Did Moses really write the first few books of the bible?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

It's always been a popular belief that Moses wrote, if I remember correctly, the first five books of the bible. But a documentary I watched at Larned said that the Jews didn't even begin writing the bible until after their exile by Babylon, so how could Moses have written the first five books if the bible didn't even start until years later when Babylon fucked their shit up? Or did they mean that was when the books, already written, were included in a single structure called the bible?

Indeed.

 The Jews calculate the Exodus as happening during the reign of Ramses The Great (1303-1213 bce)   The Torah known today was actually written during the Babylonian exile, ca 539 bce.

Minor points; Egypt was not a slave-dependent society although it had slaves. Many were prisoners of war and were eventually release.
 
The Torah says half a million men left Egypt to begin the Exodus. Add women and children and that comes to about 2 million.
At that time, the world population was about 40 million. The total population of Egypt was perhaps 2 million. 

It took Moses 40 years to lead his people to Canaan, where they exterminated the inhabitants. At that time Canaan was a client state of Egypt.  Taking the longest route, Canaan is around 8000km from Egypt. 40 years?

Recent archaeology has established that the Exodus almost certainly did not happen. Moses probably never existed..


My reference :

"The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, a book published in 2001, discusses the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible. The authors are Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine."


The Bible Unearthed - Wikipedia

[brewer]

He used a ghost writer.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Assuming that Moze was a real person, and further assuming that he was literate enough to write, and still further assuming that he is responsible for writing the Torah, he could not possibly have written the last chapter of Deuteronomy, since it describes his death, burial and eulogy. Since we know there’s bits of it he couldn’t possibly have written, it’s a stretch to assume he wrote any of it.

Also, the Torah parts concerning Moze are all written in the third person. If he wrote it himself, why?

Boru

The combination of megalomania and narcissism?  A desire to portray how he would like himself to be seen as an objective authoritative fact rather than a mere claim?   That an hagiographic account of a person known to be very full of himself is written in the third person is certainly no strong evidence that he didn’t write it himself.   Caesar for example wrote of himself consistently in the third person in the Commentarii de Bello Gullico.

And yet Paul was a megalomaniac narcissist of the first water and wrote his Epistles in the first person.

Boru

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

The combination of megalomania and narcissism?  A desire to portray how he would like himself to be seen as an objective authoritative fact rather than a mere claim?   That an hagiographic account of a person known to be very full of himself is written in the third person is certainly no strong evidence that he didn’t write it himself.   Caesar for example wrote of himself consistently in the third person in the Commentarii de Bello Gullico.

And yet Paul was a megalomaniac narcissist of the first water and wrote his Epistles in the first person.

Boru

Yeah, after having hallucinations.

That god spoke to Saul on the road to Damascus is a basic tenet of Christianity.   Dude falls off his horse and later announces that god has spoken directly to him. Instead of at least making him go and lie down for a bit, that claim is tacitly accepted from then, to this day.
Were there no 'heretics' who seriously questioned*** Saul's claims?

Along with Joan D'Arc I've long thought Paul was suffering from a mental illness such as schizophrenia or epilepsy.  As far as I can tell, the bunch of not-very-bright-illiterates who believed that shit were about as gullible as  the more extreme literalists today. EG Ray Comfort, Ken Ham, Little Kirky Cameron and those who hang on their every word. .   


***Eg "The bloke is unwell. Someone fetch him a damp cloth for his forehead"  Same goes for a lot of stuff claimed of Jesus. One of my favourites is the woman taken in adultery. Jesus forgives her, using the earliest example of a Tu Quoque fallacy I've come across. In reality, the woman had been judged after breaking the law of Moses.. The penalty was death. Had Jesus interfered  and had the gall to forgive her, he would have almost certainly joined her to be stoned, for blasphemy. It's that event, with others, which has led me to think that those who wrote the gospels were so ignorant of Jewish custom and law that they were probably not Jewish.

[Angrboda]

What do you want to bet that Paul wasn't circumcised?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

What do you want to bet that Paul wasn't circumcised?

Nothing. I'll give you 10:1 that he was.   Paul was born into a devout Jewish family. He was brought up by Gamaliel, a leading authority in the Sanhedrin. Most unlikely that he would not have been circumcised at 8 days, according to custom and law.  (Circumcision is seen as ratifying God's covenant with Abraham to make the Jews his chosen people)

Trivia; at the time I was born, hospitals in Australia routinely circumcised baby boys.  My mother told me that a few days after I was born, the nurse announced  "We  are going to circumcise baby today".   Mercifully, I don't remember.

Today the US has more non religious based male circumcisions than any other country on earth.  Over the years I've tried to find medical justification for circumcisions. The closest I've come across is that male circumcision might  be a good idea in a dry, sandy environment with poor static hygiene. I think male circumcision is barbaric. Female circumcision is terribly cruel and utterly indefensible imo.

[popeyespappy]

Absofuckinglutely not.

[Jehanne]

And yet Paul was a megalomaniac narcissist of the first water and wrote his Epistles in the first person.

Boru

Yeah, after having hallucinations.

That god spoke to Saul on the road to Damascus is a basic tenet of Christianity.   Dude falls off his horse and later announces that god has spoken directly to him. Instead of at least making him go and lie down for a bit, that claim is tacitly accepted from then, to this day.
Were there no 'heretics' who seriously questioned*** Saul's claims?

Along with Joan D'Arc I've long thought Paul was suffering from a mental illness such as schizophrenia or epilepsy.  As far as I can tell, the bunch of not-very-bright-illiterates who believed that shit were about as gullible as  the more extreme literalists today. EG Ray Comfort, Ken Ham, Little Kirky Cameron and those who hang on their every word. .

I wonder if some of the hallucinations could not have been due to having ate the wrong type of wild mushrooms?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Absofuckinglutely not.

 Just so. Apart from the fact that the Torah was written about 700 years after Moses is claimed to have lived (during the reign of Ramses The Great, 1303-1213 bce)

 The best argument against Moses writing well, anything, is perhaps that recent archaeology has shown the  Exodus almost certainly never happened and consequently, Moses almost  certainly did not exist.

[Silver]

The irony of referring to obvious works of fiction as historical is lost on theists.