Did Moses receive Genesis directly from God on Sinai?

[Calminian]

The is from a discussion on another thread but I thought it would make a good topic of its own. I thought responding to this below would be a good place to start and get the ball rolling, though I'm sure this will go in many directions.

BTW, Adam wasn't there to witness the six days of creation so it must be assumed that he got that information from God. Why would it then be considered that Moses wouldn't have gotten that same information from God himself. Up to the days of Moses we have no Scriptural evidence that the things of God were written down and from what I glean from Moses' dealings with the Hebrews, by the time of his arrival to lead the people out of Egypt, and even into the days they wandered in the desert, they don't seem to have had a very clear understanding or faith in their leader, God. This encourages me to believe that while there may have been some handed down historical accounts, there certainly wasn't as complete an account as what Moses wrote of the days preceding his life....

Ted, you may be interested to know that Adam's name doesn't appear at the end the the creation account. You rightly point out that he would not have been there to witness these events, and interestedly the first toledoth of Genesis appears with no name attached to it. It's simply concluded with,

Gen. 2:4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.​

I don't know if Adam was given the creation account via dictation, but if he was he didn't include it in his own account. Wiseman believed that God himself wrote the creation account, which is plausible considering He engraved tablets on Sinai. If someone was given this account via diction, they opted not to sign it as they did all the other toledoth. I suppose it could have been given to Adam, maybe even Enoch, or any early man. But no one claims it with their toledoth signature.

Now, Adam's tablet (per the tablet theory), is said to span from Gen. 2:4b-5:1a. It ends like this, literally,

This [is] the book, of the account, of Adam. (Gen. 51a)​

Now in those events from 2:4b-51a, Adam was there for just about everything. He would have been a contemporary record keeper. The only part he couldn't have witnessed or consulted a human witness was his own creation from dirt. But we know Adam once walked and talked with God, so that brief bit of his history most certainly would have been told to him. Everything else he was contemporary to, even the genealogies of Cain, (considering he lived 935 years). He either would have witnessed the accounts directly, or had access to someone who did, or perhaps attained access to other written toledoth during that time.

Now I suppose you could argue that God could have just as easily dictated the lost history of Adam's generation to Moses, after the flood. But if He did do that there's some peculiar things to consider within the text. First, why would the phrase, "this is the book of the toledoth of Adam" appear in the text? Why would a book within the book of Genesis be mentioned, if this was all just dictation from God.

But even more interesting are the tenses found in Adam's account. Look at this phrase for instance,

Gen. 2:10 A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrate​

If God gave this to Moses after the flood, why did He express that gold is presently in Havilah? Other things in this account are expressed in the perfect, expressing past tense, but whoever the original author was, he expressed Havilah has having gold presently, at the time the account was written.

Now certainly you don't believe that the Hivilah which was watered by the Pishon river was still around in Moses time after the flood. Yet according to the author of this particular account, it was still there, and still rich in gold, and other precious elements. Now if the author was Adam (an antediluvian) this makes perfect sense. He died before the flood, and would have spoken of these lands in their current state when he wrote the account. Conversely, if this was dictation from God to Moses, you'd think He would have spoken of this land and these rivers in the past tense, for they were part of the antediluvian world, and didn't exist anymore.

Now I'm thinking you may have some good explanations for these textual problems, but those are the kind of scriptural evidences and lead me to believe in older accounts that predated Moses and were merely compiled and edited by him under divine inspiration. And heck, the revelation on what to include and not to included may indeed have taken place on Sinai. But he must have used older pre-flood writings.

 

[ChetSinger]

Now I'm thinking you have some good explanations for that, but those are the kind of scriptural evidences and lead me to believe that the accounts in Genesis predated Moses and were merely compiled and edited by him.

I'm a believer in the existence of past records. In the Song of Moses, he sang that the Israelite elders maintained a historical record that he considered reliable, going back at least as far as the division at Babel:

Remember the days of old;
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you,
your elders, and they will tell you.

When the Most High agave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.

 

[miamited]

Hi Cal,

You posted: But even more interesting are the tenses found in Adam's account. Look at this phrase for instance,

Gen. 2:10 A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrate.

The tenses would all be however God relayed the account to Moses. God could well have spoken to him and said, "Moses, in the days that I am telling you about a river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there). The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the enter land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrate.

