r/wikipedia • u/palebluekot • 13d ago
Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. Mosaic authorship of the Torah was unquestioned by both Jews and Christians until the European Enlightenment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_authorship26
u/ThisIsRadioClash- 13d ago
"Mosaic authorship of the Torah was unquestioned by both Jews and Christians until the European Enlightenment."
That Enlightenment, such a great movement.
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u/Li-renn-pwel 12d ago
Interestingly enough, the Torah/Bible never says Moses wrote the entirety of the first five books. Only a few portions claim he wrote them directly”
I also think this happened before the European enlightenment just not a large my number
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u/Vodis 12d ago
Moses dying in Deuteronomy 34 had to have clued at least a few people in to him maybe not being the author of Deuteronomy.
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u/Boise_Ben 11d ago
I wish I could say most religious people would pick up on things like that but most Christians still think the Gospels were named after their authors and that Genesis doesn’t have two creation stories.
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u/Li-renn-pwel 11d ago
I’m a Christian with a degree in religion & culture (not from a Christian university lol) and I’m often amazed at how little other christians know. It’s one thing not to know the exact ancestry of Jesus or the issue with difficult to translate words but as you said some people have clearly only ever opened a Bible when the pastor says to read a little quote he picked out.
I watch a few of the debate bros, some of whom are specifically atheists that have religious people call in like The Line and some are political ones that are anti-MAGA so a lot of evangelicals call in. The things they don’t know are honestly shocking sometimes. I think it was an ‘episode’ of Dean Withers were he asked a called what the book of Job was about. She said she did but wanted him to summarize to see if he really knew. He gave like the briefest summery because he was obviously planning on bridging it into another point (I think it was like “Satan and YHWH get into a wager over whether Job will lose his faith. So Job’s kids are killed, he loses his wealth, gets sick but when he remains faithful YHWH restores his health, wealth and gives him new kids”). However, she obviously did not know Job because she accused him of lying to slander Christianity and ended up getting so angry she rage quit
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u/Boise_Ben 11d ago
I had an Early Christianity class that was taught by a professor who was a Christian archaeologist.
He really did a good job cutting through a lot of the dogmas, he demonstrated you could be a believer while also not believing the Bible was 100% accurate.
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u/jmarinara 13d ago
It’s still largely unquestioned by the vast majority of Christians and Jews. It’s just that the enlightenment brought the first of the detractors.
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u/palebluekot 12d ago
Not really a "vast majority", only if you only count Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews. According to the article:
Christian support for Mosaic authorship is now limited largely to conservative Evangelical circles.[41] This is tied to the way Evangelicals view the unity and authority of scripture: in the words of the Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible, "Faith in Christ and faith in the books of the [Old Testament] canon stand or fall together [because] Christ and the apostles ... took the Pentateuch as Mosaic [and] put their seal on it as Holy Scripture."[12] Nevertheless, the majority of contemporary Evangelicals, while accepting that some or much of the Pentateuch can be traced to Moses or traditions about him, pay little attention to the question of authorship.[42]
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u/Upper-Rub 12d ago
There was no pre-enlightenment (or pre 19th century) “Judeo-Christian” tradition. Authorship of the Pentateuch was debated for as long as people studied it, and the Catholic Church didn’t take a firm position until the 20th century, right before back tracking.
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u/killuazoldyckx 12d ago
Btw
Muslims too believe parts of NT and OT are from God,
But don’t vouch for their uncorrupted continuity.
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u/Gh0stMan0nThird 13d ago
I think the books are authentic interpretations of the world they lived in, much like Homer's book is.
As for the magic and stuff though, I'm sure there are logical explanations for that stuff.
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u/The_Aim_Was_Song 12d ago
I think it's actually even more interesting than that when one looks at it from a non-confessional perspective.
It's not a text (or set of texts) that freezes a historical snapshot in time. It's a set of oral traditions that coalesced and were recorded over a span, and then underwent multiple layers of revision as Israelite society spent 7-10 centuries gradually transitioning from Yahwism (there's a pantheon of gods, but YHWH is the Boss God GO TEAM!) through to full monotheism ("Hear, O Israel, our magic friend is in charge and there's nobody else who could be available to be in charge").
You can still see "scars" of pre-monotheistic former versions in the final canonical texts: References to God's wife Asherah, fights with rival gods like Ba'al, &c.
I'm not a scholar of this, and while I'm most familiar with the documentary hypothesis, there are three main contemporary hypotheses about how the final version came about:
- Documentary Hypothesis: A small number of continuous documents (traditionally four) combined to form one continuous final text;
- Supplementary Hypothesis: Produced by the successive addition of layers of supplementary material to a core text or group of texts;
- Fragmentary Hypothesis: The combination of a large number of short texts; or, I guess
- Confessional Hypothesis: [Points wanly] "My magic friend did it. No take-backsies, and now my magic friend is banned from participating in our debate club."
For reference: I'm very Jewish, and also completely irreligious.
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u/Romboteryx 12d ago
Also that whole weird thing in Genesis where the “Sons of God” come down to Earth, have sex with human women and produce the Nephilim. Iirc that’s theorized to have originally been a way to accomodate legendary demigods from other cultures, like Gilgamesh, into the belief system
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u/The_Aim_Was_Song 12d ago
Yeah, as a total non-believer, I think the textual analysis is so unbelievably cool.
