Announcer: Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Fr. Stephen De Young teaches verse by verse on the podcast The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies and is an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. And I don't have a "when we get started" because we're starting over.

We're beginning at the beginning, which is a very good place to start, or so Rodgers and Hammerstein would have us believe.

So most of tonight, as I mentioned, is probably going to be introduction.

I'm not, as I mentioned, going to do introduction to the Bible as such because there's a recently published book about that that people can pick up if they want that.

I am, however— We're going to do sort of an introduction to the Torah as a whole, and then an introduction to the book of Genesis.

And that's why I'm imagining that's going to take up most of tonight to kind of set the stage,

and then, presumably, Lord willing, next week, we'll actually start with Genesis 1:1 and go from there.

So, as I said, we'll begin with an introduction to the Torah.

As a whole, the Torah is the first five books of the Bible, otherwise known as the Pentateuch—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—

that is and has, as far as we can tell—as far as we have evidence—always circulated as a unit—

as we go on tonight, we'll talk a little more about that—

but as a unit of five books, often contained on one big scroll, sometimes on five individual scrolls.

And that unit is the first basic building block of the whole concept of Scriptures.

So that's the beginning.

And when the other books of the Hebrew Bible, Christian Old Testament, when those are called Scriptures, they're being called Scriptures in connection with the Torah.

They're saying these things are like the Torah, like the Pentateuch, like those that we all agree on.

The gospels are going to come to play—and we'll talk more about this—a kind of similar role in the New Testament to what the Torah played in the Old Testament.

But the Old Testament—And I just did it so I'll explain.

I just said the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament.

Those are technically two different things.

Because the Hebrew Bible is the list of books written in Hebrew that's accepted by later Rabbinic Judaism.

The Christian Old Testament has more books than that. In some cases it's based on different Hebrew texts than that.

And I said that deliberately.

It's not based on the Greek text.

The Greek text— where the Greek text is different, it's different because it's based on different Hebrew texts.

It's not that the Greek translators sort of went into business for themselves and added things and changed things.

They were working from, we now know, from a different set of texts.

But there are also additional books in the Christian Old Testament. So those two things are not necessarily the same thing.

So the Torah is the beginning of that.

The word torah literally means in Hebrew: teaching.

So that's kind of a broad category, just teaching. You can teach just about anything.

And the reason I comment on how broad that category is is that there's a whole history of translation coming down to us where now in English we usually refer to it as the Law.

And teaching and law, the way it's used in modern English, you can see there's a disjunction there, right? in terms of the concepts.

So how does that happen?

When the word torah gets translated into Greek, it gets translated as the Greek word nomos.

And the word nomos is also a kind of broad word.

So nomos refers to what would include like the laws of a people or a place, but also includes what we would call customs, mores, a way of life. It includes religion.

So in Greek they could talk about the nomos of Athens.

And that would include the worship of Athena and Hephaestus. It would include the laws that govern— and the constitution that govern the city. It included their customs, their way of life, the way they manage their household.

Sort of all of that would be included in the nomos of Athens.

And so the idea when that translation was formed in the third century B.C., when they settled on nomos, was: This is the nomos of the Jewish people. This is the nomos of Israel or the nomos of Judea.

Q1: It includes culture?

Fr. Stephen: It includes all that: the whole way they live and govern themselves and worship and all of that. Right? It's sort of all balled up in that.

Yeah, so a very broad definition of culture, like all of that.

And that was sometimes opposed in Greek philosophy—

They would talk about what is by nature, like physis, and what is by nomos.

So, for example, the speed limit, right, is not the result of nature. There's nothing about the nature of the road necessarily that requires a certain speed limit.

You could see this, because you could have a stretch of road where the speed limit gets changed over time.

Rather, the speed limit is by nomos, by custom, convention, cultural rule. It is imposed—but it can be otherwise.

Something that would be by nature would be like, for most Greeks, philosophers at least, would be something like murder being a crime.

Or stealing another person's personal property.

That's not just a convention or a cultural thing; this is something that is by nature wrong.

And there could be things that were by nature good, regardless of what the customs and laws and all those things were.

But, so nomos was a pretty decent translation of Torah in that it included all of those elements.

But you can even see a little bit of a shift there, because Torah, the teaching, this is teaching from God to humanity is the idea.

Whereas when you get to the third century and Judea is this one nation in the midst of a whole bunch of others, it's sort of: oh, well, that's their ways. [Laughter]

It's sort of a more relativized kind of idea.

So nomos gets translated. When St. Jerome translates the Bible into Latin, he translates it as lex.

