Tuesday, February 12, 2008

A Random Thought

It occurs to me to wonder whether, in all the debates over whether or not Moses wrote the Torah, much has been done with the fact that the references to Moses are all in the third person. That is to say, how likely is it that an author making a historical record of events in which he himself was not only a direct participant, but indeed a key player, would refer to himself in the third person, rather than the first? If, as Judeo-Christian tradition has long held, Moses was the divinely inspired author of the Torah, would we not expect a first-person narrative from Exodus to Deuteronomy? For myself, I tend to think that we would.