In some surprise we replied, “I am sorry to sound dogmatic, as I try never to dogmatize. All that I mean to imply is that I am absolutely certain that he did write it!”
Our humor, which was intended as oil on troubled waters, turned out to be more like gasoline on raging fires! The exasperated gentleman exclaimed with considerable more heat than he had previously manifested, “You can’t prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch!”
“I don’t have to,” I replied, “as the boot is on the other foot! May I quote to you a section from Greenleaf on Evidence? Here is the citation: ‘When documents purporting to come from antiquity, and bearing upon their face no evident marks of forgery, are found in the proper repository, the law presumes such documents to be authentic and genuine, and the burden of proof to the contrary devolves upon the objector.’ Now, my dear brother, these documents do come from antiquity. They bear no evidence of forgery, and have thus been accepted and accredited in all of the ages that make up three millenniums of time. You face a problem if you are going to repudiate all the evidence and tradition of their credibility. Just how are you going to prove that Moses did not write these books ascribed to him?”
“That is easy,” the scholarly brother retorted. “Moses could not have written the first five books of the Bible, because writing was not invented until five hundred years after Moses died!”
In great amazement I asked him, “Is it possible that you never heard of the Tel el Armana tablets?”
He never had!
So we took time to tell him of the amazing discovery of this great deposit of written records from the library of Amenhetep the Third, and their bearing upon the great controversy. Then we told him also of the older records of Ur, that go all the way back to the days of the queen Shub Ab, and manifest a vast acquaintance with the art of writing as far back of Abraham as this patriarch in turn preceded the Lord Jesus Christ! He frankly confessed his total ignorance of this entire body of accumulated knowledge, and then closed the debate by stating,
Plate 8
Ancient seals, depicting historic events.