Who Wrote That?

Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov

Donald Ostrowski

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501750823, 9781501749704
• eBook ISBN: 9781501749711
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Who Wrote That? examines nine authorship controversies, providing an introduction to particular disputes and teaching students how to assess historical documents, archival materials, and apocryphal stories, as well as internet sources and news. Donald Ostrowski does not argue in favor of one side over another but focuses on the principles of attribution used to make each case.

While furthering the field of authorship studies, Who Wrote That? provides an essential resource for instructors at all levels in various subjects. It is ultimately about historical detective work. Using Moses, Analects, the Secret Gospel of Mark, Abelard and Heloise, the Compendium of Chronicles, Rashid al-Din, Shakespeare, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, James MacPherson, and Mikhail Sholokov, Ostrowski builds concrete examples that instructors can use to help students uncover the legitimacy of authorship and to spark the desire to turn over the hidden layers of history so necessary to the craft.

CHAPTER 1

Did Moses Write the Pentateuch?

The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as well as of the Christian Old Testament. The designation “Pentateuch” derives from Greek penta (five) plus teûchos (vessel, in the sense of a case for scrolls). These five books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. They are also collectively called the Torah. Until the late nineteenth century, the consensus view of biblical scholars was that Moses wrote these first five books of the Bible. The Church father Jerome (AD 340–427), however, suggested that Ezra the Priest wrote the Pentateuch in the fifth century BC based on notes made by Moses. Since the sixth century AD, doubts have been expressed about whether Moses was the author of all the Pentateuch. But it was only in the mid-seventeenth century that the first relatively systematic discussion of the issue appeared. By the late nineteenth century, the scholarly consensus began to turn against Moses being the author of any part of it. Yet in the Bible are references to the Pentateuch’s being “the book [sephar] of Moses” (Ezra 6:18 and Neh. 13:1) and to Moses’s knowing how to write (Exod. 17:14, 24:4, 34:27–28; Num. 33:2). It would then seem to require an explanation for the rejection of Mosaic authorship that is now the standard view in the scholarship.

Context of the Controversy

The first book, Genesis, besides describing the creation of the world, also tells the story of how a Hebrew slave, Joseph, rises to become the vizier (prime minister) of Egypt. His brothers, who had sold him into slavery in Canaan, bring their families to join him in Egypt. The second book, Exodus, picks up the story many years later when the Hebrews have become numerous (“the descendants of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly” [Ex. 1:7]). The new pharaoh perceived their numbers as a threat and enslaved them, but their numbers kept growing. So he ordered the killing of every newly born Hebrew male. A daughter of Levi gave birth to a male child and hid it for three months. When she could no longer hide it, she set it in a basket among some reeds on the shore of the Nile River. The daughter of Pharaoh found the baby and raised it as her own son. She named him Moses “because I drew him out [Hebrew: mashah] of the water” (Ex. 2:10).

When Moses had become an adult “he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people” (Ex. 2:11), so he killed the Egyptian. As a result, he had to flee Egypt and spent forty years in exile in Midian,¹ where he married Zipporah. God, hearing the complaints of the people of Israel in Egypt, appeared to Moses in a burning bush and tells him to go back to Egypt and free his people. After a number of tribulations, Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt. According to the fourth book, Numbers, there were 603,550 adult males (Num. 1:45). If we count on average 3.5 wives and children for each male, we arrive at a figure in excess of 2 million. At the time, according to demographic estimates, Egypt had a total population of no more than 3 million people. Such a mass out-migration, if both estimates are accurate, would have depleted the Egyptian population. The book of Exodus says that the Moses-led Hebrews wandered forty years in the desert of Sinai and then they reached the land of Canaan, the promised land of milk and honey, where they settled down. Moses, however, dies en route.

Into the Thicket

One discrepancy that struck scholars early on was the question of what alphabet Moses would have used to write down the text. The earliest evidence of Hebrew lettering dates to the tenth century BC as it derived from Phoenician script, which the Hebrews in Egypt would have come into contact with only after the return from slavery in Egypt to the land of Canaan. Since the book of Exodus says that Moses did not enter the promised land, it seems unlikely he would have written the text in Hebrew. It is unlikely that Moses learned to write Hebrew when he was in exile in Midian for forty years because that was again before the Hebrew alphabet was invented, as far as we know. Of course, one could also suggest that he wrote in Egyptian demotic, which he presumably knew and which would have been translated later into Hebrew. Again, we have no evidence either physical or linguistic for that hypothesis, and thus far no one has found any evidence in the text of Egyptian linguistic influence.

Finally, as Biblical scholar John H. Hayes (1934–2013) described it, the absence of “external frames of reference makes it impossible to connect any of the events depicted about Moses with the history of other cultures.”² Not even the pharaoh of the Exodus from Egypt is given a name. Nor is Moses mentioned in any contemporary source outside the Bible.

Moses: Historical Person or Mythical Figure?

Another problem is that some scholars began to question whether Moses was a historical person or a mythical figure of Hebrew folklore instead. And if he was a historical person, what can we say about him? The historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892) asserted that although Moses “very probably existed,” he “is completely buried by the legends which have grown up over him.”³ It was the Biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) who first argued that the Moses of the Bible is a later fiction of the priests who wrote the Bible.⁴ Hayes mentions that “many of the stories [associated with Moses] are legendary in character and are built on folktale motifs found in various cultures.”⁵ Even the name “Moses” has raised questions. It is doubtful that the daughter of Pharaoh would have given a foundling a name derived from Hebrew, because in the context of a Hebrew-male-killing pharaoh, giving the infant a Hebrew name would have signaled its origins. The biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman (b. 1946) compares the name Moses to the English name Drew (as in “I drew him out”).⁶ If, say, the dictator of Tyrranistan ordered all male English infants killed in his country, someone in the dictator’s family naming a foundling Drew would not have been such a wise thing to do.

