[soft orchestral music]
[intriguing reverent music]
- I grew up hearing stories from the pages of the Bible,
but did they really happen?
This question led me to the ancient lands of the Middle East
searching for patterns of evidence
that matched the Biblical events.
I wasn't prepared for what would be revealed.
[soft mystical music]
I had been interviewing people all over the world for years.
Now, it was time to tell my story.
As a filmmaker, investigating the Exodus
and the writings of Moses,
I was confronted by a new controversy.
Most scholars don't think Moses could have written
the early books of the Bible;
but that is exactly what the Bible is claiming.
These scholars think that Hebrew, the language of the Bible,
wasn't even in existence at the time of Moses.
This is the Moses controversy.
But that is not where my journey began.
I started this investigation back in 2002
searching for the path that Moses and the Israelites
would have taken in their Exodus out of Egypt.
- [Man] Either he was [mumbles] something like that.
- Do what?
What interested me in the beginning
was that I had heard of Exodus explorers
claiming to have found remarkable evidence
of a miraculous sea crossing where the Bible says
God split the waters to allow the Israelites to pass.
But brought the water back down on the Egyptians,
destroying their chariots and army.
These explorers claim to have found the remains
of coral-encrusted chariot wheels
on the bottom of the Red Sea.
[intriguing music]
There were other Exodus explorers claiming to have found
the real location of Mount Sinai
with the remains of altars from the time
when the Israelites met with God,
[thunder crackling]
and where Moses began to write the first books of the Bible.
Could it be that after thousands of years,
the real Exodus story was finally being discovered;
one of the greatest stories of the Bible.
- I think the Exodus story is fundamental
because when you to understand the Bible,
it's the history of Israel.
[singer vocalizing]
Israel has no history apart from the Exodus.
The Exodus defines the Jewish people.
It's their self-identity.
The whole understanding of the Passover,
which throughout the Old Testament,
you see that the Exodus is repeated over and over again.
[singer vocalizing]
- Who would combine Passover offering matza.
- [Randall] It's the God who brought you out of Egypt.
Remember, go back to, these events happened.
[matza crackling]
[singer vocalizing]
- [Timothy] But I also interviewed scholars
who dismissed the books of Moses as fanciful tales
about the origins of the Israelites
not written until long after the events.
This caused me to put my investigation of the sea crossing
and the journey to Mount Sinai on hold.
[birds chirping] [singer vocalizing]
I knew I could not investigate these events
until I first determined whether Moses
even had the ability to write down the details
of the Exodus journey.
This investigation would reveal one of the most profound
discoveries I have ever encountered.
- Another one going along in this direction.
[stirring adventurous music]
- [Timothy] I traveled to some
of today's leading universities to understand why
mainstream scholars don't consider these early events
of the Bible to be historical.
Professor William Dever is one of America's
premier archeologists who specializes
in the history of Israel during Biblical times.
Early in his 50 year career,
he witnessed and actually participated
in a revolutionary change of attitudes towards the Bible
in the field of archeology.
- I made my early reputation warring against
traditional Biblical archeology.
People say Dever's the man who killed Biblical archeology.
No, I only observed its passing and wrote its obituary.
The fact is that sort of archeology,
tryin God to prove the Bible, wasn't working.
I rebelled against my teachers when I was young
because I thought there was much more to learn
with different approaches to archeology.
Today no one does that kind of prove the Bible archeology.
Remember the Biblical writers exaggerate.
Solomon was not quite that great
and David didn't do all those things.
I don't see Moses as the founder of Israelite religion
and most scholars don't today.
- [Timothy] Professor Donald Redford has long been
one of the world's most respected Egyptologists.
He was given the award for Best Scholarly Book in archeology
for his work Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times.
He too is very critical of the early Bible stories,
including the Exodus.
- I would subject the Biblical one to 15 of Exodus
to the same kind of historical probing
that any historian will do.
Who wrote this stuff?
For whom did he write it?
When did he write it?
Very important, what did he know of the topic
he was writing about?
Boy in my research, Exodus one to 15
comes off very negatively.
- What does negatively mean?
- It does not reflect almost anything
to do with the original incident.
[stirring music]
[birds chirping]
- [Timothy] Retired university professor Doug Knight
taught at Vanderbilt's Divinity School.
He co-wrote The Meaning of the Bible,
which is used in numerous colleges and seminaries.
- Did Moses write the Torah?
Frankly I don't think so.
I think it was a product of a lot of other people
much later than his time.
[intriguing music]
- Interestingly, these three leading voices
in the world of archeology, Egyptology, and Biblical studies
have something in common:
All were raised on conservative Bible-believing homes
just as I was.
Over time, these scholars became agnostic;
at least in part because of the challenges they saw
against the Bible, such as the lack of supporting evidence.
Was that sort of the beginning of going from
maybe a fundamentalist believer to an agnostic?
- Yes, very much so.
This is very personal [mumbles] that something had been
put over on me and there was fraudulence involved.
I still feel that way.
[horn blaring]
- By exploring this topic,
would I follow their same path?
Or would I find answers to my questions and keep my faith?
[leaves rustling]
My parents met at a Bible college in Minneapolis.
My mother got her degree in music and my father,
a decorated Korean war vet, was studying to be a pastor.
They married and I was their first child.
[soft piano music]
On weekends we would travel to a country church
in Wisconsin to help with services.
My father, with his military background,
ended up becoming a police officer.
My family grew to include two sisters and a brother.
Every week we attended Sunday School at church
and would hear a different story from the Bible.
That would have been the first time
I learned about Moses and the Exodus.
I would come to believe that these stories were true.
As I grew older, I was taught that Moses was the author
of the first books of the Bible,
also known as the Torah or the Pentateuch.
That is why what Professor Doug Knight said
about the Bible not being written by Moses,
but by multiple authors hundreds of years later
was troubling to me.
I asked Professor Dever about this.
Let's talk about how common the view is
that Moses wrote the Torah among scholars today.
- I don't think any scholars would hold that view today.
Even evangelical scholars
make use of the documentary hypothesis for instance.
Laypeople of course will believe that
and orthodox Jews will believe that, orthodox rabbis.
But I don't think any mainstream scholars
would any longer hold that view.
[foreboding music]
- Did the skepticism of Dever and the others
come from a previous generation's paradigm?
Because there are scholars with a different view.
[soft piano music]
I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky.
I wanted to ask some of the top evangelical scholars
whether they have abandoned the thinking that Moses
wrote the Torah.
The question about Moses' authorship is a question
that I've been investigating.
Do you think Moses authored the first five books?
- I think it comes from Moses himself.
- And it comes from the time period he would have lived?
- [Peter] That's right.
[lock clicking]
- Professor Peter Gentry is a leading expert
in the ancient Near East,
working in a dozen ancient languages
while specializing in Greek and the Semitic family.
He spent 17 years at the University of Toronto
in the same department where Donald Redford taught.
- Many scholars today are just unaware
of the latest advances in research on archeology, history,
how the Hebrews did their writing,
how Hebrew literature works.
All of these things uphold the claims in the text
and show that the criteria used to establish
the documentary hypothesis is completely false.
[soft reverent music]
- Why haven't people acknowledged that?
- I think if you're going to be a real scholar,
if you're going to open yourself to the truth,
we can't just copy what we're taught by our professors.
We have to investigate the evidence.
- Could there be evidence
that the majority of scholars are missing?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized
that the attack on the credibility of the Bible starts here
with the questions of who wrote the Bible
and when was it written?
The Exodus includes a series of fantastic miracles.
It's an account that tells of God
leading the Israelites out of Egypt
across a vast wilderness.
[soft reverent music]
Pharaoh's army of chariots pursues them,
trapping them at the sea.
[stirring music]
Then the sea parted, allowing the Israelites to pass through
but destroying the Egyptians.
The Israelites then went on to Mount Sinai to meet with God
and receive the 10 Commandments.
All this was said to be recorded by Moses
as an eyewitness account that had details
of the route out of Egypt, including camp sites.
To investigate this route, I would need to look at
the geographical descriptions and identifications
given in the text for the journey
because some of these sites might still be locatable.
But if Moses didn't record this
and it was just a later invention,
then what would be the point of searching for evidence
of the route taken by the Israelites?
Since the rest of the Bible
is based on the writings of Moses,
the credibility of the Exodus and the entire Bible
is directly connected to the question of Moses' authorship.
Can any of it be trusted?
So it's clear that the big question in this investigation
needs to be this:
Did Moses have the ability to write the book of Exodus
as an eyewitness account?
[birds chirping]
If Moses began writing the first five books of the Bible
during the Exodus, when did that occur?
That's a dating question that brings us back to Egypt
because it supplies all the archeological dates
for that region of the world.
In a previous film called Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus,
I created a wall of time to help visualize
the different time periods I was investigating.
The wall of time allowed me to simply compare
the events of Egypt's history on the first level
with events recorded in the Bible on the second level.
