I'm reposting our old friend above, as I want to make some further comments. In particular, I want to address the dates of the Pentateuch, i.e. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The question of Pentateuchal origins has fascinated me ever since I first was introduced to the reality that it can't all have been written by Moses—even if the above chart does clearly suppose Mosaic authorship of the entire Pentateuch, and moreover dates Moses to the 15th century (as I have discussed in a previous post, this itself is a dubious chronology, not least of all on the biblical data itself). The very fact that Deuteronomy narrates Moses' death and burial is already a big hint that he didn't write every word in the Pentateuch. There are other hints however, one of which is the so-called "Table of Nations" from Genesis 10.
The "Table of Nations" tells how all the peoples of the earth are descended from the three sons of Noah: Japheth, Ham, and Shem. Many of the ethnonyms mentioned there can be found in extra-biblical sources. So, for instance, Javan, son of Japheth, probably is to be identified with the Ionian Greeks, quite clearly known elsewhere. Here, it's useful to use Kenneth Kitchen's reconstruction of the development of the Table of Nations (found in his On the Reliability of the Old Testament). He argues that the nucleus of the Table of Nations was formed in the third millennium BCE, well before Moses; that it accumulated material throughout the second millennium; and then was "updated" in perhaps the tenth century and certainly the seventh. Kitchen is useful because of his "maximalist" tendencies: he wants to show as much as possible that the material in the Hebrew Bible is both old and historically reliable. It is thus interesting for our purposes that even Kitchen can't deny that the Table of Nations as it stands in our Genesis was work in progress at least as late as the seventh century BCE. This makes a date for Genesis c. 1430 somewhat questionable.
Now, Kitchen's argument is very interesting for a few reasons. First, for quite some time the seventh century was seen as a significant period in the development of our Pentateuch. According to 2 Kings 22, under Josiah (who reigned over Judea for much of the latter seventh century) the "book of the Law" was rediscovered. This story has long been taken as an indication that in fact there was significant compositional work on the Pentateuch (especially Deuteronomy) at this time. Much of the work that scholars once assigned to the seventh century has now been moved into the fifth or even the fourth, but nonetheless 2 Kings 22 does raise the possibility that something important was going on with the texts of the Pentateuch in the late-seventh century. Second, the earliest extant artifacts bearing something recognizably close to our Pentateuch (a pair of silver amulets bearing versions of the priestly blessing known from Num. 6:24–26, found at Ketef Hinnom) are dated by their excavator to the late-seventh century (although, as these things go, this date has not gone without challenge). Third, the Hebrew of the Pentateuch is close to that found on inscriptions from the mid-eighth through late-sixth centuries (although again, the significance of this fact for dating the Pentateuch has been challenged, and there are significant temporal gaps in the inscriptional evidence). The extent however to which evidence regarding the Pentateuch clusters around the seventh-century BCE is striking—sufficiently so that it seems hard for me to imagine that there wasn't something happening with the Pentateuchal text (or what became the Pentateuchal text) at this point.
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