Seeming Contradictions, Scribal Notes and the Authorship of the Pentateuch

As we read the five books of Moses, we come to places where the story seems a little different from what was recorded earlier, and to sentences that Moses could not have written. We need not get stuck there, as though they were contradictions we could never get past. Seen in their setting, they are very simple to explain.

Real Events Must Reconcile

In Deuteronomy 2, Moses recalls the message he sent to Sihon, king of Heshbon: “Let us pass through your country. We will stay on the main road; we will not turn aside to the right or to the left. Sell us food to eat and water to drink for their price in silver. Only let us pass through on foot, as the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir, and the Moabites, who live in Ar, did for us” (Deuteronomy 2:27–29). But Numbers records that when Israel asked to pass through Edom, the king of Edom refused and came out against them with a large and powerful army (Numbers 20:14–21). So is Moses changing the story? Is he twisting the narrative for his own purposes? Or is it only a seeming contradiction?

Why must this be reconciled? If it is fact, it has to be reconciled; if it is a story, it need not be. Even in a story, of course, we look for what film-goers call “goofs”: continuity errors, where something is one way in one scene and another way in the next. But if something really happened, there can be no contradiction in it. So when two accounts of a real event seem to differ, we must ask why. A real event cannot contradict itself, though two recollections of it may differ in small details, as we shall see.

The answer here is simple. At that time a nation such as Edom was not ruled by one king from one capital. It was spread across a vast territory, and it was not centralised. Today we have centralised governments, and if anyone wants to pass through a nation, the central government knows and deals with it. It was not like that then. One part of Edom, under one leader, refused to let Israel pass, and Israel took a detour (Numbers 20:21). Another part, under another leader, let them pass. So there is no contradiction. It is not as though all the Edomites gathered together and said, “We will not allow you to enter.”

The same is true of the Amorites, who had two kings, Sihon and Og (Deuteronomy 3:1–11). The Amorites were a race of people, not a unified nation. India before independence was called one nation, yet it had many kingdoms and many kings. In the same way, different parts of the same people had different kings and different leaders, and each part made its own decisions.

We need not get stuck at such places, as though they were contradictions we could never get past. They are very simple to explain. Seen in their setting, they can be reconciled.

Only One Can Be True

The same principle applies to the teaching. In the Law, God is revealing Himself, and what He reveals about Himself in one place will not contradict what He reveals about Himself elsewhere. When two statements contradict each other, only one can be true. Both cannot be true at the same time.

Many Christians take one verse from the Bible whenever they want to justify something, yet verses can be pitted one against another. The Bible must be read as a whole, from the whole picture, from a holistic perspective. Otherwise we run into contradictions that we shall never be able to reconcile. Why, for example, did God forbid Israel to take the land of Edom, Moab and Ammon (Deuteronomy 2:4–9, 19), while commanding them to take the land of the seven nations (Deuteronomy 7:1–2)? Was it because Moab and Ammon descended from Lot (Genesis 19:36–38), and Edom from Esau (Genesis 36:1, 8), and God had an affinity for them? Either God is partial or He is not partial. Either He loves one group of people or He loves everyone. There is no middle ground. God is not partial. Why should He ever be? What would He gain from any nation? If He were partial, what would be wrong with racism or caste prejudice? When we portray God as partial, it is often to justify our own partialities. So we must think these things through, and find the answer that does not contradict what God has said about Himself.

Sometimes the seeming contradiction lies within a single verse. Moses says that he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, “and the LORD listened to me at this time also. It was not his will to destroy you” (Deuteronomy 10:10). Did God listen to Moses, and so decide not to destroy them? Or was it already His will not to destroy them? Moses himself makes it clear: it was not that he changed God’s mind. It was God’s own will not to destroy them. The two things happened one after the other, but one did not cause the other: sequential, not consequential. Moses wanted what God wanted.

The tablets were “inscribed by the finger of God” (Deuteronomy 9:10), yet God is spirit: either He has a body or He does not. God says, “Let me alone, so that I may destroy them” (Deuteronomy 9:14): either God is wise and knows everything, or He is impulsive. Isn’t He God? Doesn’t He already know? What God says about Himself is theology; how a narrative describes Him is depiction. Where the two seem to differ, what He says about Himself is the truth.

Moses even asks, “Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation…?” (Deuteronomy 4:34). Is he saying that there are other gods? That would contradict what he says in the same chapter, that “the LORD is God; besides him there is no other” (Deuteronomy 4:35). He means the gods of people’s minds: even in their myths, nothing like this had ever happened.

