If you have a hard time with this, remember you can read, it's in chapter 24, Old Testament Reliability, page 241 in the Contenderously for the Faith, the Survey of Christian Apologetics, my textbook. If you ever want more copies of it, you just go to Amazon.com. I think they're $29.99, they're a little pricey. But there's a chapter on Old Testament reliability there, and it goes right along the outline. And so the documentary hypothesis, how did this get started? Well, first there was a guy named Gene Astruc in 1753. He was the first one to argue that different names of God, different divine names, to different sources. So he separated Elohim, the Word for God, and Jehovah, or Yahweh. And he said, look, you know, these guys, this, you know, They're already moving away, enlightenment, rationalism, even by 1753, they're moving away from miracles, so they're trying to find natural explanations for everything. Then they're thinking that mankind, ancient man, was so dumb, so stupid, there's a real cultural snobbery there. And so they came up with the idea that the ancient Jews were too primitive to have two names for their primary deity. They just thought, no, that's just way too advanced. Well, we now know that many ancient cultures, that even predated the Jews, had more than one name for their primary deity. But this was the line of reasoning. Now think about how stupid that is, because in many passages in the first five books of the Bible, God has called Yahweh Elohim. So he's got two different authors of that one verse. And then what brought them together? They come up with a hypothetical editor, a redactor. This is just wild, wild speculation. You wouldn't do this with any other literature, by the way. Then Bill Helm, M.L. Dweck, said Deuteronomy was written at the start of Josiah's Reformation to unify worship with the Jews in 621 B.C. So this was in 1806, and this guy actually wanted, he looks at Deuteronomy, the legal code there, and he says, wow, that's way too advanced for, you know, the 1500s, you know, going way back to the time of Moses. That's way too advanced. Therefore, it was probably written at the start of Josiah's Reformation And basically, he's got King Josiah deceiving the people into believing, oh yeah, this goes back, you know, almost a thousand years to the time of Moses, and I guess the Jews were so stupid that they bought that? Okay? That would be like somebody just writing a document today and then claiming that it goes back over a thousand years. So then Herman Hupfeld divided the Elohim document into E1 and E2, and one part later became the Priestly Code. That was 1853, almost at the time of Darwin. So now you got, okay, it's like, okay, we got portions in the first five books where God's called Elohim, you got portions where he's called Jehovah. With the Elohim, this guy said, hey, this is more than one author. Because one of the two authors is writing, you know, a priestly code, kind of like, you know, the book of Leviticus, okay? And so now you're breaking things down. You got the Elohim author, the Jehovah, author, the Deuteronomy, author, and now the Priestly Code, author. And so Abraham Kuhner gave us that order, said okay, well Jehovah's written first, the Elohim document second, Deuteronomy third, and the priestly code fourth, and that was in 1869. So, I mean, the only thing that's evolved, they're acting like, you know, the Bible evolved into this. The only thing that's evolving here is the documentary hypothesis itself. And then Julius Welthausen supported the J-E-D-P order with the evolutionary view of religion, that animism evolved into polytheism, which evolved into monolatry, which evolved into monotheism. In other words, animism, the belief that spirits animated all of life, that evolved into deifying these spirits, so it evolved into polytheism, which eventually, you just picked one of the gods and worshipped it, and that eventually evolved into monotheism. By the way, you'll often find a lot of these higher critics with German names, and it's because Germany led the way it thought, so that, you know, German higher criticism was the first to attack the traditional authorship of scriptures, and then Europe followed, okay? But when the Bible was attacked and the German leadership didn't believe in it, something had to fill that vacuum in the liberal German church. In what year? And basically what filled that vacuum was the Nazi movement and the Thule Society and the resurgence of the ancient pagan beliefs. Was this during Stalin also? What's that? During Stalin? No, this was 1878, this was getting formed around, But what that led to was, in Germany, was the seminaries were teaching the future pastors to doubt the veracity of the scriptures, the authenticity of the scriptures, and to doubt that it was actually written by God, and they were coming up with man-made solutions to how the Bible got there, and so the Nazis by the 1890s were on the rise