At the bottom was a timeline of absolute dates
and a movable base to gauge the events of history,
with great pylons marking every thousand years.
[stirring reverent music]
Over the last century, the dominant view among scholars
has been the assumption that if the six steps
of the Exodus happened, it must have been
during Egypt's new kingdom at the time
of its most famous Pharaoh, Ramesses II around 1250 B.C.
This is known as the Ramesses Exodus Theory.
However, my previous investigation
highlighted clear Biblical evidence pointing to
an earlier Exodus state closer to 1450 B.C.,
rather than 1250 B.C.
The kind of writing system Moses used
must have been in place by 1450 B.C.
[soft reverent music] [singer vocalizing]
Throughout history, all known Torah scrolls
were written in Hebrew, the language of the Israelites.
One reason mainstream scholars doubt that
Moses could write the Torah is that they say
there was no form of writing like Hebrew
in existence at the time of the Exodus.
So to establish the possibility that Moses
could have written the first books of the Bible,
I would have to identify a writing system
that Moses could've used that had these components.
It would need to exist by the time of the Exodus
because that's when the Bible says Moses was living
and writing the early books.
It would have to be available in the region of Egypt
because that is where the Bible places Moses
and the Israelites in the centuries before the Exodus.
It would need to be a form of writing like Hebrew
that Moses could have used to write the Torah
because that was the language of the early Israelites.
Patterns are powerful tools because they demonstrate
a sequence of information.
A sequence is much stronger than one random piece of data.
I have learned that to find a pattern in history,
you would need all the pieces to fit together.
[plane engine roaring]
[intriguing music]
One reason there is a debate over
whether Moses could have written the Torah
is because the original documents have not survived
the many centuries down to today.
So what are the oldest copies we have
and how close are they to the time of Moses?
[singer vocalizing]
I traveled to the Dead Sea in Israel,
where in the 1940s and 50s, the oldest known copies
of books from the Bible were discovered.
They were called the Dead Sea Scrolls
and they were written in Hebrew,
the language of the early Israelites.
Dr. Randall Price was the director of excavations
at Qumran for 10 years.
In January of 2017, he was a part of the discovery
of a new cave at Qumran;
the first new cave in over 60 years.
- Here we also found part of a top of a juglet
and of a cooking pot, indication this cave was used.
- [Timothy] They found the remains of jars,
placed in niches, but the scrolls had been taken.
They hoped to find more caves with new evidence
in the years ahead.
I asked him about the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
- Now with the Dead Sea Scrolls, not only do we have
this history brought to life
with all these various documents,
but we have every copy,
every book of the Old Testament except for Esther.
But Esther is mentioned in some of the texts,
so we know they must've had it represented.
We have the oldest copies of the Bible that we know.
[singer vocalizing reverently]
- [Timothy] The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
puts the date at around 200 B.C. for the oldest copies
of books from the Bible that have been found.
If the story of the Exodus originated earlier than this,
the question is how much earlier?
[birds chirping]
If mainstream scholars don't think Moses
wrote the first five books of the Bible,
when do they think they were written?
- My thinking is it was written during the Persian period,
which would put it probably
at the fifth to fourth centuries B.C.
- [Timothy] So not back as an eyewitness account.
- [Douglas] I don't think so; there's no evidence for that.
- If the early books of the Bible weren't written
until this time, then that's a big problem
for the validity of the Bible's claims.
[intriguing music]
[muffled speech]
A colleague of Professor Peter Gentry
is Professor Duane Garrett.
He is the distinguished John R. Sampey
Professor of Old Testament at Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary.
Professor Garrett authored Rethinking Genesis
and has written commentaries in other books
on the development of the Bible.
Do you think that Moses wrote the Torah?
- Moses did write it.
There are things in the Pentateuch
such as the death of Moses.
The Pentateuch doesn't claim that Moses wrote his own death.
I don't think that's a problem.
But if you look at the fact that the laws are crucial
and are central to the Pentateuch
and that those come from Moses,
then certainly it is fair to say that Moses is the author
or the source of the Pentateuch.
- When I was filming William Dever, he was very adamant
that really no one believes that
Moses wrote the first books of the Bible.
What would you say to that?
- When you speak of mainstream scholarship,
it depends upon how you define the term.
If you define it by a fairly exclusive club
of university scholars, basically they're right.
But of course, there are plenty of evangelicals
who have looked into the issue and continue to hold to
Mosaic origin for the Pentateuch.
It just depends on how you define the term.
[birds chirping]
- [Timothy] In 1979, southwest of the old city of Jerusalem,
an archeological team headed by Gabriel Barkay
uncovered two tiny scrolls made of silver.
They fit into an ancient amulet
that was hung around the neck.
When the scrolls were carefully unrolled,
they revealed Hebrew writing, including a passage
from the Book of Numbers.
[soft reverent music]
It was the famous blessing Moses gave to the priest.
- [Man] The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make his face to shine upon you
and be gracious to you.
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you
and give you peace.
- [Timothy] The wording exactly matched
what is found in modern Bibles.
After testing, it was found to be the oldest surviving text
of a Biblical passage and it was dated to 600 B.B.,
which is 400 years earlier than
the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran
and more than 200 years earlier than
when Professor Knight thinks the first Torah was written.
So I asked him why he thought Moses
couldn't have written the Torah
back at the time of the Exodus.
- Even though writing was possible,
most people were illiterate.
Who would have written it and for whom?
There is no reading public that's out there waiting
for the next installment.
- [Timothy] It was clear that this issue
of when widespread literacy was possible is important.
- The context in which this literature
first came into existence was in oral traditions
that were being passed on from one generation to the next.
Stories that you would tell your children.
They would then tell their children.
These stories are not unchanging as they pass on in time.
You embellish, you enhance, you connect.
Pretty soon you might end up
with a larger saga of materials.
These oral traditions really are the seed bed
for later on what became written text.
- The thinking is that if Moses didn't write
at the time of the Exodus, then this part of the Bible
and its account of god-given revelation to mankind
was an oral tradition and more vulnerable
to changes and exaggerations with each telling of the story.
If that happened, it would no longer
be a trustworthy account.
But surely widespread literacy wasn't required
for Moses to write the Pentateuch,
since scribes in Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia
wrote all the time without a large-reading audience.
However, as I read the book of Deuteronomy,
I saw that a wider literacy was essential
for the Israelites to understand and preserve the revelation
given to them in the books of Moses.
It recorded that Moses told the heads
of Israelite households to write the words of the law
on the doorposts of their homes and on their gates,
so they could teach them to their children.
What I know so far is that the Bible
is claiming that Moses wrote
and that there was literacy among the Israelites.
We may never know how widespread it was.
But because of the perishable nature
of the writing material, it's not surprising
that we haven't found much evidence of writing,
including books of the Bible
from the early part of Israel's history.
[birds chirping] [soft reverent music]
If Moses wrote the Torah,
was there a suitable writing system as early as 1450 BC?
[singer vocalizing]
I went to Egypt to meet Egyptologist David Rohl.
He has written Exodus: Myth or History,
in which he lays out evidence for the Sojourn,
Exodus and Conquest at the earlier date.
I asked David to help me understand
how writing developed in the ancient world.
Wow, look at these.
These reliefs are absolutely perfect.
- [David] They're gorgeous, aren't they?
- [Timothy] Yeah, is it a tomb or a temple writing?
- This is actually a chapel above a tomb.
The tomb is actually below us down here.
But what we're standing in is the chapel above the tomb
and it's covered in hieroglyphs.
This is the cartouche of the God's Wife,
Amenirdis, A-men-irdis.
You always read hieroglyphs looking into the animals.
You face towards the animal like the snake here
and the vulture here so you're reading from left to right
in this case and then from top to bottom.
- Is this a story, a narrative
or what does all this mean?
- No, they're spells, incantations and things like that.
They mention the person and what she must do
to enter the underworld, to pass into that other life.
- [Timothy] David went onto explain to me
that writing actually existed long before the Exodus
in forms such as hieroglyphics in Egypt
and cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia,
which was in the area of modern day Iraq.
But were hieroglyphics or cuneiform
a suitable writing system,
that Moses could've used to write the Torah?
As I thought about it, the writing system
also had to be simple enough for the Israelites
to read what was written as Moses commanded.
Unlike the alphabet, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics
had nearly 1,000 signs.
They were so complicated to learn
that only the scribes, priests and kings could use them.
In contrast, our alphabet today has 26 letters.
Imagine how much harder it would be
to have to learn four of our alphabets rather than one.
But to learn hieroglyphics, one would have to learn
the equivalent of 40 alphabets.
That's one thing that made the alphabet so revolutionary.
With a simple-to-learn yet powerful alphabet,
it would've been possible to teach large numbers
of Israelites to read and write.
With a non-alphabetic system, this would've been impossible.
