> >these scrolls cannot be accepted as evidence that the pentateuch as a whole was composed before the 6th century, as it is widely accepted that the torah draws on earlier oral and written sources and traditions, and there is no reference to a written torah in the scrolls themselves. the point is there must have existed a people in palestine who had a religion similar to the one in the pentachuach because there were fragments of the book of numbers which predated the translation (creation of in your view) of the pentateuch by some three hundred years. the idea that the greeks just handed over a folk history and monotheistic religion to a group of pantheistic tribes is counterindicated by the book of numbers existing before this happened by three hundred years whether it was in a written or oral form.
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