Episode 30
The Books of Moses Part 1 - The Five Books of Moses
Welcome to the Poison Room, a podcast about dangerous books, texts, manuscripts and other things in the vein of making various distinct physical markings on a plethora of different surfaces in order to convey meaning.
This episode… and next episode… and… probably the episode after that I have a story for you that… well. The story we’ll end with is one that came to my attention last year thanks to the google alert I have for ‘dangerous books’. It was a news report about the death of Nigerian musician and singer Majek Fashek.
Now, before I tell you anything at all about Majek Fashek, and what his death had to do with any sort of dangerous book, we need to do quite a bit of historical context. So to start with, we need to jump back a few thousand years. Before we can talk about Majek Fashek, we need to talk about another guy: Moses.
Yes, Moses as in ‘that guy who God sent to tell Pharaoh to “Let My People Go”’. ‘Ten Plagues of Egypt Moses’. That Moses.
The story of Moses appears in the book of Exodus, or, in Hebrew, the shemōt. It’s the second book in the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch, which are collective names for the first five books of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible, or, for Christians, the first five books of the Old Testament – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
But another name for the five books as a whole is ‘The Five Books of Moses’, because of a traditional belief in the idea that Moses was the author of the Torah. Now, today scholars know that Moses did not write the Torah. We know it wasn’t even written by just one person. And I have a bunch of stories about what it has cost various people to get to the point where it’s relatively uncontroversial to acknowledge that. But we’re not interested right now in what modern scholarship knows about the authorship of the Torah, or how we got there. We’re not interested in when and how the idea of Moses as author lost its shine. We’re interested in when it first appeared.
Trying to pinpoint when – or by when – the idea of Moses as author of the Torah emerged is frustratingly difficult. I spent way too long trying to find anything authoritative written on that exact topic that would provide some degree of specificity – even if just ‘hey, here’s the first time the phrase ‘five books of Moses’ is used in our written record, or ‘here’s the first reference to Moses as the author’. I have failed.
And maybe that’s fair. Why should the question be important to contemporary scholars when the question of the authorship of the Torah wasn’t initially important to ancient Jews? The general idea of the identity of the author being important just wasn’t common in the ancient Semitic world (Schniedewind 2004: 7). Classical Hebrew doesn’t even have a word that means author. The closest word is ‘sofer’, meaning ‘scribe’ (Schniedewind 2004:7). The question of authorship only started to become important when the Jews started to have much greater contact with the Greeks of the Hellenistic era, which was from 323 BCE to 31 BCE (Schniedewind 2004: 7). Which is not to say that they’d never considered who authored certain texts before then.
Richard Elliott Friedman, author of a book called Who Wrote the Bible? suggests that Moses was seen as the author of the various texts that comprise the Torah before the Torah even existed in the form we have it. He suggests that the various manuscripts were combined into one by an editor, precisely because all the manuscripts had already come to be attributed to Moses. Thus the editor merged them together to produce one document that contained everything believed to have been written by Moses. Friedman also suggests that happened in the time of Ezra – somewhere around 460 BCE (Friedman 1997: 226), way before the Hellenistic Era. Friedman actually thinks that the final redactor was Ezra, but getting into that right now is too tangential even for me.
Let’s put aside the question of when the idea of Mosaic authorship emerged, and look at how it might have emerged.
The most common suggestion I’ve come across is that the idea of Moses as author probably arose from some verses within the Torah itself in which Moses is described as writing something down (McEntire 2008: 8-9). There are three references in Exodus to Moses writing things down, another two in Deuteronomy, and a reference in Numbers to Moses ‘recording’ something.
And Exodus specifically is gonna keep coming up in this story, so I’m gonna give you a tl;dr of it so I can highlight the parts that are relevant to our purposes and I’m not just dumping out-of-context bits of story on you later. It’s kinda long, but I’ve managed to get it down from over 35,000 words in the English translation to just under 5,000. Here we go.
At the start of Exodus the Israelites are living in Egypt. They had arrived in Egypt as a group of 70 – the family of Joseph – his father, his brothers, his brothers’ wives and their kids. Joseph was popular in Egypt because he’d helped them manage a seven-year famine/drought. Fast-forward a few generations and there are now a lot more than seventy of them, and the memory of how Joseph had helped the Egyptians had faded. Eventually there’s a pharaoh in charge to whom the name of Joseph means nothing. He looks around, sees how many Israelites there are and decides that he doesn’t like this. He was worried that if a war broke out the Israelites would side with the enemies of the Egyptians, fight against them, and leave the country (Exodus 1:8-10). So obviously, the natural thing to do, if you’re worried someone living with you will side with your enemies if a war should break out is to treat them really, really badly. So he orders the Egyptians to enslave the Israelites and set them to work making bricks and building cities.
As it turns out, enslaving a group of people doesn’t actually work as a form of contraception, either, so the Egyptians have even more Israelites living with them, who happen to now have good reason to side with Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war (Exodus 1:11-12).
So like a totally reasonable and rational person, the Pharaoh summons the Hebrew midwives and tells them that when a Hebrew woman gives birth to a boy, they should kill him. The midwives for some reason aren’t really sold on the idea of mass infanticide and don’t do it. When Pharaoh summons them back to ask them why they’re not killing the boys as he ordered them to, they tell him that Hebrew women simply give birth really fast, and just keep giving birth before they get there (Exodus 1:15).
