Did Moses write Genesis?
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Wellhausen. The relative dates for these four sources are disputed. The order could be PEJD or EJDP. In his 1878 “Documentary Hypothesis” (Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel), Wellhausen proposed that the J Source was composed in the mid-10th century BC; the E Source in mid-ninth century BC; the D Source in the late-seventh century BC; and the P Source at the end of the sixth century BC.
He argued that editors (redactors) first combined JE, then JED, and finally JEDP by the mid-fifth century. He also examined Exodus, concluding that J and E are presented separately in parts of Exod 1–19 and merged with each other and/or P in parts of Exod 1–19. He argued that P is dominant in the legal portions and tabernacle accounts of Exod 20–40.
Criticisms of Wellhausen. Wellhausen’s hypothesis was widely—but not universally—accepted. Sayce, Keil, Delitzsch, Cassuto, Harrison, Archer, Kikawada, Quinn, and Wenham have argued against it, as well as those in the archaeologically-oriented “Albright school.”
Eissfeldt, Schmid, Kaufmann, and Friedman have also published modifications of the Wellhausen approach. Propp’s commentary on Exodus details how even firm advocates of the Documentary Hypothesis vigorously disagree on source identifications throughout Exodus. In his 1987 The Making of the Pentateuch, Whybray reviews the history of the Documentary Hypothesis and the two major opposing views:
1. The “fragmentary hypothesis”—the Pentateuch arose from many individual sources rather than a few major documents (Rendtorff, Blum)
2. The “supplementary hypothesis”—the Pentateuch is, at its core, a single work to which a variety of later modifications were made, mostly via relatively small additions (Van Seters)
He argues that the Documentary Hypothesis is the least convincing of the three options.
Biblical Claims for Mosaic Authorship. Moses describes himself in the third person as the author of what he has written at several points in the Pentateuch. Such third-person descriptions are widely attested in all sorts of ancient Near Eastern literature. For example:
• Moses mentions how God told him to write down the story of the Israelites’ encounter with the Amalekites at Rephidim (Exod 17:14).
• He describes that God instructed him to write down the law (Exod 24:4; 34:1, 27–28; Deut 31:9, 24).
• He describes how God required he write down, at His dictation, the “Song of Moses” (Deut 31:19–22, referring to the song in Exod 32).
• In Deut 31:24, Moses claims that he wrote all of Deuteronomy. Alternatively, the verse may refer to all of the law from Exod 20 onward.
Though kings were normally the ones to issue laws, Moses never claims that he is royalty. In this sense, he is unique in the usual ancient Near Eastern legal corpus’ orientation toward monarchical law (see, e.g., Watts, “The Legal Characterization of Moses in the Rhetoric of the Pentateuch”).
Moses claims to be a sort of secretary to God—a scribe with no authority of his own, but who gets everything he writes down via the direct revelation of Yahweh. For example, in Num 15 and Num 27, Moses must ask God how to resolve certain issues; he has no authority to issue an answer himself.
Even though Moses is a key character in many of the issues and developments of the book of Exodus, he carefully presents himself in a literarily impersonal way. As a result, the focus is on Yahweh and Yahweh’s covenant law rather than Moses (see Machinist, “The Man Moses,” 18–19, 53).
Moses appears to have departed from usual practice by referring to his authorship within the Pentateuch. He may have done so to lend authority to those works from within rather than through an external title or superscription.
If Moses wrote during the wilderness years after the exodus from Egypt, he may have been seeking to maintain credibility with Israelites who needed to know an authoritative and trustworthy story of their national history. This is especially true of the new generation born in the wilderness as well as those who had joined with Israel from other ethnic groups (Exod 12:38), who would have been ignorant, and perhaps even skeptical, of most of Israelite history.
Text
The text of the book of Exodus is well preserved in the Masoretic Tradition, likely because of the work of Ezra. Ezra probably brought a copy of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets—carefully preserved and well-edited—from Babylon to Jerusalem in 458 BC (see Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies). Israelites believed that Holy Scripture should be carefully preserved. For example, the text of Neh 8 was copied many dozens of times before it came into the form now known as the Masoretic Text (MT), as exemplified by the best early complete manuscript from that tradition, the Leningrad Codex of AD 1008.
The Septuagint (LXX) confirms the vast majority of MT readings; in a few places, it also contains some longer readings. In much of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets, the LXX does not expand the text; rather, the MT of these books tends to leave things out and shorten the overall text slightly. Few of these omissions have any significant effect on the interpretation of the book of Exodus or any full passage.
Occasionally, the Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls, also called Q or DSS) evidence helps resolve textual questions. However, only about 50 Qumran readings are long enough and different enough from the MT to serve as legitimate comparison texts (compare Fitzmeyer, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study). Though the Vulgate, Peshitta, or the Aramaic Targum of Exodus will occasionally provide further information for a text option, these three texts usually simply add weight to what the LXX and Qumran readings already attest to. The text of Exodus is more free of problems than most Old Testament books.
Date and Historical Reliability
Evidence. Little extrabiblical evidence supports the events described in Exodus. As a result, arguments both for and against the book’s historicity have been made. The lack of written Egyptian evidence for the exodus may be a result of the pride of the ancient Egyptians.
Wheeler argues that the ancient Egyptian mindset would have found it almost impossible to record anything about the exodus, the plagues, or other events that showed the weakness of Egypt, its leaders, or its people. Egyptians believed that writing could create reality—it had the power to control the forces of the cosmos.