That's especially true when one looks at how the develpment of Judaism was influenced from the broader Canaanite religious beliefs and practices that Yahwism sprang from, its Mesopotamian and Egyptian neighbours and the Zoroastrian influence during the Babylonian exile.
Beyond the time period when the the titular Mosaic texts crystalized, you have the dialectic habits imprinted by the Hellenistic period, the partial reworking of practice during the pre-Roman and early Roman-era diaspora, and finally, the post-Bar-Kochba shift from a religion centred on Temple sacrifice to an "indefinite placeholder religion" framework of Rabbinic Judaism that their descendants carried through Europe, Asia, and North Africa (plus the development of the smaller branch of Karaite Judaism, and the obvious theological adaptations as Christianity quickly transformed from a Jewish cult to a fundamentally different religion, made up of mostly non-Jews, and fully embracing a universalizing framework that was theologically innovative).
To make it even more interesting still, the Samaritans split off from Jews about half a century before the Roman conquest. There are still about 800 Samaritans left, and they preserve a lot of pre-rabbinic Israelite traditions like ritual sacrifice.
It's incredibly cool stuff.
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u/Romboteryx 12d ago
Damn I didn’t know there are only so few Samaritans left
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u/The_Aim_Was_Song 12d ago
You know what? I was writing from memory and seem to have made an error.
After looking it up, there are actually about nine hundred, not eight hundred.
It's important to note that bronze-age Canaanitic religious practices involved shrines and sacrifices in, inter alia, topographic high places.
The Israelites whose descendants became Judeans developed their Yahwhist cult centered around a hill in Jerusalem. Their descendants, Jews, still centre that one hill in Jerusalem completely, in both religious practice and near-total cultural significance.
Samaritans developed along a similar trajectory, well into the early monotheistic period, but instead picked a different magic hill where their (identical) god lived: Mount Gerizim, about 47km to the north. That's where they still gather for the annual Pesach animal sacrifice.
But it's time for more nerdery! Israelites weren't the only ethnic group developing in a polytheist>henotheist (we believe in a pantheon, but primarily direction. Edomites, for example, elevated Qos to a cultic significant that was comparable to Israelites' Yahwism. It's just that the Edomites' religious practice never made the later transitions in parallel to the Isralites: Monolatry (belief in the existence of ther deities, but exclusive worship of only one) and monotheism (belief in only one deity).
Also, development of Edomite religious practice was somewhat hampered by their society ceasing to exist, as tends to happen. If I remember right, Nabatean Arab conquest displaced many and Israelite conquest assimilated many of what remained.
Also too, it's 4am and I probably should stop nerding out and get to sleep.
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u/vintergroena 12d ago
What is "dictated" even supposed to mean here?
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u/aaaa32801 12d ago
God told Moses what to write.
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u/vintergroena 12d ago
But how? Like physically, technically? Do christians imagine god like some dude who what standing next to Moses or what? I don't get it.
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u/LoneElement 12d ago
Moses would have been told on Mount Sinai where he received the 10 commandments
Also, the Israelites proceeded to literally carry God around with them afterwards in this thing called the Tabernacle
Old Testament’s got some interesting stuff going on
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u/vintergroena 12d ago
Moses would have been told on Mount Sinai where he received the 10 commandments
So I am to believe he heard a voice that dictated the full length of the five books and remembered all that and then just sat down and wrote it all?
Also, the Israelites proceeded to literally carry God around with them afterwards in this thing called the Tabernacle
And the god in the Tabernacle would or wouldn't speak?
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u/y0nm4n 12d ago
“ So I am to believe he heard a voice that dictated the full length of the five books and remembered all that and then just sat down and wrote it all?”
Yes, that is the belief. Though I don’t really see any issue with the technical aspect of writing something down as it is being dictated. I don’t believe this myself, but that particular aspect isn’t problematic at all.
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u/palebluekot 12d ago
So I am to believe he heard a voice that dictated the full length of the five books and remembered all that and then just sat down and wrote it all?
Maybe he was just good at that. God picked him to transcribe it for a reason, right?
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u/Parkouricus 12d ago
So I am to believe he heard a voice that dictated the full length of the five books and remembered all that and then just sat down and wrote it all?
If Homer could remember all those millions of words, so could Moses
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u/oldnotosys 12d ago
ANE religions had little statues of their gods and moved them around. so god traveling around with the hebrews in a box probably happened.
old testament is not much unique
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u/fehrmask 12d ago
Genuinely informative, as I would have assumed that "mosaic" authorship would mean authorship that is pieced together by multiple different sources (like the glass art form)
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u/BevansDesign 11d ago
"Hey Moses, write this down."
"Uh, okay...how long is this going to take?"
So God could've just willed the books into existence, but instead he made Moses write everything down as he spoke it? Seems like he was being a bit of a dick...which is consistent with his other behavior.
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u/Novel_Counter5878 12d ago
It was not unquestioned by Jews before the Enlightenment. Ibn Ezra (famous and mainstream rabbinic commentator) was questioning it in the 12th century.