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012 | Canon of Torah | Understanding the Canon
775 Plays5 years ago
In this episode we discuss the authority of Torah, or Pentateuch - the first five books of the Bible! We chat about JEDP theory, whether or not Moses authored the book, and why it was considered authoritative for Israel. This is a very detailed episode so be ready to take notes!
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Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
The Pentateuch: Authorship and Compilation
00:00:30
Speaker
All right, who is ready to get super nitty gritty into the details?
00:00:36
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of canonization because we're going to be talking a lot about authorship, some theories about the dates and the compilation and the sources behind the Pentateuch or the Torah. And it's going to be very detailed. So I just want to prepare you. If you're a note taker, this would be a great note taking episode because I have a lot of information to share with you. Now, of course, every theory that we talk about
00:01:04
Speaker
has sub theories and variations and all of those things are able to become even more complicated the further along we go. So I am going to stick with a very high level view so that we can just kind of get the big picture of the Pentateuch.
Old Testament Structure and Differences
00:01:21
Speaker
So before we get into the details, we're going to talk a little bit about canonization of the Old Testament as a whole and just how to understand the nature of the Old Testament.
00:01:34
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little review. The Old Testament was written over the course of about 1100 years. It had around 40 different authors and the order of the Old Testament that we have today is not the same as the Jewish Old Testament that even Jesus would have had. We talked about in last week's episode how Jesus had a three-part
00:01:58
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Old Testament that began in Genesis and ended in Chronicles. And so today we have an Old Testament that is based off the Septuagint or the Greek Old Testament
00:02:10
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and the Latin Vulgate which was translated from the Septuagint. And the order in these books was different than the original Hebrew version. Not different in what books were contained in the Old Testament, but simply different in their order and how they were combined. So in the Hebrew Old Testament,
00:02:33
Speaker
you might have seen before this abbreviation it's T-A-N-A-K to knock and basically what it is is it's an abbreviation for the three names for the three different scrolls so you have Torah which is the first five books the Torah is also called Pentateuch the first person to refer to the Torah as the Pentateuch which means five books was the church father origin so
00:03:01
Speaker
that term came from him, it wasn't used by the Jews, but it is a helpful way of remembering that there's five books in the Torah. So Torah is the first one of the three, then Nebim, which would be the prophets, and then the Ketubim, which is the writings. And so the abbreviation for this looks like Tanakh, T-A-N-A-K.
00:03:26
Speaker
Now the difference in this Old Testament Jewish version, there's a couple differences, but one of the big ones is it had less books than the Old Testament we have now. And you might freak out a little and be like, where did they go? Did we make them up? No, they were just compiled differently. So for instance, the minor prophets were all one scroll.
00:03:47
Speaker
That's a lot of books in one scroll. So for instance, the prophets had the former prophets, which would be Joshua, Samuel, Judges, and Kings, and then the latter prophets, which was Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and all of the minor prophets in one scroll. So you can see how the Jewish Old Testament would have looked different for Jesus than it does for us now, while still containing all of the same information that we are working from today.
00:04:16
Speaker
Jesus had the same Old Testament that we have. He also would have had access to the apocryphal books, so like the book of Enoch, Maccabees, things like that, even though the apocryphal books were not deemed canon by the Jews. They were considered historical, but they were not considered inspired works in authoritative.
00:04:38
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the faith. So we'll get more to the Apocrypha later on, but hopefully this gives you kind of a foundation as we are working forward to talk specifically about the Torah, its authorship, and some questions surrounding its canonization. Okay, Torah. Genesis through Deuteronomy,
00:04:57
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And as we said, this is called the Pentateuch in Greek. And this is a vital piece of scripture, not just to the Jews, but also for Christians. As we look at how the canon of scripture was compiled, we need to consider where these first five books originated, who authored them, and what may have been their consolidation process. So there's a lot of theories about this among theologians and academic scholars of the Bible.
