Description: Creation Accounts Self-Conflict, Self-Contradiction of Accounts, Genesis Problems, Moses and the Pentateuch.

Our reply here will not be in the same format as most of our chapters, for there is much here that can be subsumed under broad categories to be answered.

Creation Accounts Conflict - Our subject of course buys into the old saw that the two "creation accounts" - Gen. 1:1-2:3 and Gen. 2:4 - are the work of two separate authors who ended up contradicting each other. He lists twelve items in support of this view. On this issue, and six of our subject's cites, now see our essay in here.

Internal Account Issues - Twelve objections are tendered regarding alleged internal inconsistencies within the two accounts. Two of these are "science" issues beyond our purview. Three others involve in-depth theological issues which should not be treated in single paragraphs as our subject has done, and will be ignored. Three are repeats of objections found elsewhere. Here are the remaining 4 objections:

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Our subject asks who God would need to divide the day from the night on the fourth day if it had already been done the first day. But he diabolically omits the words which indicate that the division was for the purpose of timekeeping on the earth - which is not what was at issue in the first instance.

Harping on the KJV's use of "replenish," our subject asks about humans before Adam and Eve, but he would have served himself better by looking at a modern version like the NIV which has the correct translation, "fill". (See the same Hebrew word [male'] in Gen. 6:11 to say the word was "filled" with violence.)

Our subject says, "If God ended his work on the seventh day," then He was still working on that day, and thus violated his own sabbath. Again, let's stop playing with the KJV and note the modern translation, which renders the pluperfect: "By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work."

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Our subject says, "If man has been made in God's image, it is safe to say he has been likened to God." Not exactly; our subject here is misunderstanding what it means to be God's "image"...and for that subject, we again refer the reader to The Mormon Defenders.

Genesis Problems - Nine objections are tendered. Seven are either repeats of objections found elsewhere, or else attempts to cover significant and complex topics like original sin in a single paragraph. One attempts to cite a verse in the Bible against alleged Christian perceptions, for which no authority is cited. Here is the one that remains:

It is asked: "How can something material exist without some kind of form?" The Hebrew does not have quite that connotation: It refers to something being desolate or in confusion, as in Deut. 32:10 - "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye."

1. Items incorporated after Moses' death. There is no doubt that as the Pentateuch's text was transmitted, various notations were made to update or clarify for later readers things that had become anachronisms. Falling into this category are the following verses, comprising 10 of the objections: Gen. 12:6, 13:7, 14:14, 23:2, 36:31, 40:15; Exodus 16:35, 30:13, 30:24; Deut. 2:12, 33:1, 34:5-6, 10. For related issues, see here.
2. Prophecy. This is covered by Gen. 49:10 and Lev. 18:28, two objections.
3. Miscellaneous goofs by our subject. We'll look at these one at a time below.

Our subject objects that "People are usually spoken of as great only after their death, and Moses would hardly have made a comment of this nature about himself." Both aspects of this objection involve 20th-century notions of humility that do not apply to the ANE. In the literature of that time rulers and significant people are regularly referred to in like manner during their lifetimes, even according to their own writings.

The Jewish historian Josephus, indeed, notes that Moses held a high position in Egypt prior to his departure to the wilderness. Ex. 11:3 is in line with this and stresses Moses' prominence in the land -- and that is something that even today people refer to when they are Senators or high-ranking military persons.

Our subject objects that there was no "house of the Lord" until Solomon built the Temple. The Hebrew here is bayith, which is inclusive of any dwelling place, including a tent like the Tent of Meeting. (As a counter, our subject cites 2 Samuel 7:6 - "Whereas I have not dwelt in any house since the time that I brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle." Here, however, bayith is indeed meant in its physical sense, as shown by the counter to a tent.)

This verse is the source of two objections:

1. It is objected that the use of "were" indicates a past tense time, proving that this was written after Israel left the wilderness. The word "wilderness" here, however, is midbar, meaning "desert" or "pasture". This could therefore have been written on the verge of Canaan, outside that geographical area.
2. It is objected that Exodus 31:15 already indicated that anyone working on the sabbath should be put to death, so that there was no reason to wonder about what ought to be done with the man. On the contrary, Moses had to be called to determine a) whether what the man did constituted "work", and b) how he was to be killed, neither of which was specified in Exodus. Our subject is confusing law with administration of the law. (Moreover, even when a law is clear, and an offense is obvious, we still bring people to trial before a judge! The ancients were no different than we are in this regard!)

A number of objections are tendered that certain verses referring to Moses in the third person indicate that he could not have written the Pentateuch (Ex. 24:13; Num. 1:1, 2:1; Deut. 33:1). This is simply ignorance of ancient literary practice; authors in this time (and even today!) refer to themselves thusly even outside of biographical literature. Josephus is a well-known example.

It is objected that the reference to "today" indicates a time after the Conquest, for the Israelites did not have the land as an inheritance until after that - which is incorrect: The Israelites had the land as their inheritance from the promise made to Abraham. (See more here.)

It is objected that the "gates" refers to Palestinian cities the Israelites did not have at the time, so that this must have been written later. One wonders why this cannot be conceived as looking forward to the time when the cities would be possessed (as in Gen. 22:17, "thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies"), but even so, the Hebrew here in this sense can be used to refer to any entrance (as in Gen. 28:17). (Also objected regarding Exodus 20:10.)

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It is asked how Moses could have written the former in light of the latter. Our subject fails to report the context of each verse: The latter is in reference to any king that the Israelites should happen to set over themselves (the "he" is the king!), and is a command; the former is a punishment that will be given if the Israelites persist in sin.

This verse, along with Neh. 8:1, is cited to prove that only one book, not five, is attributed to Moses. Obviously this does not disprove that four others cannot be attributed to Moses as well!

Playing with the KJV again, our subject objects that there were no "Gentiles" at this time - ignoring the fact that modern translations more properly render this word "peoples" (it carries both meanings).

Against the idea that Joshua wrote Moses' epitaph, our subject quotes this verse and claims that Joshua would not have written such a thing. There are two problems with this assertion: 1) He stops the quote at the word "wisdom"; 2) in the ANE, leaders were always considered to be the repository of Wisdom, so that there is no reason at all that Joshua, the leader of the people, could not have said this about himself - no less than Pharaohs could have said similar things about themselves.

In closing, our subject offers some vague complaints about the lack of ability to establish certainty of Mosaic authorship (versus probability), which places demands upon the Pentateuch that are never placed on other ancient documents, and repeats earlier errors re literary style of the time and the use of updated language. In short, he provides no counter to Mosaic authorship, and we challenge him to refute Glenn Miller's essay on the topic, referenced above. To close, here is one points our subject brings up in the 20th issue of his newsletter in reply to proofs for Mosaic authorship. In response to Archer's observation that "a far greater number of Egyptian names and loan words are found in the Pentateuch than any other section of Scripture. This is just what we would expect from an author who was brought up in Egypt, writing for a people who were reared in the same setting," our subject counters that "After being in Egypt for hundreds of years, the Hebrew language would undoubtedly have incorporated many Egyptian terms, and any subsequent Hebrew writer, Moses or otherwise, would have reflected that influence." This is exactly the sort of objection we would expect from a critic unschooled in the evaluation of ancient documents, offered as it is with absolutely no proof of Egyptian influence on ancient Hebrew. The presence of loanwords is a standard, objective criteria for determining an ancient document's point of origin; are we to throw it out based on our subject's unschooled counterpunches?