Throughout the history of the church, many Christians have held that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible (Genesis-Deuteronomy), also known as the Pentateuch or Torah. However, many modern critical scholars argue that Moses didn’t write a single word of it. 

I would like to present something much more modest in this post: even if you believe Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, the text itself demonstrates that a later scribe or editor changed and added to the books after the originals were written.

To put it differently, Moses did not write every word of the Pentateuch. Here are 3 examples from the text to demonstrate this. 

Example 1: The Death of Moses

Let’s start with an obvious example. The end of Deuteronomy (34:1-12) records an event of Moses’ story that he probably wouldn’t write himself: his obituary! Deuteronomy 34:5-6 reads:

“So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, in accordance with the word of the Lord. And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor; but no one knows his burial place to this day.”

Not only is it clear that the author of this text wrote this after Moses had died, but there are also several clues that a significant amount of time must have passed between Moses’ death and when this was written. For starters, enough time had passed to where no one knew where Moses’ grave was anymore. Verse 6 also includes the phrase “to this day” indicating that this author lived long after Moses.

Lastly, Deuteronomy 34:10 states, “Since that time no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses.” Now, what impact would this statement have if only a year or so had passed since Moses’ death? Clearly, it had to be a significant amount of time. 

Example 2:  The Most Humble Man 

The Pentateuch contains several negative stories about Moses, such as the fact that he never entered the Promised Land (Deut. 34:4). I could see Moses owning up to his mistakes and including these stories. However, I couldn’t see Moses as the kind of person who would write this statement in Numbers 12:3 about himself:

“Now the man Moses was very humble, more than any person who was on the face of the earth.”

If someone went around saying, “Look at me, I am the most humble on the planet,” you would probably think the opposite about them. 

Scholars have long recognized that this is probably an editorial comment that was added to the text sometime after Moses.¹ Since Moses is consistently portrayed as being very close to God in these stories, perhaps the editor is trying to ground Moses’ humanity for the audience.

Example 3: “To This Day” 

We already mentioned the phrase “to this day” regarding the unknown location of Moses’ grave in Deuteronomy 34. This phrase appears several other times in the Pentateuch and is used to notify the reader that things had not changed since the event had taken place (see Gen. 26:33; 32:32; 47:26; Deut. 2:22; 3:14; 10:8). 

But perhaps the most significant example where this phrase appears is in Deuteronomy 29:24-28, which reads:

“All the nations will say, ‘Why has the Lord done all this to this land? Why this great outburst of anger?’ Then people will say, ‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt. And they went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods that they have not known and whom He had not assigned to them. Therefore, the anger of the Lord burned against that land, to bring upon it every curse which is written in this book; and the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger, fury, and in great wrath, and hurled them into another land, as it is this day.’”

We need to think through Israel’s history for a moment in order to catch the significance of how the phrase “as it is this day” is being used in this passage.

At this point in their history, Israel had not entered the promised land yet, which takes place later in the book of Joshua. After they entered the promised land, there was the period of the judges and then the monarchy. So the people remained in the land during this time.

However, the first time that Israel was “hurled into another land” was when the northern kingdom fell in 722 BC. This period is known as the Assyrian exile and is recorded in 2 Kings 17:6-20. This passage in 2 Kings tells us why they were exiled, which are the same reasons mentioned in Deuteronomy 29: Israel “rejected His statues and His covenant” (2 Kings 17:15), “abandoned all the commandments of the LORD” (2 Kings 17:16), and “feared other gods” (2 Kings 17:7).   

If you haven’t stopped reading yet, what I am trying to say is that the editor added/updated Deuteronomy 29 at some point after the northern kingdom had fallen in 722 BC.² The editor did this so that his audience and later readers would know that Israel was in exile because they had worshiped other gods.

Key Takeaways

There are so many more examples we could look at, but I think you get the point. At least one editor, probably centuries after Moses, tweaked the books of the Pentateuch into what we have today. In other words, Moses did not write every single word from Genesis 1:1 through Deuteronomy 34:12. At the very least, this shows that the process of how we got the Bible is more complicated than we might first imagine.

There are two principles I think we can take from this.

1. Accept the Bible for What It Is

First, as I mentioned in this previous post on Inspiration and Inerrancy, we must accept the Scriptures as they are, not as we would like them to be. I believe that the entire Bible is inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16). So that means the best way to discover the process of God’s inspiration is to read and study the “finished product” of the Bible. The Bible is an amazing library filled with beautiful poetry, thrilling narratives, thought-provoking parables, history, theology and so much more. We submit to the authority of the Bible by accepting it as it comes to us.

2. Acknowledge the Human-ness of the Bible

Second, the Bible is a very human book in a very real sense. The Bible didn’t just fall out of the sky. God allowed the Bible to be edited and compiled together long after the individual books were written. God allowed Paul to use a scribe to write the book of Romans for him (Rom. 16:22). God allowed the Bible to be translated into many different languages. Simply put, God allowed imperfect humans to write, add, edit, compile, transcribe, copy, and translate the Bible. 

When we accept the Bible for what it is and acknowledge its human-ness, we will begin to see its beautiful complexity. Instead of viewing the Bible as a problem to be solved, we will begin to view the Bible as a treasure map to be explored. We will see the Bible as God intended it to be.

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1. John D. Barry et al., Faithlife Study Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012, 2016), Nu 12:3.
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2. John D. Barry et al., Faithlife Study Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012, 2016), Dt 29:27–28. ↩︎