Now the tenses to describe the gold and the rivers would be correct if those things did still exist in the day that God gave unto Moses what he was to write. However, I don't really allow that the tenses would necessarily be a wise way to determine the time of authorship. I'm not sure that in ancient languages tenses were necessarily used as we understand them today. I believe that much of what we decipher and translate from really ancient languages today, we tend to add tenses based on our understanding of the context of what is being written about.

One of the secondary issues that I have with previous written accounts is where they came from. There is no record that Noah carried any written records with him on the ark. So, any written record predating the flood would have been lost under several feet of sediment. If Noah didn't take all these records with him on the ark, then how were they found? Of course, I'm not an accomplished archeologist and so maybe I just don't understand what billions of tons of water rushing over all the earth flooding even the highest peak to at least 20 feet would have done to stone tablets that may have been written before the flood.

Second, we don't find God giving any command to write things down until Moses. There is no indication that God told Abraham to write things down. Now, maybe Abraham was some sort of prolific record keeper, I don't know, but when I die, even with all the writing media available to me today, I don't think anyone will ever find that I ever wrote much about my family history or really even much of the things that I did while alive.

So, yes, I have read and understand the basic premise of the tablet 'theory' (and please understand that just like the evolutionary accounts it is called a theory for a reason) there isn't really any hard verifiable evidence to fully support it. I've also read those who lay claim to the authorship of the book of Genesis by several different authors, but I also understand that this is based on our modern day understanding of how folks speak and communicate. One of the reasons I don't use the KJ translation is because people don't speak like they did in the days of the good old king James. Often times verb usage and placement within a sentence structure is much different than what we have today and that was only 400 years ago. How do you imagine to know how people spoke and how they understood the use of tenses 5,000 years ago? Let me ask you, if I may, what do you think Moses was doing for 40 days with God?

You asked: If God gave this to Moses after the flood, why did He express that gold is presently in Havilah?

Quite possibly the gold was still there in Moses day. After all, they didn't have heavy equipment and machinery as we do today to mine gold and the gold in Havilah may even still today be good aromatic resin.

God bless you.
In Christ, Ted
​

 

[Calminian]

...Now the tenses to describe the gold and the rivers would be correct if those things did still exist in the day that God gave unto Moses what he was to write.

Yeah, I suppose if Havilah somehow survived the Flood and was still being watered by the Pishon. But I would dismiss that possibility considering Noah’s flood was global, and destroyed the whole land.

However, I don't really allow that the tenses would necessarily be a wise way to determine the time of authorship. I'm not sure that in ancient languages tenses were necessarily used as we understand them today. I believe that much of what we decipher and translate from really ancient languages today, we tend to add tenses based on our understanding of the context of what is being written about.

And it is true that the hebrew verb system is a bit different than the english one, and renders things as past tense very differently. This is something I’m currently looking into and working through. I’m going to hold off for a bit in commenting on this to do some more research.

One of the secondary issues that I have with previous written accounts is where they came from. There is no record that Noah carried any written records with him on the ark. So, any written record predating the flood would have been lost under several feet of sediment.

And I would agree. If Noah did not take Adam’s book of histories on the Ark, then it would be gone and never found. But if it was taken on the ark, problem solved. These records would have been passed down, and added to accordingly. As Shem lived his very long life, he would have seen things and recored them over the course of his life. And if not him, someone else. But his life overlapped both Abraham's and Isaac's so the plausibilities abound as to how they could have reached Moses.

Second, we don't find God giving any command to write things down until Moses.

It’s a good question, and I think the answer is found in the nature of the type of things God commands men to write down. For you and I would both agree that writing in general existed prior to Moses giving the law. Job for instance contains no such commandment to anyone to write down its contents, and it predated Moses.

But in the case of Moses, something different is going on here, as he is being commanded to write down the law for Israel, and specific instructions for Israel to follow concerning the law and construction of the tabernacle. But there are other writings by Moses that aren’t attached to that command, such as the historical narratives of his life that followed after Sinai. Nowhere do we see a command to Moses to write down his own personal history going forward, yet he most certainly did do that. Thus there’s no reason we should expect to see any command like this extended to Adam or Noah or Job for that matter, if they indeed recored history.

