Good morning, students. Today, we are going to examine higher criticism of the Bible. This is a topic that you should be introduced to, as it represents how modern science has approached the nature of the text in both the Old and New Testaments. Therefore, this is another one of our lessons where we see religion and science being brought near to each other. However, before we do that, I want to ensure that you understand the landscape upon which this drama is played out. In your notes, you will find a map of the ancient Near East. As Ezekiel says, the land of Palestine, or Canaan, is at the heart of the earth. This is still true today. If we look at east and west, it is somewhat like the cross-section point. Thus, it was indeed a crossroads. If you will notice, Palestine is located between the Great Sea, or the Mediterranean Sea, which is sometimes referred to as the sea of Middle Earth, and the Jordan River, which flows down from the Sea of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee is the only natural lake, the only lake in Palestine, and it flows down to the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest place on the planet where one can walk openly. It is 1,500 feet below sea level and is extremely salty, more so than the oceans. Between these bodies of water lies what is called the Land of Canaan or Palestine, although some of the Jews settled on the eastern bank of the Jordan River. You will notice that to the south lies Egypt, and the Nile River, the longest river in the world, is there. It is kind of the lifeline for that place. When you consider the book of Exodus for next week, God is going to send plagues on that nation as He is freeing His people from their captivity. One of those plagues is going to turn that long river into blood because that is the source of life for them. They viewed it as a god. And so when we consider the plagues—there are ten of them—I want you to ask, why so many? As well as the other question I want you to ask, and I will emphasize it hopefully at the end, is also, what is so significant about the divine name in the book of Exodus? Those are going to be the two questions we will lead off with next time, discussing, Lord willing. So that is Egypt. We saw that at the end of Genesis. That is where they traveled down out of the promised land. Now, to the far right is where Abraham came from. That is the land of Mesopotamia, literally in the middle of the rivers. The two rivers are the Euphrates, often called the river in the Old Testament, and then the Tigris. The city of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, is on the Tigris River, and the city of Babylon, the capital of Babylon or Babel, is on the Euphrates River. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans, which is the old name for the Babylonians. As people, kings, and armies travel back and forth and traders bring their goods, they would go through the land of Palestine, north and south, because to the east of Palestine or Canaan is desert. And so they would go up the rivers in the Fertile Crescent and then go down through Palestine to Egypt and vice versa, back to the other region. That is the playing field that we are dealing with as we talk about these cultures today. We are going to talk about all three of them: the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the Babylonians or Mesopotamians. One other thing that we need to do is also situate this in time. Your basic history tools are always a map and a timeline. You just can't get around it. With regard to the timeline, we're going to treat it in light of the promise to Abraham of land. That's a key concept. He's going to inherit or obtain this land someday. And so, they're in the land for a while, they're out of the land. That's what we saw in Genesis, right? The patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are in the land. Abraham lived around 2000 BC. But then they go out of the land to Egypt, and as God foretold to Abraham in a dream, they would be there for 400 years. Now, I want you to ponder that. I mean, there's hardly any ink given to it in the Old Testament, but 400 years, that's going back this year, in fact, to the time of the pilgrims. I mean, 400 years is a long time to be in a place. I can imagine how they might long have forgotten the land of Canaan if it hadn't been retold to them, right? or if they had not had the writings, later on, the writings that Genesis retells that story. So they're in Egypt for 400 years, eventually are enslaved because the Egyptians are afraid of a fifth column developing if they were ever invaded. The invaders would join with the oppressed class and rise up against the Egyptians. And so they mercilessly enslaved them, which prompts God to act. You'll read about that in the book of Exodus. They're in the wilderness for 40 years. It only takes a matter of weeks to get to Palestine. Obviously, Jacob's sons did it quite easily, but it's due to disobedience and rebellion that God keeps them in the wilderness between the two areas for 40 years. That's where God takes them as his people, makes a covenant with them. They become, as it were, husband and wife, by analogy, at Mount Sinai. Once they enter the land under Joshua, they remain there for about 800 years. This period includes the time of the judges, which then transitions to the time of the kings. We will discuss that transition. However, they are later forced to leave the land again because they become worse than the Canaanites. As a result, God destroys their capital city and their place of worship, and they are relegated to the land of Babylon, where Abraham had come from, for 70 years. 