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.
10 Reviews
Mahoney, the filmmaker, is genuinely investigating a deeply troubling matter- what he finds is incredible.
funkifizied3 July 2021
Firstly, I appreciate Timothy Mahoney's approach in this documentary. He mentions very clearly at the start that he is troubled by the growing consensus that Moses did not write the Torah. His conviction and passion for seeking out the truth for himself is truly inspirational. He has every right to go on a journey to discover if what he was taught as a child was untrue.
Secondly, to do with the analysis itself- i found it refreshing that he does not go into the interviews with a per-conceived idea. Instead, he is merely asking the scholars who hold strongly to the non-Moses authorship to explain their views. And he publishes their responses rather than edit it out. One can clearly see that he interviews scholars that agree and do not agree with him- and what both parties say are shown.
Thirdly, while i was expecting any American documentary on the Bible to be openly one sided, Mahoney, i felt, was approaching it from an evidential and scholarly perspective. He does not jump to conclusions without seeing what the evidence he finds is actually saying. Once the evidence is found and is examined, one is able to use their intelligence and perception to connect the dots. Mahoney does connect the dots (he calls them patterns) and he discovers something interesting.
Overall, this is definitely worth a watch. It is a well made documentary and the only bias i can see is the conviction of the film-maker who is trying to make sense of where the truth lies when it comes to something he has treasured since childhood.
Secondly, to do with the analysis itself- i found it refreshing that he does not go into the interviews with a per-conceived idea. Instead, he is merely asking the scholars who hold strongly to the non-Moses authorship to explain their views. And he publishes their responses rather than edit it out. One can clearly see that he interviews scholars that agree and do not agree with him- and what both parties say are shown.
Thirdly, while i was expecting any American documentary on the Bible to be openly one sided, Mahoney, i felt, was approaching it from an evidential and scholarly perspective. He does not jump to conclusions without seeing what the evidence he finds is actually saying. Once the evidence is found and is examined, one is able to use their intelligence and perception to connect the dots. Mahoney does connect the dots (he calls them patterns) and he discovers something interesting.
Overall, this is definitely worth a watch. It is a well made documentary and the only bias i can see is the conviction of the film-maker who is trying to make sense of where the truth lies when it comes to something he has treasured since childhood.
Please post a review only if you watch the documentary
aeron-3046028 June 2019
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.
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.
Good Education, But First Watch the prequel "Patterns of Evidence: Exodus"
guy-37221 August 2020
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 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.
Mohaney Rightfuly Pauses Before Jumping Into the Bigger Controversy
mbanak11 January 2020
Warning: Spoilers
Just saw the film tonight at a congregational event. I have been watching Mahoney, and there is a personal sense of integrity, which radiates through his work. At the end of his previous film, his first film, PATTERNS OF EVIDENCE: EXODUS" he hints that something about the Red Sea crossing and Mt. Sinai would be forthcoming next.
In this movie, it emerges that he could not, in good conscience, proceed, until questions about Moses' authorship were resolved.
The essential argument, which Mahoney refutes, is that Moses could not have written the first 5 books of the Bible, because writing was not sufficiently developed his time. Mahoney shows with room to spare, that there was plenty of evidence of a scripting method available back then, and it emerges at the time of the Patriarch, Joseph ... a wise man of his age. And all Western alphabets emerged from the alphabet invention made this time period.
If you want to plug into this attractive theory, it is important to understand the specific point Mahoney is making: He is not saying the Semitic languages began with Hebrew as an offshoot of Egyptian. The Semitic language family, as spoken, always flourished. Mahoney's point is that the ALPHABET, that written invention, appears to have emerged as a spinoff of Egyptian Hieroglyphics, and that provided Moses with the technology of alphabet, which enabled transmission of Divine Law.
One of the Primary "Aha" moments for me in this film, is that Yahweh, the Deity of the Bible, wanted his people to be literate. The Mosaic Law explicitly requires posting the commandments on the doorposts of your home !
And so, what started out as another spiritual crisis for Mahoney, turns out to be a smashing good resolution of the "Moses Controversy", and a delightful theory on the origin of the western alphabet ... using real evidence.
I especially cherish the contributions of agnostic scholar David Rohl. His friendship and expertise is most appealing. He is a most beloved professor.
Mahoney loses one (1) point for glossing over some detail, for which the observant viewer would find clarification important. Such as making clear the geographical location of certain evidence.