So Pharaoh outsources the mass-murder to the Egyptians instead, and tells them that they need to throw every Hebrew boy that’s born into the Nile. Now one particular family, in the tribe of Levi, have a child, who happens to be a boy. The mother manages to hide the baby for a short while but babies cry, and generate waste, and need feeding, and can generally be hard to conceal. So after three months his mother ends up water-proofing a papyrus basket, placing her son in it, and hiding the basket in the reeds along the bank of the Nile (Exodus 2:1-4).
Later that same day the pharaoh’s daughter heads down to the river to bathe, finds the basket, and discovers the baby. She realises that he must be the child of one of the Hebrew women; but it turns out she’s also not a fan of infanticide and doesn’t want to kill the baby. Luckily, a young Hebrew girl – who is totally not the baby’s elder sister because she absolutely did not loiter around to watch what would happen after her mother placed the basket in the reeds – approaches the pharaoh’s daughter and asks if she would like her to go and find one of the Hebrew women to nurse the child for her. Pharaoh’s daughter did indeed want her to go do that and it turns out that this Hebrew girl just so happened to know a Hebrew woman who would be able to nurse a baby. So the baby’s own mother nurses him initially, and then when he’s a bit older he’s raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter, and get the education that one would expect a high-ranking Egyptian of the time to get. She calls him Moses.
Fast forward to Moses as an adult. Despite being raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter, he does know he’s Hebrew. One day he sees an Egyptian beating an enslaved Hebrew, and, with a quick glance around first to make sure there are no witnesses, Moses kills the Egyptian and buries his body in the sand. Buuut people still find out that Moses done did a murder, and when the Pharaoh finds out he decides to have Moses killed. But Moses does the smart thing and flees to a place called Midian. Whilst there he gets married, has kids, and, y’know, just lives his life. Eventually the old Pharaoh dies (Exodus 2: 11-23).
One day Moses is looking after the flock of his father-in-law, and takes them out to graze near Mount Horeb. Whilst there, he encounters a burning bush, except, like… the bush is on fire, but it’s not actually burning up. So Moses is like ‘hey, that’s weird’, and goes to investigate. At which point Yahweh calls his name. Yahweh tells Moses that he has heard cries of his people suffering in Egypt, and has decided to do something about it, and the thing he’s decided to do about it involves Moses going back to Egypt and telling the new Pharaoh that the Israelites are gonna leave now. He also gives Moses advice on what he needs to say to convince the Israelites that he has indeed been sent by Yahweh to do this, promises that he will be with Moses, and then tells him what needs to say to the Egyptians (Exodus 3).
But Moses is like ‘okay, but I’m not really great at public speaking, you sure you can’t get anyone else to do this?’. Yahweh starts to get kinda cross with Moses, but then tells him ‘okay fine. Your brother Aaron is good at speaking. I’ll tell you what to say, and you can pass it on to him, but you’ve still gotta be there, because you’re gonna have to do some stuff with your staff and you have to tell Aaron what to do, because I’m not talking to him, just you’. So Moses agrees, and tells his father-in-law that he’s going back to Egypt to see if anyone he knows is still alive. He takes his wife and kids with him, and off they go. Before they reach Egypt they bump into Aaron, and Moses explains the plan. They get back, and Aaron and Moses go talk to the elders of the Israelites, and tell them what Yahweh has said. They accept it and are grateful that Yahweh is gonna do something about their current situation (Exodus 4).
Then Moses and Aaron go talk to Pharaoh, and explain to him that their Lord, Yahweh, has said that the Pharaoh should let the Hebrews go and hold a festival for him in the wilderness. But Yahweh also hardened Pharaoh’s heart against their request, so his answer was ‘lolno. Get back to work’.
But Pharaoh doesn’t just tell them to get back to work, he makes conditions ever harsher for the Israelites. The slave drivers are told that they must work the Israelites even harder, they have to do more work each day. When the people approach Pharaoh to ask what the deal is, he tells them they’re just lazy, and to get back to work. The Hebrews let Aaron and Moses know that their intersession has gone super duper well, thanks a lot. So Moses goes back to Yahweh and asks what the deal is (Exodus 5). Yahweh reaffirms that through his might, the Pharaoh will let the Israelites go. He tells Moses to go back to the Israelites and tell them that he will free them, they will be his people, and he will be their God, and that he will bring them to the land that he had given to their forebears.
So Moses goes back, and tells the Israelites this. But this time, they’re a bit more sceptical of the message since it didn’t exactly work out so well for them the first time. But Yahweh still tells Moses to grab Aaron and go to Pharaoh and tell him to let the Israelites go (Exodus 6). Obviously, Moses doesn’t really understand why the Pharaoh would listen to him when not even the Israelites will, but Yahweh reassures him that it will all work out in the end. Because actually, the Pharaoh not listening to him is part of the plan. Yahweh has inclined Pharaoh’s mind to not let the Israelites go, so that Yahweh can display his wonders, mighty acts, and judgement in Egypt, and then he will make Pharaoh free them.