- In Egyptian scrolls, they had a list of names
on a [mumbles] and that sort of thing that went on forever;
hundreds and hundreds of things
that the kid would have to memorize.
But not with an alphabet,
you can simply use the 26 signs and that's it.
- [Timothy] But it was worse than that.
Hieroglyphics had symbols for whole words,
parts of words and determinatives that were not pronounced
but were visual cues for the reader.
I could see how these symbols
would be hard to learn and hard to use.
In contrast, the alphabet was based entirely
on the sounds that each letter stood for.
Suddenly writing became simple enough
for common people to learn and this is how we continue
to teach reading and writing today.
- [vocalizes] Cat.
- For the writer and the reader,
it simplified things greatly.
These were entirely phonetic
and he could actually take and make his own words.
- [Timothy] The ornate artwork of hieroglyphs
were specially designed to be used
on grandiose monuments, not on scrolls.
This is another advantage for using an alphabet.
- In fact if you're writing something
like the book of Exodus or the book of Genesis,
it takes less room to write it.
If it was tried to be written down
with something like hieroglyphics,
it would've taken miles of Papyrus
to write that particular book.
- [Timothy] The complex pictograms of hieroglyphs
were replaced by the simplified strokes of letters.
The genius of the alphabet would revolutionize history.
With only a handful of letters,
the alphabet was powerful enough
to express an infinite number of words;
words for every idea on every page of every book
found in libraries around the western world
from children's books to scientific journals to Bibles.
When I examined the relationship
between the Bible and the alphabet through history,
I saw that no other book in the world
was translated into more languages
than the books of the Bible.
[intense adventurous music]
I went to see Hebrew scholar, Brian Rickett.
He showed me amazingly complex structures and nuances
in the Torah text that would require the power
and flexibility of the alphabet.
- Here's what we know: this is an extremely
well-written, complex document.
It reflects mastery of the language, linguistic mastery.
A remarkable uniformity from beginning to end.
It reflects sophistication, elegance, artistry.
All the kinds of things you might look for
in a piece of world-class literature.
The Torah itself has it.
- Every Torah scroll that has been found
was written in a Hebrew alphabet.
It was clear that this would require another step
to look for in my investigation.
If Moses wrote the Torah and just as importantly
the Israelites were able to read it,
they would've needed the power of an alphabet.
The question is was there an alphabet available
at the time of the Exodus?
[soft piano music]
I went to George Washington University
to see a professor of northwest Semitic languages.
I wanted to know more about why mainstream scholars
doubt that Moses could've written
the early books of the Bible.
Professor Christopher Rollston
is an expert in the ancient Semitic family of languages;
one of which is Hebrew.
Do you think that the Hebrews were in Egypt,
that there was really the story,
the narrative of the Bible that places them there?
- I believe that there was an Exodus,
but I think the narratives grew through time
to become stories almost if from Homeric proportions.
- Homeric meaning Homer?
- Yes, indeed. - Okay, alright.
A meaning that there was some exaggeration?
- That's a term we could use.
I'm a practical person and ultimately,
I know just as you do that stories
are told and retold and told again.
Sometimes the stories grow and the details change
through the telling in different times in different places.
The narratives in the Bible I find to be beautiful,
the narratives about the Exodus.
But the details, I think, are not always so precise.
- [Timothy] But if it's not accurate, can I really trust it?
Is there a god who saves the oppressed
or is this more or less a fairytale?
Some say more and some say less.
[soft reverent music]
When does an evidence for the earliest keeper alphabet
or script first appear?
- We know the Hebrew scripture very well
begins about 900 BCE and it's very distinctive;
it's different from Venetian, it developed from Venetian.
The Hebrew script is a distinctive script
and we know it well from hundreds
and hundreds of inscriptions.
[soft inquisitive music]
- If the Hebrew script
wasn't available until 900 BC,
some see this as a big problem for Moses writing
the first books of the Bible at the time of the Exodus.
This is the first step of the pattern
that I'm looking for.
What could be the answer to this problem?
Do you think that it was an earlier form of it?
A Hebrew form that Moses could have used
that evolved over time?
- The problem...
The script certainly evolved during the course of time,
but its evolution begins around 900 BCE.
- We don't know what he wrote
and he would have written in Egyptian probably
if he had written, not Hebrew.
- The logic makes sense.
In the standard view, there's no Hebrew alphabet available
at the time of the Exodus.
So Moses couldn't write the early books of the Bible.
If that's the case, can the Bible's accounts,
God acting in history, really be trusted?
For example, when the Book of Exodus
says that the sea miraculously parted
and the people of Israel went into the midst
of the sea on dry ground,
the waters being a wall to them
on their right hand and on their left.
Was that something Moses actually saw with his own eyes?
Or was it just the invention
of somebody writing centuries later?
[waves splashing]
These thoughts were troubling to me.
The reason I cared so much
goes back to how I was raised.
My parents' marriage broke up when I was really young.
It was extremely painful.
Being the eldest of four siblings,
I had the responsibility to watch my brother and sisters
'cause my mom couldn't be there all the time.
So when we went to the park or we went sliding,
I was on duty.
That's what happens when your folks break up.
You end up becoming, if you're the eldest,
sort of responsible.
I became the man of the house.
My mother, as a single parent,
would read Bible stories to us
every night before we went to bed.
She put a lot of faith into the idea
that they were true.
She believed that if God helped people in the past,
he could help her make it
as a single parent with four kids.
It was very important to her.
The Bible gave her hope.
She wanted it to be important to her family as well.
Growing up hearing these stories from the Bible,
I'd always assumed they really happened.
They really intrigued me.
But the question is did I believe this
just because it was the way I was raised?
If I'd been raised in another part of the world,
wouldn't I have believed something altogether different?
Did I believe the Bible because it was true
or because it's just what we believed?
[soft intriguing music]
While visiting Brian Rickett,
I asked him how emphatic the Bible's claims are
for Moses writing its first books
around the time of the Exodus.
- Exodus 17:14.
It says the Lord said to Moses, "Write in a book.
"Write this in a book," then it goes on.
When Moses produces the tablets,
God tells him to do that too.
We have references in the Torah
and all throughout the Bible
that describe Mosaic authorship to the texts
and it claims for itself that it is the product
of Moses' writing as a result of what God told him to do.
- I remembered that almost all of the books of the Bible
reference back to the writings of Moses.
Jesus talks about Moses and references Moses.
If Moses didn't exist, then what does that do
to really the credibility of Jesus?
- Yes, John 5 provides five witnesses to Jesus' divinity.
He concludes his argument by saying this in John 5.
"If you believed Moses, you would believe me;
"for he wrote of me.
"But if you do not believe his writings,
"how will you believe my words?"
So there it looks like you have a definitive statement
from Jesus that Moses produced the Torah
and he's staking an awful lot on that reality.
- What Moses himself says
that these things were given to him by God.
God told me.
God spoke to me.
God commanded this.
- He clearly says that what he is writing
is what God revealed.
On the other hand, we see that he undoubtedly had sources.
Moses didn't live in a vacuum.
The traditions and things,
whether passed on orally or in writing, were given to him
probably by the Israelites in Egypt;
part of the history he was given.
This formed part of the basis on which he wrote.
The rest revealed by God.
[soft reverent music]
- If the Bible's claims are true,
then Moses must have been
at least the primary person responsible
for writing major parts of the Torah,
which is the common assumption of early Judaism
and of Jesus and his followers in the New Testament.
Once again, Moses would have needed
a form of writing like Hebrew by 1450 BC.
Yet this is exactly what most scholars say doesn't exist.
I was raised in a home that took the Bible literally,
and you probably-- - I was too.
- Yeah, so the question is is the Bible
a literal story of God acting in history?
- It purports to be.
But whether it is or not is a question of belief.
That's not something that can be proven.
- [Timothy] Proven is a hard task;
but I'm just asking if there's good reasons to believe it.
The text is claiming not only that Moses
wrote these things, but that God inspired
the very words that were written.
But if as some scholars are suggesting,
there are parts in the Bible that are true
and others that are not,
how could you ever know which parts to trust?
Believing in the God of the Bible,
has been the foundation for my own family for generations.
But what does that faith mean
if it's based on a mixture of real history
along with legends and fairytales?
That thought left me very unsettled.
I knew that if I was going to deal
with this skepticism concerning the Bible's integrity
and not live in a conflicted way, I would need answers.
I couldn't give up.
I would have to continue with the original question:
Is there any evidence outside the Bible
demonstrating that Moses could have written the Torah?
According to the Torah, this is an eye witness account
of Moses bringing the Israelites out of Egypt
to Mount Sinai to meet with God.
[thunder crackling] [soft reverent music]
- It's an amazing experience that we can't even imagine.
But look at what happens.
God comes down to Mount Sinai.
The people are expecting this.
They were told before they left Egypt,
Come, God is waiting for us at Mount Sinai.
He's got something to tell us.
[thunder crackling]
On the morning of the third day,
there was thunder and lightening,
a thick cloud on the mountain,
and a very loud trumpet blast.
