Major funding for "The Bible's Buried Secrets" is provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and the Righteous Persons Foundation.





Additional funding for this program is provided by the Skirball Foundation and by The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation.

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Transcript

PETER MACHINIST (Harvard University): The way to understand Israel's relationship to the super powers—Egypt and Mesopotamia on either side—is to understand its own sense of its fragility as a people. The primary way in which the Bible looks at the origins of Israel is as a people coming to settle in the land of Israel. It's not indigenous; it's not a native state.

NARRATOR: The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of Israel's origins. The first is Abraham, who leaves Mesopotamia with his family and journeys to the "Promised Land," Canaan.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible, "Revised Standard Version," Genesis 12:1 and 2): The Lord said to Abraham, "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation. And I will bless you. I will make your name great."

NARRATOR: According to the Bible, this promise establishes the covenant, a sacred contract between God and Abraham. To mark the covenant, Abraham and all males are circumcised; his descendents will be God's chosen people. They will be fruitful, multiply and inhabit all the land between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In return, Abraham and his people, who will become the Israelites, must worship a single god.

THOMAS CAHILL: This is a new idea. It was an idea that no one had ever had before. God, in our sense, doesn't exist before Abraham.

NARRATOR: It is hard to appreciate today how radical an idea this must have been in a world dominated by polytheism, the worship of many gods and idols.

The Abraham narrative is part of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, along with Noah and the flood, and Adam and Eve. Though they convey a powerful message, to date, there is no archaeology or text outside of the Bible to corroborate them.

DAVID ILAN (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion): The farther back you go in the biblical text, the more difficult it is to find historical material in it. The patriarchs go back to Genesis. Genesis is, for the most part, a compilation of myths, creation stories, things like that, and to find a historical core there is very difficult.

NARRATOR: This absence of historical evidence leads scholars to take a different approach to reading the biblical narrative. They look beyond our modern notion of fact or fiction, to ask why the Bible was written in the first place.

WILLIAM DEVER: There is no word for history in the Hebrew Bible. The biblical writers were telling stories. They were good historians and they could tell it the way it was when they wanted to, but their objective was always something far beyond that.

NARRATOR: So what was their objective? To find out, scholars must uncover who wrote the Bible and when.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible, "Revised Standard Version," Exodus 34:27) And the Lord said to Moses, "Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I make a covenant with you and with Israel."

NARRATOR: The traditional belief is that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, the story of creation; Exodus, deliverance from slavery to the Promised Land; Leviticus; Numbers; and Deuteronomy, laws of morality and observance.

Still read, to this day, together they form the Torah, often called the "Five Books of Moses."

MICHAEL COOGAN (Stonehill College): The view that Moses had personally written down the first five books of the Bible was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century. There were a few questions raised about this, for example, the very end of the last book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, describes the death and burial of Moses. And so, some rabbis said, "Well, Moses couldn't have written those words himself, because he was dead and was being buried."

NARRATOR: And digging deeper into the text, there are even more discrepancies.

MICHAEL COOGAN: For example, how many of each species of animals is Noah supposed to bring into the ark? One text says two, a pair of every kind of animal; another text says seven pair of the clean animals and only two of the unclean animals.

NARRATOR: In one chapter, the Bible says the flood lasts for 40 days and 40 nights, but in the next it says 150 days. To see if the floodwaters have subsided, Noah sends out a dove. But in the previous sentence, he sends a raven. There are two complete versions of the flood story interwoven on the same page.

Many similar discrepancies, throughout its pages, suggest that the Bible has more than one writer. In fact, within the first five books of the Bible, scholars have identified the hand of at least four different groups of scribes, writing over several hundred years. This theory is called the Documentary Hypothesis.

MICHAEL COOGAN: One way of thinking about it is as a kind of anthology that was made, over the course of many centuries, by different people adding to it, subtracting from it and so forth.

NARRATOR: But when did the process of writing the Bible begin?