Well probably not the death but part of the decline. Mt Ebal Curse Tablet I didn't appreciate the significance of this until I heard this video. Top 5 Archaeological Finds That Affirm the Bible, with Dr. Scott Stripling The tablet contains the names El and YHWH together and dates from 14th to 13th century BC. This is direct conflict with a core assumption of the Documentary Hypothesis which posits that the names were not used together at this time and show different authorship.
Here is an article about it from the Biblical Archaeology Society, for context. There was supposed to be a peer-reviewed publication about it by the discoverers last year, but I don’t know if that came to fruition. I’d love to read it if it did. It’s an intriguing find, but from what I gather, a number of important factual questions about it remain unanswered, and this limits our ability to make precise determinations about what it might mean for the larger field. Until something is published, it’s more guesswork than anything else.
I've updated the link to start a bit earlier to provide more context. The interviewee is the lead archeologist of the team that found the tablet. He says at 18:46 that publication is imminent following peer reviewers comments. There are many scholars who have entire careers and publications invested in the Documentary Hypothesis. They are not going to easily let go of all that work, prestige, and income. p.s. I did also see the article you mentioned.
No doubt, archaeology and the other sciences are verifying the veracity and reliability of the Bible at every turn. I just read Eric Metaxas' Is Atheism Dead? and I would have to conclude, yes it is.
It seems unlikely the clock will ultimately be turned back on the Documentary Hypothesis. That ship has sailed. It is also unlikely the Hypothesis will advance to the next stage and become a Theory. It is doubtful we will ever find a manuscript or fragment of “E” or “J.” Despite the various iterations and division/multiplication of sources the Hypothesis has gone through, however, the foundational propositions (1) that the Pentateuch as it has come down to us could not have had a single author, on the basis of internal evidence, is highly probable, and (2) that this author could not have been Moses, seems virtually certain. For such to be a proverbial “hill to die on” actually violates sola Scriptura: at no point that I am aware of does the Pentateuch refer to itself as a unit, or claim Mosaic authorship for itself. The ascription of Mosaic authorship is in the first instance a product of tradition, not exegesis. Genesis, for example, never even mentions Moses. Biblical Hebrew script also did not exist in the 2nd millennium BC. If a time traveler took a Torah scroll and handed it to Moses, he would not have been able to read it. I think we’re ok letting the science play out on its own, and then following the conclusion honestly, wherever it leads. But it’s unlikely it will lead us back to Mosaic authorship.
That proposition is based on the use of different names for God and the assumption that this indicates different authors; that the author of J used YHWH, and the author of E used El. This find shows that one author could use both names. Hence it seriously undermines a basic proposition of the Documentary Hypothesis. However we can conclude that the section about the death of Moses was not actually written by Moses. That's long been recognised even by opponents of the Doc Hyp.
This is a Straw Man. There is a lot more to the Documentary Hypothesis (DH) than the mere difference in divine names in different narratives. Of course a single author could have merely used different names for the same deity. That’s not the sole basis of DH. Both the Priestly source and the Elohist source refer to God as Elohim, after all. It can’t be known in advance with certainty which DH scenario (if any) is the absolutely true one. It all comes down to intrinsic probabilities, with some scenarios simply being more likely than others. There are plenty of good books that have been written about it if suggestions are desired. I can’t hope to duplicate those presentations here.
On the basis of the traditional development of these things, I suspect there is a way to go. For those familiar with the process: Hypothesis - Antithesis - Synthesis I have long held the view that the failure of the documentary hypothesis is that there seems to be a reliance on documents that we do not have and indeed may never have existed. If you prefer the idea that these may be loosely bound oral traditions, I believe that we have a more workable starting point. There is no doubt that the documentary hypothesis has helped us gain a better understanding of the text. The challenge that this current find is The lead tablet, which measures less than 1 inch square, appears to have been folded in half after being written. This makes it impossible to read without advanced digital scanning, which was carried out in Prague by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Although images of the scans have not been released, the ABR team says that the inside contains 40 letters written in four lines of text. As translated by the team, the tablet reads: “Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God Yhw. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by Yhw—cursed, cursed, cursed.” So firstly, it is very small. And secondly, it was not found as part of the excavation, but rather in a reprocessing of material dumped from an earlier excavation, which while it does not negate the veracity of the find, does cast some doubt on the provenance. It is interesting and perhaps telling, that nearly five years after its recovery, there has been no released peer review, and indeed, for what it is worth, Wikipedia doesn't cover it. Most of the curse tablets found so far seen, seem to come from the Greek and Roman World, from about the 2nd Century BCE forward. The Greeks used lead for their curse tablets, however, they may simply reflect that lead survives better than many other materials that could have been used. The Curse tablet from Mt Ebal seems to be from 1000 years earlier, and in a different culture. I am certainly not discrediting it, however, there are more than a few hoops to jump through, before we can definitely declare a Black Swan Event, and discard the accumulated wisdom. Mt Ebal is the site of the discovery of the Samaritan Pentateuch, which has been important in its own right, and it seems to be more in line with the LXX than the Masoretic text. Given that this predates the fall of Jerusalem in c1000 BCE that is also telling.