And this is where the trouble starts to set in, right?

Lex in the fifth century when St. Jerome used it included most of what nomos included, that it wasn't just the law like the civil law, but could also include customs and mores and folk traditions and that kind of thing.

But it didn't necessarily include religion already.

It was more— because you've got to think of how the Romans used Latin, so it was much more.

And Jerome— St. Jerome was aware of the shift in meaning, and what he seems to have been trying to get at—

And where I'm getting this from is St. Jerome, in addition to translating the Bible, he wrote those introductions to the books of the Bible,

where he talks about how and why he translated certain things, and what he thinks is important about the book and other things like that.

And what he seems to have been doing is he was trying to bring this into the kingdom of God idea.

So there's the kingdom of God. The king issues laws. And these are the laws issued by the king.

That was kind of his approach and why he chose what he chose.

But there's already kind of some slippage there.

And then over time, lex comes to just mean, over the course of the medieval period, lex comes to mean something more like what "law" means in the modern world, where we talk about civil law.

And the problem with talking about it as law—

we talked about this a little bit when we were reading St. Paul's epistles, because in the English translations of St. Paul's epistles, he's always talking about the law in the English translation.

And when we hear law, and we think about the Torah, we only think about part of the Torah.

We think about the commandments.

When we say law, we think: Oh, commandments, rules, legislation, right?

But the whole book of Genesis that we're about to start on is part of the Torah—and it's mostly stories.

The first half of the book of Exodus is part of the Torah, that's describing the people being brought out of Egypt under Moses, going to Mount Sinai.

That part with the commandments and laws proper doesn't really kick in until near the end of the book of Exodus.

And then it's Leviticus, parts of the book of Numbers and parts of the book of Deuteronomy.

So you're only getting about half the Torah if you just are thinking of commandments.

So this is a much wider category, including when St. Paul is talking about it.

So if we get back to it, this is why I use the word Torah more often.

Pentateuch is fine. That's just five books, right? Which it is; it's five books.

But Torah really conveys this idea that this is God's instruction to humanity through Moses, and God can teach in a variety of ways.

He can teach by telling you a story, right?

Christ did that all the time. He taught by telling people stories, right?

He can teach by giving you direct commandments.

He can teach by the record of how he interacted with people in the past.

But he can teach about himself and the world and how the world should be and how we should be and interact in the world.

He can do that through a variety of means.

That's why I think Torah and teaching is the best overarching way still to kind of look at this that will encompass the whole thing and help us see the connections between these things,

because once I get done with the introduction of the Torah and get to Genesis proper, Genesis is sort of the prologue to this whole thing.

We tend to read Genesis in isolation, and even stories in Genesis sort of, as these isolated stories without thinking about: Well, how does this connect to what happens at Exodus and the rest of this? But really it's the lead into that.

But so back to the Torah proper.

So as I mentioned, this is the teaching of God to humanity through Moses.

Pentateuch, these are the five books. They're the five books of Moses, sometimes just referred to as Moses.

So what does it mean to say Moses wrote the Torah? Or Moses wrote the Pentateuch?

And this is a little bit of a can of worms, but I'm not going to go all the way down this rabbit-hole.

I'm just going to move across this rabbit-hole and refer to elements of the whole that we can see from the surface.

So it has been traditional—not just in Christianity, but well before Christianity proper, before anyone was called a Christian, well back into the period of ancient Israel—that these books were attributed to Moses.

And even the word "book"—

The word book really means scroll. It's a question of how many scrolls this text took up.

But that these were attributed to Moses.

We talked about, when we talked about the epistles of St. Paul, that the epistle of St. Paul actually means different things with different epistles, because like some of them he has a listed co-author.

At the beginning it says: Paul and Timothy.

So that it's still an epistle of St. Paul, but it's that in a different sense than, like, Galatians that's just from St. Paul, or these other things.

So in the ancient world the idea that these are the books of Moses never gets super defined as to what that means. Everyone just kind of accepts it.

Proverbs is referred to as "Solomon" even though there's stuff in Proverbs that says it wasn't written by Solomon.

It says: these proverbs from— and it's someone other than Solomon.

The Psalms get referred to as "David" even though there are psalms where it says this is written by the sons of Korah, this is written by Moses in the case of Psalm 90.

So they never felt the need to like really button in, like: So are you saying that Moses wrote exactly these words, in this way at this particular time?

They didn't get into that.

They didn't get into: Well wait a minute. The end of Deuteronomy talks about Moses dying. Did he write that?

They didn't get into those questions. [Laughter] These are from Moses. That was sort of good enough.