So Moses and Aaron go back to the Pharaoh, to tell him Yahweh said he’s gotta let the Israelites go. But Yahweh has given them a few more instruction for this encounter:
The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Perform a miracle,’ then say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,’ and it will become a snake.”
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (Exodus 7:8-13).
So Pharaoh has had a display of power to show that Moses and Aaron do indeed have the power of Yahweh behind them. But this doesn’t convince Pharaoh to let them go, because… that’s also part of Yahweh’s plan. So Yahweh tells Moses what to do next.
The following morning, as the Pharaoh is going to the Nile, Moses meets him there. He takes in his hand the staff that had turned into a snake the day before, and strikes the water of the Nile. The water changes to blood. The fish die, and no one can drink the water. Because it’s blood. Then Aaron takes his staff and stretches his hand over the waters of Egypt, and all the water turns to blood – streams, canals, reservoirs, even the water stored in pots and other vessels. All blood. But apparently the Pharaoh’s magicians could manage the same thing through their ‘secret arts’, so Pharaoh wasn’t swayed by this display of power (Exodus 7).
Seven days later Yahweh tells Moses to once again go to Pharaoh. This time he doesn’t just tell him to let the Israelites go – the order comes with a threat: let them go, or I will send you more frogs than you have even seen in your entire life. Pharaoh doesn’t let them go. Moses tells Aaron to stretch out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and frogs begin to appear. A lot of frogs. The Nile is full of frogs. The land is full of frogs. The Houses are full of frogs. The beds are full of frogs. Frogs. Everywhere. Now, Pharaoh’s magicians could apparently do the same thing with their own secret arts. Which presumably just means there were even more frogs. But they don’t seem to be able to get rid of the frogs. Just make them appear.
Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron, and tells them that if they pray to their God and remove the frogs, he will let them go to offer sacrifices to Yahweh. They agree that Moses will do this the next day. So Moses appealed to Yahweh to do something about the frog situation. And Yahweh did something about the frog situation. He killed them all. Except the ones in the Nile. So. Like. There were still frogs everywhere. They were just… dead frogs.
Anyway, the frogs are… technically gone? But now that the immediate problem is over, Pharaoh of course reneges on his promise.
So we’ve done two plagues now. Onto the third:
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron, ‘Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the ground,’ and throughout the land of Egypt the dust will become gnats.” They did this, and when Aaron stretched out his hand with the staff and struck the dust of the ground, gnats came on people and animals. All the dust throughout the land of Egypt became gnats. But when the magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, they could not.
Since the gnats were on people and animals everywhere, the magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.” But Pharaoh’s heart was hard and he would not listen, just as the Lord had said. (Exodus 8:16-19)
So yeah. Egyptian magicians defeated due to inability to make gnats come everywhere. But despite the Egyptian magicians being like ‘no okay, this is legit’, Pharaoh does not change his mind about letting the Israelites go. Probably because Yahweh had hardened his heart against the idea. So we move on to the next plague: flies. Following Yahweh’s orders, Moses goes to Pharaoh and tells him to let the Israelites go, or the land will be afflicted by a plague of flies. Or rather, the Egyptians will be afflicted by a plague of flies. This time Yahweh also specifies that the areas where the Israelites live will not be affected by the plague. So the swarms of flies descend, and ruin everything. And Pharaoh tries to make the most minimal concession and tells Moses and Aaron that they can make their sacrifices to Yahweh there in Egypt. Moses and Aaron reject this offer. Pharaoh makes another offer – that the Israelites can go and make their sacrifices in the wilderness, but they have to promise not to go too far, and also they have to get rid of the flies.
So Moses is like ‘sure, okay, I’ll go ask God to make the flies go away. And you’d better keep your word about letting us go, this time!
Pharaoh did not keep his word (Exodus 8).
So we move on to plague five: killing all the livestock. Much like the fly-plague, this one will not affect the livestock of the Israelites. Just the Egyptians. Moses gives Pharaoh fair warning, but of course, Pharaoh doesn’t acquiesce to the request to let the Israelites go, and the next day all the livestock of the Egyptians die. And none of the livestock of the Hebrews die. Pharaoh still does not let them go.
So we move on to plague six:
Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Take handfuls of soot from a furnace and have Moses toss it into the air in the presence of Pharaoh. It will become fine dust over the whole land of Egypt, and festering boils will break out on people and animals throughout the land.”
So they took soot from a furnace and stood before Pharaoh. Moses tossed it into the air, and festering boils broke out on people and animals. The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils that were on them and on all the Egyptians. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the Lord had said to Moses. (Exodus 9:8-12)
So after a brief absence, the magicians are back, but they’re still useless – they haven’t been able to do anything since they were unable to replicate the plague of gnats. Now, not only are they not able to replicate a plague of boils, they’re not even able to protect themselves.
On to plague seven. For this one, Yahweh tells Moses to warn Pharaoh that he should order his people to bring everything from their fields inside, because he’s going to send a storm of killer hail, and everything that’s not sheltered will die or be destroyed. Some of Pharaoh’s officials are scared enough to heed this warning, and bring the enslaved people and livestock from their fields inside. Others leave them out.
