For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.
Romans 15:4

In part 2, we continued answering a student’s questions about what was being taught in her college class regarding Moses and the Bible’s history. She informed us that the “professor has mentioned several times that those pieces of the Bible may not be historically accurate, but are just told to depict a characteristic of God.” We barely scratched the surface of the voluminous evidence regarding the Bible’s accuracy and reliable transmission, confirming its inspiration. Now we turn to the most attacked of God’s inspired scribes.

MOSAIC AUTHORSHIP

Regarding Moses’ authorship of the Torah, it was never seriously questioned until the 18^th century during the Enlightenment. Here is a brief history:

• 1656 – Dutch Jew Baruch de Spinoza was expelled from the congregation of Amsterdam for insisting Moses did not compose the Torah.

• 1753 - French professor of medicine Jean Astruc (1684-1766) anonymously published a book stating Moses is rightfully called the author, as Moses compiled the current book of Genesis from multiple documents. Astruc believed there had been two different authors for Creation (ch. 1 & 2), as well as 2 to 4 composers of the other Genesis narratives, mostly because of the use of either Yahweh or Elohim.
• This would be the basis of what would later become the Documentary Hypothesis as used by critics of Mosaic authorship, though Astruc supported Moses as the author through what would become the Toledoth/Wiseman hypothesis.

• 1800s – through the works of Hermann Hupfeld (1796-1866, German), Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1869, German), Wilhelm Vatke (1806-1882, German), Julius Wllhausen (1844-1918, German), and Édouard Guillaume Eugène Reuss (1804-1891, French) came the Documentary Hypothesis, referred to as JEDP.

• JEDP (Documentary Hypothesis) teaches four sources for the Torah, all of which came centuries after Moses. This serves to discredit Moses and the Torah’s history.
• J – Jehovistic documents: composed around 900-850 B.C., these author(s) used the name Jehovah (YHWH) in their texts.
• E – Elohimic documents: composed around 750-700 B.C., these author(s) used the name Elohim in their texts.
• D – Deuteronomic documents: composed possibly around the time of King Josiah’s reforms c. 621 B.C., these author(s) composed Deuteronomy.
• P – Priestly documents: priests added to and compiled the complete Torah during the Babylonian exile after 586 B.C.

• 1970s – the Documentary Hypothesis was actually discredited in the 1970s by John Van Seters (1935-, Canadian), Hans Heinrich Schmid (1937-2014, Swiss), and Rolf Rendtorff (1925-2014, German).
• However, they had no cohesive replacement for the Documentary Hypothesis, only that it was bad scholarship. Here’s why:
• In Genesis:
• YHWH is used 164 times in chapters 2-22, 24-32, 38-39, 49.
• Elohim is used 219 times in chapters 1-9, 17, 19-28, 30-33, 35, 39-46, 50.
• The usage of these names overlap chapters and toledoths.
• Thus, the usage of these two names does not prove anything, yet it is the crux argument for the skeptics!

As Dr. Peter J. Gentry, professor of Old Testament Interpretation at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, states, “Many scholars today are just unaware of the latest advances in research... and all of these things uphold the claims of the text and show that the criteria used to establish the Documentary Hypothesis is completely false.” Hence, Jesus and the entirety of the Bible are validated in their unified testimony that Moses was the inspired author of the Torah.