A Bible Believer Cherry-Picking History -- Again
PeaceAndLongLife3 April 2019
Warning: Spoilers
In this sequel to his story on the Exodus, Tim Mahoney tries to prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch -- Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. He's trying to counter the argument advanced by most historians that no alphabet existed at the time Moses allegedly wrote the books and that they were instead written after the Babylonian exile.
The trouble for Mahoney is that, under the basic rule of scientific inquiry, if the evidence doesn't support a theory, the theory has to be modified or discarded. Throughout the film, Tim Mahoney sticks to his assertion that Moses had an alphabet to work with and provides just enough evidence to support his position. However, just like in Exodus, he provides clips of archeologists who disagree with him, but doesn't elaborate on the evidence they would use to support their positions and go against his theory.
Mahoney's focus is on the proto-Sinaitic script found is Egypt. It was a departure from the Hieroglyphic form of writing, which had hundreds of symbols. Only fragments of have been discovered in the Sinai, the Nile valley and Israel. They date from anywhere between 1850 and 1550 BCE, during Egypt's Middle Kingdom period. Archeologists have concluded that the script was an ancestor of the proto-Canaanite alphabet, the predecessor of the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets.
Mahoney's argument was that the proto-Sinaitic script led immediately to the Hebrew alphabet, and that it was used by Moses to write the Pentateuch in the middle 2nd millennium BCE, when Mahoney claims the Exodus occurred. The problem with this assertion is that no traces of Hebrew writing have been found that date from before 900 BCE. In fact, the earliest surviving fragments of Hebrew Bible are the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which date from the 1st century BCE, and the Silver Scrolls, which date from the 4th century BCE. Even the proto-Canaanite alphabet didn't see widespread use until after 1200 BCE, around the time of Bronze Age collapse of many of the old Middle East cultures.
Mahoney dismisses the critics of his theory as biased towards a particular "paradigm." However, the supporters he interviews at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville and at the MIKRA Research Laboratory are evangelicals who believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He relies heavily on the theories about the origins of the Hebrew language advanced by Douglas Petrovich, a professor at the Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas. Petrovich is a self-described creationist, according to his own YouTube videos.
In the end, in his quest to be a 100-percent believer in the Bible, Mahoney abandons even the smallest fringes of credibility by crediting Joseph with the development of the Hebrew alphabet and asserting it was of divine origin.
An excellent book on the origins of the Pentateuch is "Who Wrote the Bible?" by Richard Friedman. It discusses how the Pentateuch was written by at least four different authors, and that the books were written shortly before and after the Babylonian exile.
Another major problem with the notion that the Pentateuch was written by one person is its disorganization, something Mahoney doesn't touch on at all. If one person wrote it, he was a terrible writer. The books are loaded with flaws and holes that no competent writer would overlook. How did I find this out? I did something that some Bible believers never do: I read the books.
In Genesis, for instance, many stories are rather short and compact, including the Creation, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Most of them are only a chapter long. Why didn't the writer provide greater detail on these stories? Probably the longest story in Genesis is the story of Jacob's son Joseph. The filler between the stories is mostly family chronologies and how some characters lived to be over 900 years old.
There are also a few story holes and contradictions in Genesis. After Cain kills Abel, he flees to the east and eventually has a wife. But if Adam and Eve were the first humans and had no daughters, where did Mrs. Cain come from? The Flood story has two descriptions of the types of animals brought on to the ark. One is of well-known story about two of every animal being brought on to the ark, while a less-known version has seven of every "clean" animal and two of every unclean animal being brought on to the ark. How could the writer miss these contradictions? The book also provides no details of the "wickedness" that existed before the Flood.
In the other books, several stories are told more than once with many of the same details. These include the stories of Moses talking with his god at the burning bush, Aaron (Moses' brother) helping Moses, the plagues of Egypt, the Passover, the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests, food restrictions, details on several festivals, instructions on the building of the tabernacle, the exile in the wilderness, requirements for offerings, the appointment of judges to assist Moses, rules against mixing with other peoples, and rules against making treaties with current inhabitants of Canaan. Some of them are repeated in one book (e.g. the repetitions of the stories in Egypt are in Exodus) while some stories are told in more than one book.
Some stories are out of place. The 40 years in the wilderness is mentioned in Exodus but the explanation on why the Hebrews are forced to wonder in the wilderness is not provided until Numbers.
A good writer would have organized the stories and books with better flow, more details, certainly less repetition, and probably less filler.