Recollection Is Not Contradiction

Deuteronomy is a retelling. The first four books of Moses are, for the most part, God’s perspective on what happened. Deuteronomy is Moses’ perspective. He is recollecting everything, because he is about to die and will not enter the land (Numbers 20:12; Deuteronomy 3:23–27), and he is speaking to a new generation. The generation that came out of Egypt is gone, and only Moses, Joshua and Caleb remain of those who began the journey (Numbers 14:29–30; 26:64–65). Yet it is a generation that knew what the older generation knew. They had travelled with Moses through all of it, and everything he recalls was already in their minds.

Exodus was written almost in real time, as things were happening. It reads more like a report. Deuteronomy is full of emotion. Again and again Moses says, “Because of you the LORD became angry with me” (Deuteronomy 1:37; 3:26; 4:21). That is the difference between a newspaper article and a person narrating what has happened in his own life. One sticks to the facts; the other carries a great deal of emotion with it.

Deuteronomy 5 repeats the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20. In Exodus, God gives them, and Moses is only His mouthpiece. In Deuteronomy, Moses recollects them and teaches them. Deuteronomy is also a condensed account, a telescopic view, not as detailed as the earlier books; otherwise there would be no point in retelling it. At times Moses adds details not recorded earlier, such as his own plea to enter the land (Deuteronomy 3:23–26). So there may be differences between Moses’ account in Deuteronomy and the account in Exodus, in the way things are explained or in the details. That does not matter at all, and we should not worry about reconciling every detail. Memory works that way in all of us. If you witness something and note it down at once, and then recollect it a year later and note it down again, the two accounts may differ. That does not mean that one of them is a lie, or that Moses is lying. In recollection there will be small differences. Emotional attachment plays its part, and recollection is always a little hazy. The same happens in the study of the Gospels. Sometimes all four are put together, and people try to work out why tiny details are not the same and cannot be reconciled. The Gospel writers wrote later, and not everything will be exactly the same in every account.

What matters is that the event itself was real. At Sinai there was thunder, a loud voice, cloud, deep darkness and fire (Exodus 19:16–19; 20:18; Deuteronomy 5:22–23). It was not something the people imagined or hallucinated. It was not one person’s vision. The whole nation experienced it together, and each could say, “I heard that too; I saw that too.” That shared experience united them, and, though it was not the only proof, it was a proof to them that something really happened there. It was not Moses going up the mountain and coming down to say, “This is what God said.” It was mysterious, not mystical: they could not understand every detail of it, but they knew it was supernatural. It was not Moses who gave them the commandments. It was God.

Scribal Additions

Some statements in the five books of Moses are not Moses’ words. The NIV and other modern translations put many of them in parentheses. The brackets are the translators’. They are not part of the original text. But the statements within them are scribal additions†: notes added by a scribe later on. They are also called editorial insertions. Even the tense in them is different.

How do we know they are scribal additions? Because of the way the manuscripts were preserved. I call them parenthetical statements; the technical term is scribal additions, and the scribe did not put them in brackets. He simply wrote the explanation into the text he was copying. The manuscripts were written on animal skin or papyrus. However carefully they were kept, they had a shelf life. They decayed and deteriorated with time. So before a manuscript fell apart, a scribe copied it. That scribe belonged to a later generation, and he was copying the text so that the people of his own time could read it. But there were names and places in it that his contemporaries would no longer know. So he explained them. His notes were a reference for his readers.

So, in a parenthesis, we read that “Hermon is called Sirion by the Sidonians; the Amorites call it Senir” (Deuteronomy 3:9). We read that Og, king of Bashan, “was the last of the Rephaites. His bed was decorated with iron and was more than nine cubits long and four cubits wide. It is still in Rabbah of the Ammonites” (Deuteronomy 3:11). That “still” is not written to us. We do not even know where Rabbah of the Ammonites is, and there is no point searching for the bed of King Og. The scribe was writing to a particular group of people at a particular time. Rabbah was still there, and they could have gone and looked at the bed. In the same way, the region Jair took “was named after him, so that to this day Bashan is called Havvoth Jair” (Deuteronomy 3:14). The whole region of Argob “used to be known as a land of the Rephaites” (Deuteronomy 3:13). “To this day” means the day the scribe was writing, not our day. And the Sea of the Arabah is explained as “the Dead Sea” (Deuteronomy 3:17), because by the scribe’s time that was what people called it.

In Deuteronomy 10, the narrative is interrupted by a note about the Israelites’ travels, Aaron’s death, and the setting apart of the tribe of Levi “to carry the ark of the covenant of the LORD, to stand before the LORD to minister and to pronounce blessings in his name, as they still do today” (Deuteronomy 10:6–9). That “today” is not our today either. Whether it is still done now is beside the point. It refers to something that began earlier in their history and was still practised on the day the scribe was writing. Nor is it Moses speaking. Moses would not write, “This still happens today, and this is why they do it: because Moses said so.” The scribe is connecting the events for his own contemporaries: “You see the Levites still doing this; this is how it all began.”

