Patterns of Evidence: Moses Controversy

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????

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.

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.

It's exhausting to see "reviews" when one is not even mentioning the documentary or specifying what is their objection with it exactly. Instead just ranting on bible as though they are the preeminent Rhodes scholar of this generation. Even if they are one Smart people saying stupid things are still stupid. For the genesis objection in the below comment, where is it mentioned in the Bible that Abel & cain had no sisters. Even if we assume they are in the late 20's at the setting of the story, Adam and Eve must have popped multiple kids by then. Bible says they had many children.

With the animal count on Noah's boat. It's the same thing, in one instance he is just summarising the count and in other expanding the details. This happens quite frequently in chronicles as well. A brief summary about a king is given in one chronicles book and further details are given in the other.

You can disagree with this documentary and give a 1star rating. For the love of Christ watch it first.