Justified True Belief

(●) The man who led a nation of slaves out of Egypt and handed them a law, and the prophet the New Testament keeps measuring Jesus against. + Ask ten people who have never opened a Bible to name a few of the Ten Commandments and most of them will manage three or four. Do not steal. Do not kill. Do not lie about your neighbor. Those sentences came into the world through one man, in a book that says he received them on a mountain in the Sinai desert, and they have been the moral floor of Western law and conscience ever since. Whatever else is disputed about Moses, that much is simply the record of what happened to his words. He is on a Christian site for a more particular reason. Almost every word Christians use for being rescued is borrowed from his story. Redemption, deliverance, passover, covenant, the blood on the doorpost, the water a people passed through on their way out of slavery: these are exodus words before they are church words, and the New Testament uses them on purpose. Matthew arranges Jesus’ teaching into five blocks and puts the great sermon on a mountain, so that a reader who knows the Torah, the first five books of the Bible and the ones that carry Moses’ own name, cannot miss the echo. Hebrews then makes the comparison explicit and says Moses was faithful in God’s house as a servant, and Christ as a son (Hebrews 3:5-6). Moses is the standard the Gospels use, and the standard they say has been surpassed. Two cautions belong with every date attached to him. The first is that not one of those years is a record of anything. They are conventions, worked backward from a single verse, and the arithmetic is worth walking through once. 1 Kings 6:1 puts the exodus 480 years before the fourth year of Solomon’s reign; Solomon’s fourth year is conventionally placed at about 966 BC; and 480 years earlier than that lands around 1446 BC. Exodus 7:7 then says Moses was eighty when he stood in front of Pharaoh, and Deuteronomy 34:7 says he died at a hundred and twenty. Add the one, subtract the other, and the result is c. 1526 to c. 1406 BC. A large body of scholarship prefers a thirteenth-century exodus instead. It leans on Exodus 1:11, where the Hebrews build a store city called Raamses, and on what the archaeology of Canaan seems to show, and it reads the 480 years as twelve symbolic generations of forty rather than as a running total. That reckoning moves every one of these dates down by roughly two centuries, which is a good reason to hold all of them loosely. The second caution is starker. No Egyptian inscription names Moses, no archive outside the Bible mentions the exodus, and the Torah itself ends by saying that nobody knows where he is buried (Deuteronomy 34:6). He is known through the books that bear his name and through the nation that says it began with him.

(●) c. 1526 BC: He was born under a royal order to drown Hebrew boys, and grew up in the household that gave it. + Exodus opens with a population problem and a king’s solution to it. The descendants of Jacob had multiplied in Egypt, a new pharaoh saw a security risk in them, and when forced labor failed to thin their numbers he ordered every Hebrew boy thrown into the Nile (Exodus 1:22). Into that year a couple from the tribe of Levi, the tribe that would later supply Israel’s priests, had a son and hid him for three months, which any parent can picture: three months of keeping a newborn quiet in a house where the wrong cry would kill him. When she could hide him no longer his mother put him in a basket of bulrushes daubed with pitch and set it among the reeds at the river’s edge. The Hebrew word for that basket is tevah, the same word Genesis uses for Noah’s ark, and the Bible uses it for nothing else. Both times it is a box that carries life through the water that is killing everything around it. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen, and what happened was that Pharaoh’s own daughter came down to bathe, took pity on the child, and, on the sister’s quick suggestion, hired the baby’s own mother as his nurse and paid her wages for it (Exodus 2:1-9). So the boy grew up in the palace of the man who had ordered his death. The name he carried is itself a small puzzle worth knowing. Exodus 2:10 explains it from the Hebrew mashah, "to draw out," because the princess drew him out of the water, but the sound of it is thoroughly Egyptian: mose, "is born," the ending in Thutmose and Ahmose and Rameses. A Hebrew child with an Egyptian name, raised Egyptian, is not the sort of detail a later legend usually invents. Stephen, summarizing the story before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council in Jerusalem, says he was "Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts 7:22).