Then Moses stretches out his hand toward the sky, and Yahweh sends the hail, and the worst storm Egypt has ever seen in its history. The hail destroyed trees, people, animals, and most of the crops. But it didn’t hit the area where the Israelites lived. Once again Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron. He admits he is in the wrong, and that the Israelites can go. So Moses goes off, brings and end to the hail and storm, and predictably, Pharaoh immediately changes his mind again (Exodus 9).
So once again Yahweh tells Moses to go back to Pharaoh, and issue the next warning. Let the Israelites go or tomorrow there’s gonna be locusts. Lots of locusts. Any crop that’s somehow survived everything else up until now will not survive a plague of locusts. So the locusts appear, Pharaoh regrets his life choices, tells Moses the Israelites can go, and then changes his mind again as soon as the locusts are gone. And that was the eighth plague. Two more to go.
For plague Nine Moses doesn’t even go visit Pharaoh first. Yahweh just tells him to stretch out his hand over the land of Egypt, which he does, and darkness descends upon the land. Only the Israelites are left with any light. Pharaoh tells Moses that the Israelites may go and worship Yahweh, but they have to leave their flocks and herds behind. Moses says nope – they have to come too. Pharaoh gets angry, and tells Moses to get out of his sight. Moses tells Pharaoh that one more plague is coming. The first born son of every Egyptian, and of all animals owned by Egyptians, that are somehow not dead yet, will die. The Israelites will not be harmed (Exodus 11).
Then Moses tells the Israelites what they must do to ensure their safety and to make sure they’re prepared to leave. On the same evening they all slaughter an unblemished male lamb. They take some of the blood of the lambs and paint it onto the top and sides of the doorframes where they live. They roast the meat over a fire and eat it along with unleavened bread, after they have already dressed to leave.
And that night a great cry went up throughout Egypt, as every Egyptian found the firstborn sons of their households’ dead. This included the son of the Pharaoh. Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and tells them to take the Israelites and leave Egypt. And so they do. 600,000 men on foot, according to Exodus. Not including women and children (Exodus 12).
The Israelites head in the direction of the Red Sea, guided by Yahweh, who in the day appears as a pillar of cloud, or column of dust, to lead the way, and at night as a pillar of fire (Exodus 13).
Of course, Yahweh makes Pharaoh change his heart one last time, and he soon comes in pursuit of the Israelites. The Israelites are reasonably concerned at the lack of an apparent way for them to cross the Red Sea or avoid the approaching forces of the Pharaoh behind them, but they follow Moses and keep heading towards the shore of the Red Sea.
Yahweh solves the problem of the Red Sea existing by telling Moses to raise his staff. When Moses does so, Yahweh parts the waters, leaving a path of dry land for the Israelites to walk through. The Israelites successfully cross the Red Sea. The Egyptians attempt to follow them, but Yahweh makes sure they get stuck and mired in mud. And when the last of the Israelites has finished crossing, Moses once more raises his staff and the entire army of the Pharaoh was swept away as the water crashed back into place (Exodus 14). After that they head off into the Desert of Shur. They arrive at a place called Marah three days later and discover that the water there was not drinkable because it was ‘bitter’. Yahweh shows Moses a piece of wood, Moses throws it in the water, and the water becomes drinkable (Exodus 15:22-25.
They encounter a few other problems too, such as not having enough food, but God provides food for them to eat in the form of mana – mysterious food that tastes like wafers made with honey – that appears each morning except on the Sabbath (Exodus 16). Several other things happen along the way – Moses strikes a rock with his staff to make water appear, they fight a battle with the Amalekites, where their victory is dependent on Moses holding his staff up. As long as his staff is in the air, the Hebrews, led by Joshua, dominate the battle. When his arms get tired and he lowers the staff, the Amalekites start to win. So his brother Aaron and another guy find him a rock to sit on and then just stand either side of him holding his hands up for him until the Hebrews are victorious (Exodus 17). After the battle is over,
…the Lord said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.” (Exodus 17:14)
This verse is the first of the three instances in Exodus in which Yahweh instructs Moses to write something down. As you can tell, there no way you can interpret this as Yahweh telling Moses to write down even just everything that’s happened so far in the book of Exodus, but it is also kinda’ vague as to what exactly he’s telling him to write down. Is it actually that bit of Exodus recounting the battle with the Amalekites? Did whatever scroll Moses wrote on end up making up that little bit of the text? Or was it a separate history? And what happened to the scroll afterwards? It’s never mentioned again. But those questions aside, it does establish the idea of Moses as author of parts of Israelite history.
Anyway. Next Moses gets visited by his father-in-law who gives him some advice about handling judiciary matters (Exodus 18). Three months after leaving Egypt they enter the desert of Sinai and set up camp near the base of the mountain. Moses climbs the mountain to have a chat with Yahweh.
Yaweh speaks the ten commandments, and then reiterates the ‘do not make any gods beside me, don’t make yourself images of gods out of silver and gold’ part (Exodus 20:23). Yahweh then gives Moses a whole bunch of other laws that we don’t need to know about for our current purposes. He tells Moses some stuff about how to celebrate annual festivals and tells him that he will send an angel ahead of them to lead the way and guard them, and that they should do what the angel says. Yahweh explains how he will drive the various peoples out of the land he has promised to the Israelites bit by bit (Exodus 23: 27-30). And Moses returns to the Israelites and relays it all. Then…
When Moses went and told the people all the Lord’s words and laws, they responded with one voice, “Everything the Lord has said we will do.” Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said.