Mosaic Authorship Debate
00:05:24
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And I could not cover all of the theories if I tried. It would take forever. So we're going to deal with one of the most popular theories in the last 200 years, which is called the JEDP theory. Before I get to that, though, I want to kind of define a few things.
00:05:45
Speaker
First, one of the things that's kind of an unspoken assumption in the church is that Moses authored the Pentateuch. He authored Torah. And one of the issues with this is we tend to think that only people who truly care about scripture would believe that Moses authored the Torah, so the conservative view. And if you're liberal, then you believe he didn't.
00:06:12
Speaker
And I want to debunk this right out of the gate because there's actually some very conservative scholars who don't think that Moses authored Torah because of how Torah is written and some of the ways
00:06:28
Speaker
it references the past. So I just want to first make sure that as I talk about the possibility that Moses didn't write Torah, you understand that there are multiple perspectives on this within conservative Orthodox theology and that this doesn't undermine the authority of it or say that Moses wasn't real or a literal person or that he didn't write things down because we know in Torah he did write certain things down.
00:06:57
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because it says that God told him to write them, but that we are looking at this text critically and letting it speak for itself.
00:07:10
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The other thing you need to be aware of is that anonymous authors were very common at this stage of ancient Middle Eastern literature. It was very common to not know who the author would have been, and that doesn't necessarily undermine the authority of this scripture and the consistency of the narrative as we will see moving forward.
Introduction to JEDP Theory
00:07:31
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Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the JEDP theory.
00:07:36
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So this was founded by Julius Wellhausen, and it's held by many scholars and university theologians who tend toward a liberal interpretation of scripture. So JEDP is an abbreviation for four supposed texts, which, when compiled over time, eventually became the Torah. These texts all had different origins and were supposedly compiled by Ezra as a canon after the Babylonian exile.
00:08:06
Speaker
J stands for jawic or jawic and that's Y-A-H-W-I-C. The J is because Wellhausen was German so that it would be jawic but it's a J. E is for elohic so like elohim it's elohic. D is deuteronomic and P is priestly.
00:08:28
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Each of these sources, so each letter stands for a supposed source text that was basically forming the Torah. Each of these sources is progressively more recent, so the Yawic text would have been the oldest than Elohic, Deuteronomic, and Priestly. Scholars believe that the Torah was compiled from four different authors and texts because the language and the use of God's name, so Yahweh versus Elohim,
00:08:58
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indicates different authorship and even different date of writing. So these source texts are supposedly completely hypothetical. None of these texts have been found. This is all hypothetical. And much of the conversation around their existence is used to support a non-literal mythological approach to Torah teaching.
00:09:22
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So basically, this JEDP theory is saying there were four different authors. And we believe that because they use different names for God.
Critique of JEDP Theory
00:09:34
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And these were all compiled together after the Babylonian exile. So so many years after Moses, after the Exodus, they're compiled by Ezra and put together
00:09:48
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And they don't result in an inspired spiritually authoritative text. They're really just a mythological background that Israel took literally is essentially what a lot of these scholars are saying. Now, there's a few things I want to mention about this view. God has many names in scripture.
00:10:08
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And authors may use specific names to reflect the character of God as expressed in the situation being recorded. We know that God acts in many different ways, and so if he's acting in a certain way, the author may use a name of God that describes him in that context. Conservative scholars argue that different name usage does not necessarily reflect a different time period or author, but simply the author's effort to depict God's character.
00:10:39
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The priestly source links, in theory, to Ezra and the final canonization of Torah as authoritative. Why does this matter? So, Felicia, why does this matter at all? Because if Torah was not authoritative until the resettlement of Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, and many scholars say this was just for geopolitical purposes, the Torah was used for political purposes to be authoritative.
00:11:07
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then its spiritual implications and its authority can only be a cultural figment. It can't be something that's eternal. I can't have something with, you know, long-term spiritual implications. We can't live by it today because it was all just a political text from random dudes that Ezra compiled to get Israel back as a nation.
