What was written directly by God in the Five Books of Moses:

The quotes from "Exodus"

For all people acknowledging the God of Abraham and His creation of this universe it is of the greatest importance to know whether we have available anything tangible attributed directly to God. For example, if archeologists ever discovered remnants of the stone tablets which God gave to Moses (and the Moses broke them), they would be a physical object made by God of the ultimate significance for the entire humanity. Yet so far neither the first nor the second issue of those stone tablets are found.


Not having any physical objects made by God, it would be also of a paramount significance if we had available some authentic texts directly attributable to God: say a true copy of the text that God curved for Moses upon the first issue of the tablets. Surely, any text coming from God directly would be the most unique among all texts available to the humanity. By its quality and content the text coming from God must surely be of the ultimate perfection proper only to God. Do we have anything like this?


Well, as the Judaic (and Christian) tradition puts it, the Five Books of Moses (out of the rest of the books of Tanach) are attributed directly to God as the authentic word-by-word copy written down by Moses and authenticated by God.


However there is nothing in Torah in support of this tradition: rather the contrary. Let's follow a few quotes from Exodus.

32.15 Thereupon Moses turned and went down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Pact, tablets inscribed on both their surfaces: they were inscribed on the one side and on the other.

 

   Note: the first issue of the tablets was two-sided.

 

32.16 The tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing, incised upon the tablets.

 

Note: this is the only place in the Bible were the expression "God's writing" is used, which indicates that the rest of the Five Books of Moses were surely not God's own writing. The Five Books of Moses therefore were a compendium written down later by Moses and his followers.

 

Those original God's written tablets were broken by Moses as soon as he confronted his people who had just betrayed God. Those original tablets written by God therefore are presumed disappeared forever (if their pieces are not miraculously discovered sometimes in the future).


During the second summon to Mount Sinai ...

 

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34.1 The Lord said to Moses: "Carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shuttered".

 

These tablets of the second issue (to be written by God Himself) were for keeping them in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle. However they had been lost later in the ancient times. Therefore, as of this moment, we do not have anything originally written by God.

 

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34.27 And the Lord said to Moses: "Write down these commandments, for in accordance with these commandments I make a covenant with you and with Israel"

 

The number of "These commandments" given in the previous verses is larger than ten. Perhaps God wanted that Moses write down those additional commandments and the entire 40 day lecture on his own.

 

34.28 And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he ate no bread and drank no water; and he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

 

Here is a controversy: in the verse 34.1 God promised to re-write the Ten Commandments on His own, while in the verse 34.27 God instructs Moses that Moses write down the Ten Commandments and their extension. 

 

In either case, whichever was written by God Himself was lost. All that could remain from that time was a compendium written down by Moses: the first part written in the presence of God on mount Sinai, and the rest of it written later by memory and through the prism of a limited human understanding of Moses (no matter what God lectured him during forty days). There is no indications as though God had ever proofread the Moses' writing.

 

 

Therefore, even in the best case scenario, we could have available only the texts written by Moses and his immediate disciples, rather than anything written directly by God or verified by God.

 

However the original Mosaic writing could be lost too, or could be modified by his ancient followers which happened to be less bright than Moses – and, unlike him, had never listened directly to God's forty-day "course".

 

As of today, what we have available as the Five Books of Moses, is the so called Masoretic scroll which has luckily survived and reached us over millennia. This means that...

The tradition of Judaism (and Christianity) attributing the Five Books of Moses directly to God, or claiming as though they were approved by God (even if written by humans) is merely a wishful thinking or an act of blind faith. For example, such are the Principles 8 and 9 of the 13 Principles of Jewish Faith by Maimonides (also known as Rambam, 1135-1204) [2]:

 

Principle 8:  I believe by complete faith that the whole Torah now found in our hands was the exact same one given to Moses...

 

Principle 9:  I believe by complete faith that this is the Torah, and it shall not be changed and it shall not be replaced with another from the Creator…

 

The problem however is in that the Masoretic scroll in the ancient Hebrew available now presents a huge challenge for understanding and extracting the original sense from it. Its text contains many linguistic glitches, variety of possible meanings of some ancient words is lost, and meaning of some ancient euphemisms is lost too [3, 4]. For that reason a process of extracting the meaning from the source text in ancient Hebrew is ambiguous. What was extracted happens to be controversial and contradicting to the contemporary hard knowledge [4]. The controversies and ambiguities in the source in ancient Hebrew only multiply in numerous translations into national languages made by different schools of religious thought.

 

Indeed, we all agree that from God we do not expect anything less then ultimately perfect. Therefore, to attribute such source text as we have to God is embarrassing and demeaning God.

 

That is why it is unreasonable to single out from entire Tanach the Five Books of Moses as though written directly by God (or supervised by God). We should rather admit that these Five Books (just like the other books of Tanach) were all humanly written – thus inevitably contain the so noticeable "human factors" in them. Indeed, it is a very understandable wish to have God's commandments as authenticated text directly from God (rather than through His human prophets and scribes), however we must live with what we have because there is no alternative to living by truth.     

 

Alexander Gofen

 

1. Richard Elliott Friedman, "Who wrote the Bible"

2. Maimonides, Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith   
3. Dennis Prager, "Exodus: the Rational Bible". 

4. Alexander Gofen, "Controversies in translations (and the source) of Torah"