He got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he splashed against the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.”
Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” (Exodus 24:3-8)
And this is the second instance in Exodus of Moses writing something down. He writes down not just the ten commandments, but all the laws that Yahweh related to him. And that that takes four chapters of Exodus to cover – Exodus 20, 21, 22, and 23 are all just Yahweh giving Moses various laws. So Moses would have written exactly the same words as appear in those chapters in Exodus. Again, it’s hardly proof of Mosaic authorship for the whole thing, but it also demonstrates that he wrote something that matches the words of Exodus – so… why not the whole of Exodus? And if he wrote the whole of Exodus, why not Leviticus, Numbers, and most Deuteronomy, too, since he’s alive right up until the sixth verse of the final chapter of Deuteronomy? Anyway, back to the story.
Moses, Aaron, some others, and seventy elders go up Mount Sinai, and they see Yahweh, and eat and drink. And then Yahweh tells Moses to come back up by himself and he will give him tablets with the commandments on them. So Moses does. He spends 40 days and nights on the mountain (Exodus 24:12-18).
Yahweh tells Moses to tell the Israelites to make a sanctuary for him, where he will dwell among them. He gives instructions on how an Ark – the Ark of the Covenant – should be constructed. And when the Ark is made, they’re to put the tablets of the covenant law inside it (25: 8-22). He gives instructions for the whole tabernacle – including table, lamps, curtains, tent, altar, a courtyard and a washing basin (Exodus 25:23 – 27:19; 30: 17-21), and he even specifies who exactly he’s chosen to make all this (Exodus 31: 1-6). He specifies what kind of oil they should use in these lamps, and then goes into detail about the types of garments priests should wear (Exodus 28), and at the end of it, he gives Moses two stone tablets with the covenant laws inscribed on them by the finger of Yahweh (Exodus 31:18).
Meanwhile, down below, the Israelites get tired of waiting for Moses to come back down – he’s up there for 40 days and nights, remember. They decide that maybe he’s not coming back down at all, and they ask Aaron to make them new gods. Aaron collects some gold from everyone, melts it down, and casts it into the shape of a golden calf for the people. He builds an altar in front of the calf, and the next day the people hold a festival and make sacrifices and present offerings, before feasting and… indulging in revelry (Exodus 32: 1-6). Meanwhile, up on the mountain, Yahweh tells Moses to head back down because his people have become corrupt and made themselves an idol. Yahweh tells Moses to leave him alone so that he may destroy the Israelites, but Moses pleads on their behalf and Yahweh relents. Moses goes back down to shout at his people. When he sees the golden calf, he throws the stone tablets he’s carrying to the ground in anger, breaking them. Moses confronts the people and demands that anyone who supports Yahweh come to him. Those of the tribe of Levi do so. Moses commands them all to take up swords and to go through the camp, each one of them killing a brother, a friend, and a neighbour. They massacre around 3,000 people (Exodus 32:25-28).
The next day Moses tells the remaining people that he will go back up Sinai to talk with Yahweh and see if he can petition the Lord on their behalf.
So Moses went back to the Lord and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.”
The Lord replied to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. Now go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin.”
And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made. (Exodus 32:31-34)
Don’t worry, a bit later Yahweh summons Moses up Mount Sinai again and tells him to make another two stone tablets so he can write the ten commandments on them again. So Moses makes the tablets, and treks back up the mountain. Yahweh reiterates some of the rules he gave before and then…
The Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 34:27-28).
Note that Yaweh said that he would write the tablets again, but when it comes to it, it’s actually Moses that does it, which makes this the final instance in Exodus of Moses writing something down. And if you’re prepared to accept that Moses wrote down the direct words of the laws of God, then… accepting that he wrote nearly all of the Torah doesn’t exactly feel like much of a stretch.
This retelling takes us up to Exodus chapter 34 out of 40. We don’t need to deal with the remaining chapters though – they’re about building the Ark, the Tabernacle, and all the other stuff as had been dictated before.
Remember, part of the reason I just summarised that is because we’re talking about where the idea of Mosaic authorship might have emerged from. As I said before, there are also references to Moses writing things down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. And a reference in Numbers to him ‘recording’ something. Don’t worry, we don’t need to give a run-down of what happened in those books. In Deuteronomy, the first reference is again to Moses writing down laws given to him by Yahweh (31:9) but immediately after Yahweh tells Moses to write down the laws he has given him, he also tells Moses to write down the words of a song, and teach it to the Israelites so that ‘it may be a witness for me against them’ (31: 19).
Finally, in Numbers (which comes before Deuteronomy), we are told that Moses recorded the stages of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Canaan. (Numbers 33:2). That happens in verse 2 of chapter 33, and the rest of the chapter is a very straightforward record of where they stayed and when. Like, literally ‘they left this place and camped at that place. They left that place and camped at this place.’ So… you could take it as ‘Moses wrote this somewhere else’, or ‘Moses wrote this following list’, or ‘everything you’ve just read about the journey out of Egypt was written by Moses.’