00:11:31
Speaker
Torah compilation for spiritual, particularly for messianic purposes, can just be written off as the ignorance of ancient minds with the JEDP theory. So I want to read you part of an article on the Torah that quotes a couple more conservative scholars who really don't think highly of the Wellhausian theory. One of them, and this is Gleason Archer,
00:11:59
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of Trinity Evangelical, said, That's quite an accusation, and I have to say that I agree.
00:12:24
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JEDP theory is loved by liberal scholars, but again, many of these liberal scholars are coming from the perspective that scripture isn't authoritative, it's not inspired, it's just old language and documents from mythological believing people. And so if that's your perspective, you're gonna do whatever it takes to find a way to undermine scripture.
00:12:54
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even if it means bending common sense. Another quote by Archer says,
00:13:03
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When all the data of the Pentateuchal text have been carefully considered and all the evidence both internal and external has been fairly weighed, the impression is all but irresistible that Mosaic authorship is the one theory that best accords with the surviving historical data. So we'll talk a little bit about that because that's debatable, but it is the counter, one of the counters to this liberal interpretation.
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00:13:31
Speaker
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00:13:50
Speaker
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00:14:08
Speaker
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00:14:33
Speaker
So let's go back to the evangelical conservative response.
00:14:39
Speaker
Moses is the commonly understood author of Torah, right? And one of the responses when coming up against the liberal theory is that Moses simply received all the information for Genesis to Deuteronomy from God, kind of like Joseph Smith in his golden tablets. They just kind of appeared. But this is not consistent with how the rest of the Bible is written. The Bible is historically rooted
00:15:07
Speaker
It is historically in a land that exists, that bears history, that you can go to, that you can see.
00:15:15
Speaker
It's also rooted in the genealogies of the Bible. It's traceable. And this is a big deal. I know that a lot of people don't like the genealogies. They find them boring and they don't understand their significance. But genealogies are so vital to the historicity of Scripture. They not only give us a way to trace the lineage of the different tribes of Israel, and for them, their ownership of land
00:15:44
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But they also show us that there was this historical connection and this biological human connection to the story. These were real people. And that's so important for
00:15:58
Speaker
the accuracy of scripture. So for Moses, just to get this out of the sky, just sitting there behind a curtain or whatever, isn't consistent with the rest of scripture, which depended on eyewitness accounts and people close to the situation who were writing near to it, like we talked about last week, early and eyewitness, as early as possible and as eyewitness as possible or talking to people who were there or near to the situation so that you can record it accurately.
Genealogical Transmission of Covenantal Truths
00:16:28
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And this second view that Moses just got the information dumped on him, it doesn't really, really fly. So here's another option. And this takes into account both divine inspiration and history. Torah portrays an incredibly detailed knowledge of Egyptian culture, history, and landscape. This is befitting of Moses' background. It's also laced with genealogical records.
00:16:56
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like I just mentioned, which give us a map for the authority of the account. And since eyewitnesses are so important to canonosity, it should intrigue us that these family lines show Seth, son of Adam, alive very near to the same time as Noah.
00:17:12
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and Shem, son of Noah, alive at the same time as Abraham. If Noah possessed family records and preserved them, and Abraham gave everything he had to Isaac, Genesis 25.5, which may have included records of his own, then we have this way of passing information down that isn't necessarily just oral. And even if it is oral, we have this way of transmitting information that preserves it for generations to come.
00:17:41
Speaker
So one of the things that's interesting when we're talking about Abraham giving everything he had to Isaac in Genesis 25, the word for statutes in Genesis 26 5, it's used in reference to Abraham's obedience, is a word for clay tablets written in stone, indicating that Abraham was recording God's directives for posterity.
00:18:04
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So now we have Abraham recording things that God said to him that perhaps Moses worked from whoever the author of Torah was worked from to compile the Torah. Another thing to take into consideration
00:18:22
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The Abrahamic covenant pivots on the transmission of covenantal truths to Abraham's children. So Abraham was supposed to share the covenant and what God said to him with his children and with their children and so on. This information had to be passed down. Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, all who operated with an understanding of who God was and how he worked among men. So during the enslavement of Israel and Egypt, reverence for God is mentioned among the midwives. So Exodus 1 17.