From what I can see, commandments to write things down aren’t attached specifically to historical narratives. Take other historical narratives, such as the gospels and Acts, and you don’t see God commanding Matthew or Luke or John to write specific histories.

Now you do have instances, like in Revelation where John is told to write down a vision of the future, but that’s different, as something from the future would have to come from God. But there are numerous histories in the Bible with no indication of God commanding a prophet to record a historical event.

With that in mind, Genesis, by in large, is a historical narrative. Laws likely existed before the Flood and before Moses, but Genesis does not record the details. There would seem no precedent to expect a recorded commandment from God to write it.

So, yes, I have read and understand the basic premise of the tablet 'theory' (and please understand that just like the evolutionary accounts it is called a theory for a reason) there isn't really any hard verifiable evidence to fully support it. I've also read those who lay claim to the authorship of the book of Genesis by several different authors, but I also understand that this is based on our modern day understanding of how folks speak and communicate. One of the reasons I don't use the KJ translation is because people don't speak like they did in the days of the good old king James. Often times verb usage and placement within a sentence structure is much different than what we have today and that was only 400 years ago. How do you imagine to know how people spoke and how they understood the use of tenses 5,000 years ago? Let me ask you, if I may, what do you think Moses was doing for 40 days with God?[/COLOR]

Well I would just correct you slightly on this point, in fact this is the very thing that lends credibility to the theory. The theory is born out of the fact that the ancients structured their accounts differently than we do today. The idea of colophons instead of titles never really dawned on anyone until Wiseman brought it to the forefront. Thus, prior to this, everyone was reading Genesis in light of modern writing concepts, not the ancient ones found in ancient tablets. I think ancient tablets actually offer some very good textual evidence for the tablet theory. No, we don’t actually have Adam’s, or Noah’s tablets and so we don’t have direct archeological evidence. But we do have textual evidence based on archeology of the antiquity of the structure of Genesis. That’s more than JEDP theorists have, and that’s more than the Sinai dictation theory has.

Quite possibly the gold was still there in Moses day. After all, they didn't have heavy equipment and machinery as we do today to mine gold and the gold in Havilah may even still today be good aromatic resin.

As stated before, this I can’t except. Antediluvian Havilah is gone, and was gone in Moses day. We'll have to agree to disagree on that.

 

[miamited]

Hi Cal,

You wrote: Yeah, I suppose if Havilah somehow survived the Flood and was still being watered by the Pishon. But I would dismiss that possibility considering Noah’s flood was global, and destroyed the whole land.

Wait a minute, the flood did not destroy the land. The earth still existed after the flood. The Euphrates river is still there today. When an area of land is given a name it is merely referring to some unseen geographic boundary lines. There's no reason to think that the land area referred to as Havila was suddenly gone because of the flood. Did it change in topography? Probably. But gold is generally in the ground and so it would have still been there but possibly under another few feet of sediment after the flood. That's really quite a non-sensical argument to me.

Then you wrote: And it is true that the hebrew verb system is a bit different than the english one, and renders things as past tense very differently. This is something I’m currently looking into and working through. I’m going to hold off for a bit in commenting on this to do some more research.

I would commend you in that.

You wrote: But if it was taken on the ark, problem solved.

That's a mighty big assumptive 'if' and I'll look forward to whatever evidence you have that might prove your 'if' true. As far as we have evidence, however, the only thing we might be sure of is that all Noah and his Son's families had to begin teaching his children's children anything of the past events before the flood would be their recollections of things they may have experienced themselves and the accounts that they were told. I don't find any evidence that would prove that any of the eight that survived the flood were necessarily keepers of written records. Writing in those days was not an easy task and certainly immediately after the flood they would have had to devise new medium with which to write first before they were ever able to write anything down. It isn't like they could have just wandered into the nearest Kmart and picked up a sheaf of paper and a handful of pens or pencils. From every indication that we have in the Scriptures, God never asked, and there is very little evidence of, written records being kept by any of the people that He worked with before Moses' day. Then once we come to Moses we find God repeatedly telling the Israelites to write things down. Seems to me that if a written record were expected to be kept God might have encouraged it as much before Moses as He did after Moses.

