THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS CORRUPTION

fact, the author of Chronicles... makes the claim that the 70 sabbatical years from the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites until the destruction of the Temple were not observed. (6)

According to the Damascus document (of which seven copies were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls) the Lord gave the Torah to Moses in its entirety in written form. These writings were sealed in the Ark for approximately five centuries, however, and were therefore unfamiliar to the masses. Discussing the problem of David’s adulterous relationship with Bathsheba (7) and why he was not put to death, the Damascus document answers, “the books of the Law had been sealed in the Ark from the time of Joshua \c. 1200 B.C.E.] until the time of King Josiah of Judah [seventh century B.C.E.] , when they were rediscovered and republished [see 2 Kings 22] .” (8) Meaning that David and the rabbis who were his contemporaries were completely oblivious to what lay written in the Torah.

Whether we conjecture that the Torah was placed within the .Ark or simply beside it, the subject is highly convoluted. The .Ark itself was lost to the Philistines for seven months during the Philistine invasions (c. 1 050- 1020 B.C.E.); upon its recovery, fifty-thousand and seventy Israelites from the town of Beth-shemesh were destroyed by God for daring to peek intothe Ark. (9) By the time King Solomon ordered that the Ark be  moved to the First Temple, 1 Kings 8:9 informs us that its sole contents were the two tablets which Moses had brought back from Sinai - not the entire Law. Even if the Torah was kept separately from the Ark, it seems to have disappeared entirely from Jewish life for centuries. Seventy sabbatical years (five centuries), if not more, passed without any public recital of the Law, culminating in the introduction of foreign gods and pagan rites into the Israelite populace. This is surely a clear indication that the Torah had long since been erased from the nation’s collective memory. Not until the eighteenth year of King Josiah’s reign (640-609 B.C.E.) was the Torah ‘miraculously rediscovered,’ 10 prompting Josiah’s sweeping reforms against child sacrifice and other pagan rituals. But the Torah was still not in common use for another two centuries at least. It seems to have disappeared from Jewish consciousness as suddenly as it appeared. There is good evidence to suggest that the first reading and expounding of the Law to the general public (after the time of Moses) did not occur until Ezra’s promulgation c. 449 B.C.E. Note that there is a massive gap of over 170 years from the time of the Law’s rediscovery (621 B.C.E.) to Ezra’s recital. (11)

footnote :

6 A. Demsky, “Who Returned First: Ezra or Nehemiah”, Bible Review, vol. xii, no.
2, April 1996, p. 33.

7 For the story of Bathsheba see 2 Samuel 1 1 .

8 G.A. Anderson, “Torah Before Sinai - The Do’s and Don’ts Before the Ten
Commandments”, Bible Review, vol. xii, no. 3, June 1996, p. 43.

9 See 1 Samuel 6:19.

10 2 Kings 23:2-10.

11 Dictionary of the Bible, p.954