Bible: Exodus

About the Author

Traditionally, the first five books of the Old Testament are presumed to have been written by Moses, and both Judaism and Christianity have preserved that tradition for centuries. This belief in Mosaic authorship was inferred from a passage in the fifth book of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy 31: 24–26, where Moses is depicted as “writing in a book the words of this law [Torah in Hebrew] from beginning to end” and preserving this “book” of laws within the tabernacle. Interpreted literally, this statement would seem to confirm the notion that Moses was the sole author of all five books. However, since the late nineteenth century, biblical scholars have noted the presence of multiple and even divergent accounts of events, place names, and personalities within the biblical text that cannot easily be explained if one assumes that the sole author of the Pentateuch was none other than Moses.

The alternative to this traditional view, referred to as “source theory” or the “documentary hypothesis,” assumes that the Pentateuch is a composite text, put together from what may have been four different literary sources sometime after the Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE. The process by which these disparate sources were brought together is called “redaction,” and evidence of a redacted narrative can be found throughout the book of Exodus. For example, two versions of how the divine name is to be understood are revealed to Moses in chapter 3. First, the voice of God that speaks to Moses out of the Burning Bush is identified as the voice of Elohim, commonly translated into English as “God.” Later in that same chapter, however, the deity is referred to as YHWH, often rendered as “Lord” in English, and we are told that this name is the name by which the Israelite God is to be known for all eternity. A similar variation of names can be found in Exodus with respect to the sacred mountain that Moses ascends in chapter 19. When we first come upon a reference to this place it is called Horeb (Ex. 3:1), but by the time we next encounter this same mountain it is called Sinai (Ex. 19:11). Numerous examples of such variability and duplication of names and references can be found in Exodus and, indeed, throughout the Pentateuch as a whole.

The conclusion that most biblical scholars have long since reached, therefore, is that the Pentateuch evolved over a period of centuries into the redacted form of the text we know today and that the unknown authors of the book of Exodus have carefully pieced together a seemingly seamless narrative of the Israelites’ epic journey from slavery to liberation to divine revelation as an instructive and imaginatively reconstructed account of their history as they wished to remember it.