Holy Moses! PBS Documentary Suggests Exodus Not Real

"It challenges the Bible's stories if you want to read them literally, and that will disturb many people," says archaeologist William Dever, who specializes in Israel's history. "But it explains how and why these stories ever came to be told in the first place, and how and why they were written down."

The Nova program will premiere Nov. 18. PBS presented a clip and a panel discussion at the summer tour of the Television Critics Association.

The program says the Bible was written in the sixth century BC and that hundreds of authors contributed.

"At least the first five books of the Bible come together during the Babylonian exile," says producer Gary Glassman.

The program challenges long-held beliefs. Abraham, Sarah and their offspring probably didn't exist, says Carol Meyers, a religion professor at Duke University.

"These stories are unlikely to represent real historical events, but rather there's some kernel of ancient experience in there which has survived and which helps give identity to the people at the time the Bible finally took shape centuries and centuries later," Meyers says.

There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus, either, she says, but "it doesn't mean that there's no kernel of truth to it."

Nova series producer Paula Apsell says she found it "extremely shocking" to learn that monotheism was a process that took hundreds of years.

"I was always brought up to believe that the minute Abraham and the patriarchs came on the scene, the Israelites accepted one God and there was just always one God and that was it," Apsell says. "I think people are going to really be stunned by that."

This premise sounds about line one of the tenets of Reform Judaism, springing from the 19th Century "documentary hypothesis" work of Julius Wellhausen in Germany. Reform Judaism had its origins in 19th Century Germany, so this connection is to be expected The initial forays into this multiple-source theory were in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes.

The only reason it's "shocking" is because most people aren't aware of this thesis.

But when you consider some simple markers within the text, you can discern a kind of "watermark" within it that tends to cast doubt on the notion that it was written by a variety of independent sources. For example, if you start with the first letter TAV in Genesis, then skip 49 (7x7) letters, you'll find VAV. Repeat this twice more and you'll find RESH and HAY - spelling out the word "TORAH."

This pattern is repeated in Exodus, but then in Leviticus, you find "YHVH" - the sacred name - spelled out with a separation of seven letters.

And in the final two books, Numbers and Deuteronomy, "TORAH" is encoded as well, but this time backwards starting with the last TAV, not the first. The contextual aspects of some other equidistant letter sequences is also notable. Obviously, this is not a random phenomenon.

It's easy to get distracted by mystical future-prediction codes, or War and Peace analysis of the "Rabbis test," the fact is that the skeptics simply gloss over the significance of the connection between significant numbers of intervening letters and significant phrases within significant contexts, because they can't calculate such significance:

"The problem with putting a number on the remarkableness of this detail is, of course, that it is ad hoc." - Maya Bar-Hillel, Dror Bar-Natan, and Brendan McKay, The Torah Codes: Puzzle and Solution

CxxxxxAxxxxxNxxxxxYxxxxxOxxxxxUxxxxxRxxxxxExxxxxAxxxxxDxxxxxTxxxxxHxxxxxIxxxxxSxxxxx?

The "Moby Dick" analysis would be more persuasive if they'd found, say, "Bildad" encoded on page 74 or thereabouts with a 60-letter separation ("...the goodly age of sixty...") or the like.

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