[trumpet blaring]
So that all the people in the camp trembled.
[trumpet blaring]
Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God
and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain.
Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke
because the Lord had descended on it in fire.
[thunder crackling]
The smoke of it went up like the smoke of [mumbles]
and the whole mountain trembled greatly.
As the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder,
Moses spoke and God answered him in thunder.
[thunder crackling]
- If you think of it, Sinai is truly awesome.
- [Timothy] Os Guinness is an author and social critic.
I met him at his office surrounded by the signed photos
of some of his writing heroes.
He had researched a number of significant features
having to do with the events at Mount Sinai.
- At the heart of Sinai,
not just the Great Constitution, the Covenant.
Not just the great liberation coming out of Egypt,
but the heart of them all is the Great Revelation,
whether it's the Lord revealing himself to Moses alone
at the burning bush or the Lord revealing himself
to the entire nation in chapter 19.
Many people don't realize how extraordinary that is.
You take atheism.
It's humans figuring it all out.
You take Buddhism.
It's humans figuring it all out.
The great difference in the scriptures,
it's not the ascent of humans
through their thinking to God, if there is a God;
it's the descent, the Revelation,
the disclosure of God to us.
That's what's unique about Sinai
and the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
- Moses came and told the people
all the words of the Lord and all the laws.
All the people answered with one voice
and said all the words that the Lord has spoken
we will do.
Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord.
[soft reverent music]
- After 3300 years, an important discovery
shed light on Moses's ability to write the Torah.
[intriguing music]
In 1905, the great pioneer of archeology,
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie,
and his wife, Hilda, went to the Sinai Peninsula
searching for evidence of ancient Egyptian activity.
Petrie had already found
the famous Merneptah Stele, near Thebes.
At the time, it contained the oldest known reference
to the people of Israel.
It boasted that they had been subdued by the Pharaohs.
Just 50 miles north west of the traditional Mount Sinai,
ancient Egypt worked major copper and turquoise mines.
One of these sites is known today as Serabit El-Khadim.
The Petries began to discover
many hieroglyphic inscriptions;
then on the walls of one of the mines,
they saw writing that appeared different from the rest.
[intriguing rhythmic music]
To learn more about Petrie and his discovery,
I went to the Petrie museum at University College, London.
Egyptologist Chris Naunton is the former director
of the Egypt Exploration Society and the current president
of the International Association of Egyptologists.
What was unique about Flanders?
- Petrie has a far more rigorous scientific approach
to the material that he was excavating
really than anyone had before.
Previously, archeologists had been drawn to,
treasure is probably as good a word,
objects which were very beautiful.
Museum quality was a phrase that was often used.
Those things were prioritized.
More or less, everything else, the non beautiful,
non inscribed, disregarded.
Petrie is the first person really to realize
that there was a huge amount
to be learned from those things.
He is the man to invent techniques
for gathering that material,
documenting it, and interpreting it.
- [Timothy] Let's just talk about inscriptions
that he found in Sinai.
- Petrie's work in the Sinai is incredibly important.
He uncovered a group of inscribed objects
inscribed with a script
which was unknown elsewhere in Egypt.
This is the Proto-Sinaitic script.
Of course, textural material which Petrie and others
were uncovering in Egypt was abundant,
but written in scripts which we're very familiar with.
This was something very different.
- Wasn't Egyptian. - Not Egyptian.
This was a new script, a new language.
Something that would have very much sat outside
what was well established as something
Egyptologists knew about in that valley.
[soft reverent music]
- In 1999, more inscriptions were found
by Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell.
This time in Egypt, northwest of the ancient city
of Thebes at a place called Wadi El-Hol.
They were in the same style as those found in the Sinai.
What date were the inscriptions at the Sinai mines
and how do we know?
- Both the inscriptions from Serabit El-Khadim
and those from Wadi El-Hol are in essence
argued to be Middle Kingdom.
One of the reasons we do that is because,
for example, at Wadi El-Hol,
the inscriptions that are closest
are actually Middle Kingdom texts
and the same is true for the Serabit inscriptions.
[intriguing music]
- In the search for a pattern of evidence,
what I know so far is that the Petries and others
discovered a new type of script.
It developed during the Middle Kingdom,
so it would have existed by the time of the Exodus
and should have been available to Moses.
This script was found in the region of Egypt.
It was not Egyptian hieroglyphs;
it was something very different.
These finds match the first two criteria
of the investigation.
But what about the last two?
Could this new writing
be a type of alphabet and like Hebrew?
[stirring music]
The Sinai mining district where the Petries
had discovered this unusual script
was off limits to filming
due to ISIS activity in the area.
I recreated the setting and asked Egyptologist David Rohl
to join me and explain the significance of the inscriptions
that the Petries had found.
- They couldn't read it
'cause it looks like Egyptian hieroglyphs;
but when you read it,
it doesn't actually become Egyptian.
It's something quite different.
So they brought an expert along later on
to read it and it turned out to be
what we call Northwest Semitic.
- How do you read something like this?
- This inscription here you see coming down,
vertical column.
Then the other one going along in this direction.
So it's like a letter L.
But it's two separate inscriptions.
The first one is really important.
The second one is the message
to say please read the first one.
[stirring music]
- [Timothy] To learn more about these inscriptions,
I traveled to Oxford, England,
home to the oldest university
in the English-speaking world.
The Griffith Institute holds the handwritten archives
of the man responsible for identifying the source
of these inscriptions.
His name was Sir Alan Gardiner
and he was one of the world's pre-eminent experts
in ancient languages.
He determined that not only was this script
made by Semitic people; it was made up of individual letters
that formed the world's oldest known alphabet.
- [Alan] The case for the alphabetic character
of the unknown script is overwhelming.
The meanings of these names, translated as Semitic words,
are plain or plausible in 17 cases.
- There are several languages
in the Northwest Semitic family;
one of which is the Hebrew spoken by the Israelites.
All of them are very similar.
Since they are all so similar,
some scholars have suggested
that Moses didn't actually need a Hebrew alphabet.
He could have used one of the other Semitic scripts
to write the Torah.
The writing could later have transitioned to Hebrew
around 900 BC when the Hebrew script developed.
This early alphabetic script has been given
several names by scholars.
One is Proto-Sinaitic.
Proto meaning first
and Sinaitic meaning from the Sinai.
Another is Proto-Canaanite
because it later shows up in the land of Canaan.
Did those inscriptions give you an idea
of the types of people that were scratching on these walls?
- They were definitely Semites.
We know that because of the words that they wrote.
Many of them can be deciphered and have been deciphered.
Those are Semitic words.
- It seemed this was just what I was looking for.
But one challenge against Moses writing the Torah
is the common view that the Phoenicians,
who lived next to the land of Israel,
invented the alphabet around 1100 BC,
long after the time of Moses and the Exodus.
If this were true, it would mean that
there was no alphabet for Moses to use.
The Petries' discovery of this early Semitic alphabet,
now dated by scholars to the era of the Middle Kingdom,
clearly challenges that claim.
For many years, the popular claim in school textbooks
has been that the Phoenicians
basically invented the alphabet.
What's your thoughts?
- In essence, I think what we can say
based on the evidence that we have
is the Phoenicians didn't invent the alphabet.
We certainly know that's the case.
The Phoenicians didn't invent the alphabet.
The Phoenicians did though standardize
the early alphabetic writing system;
but the alphabet itself was an innovation
and it was definitely Semites who invented it.
- [Timothy] This would mean that the world's oldest alphabet
is not Phoenician, but is actually the Proto-Sinaitic script
found by the Petries.
[stirring music]
- What the evidence suggests
is that we have wonderful Northwest Semitic inscriptions.,
evidence for the Semites inventing the alphabet.
Evidence for the first alphabet,
a grand of technology that will from that point on
transform so many things.
- Transforms the world. - We use it today.
- I am asking the questions from my own faith.
I wanna know if Moses wrote.
- It's not just a matter of historical curiosity.
Well Moses wrote these books
and not some anonymous figure.
It is that Moses is the chosen man of God.
He is the man who spoke God
as a man speaks to his friend.
Moses has great authority.
That is why I think Jesus and the apostles
when they spoke of the books of Moses,
they refer to him by name because he was Moses.
He was this chosen man of God.
- In my search for a pattern of evidence
showing that Moses could have written
the first books of the Bible,
the inscriptions found by the Petries and others
confirm that the Proto-Sinaitic script
is the earliest known alphabet
and it appeared centuries earlier than even Phoenician.
An alphabet would make learning to read and write easy,
allowing the Israelites to teach their children
the words of God as Moses instructed.
This alphabet was Semitic,
which means that it was in the same family as Hebrew.
Therefore, it was a form of writing like Hebrew.
This writing existing by the time of the Exodus
and in the region of Egypt could have provided
the tool needed for Moses to express
the nuance and detail found in the early books of the Bible.