(●) c. 1486 BC: At forty he killed an Egyptian overseer, and ran for his life into the desert. + The first adult act recorded of him is a killing. He went out to where his own people were working, saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, looked this way and that way, and struck the man down and buried him in the sand (Exodus 2:11-12). The looking around is the damning detail, and the narrator leaves it in. The next day he tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews and one of them said the sentence that ended his life in Egypt: "Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" (Exodus 2:14). The thing was known. He ran. Midian was desert country east of the Gulf of Aqaba, and he arrived there as a fugitive with no standing at all. He sat down by a well, drove off some shepherds who were bullying seven sisters trying to water their father’s flock, and was taken into the household of their father, the priest Jethro. He married one of the daughters, Zipporah, and named their first son Gershom, because, as he said, "I have been a sojourner in a foreign land" (Exodus 2:22). Stephen puts him at forty when he left Egypt and gives him forty more years in Midian before the bush (Acts 7:23, 7:30). Forty years is a long time to be nobody. The man who would one day face down a superpower spent the middle third of his life keeping another man’s sheep in a country not his own, and nothing in the text suggests he expected anything else.

(●) c. 1446 BC: A bush that burned without burning up sent him back at eighty, arguing the whole way. + He had taken the flock to the far side of the wilderness, to Horeb, the mountain the Torah also calls Sinai, and there he saw a thorn bush on fire that was not being consumed. What caught him was not the flame but the arithmetic of it: a burning bush should be gone in a minute, and this one was not. He turned aside to look, was told to take off his shoes because the ground was holy, and then was told to go back to Egypt and bring the people out (Exodus 3:1-10). What follows is one of the more human passages in Scripture. Moses raises five objections in a row, and God answers every one of them. Who am I to go? What if they ask your name? What if they do not believe me? I am not eloquent, slow of speech and slow of tongue. And finally, with nothing left to argue, send somebody else. That last one is the only place in the call story where God’s anger is kindled against him, and even then the answer is a concession rather than a refusal: his brother Aaron will do the speaking (Exodus 4:10-16). The greatest prophet in Israel spent his call trying to get out of it. He went back with his wife and sons and a staff, and Exodus 7:7 fixes the moment: "Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron eighty-three years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh." Eighty is worth pausing on. On this reckoning two thirds of his life were over before the part anyone remembers began.

(●) c. 1446 BC: Ten plagues broke Egypt, and a nation of slaves walked out in a single night. + The confrontation runs through ten disasters, and they are not random. Egypt’s gods were bound up with the Nile, the sun, the frog, the cattle, and above all with the life of Pharaoh’s own house, and the plagues walk down that list. Exodus says as much in plain words: "on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments" (Exodus 12:12). The contest is not Moses against a king. It is presented as a trial of strength between the God of a slave people and the whole religious apparatus of the strongest state on earth. The last night is the one Israel still keeps. Each household killed a lamb, put its blood on the doorframe, ate in haste with sandals on, and the marked houses were passed over, the destroyer kept outside them (Exodus 12:1-13, 23). Passover is among the oldest continuously observed festivals in the world, and its whole logic is that a substitute died so that a firstborn did not. Then came a sea, a wind blowing all night, a crossing, and the pursuing chariots lost in the returning water. The victory song in Exodus 15 is written in Hebrew old enough to sound strange to later Hebrew ears. Many scholars place the poem itself in the earliest layer of the language, which would make it among the oldest pieces of writing preserved in the Bible. A minority reads those same old forms the other way, as archaizing, meaning a later writer reaching deliberately for antique language the way a modern hymn reaches for "thee" and "thou," and on that reading the poem is much younger than the event it celebrates. One more thing has to be said, and it is not a comfortable one. No Egyptian text mentions any of this. That silence is real, though it is worth knowing that Egyptian royal inscriptions were monuments rather than newspapers: pharaohs commemorated victories and were quiet about the rest. Silence is not confirmation, and it is not refutation either, and the argument over what the archaeology of Sinai and of the Late Bronze Age, the stretch of centuries in which the exodus is placed on either dating, can and cannot show is very much alive.