00:18:53
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and the people actively called upon God, Exodus 3.
Moses's Contributions to the Torah
00:18:56
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It was their call upon God for help which God uses as the basis for his call on Moses' life. So we're moving from Abraham's transmission of this information forward to Moses, who became the first and really the greatest according to the last chapter of Deuteronomy.
00:19:15
Speaker
Deuteronomy 34, prophet of Israel. He received and recorded Torah so the people of Israel could live with God among them. Now some would say he didn't record the entire five books because we do have only a few evidences of where Moses is writing down information. So we know that Moses
00:19:41
Speaker
wrote down some facts about the battle with the Amalekites. This is in Exodus 1714 because the Lord said to him, write this as a reminder in a book and recite it in the hearing of Joshua about the Amalekites. He also recorded Exodus 20 through 23 where he wrote down all the words of the Lord, says in Exodus 24.3.
00:20:04
Speaker
We know the Decalogue in Exodus 32 was written by him, Exodus 34. And then there's a couple stops in the wilderness, Numbers 33, and it says Moses wrote down their starting point stage by stage by command of the Lord. In Deuteronomy 31, we know that Moses wrote down a song and taught it to the Israelites. And earlier in Deuteronomy 31, he wrote down the law and gave it to the priests.
00:20:32
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Now, why, if we know that Moses is writing stuff down, we know he's literate, we know he's writing some things, why not say he just wrote the whole thing? Well, there's a couple things that can make us question that. In a handful of places, and this is according to torah.com, which I believe is a messianic approach to this topic. It's very fair and balanced. In a handful of places, Pentateuch
00:20:59
Speaker
references things that show the author is living across the Jordan long after the wilderness period after they've taken over Israel or Canaan. So one of the things that's mentioned in Genesis is that Canaanites were in the land. Genesis 12.6, the Canaanites were in the land.
00:21:20
Speaker
at that time. So the author is clearly referring to a time when the Canaanites are no longer in the land, but Moses died before that happened and he never got to go into the land. Another time
00:21:33
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we see is at the end of the description of Esau's descendants comes an Edomite king list, and it says, this is Genesis 36, 31, these are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites. So the author is speaking in past tense, but with this present knowledge of where Israel's going. Again, Moses wouldn't have been there to write something like this. Exodus 16, 35, in reference to manna,
00:22:03
Speaker
ends with this statement, the Israelites ate manna 40 years until they came to a habitable land, so Canaan. They ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan. Again this is in past tense. Now it could be argued, well Moses could write it in past tense, but then this would mean that he wrote it right before he died when they got to the border of the land of Canaan. And there's quite a few other
00:22:28
Speaker
Issues like this another one and this is kind of intriguing in Deuteronomy 3 11 King Ag of Bashan is mentioned and it says in fact his bed an iron bed can still be seen in Raba of the Ammonites So this person is writing suddenly in present tense saying look all this time has passed and you can still see this iron bed here so all of this together
00:22:53
Speaker
It's not saying that, oh my goodness, we're denying this fundamental truth.
Torah's Role in Divine Law
00:22:58
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Moses wrote the Torah. Truth is, conservative scholars debate this. It's not necessarily true that Moses wrote the Torah. He definitely wrote pieces of the Torah. What does matter though is,
00:23:13
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Are we still adhering to the authority of Torah? Because this is foundational stuff. This is stuff Jesus was working from. This is stuff Jesus was fulfilling. So it's very vital that we preserve the importance of inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility in regard to these first five books.
00:23:34
Speaker
The fact that Moses didn't write it doesn't necessarily undermine its truth. The book of Hebrews is also canon, and we don't know who authored that. So I just want to encourage you if you're like, I always thought Moses wrote the Pentateuch. This is not necessarily something that should shake your faith.
00:23:53
Speaker
It should actually strengthen your faith because what we're doing is we're looking at Torah specifically and allowing it to interpret itself and say, okay, you know what? We do see these textual evidences that perhaps Moses didn't write the entire thing, but we know that he wrote some of it. Okay.