I was excited to actually find evidence
matching all four steps of the criteria.
But this brings up a new question
about the fourth step of the pattern;
an even bigger and more profound question
that goes beyond whether it was like Hebrew.
What if these inscriptions weren't just like Hebrew?
What if they actually were Hebrew?
If that were true, it would be a slam dunk
for Moses' ability to write the Torah in Hebrew,
the language of all known Torah scrolls.
Not only that, if it was Hebrew,
it would show that the source of the script
was the Israelites.
I couldn't get this idea out of my head.
Was this script actually the earliest written Hebrew?
As I set off to investigate,
little did I realize how controversial
that question would be.
[soft reverent music]
Could this script actually be
the earliest form of written Hebrew?
This might seems like a logical question,
but I was very puzzled to find
just how controversial this idea is
in the world of academia today.
[stirring music]
[muffled crosstalk]
I went to Israel to meet with the chair of Egyptology
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Professor Orly Goldwasser
is one of Israel's leading experts
on the formation of the early alphabet.
There are some people suggesting
that this Proto-Sinaitic script
was early form of Hebrew.
Have you ever heard that before?
- Yeah, yeah, this is sad.
- Sad?
This is sad?
- It's not science.
This is, excuse me for using the very blunt words here.
This is disseminating fake knowledge
and fake science to people.
It's not their field.
You can tell me for example, any stories in biology,
mathematics and I will believe because I don't know.
Really if my great teacher Joseph Naveh would be alive,
I think he would die again if he moved here.
- You could hear that?
- He invented this theory.
It has nothing to do.
Hebrew is a kind of dialect
that developed Canaanite dialect.
It developed much later.
To call this old Canaanite dialect
which cannot be identified,
maybe because the inscriptions are too short.
Hebrew, it's opportunism.
- [Timothy] Professor Gentry
experienced something different with his professors.
- Frequently when we're taught things,
there's a consensus among scholars
that this is the way things are.
But when you get out the microscope
and examine the evidence, sometimes it doesn't add up
so it's important to check things out.
- Yeah 'cause I know a lot of people
can say my professor told me. - Yeah, that's right.
- Then his professor told him, correct?
- That's right.
- Then there's the real question of is it correct?
- That's right.
- What would be one example of a problem you had
that through diligence and investigation,
you were able to solve for yourself?
- I think the documentary hypothesis is one.
I went to a school where they taught it
every day for 17 years.
I read a book by an Italian Jew called Umberto Cassuto.
He wrote a very good book
criticizing the documentary hypothesis.
One day I was at the University of Toronto
and my professor was teaching the documentary hypothesis.
All I did was very politely say,
"Have you ever looked at the book by Umberto Cassuto?"
The answer I was given was,
"We don't read books like that around here."
That was when I clued in and realized
for them it's a faith stance.
It's not as if
this is perfect science.
- In other words, there was a sense
that they didn't wanna hear other information.
- That's right.
For me, they were the fundamentalists
because their minds were closed
and they were not interested in evidence
that would call their consensus into question.
[soft reverent music]
- The issue of this script being Hebrew
directly connects to whether Moses
could've used it to write the Torah.
If one believes that Moses didn't write the Torah,
then where does that thinking naturally lead?
[birds chirping]
We both grew up in families that both believed
the Bible was a historical document.
- My father was a minister, very conservative,
southern, small-town churches.
- Tell me about that.
You were raised in a conservative home.
- We read the Bible literally and thought that was adequate.
Then I went to a Bible college and nothing changed there.
Then I went to a liberal/protestant theological seminary
and that was quite a shock I remember.
Then I went onto Harvard and by that time,
I was moving away from theology
and into history, thus into archeology.
- You were actually a minister.
- I was a clergyman for 13 years, United Church of Christ.
- I'm gonna ask you a theological question
'cause you have had quite an arc of a life.
- I've had an adventuresome life.
- You have, you have.
I'm gonna ask you the most obvious question, is there a god?
- I am not an atheist.
I think that's an arrogant position.
I'm an agnostic, which means I do not know
and I think that's the only honest position I can take.
I'm not going to say there is or there is not,
that's a theological issue.
I'm not a theologian.
[soft reverent music] [singer vocalizing]
- In these interviews it was clear to me
that the more these scholars doubted
that Moses wrote the Torah, the less sure they were
of even the existence of God.
I remember going to church on Sunday mornings
and hearing the Bible called the Word of God.
I was taught that Moses and other Biblical writers
were divinely inspired.
They were chosen people who wrote
what they saw and heard from God,
so others in the future could read it.
Was there a connection between the Bible
and the world's first alphabet?
[intense reverent music] [singer vocalizing]
Early in his career, David Rohl had uncovered problems
with the dates given to the reigns of Egyptian Pharaohs.
He concluded that Egypt's dating had been over-exaggerated
and needed to be revised.
When this was done, he began to see evidence
for the Biblical Exodus emerging in an entirely new period.
While most scholars put the six steps
of the Exodus in Egypt's New Kingdom,
this evidence was in the earlier middle kingdom
at a time where most weren't looking.
The unexpected result of David's revision
of Egyptian history was that the early evidence
shifted forward aligning with the Biblical dates.
[foreboding music]
To further explore his theories,
he traveled into the Sinai area
were the Petries made their discoveries.
[lively mystical music] [singer vocalizing]
He had quickly come to realize
that placing the early Israelites in the Middle Kingdom
could connect them and their Hebrew language
with the Proto-Sinaitic script, which was invented
in the same time period and in the same area.
But the idea of Moses writing the Torah
and a Biblical Exodus is inconceivable to most scholars.
Yet I had been faced with this challenge before
and the solution was found in a pattern.
In the search for whether the Sinai inscriptions
were actually written in an early form of Hebrew,
I would need to answer the following three questions.
Do the letters of the Proto-Sinaitic script
match the look of Hebrew?
Is there a connection and are the inscriptions
readable as Hebrew, do they make sense?
Does the history of the early alphabet
match the history of the Israelites?
Because if it does, it would indicate
they were the ones responsible for it.
The first question of the Hebrew pattern is
do the letters of the Proto-Sinaitic script
match the look of Hebrew?
[intriguing orchestral music]
Dr. Douglas Petrovich has long studied
inscriptions and their meanings.
He is yet another scholar I met
who believes Moses wrote the Torah.
It appears that Professor Dever's claim
that scholars no longer hold this view was overstated.
Just like David Rohl, Dr. Petrovich proposes
that the early Sinaitic script is actually the earliest form
of written Hebrew developed by the Israelites.
However unlike Rohl, Petrovich doesn't see a problem
with Egypt's dating system, so he uses the standard dates.
Petrovich recently outlined his case
in his book, The World's Oldest Alphabet.
He thinks a key link between the Sinai inscriptions
and the early Israelites is the fact
that whoever invented the alphabet borrowed symbols
from Egyptian hieroglyphs to make the letters.
Here's the Egyptian gallery and we have an artifact here.
Tell me about this.
- That's right, this is from ancient Egypt.
It's from the Old Kingdom,
maybe about 400 years before Abraham lived.
- It's very old then. - It's very old.
- What is the connection with Egyptian hieroglyphs
and the oldest alphabet?
- This is the very writing script
that's the basis of the world's oldest alphabet.
They were formed from 22 of these hieroglyphic signs.
- Are there any of those examples here on this?
- Yes, in fact here is a wave of water.
When you convert this into a proto-continental
alphabetical letter in Hebrew,
this becomes the M
because for Hebrews, water is mayim.
They see the wave of water,
they're thinking mayim
and they pronounce muh.
- This is were the alphabet came from,
but how did it develop over time?
When you look at the family tree
for the beginning of the alphabet,
it starts with the Proto-Sinaitic script
which when found in Canaan is called Proto-Canaanite.
Then in the standard view,
the alphabet is believed to have developed
into Phoenician hundreds of years later.
In this view, Phoenician branches into other scripts
such as Old Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek
continuing on to numerous alphabets over the centuries.
But was the first alphabet related to Hebrew?
Professor Petrovich has argued that
the Proto-Siniatic inscriptions
were actually an early form of Hebrew
and the world's first alphabet.
What are your thoughts?
- I wish that it were true.
I wish that were correct.
It would be absolutely fascinating.
The difficulty with that is first and foremost
the script of the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions
or the early alphabetic inscriptions;
the script is definitely not the Hebrew script,
so that's a problem.
- I could see why it's difficult
to link Old Hebrew with the world's oldest alphabet,
the Proto-Sinaitic script.
Old Hebrew or Paleo Hebrew, as it's sometimes called,
is thought to have emerged 1,000 years later
and to have developed from Phoenician.
The consensus of scholars holds
that the very first Hebrew text
starts with Old Hebrew by definition.
- We know the Hebrew inscriptions well.
We know the Hebrew script well beginning around 900 BCE.
The script of those inscriptions
is dramatically different from the Hebrew script,
dramatically different.
