Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses

Ibn Khaldun, a Neglected Source of Antichristianity or Attacks on the Bible · Responding to Tim Zeak on Exodus, part I · More on Exodus, not on Tim Zeak, for now · Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses · Israelites at the Exodus

Well, they would claim:

Ezra wrote "Moses"

as they don't recognise Moses as a historical person or as a real author. And likewise kings David and Solomon are a mythical touch to two kingdoms that had broadly speaking the same religion, but had never been actually one single united kingdom. It was all invented during the exile.

Horseback riding in regular use, especially military such or for hunting, was invented some time in 800 BC by the Assyrians.

If the story of Genesis and Exodus were written after this, and if the story of kings David and Solomon were written after this, why did those inventing "myths" not put horseback riding as a regular and utilitary feature into these "myths"? It would have been within their experience. With no real historic tradition from before this time, they would have had no means of checking that horseriding hadn't been practised earlier.

Yet ... Absalom rode a mule and would not have ridden the mule in battle (or presumably even for hunting). Horses and their bits tend to come behind chariots, even into the time of King David. If Ezra had been inspired by Babylonian culture without any own historical culture, how would he have known?

Yet, someone knew, as I noted in the PS of Centaurs Revisited:

Did riding exist in the time of King David? According to above, it shouldn't have. So, I looked for the Latin case forms of "equus" in the psalms:

These, first of all, have no relation unambiguously to riding:

Nolite fieri sicut equus et mulus, quibus non est intellectus. In camo et freno maxillas eorum constringe, qui non approximant ad te.
[Psalms 31:9]

Fallax equus ad salutem; in abundantia autem virtutis suae non salvabitur.
[Psalms 32:17]

Non in fortitudine equi voluntatem habebit, nec in tibiis viri beneplacitum erit ei.
[Psalms 146:10]

Hi in curribus, et hi in equis; nos autem in nomine Domini Dei nostri invocabimus.
[Psalms 19:8]

This one, of course, does:

Ab increpatione tua, Deus Jacob, dormitaverunt qui ascenderunt equos.
[Psalms 75:7]

But : In finem, in laudibus. Psalmus Asaph, canticum ad Assyrios. It's not a psalm of David, but one of Asaph.

But didn't Absalom ride when his hair got stuck in a tree?

And it happened that Absalom met the servants of David, riding on a mule: and as the mule went under a thick and large oak, his head stuck in the oak: and while he hung between the heaven and the earth, the mule on which he rode passed on.
[II Kings 18:9]

He rode a mule, not a horse. Mule riding and donkey riding is older and it is not used in battle.

So far my PS ... so, the Ezra idea of Mosaic authorship should be at least somewhat shaken by the accuracy about conditions centuries older than Ezra in which there were no horseriders.

There is another idea which is also ludicrous, and I have seen AronRa propose it - the Tower of Babel story records the loss of one common language.

• First, cuneiform writing had been used for both Sumerian and Akkadian (two languages about as different as Chinese and Japanese) since centuries before the exile.
• Second, the cuneiform writing was not lost, it continued to be in a somewhat more restricted use after the fall of Babylon for a few centuries more, up to 1st C BC for last Sumerian and 1st C AD for last Akkadian texts.
• Third, Aramaic immediately took over as new official language, and it was a more practical one, closer to the actual spoken languages.

In other words, the non-miraculous event pretended to be behind the Tower of Babel story is impossible historically. It's as impossible as Queen Victoria getting exited at watching Back to the Future. Or C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien plagiarising George Lucas' Star Wars. Or a huge civil war breaking out in Germany when Hitler died, due to the power vacuum. This is impossible as in truly impossible, whether miracles be possible or not.

As a matter of fact, I think miracles are possible. But even if they weren't, that "explanation" behind the linguistic miracle of Babel would be Scooby Doo on an entirely wrong track.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Matthew, Apostle
21.IX.2021