Once you get into the Early Modern period, particularly in Western Europe, that wasn't good enough anymore. That wasn't good enough anymore.

Part of this is related to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, because when the Protestant Reformation began, one of the basic principles of the Protestant Reformation was sola scriptura,

which meant that— which doesn't mean we ignore everything except the Bible, at least it didn't originally—

it meant everything else is submitted to the authority of the Bible.

Well, one of the very first counter-arguments that they received from the Roman Catholic Church was: Well, how do you know what's in the Bible? [Laughter]

Because there's not a table of contents in the Bible.

And they said: See? You only have it on the Church's authority what's in the Bible.

And so the counter to that from the Protestant Reformers was to try to come up with criteria that had nothing to do with the later Church to sort of validate the books that were in their Bible.

One of the key ones in the New Testament was the authority of the author.

So this is written by an apostle.

The gospels are written by eyewitnesses.

And that's what makes it canonical, not a decision made by the Church or a tradition of the Church or whatever later. It's: this is the person who wrote it.

And, without going all the way down that rabbit-hole, you could make a better argument for that with the New Testament than with a lot of the Old Testament, because there's a lot of the Old Testament where we don't know who wrote it.

Like who wrote 1 and 2 Kings? Or 3 and 4 Kingdoms? It doesn't say. We don't know exactly who wrote it. So that makes that harder.

But when it came to the Torah, to the Pentateuch, they said well see this comes from Moses, and that's what makes it authoritative.

So once you get fully into the Modern period, you then have people who want to attack the authority of the Bible.

And since in the Protestant Reformation—

And most of these people wanting to attack the authority of the Bible at least come from a Protestant background. Some of them still identified as Protestants.

These are our 18th- and 19th-century German friends, who mostly still considered themselves Lutherans, despite what they were doing.

I recently read a quote from Wellhausen, who's going to come up again in a minute.

[Julius] Wellhausen, who was one of these German scholars, who really did a number on the Torah or the Pentateuch, who actually had later in his life—

I don't know if I would describe it as a moment of guilt or repentance or what—but he actually resigned as a theology professor,

because he said that he realized that what he was teaching about the Bible was making future ministers unfit for their profession.

Like he sort of had this moment of awareness of: Hey! Me undermining the authority of the Bible is not helping these future ministers! even though he considered himself to be a good churchman.

But so, because they were from that background, the authority was based on the authority of these authors.

So you see very quickly in the 18th and 19th centuries one of the first attacks of the authority of the Bible is: The people who you say wrote this stuff didn't write it.

So St. Paul didn't write half those epistles, none of the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, all of that stuff.

And they very quickly went after the idea that Moses—

So the early versions of that were: Moses couldn't have written anything at all.

Archeology wasn't real great then. They didn't have a good sense of the ancient world.

Various reasons why he couldn't have written anything at all.

And, interestingly enough, in trying to defend the idea that Moses could have written the Torah, a fellow came up with the idea that he used source material, multiple pieces of source material.

And this became known as the documentary hypothesis, or if you've been reading a book about the Old Testament, they start talking about J and E and D and P and all that stuff. Yeah. [Laughter]

That's actually— Wellhausen actually came up with those labels, the aforementioned Wellhausen.

But that was actually originally thought up by a guy trying to defend Moses having written it, but then quickly got taken over as: Oh, see, this proves Moses didn't write any of it.

Q2: When did Moses have the time to sit down and write?

Fr. Stephen: What!? Well, there are places where Moses is said to have written things, in the Torah itself.

And having been raised in the Egyptian court, he would have been literate, highly literate, in multiple languages.

And we know that because we have letters from this period, written from Egypt to other nations in the Near East,

which means they were on tablets written in cuneiform by Egyptians, who did not use cuneiform themselves.

So their scribes were very well-educated in the other languages at the time.

Now, that's a whole different Semitic language group than Egyptian. These are totally different languages, but they were able to translate back and forth and had a lot of contact.

But so they really went to town.

The idea there quickly— I'm not— Again, there's another rabbit-hole I'm not going all the way down, but—

The original idea between the J E D P thing was:

J and E—the J is short for Jehovah, because you have to remember what this was. [Laughter]

And the E is for Elohim, the word in Hebrew we normally translate as "God."

So they said: Well, there's some places in the Torah that refer to God as Yahweh, and there's some other places in the Torah that refer to God as just God, Elohim.

And so they decided: Well, this is originally two different sources:

So there was one text that called God Yahweh, and another one that called him Elohim, and they've been brought together here.

So you may ask: What about all the places that refer to him as "Yahweh Elohim"?