70 years is a long time, similar to the duration of communist rule in Russia, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Later, a remnant—not all—returns to the land under the leadership of some scribes, teachers of the law (with Ezra being very important), some priests, and governors who served under the Persians. They regain their freedom for a little while. Then, during the time of the New Testament, Rome conquers them again in AD 70 and scatters them to the nations in a large diaspora. That is the history of the Jews in a nutshell: repeatedly entering and leaving the land. Keep this timeline and map in mind as I discuss some of these topics, both today and in the coming weeks. Let's talk about higher criticism. It's an interesting name. It's somewhat ironic. It's almost as if the Enlightenment named itself. Was it truly enlightening? Well, in certain respects, with regard to nature, but not in other respects with regard to philosophy, theology, or even the arts if you consider modern times. So, the name "higher critics" is like the winner getting to name what happened. Thus, they view themselves as being on a higher plane of scientific rigor and objectivity. However, postmodernists would likely point out that there's a lot of bias. I'm not necessarily saying bias is bad, especially if your bias is first and foremost love for God and love for humanity. The two main issues you would discover in higher criticism are dating—not going out with someone, but rather determining when the books were written—and sources. What was behind the book that we see in the Bible today? Are there layers of other writings behind that book? I think Heinsohn's patients tended to think that there were two stories of Job at different times. It would be similar to that, where there was the initial story of Job the patient, and then Job every man was inserted into it at a later date. These kinds of theories are taught in almost every college or university. It is so assumed in scholarship. If you went to most any place, and I even had it in my high school back in the 1980s, we received a kind of teaching about the Bible as literature, and I think it even mentioned something similar to that then. This is so common. It's one of the reasons why I'm teaching this to you in the Western theological tradition. It's a big part of the last 200 years of that tradition, and it hasn't gone away. Critical views of the Bible, skeptical views of it, say it was written by this person, but I doubt it. I think it was written two, three, or 700 years after that person by a school of scholars or thinkers in order to prove this point and then, in revisionist history, go back and claim that individual as their authority. Do you see the kind of issues involved? So, there is a reason for that. The reason for that is there is a naturalistic skepticism towards the miraculous claims that the Bible makes, especially the claims of prophecy. The Bible is full of prophecy. It is all over the place. We just read about it in Genesis. God tells Abram, "Your people, your descendants, shall be in Egypt for 400 years, enslaved, and then shall come back to this place." A scholar would look at that and say, being very skeptical, "I doubt that that happened or that Abraham had that foreknowledge." The reason being is that it is a miraculous thing. People cannot know that. They can be good guessers. In that case, of course, the book of Genesis is written after Abraham, and so we can understand somebody could include it there in a very naturalistic way, somebody might think. But the bigger claims of prophecy in the Bible are harder to explain away. Prophecies include the naming of Cyrus, king of Persia, 150 years before the king reigns. And so, what kind of insider knowledge is that? That the very name of the conqueror of Babylon is cited in Isaiah. Well, the way that scholars, skeptical scholars, deal with that is they just say that that latter part of Isaiah was written in the time of Cyrus, or beyond, and the earlier part was written earlier. So, they just slice the book in two, and they have a deutero-Isaiah, it is called, a second Isaiah, that then would cover that part. Daniel, a book that I will have you read in a couple of weeks, is filled with prophecies down to the detail. I remember reading Gleason Archer's commentary on it. It is so precise in its forecasting that scholars basically give it tacit acknowledgment of its accuracy by saying it had to have been written after the fact. In doing so, they are saying, "Okay, we are not arguing that the book matches history. What we are arguing is that it was written before the history happened. We are saying it was written after it happened." Of course, if supernaturalism—a supernatural knowledge—is written off as impossible as we go into this, you are left with few options. The three areas of discussion where these scholars tend to camp out are in the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Gospels. The Pentateuch are the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Germans have it easier. They just call it 1st Moses, 2nd Moses, 3rd Moses, 4th Moses, 5th Moses. Das Buch des Moses, I think. You know, so the Book of Moses. And, you know, this is, that makes it really simple, but that is what they questioned: the scholars questioned whether Moses actually wrote those books. Mosaic authorship is denied for the Pentateuch. In fact, the Pentateuch is said to have been written up to or even beyond the Babylonian exile, where some of the data was even inserted into those first five books afterward. They came back to the land in, say, the 5th century BC. Well, that is 1,000 years after when Moses lived. The second area is the prophets. I just mentioned Isaiah. Daniel, they will say, is dated like 150 BC, which is 350 years after the historical Daniel would have lived in Babylon and the Persian takeover. The Gospels are another place where there is a lot of