. Furthermore, the Pentateuch lacks the type of information that contemporary historians demand: a clear witness to the use of sources close to the period described (i.e., annals, chronicles, inscriptions) and a backing of chronology that lines up with contemporary material” (Mark W. Chavalas, “Moses,” DOTP 571). So a case would be made against the historicity of Moses on the basis of silence, but this kind of argument is logically weak. As if often said, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

 

Second, the argument for silence against the historicity of Moses is weakened by the fact that there are several plausible explanations for lack of earlier extant evidence for him. For one thing, it is likely that early written copies of pentateuchal books or portions of what is now the Pentateuch would have been relatively few. This could partly explain the importance of the discovery of the “Book of the Law (תּוֹרָה)” in the temple by Hilkiah the high priest during the religion of Josiah (2 Kgs 22:8, 10-11; 23:2-3; 21, 24). The few texts would have been vulnerable because they were likely written on papyrus, parchment (e.g., Jer 36:22-23), or other materials that would not survive for centuries and could easily be destroyed by fires, such as those kindled by invading armies (Kitchen, On the Reliability, 305; Garsiel, “Book of Samuel,” 28).

 

Moreover, the Bible and archaeology attest to widespread departure from the religion mandated by the Pentateuch throughout much of the preexilic era. There is abundant archaeological evidence of idolatry, during this period, and 2 Kgs 23 reports concerning the Passover that was observed in Jerusalem in the eighteenth year of Josiah (v. 23): “For no such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel, or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah” (v. 22; cf. 2 Chr 35:18) (Second Chronicles 30 records a Passover celebration during the reign of Hezekiah, but the whole event was delayed from the fourteenth day of the first month [Lev 23:5] to the fourteenth day of the second month [2 Chr 30:15; cf. Num 9:11] and most of the people were ritually impure [2 Chr30:18; contrast Num 9:6-13]. Second Chronicles 30:26 reports that “since the time of Solomon the son of David king of Israel there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem”). It appears that the few existing copies of parts of the Pentateuch were neglected, as indicated by the fact that the Book of the Law found by Hilkiah had been lost in the temple during the previous years of apostasy.

 

It appears that this neglect could at least partly explain the paucity of evidence in the historical and prophetic writings of the Hebrew Bible for the impact of Lev 1-16 on Israelite life during the preexilic period. Other explanations are less convincing. It is true that the priests were the custodians of the ritual legislation, which was idealistic and applied to the inner world of the cult. However, this body of instruction was not intended to be a priestly secret, as ritual knowledge was in at least some other ancient Near Eastern cults. Much of it was addressed to all Israelites (Lev 1:2; 4:2; 7:23, 29, etc.), and the priests were to teach it to them (Lev 10:11) (cf. “It is telling that the Bible never depicts priests or scribes as jealous or protective of their writing skills. The notion of scribes feeling . . . that it is a tragedy if divine knowledge falls into the wrong hands, as Ipuwer put it in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom . . . is alien to biblical knowledge” [Berman, Created Equal, 116]). (Roy E. Gane, “Was Leviticus Composed by Aaronide Priests to Justify Their Cultic Monopoly?,” in Exploring the Composition of the Pentateuch, ed. L. S. Baker Jr., Kenneth Bergland, Felipe A. Masotti, and A. Rahel Wells [Bulletin for Biblical Research Supplement 27; University Park, Pa.: Eisenbrauns, 2020], 207-9)

 

After discussing other evidence for the historicity of Moses (ibid., 207-11), Gane notes that:

 

It would be argued that a mask of Moses in Leviticus draws on the personality of this character portrayed in an earlier book, such as Exodus. But then the question of historicity versus persuasive pseudonymity simply shifts so that book, and if he is historical there, why not in Leviticus? Authority must be established somewhere before it can be credibly extended by pseudonymity, especially when so much weight is placed on the authority. (Ibid., 211)