(●) c. 1446 BC: At Sinai he received the law, and came down the mountain to find a golden calf. + Three months out of Egypt the people camped at a mountain, and the mountain went dark with smoke and shook. The Ten Commandments were spoken to the whole assembly, and the assembly did not enjoy it: they begged Moses to go up and listen on their behalf, because hearing God directly was more than they could stand (Exodus 20:18-19). That request is the beginning of his life’s second job. From then on he is the go-between, carrying words down and pleading upward. Forty days later he came down with two stone tablets to find the people dancing around a golden calf his own brother had made for them, six weeks after they had promised to keep the covenant, the binding agreement between God and the nation, sworn like a treaty and carrying obligations on both sides. He threw the tablets down and broke them at the foot of the mountain, ground the calf to powder, and then turned and did the thing that defines him: he went back up and offered his own life in exchange for theirs (Exodus 32:19-32). Two scenes close the chapter, and both stayed with Christian writers for centuries. He asks to see God’s glory and is put in a cleft of the rock and covered with a hand while the glory passes, being told that no one can see God’s face and live (Exodus 33:18-23). And when he finally comes down with the second set of tablets his own face is shining so alarmingly that he has to veil it (Exodus 34:29-35). The Hebrew verb behind the shining is built on the word for a horn, a ray of light being a horn of light, and Jerome’s Latin rendered it cornuta, "horned." That is why Michelangelo’s Moses in Rome sits with two small horns on his head: a translator’s choice, set in marble.

(●) c. 1445 to c. 1407 BC: The generation he rescued refused the land, and his own temper at a rock cost him it too. + Twelve scouts went into Canaan, the land they had been promised and were now close enough to look at, and came back with the same report and two opposite conclusions. The land was good; the cities were fortified and the people were big. Ten said it could not be done and the assembly voted to go back to Egypt; two, Joshua and Caleb, said it could. The verdict was that the generation which had watched Egypt broken and still would not trust would not see the land, and the nation turned back into the desert for forty years (Numbers 13-14). Those years are a catalog of complaints and revolts: no water, no meat, the wrong leader, and in Korah’s rebellion a direct challenge to whether Moses had any right to lead at all (Numbers 16). It is in the middle of this stretch that the narrator drops in one of the strangest lines in the Torah, that "the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth" (Numbers 12:3). The Hebrew word behind it, anav, carries the sense of being bowed down or afflicted as much as it carries the sense of a mild temper, and it is not the description of a man having an easy time of it. Then, near the end, his own failure. At Kadesh the people were out of water again, and God told him to speak to a rock. He struck it twice with his staff instead, and said to the people, "shall we bring water for you out of this rock?" The water came, and the sentence came with it: because he had not treated God as holy in the sight of the people, he would not bring the assembly into the land (Numbers 20:7-12). Readers have argued for two thousand years about whether the punishment fits the offense. The account neither defends it nor softens it, and it leaves the greatest figure in Israel’s history under the same disqualification as everyone else who came out of Egypt.

(●) c. 1406 BC: He saw the land from a mountain in Moab, died at a hundred and twenty, and nobody knows the grave. + Deuteronomy is his last month: three long speeches to the generation that grew up in the desert, going back over the law and the story for people who had been children when it happened. He blesses the tribes one by one, hands his office to Joshua in front of everyone, and then climbs Mount Nebo alone to look across the Jordan at a country he has spent forty years walking toward and will not enter. The book says it without ceremony: "So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD, and he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor; but no one knows the place of his burial to this day" (Deuteronomy 34:5-6). He was a hundred and twenty, and the narrator adds that his eyesight was not dim and his vigor had not left him, which makes the death read as a summons rather than a decline. The people mourned him thirty days. The unmarked grave is worth sitting with. Israel would go on to venerate places and objects: the ark, the tabernacle that was the portable tent of worship carried through the desert, in time the temple. The one man who could most easily have become a shrine was buried where no one could find him, and the book that reports it closes with the judgment that since that time no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face (Deuteronomy 34:10). That obituary was written by someone who is not Moses, which is the plainest clue the Torah gives about its own making.

What He Taught

(T1) God is one, and the name he gives for himself is not a title but a statement that he simply is. + Every god in the ancient world had a name that placed him: Ra of the sun, Baal of the storm, Chemosh of the Moabites. A name told you which department a god ran and which nation he belonged to, and knowing it was how you got his attention. So when Moses asks what to say if the Hebrews want the name of the God sending him, he is asking an entirely ordinary question, and the answer he gets is not an ordinary answer. "I AM WHO I AM" translates a Hebrew phrase, ehyeh asher ehyeh, built from the verb "to be," and it can be rendered "I will be what I will be" just as fairly. Either way it refuses to do what a name in that world was for. This God is not defined by a department, a territory, or a rival. He is the one who is, and everything else is the sort of thing that might not have been. The Greek translators of the Septuagint, the pre-Christian Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures, rendered the phrase with ho on, "the One Who Is," and Christian theology has been building on that ever since. Thomas Aquinas argued that "He Who Is" is the most proper name of God precisely because it says nothing about him except that he is (Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 11). And a demand follows from it, one the commandments make without pausing to argue for it. If there is only one God, then loyalty to him cannot be one devotion among several, so the opening commandments simply say it: no other gods, and no images. Israel’s neighbors could add a deity to the household shelf without difficulty. This one could not be added to anything.

