Hi all.

Upon recommendation, I'm reading the Joseph Wheless book "Is It God's Word?" I'm in the middle of the second chapter, where he's painstakingly demonstrating time and again that the Old Testament books could not have been written by the person whose name they bear. He spend a great deal of time showing how it's ridiculous to say Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and I understand why this proof is damning (particularly the bit about how nothing from those books was mentioned in any of the later books until the Babylonian captivity, which COINCIDENTALLY had their own Eden/Flood/etc myths). However, I fail to understand why it matters whether the book of Joshua, for instance, was written BY him. As a child, I always assumed the book was named such because it was ABOUT him.

Can anyone explain to me what difference it makes? (Wheless may get around to it sooner or later, but I'm knee-deep in proofs that the OT was clearly not written by those for whom they're named, and I can't help but think this is immaterial.)

Thanx.

diana

"Can anyone explain to me what difference it makes?"

none, unless you're a fundy or Orthodox Jew.

One nontrivial reason: the New Testament's references to Moses, such as him being the author of various laws.

Opus1

For some reason, many fundies find "tradition" as authoritative as Biblical statements. You're correct in that there's nothing in Joshua which states specifically that he wrote it.

But you'd be surprised at some of the things fundies will believe. They'll argue to the death that Matthew was written in Hebrew, solely because that's what Eusebius wrote that Papias thought, or something like that. Go figure.