Ah, see? That's where they tried to blend it together to hide the fact, yes, that it was two different documents. [Laughter]

Yes, sir?

Q1: Somebody recently has come up with a book that said it was supposed to be just J.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, so as we go down this road—

Well, let me finish. I'll get back to that.

So that was J and E. So they divided these two things.

And then they said: Well, Deuteronomy looks kind of different than the other four. So we'll split off. That's D. It's just the book of Deuteronomy. This is a whole separate thing.

And then P stands for priest.

And they said: Oh there's a lot of priesty stuff in here. [Laughter]

And they're like: Well, that can't be part of those older traditions. That must be something the priests came up with later.

And so they said there's sort of this layer of editing, where priests have gone through and messed with things.

But then that wasn't good enough as things went on, because, again, we have to keep publishing journal articles and writing dissertations.

So it got to the point where there was like: J1, J2, J3, E1, E2, E3, these multiple things. [Laughter]

Now, given, no one has ever found a copy or a fragment of any of these hypothetical documents separately, that were supposedly all mixed together. Yeah.

Q1: So it's all this assumption that because it's a different style to the translations, that these are different authors?

Fr. Stephen: There isn't really a different style.

Q1: Well, I know that.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah.

Q3: Well, how did they get there? There had to be an underlying assumption that somebody wrote this...

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the underlying assumption is: one, Moses didn't write this, because Moses probably didn't exist. So that's assumption one.

Assumption two, there's so much diverse material here that it must have come from multiple oral sources and oral traditions.

Q3: But wasn't style and voice more of an issue…?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and as everyone in 18th- and 19th-century Germany was all about, especially 19th-century Germany, this evolutionary presupposition:

Things start very simple, and then they get more and more complex over time, culminating in 19th-century Germany, right? [Laughter]

And that's not just a joke. They say that kind of stuff all the time. You know, they were totally clear that 19th-century German Lutheranism was not just the pinnacle of Christianity; it was the pinnacle of all human religion. See Hegel. [Laughter] It had all been building up to that!

So it's got to develop over time, and if this developed over time then we can backtrack and trace all the pieces.

But then once you've done that you've also completely relativized it. What authority does it have left?

This is just this thing that got thrown together over a long period of time by different people, and there's no mind behind it, Gods or anyone else's. here's no— It's kind of accidental.

Q3: Has any other text in history had this much magnification?

Fr. Stephen: No, and it's because only— That kind of modernism only developed in the West,

and the Bible is the only text that wielded the kind of authority that it wielded in the West.

So they didn't need to—

I mean there are people out there, you know the "William Shakespeare never wrote anything; these are all written by Edward de Vere or someone else"—

Those people are out there, but there's a lot fewer of them than are going after the Bible, because the authority of Shakespeare is much below that of the Bible.

But yeah, you get weird Homer theories, you get weird, you know— but not at the same level.

So— But once you get to where you've got, like, three Js, three Es, two Ps, and a couple of Ds, you're literally at the point where, when you read these articles, they're taking one verse and breaking it into three pieces:

These two words came from J2, these two words came from E2, and this last word came from P.

And you're at just this level of absurdism where it's like—

And then people, they've tried to put together a critical edition of J where they took all the stuff that they thought was J and tried to put it together,

and of course it doesn't work. It doesn't form sentences, let alone coherent stories or anything.

And so that has fortunately mostly fallen apart under its own weight in modern scholarship.

So the whole J and E thing has fallen out of [favor]. Everybody's like: That was kind of dumb.

People can refer to the same God by multiple names.

They looked at other literature from the Ancient Near East and said: You know, they all have a bunch of names for their gods. Maybe the Israelites did, too, a bunch of names for theirs.

So the J and E has fallen out of [favor].

People do still want to try and say Deuteronomy is separate from the others, so you do get that.

And pretty much everybody agrees that, you know, yeah the people who were copying the Torah down through the generations were mostly priests, because they were literate.

But beyond that… I mean I'm sure there's still old professors out there, grinding that axe and stuff, but it's not as big as it used to be.

But you will still see books talking about that is why I mentioned it. [Laughter]

Q1: I was taught it, and I taught it, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So the—

Two pieces now. In terms of, you know: Did Moses write the Torah?

If by "write the Torah"—this is going to sound similar to when we talked about St. Paul—you mean: Did Moses sit down with a piece of parchment from Egypt and a stylus and write exactly the words, the Hebrew words, say, that we have now, then the answer is no,

because the Hebrew words we have now, that version of the Hebrew language, of the oldest versions we have of the Torah, did not exist at the time Moses lived.

