Biblical Anachronisms

From *The Skeptical Review*, 1999 / May-June:

by Farrell Till

Anachronisms occur in written documents when they make references to anything (persons, places, events, etc.) that did not belong to the era in which the documents were set. If a history of the Civil War made references to aerial bombardments and said that Thomas Jefferson was the president at this time, these would be anachronisms, because airplanes didn't exist then and Jefferson was president 50 years earlier. Anyone seeing such references in a history book would immediately realize that the writer was poorly informed about some aspects of this war. Certainly, no one would consider the author to be an infallible writer.

If we would react this way to anachronisms in a history book, consistency should require us to react accordingly to anachronisms in the Bible. Inerrantists, of course, are loath to admit it, but anachronisms are in the Bible. Genesis 36:31, for example, referred to kings that reigned over Israel: "Now these were the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the children of Israel." Biblical fundamentalists believe that the book of Genesis was written by Moses and will vigorously oppose any attempts to prove otherwise, but according to Deuteronomy 34:1-7, Moses died and was buried in an unknown location before the Israelites had even entered into the promised land. The first king of Israel was Saul, who was anointed king in 1 Samuel 10:1, but if biblical chronology is correct, this would have been approximately 400 years after Moses had died. If Moses did indeed write the book of Genesis, how could he have known about kings who wouldn't exist for another four centuries? Inerrantists will simplistically argue that he knew this by "inspiration," but a more reasonable explanation would be that Genesis was written by someone else long after the time people have traditionally believed.

Moses is the assumed author of the book of Exodus too, but another anachronism also casts suspicion on the Mosaic authorship of this book. The writer, whoever he was, said that when pharaoh allowed the Israelites to leave Egypt, "God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near" (Ex. 13:17). In other words, the writer was claiming that God didn't lead the Israelites out through the land of the Philistines, even though that would have been the shortest route, and the reason given was that the people might "see war," change their minds, and return to Egypt. So instead God took them the long way around, where the Israelites still saw war with the Amalekites and other warring tribes, and constantly bellyached and asked to return to Egypt, but that is another article. For now, we want to focus on the anachronistic reference to the Philistines.

If biblical chronology is accurate, the exodus would have occurred around 1495 B. C., at which time the Philistines had not yet settled into Western Canaan. Archaeological work has confirmed that the Philistines were a "sea people," who migrated south, probably from Greece and the Balkans, in the 13th and early 12th centuries B. C. They attempted to settle in the Nile delta but were repulsed by Pharaoh Merneptah in the late 13th century. They settled on the Palestinian coast, where they continued to harass Egypt, but near the beginning of the 12th century, they were defeated by Ramses III in a combined land and sea battle that ended their threat to Egypt. Dating from the 12th century, the annals of Ramses III and Egyptian stone reliefs at his temple to Ammon at Medinet Habu near Thebes tell of these battles with the Philistines, so the southward migration of the Philistines actually occurred after the Israelite exodus from Egypt. The reference to them in Exodus 13:17 is an anachronism that was either penned by the real author of Exodus, who would have lived well after Moses, or else is a textual insertion that was added to the original work. Either option does serious damage to the inerrantist view of infallibly inspired biblical writers.

The Exodus writer also referred to Israelite priests before any priests had been appointed. In Exodus 19, Moses had presumably been called to the top of Mount Sinai to chat with Yahweh (v:22), at which time Yahweh gave a strict warning to Moses that the people should stay away from the mountain: "Then Yahweh said to Moses, `Go down and warn the people, lest they break through to gaze at Yahweh, and many of them perish. Also let the priests who come near Yahweh consecrate themselves, lest Yahweh break out against them'" (vs:21-22). After Moses had reminded the omniscient Yahweh that the people couldn't come to the mountain because Yahweh had previously warned them that they would die if they touched it, Yahweh said, "Away! Get down and then come up, you and Aaron with you. But do not let the priests and the people break through to come up to Yahweh, lest he break out against them" (v:24).

So on this occasion, the inscrutable Yahweh twice referred to "the priests" and warned them of dire consequences if they came near the mountain while the confab with Aaron and Moses was in progress, but the problem for biblical inerrantists is that there were no priests at this time for Moses to warn. Aaron and his sons were the first priests appointed to serve in the new religion that Yahweh allegedly revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, but their appointment did not come until after Moses had returned from the mountain with intricate instructions on how to build a tabernacle and the furniture and vessels that would be in it. Not until Exodus 28-29, after Moses had returned from the mountain, were Aaron and his sons consecrated as priests, so it is hard to understand why an omniscient deity would not have known this before telling Moses to warn nonexistent priests to stay away from the mountain. This is the kind of anachronistic mistake that would be understandable in the writings of normal, fallible humans, but we certainly wouldn't expect to find it in the writings of someone who was presumably inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent deity.

That is exactly why rational people just can't believe that "God" inspired the writing of the Bible. There are just too many mistakes like these that discredit the divine-inspiration claim.