debate. And basically, it comes down to theories that they were not written by eyewitnesses. They were written by schools of churchmen who were arguing with other schools of thought over how church should be done. As they defined Christianity for what it really is and what they wanted it to be, each group or each school argued with the others. They all claimed Jesus and said that he represented their tradition and that he started it. Instead of viewing the four Gospels in harmony—a view I will present to you—they viewed them in an adversarial role as competitors for the definition of orthodoxy and what Christianity really should be. Okay, I hope you got a feel for what this is like. It is a naturalistic view of how the Bible originated. I am going to give you the documentary hypothesis, not because it is a big contender in scholarly circles today. I am told that, regardless of your background—whether you are liberal, conservative, or something else—if you are a cutting-edge Old Testament scholar, the documentary hypothesis is passé. However, given that fact, it is still around and gets taught as if it is accurate or as if it represents the scholarly view. So, I am going to talk about it because it does bring up a number of issues you have probably heard if you have ever studied these things in a public school or maybe even heard something on television or in a documentary. The documentary hypothesis began in the Enlightenment. The idea was started by Jean Astruc. I am getting all this from an article by Dwayne Garrett, as well as other things I had learned, but Garrett really summarized it well. He basically said that the names, the original names of Yahweh and Elohim, Yahweh is the proper name of God, often translated as Lord. That is something I will explain, Lord willing, next time. Elohim is just God. Where you find these different names, the idea was, the suggestion was, that there are different documents behind the text. That started the whole ball rolling. In the Old Testament, in the Pentateuch, did we have a fragmentary hypothesis? In other words, that the Pentateuch is a pile of fragments sewn together. It is a supplemental hypothesis with one main text augmented by fragments, or is it a documentary hypothesis with stand-alone documents that then a redactor, meaning an editor, incorporates together into one big text? That theory was pushed by K.H. Graf and Julius Wellhausen, became the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis in the late 1800s, and was popularized in English by S.R. Driver. Driver is a noted Hebraist, and I still use a lexicon in Hebrew that he edited, even though it is 100 years old. Within that lexicon, it has all the J, E, D, and P's that are in Driver's theory from Graf and Wellhausen. You will notice on your notes that they are written kind of top to bottom: J, E, D, P. This is the J, which is like the informal name for it, the J-E-D-P view of the Pentateuch. J stands for Jehovah or Yahweh, which is the first proper name of God. E stands for Elohim. D stands for Deuteronomist, because Deuteronomy is claimed to have been written during the time of Josiah, the king in the 600s BC. P stands for priestly, which refers to the whole book of Leviticus as well as other parts. The P is said to have been written during the time of Ezra after they returned from the land of Babylon. It was written in order to build up temple worship and loyalty to the temple upon returning to Jerusalem and worshiping there. That is the theory. Basically, the initial documents J and E are then supplemented by D, which aims to uphold the kingship in Jerusalem, the proper worship of God, and the historical background to support that. P does a similar thing after they enter the land. These documents are not historically accurate but are functional documents for their time. Some of the evidence for this theory comes from the names Jehovah and Elohim, most famously presented in the first two chapters of Genesis. Genesis 1 uses Elohim: "In the beginning, God." However, Genesis 2 introduces the name of God, the Lord God, who walked through the garden and placed man in the garden. Therefore, these two chapters are said to have come from different sources. There is repetition. For example, Abraham lies in one place, and then Abraham lies in another place, and then Isaac lies. There are likely different versions of the lying story that have been combined into one larger story. This is similar to what Herodotus might do with his histories, incorporating differing views of events. However, unlike Herodotus, who acknowledges conflicting stories, these differing accounts have simply been incorporated into one larger story without explicit acknowledgment. Contradictions exist where chapter one states that God made the animals and then made man, while chapter two states that God made man and then made the animals. Thus, the stories appear to contradict each other. In terms of style, there are noticeable differences. Chapter 14 of Genesis, for instance, exhibits a different style compared to other parts, suggesting a different author. Furthermore, the entire narrative is based on an evolutionary view of religion. As I mentioned in our discussions about evolution, there is a perspective that societies have evolved from animism, where every tree and rock has a spirit, to a pantheon of gods, then to a few gods, and finally to one God. Those who propose this view often extrapolate further, suggesting that we no longer need any god to explain our world in this scientific age. This perspective has been imposed on the Old Testament, with the implication that the initial stories originate from a pagan background. Shilin, for example, seemed to imply this in his view that there is a significant amount of paganism in the book of Job. Garrett, in