00:24:14
Speaker
So returning back to our discussion of Moses as the one writing it, there are people who do think he wrote it in that David, Ezra, the Pharisees, and Jesus affirmed it. Now the sources for this are when the Pharisees or Jesus refer to Torah as the law of Moses,
00:24:38
Speaker
But reality is the law was given to Moses. It was given to Moses and he then wrote it down for the people and he spoke it to the people. So we can still call it the law of Moses while also believing that all of Torah wasn't necessarily written down by Moses.
00:24:58
Speaker
and we're not speaking double talk here. There is indication someone else, maybe Joshua, maybe not, completed the final verses of Deuteronomy after Moses' death and then affirmed his teaching as authoritative for the people of Israel. Because as soon as we go into Joshua, we see them affirming these truths as they start the conquest into Canaan.
00:25:19
Speaker
A last important thing that challenges the JEDP theory, and this is according to Dr. Eckhart Otto, is Deuteronomy's role, so the last book of the Pentateuch, the last book of Torah, its role as an exegesis of Leviticus and Exodus. So in Deuteronomy 1.5 Moses explains or expounds on Torah.
00:25:40
Speaker
extrapolating all the previously given laws with new context in the Promised Land. So this is seen between Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. Dr. Otto calls Deuteronomy the legal completion of the Pentateuch. So this is an authoritative, interpreted compilation.
00:25:59
Speaker
And as they're wrapping this up and Moses is about to die, they're about to go into the land, he gives them everything that he's told them before in this concise form and he challenges them. He says, you need to choose. Are you going to choose life or are you going to choose death? And everything that was taught to them was considered binding and authoritative. Israel treats Moses' work as this authoritative guide for their theocratic existence.
00:26:28
Speaker
We can look at Deuteronomy, we can look at Joshua, and their violation of the law results in the conflict we see in Judges. So though the Torah itself may not have been compiled in the form we know it until Ezra's era, it was functioning as an authoritative rule for Israel, and it was a foundational text for understanding the divine long before Ezra ever existed.
Faith, Scripture, and Historical Roots
00:26:54
Speaker
Okay, this was a lot of information. You guys are probably like, my head is spinning right now. I don't even know what to think. Hopefully it wasn't too overwhelming. But I want to end this with why this matters. So as Christians, we base our earthly and our eternal lives on the authority of scripture. Knowing where it came from and how it was compiled, roots our faith in history. But it is important to know the Christian faith is still faith. It's not blind.
00:27:25
Speaker
It's not without fact or reason, but still it's faith. We Christians believe in something mystical and earthly, and as such there will always be an element of the unreasonable about it. Those who refuse to believe may be subscribing to one of Ravi Zacharias' three kinds of unbelief.
00:27:45
Speaker
rational, not enough information to convince me, emotional, my experiences keep me from believing, or volitional, I choose not to believe. Volitional unbelief can manifest one of the first two ways, and ultimately no amount of information or experience will convince that person of the realism of Jesus Christ or of the authority of the Bible. Only the Holy Spirit Himself can reach the heart of a person who is bent on disbelief.
00:28:14
Speaker
So all of this is meant to give you information in a foundation to understand the Bible that you're reading, to understand that this didn't fall out of the sky, that it has been authoritative from the beginning, that it's a foundational text to understanding God
00:28:34
Speaker
It's how Israel knew who God was, how to relate to him, how to act, how to choose justice and mercy.
Old Testament Laws and Jesus's Role
00:28:41
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And so that foundation is going to guide what we see in the historical books and in the prophets and in the writings and then eventually in the New Testament.
00:28:51
Speaker
So it's important for us to have this foundation because the law of God that's outlined here and the atonement laws and Leviticus, all of that is going to be so significant once we get to what Jesus was doing as the fulfillment of the law. I hope this was exciting you guys and I can't wait to come back next week as we talk about the canon of Ezra.
00:29:18
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.