Did Moses really exist and write the Pentateuch?

The death of Moses is an historic event. It occurred in the early part of the year 1405 B.C., some weeks before the passage of the Jordan. The mission of Moses, whatever it was, was complete. His work was finished. He leaves it as a legacy to his successors. But what was his work? The answer of the word of God is nowhere equivocal. It uniformly maintains that the law was given by Moses. Moses, while he was alive in the world, not only acted as a mediator between God and the generation of Israel of his day, but by divine authority established the covenant relationship under which they and their successors were to be the people of God and enjoy His blessing. Now, the history of the children of Israel under these covenant relationships is to be distinguished from the establishment of the relationships. Moses is not the author of their history under the covenant, but the author, under God, of the covenant under which their history occurred. He gave by divine direction all the laws by which their conduct was to be regulated. He promulgated all the divine communications in regard to the establishment of the covenant. He wrote the history of the communication of the covenant. When he died, the work of communicating the covenant was finished. He left thus a body of writings which ever after was referred to under specific names, such as, The Law, The Law of Moses, This Book of the Law. These terms do not apply simply to the testimony — the tables of the law, put into the ark — but to the entire body of the writings of Moses, i.e., the authorised copy of the history of the establishment of the covenant.

The record of the lives of the Patriarchs is, we are told, an ideal, rather than an actual, picture of human life at that period. So, perhaps, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had never existence. Perhaps this is true also of the God of those three men! If we could only swallow the first, we might not wamble at the second. We are informed that the religion of Israel derived many of its elements from the primitive religion of the Semites, and was largely influenced in its development by the faiths with which it came in contact in the course of its history. How do I know that this is true? The Scripture tells me that the law was given by Moses, and in all its sacrificial and ceremonial economy we have “Jehovah said unto Moses.” And are we to learn from these critics that the whole thing is a perfect farce, for if there is a bit of truth mixed with it, it is only by that mixture made the greater deception?

Our Lord testified to the authorship of Moses. “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27). And again He testified belief in Moses to be of such vital importance, that no one can be a Christian, who does not receive his testimony. He said, “For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me: for he wrote of Me, but if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words” (John 5:47). Again, he referred to Moses as an author, whose authority was undisputed by them. And this appeal to Moses is carried on in the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Epistles. Indeed, the argument of the whole Hebrew Epistle hangs upon the existence and acts of the great law-giver.

There is no such history in the world as the books of Moses. Any description of the creation of the world given by heathen writers, or handed down by tradition, is childish and puerile in the extreme. Whence the majesty and sublimity of the account Moses gave of creation and its subsequent details, if it were not inspired?

But if Moses did not write the books that bear his name, never were books, we repeat, more honeycombed with lies. His name is woven into Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy hundred’s of times. “And the Lord spake unto Moses,” with its variations, is a formula repeated dozens of times, and it were blasphemy to write it down again and again if it were not true. As we have said, our Lord attributed these books to the authorship of Moses. The testimony of the Jews, their jealous guardianship of the sacred volume, the way it is woven into the history of the children of Israel, all bear irresistible testimony to the authorship of Moses, and hence to this memorial, beginning at the time, of the alleged fact, thus meeting the requirements of Mark No. 4.

Is it reasonable to suppose that a character like Moses should give himself to a system of wholesale lying on such solemn subjects, and take the name of the Lord his God in vain? At the time when He was solemnly calling upon the children of Israel to serve God, and to worship Him only, was he indulging in a gigantic and blasphemous hoax? We cannot believe it.

"If we cannot suppose that the Pentateuch is correct history, then we do not know precisely what Moses did for his people … From all that we do know, we are led to believe that what Moses did was rather to organize the people, and give them an impulse in religion, than to frame any code of laws, or make any great change in their institutions."*

The Harvard professor goes on to tell us that "we" know now that God did not give Israel the law at Sinai; but so long as we refuse that, he will allow us to believe that "the people, or a part of them, may have stayed there awhile." Moses' part in it all, he tells us, matters very little.

The Israelites were contemned as being shepherds, an avocation which the Egyptians despised, and hence the kings who protected them were probably called the shepherd kings, and shared the same detestation, execrated as having impiously shut the doors of the temples, and thus bringing upon the nation the anger of the gods. Such was the record of an historian who, ages after, ascribed to idols the judgments that fell upon this Pharaoh. The cunning of the Devil, the blindness of man are here most plain; for the judgments of God were against the idols. Satan makes man believe the "gods" did it as a punishment for shutting up their temples. This historian (Diodorus Siculus) says that a plague broke out in Egypt through the anger of the gods, because there were many foreigners there who practised unknown rites in their worship, and in consequence the ancient religion was neglected. The Egyptians feared that they would never be able to appease their gods unless they expelled all the strangers from their country. He mentions Danaus and Cadmus, but the greater number of the expelled was under the conduct of Moses, a wise and brave man, who led his followers into Judea and there built Jerusalem and the temple, and who pretended to he inspired by Jaoh. This was written twelve centuries after the event, and through all that time this tradition which gave the glory of God to idols was received as the truth. Thus it is that Satan has always turned the truth of God into a lie. God's sore judgments were against idolatry; Satan persuades man that these judgments support it. It may be mentioned that chronologists assert that Danaus and Cadmus with their followers did arrive in Greece about the same time that Moses and the Israelites departed from Egypt.

But not one line concerning him would have been found in the Word of God. He might have made his mark upon the Egypt of his own time, and his mummy lain in some Museum today. But it would have stirred only a feeble interest, and to the question, Who was this Moses? only a very meagre answer would have been given.

Let us suppose these events had never occurred. Suppose the children of Israel had never been in bondage in Egypt, had never crossed the Red Sea, had never wandered in the Sinaitic desert for forty years. We are then faced with the alternative, viz., that they were somewhere else. Suppose they were, as would be most natural, in Palestine, the country which for many centuries was their home. Is it possible that any person could arise, able to persuade a whole nation to adopt a history of such a miraculous nature, a history that did not belong to them, and to start a number of memorials of the nature we have been considering? No reasonable man but would admit this were an absolutely impossible feat.

123 Take Herodotus, and you will find that he has no nations with a history to tell you of but such as were in connection with the Jews — the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Babylonians, and such like — I name only the earliest. All the rest is vague and dark. Outside this we have some Chinese dynasties and some dark Hindu traditions, which tend to confirm the early Mosaic accounts; and in monuments which no fraud could have reached. In Egypt, we have pictures of Jews making bricks under the lash; and, what is remarkable, we have evidently Jewish overseers, and besides them Egyptian directors, or head-overseers — exactly what is stated in the book of Exodus. For if infidelity can find doubts to stumble and fall upon, God has given to a simple faith what even externally confirms its confidence, and confounds the folly of the false science that will not believe. Such proofs are never the foundation of faith; they cheer and confirm it.

In the neighbourhood of Israel all is light. Prejudiced, ignorant, barbarous as they may have been, they possess and shed the light of their history on all the nations around them. It is preserved almost with modern accuracy, when a few fragments scarce rescue from entire oblivion other ancient histories. We must disentomb the remains of Thebes and the Ninevehs to get at the history of their ancient monarchs, to know their dynasties, and say even if there were two Assyrian empires or one, while, by God's providence, that which gives some historic data to the glories of Mizraim and Asshur confirms in its detail that of which we have already the minutest particulars in Israel's authentic history. We find, in pictures yet fresh on the lore-covered walls of the country of the Pharaohs, the very kinds of overseers over the Jews making their bricks, of which Moses speaks in the Book of Exodus. Modern research alone has given the place and importance to these countries which the scriptures had already assigned them.