Moses himself speaks the same way to his own hearers. Of the tablets of the covenant he says, “I … put the tablets in the ark I had made, as the LORD commanded me, and they are there now” (Deuteronomy 10:5). That “now” is the time of the people he was speaking to, who had the tablets among them.

Whoever added them, the matter remains the same. They help a later generation understand the text. Some of the names mean little to us anyway. We do not know Gilead, Bashan or Argob, so even the explanation does not help us much. For the people of the scribe’s day, it did.

Moses Speaking, or Someone Writing About Moses?

Sometimes Moses is speaking. At other times an author speaks about Moses, as an omniscient narrator: “This is the law Moses set before the Israelites. These are the stipulations, decrees and laws Moses gave them when they came out of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 4:44–45). The book itself opens, “These are the words Moses spoke to all Israel” (Deuteronomy 1:1). In such passages Moses is the protagonist of a story written by someone else. So we may ask: did Moses write this, did someone else write it, or was Moses writing about himself in the third person?

We do not know. Redaction criticism holds that the text is an edited version: that someone wrote parts of it later and placed them into Moses’ narrative. Textual criticism has produced various theories about which book Moses wrote and who else might have written the rest. For most of us, these questions are not important. For most of us, Moses is the author of these books; only textual criticism and its theories raise other possibilities. And whoever the author is, the matter remains the same. The concept remains the same. What is important is not who wrote it, but whether it is historically true.

Moses Anticipates the Questions

Moses also speaks the way Paul often writes in his letters. The Epistles were written to address particular problems in the churches, and a writer like Paul anticipates the questions that will arise and answers them before they are asked: if you ask this, here is the answer. “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” (Romans 6:1–2). Moses does the same. The people had seen the Egyptians fall. They had seen God protect them, even from the natural elements. Now they were to take over the lands of the Canaanites. God had taught them that this was for a purpose. Even so, an idea could slowly take root in their minds: that they were a superior race and God would stand with them against everyone else. They could come to think that they had a special place in His heart, and that He would never destroy them. So Moses stops, again and again, to state the questions they would ask in their hearts and to answer them before they are asked. He reminds them what God did to Pharaoh, and to Dathan and Abiram, men of their own people (Deuteronomy 11:2–7). They are like any other nation, and God will not be partial to them. “You may say to yourselves, ‘These nations are stronger than we are. How can we drive them out?’ But do not be afraid of them; remember well what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt” (Deuteronomy 7:17–18). “You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17–18). “Do not say to yourself, ‘The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.’ No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you” (Deuteronomy 9:4). Each time, Moses states the question the people will ask in their hearts, and then answers it.

Manuscripts, Not “Discoveries”

People sometimes say that Mount Sinai has been confirmed, or that the rock Moses struck has been found (Exodus 17:6; Numbers 20:11). Sinai is a historical place, but we do not know which mountain it is. The people of that time were not intent on preserving places for posterity. Even in the time of Jesus, no one bothered to preserve where He walked, which garden He prayed in, or which house He was born in. For them, it was all about the commandments, not about the place.

We must respect archaeology. If there is an archaeological find, supported by proper evidence, we accept it as true. But when a claim comes from some Christian who says, “This has been found; that has been found,” we must be very wary of it, and not get excited. People have claimed to have found Goliath’s skull (1 Samuel 17:4, 51), and a piece of Noah’s ark on the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:4). Christians get very excited about such stories. There is the story of the “well to hell” in Siberia, a hole dug so deep that screams were supposedly heard from below; it turned out to be a hoax. Many such stories were created by pranksters and artists. Some began as satire. There are satirical websites, such as the Babylon Bee, that make fun not of the Bible but of gullible people who proclaim things as true. They publish doctored images, and today artificial intelligence makes such images very easy to produce. Then gullible Christians lap it up and share it on social media: “Praise be to God, hallelujah, we have found this!” When we learn how these stories were made, we have to hang our heads.

We do not need such things to know that the Bible is reliable. If historical evidence turns up, praise God for it. If it does not, that is fine too. Either way, it does not affect our understanding that the Bible is true. We are speaking of events some 3,500 years ago, and the biblical manuscripts themselves are evidence enough that these are not cooked-up stories. They are among the best-preserved manuscripts of the ancient world. Compare them with the writings on which we rely for other ancient figures. Everyone accepts that Socrates lived, yet the earliest surviving manuscripts of Plato’s dialogues, our chief source for Socrates, were copied more than a thousand years after Plato wrote them. No one questions them. When it comes to the biblical manuscripts and their reliability, the evidence is overwhelming, and no one can stand against it.