So there’s the probable beginning of the idea of Mosaic authorship. The earliest definitive statement that Moses was the author that I’ve managed to find in an ancient source is from centuries later, in the Babylonian Talmud. There, we find a definite statement in a tractate known as Bava Batra that Moses was the author of the Torah (14b12). The Babylonian Talmud was compiled over centuries from discussions between rabbis over how to interpret scripture, or how to interpret interpretations of scripture. It was written down around 500 CE, but it reached its final form somewhere around the 7th to mid-8th century CE. Obviously that’s ceeeenturies later than when the Torah reached its final form. But the Talmud is not the book we’re interested in. We just needed to know that the idea of Mosaic authorship was developing through this time period.
And to be clear: I’m absolutely not saying that this comment in the Talmud is the earliest reference to Moses as author. Judaism in antiquity is not my speciality and I don’t know all the difference sources that I could check. But I’ve just not managed to find even another academic’s discussion of when the claim of Moses as author, or the phrase ‘the five books of Moses’ first appeared. So this has been super frustrating for me and this kind of thing is why I take too long writing episodes because maybe if I just chase up one more footnote I’ll find the answer. So why is the idea of Mosaic authorship important to our story?
Before we get to that, we’ve got to gather up a few more strands of this story. Firstly, let’s talk about the association between ancient Egypt and magic. On the part of the Greeks, and the Romans, those who wrote about the origin of magic usually attributed it to the Persians, naming Zoroaster as the source.
Plato’s 4th century BCE dialogue the First Alcibiades calls Zoroaster the originator of magic. (155a). Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, doesn’t think much of magic, and claims that the first person who wrote about magic was a guy called Osthanes (Ost-ah-knees), who accompanied King Xerxes on his expeditions against Greece. Pliny blames Osthanes for disseminating the practices of magic wherever the Persians went, and claims that it was from him that the Greeks picked up a very strong interest in magic (Nat. Hist. 30.2). But Egypt also has a strong association with magic, and that only gets stronger over time.
In Christian, Jewish, and pagan literature we find a strong association between Egypt and magic. The Talmud states that nine tenths of the magic descended on Egypt (Kiddushin 49b). The Greek philosopher Celsus, writing in the second half of the second century CE, wrote an anti-Christian text called ‘The True Doctrine’ in which he accused Jesus of having learned magic in Egypt – i.e. the miracles of Jesus were not divine miracles, they were the same magic that anyone could learn in Egypt (Origen, Contra Celsum 38).
In a third century novel attributed to Pseudo-Clement, the protagonist declares his intention to travel to Egypt, befriend the hierophants, and commission a magician to summon a soul from ‘the infernal regions’ (Recognitions 1.5). A text called the Confessions, dated to around 350-370 CE (Bailey thesis :4), details the story of Cyprian of Antioch, who supposedly lived a very colourful life of sin and evil as a magician before converting to Christianity. Much of his magic is learned during a period of training in Egypt (Confessions 12). The story is entirely fictional, as are, probably, an awful lot of stories along that theme. The young man going to Egypt to learn magic is an established trope by this point in history.
In a dialogue called the Philopseudeis the author Lucian has one of his characters, the Pythagorean Arignotus, detail how he purged a demon from a house by discovering where in the house a corpse was buried after spending a night in the house with his personal library of Egyptian magic books to hand and using his most potent Egyptian spells (Philopseudeis 31).
To be clear, this is all about the reputation of Egypt as a hub of magic. As Matthew Dickie points out, we can ask some valid questions about how much Egypt’s reputation matched up with reality (Dickie 2001: 196). Were Egyptians really practicing magic that much more than everyone else, or is this maybe just a useful trope that doesn’t really care much about reality? But those questions aren’t what we’re here to look into. Regardless of how much was fact and how much fiction, Egyptian magic did mingle with Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman magical and miraculous practices, and there was a definite cultural perception that Egypt was a place of magic.
And that association between Egypt and magic, though not as strong around the time the books of the Torah were written, is still there. Y’know. In Exodus. Moses and Aaron take on the Pharaoh’s magicians. The magicians can turn their staffs into snakes through their magic arts. They can make frogs appear with their magic arts. They can turn water into blood with their magic arts.
So it’s not entirely surprising that, despite pointing to Zoroaster as the creator or discoverer of magic, Pliny the Elder also mentions a much younger sect of magic founded by Moses, along with Jannes and Lotapea (Natural Histories 30.2). We have no idea who Lotapea is supposed to be, but Jannes was the name given to one of the Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses and Aaron when they approached Pharaoh about the whole ‘letting the Israelites go’ thing. Yeah. Over time their story gets embellished, to the point that they get their own redemption arc where they eventually covert to Judaism (Gager 1972: 137).
And after all, Moses was raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter. He got himself some of that fancy Egyptian education. Which as everyone knew, involved learning magic. So given all of that – Moses as author of sacred texts, Moses’ connection to both magic and Egypt, and Egypt’s own reputation for magic, it’s wholly unsurprising that Moses’ name pops up in the Greek Magical Papyri.