Yes. It was written in a language that didn’t exist when Moses is said to have lived. And, he was dead.
Referring to the account of the death of Moses. Partially correct. The oldest versions we have today are written in Hebrew. The original texts were probably written in the proto-alphabetic script used in the curse tablet and later re-written in Hebrew. Today of course we have versions written in English which was definitely not around in the time of Moses. Remember the curse tablet would have been written within 1 generation of his death.
Biblical Hebrew script didn’t exist in the 2nd millennium BC. That’s not “partially” correct; it’s completely correct. The oldest complete copy of the MT - the Leningrad Codex - is from the 11th century AD. The oldest copies of individual passages - the Dead Sea Scrolls - are from a thousand years earlier, still a thousand years too late.
Interesting but irrelevant. The question is whether Moses wrote the Torah, not what language or alphabet he wrote it in. The spoken Hebrew language clearly predates the written language, because you can only write what is already being spoken. Of course languages change over time, both in spoken and written forms; e.g. the English alphabet no longer includes the letter “thorn”; and there can be several dialects within a language. Moses was probably multilingual. When the Israelites entered Egypt they spoke their own language and they might have retained a version of this, even if some of them also spoke Egyptian. Moses was raised by his own mother (as wet nurse ) and as an adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, and he was married to a Midianite, so we assume he spoke to his wife and father in law. He might have written in hieroglyphics, a proto-alphabetic script, or some other writing system. All your observation means is that the earliest extant copies we have come from a time after biblical Hebrew script had been adopted. Moses probably used a number of different sources for the period before his birth; oral and written. The toledeth structure in the early part of Genesis suggests this. And as mentioned above the passage about the death of Moses was probably added after his death.
Aside: Genesis 47:7 Then Joseph brought his father Jacob in and presented him before Pharaoh. After Jacob blessed Pharaoh, 8 Pharaoh asked him, “How old are you?” 9 And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty. My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers.” Although not mentioned it is likely that Pharaoh talked to Jacob through Joseph as an interpreter. For trade, diplomacy, and migration it's likely that many people were multilingual. The earliest clear mention I can think of is 2 Kings 18:26 Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah, and Shebna and Joah said to the field commander, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall.”
A valid point. The text could have cpme down originally from Moses, or at least large portions of it. Unless he dictated it from Sheol and employed a 'messenger', i.e. angel to deliver it and get it printed, we may assume it must be a non Mosaic interpolation. I can see no reason, if it was actually written by Moses himself, for him not foreseeing the details of his impending death and recording it in the first person. Odd that it is written in the third person, or rather, not at all odd, since we may assume Moses would have been unable to write an account of his own death, which had not yet occurred. .
I wrote above that the text as it has come down to us could not have been written by Moses, as biblical Hebrew did not exist in the 2nd millennium. So, even on the most conservative assumptions, the text would have been at the very least transliterated at some point, a process we may reasonably suppose to have been imperfect, given certain anomalies in the text as we have it. This isn’t decisive proof against Mosaic authorship per se, but it is one important piece of the puzzle. (Another important piece is the lack of evidence for the Exodus itself in the form in which it’s described.)
Here is an interesting article about the varying depictions of Moses in Exodus, which illustrates another piece of the puzzle. https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-priestly-moses
I have a book; Waterloo, written by Bernard Cornwell. The events took place well before the lifetime of Mr Cornwell and he wrote his book using a variety of source material (4 pages of bibliography). In the same way I can say that Moses wrote Genesis even though the events took place well before his lifetime. Except for his death the other books were written in his lifetime or immediately before so could be written from his own experience and eyewitness accounts. Again, he could have used other source material, e.g. “the Book of the Wars of YHWH” (Num 21:14). The original autographs were then copied and it is clear that scribal edits and updates did happen. These were limited to what would have been necessary to keep the text understandable to the audience. The Torah has also been transcribed into Biblical Hebrew from the original script. This may have been more the adoption of a new script rather than a translation. In this view (I’m don’t know if it has a name) Moses was the original author of the Torah and that what we have today is substantially a faithful copy with only minor edits and that it preserves the original content and intent of Moses. From the way it was referred to in the New Testament Jesus and the Apostles had a similar view.