(Q) "And God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM'; and He said, 'This is what you shall say to the sons of Israel: "I AM has sent me to you."'" + Source: Exodus 3:14 (English Standard Version). The answer at the burning bush, given to a fugitive shepherd who has just asked what he is supposed to tell people when they demand to know who sent him (T1).

(T2) The law begins with a rescue already accomplished, so obedience is gratitude rather than payment. + Read the Ten Commandments from the top and notice that the first sentence is not a command. Before a single "you shall" arrives there is a statement of fact: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The commands come after, and they come to people who have already been carried out of the country. Nobody at Sinai was keeping the law in order to get out of Egypt. They were out of Egypt, standing at a mountain in the desert, hearing what life in freedom was going to look like. The contrast with the neighbors is sharp and easy to check. The Code of Hammurabi, the great Babylonian law collection from several centuries earlier, opens with a long recital of the king’s titles and the gods who appointed him, and its prologue is an advertisement for Hammurabi. The Sinai prologue advertises nothing except what has already been done for the people being addressed. This order, rescue first and requirement second, is the shape Christian theology later described as grace before law, and Paul’s summary is that the law was a guardian, the household slave who walked a child to school, until Christ came (Galatians 3:24). It also explains a feature of the commandments that surprises modern readers: how few of them there are, and how much of the following legislation is about ordinary neighborly life. A people rescued for free is being taught how to live with each other, not sitting an entrance exam.

(Q) "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me." + Source: Exodus 20:2-3 (English Standard Version). The opening of the Ten Commandments. The statement of what God has done comes first and the command second, which is the whole point (T2).

(T3) The one God is to be loved with everything a person has, and the loving is taught at home. + A handful of Hebrew words in Deuteronomy 6:4 became the sentence Jews have recited daily since antiquity and have died saying: Shema Yisrael, "Hear, Israel." The Shema, named simply for its first word, is not a prayer that asks for anything. It is a declaration that the LORD is one, followed immediately by a command to love him with heart and soul and strength, which is a striking thing to command at all. Ancient treaties did tell a vassal, a lesser king bound by oath to a greater one, to love his overlord, and the wording here has that flavor. But a god in that world was something you feared and fed and kept on the good side of, not something you were ordered to love with everything you had. What comes next is more startling still, because it is entirely domestic. These words are to be on your heart, and you are to teach them diligently to your children, and speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road and when you lie down and when you get up (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). No priesthood is mentioned here, no temple, no festival. The handing on of the faith is given to parents in the middle of an ordinary day, at the table and on the road and at bedtime, which is where almost every believer who has ever lived actually learned what they believe. Jesus was asked which commandment was first of all and answered by quoting this one, opening line included, and then joined it to a sentence from Leviticus about the neighbor (Mark 12:29-31). He did not offer a new summary of the law. He gave the summary Moses had already provided, and told his questioner he was not far from the kingdom of God.

(Q) "Hear, Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." + Source: Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (English Standard Version). From the first of the farewell speeches in Moab, spoken to a generation born in the desert (T3).

(T4) The foreigner living among you is to be loved like a native, because you were foreigners once. + Leviticus 19 is the chapter that gives the world "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (19:18), and sixteen verses later it does something the ancient world almost never did. It extends the same command to the resident foreigner, the person living in your country who is not one of your people: love him as yourself. And it gives a reason, which law codes rarely bother to do. Because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. That reason is the memory of slavery turned into legislation, and the same argument runs all through the Torah in practical form. Do not glean your field to the edges or pick your vineyard bare; leave the corners and the fallen grapes for the poor and the foreigner, which is a welfare system built out of deliberate inefficiency (Leviticus 19:9-10). Give your servants, your animals, and the foreigner inside your gates the same sabbath rest you take yourself, and remember that you were a slave in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:14-15). Do not pervert the justice due to the fatherless, the widow, and the stranger (Deuteronomy 24:17). Those three named categories are the people in any society with nobody to speak for them. None of this makes the Torah’s social legislation modern. It regulates slavery rather than abolishing it, and its penalties are the penalties of a Bronze Age court. What it does is anchor the treatment of the powerless in something other than the goodwill of the powerful. The obligation is grounded in what God did for a people who had no rights at all, and that argument turned out to have a very long fuse.