in Germany, and that taking ancient German myths and blending it with occultism, that eventually filled the vacuum that was left by a church that had, you know, a church's leadership. That doesn't mean all the Germans were no longer Christians, But it was really hard to find pastors who really believed. It's interesting to me, because the Mennonites were in Germany at that time, and they were building farms. And Mennonites are very superstitious. They don't believe in... Their kids do not go to school after 8th grade, so they don't believe in scholarly things. So I was, that's why that's been kind of interesting to me to know that that was happening in other churches and might be one of the things that they were antagonistic about. Yeah, well it was mainly that the Lutheran Church was really strong in Germany as was the Roman Catholic Church. Now, the Nazis did tend to catch, even though there was Pope Pius of that day, signed a concordat with Hitler, basically said, you don't mess with my people, we won't mess with you, we won't preach against you. Well, Hitler did start messing with Roman Catholics. And so then the Pope sent out an ecumenical letter that the Nazi movement is a pantheistic, paganistic, occultic belief system, and that Catholics need to oppose it. Well, because the Roman Catholic Church was top-down, they actually got off to a better start in Germany, whereas So many of the Protestant German Lutheran ministers, and by the way, the Lutheran paychecks were coming in the mail from the German government. So that also gave a little bit of incentive to be okay. So what you ended up having was the swastika alongside the Bible and to move out. So now, there were many Protestant Christians who stood up against Hitler. But there was a guy, I think his name was Robert Erickson. He's still around, too. He's at PLU now. But he used to teach at Olympic College. Twice, I challenged him to a debate. And both times, he didn't even turn me down. He just laughed and looked at me. I was like, you're nobody, Fernandez. But Erickson used to tour Europe, and he speaks a lot in synagogues here in the States, and he argues that Christianity led to the Holocaust. He wrote a book published by Oxford Press, titled Theologians Under Hitler, where he brings up some German authors like Althaus, and where these guys bought into the Nazi white Aryan Jesus type of thing. And so he acts like Christianity is so dumb that it's always going to lead to the desire for a dictator. Like the way he would interpret what's going on today, he would probably say that these dumb Christians want a dictator a racist dictator to rule for them, and they're not smart enough to vote liberal or whatever. That's just the approach he would take. But in reality, what the problem was, when your church leadership stops preaching the Bible, if your people don't have biblical faith to give their life meaning, they're going to look for something else. The Theosophical Society of Helena Blavatsky, the former of the New Age Movement, when she came out of, you know, she started in Russia, but the German branch was the Fool's Society, and that's where the Nazis got their start. So this German higher criticism, which is now very popular in Europe and the United States, the Jena Seminar is based on foreign criticism. So all these attacks on the Jesus of the Bible. Whenever CNN throws together the real Jesus of history, and they do this documentary, and they interview these guys, they say, yeah, Jesus never claimed to be God, and all this other stuff. It's all based on higher criticism, and with a little bit of foreign criticism. Doesn't the Roman Catholic Church also infiltrate, or at least have a relationship with Hitler? Yeah, there's Nobody gets an A+, the Roman Catholic Church or the Protestants, but the Roman Catholic Church really did not do as bad as a lot of Protestants will try to claim. I mean, the Jews Who Survived the Holocaust gave an award, a very prestigious award, to the Pope of that day. It's kind of like they give awards to faithful Gentiles, Gentiles who risked their lives and helped, you know, and so a lot of, a lot of German Jews dropped their kids off at convents and they were given Catholic names and then nuns pretended that they were not Jewish and then they eventually smuggled them out of the country and, but then what did those kids do? They converted to Catholicism The Protestant Church, which is supposed to believe in Sola Scriptura, like Martin Luther, the Bible is the sole authority, the final authority for faith and beliefs. But instead, because they rejected it, the German leadership rejected it, the leadership, for the most part, was leading the Protestant Christians in the wrong direction. Praise God that so many millions of Protestant Christians you know, basically flipped off their leaders. In Holland, when the Nazis took over, Corrie ten Boom's dad, they got him quoted in The Hiding Place, the movie, where