his article, addresses each of these points. His discussion is helpful, and I do not wish to dwell on it excessively. However, I want to provide you with suggestions on how to approach these issues and emphasize that none of these points are conclusive. Firstly, regarding the names, Garrett argues that there is no analogy in the ancient Near East for attributing different sources to different names. He suggests that this idea is a product of the fertile imagination of Western minds. Regarding repetition, the ancient Near East loved repetition, and the documents used repetition to emphasize things. I note in the New Testament that it is interesting: Peter's coming to the house of Cornelius and what Cornelius had experienced is repeated three times in the text, showing its importance for the book of Acts. I think of Abraham's servant going to find a wife for Isaac, and I think he recounts what Abraham had said. Of course, that repetition drives home the point that later generations of Jews who received the book needed to know: do not marry Canaanites. It is not that they took that and incorporated it back into the text. It was there in the story, in the history itself, and it is highlighted through repetition. The repetition serves a purpose; it was very prized in the ancient Near East, Garrett says. Contradictions are self-refuting. If there are so many contradictions, where is the editor? You claim there is an editor who is stitching these together, incorporating these together. Where is the editor then, the redactor? Personally, it is interesting with regard to Genesis chapter 2. I remember studying my Hebrew syntax book, and a comment was made on the preterites in chapter 2. They could be pluperfects and not just perfects, indicating that God had made the animals, speaking of how he had made them prior to man. And I am sure there are other ways of explaining it too, even summary statements in chapter one that do not necessarily imply a strict chronology within each day. The style implying authorship would be very risky. If any of you are C.S. Lewis scholars, who would want to take any Lewis book and say, "This has a different style than that Lewis book. It must be different authors. It cannot just be C.S. Lewis." I believe there are some stylistic differences. I also believe there are some sources. I think Genesis 14 may come from a source that was incorporated. I will discuss the fact that there are sources. However, I think these sources were used initially when the book was published and were not like a large patchwork quilt that was created later. The evolutionary development of religion is something that should be questioned in general. More than one source has indicated to me that this is something that is actually in reverse. That is, pagans and primitive peoples have often had a monotheistic religion, and it has degenerated over time to something that is not. I am not an anthropologist, so I cannot delve deeply into this topic. I recently read about even Sigmund Freud and one of his colleagues at the University of Vienna who had taken apart one of Freud's own theories based on the typical evolutionary development and turned it on its head, much to Freud's dismay. These are some thoughts you can explore. As I said, I do not think serious scholars are still holding to the documentary hypothesis, but this is what they do hold to. Almost so many, let's put it this way, many, many Old Testament scholars today hold to a naturalistic view of the text. To affirm its divine element, its prophetic element, its inspired element is not the majority opinion. And so, when I told you that we live in a box, that box represents a hermetically sealed, lead-lined view of the universe where we must deal only with natural causation, and not even allow the possibility of a God, even if He exists, to have spoken these words, it is that assumption that needs to be questioned. The Bible speaks of a very porous box in which God not only acts but enters and speaks into. Well, to help you understand this, perhaps I can give it a different feel by approaching it from a different angle. Beyond even the question of inspiration, these theories attack the basic historicity of the text and imply that the Old Testament is not historically reliable. I want to point out something that might help lend some plausibility to my claims that it is historically accurate, even if you do not go further and say that it is inspired. Many people, and I had one student in class actually speak up and say this to the rest of the class, believe that these texts came about through a long series of oral traditions, and you just need to be aware of that. This is a common view, and certainly some cultures are very oral. I remember one missionary telling me about being in Ethiopia, where a man had said to him, "Did you hear the speech the president gave last night?" The missionary had not heard it. The man then went and recited the entire speech verbatim, about 20 minutes long. Memories can be highly developed where there are no written forms, and tribal peoples who have no writing ability often have strong memories. A friend of mine also experienced the same thing in Cameroon while growing up there. His parents would tell him long lists of things to do, and he retained them fully. His school also had a lot of that element in it, I think. Oral traditions and oral cultures exist and have existed. The question is, what was the ancient Near East like? I was fascinated to revisit some of the readings I had been given in seminary and to see what was being claimed there. On the two sides of Canaan, Mesopotamia to the east and Egypt to the west, both cultures simultaneously developed writing systems. Mesopotamia had cuneiform on clay tablets, which were about four inches long, so that