(Q) "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God." + Source: Leviticus 19:34 (English Standard Version). The extension of the neighbor command to the resident foreigner, in the same chapter as "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (T4).

(T5) A mediator stands between God and a guilty people, and offers to be blotted out in their place. + A mediator is simply a go-between: someone who stands between two parties who cannot deal with each other directly, and speaks for each to the other. Abraham had already pleaded for Sodom, but Moses is the first person in Scripture whose whole office is to stand between God and a people, and the golden calf is where the office costs him something. He had every reason to take the offer God made him after the calf, which was to destroy the nation and start again with Moses himself as the new Abraham. Instead he went back up the mountain and argued on the people’s behalf, and when the argument ran out he offered himself: forgive them, and if not, wipe me out of the book you have written. He does not minimize what they did. He calls it a great sin in the same breath. He asks for pardon anyway, and puts his own name on the line to get it. Psalm 106 remembers him as the man who "stood in the breach before him," a picture out of siege warfare: one man standing in the breach in the wall (Psalm 106:23). Christian readers have never been able to read that chapter without looking forward. The New Testament says there is one mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5), and the difference between the two is the point. Moses offered to be blotted out and the offer was not accepted, because he had his own sin to answer for and could not carry anyone else’s. What Moses proposed on Sinai is what Christians claim actually happened at Calvary, the hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.

(Q) "But now, if You will forgive their sin, very well; but if not, please wipe me out from Your book which You have written!" + Source: Exodus 32:32 (English Standard Version). Spoken the day after the golden calf, on his second climb up the mountain. In the Hebrew the sentence breaks off after "if You will forgive their sin" and never finishes, as though he cannot bring himself to name what he is asking and simply stops. The words "very well" are supplied by the translators, printed in italics, to make the English hold together (T5).

(Q) "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen; to him you shall listen." + Source: Deuteronomy 18:15 (English Standard Version). Part of the legislation about prophets in the farewell speeches, given as the alternative to the fortune tellers and mediums of the surrounding nations. Jewish readers have taken it to describe the succession of true prophets after Moses; the Samaritans built their expectation of a coming teacher on it; and the earliest Christian preaching applied it straight to Jesus, both in Peter’s sermon at the temple and in Stephen’s defense (Acts 3:22, 7:37). It is the hinge on which everything the church made of Moses turns.

What Later Believers Made of Him

(†) The New Testament reads him as a witness who points past himself. + The Gospels do not treat Moses as a rival to be got out of the way. They treat him as the prosecution’s own witness who turns out to testify for the defense. "For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me," Jesus tells his opponents (John 5:46), and after the resurrection Luke has him beginning "with Moses and with all the Prophets" to explain to two disciples what had just happened (Luke 24:27). The scene that puts it most vividly is the Transfiguration. Moses and Elijah appear on a mountain with Jesus, and Luke says they were speaking of "His departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" (Luke 9:31). The Greek word Luke uses for departure is exodos. The lawgiver of the first exodus stands on a mountain discussing the second one, and then the voice from the cloud says of Jesus what Deuteronomy 18:15 had said of the coming prophet: listen to him. Hebrews makes the ranking explicit, and does it without insult. Moses was faithful in all God’s house, it says, and that faithfulness is granted at full value; but he was faithful as a servant in the house, and Christ as a son over it (Hebrews 3:5-6). John states the same relation in a single line Christians have quoted ever since: "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). Paul works the theme through the veil of Exodus 34, arguing that the glory on the lawgiver’s face was real and was fading, and that what replaced it does not fade (2 Corinthians 3:7-18).