their pastor, their Protestant pastor, His problem wasn't higher criticism, his problem was no spying. He was afraid of the Nazis and he didn't want to smuggle out this Jewish baby. And Sikori Tamboum's dad was saying, hey, you know, we owe everything we have to one Jewish baby who grew up. He was talking about Jesus. And the pastor still was like, look, I want no part of this and this and that, blah, blah, blah. So the Temboom family had to rescue that baby and other Jews later on. But Cory was like blown away. How could a man of God, how could a pastor not want to save this Jewish baby? And the father's response was, just because a mouse can find his way into the cookie jar doesn't make him a cookie. And so he basically Christian. So, but whatever the case, the final conclusion of the documentary hypothesis was that the Jehovah document was written about, okay, if Moses wrote the first five books, it's 1450 BC, okay? Well, the documentary hypothesis says the first thing that was written was the Jehovah document in 850 BC. And then the Elohim document was written about 750 BC. So you can see right there, we're like 600-700 years later. So this is long after this guy Moses was supposed to have lived. Then Deuteronomy, the legal code. The Day Death, 621 BC. And then finally you have the priestly code with the sacrifices and probably 570 to 530 BC. Now, if you accept the traditional Jewish and Christian view, it's 1450 BC with Moses. You can see if it's much, much later that it really destroys the credibility of the Mosaic authorship and then Moses, if Moses didn't write it, then when these things were being written, Parting of the Red Sea, the Ten Plagues, these were not written by contemporaries. So this is just pretty much mythology at best, lies at worst. Yes? What were they reading when the kings got a hold of the law, the book of the law in the Old Testament, and they repented? of Josiah and that's why these guys have at Josiah's reform in 621 B.C. He doesn't see it as Josiah The people repent, they turn from their sin, but it's only because Josiah and his, the depowering leader, are lying to them. They wrote up a document and claimed, you know, they claimed Deuteronomy goes all the way back to 1450 BC with Moses, but they just wrote it themselves. And I would think you'd really have to accuse the Jews of being incredibly gullible and naive. to accept that. Oh yeah, yeah, we need to get back to our laws. Well, they weren't really in existence according to these brilliant evolutionary scholars that arrived on the scene. So, the reputation of the documentary hypothesis, we'll talk about what's wrong with the documentary hypothesis, and then we'll give positive evidence of the Pentateuch. And then after that, we'll just make a few brief comments on three other books of the Old Testament, Joshua, Isaiah, and the book of Daniel. OK, the first point in our reputation of documentary hypothesis is that 20th century scholarship repudiates this view. So if you go to a liberal college, a secular college, and they're still teaching the documentary hypothesis, that just shows you your professor hasn't kept current with his work. If he's in the know, even if he hates Jesus, he's not teaching a documentary hypothesis, okay? It's kind of like the same Sometimes the neo-Darwinists are so neo, so new, and the twist that they put, the footnotes on Darwinism, that it's not even close to anything like Darwinism. So the 20th century scholarship repudiates this view. Still, what does it do? It turns to more liberal speculation. So, in other words, nobody believes in the J-E-D-P anymore. But it's not that they're going back to Moses. Now they've added a redactor because they found so much unity. Well, maybe that unity is there because it's all written by one author. But they're saying, no, maybe there is a redactor that kind of edited it, put it all together. So now you've got a fifth guy. And then they're saying they're adding more and more authors. So instead of four, you might have seven, eight, 10, 12. So the speculation just gets wilder and wilder to try to explain nuances that should cause them to just trash the whole documentary hypothesis. So they get even more liberal speculation. They use circular reasoning. They assume what they're supposed to prove. They assume Revelation is impossible to then prove the Bible is a human book. So they're acting like, wow, look, I will disprove. You believe the Bible is God's Word? I'm going to disprove that it's God's Word. And how do they start trying to disprove it? By assuming that the Bible is not God's Word. They say, well, wait a minute. This can't be true. If this was true, the Red Sea was parted? That can't happen. Why can't it happen? Because they don't believe in miracles. So they're assuming what they're supposed to be proving. By the way, it's the same with Darwin and Evolution. He assumed God didn't create the world and we need to look for natural