Instituting the type of laws that Moses introduced that regulated even the most minuscule aspects of life had to necessitate immense influence of some sort.
But obviously, if one is taking a skeptical view of the Torah, the first thing one would question is whether those laws actually come from Moses. In fact, I am pretty sure that most of the detailed laws do not.
So by what merit did he gain the influence that he had?
Well, if one doesn’t accept the basic historicity of the Biblical account, there’s really no way of knowing. Some scholars don’t think there was any such person at all. Others think he might have led a group of refugees from Egypt but that this wasn’t the massive event described in the Bible (that seems the most reasonable likelihood to me–I believe that the Exodus happened, but the numbers given in the Bible are pretty clearly not to be taken literally, and it’s quite possible that not all the people who later identified themselves as Hebrews actually descended from the group that came out of Egypt). According to Wikipedia, Martin Noth thought that Moses was an “obscure person from Moab” (not having read Noth, I don’t know what his arguments were for this interpretation!).
And the institution of the passover would only make sense culturally if it happened, what purpose would the common Israelite have to celebrate the passover out of the blue if it was just made up?
The Passover is clearly, at one level, an agricultural festival. As such, it needs no explanation. The question is: why would the ancient Hebrews come to associate it with traditions of having escaped from Egypt if none of their ancestors actually did so escape? One could come up with answers for this (maybe the “historical” meaning of the festival was imposed by later Yahwist reformers, etc.), but I think the most reasonable explanation is that some such event did happen.
Moses’ contemporaries would call his bluff,
I’m confused by this. What contemporaries? What bluff? We’re talking about texts that cannot be
proven to have existed before the Hellenistic period, though I think they were written in their present form some time before that, and I’m fairly confident that major parts of them long predate the final editing. There is no evidence directly from Moses’ time, except maybe the “Stele of Merneptah,” which is pretty hard to relate to the Biblical account unless you go against the view of most scholars that it refers to Israel as a group already inhabiting Canaan. So why would a skeptic need to explain anything at all about Moses’ contemporaries?
and even if they were apathetic to the story he was selling and didn’t feel the need to oppose it outright, why was the practice so universally and devotedly attended to by all Israel?
Do you mean after the Exile? Because before the Exile, by the Biblical evidence itself, we know that it wasn’t universally and devotedly attended to by all Israel. Hezekiah’s and Josiah’s celebrations of the Passover are marked as unusual, even unprecedented (since the time of David and Solomon–but of course, a skeptic would argue that this is a legendary golden age, much as if you found a late medieval writer describing a tournament as “the greatest since the time of King Arthur”).
Why would they willingly exchange a real history of conquest for a fake history of subjugation and looking like idiots?
I think this is one of the strongest arguments in favor of the view that the Exodus really happened. How one approaches it depends on how one views the composition of the Old Testament. If one believes the stories in the Old Testament to have been written during or after the Exile, then there might be some support for the idea that Jews sought for an ancient parallel with the present reality of exile and postexilic existence as a small province of a great empire. You certainly see this in the exilic prophets, who compare the return from exile with the Exodus from Egypt.
Here, in my opinion, is where your argument about contemporaries is valid. It seems unlikely that these stories would have gained acceptance among postexilic Jews unless there had been much older stories of an Exodus from Egypt. In other words, it seems a lot more likely that the exilic and postexilic writers were drawing on ancient legend/tradition to explain the present reality than that they made up a story of which no one had heard before. So I think that part of your argument is highly plausible.
The part about “looking like idiots” is less so. Clearly the repeated descriptions of Israel’s sin and folly are making a theological point about the reasons for later divine judgment.
One important point to bear in mind is that the Hebrew Bible was not some kind of spontaneous creation of the whole people, reflecting a traditional, consensus view. At least, there is no evidence for such a view either from archaeology or from the Bible itself. The Bible consistently presents the majority of the people as idolatrous and disobedient. Granted, as I just said that could be polemical exaggeration to make a point. But in that case, the people making the point would obviously be making it at the expense of their fellow-Israelites. And the archeological record bears out the Biblical claim that the religious practices of most Israelites for most of the pre-exilic period had little to do with what the Bible said ought to be done. That part seems pretty solid, whatever one’s position on the accuracy of the Bible as a whole.
Edwin