(†) The exodus became the language every later deliverance was described in. + Paul, writing to a Greek church in a port city, reaches for Moses without stopping to explain himself: Christ our Passover has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7), and the fathers "all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea" (1 Corinthians 10:1-2). Within a generation of the crucifixion the two central Christian rites were already being explained by a lamb in Egypt and a crossing of water. The fathers took that and ran with it. Origen preached his way through Exodus in the third century, reading the sea crossing as baptism, and in his twenty-seventh homily on Numbers he took the forty-two camping places of the wilderness march and made them the stages of a soul’s progress toward God. Gregory of Nyssa wrote a whole book, The Life of Moses, reading the ascent of Sinai into the dark cloud as the pattern of how anyone comes to know God: the closer you get, the less you can see, and the darkness is not failure but arrival. That book is one of the founding texts of Christian mysticism, and every line of it is a reading of a man climbing a mountain. Then the story went out of the church and into the world, and it kept its shape. Enslaved Africans in the American South sang "Go Down, Moses" with the refrain "let my people go," which is Exodus 5:1 quoted almost word for word, and they were not being decorative; Harriet Tubman was called Moses by the people she led north. On the night before he was killed in Memphis, Martin Luther King ended his last speech by saying he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the promised land and might not get there with them, which is Deuteronomy 34 spoken by a man who had lived inside that book. Few ancient stories have been used so often, by so many different people, to say the same thing: that slavery is not the last word.

(†) Whether he wrote the books that carry his name is a real question, and the tradition raised it first. + The Torah never says Moses wrote all of it. It says he wrote particular things: the record of the battle with Amalek (Exodus 17:14), the words of the covenant (Exodus 24:4), the stages of the wilderness journey (Numbers 33:2), and a law he handed to the priests (Deuteronomy 31:9). Then there are the passages nobody thinks he wrote about himself, most obviously the account of his own death and burial and the note that no prophet since had arisen like him (Deuteronomy 34:5-10), and the aside that he was the humblest man on earth (Numbers 12:3), which is a strange thing to write about oneself. Jewish tradition noticed early: the Talmud discusses who wrote the last eight verses of Deuteronomy and preserves the view that Joshua wrote them (Bava Batra 14b-15a), and the medieval commentator Ibn Ezra hinted at other later touches in a famously cautious note. The modern debate is a different animal. In the nineteenth century Julius Wellhausen gathered a century of work into the documentary hypothesis, the proposal that the Torah was woven together from four sources written centuries apart, conventionally labeled J, E, D and P, with the priestly material late rather than Mosaic. For roughly a hundred years that was the settled framework. It is no longer settled. Scholars such as Rolf Rendtorff, Erhard Blum and John Van Seters took large parts of it apart, and they did it as critical scholars themselves rather than as defenders of the tradition. The field now holds a range of positions, running from complex late composition at one end to substantial Mosaic origin transmitted and edited over time at the other. Two things are worth saying plainly. First, "Moses wrote it" and "Moses stands behind it" are different claims, and Christians have held both; the careful version of the traditional position has always allowed for later editing, because Deuteronomy 34 forces it. Second, the historical questions here are genuinely open and are not closed by insisting on either answer. Nothing in the Christian claim about Jesus depends on a particular solution to the source problem, and treating that question as a loyalty test has cost the church more than the question itself ever did.

(†) The hard parts of his books are genuinely hard, and Christian readers have never agreed about them. + The Torah has hard edges, and smoothing them over does a reader no favors. - The command to destroy the Canaanites is the worst of it. Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 20:16-18 order the devotion to destruction of whole populations, an old formula meaning a people handed over to God entirely and not taken as plunder, and no amount of context makes those sentences comfortable. What the language means, what the archaeology shows, and whether any reading survives moral scrutiny are worked through in Common Objections, under Did God Command Genocide?, and they are not treated as easy there either. - The law could not do what it required. This is the New Testament’s own verdict rather than an outsider’s: what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did another way (Romans 8:3), and the sacrificial system could never make the worshippers perfect (Hebrews 10:1). Christians therefore hold that the covenant Moses delivered was meant to be temporary in exactly the respect that mattered most. - Christians have never agreed about which parts still bind. Thomas Aquinas sorted the law into moral, ceremonial and judicial, keeping the first as permanent; the Reformed traditions built a doctrine of the law’s continuing use in the Christian life; Lutheran theology framed the whole matter as law and gospel, the running distinction between what God commands and what God gives; others read the Mosaic covenant as closed at the cross. That is a genuine and unresolved disagreement inside Christendom, and it is better named than settled by assertion. - He did not enter the land. Whatever the striking of the rock amounted to, the book that praises him most is the book that records the sentence and never appeals it (Numbers 20:12; Deuteronomy 34:4). That last fact is worth turning over slowly. A national epic composed to glorify a founder does not usually disqualify him in the final chapter and bury him where nobody can build a monument. The Torah does both, and then says the man was still the greatest prophet Israel ever had.