explanations. Or God at least didn't design life. So what was the origin of life and the origin of species? The third point there, they explain away any opposing evidence with a hypothetical editor. So there they see the unity It's like, wow, it looks like only one guy wrote this. There's tremendous unity in this. Well, there was probably an editor who pulled it all together. So it's like, wow, this is so different. It's got to be different authors. Yeah, but look at the unity throughout. OK, well, there was an editor that gave it the unity, but they have to be different authors. They teach that the Hebrews couldn't use more than one name for their God, but we now know the Babylonians, the Ugarit, the Egyptians, the Greeks, even the Muslims, 600 years after Christ, had more than one name. I don't even know what the other names may be. You might know, but I'm not sure myself, for Allah. But there's other names that they used for Allah. So now it's like, now that we have all this evidence that other ancient peoples used more than one name for God, that makes it look like, well, is this argument anti-Semitic then? Because you're acting like only the Jews weren't smart enough to use more than one name for God. Also, they assume secular history is always right when it differs with the biblical account. So whenever they see, you know, I mean like, You'll have like, I don't know if it's the Egyptians, but ancient cultures recording the reign of their kings. And they'll have some of their kings that are like reigned for 20,753 years. Well obviously these guys do not have a whole lot of respect for history and telling the truth. So why would they report something else and it differs from the biblical account of that event, why would we side with this? I mean, just look at all the different creation, flood, creation fall and flood stories, and other ancient accounts like the Gilgamesh epic, okay? I mean, in that you've got the ark is shaped like a coke bottle, and it's just going to I mean, you've got elephants dropping on Noah's head. I mean, there's no way you can survive that. Yet, with the dimensions given of the Ark in the Bible, it's the perfect dimensions for a large barge, which means the heavier you weigh it down, the harder it is to capsize it. And so the true story is in the Bible. The legendary and inaccurate recording of history is in the other books. By the way, you can claim an inaccurate historical book is accurate, and you don't have to change your life. But if you acknowledge that the Bible is accurate, you've got to change everything. And that's what they don't want to do. Then they take passages out of context to prove that the Bible has contradictions, and no matter how many solutions you propose, they just reject them. They reject evidence for much Semitic repetition in literature by the same author. It's like Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. You've got two creation accounts. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. This focuses on the creation of the universe. And this focuses on the creation of man. It doesn't mean that that it had to be two different authors, okay? And Semitic repetition was a poetic way for the Jews. They could do it in stories, give two separate accounts of the same event, or they could just, you know, repeat it in their poetry, like, the Lord is near to all who call on Him, to all who call on Him in truth. And we all know about Proverbs, It's saying the same truth, but there the same truth has come at it from opposite sides of the same coin. And so Hebrew Semitic repetition was a normal writing style. You can't use that as an excuse to say, OK, it's got to be different authors because they're saying the same thing in different words. And then they assume they have the reconstruct the text 3,000 years later and do a better job at that than people much, much closer to the events and to the writings themselves. So the documentary hypothesis really has no basis in reality. Now, we can also give some positive evidences Pentateuch, that he wrote it between 1450 and 1410 BC. The first evidence is the unity of the first five books. Now maybe somebody who holds this documentary hypothesis would say, well, I don't see the unity you're talking about. Okay, well then why did you invent your hypothetical editor? Okay, so you know it, I know it, there's unity. There's no unity there. Why aren't people going around complaining? Man, I hate competitive. Because there's no unity. It's just a bunch of stuff just thrown together. No, it's very unified. And that's why they had to invent their hypothetical editor. But the unity of the first five books would be better explained by the same author. Does not unity come with our knowledge of God? I mean, the more knowledge we get about God, the more unifying things are? Well, here what we're looking at, yeah, I would agree, and that's where we get the word university from. Because in belief