- [Timothy] However, scripts can look dramatically different
and still be a part of the same family.
One example can be seen by looking
at the first verse in the book of Genesis
as seen in the Wycliffe Bible.
It was written in the English of 1385
from about 600 years ago.
Here is the same verse today.
I was surprised how much English has changed.
Furthermore, even Professor Rollston
acknowledged that the Hebrew script
changed over time in a later period.
But if Old Hebrew evolved over time,
why couldn't it have evolved earlier
from the script that is known today as Proto-Sinaitic.
[intriguing inquisitive music]
I needed to go back to Israel
and to the important Biblical city of Gezer,
20 miles northwest of Jerusalem.
It was here that Irish archeologist Stuart McAllister
discovered what many considered to be
one of the earliest Old Hebrew inscriptions found to date.
It was a calendar inscribed on a limestone tablet
that included monthly information about crops.
I looked at the Gezer calendar
to compare it to the inscriptions
the Petries discovered in the Sinai mines
which are from centuries earlier.
For many of the letters, you can see a clear resemblance.
Some of the letters of the two scripts are also different.
But according to Doug Petrovich,
they aren't as different as Professor Rollston claims.
He showed me how each letter changed over time
starting with the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
the letter [speaks foreign language].
- It starts out as a full man here, here and here.
Usually he has both arms up with right angles at his elbows
in a pose that we who live in the United States
would call the Touchdown Pose.
This is the touchdown letter.
This letter makes the H sound in Hebrew like huh
and it comes from the Hebrew world halal.
That's the word that's connected to the pictograph.
Halal means praise.
- Or hallelujah?
- The word hallelujah is based on this very word.
It's the arms raised in praise toward God.
The head is insignificant, the legs are insignificant.
Oddly enough, what happens over time as the letter evolves?
Here's one leg missing.
Here's a head that's been reduced greatly.
Reduced greatly, reduced greatly.
No legs at all here on Sinai 374, why?
Because all you need is the hands raised.
Eventually they realized we don't really need the head
and we don't really need the legs,
so that morphs into what looks like an E.
If you were to take this from the Sartah Ostracon
and turn it 90 degrees to the left,
it would be the neck of a person, the left arm of a person
and the right arm of a person all pointing up.
- While the Proto-Sinaitic letter
of a man praising may look quite different
than the corresponding Hebrew letter,
once you understand how it developed,
you can see how they relate.
David Rohl also showed me how this development happened
with our modern letter A.
- I'll give you a good example.
The bull's head, Aleph.
It starts life as an ordinary drawing
of a bull with two horns.
As it comes through Proto-Canaanite into Phoenician,
it turns to that shape at right angles
from the original bull and it's now become lines
rather than a very careful drawing, it's very angularized.
Then it comes into Greek
and to our English language like this.
It's rotating and it's changing its shape,
but you can still see the original bull's head,
in the letter A but it's now upside down.
- [Timothy] But can these two related scripts
be considered different versions of Hebrew?
It appears that Phoenician is the one thing
standing in the way of making that link.
How dramatic are the differences
between Old Hebrew and Phoenician?
When compared to Phoenician, the character of the letters
looks very similar to the Old Hebrew
found by Stuart McAllister to the point
where most of the letters are basically identical.
It could almost boil down
to individual styles of handwriting.
[birds chirping]
Israel's preeminent authority on ancient inscriptions
was the late Joseph Naveh.
Dr. Goldwasser was one of Naveh's students.
- He was the great expert of the script.
- 'Cause I wanna find out what the truth is
'cause I've interviewed some people
who are saying they think there's a link.
I know that Joseph Naveh, he said something.
He wrote, "In inscriptions of the 10th century."
- 10th century, remember the 10th.
- [Joseph] In inscriptions of the 10th century,
Phoenician, Hebrew and Aramaic scripts
are indistinguishable.
[reverent music]
- If Old Hebrew, Aramaic and Phoenician
were indistinguishable in the 10th century,
is it really proper to call the script
Phoenician at that time?
According to Naveh, it's only later that this script
branches into the more distinct versions.
In that case, the actual model for the early alphabet
would look more like this with this mystery script
being the predecessor of the other three.
Today, some call this mystery script early Phoenician.
Others call it a late form of Proto-Canaanite,
but could it actually be an early form of Hebrew?
To be clear, Joseph Naveh held to the same standard view
as professors Rollston and Goldwasser,
that we can't call the early phase of this script Hebrew
because Old Hebrew did not become a distinct script
until after the 10th century BC.
- This is worse for your theory
because Naveh believes the Hebrew was born even later.
- Okay, what is called Old Hebrew came later.
But the question remains,
what really was this mystery script?
Professor Naveh did an extensive study
of six letters from this script
as it evolved into Phoenician, Old Hebrew and Aramaic.
Surprisingly he said that over time,
"The Hebrew script preserved the basic forms of the letters
"to a greater extent than the other two."
Now that is curious.
Why would Old Hebrew be the one
to maintain the characteristics
of the mystery script better than the others?
Naveh believed it was because the Israelites
were isolated in a mountainous land steeped in tradition,
so they didn't change things.
But if Old Hebrew is the most similar to the mystery script,
maybe it's because both were forms of Hebrew.
Based on the thinking of scholars
like Petrovich and Rohl, this opens up the possibility
that Proto-Sinaitic was merely Hebrew 1.0
as the earliest form of written Hebrew
that later developed into Hebrew 2.0, the mystery script.
It was then picked up by Israel's neighbors,
the Phoenicians, before spreading throughout the region.
It would later develop into Old Hebrew or Hebrew 3.0.
Interesting though,
the idea that some form of Hebrew writing came first
is supported by one of the earliest Jewish historians.
Eupolemus around 150 BC wrote in his book
titled On the Kings of Judea.
- [Eupolemus] Moses was the first wise man
and the first that imparted grammar to the Jews.
The Phoenicians received it from the Jews
and the Greeks from the Phoenicians.
- For Rohl and Petrovich, Moses was the wise man
who had the ability to write the book of Exodus
as an eyewitness account.
[intriguing music]
When investigating the first step,
does Proto-Sinaitic match the look of Hebrew?
I discovered that there are many letters
in Proto-Sinaitic that closely resemble
those of the mystery script in Old Hebrew.
The development of those letters that aren't different
can be traced in a logical way
showing that these scripts are related.
Over time as the script transition
to the distinct Phoenician, Aramaic and Old Hebrew styles,
it was the Old Hebrew that maintained the style
of the mystery script better than the others.
This supports the idea that the original Proto-Sinaitic
was Hebrew 1.0, which then evolved into Hebrew 2.0 and 3.0.
I can now move on to the second step of the pattern
investigating whether the inscriptions are readable
as Hebrew, an idea that is extremely controversial.
Rollston says that the words found in the inscriptions
are not specific to Hebrew,
but are common to all Semitic languages.
- In other words, it's not evidence
for those texts being Hebrew.
It's evidence for those texts being Semitic
and that's all that we can say.
- But if all the Semitic languages are so similar,
then doesn't that also mean that we can't really say
that it isn't Hebrew?
Obviously, some Semitic group invented the first alphabet
and why not the Israelites?
For more than 100 years,
other scholars have suspected the Hebrew connection,
but their ideas never took hold.
[lively mystical music]
- In the wall. - David Rohl has worked
with the Sinai inscriptions
and disagrees with Rollston's position.
He believes they can be read as uniquely Hebrew.
Rohl used recognized letter identifications
made by previous scholars for the signs.
He then sent those letter interpretations
to Rabbi Michael Shelomo Bar-Ron in Jerusalem
to see if the inscriptions could be read as Biblical Hebrew.
- One day David Rohl just sends me an email
with a string of letter names.
I scratch out this string of letters
in the modern human characters that we make use of.
I look at it for a minute and I clearly make out
what the word roots are; I'm blown away.
I can read it.
In other words this is not the northwest Semitic
that you're talking about,
this is the Hebrew of our ancestors.
This etching, this inscription somewhere in the Sinai Desert
is actual plain Biblical Hebrew.
- What were some of the things that were written there?
- There are things like instructions, how to use mana.
In the Bible there's a big thing about you mustn't store it.
You have to eat it when it's given to you.
This thing says pay attention to the way you use mana.
Follow the Father and his instructions.
- [Timothy] Dr. Petrovich also agrees
that these inscriptions are an early form of Hebrew.
However, he has arrived at different interpretations
than David Rohl.
Petrovich identifies words and names
he believes are uniquely Hebrew,
as well as Biblical characters.
[hammer clinking]
One such character had a son who participated
in the building of the tabernacle at Mount Sinai.
[soft reverent music]
In another inscription from the minds of Serabit el-Khadim
he even reads the name Moses.
What makes interpreting these inscriptions so difficult
is that there are only consonants, no vowels.
Many of them have no spaces between words.
They can be written either left to right or right to left.
