The Old Testament

stephenstrent7
Dec 27, 2025
8 min read

Ezra Reading the Law for the People, Nehemiah 8:5-6, Gustave Doré's illustrations for La Grande Bible de Tours, 1866. This etching is a bit inaccurate as it suggests Ezra was reading from the stone tablets, which by then had been lost.

Where Science Meets the Old Testament, for the Come Follow Me lesson December 29–January 4: Introduction to the Old Testament

The following is an excerpt from part of a chapter in my forthcoming book: Noah’s Flood and the Philosophies of Men, along with some other comments.

Rebecca Wollenberg, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has stated, “In the 3^rd century C.E., Porphyry of Tyre, a Greco-Roman philosopher, wrote a scathing critique of the Jewish biblical corpus in his (now lost) work Against the Christians…He claimed that the Mosaic Pentateuch had been lost to the ravages of war when Nebuchadnezzar II razed Jerusalem (586 B.C.E.), and the loss had been covered up with a pseudepigraphic forgery: ‘Nothing Moses wrote has been preserved for all his writings are said to have been burnt with the temple. All those written under his name afterwards were composed anew one thousand one hundred and eighty years after Moses’ death by Ezra and his followers’…Porphyry accuses Ezra the Scribe and his followers among the Israelite elite of fabricating the Pentateuch now circulating in the name of Moses to cover up the irretrievable loss of the original Torah…It would be easy to dismiss Porphyry’s claim as the invention of a well-known pagan polemicist, except that pious Jewish and Christian authorities of the period circulated a strikingly similar story about the Torah’s loss. But they believed that Ezra reconstructed the Torah faithfully through divine inspiration.”¹

In my opinion, the truth lies somewhere between fabrication and divine inspiration. I agree that most, if not all copies of the Torah, were destroyed during the second sacking of Jerusalem, but it is my opinion that the Oral Torah, that committed to the memory of the priests and Levites, survived. After nearly two hundred years, perhaps “Ezra the priest, the scribe, even a scribe of the words of the commandments of the Lord, and of his statutes to Israel”², was one of a very few who still had the entire Torah committed to memory; “For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.”³

We are told in Ezra 7:11 and 25, “Now this is the copy of the letter that the king Artaxerxes gave unto Ezra the priest, the scribe, even a scribe of the words of the commandments of the Lord, and of his statutes to Israel…And thou, Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God, that is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people that are beyond the river, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach ye them that know them not.” There were obviously two groups of Israelites: those who knew God’s laws and those who did not.

Among Hebrew scholars, memorization apparently was viewed as much more important than writing. Such behavior may have been exacerbated by the second Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 586 BC, when the vast majority of the extant Hebrew documents of the time were destroyed. The scholars may have realized that if the history was in their minds, it could not be destroyed as long as one scholar survived. Even today, many orthodox Jewish students have memorized the complete Torah (all of the first five books of the Old Testament, even Leviticus!) by the age of ten. Imagine how the story the ancient scholars memorized might have changed through time, becoming more codified and, thus easier to memorize, with each passing generation. Imagine how much changing philosophies and paradigms, as well as the Babylonian captivity itself, may have influenced those stories—especially with the Babylonians purposely ingraining (brainwashing) their learning and culture into the minds of the Israelite elite.

The Babylonian captivity lasted from 597 BC until 538 BC. However, Ezra, who lived in Babylon around one-hundred years after the captivity officially ended, led some descendants of Jewish exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem during the reign of King Artaxerxes I (464–424 BC) or Artaxerxes II (405/4-359/58 BC).⁴

We read in Nehemiah 8:7-8, “Also Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites, caused the people to understand the law [read by Ezra]: and the people stood in their place. So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” Matthew Poole’s Commentary on the Holy Bible states for those verses: “…the words, which being Hebrew, now needed to be translated into the Chaldee or Syriac language, which was now and henceforth the common language of that people, who together with their religion had also in a great part lost their language; as also the sense and meaning of them; they expounded the mind and will of God in what they read, and applied it to the people’s present condition, as they saw fit, as the manner of the prophets generally was.”⁵ The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary for those verses states, “Commentators are divided in opinion as to the import of this statement. Some think that Ezra read the law in pure Hebrew, while the Levites, who assisted him, translated it sentence by sentence into Chaldee, the vernacular dialect which the exiles spoke in Babylon. Others maintain that the duty of these Levites consisted in explaining to the people, many of whom had become very ignorant, what Ezra had read.”⁶

However, we learn in Nehemiah 8:13-15, “And on the second day were gathered together the chief of the fathers of all the people, the priests, and the Levites, unto Ezra the scribe, even to understand the words of the law. And they found written in the law which the Lord had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast of the seventh month: And that they should publish and proclaim in all their cities, and in Jerusalem, saying, Go forth unto the mount, and fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees, to make booths, as it is written.” These verses seem to indicate that even the priests and Levites didn’t know all of the Law of Moses—even though they could translate Hebrew to Chaldee.

We are told in 1 Nephi 3:2-4 that Lehi said to Nephi, “…Behold I have dreamed a dream, in the which the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brethren shall return to Jerusalem. For behold, Laban hath the record of the Jews and also a genealogy of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass. Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brothers should go unto the house of Laban, and seek the records, and bring them down hither into the wilderness.”

When Nephi had the chance to kill Laban and obtain the plates, he held back. Then he recounted, “And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him. And the Spirit said unto me again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he also had taken away our property. And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief. And now, when I, Nephi, had heard these words, I remembered the words of the Lord which he spake unto me in the wilderness, saying that: Inasmuch as thy seed shall keep my commandments, they shall prosper in the land of promise. Yea, and I also thought that they could not keep the commandments of the Lord according to the law of Moses, save they should have the law. And I also knew that the law was engraven upon the plates of brass. And again, I knew that the Lord had delivered Laban into my hands for this cause—that I might obtain the records according to his commandments.”⁷

It is entirely possible, given Wollenberg’s comments above, and what we learn from the Book of Mormon, that not only were the brass plates on great value to the Nephites, they very likely were the only pre-captivity written copy of that part of the Old Testament to be preserved at all. Had Nephi not killed Laban and taken the plates, it is almost certain that they would have been taken by the Babylonians and melted down with all the rest of the sacred records.

One criticism of the Book of Mormon is the argument that people didn’t write on metal plates in pre-captivity Israel. We are told in 2 Kings 24:11-14 [that in 598/597 BC], “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against the city [of Jerusalem], and his servants did besiege it…And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces [and probably melted down] all the vessels of gold which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of the Lord…And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.” Among the Temple treasures that were taken by the Babylonians, cut in pieces, and melted down, were almost certainly any records written upon metal plates. Furthermore, any records that survived the sac would certainly not have been allowed to be taken by the captive intelligentsia to Babylon. During the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity, any copies that may have survived the sac of Jerusalem would likely have been lost or destroyed/degraded.

Even though it is highly likely that Moses wrote a portion of the Pentateuch, most of his original papyrus manuscripts probably became lost or degraded long before the Babylonian captivity, which occurred some 700-800 years after Moses lived. But there were probably a certain number of copies circulating within the Israelite community (such as the brass plates), as well as the writings of later Hebrew prophets. For example, Isaiah, who lived around 100-200 years before the Babylonian captivity, likely wrote his prophesies in proto-Canaanite upon papyri and/or metal plates, most copies of which would have been destroyed in the sack of Jerusalem. As a result, copies of his writing, like those on the brass plates, would have become very rare and very valuable. The brass plates, perhaps, being the only copy surviving the Babylonian destruction.

Given this information, it is easy to see how, “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.”