is not very big. The stylus was like a sharp iron point that would then sink into the clay. Perhaps you have seen these little arrow writings, little arrows pointing this way and that way, which then developed. That is called cuneiform writing. They used logograms at first, which are somewhat like our icons. We are getting back into this in the West, where one symbol represents one word. But eventually, they reduced that to syllables, and that cut down the number. I think it down to around a few hundred that scribes had to learn, and they could work with these syllables and record all sorts of data. Myths and epics, hymns and prayers, wisdom literature, jurisprudence, annals, chronicles, and all sorts of things were written down on these tablets. In Northern Syria, they dug up a tell, that is a mound, where Ebla, the capital of a Western Semitic empire, was located. The royal archives there, which would predate, I think, Abraham, contained 15,000 tablets, with 80% of them written in Sumerian and 20% in the indigenous Eblaite language. So, we are talking about a very literate culture. Even though it was hard to write and required a lot of training to learn, there was a lot of cuneiform writing. This practice went on for a long time, I think around 2,000 years, even down to, I think, the Aramaic period. So, that is in Mesopotamia. Now, in Egypt, you do not have cuneiform; you have hieroglyphics, and you do not have clay tablets; you have paper, well, papyrus. It is a reed that they would then strip the fibers and mash them together in a woven form, or perhaps just a mashed form, and it became literally paper. We get our word "paper" from "papyrus." Just to finish off a little etymology, it was sold at Byblos, I think, and distributed from there in Phoenicia, and that is where we get "Biblion," Greek for book, and "Bible," which is all it says is book. It is the holy book. It is the unique book. And so, in Egypt then, they had those hieroglyphics, which until, I think, the Rosetta Stone was not able to be interpreted by modern man. But once it was and the code was cracked, we know that it is another written form. And they also were a written culture. And so there is a lot of Egyptian literature. And they even developed a way to write consonants, where 24 signs were representing a consonant apiece. The irony of it is, they never then bridged to an alphabet. So let me just talk about the difference between these two. You have cuneiform, which is syllables, hundreds of them representing different syllables matched together, and some logograms, icons, as it were, thrown in for good measure, like you might throw a smiley face in. And then over here in Egypt, you have the hieroglyphics, which are pictures, though some of them started morphing down to consonants, not syllables, consonants, hard sounds. But none of them became alphabets. The genius of an alphabet is that a symbol represents a sound. When you see the symbol, you say the sound. If English today had a pure alphabet, our alphabet is atrocious. There are, I think on average, seven different ways to say or write the major vowels, each of them, long vowels. You know what it is like to write and spell English. You basically have to go through a phonetics class in order to get to that point. At the end of the day, it is still just practice. That word does not look right. There is no rule for it. But if all 45 or so sounds of English were reduced to one symbol per sound, I dare say, I bet, that the same thing I see in my Greek 1 class would happen with our youngsters in America. Within three weeks, my Greek 1 students are reading Greek because the way Erasmus interpreted and the Renaissance interpreted those Greek letters, they basically made it a pure alphabet. This symbol says that sound. It is easy. It is genius. And we find then that even in the land of Canaan, a boy could write. In Judges, there is a boy that can write. You do not have to be a trained scribe. The interesting fact is that it is in the land of Canaan. It is the Canaanites who first developed the alphabet. William Albright, an American scholar in the late 60s, published a book that had the Sinai turquoise mines proto-alphabet. In these mines were Canaanites who had been captured working for the Egyptians. They started using the consonants, I guess, of the hieroglyphics for actually saying their own language sounds. And I suppose that is the way I think it worked. And if it did, I can imagine that they were maybe coding from their masters or something. But that caught on among the Canaanites. Maybe some of them were freed or escaped, and it caught on. We have pottery from before the Babylonian takeover, where the Jews were using those alphabets, that alphabet for the Hebrew language. The Phoenicians were Canaanites, and the Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenicians. I believe that the Romans got it from the Greeks, and we have it from the Romans. So, our alphabet can be traced all the way back to the Canaanites. The timing of that alphabet is in the 16th century BC, a hundred years before Moses leads the people of Israel out of Egypt. And where did Moses spend the second portion of his adult life before the 40 years in the wilderness? He spent it in the Sinai Peninsula, the very place where that alphabet first appeared historically a hundred or so years before Moses was there. To think that Moses wrote in an alphabet is historically plausible. The cultures that Moses wrote in and that surrounded the land of Canaan were literate, written cultures. They were oral to this extent: they would write down things that were important to them and then teach them, having their students memorize them so that they could be orally recited. However, they were recited from a written text. It was written first, which