Moses – a confusing story?
Moses is the most prominent human character in Torah. He leads the Israelites out of Egypt, and guides them towards Canaan. He mediates the laws the Yahweh revealed on mount Sinai.
Critical scholars point out that there is no extrabiblical biblical evidence that Moses was a real, historical, person. The accounts of him in Scripture were compiled centuries after the events they purport to describe.
According to Jeffrey Stackert, there is not one Moses in the Old Testament, but four. Each of these belongs to one of the four literary traditions that make up the Torah. The compiler, wishing to be faithful to his sources, did not trouble to reconcile many of the discrepancies between those sources. Stackert asks, for example:-
Is it Moses who strikes the Nile River to enact the blood plague in Egypt (Ex 7:20b), or does he simply stand by as his brother, Aaron, holds out his hand over Egypt’s waters (Ex 7:19, 20a)?
Does Moses turn his rod into a serpent before the Israelites (Ex 4:3-4, 30), or is it Aaron who performs this wonder—and before the Egyptian king, Pharaoh, not the Israelites (Ex 7:10)?
Does Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt in the middle of the night (Ex 12:29-34), or do they wait until morning to go (Ex 12:22)?
Upon descending from Mount Horeb, does Moses immediately deliver to the Israelites the laws that Yahweh gave him there (Ex 24:3-8), or does he wait until the end of the wilderness period to deliver Yahweh’s laws (Deut 1:5, 5:1, 6:1)?
Does Moses teach the Israelites that they may eat meat from animals found dead (Lev 17:15), or does he insist that they may not (Deut 14:21)?
Stackert does point out that the sources must have had much in common if they could be combined in this way.
For my part, I think that the evidence for the existence of Moses, and for the general reliability of the biblical text, is far stronger than for the existence of these putative source documents. And if the compiler was not too bothered about these apparent discrepancies, then we can follow his lead and concentrate on hearing God speak in his word.