BIBLE CONTRADICTIONS: THE PENTATEUCH

The contradictions offered in GhanaNet.com just keep coming. This group involves those that appear in the Books of Moses or allude to those books:

Seedtime and harvest were never to cease. (Genesis 8:22)

Seedtime and harvest did cease for seven years. (Genesis 41:54, 56; 45:6)

The second group of references all refer to the seven-year famine in Egypt. However, Genesis 8 is a blanket promise given to all mankind after the flood that there would be no similar massive disruption of the various cycles in the earth. That verse can be diagrammed as follows in order to better show the poetic parallelism in God's words:

As long as the earth endures,

    seedtime and harvest,     cold and heat,

    summer and winter,       day and night

            shall not cease.

You can see that the pair “seedtime and harvest” is explained in the next line as the extremes of the seasons. Similarly, “cold and heat” are referring to the daily rotation of the earth. It nowhere says that there will be seeds planted or crops harvested every year, only that the two time periods when those events normally happen will continue forever.

 

God hardened Pharaoh's heart (Exodus 4:21, etc.)

Pharaoh hardened his own heart (Exodus 9:3, etc.)

I have explained this one elsewhere, but suffice it to say that both events happened. Here as in other cases in the Bible, the usual pattern is that people first sin by hardening their hearts. If the attitude persists, God then hardens their hearts even more in order to publicly demonstrate some subsequent action of His. This might be to show the justification for His judgment on them or to highlight even more clearly the actions of that person's righteous opponents.

All the cattle and horses in Egypt died. (Exodus 9:3,6)

All the horses did not die. (Exodus 14:9)

The author of this contradiction could just as well have added that some cattle appear to be left two plagues later. There are basically two proposed solutions to this one, and so we will take them in turn:

1. “The story is obviously told in dramatic form. The Semitic writer does not expect his reader to be a literalist. His phrase is as legitimate as ours, when we say that 'Everyone went to the concert.'” (Knight)

Childs says much the same thing: “But the discrepancy is not a serious one, since the narrative style should not be overtaxed.” Propp concurs: “This seems a clear case of hyperbole.” And he quotes the Jewish scholar Ibn Ezra, who explained that “all” really means “most.”

2. Alternatively, both Cole and Dillman explain that the text only says that the livestock out in the field at the time were hit by the plague. Consequently, those animals housed in barns were spared. This view is also supported by the punctuation used by the NRSV translators: “...the hand of the LORD will strike...your livestock in the field: the horses, etc.” Notice the different implication one gets using different punctuation: “..the hand of the LORD will strike...your cattle/livestock in the field, the horses, etc.” Of course, the original Hebrew had no punctuation, and so both translations are possible.

Lastly, there is my own unscholarly opinion. Many commentators correlate the various plagues with the times during the year when they would have been most likely to have occurred. They conclude that the time period for all ten plagues to have taken place would have stretched out to encompass most or all of a year. Thus, after the fifth plague decimated the cattle, the Egyptians had plenty of time to acquire replacements from neighboring peoples, or even take some of the Jews' livestock from them, before the seventh plague or the time of the Exodus.

Moses feared Pharaoh. (Exodus 2:14,15,23; 4:19)

Moses did not fear Pharaoh. (Hebrews 11:27)

Let us consider the Exodus passages first. After Moses had killed the Egyptian, he was surprised to find out that the event had been witnessed. Feeling that discretion was the better part of valor, he left town before others found out. It nowhere says that Moses was afraid of Pharaoh, although I can see how that can be inferred from the text. And, of course, there is a difference between showing wisdom and prudence in one's actions and being in deadly fear. F. F. Bruce adds, “He was afraid, admittedly, but that was not why he left Egypt; his leaving Egypt was an act of faith [knowing that God would take care of him],” as the author of Hebrews explains.

Note that the above criticism assumes that it was Moses' leaving Egypt in Genesis 2-4 rather than the later Exodus of all the Jews that was referred to in Hebrews, but scholars are divided regarding that point. Hodges, Ellingsworth and Buchanan, among others, feel that the reference is to the Exodus instead. In any case, the author of Hebrews does not mention the negative aspects of the various heroes of the faith he lists in the 11^th chapter, but emphasizes instead their acts of faith. Thus, Buchanan explains the situation as such: “The author sharpened the contrasts between the values at stake for Moses so that they appear more vivid than they were presented in the Exodus account.”

There is also a third possibility. The main obstacle to seeing a reference to the Exodus in Hebrews 11:27 is that it would disrupt the strictly chronological order of the events related in that chapter (placing the Exodus before the Passover instead of after it). One possible way, however, out of that problem is explained by Ellingsworth, who evokes an incident in Exodus 11:8 occurring before the Passover in which “Moses went out from Pharaoh with fury.” It is possible that the sentence can be translated to refer to Pharaoh's fury rather than that of Moses. In that case, there is no mention of Moses being momentarily in fear for his life at that time. This explanation would also locate the historical allusion in Hebrews 11:27 in its proper chronological order.

24,000 died in the plague. (Numbers 25:9)

23,000 died in the plague. (I Corinthians 10:8)

One possible explanation is that Paul was relying on an alternative text of Numbers of which we have no present knowledge. I have discussed elsewhere that numbers in the Bible, unlike words, have little to no redundancy. Thus, if a scribe at one point or other in the copying of the text accidentally wrote down the wrong number, there was little chance for that error to be caught in subsequent copying of that defective text.

However, other theories have been proposed to resolve this discrepancy. But many feel that it “has not yet found a satisfying solution.” (Ciampa and Rosner, Commentary on the NT Use of the OT) Nevertheless, here are two other possibilities.

Koet explains that Paul fused together two punishments of the Israelites found in the Pentateuch: the one in Numbers and the incident in Exodus 32:28 occurring after the people worshiped the golden calf. In this latter event, it states that 3,000 “fell in a single day.” That same wording appears in I Corinthians. This was done so that “the reference to Numbers 25:1-4 would still be recognizable but that the echo of Exodus might also be heard.” (Ciampa and Rosner)

Probably a more likely explanation is proposed by a number of other commentators. The Numbers 25 incident describes the deaths as occurring over several days. In verses 1-4, the leaders are killed, and in verses 5-8, the other Israelites who aligned themselves with the Moabites were killed. Verse 9 then gives the total as 24,000. Thus, those killed on a single day amounted to only 23,000, as accurately stated by Paul in I Corinthians using additional information to which we are not privy today.