in God, Christianity was thought to be, the biblical worldview, was thought to be that which unifies all the diversity of knowledge. It's one of the problems But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is, were the first five books written by different authors or were they written by one author? And the unity shows that it was probably written by one author. And then the Pentateuch other books in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, even Jesus himself. Time and time again, Moses is referred to as the author. So here you have ancient writings, ancient writers saying that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. You see that in Joshua, 1 Kings, Daniel, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Luke, Jesus says it, And then Romans 10, 10 verse 5. And so, not just the Pentateuch itself, but even outside the Pentateuch, the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and even Jesus himself calls Moses the author. Why should we doubt that? Just because some PhDs in European and American schools. You also find many eyewitness details in the Pentateuch. You know, they've got eyewitness details are recorded like of the wilderness and it's supposed to be written by guys that are in Babylon and far away lands that have never been in the proximity to the Holy Land or the wilderness. The author of the Pentateuch, whoever it is, is acquainted with Egypt, but unfamiliar with Canaan, with the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. So you've got a guy who gives eyewitness details of Egypt and the wilderness, but only talks about the Promised Land as if he's never been there. Well, that fits Moses perfectly. He was born and raised in Egypt, trained in Egypt, lived and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness, but had never been to the Promised Land. He only got to see it from the mountaintop before he died. You have a desert atmosphere and point of view. That's why, you know, one of the reasons for wiping out the enemy is so that you can't take prisoners. One of the reasons why some of the, there was a death penalty for some crimes that were so strict that why not just stick the guy in jail? Well, when you're a nomadic people and you've got 2 million people moving through the wilderness, you can't take 100,000 prisoners with you. The first time you get attacked, what are they going to do? They're going to set the prisoners free, and now you've got 100,000 warriors unleashed against you. But you'll find that throughout. I mean, why would anybody even come up with the idea of a portable temple? Unless you really were part of a nomadic people, you had to travel and all. The desert atmosphere and point of view, second millennium BC customs throughout, the customs that Abraham went through to buy a plot of land for the burial of his wife Sarah. You also have a greater percentage of Egyptian words in the first five books than the rest of the Bible combined. Okay, so it's as if whoever wrote the first five books of the Bible, he's writing in Hebrew, but he's very well You know, it's like... There's some Greek words in Daniel. Well, they turn out to be musical instruments. They're probably musical instruments that were... It's like, hey, we say piano. That's an Italian word. And, you know, it's not my fault that we didn't give it an English word. We just borrowed the Italian word. Well, you'll find more words like that, more Egyptian words like that in the first five books than the rest of the Bible put together. When you look at Moses' qualifications, he was educated, educated enough to write, and to write real well. He was probably, he was like a celebrity, he was a man of renown, so he was probably a general while in Egypt, and that probably gave him the training he needed to lead the Jews in their battles later on. But he was well educated, He had knowledge of Egypt and of the Sinai Peninsula. Moses was qualified to be the author. We don't know anybody who's more qualified to be the author of the first five books than Moses himself. So why should we deny when the Bible calls Moses the author time and time again? Then you have the different divine names used for God in different contexts. So when you're speaking about God as the creator and you're speaking about God's power, that's when you use Elohim, God's power and majesty. But when you're talking about God in reference to his covenant relationship with the Jewish people, then he's the I am who I am, Yahweh. Elohim is telling the Jewish people, I am the true Elohim, the true creator, and my personal name, Moses wanted God's personal name, it's Yahweh, I am who I am. The variation that you find in diction and style, well, first off, that's from different types of literature. I mean, when Moses is giving genealogy being recorded. Also, good authors vary the text to prevent monotony. You know, sometimes they use synonyms just so as to not bore somebody. Read Psalm 119 