Introduction 📜
Frederick Moriarty writes:
“Like the other books of the Pentateuch, which both Jewish and Christian traditions attach to the name of Moses, Nm is a compilation of several sources embodying material from different stages of Israel’s history. It is even misleading and anachronistic to call Nm a ‘book’ as we understand the term today; we should rather speak of a very complex assemblage of historical, legal, and liturgical traditions spanning a period of approximately 1000 years. Analysis of Nm reveals that the J, E, and P traditions predominate, the last impressing on Nm its own peculiar spirit and character. The J and E traditions in Nm cannot be separated easily; they were probably drawn together, or conflated, shortly after the destruction of Samaria in 721. Both traditions were subject to the editorial control of P, and it is generally agreed that the P tradition has given Nm its final form.” (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 86)

Dennis T. Olson writes:
“The first census list in Numbers 1 introduces the first half of the book, which includes chaps. 1-25. The first half of Numbers recounts the eventual death of the old generation of God’s people out of Egypt as they march in the wilderness toward the promised land. The death of this old generation who had experienced the Exodus and Sinai events is precipitated by the people’s continued rebellion against God, coming to a climax in the spy story in chaps. 13-14. “The second census list in Numbers 26 introduces the second half of the book, which includes chaps. 26-36. This second half of the book recounts the emergence of a new generation of God’s people as they prepare to enter the promised land. The theme of this part of Numbers is not rebellion and death, but new life and hope. This overarching structure of the death of the old generation and the birth of a new generation of hope provides the interpretive framework for the other varied contents of the book of Numbers.” (Harper’s Bible Commentary, p. 183)

Samuel Sandmel writes on the authorship:
“Genesis through Numbers, as we have been saying, is basically a Priestly creation. The narratives, especially the older ones, were mostly assembled by P rather than originally written by him. Most of the legislation, however, was written by P—or, rather, rewritten, for much of it is inherited from ancient times. P’s accomplishment was to set the complex, almost codified legislation into the framework of a reconstruction of Hebrew history. Without the history, the legislation would hang in mid-air. The question, ‘What shall a man do?’ would not have been merged with the question, ‘What shall a man think?’” (The Hebrew Scriptures, p. 401)

Textual Issues of the book of Numbers 📜

1. Date, provenance, and historicity

Chronology:

Authorship

1. History of Scholarship

“As regards the historical value of Numbers, the book contains a large amount of priestly materials (see ahead for details), and, as the foregoing discussion already suggests, these have generally been dated late and considered as unhistorical. Narrative materials have also generally been considered as unhistorical (cf. the commentary section), and, in any case, many of them depict events in the desert that would be difficult to verify externally.”

“This model was abandoned due to the lack of archaeological evidence for an Israelite conquest at sites such as Ai (Josh 7–8), Jericho (Josh 2, 6), Gibeon (Josh 9) and Arad (Josh 12:14; Num 21:1–3).”

Richard Elliot Friedman on the authorship of the Torah

They are also known as the Five Books of Moses. Moses is the major figure in most of these books, and early Jewish and Christian tradition held that Moses wrote them, though nowhere in the Five Books of Moses themselves does the text say that he was the author. But the tradition that one person, Moses, alone wrote these books presented problems. People observed contradictions in the text. It would report events in a particular order, and later say that those same events happened in a different order. It would say that there were two of something, and elsewhere it would say that there were fourteen of that same thing. It would say that the Moabites did something, and later it would say that it was the Midianites who did it. It would describe Moses as going to a Tabernacle in a chapter before Moses built the Tabernacle. People also noticed that the Five Books of Moses included things that Moses could not have known or was not likely to have said. The text, after all, gave an account of Moses’ death. It also said that Moses was the humblest man on earth, and normally one would not expect the humblest man on earth to point out that he is the humblest man on earth.
In the eleventh century, Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish court physician of a ruler in Muslim Spain, pointed out that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named kings who lived long after Moses was dead. Ibn Yashush suggested that the list was written by someone who lived after Moses. The response to his conclusion was that he was called “Isaac the blunderer.”
The man who labeled him Isaac the blunderer was Abraham ibn Ezra, a twelfth-century Spanish rabbi. Ibn Ezra added, “His book deserves to be burned.” But, ironically, ibn Ezra himself included several enigmatic comments in his own writings that hint that he had doubts of his own. He alluded to several biblical passages that appeared not to be from Moses’ own hand: passages that referred to Moses in the third person, used terms that Moses would not have known, described places where Moses had never been, and used language that reflected another time and locale from those of Moses. Nonetheless, ibn Ezra apparently was not willing to say outright that Moses was not the author of the Five Books. He simply wrote, “And if you understand, then you will recognize the truth.” And in another reference to one of these contradictory passages, he wrote, “And he who understands will keep silent.” In the fourteenth century, in Damascus, the scholar Bonfils accepted ibn Ezra’s evidence but not his advice to keep silent. Referring to the difficult passages, Bonfils wrote explicitly, “And this is evidence that this verse was written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it; rather one of the later prophets wrote it. ” Bonfils was not denying the revealed character of the text. He still thought that the passages in question were written by “one of the later prophets.” He was only concluding that they were not written by Moses. Still, three and a half centuries later, his work was reprinted with the references to this subject deleted.
In the third stage of the investigation, investigators concluded outright that Moses did not write the majority of the Pentateuch. The first to say it was the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century. Hobbes collected numerous cases of facts and statements through the course of the Five Books that were inconsistent with Mosaic authorship. For example, the text sometimes states that something is the case “to this day.” “To this day” is not the phrase of someone describing a contemporary situation. It is rather the phrase of a later writer who is describing something that has endured.
Scholars could open the book of Genesis and identify the writing of two or even three authors on the same page. And there was also the work of the editor, the person who had cut up and combined the source documents into a single story; and so as many as four different persons could have contributed to producing a single page of the Bible. Investigators were now able to see that a puzzle existed and what the basic character of the puzzle was. But they still did not know who the authors of any of the four old source documents were, when they lived, or why they wrote. And they had no idea who the mysterious editor was who had combined them, nor did they have any idea why this person had combined them in this complex way.
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Numbers 1:47-54 as unhistorical