The true identification of several of the letters
are disputed and many are damaged, making them hard to read.
That is why many scholars state,
"We can't read these inscriptions as Hebrew."
- Someone's attempt to state that
they can not only read these inscriptions,
but read names that we know from the Bible
or positive that we have people present
in these inscriptions from the Bible.
It's a difficult thing indeed.
You have to have evidence for these proposals
and it's just not there.
- Some of my critics such as Christopher Rollston
are saying that this could be any Semitic language.
There's no way of identifying as clearly being Hebrew.
There are several distinctively Hebrew words
that are not found in any other Semitic language
that are contained in the 15 Hebrew inscriptions
I've translated.
- [Timothy] The key to Petrovich's approach
was to test different letter identifications
for those Proto-Sinaitic letters that are disputed.
- I was able to try the different options
of what all the scholars have been proposing
for 100 years or so.
Through that process,
I was able to answer which were correct.
Because in certain contexts,
if you took it one way, it wouldn't work.
If you took it another way, it definitely worked.
In fact, it always worked.
[intriguing music]
- When Rohl and Petrovich assigned
equivalent Hebrew letters to these inscriptions,
they claim they make sense when read as Hebrew.
They state they are finding uniquely-Hebrew words.
They also claim that some of the inscriptions
reference Biblical characters and events.
What complicates this issue
is that there are different approaches
in reading the letters produce different interpretations.
But the end of the day,
it's encouraging that there are at least two possibilities
that result in meaningful phrases for these inscriptions
when Hebrew letters are applied.
What these inscriptions might say is something
I will continue to investigate in future films.
People such as Professor Rollston
say that it can't be Hebrew because the Hebrew writing
didn't exist until much later in time.
- That's true.
He calls this language northwest Semitic.
These scriptures are northwest Semitic.
But I say it's a matter of history, not so much of language.
You could interpret them as Hebrew
only if you have the history to back it up.
- Because we have a script that looks similar to Hebrew,
yet has some uncertainties with the interpretations,
the final step becomes the key to determining
which Semitic group invented it.
Does the history of the early alphabet
match the history of the Israelites?
[lively tribal music]
The hieroglyphic roots of the first alphabet
along with the locations of the inscriptions
point to Egypt being the source.
Most scholars believe that this first alphabet
developed outta the elite class of scribes
who would've been familiar with using Egyptian hieroglyphs.
But Professor Goldwasser has a different idea.
Your theory is that common people invented the alphabet.
- Yeah, my theory is that I take this great invention
that change history from the intelligence of the old world
to the so-called simple people
and say my inventor or inventors
were just people that were illiterate in any script.
This gave them the freedom to invent, you see,
because their mind was free.
Nothing was told them you should do this with this picture
and that with the other pic;
they could prepare a new theory.
People hate it.
The scholars today even hate it.
- They hate it? - Yeah.
- How dare they.
- They still write against me.
It's impossible that simple people
invented this very complex, phonetical.
It's common sense.
It's fantastic common sense.
- Everyone agrees that whether they were elite
or from the common class,
whoever invented this Semitic alphabet
had to have been a genius.
But who would've had the motive
to write their Semitic language in this unique script?
- The book of Genesis tells us
that the first descendant of Abraham to arrive in Egypt
was his great-grandson Joseph, the son of Jacob.
Joseph's brothers had sold him as a slave
to a caravan of traders, who brought him down to Egypt.
With God's help, Joseph was able to save Egypt
by warning of a coming calamity.
Seven years of plenty
would be followed by seven years of terrible famine.
Pharaoh was so impressed that he puts Joseph in charge
of preparing for the famine and makes him
second in command over the entire country.
"Since God has shown you all this,
"there is none so discerning and wise as you are."
- Joseph was an administrator over all of Egypt,
a position that would have required him
to read and write hieroglyphics.
Could your distant relatives,
the Israelites or let's say Joseph,
could they have been involved with any of this writing?
- I can write another story about somebody called--
- Benny. - Benny,
who was also in Egypt and he was also very clever.
He sold the hieroglyphs.
He might have invented the alphabet.
This is endless, you see.
First of all, it's a little too late already.
Then how come the inscriptions in [mumbles] earlier?
It's not your time of Joseph or Benny
or whoever it could be. - Whoever, yeah.
Professor Goldwasser is assuming that these inscriptions
are earlier than the time of Joseph
because she holds to the standard view
of the Ramesses Exodus.
However, my previous investigation
had uncovered impressive archeological finds
matching Joseph and his family in the Middle Kingdom.
These all came from a location
called Avaris, the city beneath Ramesses,
where the Bible places the early Israelites.
It was David Rohl who had first come up
with these connections.
- [Man] Joseph saved the country from a terrible famine,
enables his father Jacob and his entire family
to settle in the best part of the land,
a place called Goshen.
- Is there any indication of famines in Egypt?
- Of course there is, in many different periods.
But there's one key period when we get this massive famine
which lasts about seven to 10 years.
It's the time of the end of the 12th dynasty
in the reign of Amenemhat III;
he's the Pharaoh of this big famine.
- [Timothy] The reign of Amenemhat III
exactly matches the time of Joseph in the early pattern.
It was amazing to see how specific the connection was
between Amenemhat, Joseph and the dates
of the two oldest alphabetic inscriptions in Sinai.
- This is the image of the oldest fully Hebrew inscription.
There are the letters, here they are drawn in.
Here's another image showing you Sinai 377 here
in the form of a stellaform.
It's like a tombstone; it's rounded at the top
and goes down straight on either side.
It's intricately connected to another inscription.
This is Sinai 46 to its left.
- Are these both?
In other words, this is one inscription
and this is a second one on the same rock face?
- On the same rock face.
We have Sinai 377 and Sinai 46.
Sinai 377 being in Hebrew very short,
very trite inscription.
Sinai 46, middle Egyptian inscription
with the year date at the top.
Then it reads right to left in these two rows,
then in all of these columns goin' down.
The date on here is year 20 of Amenemhat III.
840 BC, 12th dynasty.
That connects these two inscriptions in time.
- To the time of Joseph and his family.
- Yes, the time of Joseph.
- [Timothy] What this indicates
is that the five oldest
alphabetic inscriptions that can be dated
all emerge in the Middle Kingdom
during the reign of Amenemhat III
in a narrow 11 year window exactly where the pattern
that David Rohl identified places Joseph and his family.
[birds chirping] [soft reverent music]
Who do you think actually was the inspiration
for this alphabet?
- I think it has to be Joseph.
That would be my guess because of what he was.
He was the [mumbles] of Egypt.
He was the most important man in Egypt after the Pharaoh.
He was educated, he worked in the palace.
He was running the country virtually,
so what better person to invent the Hebrew alphabet
than the person who was familiar with the hieroglyphs,
who knew the Semite people, who was administering the land?
He's the the guy who's most likely
to be able to come up with this idea.
- So who invented the first alphabet?
His scholars suggest it may have been an elite scribe
or a common miner like Benny.
But whoever it was, they would've needed to be
a Semite familiar with hieroglyphics,
motivated to create a new script
while living in Egypt at the same time
as Pharaoh, Amenemhat III and Joseph.
- If Joseph for instance was the person
who invented this method of writing
the Semitic language as a script,
Moses would've learnt not very easily
and that would've been the form of writing he would use
to write the narrative of the Exodus oourney.
[ mystical music]
- With Moses' background as both Prince of Egypt
and an Israelite, he would've most likely known
about the Proto-Sinaitic script
that the Petries later discovered.
But there's another piece of information
that both Rohl and Petrovich see
connecting the history of the Proto-Sinaitic script
and the history of the Israelites.
They note that these types of inscriptions
end in Egypt around the time of the Exodus
and are never seen there again.
However, inscriptions in the Proto-Sinaitic style
do show up afterwards in Canaan;
that is why one of the names
of the script is Proto-Canaanite.
This just happens to match
the Bible's account of the Israelites
who grew into a nation in Egypt
and later moved to Canaan, conquering the Promised Land.
- Supporting the idea that the mystery script
is actually Hebrew and not Phoenician is the fact that
when the inscriptions first show up in the area of Canaan,
they are actually found in Israel for several hundred years
before showing up in Phoenicia.
[soft reverent music]
The Bible records that the greatest interaction
between Israel and Phoenicia, which is the area of Lebanon,
was during the rain of King Solomon in the 10th century BC.
Solomon was given the responsibility
of building Israel's first temple in Jerusalem.
To help with this task, Solomon wrote to King Hiram
obtaining cedar trees of Lebanon and craftsmen.
Intriguingly the oldest known alphabetic inscription
from the land of Phoenicia is found on the lid
of a sarcophagus named Ahiram.
Many date this artifact to the 10th century BC.
I took note that the Bible's King Hiram
at the time of Solomon is virtually the same name
as Ahiram on the sarcophagus.