They would have believed that writing down the story of Yahweh’s domination over their gods (Exod 12:12), the killing of the firstborn, and the other plagues (Exod 10:7) would fix these events in reality, giving them a currency and a continuation that would be harmful for the future of Egypt (Wheeler, “Ancient Egypt’s Silence about the Exodus,” 257–64).
Date. No surviving evidence from Egypt points to a date for the exodus. The route of the exodus and the location of Mount Sinai are also debated. Arguments include:
• A 15th-century exodus and the location of Mount Sinai as Jebel Musa in the Sinai Peninsula. This date is supported by 1 Kgs 6:1.
• A 13th-century exodus and a strictly Midianite (northwest Saudi Arabian) location for Mount Sinai.
• A 14th-century exodus (1312 BC) during the reign of Pharaoh Horemheb (Adler, “Dating the Exodus: A New Perspective,” 44–51).
• Horn argues for the traditional southern route of the exodus and the traditional Jebel Musa in the southern Sinai as Mount Sinai (Horn, “What We Don’t Know about Moses and the Exodus,” 22–31; see also Millard, “How Reliable is Exodus?”).
Arguments have been advanced to support such historical claims in Exodus as:
• The rapid increase of the Israelite population in northeast Egypt (see Cohen, “The Fertility of the Early Israelites,”)
• The Egyptian killing of male infants to control the population
• Moses’ ability to access the pharaoh even though he was from the slave class
• The plagues
• The Israelites’ ability to escape from Egypt while being pursued by chariot-mounted Egyptian troops
• The Israelites’ ability to encamp at Mount Sinai although it didn’t have a water supply capable of supporting so many people
Many people seeking the location of Mount Sinai have first considered volcanoes that may have been active in biblical times; they argue that the glory cloud atop Sinai was merely smoke from a volcano. However, this is unlikely. Both Moses and the Israelite elders actually enter the cloud (Exod 24:9–11). Furthermore, other biblical storm theophanies contain similar descriptions without any hint of volcanic activity (see Niehaus, God at Sinai).
Pharaoh
Native Egyptian or Asiatic Hyksos? The pharaoh “who did not know about Joseph” (Exod 1:8) was probably a native Egyptian pharaoh who rose to power sometime after the overthrow of the Asiatic Hyksos conqueror-occupiers. Joseph, who was also Asiatic, could have risen to prominence under the Asiatic Hyksos pharaohs.
However, a native pharaoh could have had warm feelings toward Israelites; in general, the Bible suggests that Egyptian—Israelite relations were not regularly hostile. Many Israelites throughout the Bible sought refuge in Egypt (e.g., Isa 19:23–25; see McHatten, “Israel and Egypt during the Exodus”; see also Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt; Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament).
Name. Exodus does not identify the name of the pharaohs in the narrative—including the pharaoh(s) under whose protection Moses was raised, the pharaoh who sought to kill him, and the pharaoh of the exodus. It is not necessary to assume that this was a result of the fact that the writer of the early chapters of Exodus lived long after the time described and didn’t know who the pharaohs were.
Moses may have intentionally kept the pharaohs nameless as a way of reducing the leader of the greatest national power of the day to a mere office (the word “pharaoh” means simply “big house”).
Structure
The book of Exodus is presented in two main parts:
1. Exodus 1–19 tells the story of God’s rescue of the people of Israel from Egypt and His bringing them to Mount Sinai.
2. Exodus 20–40 describes His covenant with them, made as they encamped at Mount Sinai.
In a primarily oral culture, the grouping of materials into two discernible blocks helped people remember the material by associating it with similar content in that same half of the book. For example, Moses has included some narrative within the mainly legal/covenant “half” of the book, such as the story of the ratification of the covenant in Exod 24.
By doing so, he indicates how important or how difficult it was for the Israelites to fully agree to honor the covenant they had been graciously provided by their God. He has also included some law within the pre-Sinai covenant part of the book (such as Passover observance), since it pleased God to start revealing that law at the first occasion of observing it (e.g., Exod 12).
Exodus addresses two broad topics:
1. Deliverance of a group of people from submission to their oppressors to submission to God
2. The constitution of that people as a people of God
Exodus is about both rescue from human bondage and rescue from sin’s bondage. Another way to characterize the two parts of the book is via the idea of servitude: in Egypt, Israel was the servant of the Pharaoh; at Sinai, they become God’s servants. These themes are also important for the rest of Scripture. Clifford suggests that Exodus embodies the most basic themes of the Bible so richly that it can be used as an organizing lens for the rest of Scripture, including the New Testament (“The Exodus in the Christian Bible:
The Case for ‘Figural’ Reading”). Getting out of Egypt and to Sinai safely constitutes the first theme of the book. Getting to know God’s covenant is the second theme, including the revelation of how He wishes to be worshiped, as indicated especially by the tabernacle focus of Exod 25–40.
Exodus is not a separate, independent work but a subsection of the Pentateuch. Exodus 1 follows closely on Gen 50; it constitutes the beginning of a new section of a larger work rather than the beginning of a new work. Likewise, Exodus 40 concludes only the portion that brings the reader to the point that the tabernacle is built and ready for use as Israel’s worship center. Ultimately, Exodus is a substructure; the bigger picture is the first five books of the Bible. Exodus comprises one integral part of that picture.
Theology
In Exodus 6:6–8, God outlines what He is doing for the Israelites and presents them with a definition of how they are to think of themselves in relation to Him: “Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.’ ” These three verses summarize the principal theological message of the book.
Stuart, D. (2012). Exodus, Book of. In J. D. Barry & L. Wentz (Eds.), The Lexham Bible Dictionary (J. D. Barry & L. Wentz, Ed.). Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.