is the exact opposite of the way that a long oral tradition has often been conceived. We see this at the end of Deuteronomy, where God says, "Moses, I want you to write this song down. It is going to be their national anthem, and then teach it to my people so that they would memorize it, sing it, and recite it." And so, there is a lot of testimony for the interesting ways in which that writing-first, then-speaking culture, you know, kind of bears witness to itself. One of the phrases that Bruce Waltke, a noted Old Testament scholar, has said is that letters were read from written text, and one person actually said, "Your tablet, which you did send forth, I have heard." And so, the transferring of tablets, of these written clay tablets, even older written sources could be then incorporated into later written sources. The scribe who learns this text by heart escapes the enemy. The sage and the learned shall together ponder them. Father shall tell of them to son and teach them to him. I could give you some other data on that, but I think that gets the point across. Let me just wrap this up by summarizing what we are looking at with the Old Testament. First, yes, there are literary sources that are incorporated into the Old Testament text. The Pentateuch mentions the book of Jasher as one of them, as it is written in the book of Jasher. And you find other chronicles and other things have been incorporated much the same way our research papers would have long footnotes or appendices or inserted block quotations. There are literary forms in the book of the Pentateuch. Some of these forms are like, say, the covenant form is one of probably the most famous. Covenants or treaties between nations around the Mediterranean region, where Canaan was, took on a certain form. It is called the Hittite form. I am told by scholars who have done a lot of work on this that Deuteronomy is not in the form of a first millennium treaty. It is in the form of a second millennium BC treaty. In other words, its very form speaks of having come from the time of Moses, not from the time of Josiah, 700 to 800 years later. And that is strong testimony to antiquity. If we were to ask why it was written and then recited, we are given the answer both in Deuteronomy 30, 31, 32, as well as in Isaiah, the prophet in chapter 30. God did not trust His people. I want you to bear witness. I told you, you will rebel against Me. Teach them this song, Moses. I knew it ahead of time that they are not going to keep My law. Now that is going to be very important for Paul's argument that the law was not given to give life. It had a different purpose: to give the knowledge of failure. Right away at the end of Deuteronomy, God says, I know they are going to fail. I am not giving them the law of Moses, this Torah, in order that they would achieve life. And so I want you to bear witness by having them memorize this national anthem. And then in Isaiah 30, He cites the people saying, "Prophesy to us pleasant things. We want to hear good news." We do not want to hear bad news. No, Isaiah, write it down so that they cannot change it. So just like we often will say in our culture, "I want to see it in writing." God wanted His words in writing so that He could hold His people accountable. There is a strong purpose for why things are written, why the Bible, why the words of God are written words. And finally, the uniform assumption of the Old and New Testament is that Moses did write. The law is attributed to him. I think it is even said that God wrote the words. I think it says in Hosea. But the biggest witness to this is Jesus. Jesus says, "If you will not believe what Moses wrote, you will not believe Me." Something to that effect. Let me see, I will get a quote here on it. It is from John chapter five. "Do not think that I am the one who accuses you before the Father. The one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. For if you believe Moses, you will believe Me. For he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?" Jesus says that Moses wrote the book of the law. The whole book of Deuteronomy states that Moses wrote the book of the law. Therefore, Mosaic authorship, though denied by higher criticism, is something that Jesus affirms. If this is personally important to you, you must ask yourself, can you have your cake and eat it too? If this is a book by God, is it really necessary that I ascribe to these higher critical theories that are naturalistic in order to explain prophetic words? Do I have to ascribe to these naturalistic higher critical theories, or can I just say, yes, Moses wrote the law? Can I just affirm that? I hope you can see the issues. To be clear on this, I do not believe that Moses wrote every word in the book of the law. The last chapter in Deuteronomy describes his death, and I do not believe that he wrote that. The law that he wrote constitutes the bulk of Deuteronomy, and it is framed within a literary framework. I find this view acceptable and traditional in the sense that most people would affirm that Moses did not write about his own death, though he could have done so prophetically ahead of time. However, what I do not doubt, and some of these other things you could quibble about here and there, is that Moses wrote the law. Jesus said it: "Moses wrote about me." I want you to consider that. I hope this has been helpful and enjoyable. These theories, along with understanding the historical and cultural background and the amazing nature in which the alphabet arose in the very place and at the very time of Moses himself, are important. You have some portions of Exodus to read for next time. Why were there so many plagues? What about the name of God, which is "I Am" or Yahweh? I hope to begin our time next time with that discussion. Thank you.