Dr. Dylan Johnson

Once you start reading the ancient literature more widely, you start to read these biblical texts in really different ways than maybe your Sunday school teacher would have taught you.

And it's kind of a it's a bit of an adventure in that respect, trying to piece out the ancient thoughts that are embedded in these texts that are actually quite familiar and making them unfamiliar.

So that's that's the passion.

Yeah, I mean, there's some obvious clues.

So there's two levels to that question.

One is, what does tradition say?

Tradition has a very simple answer.

Moses wrote the story.

Moses wrote the story.

Stupid question, Kate.

Right.

So he wrote the first five books.

But since the Enlightenment, we have started to question Mosaic authorship.

So the historical critical answer is, well, it's someone who speaks Hebrew because it's written in Hebrew, which places them in the geographic orbit of Israel, Palestine, probably based on the way that the Hebrew is written sometime between... And here's dates...

always a debate, sometime between the 9th and, let's say, 4th centuries BCE.

And that's being broad, and I don't think there's many people who would disagree with that very broad dating scheme, which places this individual, this scribe, this author, probably in kingdoms that we know as Israel and Judah, but also then later developments where they lose their autonomy and become provinces, Persian Yehud.

Hellenistic Judea.

So somewhere in there.

But beyond that, it's a literate individual, which implies an elite individual.

And as we're going to get into literacy in the ancient world, especially is probably going to fall into a gender category of males.