How Archaeology Helps You Understand the BibleSample

Holy Scriptures: Thank You, Professor Schwartz

In the spring of 2004, after my class on prophets as messengers of God, Dr. Baruch Schwartz motioned to a few graduate students and invited six of us to a workshop the following Thursday. Dr. Schwartz, a visiting professor from Hebrew University, taught the course I was taking and had a keen interest in the origins of Scripture.

I remember him opening the class by saying, “Tonight you are going to redact the Bible the way we think the first scribes did.” He has us read Exodus 19 aloud and instructed us to “stop whenever something sounds repeated.” We marked our Bibles and continued through the chapter. At the end, Dr. Schwartz guided us in evaluating our work.

The scholarly Documentary Hypothesis holds that the Pentateuch was woven from four distinct sources rather than written by a single author; critics often use it to argue the Bible is merely human. Dr. Schwartz offered a different view. A theologian working in secular institutions, he believed several distinct versions of the Torah originally existed and that when the scribes combined them, they made no editorial choices because all versions were divinely inspired.

Before that evening, my relationship with Scripture felt fractured. I had deep faith, yet for four years the traditions I’d grown up with had been challenged by scholars. When I learned Moses died before the end of Deuteronomy and could not have written his own burial, I shelved the fact, unable to reconcile inerrancy with philology. Doublets, differences between Kings and Chronicles, and late vocabularies in narratives such as Job were presented to me as errors by my secular instructors.

Dr. Schwartz’s perspective—that God-following scribes intentionally preserved these so-called errors because every part was inspired—helped to put me back together. After years of editing many theological manuscripts, I know editors typically resolve inconsistencies. Yet the scribes did not choose the order of creation in Genesis 1 over Genesis 2, or correct whether Noah's animals boarded two by two or seven by two. They trusted the words given by God. This shift—from seeing errors as human flaws to divine intention—allowed me to question difficult passages without abandoning faith. It reframed seeming contradictions and restored a sense of coherence to my faith and to the text itself.

How do I approach apparent contradictions in Scripture? In what ways can scholarly insights deepen rather than diminish faith? How might embracing divine intention in textual variation change my understanding of God, Scripture, and my personal beliefs?