The name Moses, however, does mean “child” in ancient Egyptian and can be found, for example, in the names of pharaohs—Ra-m(o)ses, where Ra represents his patron god. Friedman pointed out that seven other of the Israelites in Egypt mentioned in the Pentateuch have Egyptian names, all from the house of Levi,⁷ so it is not out of the ordinary for Hebrews in Egypt mentioned in the Pentateuch to have Egyptian names. If Moses was such an Egyptian name, then the story provided in Exodus of its having a Hebrew origin could have been to give the person who led the Hebrews out of Egypt more bona fide Hebrew credentials.

To be sure, the existence of Moses as a historical person has its defenders. The popular historian Paul Johnson, for example, mounted an energetic defense:

He [Moses] illustrates the fact, which great historians have always recognized, that mankind does not invariably progress by imperceptible steps but sometimes takes a giant leap, often under the dynamic propulsion of a solitary, outsize personality. That is why the contention of Wellhausen and his school that Moses was a later fiction and the Mosaic code a fabrication of the post-Exilic priests in the second half of the first millennium BC—a view still held by some historians today—is scepticism carried to the point of fanaticism, a vandalizing of the human record. Moses was beyond the power of the human mind to invent, and his power leaps out from the page of the Bible narrative, as it once imposed itself on a difficult and divided people, often little better than a frightened mob.⁸

Moses may have been a real person in the historical past, but Johnson’s argument is not a good one in favor of it. First, Wellhausen’s skepticism about the reliability of the Bible as a historical source for the events being described has been a legitimate way of studying the Bible since the nineteenth century. Both Johnson’s hyperbole and his attempt to denigrate approaches other than his own smacks more of fanaticism than Wellhausen’s methodical discussion does. Second, Johnson uses the argument that the human mind is incapable of inventing someone of the power of the Moses character in the Bible. Yet it would appear that the Moses of the Bible is a composite character who is presented sometimes favorably and sometimes unfavorably in the text. To argue that a character is beyond the power of the human mind to create is not a good criterion for deciding the historicity of an individual. How many fictional characters are equally if not more powerful than the evidence indicates for those who are presented as being real, historical people? Does not Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment or even Sherlock Holmes come across as more powerful personalities, more real than say Narmer or even Hammurabi about whom claims have been made that they changed history? Is the Moses of the Bible more powerful as a character than Raskolnikov or Sherlock Holmes? The only difference would seem to be that characters in novels are presented as fictional whereas Moses is presented as having existed in the real, historical past. But would a historian one thousand years from now understand that Sherlock Holmes was meant to be understood as a fictional character? Finally, Johnson seemed to be practicing a brand of exemplar historical writing here. He seems to be saying historians know that larger-than-life personalities change the course of history, and Moses was one of those. Therefore, he must have existed because history was changed. Again, Johnson’s argument can be faulted on the basis that he assumes Moses’s existence as part of his argument. In other words, his argument is circular. Besides, there are any number of comic book superheroes whose exploits have changed the course of history in fiction, but Johnson would not argue that they have to exist thereby.

For our purposes, we can assign Moses a place in the virtual past because it is easier to explain the evidence that way. If we posit that Moses was a completely mythical character, then we would have to explain why the writers of the Bible created him. If the stories are fictional, then it would seem a better way to get people to believe them would be by wrapping them around a real person, such as George Washington and the cherry tree or the Hitler diaries. From the style of it, we can conclude that the writers of the Bible were hoping people would believe their stories, no matter how fantastic the events described in them may be. Therefore, it is probable that Moses was a real, historical individual. Whether he did all the things attributed to him is altogether another matter. Even the archaeologist William G. Dever (b. 1933), who is among those who consider Moses to be “a mythical figure,”⁹ has suggested that “a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late thirteenth century B.C.”¹⁰ To be sure, the distinction between a “Moses” and a “Moses-like figure” may be a little too fine for some people who would prefer to merge the two. In any case, it brings us back to Renan’s position of over 130 years ago.

Another reason scholars are dubious of a Mosaic authorship is there is so much evidence in the text that is difficult to explain if we assume Moses (or a Moses-like figure) is the author or even that there is a single author. The historian J. Kenneth Kuntz (b. 1934) has categorized this evidence into five types:

(1) duplication of narrative accounts;

(2) internal contradictions;

(3) anachronisms and other problems of chronology;

(4) presence of diverse literary styles;...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• 1. Did Moses Write the Pentateuch?
• 2. Who Wrote the Analects?
• 3. Who Wrote the Secret Gospel of Mark?
• 4. Did Abelard and Heloise Write the Letters Attributed to Them?
• 5. Who Wrote the Compendium of Chronicles (Jami al-Tawarik) and the Collection of Letters Attributed to Rashid al-Din?
• 6. Who Wrote Shakespeare?
• 7. Who Wrote the Works Attributed to Prince Andrei Kurbskii?
• 8. How Inauthentic Was James Macpherson’s “Translation” of Ossian?
• 9. Did Mikhail Sholokhov Write The Quiet Don?
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index