The trouble for Mahoney is that, under the basic rule of scientific inquiry, if the evidence doesn't support a theory, the theory has to be modified or discarded. Throughout the film, Tim Mahoney sticks to his assertion that Moses had an alphabet to work with and provides just enough evidence to support his position. However, just like in Exodus, he provides clips of archeologists who disagree with him, but doesn't elaborate on the evidence they would use to support their positions and go against his theory.
Mahoney's focus is on the proto-Sinaitic script found is Egypt. It was a departure from the Hieroglyphic form of writing, which had hundreds of symbols. Only fragments of have been discovered in the Sinai, the Nile valley and Israel. They date from anywhere between 1850 and 1550 BCE, during Egypt's Middle Kingdom period. Archeologists have concluded that the script was an ancestor of the proto-Canaanite alphabet, the predecessor of the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets.
Mahoney's argument was that the proto-Sinaitic script led immediately to the Hebrew alphabet, and that it was used by Moses to write the Pentateuch in the middle 2nd millennium BCE, when Mahoney claims the Exodus occurred. The problem with this assertion is that no traces of Hebrew writing have been found that date from before 900 BCE. In fact, the earliest surviving fragments of Hebrew Bible are the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which date from the 1st century BCE, and the Silver Scrolls, which date from the 4th century BCE. Even the proto-Canaanite alphabet didn't see widespread use until after 1200 BCE, around the time of Bronze Age collapse of many of the old Middle East cultures.
Mahoney dismisses the critics of his theory as biased towards a particular "paradigm." However, the supporters he interviews at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville and at the MIKRA Research Laboratory are evangelicals who believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He relies heavily on the theories about the origins of the Hebrew language advanced by Douglas Petrovich, a professor at the Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas. Petrovich is a self-described creationist, according to his own YouTube videos.
In the end, in his quest to be a 100-percent believer in the Bible, Mahoney abandons even the smallest fringes of credibility by crediting Joseph with the development of the Hebrew alphabet and asserting it was of divine origin.
An excellent book on the origins of the Pentateuch is "Who Wrote the Bible?" by Richard Friedman. It discusses how the Pentateuch was written by at least four different authors, and that the books were written shortly before and after the Babylonian exile.
Another major problem with the notion that the Pentateuch was written by one person is its disorganization, something Mahoney doesn't touch on at all. If one person wrote it, he was a terrible writer. The books are loaded with flaws and holes that no competent writer would overlook. How did I find this out? I did something that some Bible believers never do: I read the books.
In Genesis, for instance, many stories are rather short and compact, including the Creation, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Most of them are only a chapter long. Why didn't the writer provide greater detail on these stories? Probably the longest story in Genesis is the story of Jacob's son Joseph. The filler between the stories is mostly family chronologies and how some characters lived to be over 900 years old.
There are also a few story holes and contradictions in Genesis. After Cain kills Abel, he flees to the east and eventually has a wife. But if Adam and Eve were the first humans and had no daughters, where did Mrs. Cain come from? The Flood story has two descriptions of the types of animals brought on to the ark. One is of well-known story about two of every animal being brought on to the ark, while a less-known version has seven of every "clean" animal and two of every unclean animal being brought on to the ark. How could the writer miss these contradictions? The book also provides no details of the "wickedness" that existed before the Flood.
In the other books, several stories are told more than once with many of the same details. These include the stories of Moses talking with his god at the burning bush, Aaron (Moses' brother) helping Moses, the plagues of Egypt, the Passover, the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests, food restrictions, details on several festivals, instructions on the building of the tabernacle, the exile in the wilderness, requirements for offerings, the appointment of judges to assist Moses, rules against mixing with other peoples, and rules against making treaties with current inhabitants of Canaan. Some of them are repeated in one book (e.g. the repetitions of the stories in Egypt are in Exodus) while some stories are told in more than one book.
Some stories are out of place. The 40 years in the wilderness is mentioned in Exodus but the explanation on why the Hebrews are forced to wonder in the wilderness is not provided until Numbers.
A good writer would have organized the stories and books with better flow, more details, certainly less repetition, and probably less filler.
Very interesting
tijerinomiriam18 January 2020
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????
Religious Propaganda
digitalhat11 April 2020
In a previous film, Tim Mahoney attempts to use fringe theories from David Rohl to shift the timeline of Egyptian history to better align with the Bible. Crazy, right? Well, in this episode of Crazy Part 2, Mahoney wants to prove that Moses wrote the first books of the Bible (alone, including his own obituary) by tracing an unknown language back to this shifted timeline.
