Bible Sleuth Turns Up Some Startling Authors : Book Identifies Moses’ ‘Ghost Writer,’ Says a Woman Wrote Sex Scenes

Richard E. Friedman likes a good thriller. Like many other Bible scholars, as it happens, he’s a Raymond Chandler aficionado. So when he sat down after 10 years of looking into who wrote the Bible, he thought of writing his book in the style of someone like, say, Alfred Hitchcock.

After all, there was a fundamental mystery--Whodunit? There was a large body of clues to be examined and sorted through. The sleuth/hero could have been modeled on a reknowned Bible scholar--say, Friedman’s former professor of Bible at Harvard University.

Friedman ended up scuttling the detective-fiction idea. But he adopted the pace and tone of a detective on a case. “Because that’s how I feel about scholarship,” the 41-year-old UC San Diego professor said recently. “That’s how I feel when I’m doing it.”

Friedman has reached some rather startling conclusions about the Old Testament--conclusions that some scholars may share but that run counter to popular notions. Among people of fundamentalist and orthodox views, his forthcoming book on the subject may ruffle feathers.

Moses Was Not Alone

Among his findings:

- The author of the Five Books of Moses was not, of course, Moses (as the traditional wisdom once had it). Friedman has come up with unprecedented detail about the social, political and religious motivations and historical context of the many people who did the writing.

In one case, Friedman has located the actual signature of a man he identifies as the author of a large chunk of the Old Testament. The author is Baruch, the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah. His signet ring was excavated in the 1970s and is on display in Jerusalem.

- Friedman believes all of the sex scenes in the Old Testament were written by the same author--a person who Friedman says could have been a woman. He is now exploring further the writings of that author, believing he may have happened upon “the first great prose writer,” living some eight centuries before Christ.

“I’ve discovered . . . an extraordinary, great author whose work runs through several books of the Bible,” Friedman said in an interview. “So that if I’m right in identifying that person, we would have for the first time a fairly lengthy work covering many different stories of different periods, all written by the same person. Which would mean the first great prose writer, ever.”

- Friedman concludes that certain stories are purely inventions of the authors, dictated by factional political and religious motives. One such story is the tale of the golden calf made by Aaron, which prompted Moses to smash the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

‘A Double-Duty Polemic’

Citing extensive historical and political evidence, Friedman concluded that the story was written by a priest as an attack on the Israelite and Judean religious establishments. Both had excluded his group of priests; Friedman called the passage “a double-duty polemic.”

“For a fundamentalist Christian or an orthodox Jew, that’s troubling,” said Friedman. “Because the Bible is supposed to be inerrant. It’s not supposed to be wrong. When the kid in Sunday school looks up and says, ‘Is it true?’ they say ‘Yes.’ And here’s someone else saying no.”

Many of Friedman’s findings are to be published early next month in his book, “Who Wrote the Bible?” Its strength, other scholars say, is Friedman’s persuasive marshaling of his clues and the fact that he lays them out for the general public, not merely scholars.

“For many of us, I suspect the Bible is a giant Rubic’s cube that the best minds of the Jews and Christians for more than 2,000 years have been trying to solve,” said William Propp, a visiting lecturer in Hebrew language and Biblical studies at UCSD. “If you can come up with a better answer to any of the problems . . . it’s an enormous achievement.”

Friedman, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature, describes his analytical approach to the Bible as “scientific method.” That is, it involves identifying a problem, observing, hypothesizing on the basis of observations, testing the hypothesis and not permitting preconceived beliefs to interfere.

“Especially on this campus, you’re sensitive to the science-versus-the-Bible dichotomy,” said Friedman. “Here, it’s no longer scientific method versus belief. It is examining the Bible within the rules of scientific method. So I can present my case to a physicist and he can look at the evidence and see if it adds up.”

For his book, Friedman also relied on a range of disciplines not traditionally tapped by Bible scholars. They included political history, archeology, literary sensitivity and methods of linguistic analysis developed over the past 15 years.

Friedman even landed a grant to study Old Testament puns--a line of investigation that he says proved especially fruitful. It enabled him to untangle the work of two troublesome authors whose writings, interwoven, could not be separated simply by stylistic analysis.

Expected Proxmire Award

“I thought I was going to get a Golden Fleece award for getting a grant to study puns in the Bible,” said Friedman, referring to U.S. Sen. William Proxmire’s annual prize for extravagant wastes of public money. “But it turned out to be a major piece of evidence.”

Friedman’s interest in the Bible did not begin with curiosity about authorship.

A former seminarian, he says he was interested originally only in what the Bible said and how that affected people. Then he encountered a professor at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in the late 1960s who “made me realize there was really greatness in it.”

Until then, Friedman had admired Greek tragedy, the ancient Greeks and the vast body of literature they left behind. His professor’s literary sensitivity and sense of history and the pagan world helped him discover the Bible’s “literary and theological quality.”

“It was how they portrayed God, and the fact that they always portrayed humans in confrontation with God, always fighting with God,” said Friedman, explaining what he came to recognize in the Bible. “That was what had fascinated me about the Greek business, too. It was always humans in tension with their gods.”

“It’s impressive to me, I suppose, in a psychological way--of revealing something about people,” Friedman added. “If you believe that this god or that god is real, that there is a god, then why, in writing stories about it, would you always portray your own people at odds with God?”

But that is the case in all great religious literature, he said.

“In the Greek tradition, it’s Prometheus: right at the beginning, humans only have something because they stole it from God,” Friedman said. “And the Bible begins, too, (with the idea) that we only have knowledge because we took it when we weren’t supposed to.”

Once Friedman had become interested in the way the Bible was written, the next question became who wrote it and why they wrote it as they had. To find the answer required knowing when the authors lived and their historical, social and literary context.

Hot on the Trail

Friedman left the seminary, choosing instead to become a scholar. He enrolled at Harvard University, from which he earned a Doctor of Theology degree in 1978. Two years earlier, he had moved to La Jolla to become UCSD’s only professor of biblical studies.

Since that time, he contends, UCSD has become a major center in biblical studies. There are soon to be four Old Testament scholars on the campus--a number that few centers in the United States can claim. One of the two most respected senior Bible scholars in the country, David Noel Freedman, now spends most of the year teaching at UCSD.

According to Richard Friedman, Bible scholars had questioned for many centuries the tradition that the first five books of the Old Testament were written by Moses. But only in the late 19th Century did it become an accepted theory among scholars that the books were in fact composed by combining and interweaving four different documents.

Such views had long been controversial. Earlier proponents had had their lives threatened and their books banned, had been imprisoned and forced to convert. One 19th Century Scottish scholar and editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had been tried for heresy and expelled from his academic chair.

By the 1930s, however, orthodox scholars who had participated in the debate had all but withdrawn from the field. By the time Friedman embarked on his work in the 1970s, the idea of composite authorship was well accepted among Bible scholars but there had been few books on the subject directed to the general public.

“His version is more persuasive than previously proposed syntheses,” said William Propp. Propp said Friedman’s book is especially persuasive because he analyzes not just one isolated part but a vast chunk of the Bible from Genesis through Jeremiah.

“The main thing of the book is actually not naming the authors, though that may be what will interest people most,” said Friedman. “It’s being able to place them in history and see why they told the story this way and not that way--and occasionally, that establishes that a story in the Bible is true or that it’s not.”

As he puts it in the book, “Reading the Bible will never be quite the same.”