If you listened to episode eight of this podcast – the one on curse tablets – then you might remember the Greek Magical Papyri, or, for short, the PGM. For those of you who haven’t listened, or don’t remember, the PGM is a collection of papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt, mainly from around the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE, containing spells and instructions for constructing spells, as well as hymns, and rituals. Greek and Roman magical practices were highly syncretic – they were quite happy to grab magical practices from other surrounding cultures and dump them all into the same big mixing pot, and Jewish magic was no exception.
Now, you might be thinking ‘wait, what? Jewish and Christian magic? Doesn’t the infamous ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?’ line come from Exodus?’ To which I would say: yes, yes it does. And there’s an even more comprehensive condemnation of magic in Deuteronomy (18.9-15). And some scholars, such as Andreas Kilcher, go so far as to argue that, not only is the fact that Moses and his god defeat the Egyptian Sorcerers, a victory of Jewish monotheism over magic, but that:
“Moses’ victory over the magic of the Egyptians has become even a foundational element in biblical, and accordingly, rabbinical literature: the rejection of Egyptian magic becomes basic to the establishment of tradition.” (Kilcher 2004: 149)
Kilcher sets up an opposition between Egyptian sorcery specifically – not Egyptian polytheism – and Mosaic monotheism. The difference, Kilcher thinks, between Egyptian and Hebrew culture, is the difference between ‘law’ and ‘magic’. After all, he notes, the prohibition against magic is made three times in the Pentateuch – once in Exodus, and then again in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy (Kilcher 2004: 150).
But… when it comes to the Torah’s position on magic, it’s actually kinda complicated. Gideon Bohak points out that in the case of the prohibition against magic in Exodus, it’s literally only three words in the Biblical Hebrew, and it’s just thrown in to a list of other regulations that don’t seem at all related. It’s not exactly being emphasised as a particularly important point. And in the case of Deuteronomy, Bohak points out firstly, that scholars today still debate what some of the specific words and terminology used actually mean, and secondly, that sometimes words that are used in a negative context in one place, appear in a different place with a positive context. For example, being a qosem here is one of the things that is prohibited and bad. But in Isiah 3:2-3 Isiah counts a qosem as among the leaders of Jerusalem (Bohak 2008: 15-16).
And when we actually look through the Torah for examples of magic, or magicians, we find that they’re often doing… very similar things to what holy men, do. Or, I guess, if you look through for examples of holy men, you can often find them performing the same kind of feats as magicians do.
It can be very hard to distinguish whether someone is a holy man or a magician. A magician and a holy man might both perform rituals for themselves and others – both Jews and non-Jews, they both do things that are morally good and morally bad (yeah, even the holy men. Elisha, for instance, literally summons some bears to maul a bunch of kids because they mocked him for being bald. Swell guy), and both magicians and holy men might use a wide range of techniques and implements (Bohak 2008: 26-27).
But there are some differences – holy men might rely on those who approach them to feed and water them, but they’re unlikely to charge a fee like a magician would. Shockingly, holy men generally emphasise the idea that they’re sent by God, or on a mission from God. Magicians don’t tend to do that. Holy men generally don’t do erotic magic, whilst magicians do, but magicians are less likely to take on tasks like resuscitating the dead and making it rain, which is more the domain of the holy man. And holy men tend to rely on an innate power granted to them by God – Moses and Aaron didn’t have to do any book learning to turn staffs into snakes or produce a plague of boils. They just do as they’re told by God. The prophet Elijah didn’t have to train to become a miracle worker or prophet, and all Elisha has to do to succeed him is literally just pick up Elijah’s cloak. Magicians, on the other hand, were generally conceived of as having studied long and hard to learn their skills (Bohak 2008: 26-27).
Naturally, then, you’d look at this list and go ‘well, Moses is clearly a holy man’. But to outsiders… he might look like a magician. After all, he had an Egyptian education, and a Greek or Roman might happily assume that included instruction in magic. He performs miracles that are the same as those that the Pharaoh’s magicians perform… and he gets a whole book of laws and knowledge from Yahweh on Mount Sinai, and maybe even all five books of the Torah!
And Moses did indeed have some reputation as a magician.
A fragment of the works of a Hellenistic Jewish author from the second century BCE are preserved by Eusebius. The author was Artapanus, and the details that Eusebius records are from Artapanus’ account of Moses’ youth. Artapanus credits Moses as the inventor of ships, machines for laying stones, Egyptian weapons, engines for drawing water and for war, and philosophy. Oh, and also he was the teacher of Orpheus. Yeah. Greek Orpheus. ‘Go to the underworld and fail to retrieve my wife’ Orpheus. (Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica XXVII). Orpheus, who is also associated with a whole bunch of magic and mysticism and whom we’ll definitely talk more about at some future point.
Building on that, an Alexandrian philosopher by the name of Philo, writing in the first century CE, reinforces that idea of Moses having an expansive education which might well include mystical elements. He describes how teachers came from all over the place to teach Moses, and that he quickly surpassed them all. He learns everything with the utmost ease: arithmetic, geometry, the theory of music and the use of various instruments. He learns from Egyptian philosophers “the philosophy which is contained in symbols, which they exhibit in those sacred characters of hieroglyphics” (Vita Moses 1. V. 21-24). He learns knowledge of astronomy-slash-astrology from the Chaldeans and Egyptians.