Let's be honest, Rohl is no expert. Look him up on Wikipedia. He basically studied Egypt while in a rock band and then obtained a BA degree. He is not a "scholar" as Mahoney positions him to be. The other person in the camp is Dr. Douglas Petrovich from The Bible Seminary, and shockingly also holds this theory.
My biggest complaint of the film is that Mahoney actually has some REAL experts in the film, people with a long history of academia that disagree with him on his findings. Yet, Mahoney never asks them WHY they think he is wrong - you know, present the evidence from the opposition. Mahoney essentially comes to the conclusion that mainstream academics are just a bunch of fundamentalists that only parrot what their professors tell them. Well, how about that...
So instead of asking more relevant questions to the academics, he would rather ask them if they believe in God - setting them up as some kind of boogeyman. How is this question relevant to the investigation? Honestly?
So Google it yourself, it's an easy way to topple this house of cards which is dependent on shifting an historical timeline in order to make it work. There is a short article from National Geographic called "We may now know which Egyptian pharaoh challenged Moses" that sums up why Mahoney is wrong. Yet, he never asks the real experts for evidence against his position, he just moves forward, stacking on crackpot theories.
This is a desperate propaganda film which is attempting to build credibility to fundamentalist Christian ideology. And if Mahoney had removed all of the religious posturing and special effect sequences, we probably could have shortened this thing down to an hour.
Let's be honest, Rohl is no expert. Look him up on Wikipedia. He basically studied Egypt while in a rock band and then obtained a BA degree. He is not a "scholar" as Mahoney positions him to be. The other person in the camp is Dr. Douglas Petrovich from The Bible Seminary, and shockingly also holds this theory.
My biggest complaint of the film is that Mahoney actually has some REAL experts in the film, people with a long history of academia that disagree with him on his findings. Yet, Mahoney never asks them WHY they think he is wrong - you know, present the evidence from the opposition. Mahoney essentially comes to the conclusion that mainstream academics are just a bunch of fundamentalists that only parrot what their professors tell them. Well, how about that...
So instead of asking more relevant questions to the academics, he would rather ask them if they believe in God - setting them up as some kind of boogeyman. How is this question relevant to the investigation? Honestly?
So Google it yourself, it's an easy way to topple this house of cards which is dependent on shifting an historical timeline in order to make it work. There is a short article from National Geographic called "We may now know which Egyptian pharaoh challenged Moses" that sums up why Mahoney is wrong. Yet, he never asks the real experts for evidence against his position, he just moves forward, stacking on crackpot theories.
This is a desperate propaganda film which is attempting to build credibility to fundamentalist Christian ideology. And if Mahoney had removed all of the religious posturing and special effect sequences, we probably could have shortened this thing down to an hour.
Compelling evidence for Moses lifetime and other parts of the Bible
doffygx12 April 2020
This documentary provides an overwhelming amount of evidence for the Moses and many other parts of the Bible have been proven all the time, everyone has been looking at the same evidence but some people are being possessed by denial . Moreover the entire egyptian traditional timeline has been messed up by secular archaeologians and they admitted it themselves, when it is aligned correctly with the Bible and the other calendars the date and evidence match correctly. It is sad that a lot of unbelievers have been manipulated into worshiping false religions of naturalism which tell them that their existense is a random accident with no meaning and they believe that these false human made dogmas are actually true despite being proven wrong, along with many other mistakes. The Bible keeps being proven correct all the time.
As the prophets said in the past, people will be corrupted by pride, thinking that they become intelligent and try to make themselves gods but in reality they are becoming foolish, full of unreasonable hatred and despair and turn away from their Creator. The Amazon website which is mainstream has a lot more reviews and they are all overwhelingly positive but here on imdb which is less populated it has some sad people that unreasonably hate everything including themselves and give low reviews to desperately try and lie to their own hearts but in the end it is all in vain. The Word of God will always be the only truth.
As the prophets said in the past, people will be corrupted by pride, thinking that they become intelligent and try to make themselves gods but in reality they are becoming foolish, full of unreasonable hatred and despair and turn away from their Creator. The Amazon website which is mainstream has a lot more reviews and they are all overwhelingly positive but here on imdb which is less populated it has some sad people that unreasonably hate everything including themselves and give low reviews to desperately try and lie to their own hearts but in the end it is all in vain. The Word of God will always be the only truth.
Ignores the science while pushing propaganda
lordsnott16 April 2020
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.
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.
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