The Deeds Of Men

Hi Glen,

Sorry I didn't get to this earlier; my daughter's 18th birthday was yesterday. Nuff said!

OK, the traditional way of looking at the first five books of the Old Testament (The Torah, or The Law) is attributing them all to Moses. The last four books present no problem with this, but how Moses knew about the Genesis material ended up being postulated as by revelation or oral tradition. While there is no doubt all these books are considered "of Moses", people have had trouble a long time with Genesis. It has different writing styles, different names for God, etc.

Thus, around the turn of the last century (1800's to 1900's), something called "higher criticism" presented the idea that Genesis had been written much later than supposed, and by four different authors or groups of authors.

Although a number of theistic evolutionists still cling to this idea, it has been rather thoroughly debunked by Bible scholars.

In the 1930's, an archaeologist and Bible scholar named Wiseman made a discovery which may be the key the the whole thing. The result of his work and work that followed up on it has yielded something called The Tablet Hypothesis. This is the conclusion I personally agree with. In brief, it postulates that Genesis was written by a series of eyewitnesses who actually signed their names to the documents they were responsible for in the same way the most ancient Middle Eastern tablets indicate was done then (and hasn't been done since). Moses, as a Prince in Egypt and also an Israelite would have been in a unique position to have access to these tablets, which may have been stored in the royal archives by Joseph when he became powerful in Egypt. I have an entire Word file if you would like me to email it to you, which includes essays by two recognized professors of Bible and begins with a letter I wrote to an inquirer some time ago explaining what it is. In the meantime, Curt Sewell (who, by the way, worked on the Manhattan Project in WWII and ended up not long ago writing a remarkable book about his conversion to Christianity called God at Ground Zero) has put up a very good essay on this on the net here: http://ldolphin.org/tablethy.html

Hope that helps. Now, on to last night's Bible study!