Could it be that the writing system of the Israelites
was shared with Phoenicians at this very time
when the scripts were indistinguishable
and we find the first inscriptions in Phoenician.
Just as Eupolemus has stated that
"Moses imparted grammar to the Jews" and that
"the Phoenicians received it from the Jews."
[intriguing music]
When looking at the final step
for whether these inscriptions could be Hebrew,
the history of this script does match
the history of the Israelites,
but only if you use the earlier Exodus date.
The inventor of the script was a Semitic genius
who was familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs
matching the Bible's account
of Joseph's rise to power in Egypt.
This script first shows up in a very narrow window of time
during the reign of Amenemhat III,
exactly where the early pattern puts Joseph and his family.
The script migrates to Canaan,
matching the Israelites' journey to the promised land.
The first inscriptions are found in Ancient Israel,
not Phoenicia and curiously, the first inscriptions
to show up in Phoenicia are found on the sarcophagus
of the king called Ahiram at the time of Solomon.
If one considers that the Bible might actually
be giving a true account, can there be any better candidates
for the ones responsible for this script
than the early Israelites?
They would have had the motive and ability to develop it
in time to write the first books of the Bible.
[crickets chirping] [flame crackling]
[intriguing music]
So when people see a connection between the Proto-Sinaitic
or the Proto-Canaanite scripts and Hebrew,
what do you say?
- I say that what I call science
and what my teacher taught me--
- Professor Naveh?
- Naveh would say that it's a very bad misleading mistake
and that the person that writes it has of course an agenda.
- On the surface, mainstream scholars use
linguistic arguments to dismiss this idea.
But there may be a deeper reason involved.
What time do you think that the Exodus would have happened?
- Most people put the Exodus in the 13th Century BCE
from my perspective based on the data at hand.
This continues to be the most convincing proposal.
- If you want to believe in historical Moses,
he would have to have lived in the 13th Century.
Whatever it was that happened in the Exodus period,
it happened in the 13th Century, not the 15th.
- Something that strikes me as ironic
is that many mainstream scholars say
that the Exodus that didn't happen
had to have happened in the 13th Century BC,
at the time of Pharaoh Ramesses,
where there's little to no evidence.
I was stumped by this problem while making my earlier film
until I was shown the earlier pattern of evidence.
It seems this same issue is at play with the early alphabet.
- If you're saying basically that Moses and Joseph
were actually later in time
than when this script was invented for the first time,
then somebody other than Hebrews or Israelites
must've invented it; it couldn't have been them.
- The late Thomas Kuhn was a physicist, historician,
and philosopher of science.
He talked about paradigms in the world of science.
A paradigm is a pattern of thinking, a model,
or school of thought that everyone
in a particular field of study holds to.
The world of archeology has its paradigms.
A paradigm is based on a set of presuppositions,
things that are assumed to be true, and we all have them.
In the case of mainstream scholarship,
their paradigm for the early books of the Bible
not being purely historical seems to be largely based
on the key presupposition that an Exodus happened
at the time of Ramesses.
It puts the Israelites too late in time
to be connected with the invention
of the Proto-Sinaitic script,
which results in the conclusion that the Bible
is an untrustworthy oral tradition.
Paradigms can blind all of us from seeing the possibility
of something new or different.
But what if the presuppositions
on which those paradigms are based are faulty.
In fact, Thomas Kuhn says that science doesn't progress
with a gradual accumulation of knowledge,
but instead undergoes periodic revolutions
or paradigm shifts when some new idea
abruptly transforms the views of that particular field.
If it was established that
the world's oldest alphabet was Hebrew
and that Moses did in fact use it to write the Torah,
that would change how the world views the Exodus,
the Bible, and world history.
But to do so would require a major paradigm shift.
This brings me back to Flinders Petrie.
[soft reverent music]
- Petrie is often known as the father of archeology.
The techniques he introduced and his understanding
and recognition of the importance of gathering all objects,
that applies to archeology anywhere.
- [Timothy] Petrie also had a startling realization
of what this mysterious script in the Sinai meant
for the writing of the Bible.
- [Flinders] Here we have the result
at a date some five centuries
before the oldest Phoenician writing that is known.
It finally disproves the hypothesis
that the early Israelites, who came through this region
into Egypt and passed back again,
could not have used writing.
- If the father of Egyptian archeology
is telling us that the Israelites have the ability
to write 500 years before the Phoenicians,
what has changed since then?
Is the main change the paradigm of a generation
that became skeptical of the Bible
because the Ramesses Exodus Theory
placed the Exodus at a time
when there was little to no evidence to support it.
[intriguing music]
I have now found evidence
for all the steps of the original pattern.
This script appears by the time of the Exodus.
It did not arise in antoher part of the world
like Greece, Persia, India or China.
It originated in the region of Egypt and the Sinai
where the Bible places the early Israelites.
The script is the earliest known alphabet
which was needed to write the Torah.
Because it was a Semitic alphabet,
it was a form of writing like Hebrew.
This is all Moses would've needed
to write the basic form of the Exodus account.
In fact I emailed Professor Rollston and asked him,
"For the sake of argument, if Moses was responsible
"for writing at least part of the Torah,
"in your view could the Proto-Sinaitic script
"have been used to perform this task?"
Rollston replied, "Yes, the script that Moses
"could've used or would've used,
"would have been Early Alphabetic, not Old Hebrew.
"By the way, I believe that Moses was historical
"and that he was literate."
Speaking of literacy, the use of a simple alphabet
would've allowed the Israelite people, young and old,
to read it, understand it and preserve the words
given by God at Mount Sinai for generation to come.
Finally the evidence from all three steps
of the Hebrew pattern also show
that it could actually be Hebrew.
The letters match the look of Hebrew.
Some have interpreted the inscriptions as readable Hebrew
and the history of the script
matches the history of the Israelites.
There seems to be no reason to doubt that Moses
could have written the Exodus account as the Bible claims.
[soft piano music]
Egyptologist Alan Gardiner,
the man who determined these inscriptions
were the oldest-known alphabet,
came to an insightful observation about its origin.
- [Alan] It has been universally recognized
that so simple and therefore so perfect
an instrument for the visible recording of language
could not conceivably have resulted
from one spontaneous effort of genius.
- [Timothy] The alphabet certainly was genius.
Yet as a person of faith, I wonder
what if the invention of the alphabet
did not ultimately have a human source?
Because with no alphabet, you would have no Bible.
The evidence appears to show that this script
did emerge suddenly in a very narrow window of time.
The Bible states that it was itself divinely inspired.
Could it be that the genius of the alphabet
was also a divinely inspired gift from God
given to a particular people at a particular time
in preparation for what was to come?
The prime purpose of communicating
the words of God to mankind
beginning at Mount Sinai.
[intense reverent music]
[volcano rumbling] [thunder crackling]
- There Israel encamped before the mountain
while Moses went up to God.
The Lord called him out of the mountain saying,
"Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob
"and tell the people of Israel.
"You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians,
"how I bore you on eagles' wings
and brought you to myself.
"Now therefore if you will indeed obey my voice
"and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession
"among all peoples;
"for all the earth is mine
"and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests
"and a holy nation."
[intense reverent music]
God spoke all these words saying,
"I am the Lord; I am your God
"who brought you out of the land of Egypt
"out of the house of slavery.
[reverent vocal music]
[rocks crumbling]
[fire crackling]
"You shall have no other gods besides me.
"You shall not make for yourself a carved image.
"You shall not bow to them or serve them.
"You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
"Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
"Honor your father and your mother.
"You shall not murder.
"You shall not commit adultery.
"You shall not steal.
"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
"You shall not covet anything that is your neighbors'."
And he gave to Moses the two tablets of the testimony
written with the finger of God.
[thunder crackling] [climactic orchestral music]
In the second year, the cloud lifted
from over the tabernacle of the testimony
and the people of Israel set out
by stages from the wilderness of Sinai.
The law was given to instruct them how they were to live.
When the people repeatedly rebelled,
it took 40 years before they could enter the land
that had been promised to Abraham hundreds of years earlier.
During this time, Moses had written down
all the instructions from God
as well as the history of his people
beginning with the creation of the word.
When Moses had finished writing the words of this law
in a scroll to its very end, Moses commanded the Levites
who carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.
He said, "Take this book of the law
"and put it by the side of the Ark of the Covenant
"of the Lord your God."
[church bell donging] [soft reverent music]
- [Timothy] I started to think about the fact
that words have meaning.
In order to preserve their meaning over time,
some form of writing was needed.
We all take it for granted today,
but where did it come from?
Before the alphabet, only the elite
had this gift of knowledge, but then all that changed.
Now everyone had the ability
to read with this simple alphabet.
This technology hasn't been replaced in nearly 4,000 years,
so I continued to wonder.
Was the alphabet's arrival
at this time in history just a coincidence
or was it the gift necessary to retain the knowledge of God?
[soft reverent music]
[lively mystical music]
[singer vocalizing]
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