To be fair, Philo does also say that magic and holy inspiration ‘cannot dwell in the same abode’, but the context in which he says this is when the spirit of God pushes all the knowledge of human skills of divination out of the head of a seer, Balaam, so that God may speak through him during his divinations (Vita Moses 1. L. 277). So the context here is once again emphasising that something done by magic and something done by a holy man can be very much utterly indistinguishable. Balaam still does the divination. It’s just that he’s being used as a divine conduit rather than using human-acquired skills. And to be super fair, in another work, Philo also claims that Moses outlawed all forms of divination or prophesying. But it’s specifically only prophesying. Not any form of magic (*De Specialibus Legibus I * 1. XI 59-66). But enough about Philo. Point is: even if Jewish and Christian writers are saying in some places ‘magic is bad!’ in other places, they’re still portraying Moses as having the same kind of knowledge that rather looks like magical knowledge. Especially if you’re a pagan who just likes grabbing chunks of other people’s cultures and mixing it in with your own weird magic stuff.
The Jewish historian Josephus, also writing in the first century CE, also suggests that people thought of Moses as a magician. He produced a word called Antiquities of the Jews - a history of the Jewish people aimed at a gentile audience. It had a definite vibe of an apologia - a work written to defend a position, person, idea, etc. Josephus was trying to explain Jewish history in a way that would portray the Jews as a respectable people to his Greek and Roman audience. In his retelling of the story of Exodus, Josephus has the Pharaoh explicitly accuse Moses of using the same magic as his own sorcerers – which conveniently allows Moses to refute that accusation and explain that his power comes from God, and is separate to – and greater than – Egyptian magic (Antiquities 2.284-286 = 2.13.3). Clearly this was a point Josephus felt he needed to make to his audience. Moses didn’t do magic. Incidentally, Josephus clearly thinks of Moses as the author of the Torah.
So the whole time that the Greeks have been aware of Jewish people and their religion and traditions, there’s an undercurrent of authors who reinforce and-or expand on areas of Moses’ story that give him a distinct magic vibe. Also an alchemical vibe, but we’ll stick to the magic for now. And there’s also a tradition of Moses having written things down, and been the author of the Torah.
And all of that is why it is not only not surprising that Moses’ name crops up in the PGM, but also not surprising that whole books of magic are attributed to him.
What we’re interested in right now is PGM XIII. The full title of which is The Eighth Book of Moses Concerning the Holy Name. It dates to the third or fourth century CE. Its contents are… well, it’s two different editions of the same text. The title of the first one is Holy Book called the Monad or the Eighth Book of Moses Concerning the Sacred Name, and the title of the second one is Secret Holy Book of Moses, called the Eighth or Sacred. And it is, if you don’t mind the anachronistic terminology, what one might call a grimoire.
And that’s where we’re going to leave it for this episode.
Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please subscribe on whatever podcatcher you’re using. Rate and review the show, especially on Apple Podcasts. Yes, you. I’m talking specifically to you. It helps with other people finding the show and all that, but mainly it also just lets me know that people are listening and I’m not sitting in a dark clothes cupboard in incredibly hot weather just for my own enjoyment.
If you have questions, comments, corrections, feedback, want to suggest a topic, etc. You can find the podcast on twitter: @poisonroompod
or send an email to:
poisonroompodcast@gmail.com
Transcripts of all episodes are available at poisonroom.com, where you can also see the references and bibliography. As always if the sources are publicly available, they’re linked to.
You have been listening to The Poison Room.
- The interesting parts of Exodus were read by Inari Porkka.
- The voice in your ears has been: plagued by gnats and flies, but thankfully never by frogs.
Bibliography
Bohak, G. (2008) Ancient Jewish Magic: A History, Cambridge University Press.
Dickie, M. (2001) Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, Routledge.
Eusebius (1903) Praeparatio Evangelica Book 9 (trans: E. H. Gifford), Oxford University Press. (https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_pe_09_book9.htm)
Friedman, R. E. (1997) Who Wrote the Bible?, Harper Collins.
Gager, J. G. (1972) Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism Abington Press.
Josephus (1988) ‘The Works of Josephus’ (trans: Whiston, W.), Hendrickson.
Kilcher, A. (2004) ‘The Moses of Sinai and the Moses of Egypt: Moses as Magician in Jewish Literature and Western Esotericism’, Aries, 4: 148-170.
Lucian (1905) The Works of Lucian of Samosata (trans: Fowler, H. W. & Oxford, F. G.), Clarendon Press.
McEntire, M. (2008) Struggling with God: an Introduction to the Pentateuch, Mercer University Press.
Philo of Alexandria (1993) The Works of Philo, Complete and Unabridged (trans: C. D. Yonge), Hendrickson Pub. (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/)
Plato (1955) Plato in Twelve Volumes (trans. Lamb, W. R. M.), Vol. 8., Harvard University Press.
Pliny (1855) (Nat. Hist. 30.2). The Natural History, (trans: Bostock, J.) Taylor and Francis.
Roberts, A., Donaldson, J., & Cleveland Coxe, A. (Eds) (1885) Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 4. Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Roberts, A., Donaldson, J., & Cleveland Coxe, A. (Eds) (1886) Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 8 Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Schniedewind, W. (2004) How the Bible Became a Book, Cambridge University Press.