when you get a chance. It's all about the Word of God. And so it's called going to use a lot of different synonyms and a lot of variety, so he doesn't bore you to death just by saying, you know, the Bible is this, the Bible is that, the Bible is this, the Bible is that. That's one of the most difficult things in writing college papers, is you know what you're talking about, you know what you want to say, but you know Dr. Fernandez is going to freak out if you use the same word over and over and over again and you don't find some good synonyms. And the temptation is going to be to find some not so good synonyms. That's why a good... What's the book you would refer to if you want to find synonyms that really hit home and you want to widen your vocabulary? way I use it. But you look up the keyword and you'll get it. And by the way, when you look up the keyword, you'll find sometimes some of those synonyms are only synonyms that only have the same meaning in a totally different context than the way you're using it. So they might give you 35 really good synonyms and maybe only 4 of them are going to work for you. They only gave you four, and let's say you're writing a 30-page paper. I need like eight or nine. Don't worry, you'll get eight or nine. What you've got to do is look at those four, look at the synonyms for them, because those are putting you in the target area. But a good author is going to do that. He's going to vary the text to prevent monotony. And then many of the parallel accounts were just the poetic style of the Jews. They used repetition. The biblical evidence, by the way, shows that the Jewish faith was originally monotheistic and then the Jews later became idolatrous and polytheistic. So the biblical evidence itself says it starts out monotheism and then devolves This is, remember when we, my course that I gave on world religions, that the evolutionary theory of the origin of religion you know, they would look at it and say, well look, all the prairie cultures are either polytheistic or animistic, so that evolved into monotheism. But, the best anthropologist, the best guy studying human beings, turned out to be Catholic and Protestant missionaries, like Wilhelm Schmitt, a Catholic priest. Why? Because they actually loved the people they were studying. And by the way, missionaries and tribal peoples automatically were considered expert anthropologists and were being interviewed by anthropologists who had their degrees but didn't even know how to communicate with these tribal peoples. But people like Wilhelm Schmidt realized, you know, let's ask them, why do you worship many gods? and we're afraid of them, but originally our forefathers worshipped one Creator God, who created everything, even the lesser gods. But we forgot his name, we forgot how to worship him, so in the meantime we worshipped these lesser gods. So Wilhelm Schmitt came up with the original monotheism view, okay? And that the original religion of mankind was worship of the One Creator God, an animal sacrifice to please Him. And that later on devolved into worship of many gods. Now, does the Bible confirm that? Yes. It's Abel's sacrifice. Worship of the One True God, an animal sacrifice to appease Him. Well, even the biblical evidence shows original monotheism, with the Jewish faith being originally monotheistic, and then they later became idolatrous and worshipped many gods. Also, study of ancient religions show that primitive peoples had technical sacrificial language, so that means we don't need to take the priestly code and make it a thousand years later than it was. Also, do you realize that when they first came out with the Documentary Hypothesis, they actually believed that no writing existed in Moses' time. Well, we now know that writing existed during Moses' time, like for instance, 1500 BC, the Rashanra literature. And we now know that there were even We have evidence of writing of common people just in business transactions in ancient Egypt about 3000 BC. So, I mean, we go way, you can go more than a thousand years before him. By the way, if evolution is true, we started writing because we got smarter. We were, at one time, too dumb to write. Creationism is true. We started writing because we were getting dumb. You know, we were probably so brilliant at one time, you know, guys before the flood living to be 900 years old. It's like, well, just in case, if your teaching is too complex, that's okay, I'll just hang out with you for 50 years. And, but, more than likely, I'm going to be able to memorize whatever you're telling me. But as time goes on, recording stuff, I think right around the time of Enoch, and he starts writing stuff down, so Noah and his sons take the Book of Enoch with them on the yard. But then, they also bring with them stories that they heard from Enoch, and they start adding those traditions, some of them were accurate, but as generations went on, some were inaccurate, so today's