Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy

Fascinating documentary specifically on whether there was even an alphabet for Moses to have written the first five books of the Bible. Or whether the Bible had to be written, as some contend, many hundreds of years later, taking imaginary campfire stories and making them into a religion to hold the people together.

This is the 2nd of the Patterns of Evidence Series, which today has 4 movies. In my august opinion, they should be viewed in order, as they build on the previous documentaries, and are incomplete explanations, when taken out of order.

I didn't know there was a proto-sinaic alphabet. It does a great job with archaeology and history to show that there was an alphabet, at the time of Moses, in which he could have written his parts of the first five books of the Bible. It goes into the development and changes of the letters and the common bias in modern archaeology against the biblical record. It even includes one archaeologist who believes what she believes because her teacher told her it was so; yikes! And then she puts forth her quaint unreasonable theory that a no account person, who had no need for letters, invented the letters, and the people, who also had no need for letters, just naturally loved them and adopted them. It shows that the quality of archaeologists range from the IQ of your smartest classmates to your dumbest classmates. It's a good documentary for the person who really does care about everything about the Bible.

This is a bad documentary. It attempts to push a specifically US-style form of fundamentalism, by trying to prove that Moses wrote the first five books of the bible.

It interviews evangelicals at southern US seminaries and pretends they have the same level of expertise as actual doctors, professors, and researchers at places like Israeli universities (who all disagree with the agenda pushed by the documentary maker).

It completely ignores the evidence and research demonstrating that the Torah was written by at least four different authors. It ignores how contradictory passages are interspersed with the different authors even using different names for god, describing contradictory events. It instead concludes that Moses was able to write the Torah because ancient Israelites invented the alphabet via divine intervention.

The documentary intentionally asks the wrong questions, so it can evade actual research and evidence. For example, it spends about half the run time trying to prove the ancient Israelis invented the alphabet. It fails at this, but apparently it felt the need to go this route because the makers thought it proves the books were written by Moses. To it's credit (and why I gave it a 2 instead of a 1), it actually shows real experts clearly stating the hypothesis is nonsense. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide them much opportunity to explain all the reasons it's nonsense.

This is not a documentary, it's US-specific religious propaganda. Only watch this if you're an anthropologist studying US culture.

I loved this documentary, especially the acting/images part of the film(would like to see more of it in future films) very interesting to see the different point of views of scholars & what the Bible reads. Good work. I am giving 10 stars because I can not find anything wrong with the film, very honest approach and because it makes you question what or who to believe... scholars, history, men????

Watched it twice. The first part was a little slow and preachy that are mostly fluff but later on when the real religion/history academicians talked about proto-writing the movie became very interesting. As with other historical fields of study, this movie presents its view points but at least tried to base it on what the scholars said. Ignoring the fluffy bits and being a language geek, I enjoyed it very much.

Firstly, I appreciate Timothy Mahoney's approach in this documentary. He mentions very clearly at the start that he is troubled by the growing consensus that Moses did not write the Torah. His conviction and passion for seeking out the truth for himself is truly inspirational. He has every right to go on a journey to discover if what he was taught as a child was untrue.

Secondly, to do with the analysis itself- i found it refreshing that he does not go into the interviews with a per-conceived idea. Instead, he is merely asking the scholars who hold strongly to the non-Moses authorship to explain their views. And he publishes their responses rather than edit it out. One can clearly see that he interviews scholars that agree and do not agree with him- and what both parties say are shown.

Thirdly, while i was expecting any American documentary on the Bible to be openly one sided, Mahoney, i felt, was approaching it from an evidential and scholarly perspective. He does not jump to conclusions without seeing what the evidence he finds is actually saying. Once the evidence is found and is examined, one is able to use their intelligence and perception to connect the dots. Mahoney does connect the dots (he calls them patterns) and he discovers something interesting.

Overall, this is definitely worth a watch. It is a well made documentary and the only bias i can see is the conviction of the film-maker who is trying to make sense of where the truth lies when it comes to something he has treasured since childhood.