I'm sorry, and I'm sure you may disagree, but there is, as far as I am aware, any hard evidence that these tablets or any other written record before the flood survived the flood. That's one of the big reasons that we don't find the book of Enoch in the Scriptures. No one can be certain that it survived the flood. Jude tells us that Enoch prophesied, but it cannot be settled as to whether there was a written record of his prophecies or that it was just hearsay evidence that had been passed down from the days of Noah. Further, since we know that the Scriptures and the things that people wrote in them were all guided and authored by the Holy Spirit, Jude may have gotten that information from that source just as Daniel got the information of the Messianic prophecies from the Holy Spirit and the angel that visited him. We just really can't be sure where the book that is identified by his name came from and for Jude to say that he prophesied is no guarantee that any of it was written down. God has, throughout the Scriptures, revealed things to men that they would have had no earthly way of knowing of their own wisdom.

Then you responded: It’s a good question, and I think the answer is found in the nature of the type of things God commands men to write down. For you and I would both agree that writing in general existed prior to Moses giving the law. Job for instance contains no such commandment to anyone to write down its contents, and it predated Moses.

There are some other questions to be answered as regards the writing of the book of Job. First being when it was actually written. Many scholars have put their minds to this task and from what I've gathered, most seem to agree that it was written in the times of the Patriarchs. The most compelling evidence being that it lists names of people and cities named after descendants of Abraham. That may well be several hundred years after the flood. Yes, certainly by then writing had been practiced. We know, for instance, that Egypt had a written language in the days that the 12 sons of Israel sojourned there and it would certainly be expected that that system had been in place for a while before they got there. But we are talking of several hundred years. A lot can happen in a few hundred years.

However, it is agreed by many that Job is the oldest of the written Scriptures. But just because people could write, doesn't mean that anything of the Scriptures, other than Job, came from such written records. My argument certainly doesn't rest on any foundation that people didn't or couldn't write, but just merely supports itself on what evidences we actually find in the Scriptures that such writing as to the beginning of all things and the things that Moses wrote about in the book of Genesis came from any such sources. My argument rests on what the Scriptures do say about their source. Paul agrees, as I do, that the Jews were raised up by God for the very purpose of writing down the Scriptures and that they are a product of the Holy Spirit working through godly men.

Your claim is that some of Moses' source material may have been from previously written records or at least by word of mouth accounts carried from generation to generation. Mine is that when God called Abraham He began working out through His descendants a plan and that that plans initial purpose was to have those descendants begin to write the Scriptures from the source of God's Holy Spirit. I do agree that we will have to agree to disagree on this matter and that's perfectly OK with me. As I stated previously, I find myself at odds with a lot of folks.

God bless you.
In Christ, Ted

 

[Calminian]

....Wait a minute, the flood did not destroy the land.

Gen. 6:13 And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth.​

Earth there is erets—the land. Yes, planet earth remained, but the land was destroyed.

The earth still existed after the flood. The Euphrates river is still there today...

No, I think you're wrong on this (in fact I think I know you are). The Euphrates river of the antediluvian world is gone. Humans have been recycling names from the beginning of time. Ever heard of Paris Texas? Mars California? Hell Michigan?

Here's an interesting article from AiG that may be helpful.
Was the Garden of Eden Located in Iraq?

Let me lay out a scenario to you for consideration. Havilah was beautiful region with gold and precious stones in the antediluvian world. After the flood, Cush named one of his sons Havilah (Gen. 10:7), no doubt in remembrance of this land. Interestingly enough, Cush himself was named after the antediluvian region of Cush (Gen. 10:6)—also a region watered by one of the Eden rivers. Shem also joined in this custom naming one of his sons Ashur (Gen. 10:22). Can you see where this is going?

Havilah was also the name later given to one of Shem's descendants (Gen. 10:29). And as you might know, these early postdiluvian names often become the names of cities and even nations. Mizraim, the son of Ham is the hebrew word for Egypt. Javan, the son of Japheth is the hebrew word for Greece. These grandsons of Noah preceded these nations and either founded them or were the sources of their names. Is there really any doubt that Havilah (the man) was the founder of the postdiluvian land of Havilah?

