Introduction:
Of central importance to historical Christian and Jewish rejection of Islam is the idea of biblical corruption wherein Muslims have claimed since Islam’s inception that the Bible is not completely preserved and contains problematic material. Modern scholarship has vindicated the historical claims of Islamic scholarship however a full exposition requires a complete discussion on methodology, the historical method, and theories of inspiration which goes beyond the purview of a simple article and as such today we will solely discuss 2 passages found in the first 5 books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) otherwise known as the Torah. Historically, Jews and Christians have always attributed the authorship of these books to Moses however modern scholarship unanimously rejects these claims for a multitude of reasons which will be discussed in a future article. For now, we will focus on 2 anachronisms which show that the author of at the very least this portion of these texts cannot be Moses himself or anyone close to him.
The Problem of Dan:
The first relevant passage is Genesis 14:14 which states:
When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan.
The usage of the term ‘Dan’ is anachronistic. Dan was the 5th son of Jacob and the 1st son of Bilhah, the maid given by Rachel to be Jacob’s second wife (Genesis 30:6). Later on, when the children of Israel conquered the land of Canaan in the days of Joshua, the tribe of Dan received a portion of the land as its inheritance. Dan’s territory was between the tribes of Ephraim and Judah and in the days of the judges, the Amorites forced the Danites into the hill country (Judges 1:34).
Much after Moses, the Israelites struggled again against the Philistines, but Samson, a judge from the tribe of Dan, was not able to deliver the Danites from the oppression of the Philistines forcing them to move (Judges 18:1-31), with their migration also being mentioned in Joshua 19:47-48.
The tribe of Dan conquered Laish (Judges 18:7) and burned the city (named Leshem in Joshua 19:47). Then, they rebuilt the city and called it Dan. Laish was a city at the northernmost end of the land of Canaan. Eventually, the expression “from Dan to Beer-sheba came to express the northern and the southern borders of Israel. The reference to Sidon in Judges 18:28 indicates that at the time the Danites conquered the city, Laish was a colony of Sidon.
Thus, it is clear then that the appearance of Dan in Genesis 14:14 is an anachronism, since in the days of Abraham Dan was not yet born and there was no Dan to give name to a city located in the northern part of Canaan.
Some Jews and Christians will attempt to say that Moses was writing in his perspective looking back at Abraham’s time period however the expression “as far as Dan” is still an anachronism in this case because Moses could not have written about the location of Dan since the land of Canaan had not yet been occupied by the Israelite tribes who were living in Egypt and was not called Dan until later. There seems to be no satisfying answer to this anachronism except by denying Moses penned this piece.
The Death of Moses:
Chapter 34 of Deuteronomy is often seen as being prophetically written by Moses or as being a completion by his successor Joshua. A closer look at the text reveals however that the report of Moses’s death in chapter 34 suggests a time much later than that of Moses. Specifically, verses 6 and 10 sound as though they were written a very long time after Moses died. After we read of Moses’s death and burial, verse 6 says, “No one knows his burial place to this day” with an emphasis on this. Verse 10 adds, “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses”. Additionally, the fact that his gravesite is unknown at this stage (Deut. 34:6) suggests that a lengthy time has transpired and verse 10 indicates that many prophets have come and gone. This passage would not make sense had this been written by Moses’ successor who himself would have been the only prophet at that stage. Finally, The usage of Dan in verse 1 as a geographical location is also instrumental in corroborating these points and supporting the multiple decades/century gap between Moses and the present author of the passage.
To maintain Mosaic authorship, one would need to argue that Moses wrote about his future death in the third person and past tense and that he also anticipated that his gravesite would become unknown and write about it non-prophetically. Verses 6 and 10 also make very unlikely the notion that Joshua is responsible since that would mean that within a few short years the eyewitnesses had trouble locating Moses’s burial site especially considering that as his successor he would have buried him and would have known about this. The same holds for verse 10. This statement makes little sense if only a generation or two (or three or four) has transpired. The whole gravity of verse 10 is lost unless we presume that a considerable length of time has transpired.
Conclusion:
By merely looking at 2 passages, we were able to determine that the author of the Torah as we have it today is not Moses. The Torah, much less the Bible, is replete with historical and theological issues that will be discussed in future works. Suffice it to say however that the authorship of the Torah must be heavily questioned by any sincere individual. We simply wish to ask the people of the Book why is it that their supposed chains of authentication and manuscript tradition does not reflect the issues mentioned above? If their chain to the Torah was truly authentic we would expect the data to accommodate this and yet it doesn’t. The simplest explanation is that we do not have the totality of what Moses received and penned down.