So he did not write— He did not personally write down those exact words—

and probably did not record the events following his own death. We'll throw that in, too.

And so what we mean when we say that the Torah is "from Moses" is, number one, as the Torah says, Moses did write.

Moses did record things, and he received things in writing, like the covenant from God that he wrote with his own finger, that he brought down from Mount Sinai.

So there are written documents from Moses that form the basis of what we have.

But then after the time of Moses, this was preserved and handed down.

It was copied. It was translated into the kind of Hebrew that the oldest versions are in.

Those oldest copies that we have, by the way, also are written in Aramaic block letters not in the old Hebrew alphabet.

So it was moved over into those kind of letters at some point, probably early on in that process, the bit about Moses dying and what happened after his death was added onto the end of Deuteronomy.

These things happened.

And so the Torah as we have it today—

And then it got translated into Greek, and then that Greek got translated into the Orthodox Study Bible. [Laughter]

But that..

So, beginning with Moses, there is this tradition that forms into the Torah as we have it today.

And so as we go there will be points, specifically in Exodus and Deuteronomy, where I will make a comment like "This is one of the oldest parts of the Torah,"

and when I say that, a certain number of people listening to this on Ancient Faith later will get triggered,

because they'll say, "Moses wrote all of it!"

Well, you have to understand now, what I mean by This or that is one of the oldest parts of the Torah," I mean, this is a piece that has been handed down to us without any editing.

I will give two examples: Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 32.

Exodus 15, which is the song of the sea, the song that Miriam leads the children of Israel in singing after they cross the Red Sea; and Deuteronomy 32.

These also happen to be the first two biblical odes at matins.

Deuteronomy 32 is another song of Moses.

Those two are in such ancient Hebrew, un-updated, that they are very hard to translate.

The beginning of Deuteronomy 32 in particular is a nightmare to translate.

I know because I've taken advanced Hebrew classes, and the professors have you translate it to be mean. [Laughter]

Because they know you are going to be like: What!? when you get to it.

To the point that people still don't agree—

I mean they have radically different different opinions on a couple verses what they even mean.

Like: Is it talking about Yahweh coming from his holy mountain with the fire of his holy ones in his hand? Or is it talking about him moving through the valley of Kadesh?

Like, that level of like— We're not sure what is going on! because it hasn't been—

So when I say this is one of the oldest portions, what I mean is this hasn't been updated; this hasn't been touched.

This looks like something that could have existed at the time of Moses exactly as is.

Whereas other parts, not only are they updated, but it's explicit in the text that they've been updated.

So it will name a city, and then say, "which used to be called—"

And the "used to be called" is what it would have been called in Moses' time.

So somebody later has updated that.

An example in Genesis:

Eventually when we get to the story of Abraham in Genesis, there is an episode where Lot gets taken captive from Sodom by Chedorlaomer.

When we read it at vespers, "Chedorlaomer" is translated, is transliterated, from Hebrew into Greek, and then from Greek into English, so it's an especially convoluted, weird way of writing it.

But anyway.

So Chedorlaomer takes— and the other kings with him take Lot as one of his captives.

Abram gathers up his 318 mighty men. They go to get Lot back.

And it says: "He pursued them as far as Dan."

Now something should jump out at you about that.

This is Genesis. This is Abraham. This is 2000 BC.

The city of Dan was named after the tribe of Dan, Abraham's great-grandson who hadn't been born yet! [Laughter]

So that's not what it was called at that time! It was called Laish at that time.

But nobody, by the time of our earliest copies of the Torah, knew what Laish was.

They'd never heard of Laish; they'd never heard that name of it.

So somebody had updated it to Dan so people reading it would understand what they were talking about.

It would be like if I tried to describe to you something that happened in Louisiana today, and I used the old native word— I only used old native words for the different locations, like indigenous words.

You'd be like: Where are you talking—?

Baton Rouge. [Laughter]

So it's the same kind of thing. It's to communicate. Yeah.

So we have to understand the Torah is exactly that, as a tradition, as a tradition that's authoritative.

There's still a tendency, especially for folks of a Protestant background, to try to say: Okay, what's the authoritative version? Is there one particular like Greek version of this that's the—? This is the ver—?

That's not how it works. We have this Tradition, and that's good because that has a richness to it, that a single text that we claim is perfect doesn't have that richness that a tradition does.

And that tradition starts with Moses.

Announcer: Listen next time as Fr. Stephen De Young continues his study of the Scriptures on The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen's email address is wholecounsel at ancientfaith.com. That's wholecounsel at ancientfaith.com.