And is it at all surprising that names like the Euphrates and Tigris were recycled and used to name postdiluvian rivers? Yet if you look at the geographical descriptions of the antediluvian rivers, you'll noticed they are completely different than their modern namesakes and can't possibly be the same rivers. From the article:

Furthermore, a closer examination of Genesis 2 reveals that the topography in and around Eden was different than today. Four rivers had once come out of Eden; today, however, only two major rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris, cut through Iraq. Also, one of the four rivers, Gihon, is described in Genesis 2:13 (KJV) to “compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia”; but the modern-day country of Ethiopia is over 1,000 miles from Iraq (and across water: the Red Sea).​

In fact, the modern rivers are actually flowing the wrong way, converging instead of splitting and flowing away from one another.

However, it is agreed by many that Job is the oldest of the written Scriptures. But just because people could write, doesn't mean that anything of the Scriptures, other than Job, came from such written records. My argument certainly doesn't rest on any foundation that people didn't or couldn't write, but just merely supports itself on what evidences we actually find in the Scriptures that such writing as to the beginning of all things and the things that Moses wrote about in the book of Genesis came from any such sources. My argument rests on what the Scriptures do say about their source. Paul agrees, as I do, that the Jews were raised up by God for the very purpose of writing down the Scriptures and that they are a product of the Holy Spirit working through godly men.

I was merely responding to your assertion that God never told anyone to write anything down until the time of Moses. By mentioning Job, I was simply pointing out that that reasoning in and of itself doesn't work, for Job is an inspired work that predates Moses. And again, look specifically at the types of things God told men to write down. In Moses' case it was commandments and instructions for the Israelites to follow. Histories, on the other hand, even Moses' specific history after Sinai are not attached to a specific command.

Your claim is that some of Moses' source material may have been from previously written records or at least by word of mouth accounts carried from generation to generation. Mine is that when God called Abraham He began working out through His descendants a plan and that that plans initial purpose was to have those descendants begin to write the Scriptures from the source of God's Holy Spirit....

But again, this is all speculation on your part. The idea that God simply dictated an unknown history to Moses is a concept found nowhere else in scripture. Histories in scripture never come about this way. It would be a very special case based on very tenuous assumptions of limited God ordained writing in the ancient world. I would submit that your theory requires much more proof as it is a much more radical idea.

The tablet theory on the other hand would fit in very well with how histories in the Bible came about. And unlike the dictation theory, we actually have textual evidence based on archeology to support the tablet theory. Furthermore, right in Gen. 5 we have mention of a book—a written document. If this was merely dictation on Sinai, this reference would make no sense. What book was God referring to if God was revealing this entire history right on the spot?

Then you have the textual evidence of the names coupled with the toledoth, who would have been contemporaries of the events in those toledoth. It's uncanny how well this works out.

If you're going strictly by evidence, I would the tablet theory beats dictation on Sinai by shutout (just say'n).

 

[miamited]

Hi Cal,

Thanks for all the well researched information.

God bless you.
In Christ, Ted

 

[Calminian]

Hi Cal,

Thanks for all the well researched information.

God bless you.
In Christ, Ted

My pleasure. I do appreciate the challenges. You did happen to drive me to do quite a bit of research on Gen. 2:10-14, which is rendered in the english as present conditions from the perspective of the author. But since this passage was structured largely of verbless clauses in the hebrew, I had to pause for a bit, and check with some smarter people. Usually, you can trust the english renderings, especially when they are unanimous, but sometimes when things are a little nuanced, that won't work.

For what it's worth, the feedback I got, did support the english translations. The writer was describing a completed action of the splitting of the river, and the rest of the descriptions were ongoing and still in existence—the river flowing, the watering of the lands and the contents of the lands. The problem is, I'm not at the point where I can explain it as they did. Perhaps one day.

 

[SkyWriting]

The is from a discussion on another thread but I thought it would make a good topic of its own. I thought responding to this below would be a good place to start and get the ball rolling, though I'm sure this will go in many directions. Ted, you may be interested to know that Adam's name doesn't appear at the end the the creation account. You rightly point out that he would not have been there to witness these events, and interestedly the first toledoth of Genesis appears with no name attached to it.

Likely Adam received the account from God.
You can imagine that Adam was Created with
the Genesis knowledge, or that God and Adam
chatted about is as they walked together in
The Garden.

This was all before the Fall, when Adam became
separated from God.