The Bible underneath it

Who Wrote the Torah

The Church’s Bible Dictionary says a later hand wrote the account of Moses’ death, and the Book of Mormon says the plates Lehi carried around 600 BC held all five books of Moses.

The point in one sentence

The Church’s own Bible Dictionary says a later hand wrote part of the first five books, and mainstream scholars place their finished form after the Babylonian exile began, so when 1 Nephi 5:11 says Lehi’s brass plates held “the five books of Moses” about 600 BC, it matches the traditional view of who wrote those books, not what the evidence shows.

The world the five books came from

If you grew up in the Church, you met Moses early. In Primary he was the baby in the basket and the prophet at the Red Sea. You were probably taught that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Many members call them the books of Moses. Jews call the same five books the Torah, which means “law” or “teaching.” For most of the last two thousand years, Jews and Christians read the five books as the work of Moses.

The Talmud, the great collection of Jewish teaching written down in the centuries after Christ, has a passage on who wrote each book of the Bible. One line says that “Joshua wrote his own book and eight verses in the Torah, which describe the death of Moses.” Those eight verses are the end of Deuteronomy. The rabbis saw the problem in a man writing the story of his own death. Rabbi Yehuda said Joshua wrote it. Rabbi Shimon said God dictated it and Moses wrote it “with tears.” (Bava Batra 14b-15a; Menachot 30a.)

A medieval Jewish commentator, Abraham ibn Ezra, stopped at Genesis 12:6. He first suggested a plain reading, that the Canaanites had taken the land from some earlier people. Then he added: “Should this interpretation be incorrect, then there is a secret meaning to the text. Let the one who understands it remain silent.” (Ibn Ezra on Genesis 12:6, Sefaria, Strickman and Silver translation.) Medieval scholars like him began to speak, carefully, about problems like this one. Scholars after him kept noticing the same kinds of lines. Today the Torah is studied in universities the way any ancient book is studied: by reading it closely, and by comparing it with the oldest copies we have. Many believers study it the other way, as the work of Moses.

The Leningrad Codex above is a Hebrew Bible copied by hand between AD 1008 and 1011. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves near Qumran between 1946 and 1956, are far older, and among them are fragments of Genesis. They show that Genesis was being copied by hand. They do not say who first wrote it.

What the Church teaches

This is not a side question for Latter-day Saints. The Church’s Bible Dictionary, the reference section printed in the back of the Church’s edition of the King James Bible, says Moses wrote the five books, and it points to two of the Church’s own scriptures as proof.

The exhibits

First the Church’s own words, then the text of the books, then the outside voices. Every quotation is word for word from the source linked.

The verses, laid out side by side

This is the part you can check yourself, with a King James Bible in your hands. Each row is a verse. The middle column says what it says. The right column says what a single author living in the time of Moses would have to be doing for it to read that way.

What the brass plates have to hold

Here is where the question stops being only about the Bible and starts being about the Book of Mormon. Nephi says the plates his sons brought from Jerusalem “did contain the five books of Moses.” The verse does not say these were early drafts, or pieces. The Church’s own dictionary reads that verse as proof that Moses was the author of all five.

The Bible gives a small glimpse of Jerusalem in the years before Lehi left. In the eighteenth year of King Josiah, the high priest Hilkiah told the scribe Shaphan, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord,” and when the king heard it read, he “rent his clothes” (2 Kings 22:8, 11). The Bible does not say how much of the Torah that book held. Nephi says the plates held all five books, from creation on.

Now put that next to what the text and the scholars show. The books describe the death and burial of Moses, which the Church says a later hand wrote. They list Edom’s kings “before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.” A later hand on its own does not settle the question, because the Church could say that hand worked before 600 BC. What settles it is when the books reached the form we have. Mainstream scholars put that during or after the exile, which began in 586 BC. The Book of Mormon puts the finished set in Jerusalem by 600 BC. That is the traditional view of who wrote the books and when, and it is not what the evidence shows.

What is true on the other side

The believing case deserves to be stated at its best. The books do say Moses wrote. Exodus 24:4: “And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord.” Numbers 33:2: “And Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by the commandment of the Lord.” Deuteronomy 31:9: “And Moses wrote this law, and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi.” Deuteronomy 31:24 says he finished “writing the words of this law in a book.” Jews and Christians read those verses as saying he wrote all five books. None of them says he wrote Genesis, and none says he wrote the account of his own death. And no reasonable reader says Moses cannot have had help: the Church’s own dictionary says he used sources, and that scribes touched the text.

Here is each believing answer, and what it leaves standing.

The common rebuttals

“The Church already says a later hand added the end. That doesn’t make Moses not the author.”

That is true as far as it goes, and it is the right place to start. But look at what the sentence has done. Once part of the five books is allowed to come from a later hand, the claim is no longer that Moses wrote them. It is that Moses wrote most of them, and everyone agrees to stop at a line the text does not draw. Genesis 36:31 is not in Deuteronomy 34. The dictionary’s own words, “documentary sources” and “scribes and copyists,” describe a book made over time, which is what scholars mean by composite. A later hand on its own does not decide the question, because the Church could say that hand worked before 600 BC. What decides it is when the books reached the form we have. Mainstream scholars put that after the exile began, and the Book of Mormon puts the finished set in Jerusalem by 600 BC.

“The documentary hypothesis has been abandoned.”

The four-document version has been heavily revised, and this page does not rest on it. What has not been abandoned is that the Torah is built from earlier sources and took its final form late. The Church’s dictionary itself says “documentary sources.” You do not need J, E, D, and P. You need Deuteronomy 34, Genesis 36:31, and two creation stories.

“The brass plates could have held an earlier copy of the five books.”

They could have, and that is the believing answer that matters most. The strongest form of it uses Nephi’s own words. The plates are a record “from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah” (1 Nephi 5:12), so they were put together late, and they could have been updated along the way, the way the Bible Dictionary says the Bible was. Look at what that gives up. If the plates were updated to include later hands, they are no longer “the five books of Moses” as Moses wrote them, which is what 1 Nephi 5:11 and the dictionary say. The claim becomes “something like them was there.” Nephi does not say that. The Church’s dictionary does not say it either.

“Jesus said Moses wrote of him.”

He did, in John 5:46-47: “For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?” This is the strongest single verse on the believing side, and it deserves a straight answer. Speaking to a first-century Jewish audience, Jesus used the name by which they called the Torah, the way a person says “Shakespeare” for the plays. If that is how he spoke, the verse does not tell us who wrote Genesis 36:31. If he meant that Moses personally wrote every word, the books themselves show later additions, as the Church’s dictionary says. Either way, the verses on the page decide the question, not the way people talked about the book.

What this means

Here is what the Church’s own pages show. The Church teaches that Moses wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy, and it points to the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses as proof. Its own Bible Dictionary admits that Moses used earlier sources, that copyists changed the text, and that the account of his death was “surely added by a later hand.” The Talmud records one rabbi saying Joshua wrote eight verses, and another saying Moses wrote them weeping. The book tells of his burial and says no one knows the grave “unto this day.” It lists Edom’s kings “before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.” It tells the creation twice, in two orders.

The question was never whether other hands touched the five books. The Church already says they did. It is when the books reached the form we have, and mainstream scholars put that after Lehi’s day.

Mainstream scholarship places the final form of the Torah in or after the exile, after the date the Book of Mormon gives for the plates. So 1 Nephi 5:11, and the Church’s Bible Dictionary that cites it as proof, describe the five books of Moses the way tradition says they were written, not the way the evidence shows they came to be. If the books on the plates did not yet exist in the form we have, what else was taught as settled that rests on the same kind of assumption?