the Book of Enoch, you know, I don't know, is it 80% accurate, 90% accurate? All I know is to their scripture. But there was writing that existed long before Moses' time. And what we're seeing is all the reasons for denying Mosaic authorship are being tossed aside. Yet these guys still proclaim some neo-form, some updated form of the documentary hypothesis. Archaeological finds confirm the Pentateuch We now know that the city of Ur actually did exist. Shechem and Bethel did exist. The Hittite legal code, the use of camels. The Hittite legal code shows a very complex legal code that even predates Deuteronomy. But also, it used to be, I think, just what, 50, 60 years ago, liberal scholars found evidence of the Hittites and said, OK, well they did exist, but they weren't as advanced as the Bible claims. And they found the Hittite legal code and evidence, and it was everything that the Bible had claimed from the start. Even the use of camels was denied. And now we found skeletons of camels. The laws of Moses is just too complicated? No. 1800 BC, you know, more than 300 years before the Law of Moses, the Code of Hammurabi was very complex, similar to the Mosaic Law in its complexity. The Book of Numbers, the Jews are numbered twice. The first generation, you know, to find, you know, that over 600,000 men of fighting age and then after the 40 years of wandering through the wilderness they have to count it again. And it's very similar to the Marietex census list of 1800 BC, the way that they divided people up and counted people in that empire. Deuteronomy, the second giving of the law there, had the same format as the the latter half of the second land, so it's a treaty between a king and his people. So God actually used the genre of his day and presented the law as the treaty between the king and his people, a covenant between them. Then we have ancient legends of creation and a worldwide flood throughout the ancient world. I think these are perversions of the true biblical account. The true biblical account is the only one that makes sense. And the Jews accepted the law as Mosaic, as coming from Moses during Josiah's reform in 621 BC. It's hard to believe any large portion had just been written. Okay? It's hard to believe that Josiah said, okay, I'm going to just pretend that this goes back to Moses, but it really doesn't, and he's going to deceive the people. In fact, I would argue that that's almost, that borders on being anti-Semitic when you argue along those lines. Okay, so basically we have evidence against the documentary hypothesis evidence for the Mosaic authorship, so there's no reason why we should doubt that Moses was the author of the first five books. Now what I want to do is look at Joshua and the Conquest of the Promised Land. By the way, if you want to go through the entire Old Testament like this, just get Gleason Archer's book. It is just outstanding the way he has dedicated his life Survey of Old Testament Introduction, Gleason Archer Jr. Now Joshua and the Conquest of the Promised Land, we now have the Amarna Tablets written from 1400 to 1350 B.C. and it contains the reports from kings in the land of Canaan the land of Canaan, the Palestine area, is reports from kings in Palestine to Egypt requesting assistance from the Haperu invaders. Now, the Haperu invaders Some scholars believe, I'm not even sure of the spelling, but the ancient word for the Hebrews is very close to spelling. And as you go from one country to another country, also the spelling changes a little. But it was, they think it traces back to Eber, a descendant of Abraham. of Abram, okay? So Abraham was a Hebrew, okay? And the problem with the Amarna tablets, some of the battles recorded in the Amarna tablets by these Haperu invaders, some of the attacks and invasions seem to be the same description given in the book of Joshua. The problem is, though, some of the Haperu invasions don't seem to correlate with things in the book of Joshua. And so a lot of liberal critics will throw it out. What you have to understand is the Jews were not the only Hebrews. Since Abraham was already a Hebrew, there were other Hebrews. And by the way, all All Hebrew means is one from across the river. Okay? So, and that means like the Euphrates River. So if you had invaders that came all the way down there and then were invading the land, nomadic peoples invading the lands approximately around the time that the Jews were as well, you're going to get stories of the battles recorded in Joshua, but you're going to get stories about other Hebrews. river, okay? And so as long as you recognize, when you look at the Amarna tablets, as long as you recognize there's more Hebrews than just the Jews, that will cause you to acknowledge the same accounts in both, and that the Amarna tablets are confirming the biblical a five or six minute break and then we'll talk about the book of Isaiah and the book of Daniel and we might be able to start