Hi again
ezrider
It's always been my understanding, although this you can't prove from the Scriptures, that it was on that mountain for 40 days that God pretty much dictated the Genesis account. Everything in Genesis, other than gossip and rumor from the Hebrews while captive in Egypt, was an unknown to Moses. Other than scuttlebutt he may have heard in the group in Egypt, Moses didn't know Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. There is no way, without God's knowledge, that Moses could have had any idea the words that Abraham spoke to Sarah.
God gave him the truth. Now some of the scuttlebutt may have been true. But when God gave it to Moses to write down for perpetuity, remember Paul said that was the chief reason there even was a Jewish people, He told him of all these people and the things that they had done leading up to the point that Moses went down off that mountain and began writing the history that they were living out.
Now, I do understand that there is a story out there that says that Moses cobbled together the Genesis account from hearsay evidence and some writings, also unprovable, that the Hebrews may have kept up with for all those years in Egypt. Honestly, from what we know in the Scriptures, the Hebrews living in Egypt had no idea that they needed to keep such an accurate historical account. They were a relatively new people group. The generations of the twelve tribes, but that didn't get acknowledged until they were in the wilderness. Scripture seems to infer that the Hebrews in Egypt really didn't do a lot of worshipping of God.
Moses didn't seem to think that the people God was sending him to would even know who He was. He asks, "Who do I say sent me?" So Moses obviously didn't know God by name or anything. I think Moses' entire faith started when he saw that burning bush. There is no accounting of any faith practices, in the Scriptures, while the Hebrews were in Egypt. They were kept separated not because they told everyone that they believed in a different God, but because they raised sheep and the Egyptians hated shepherds and shepherding...according to the Scriptures. The last thing we hear about God among the Hebrews in Egypt, was Joseph's account that he knew God. Now, here it is 400 years later, which BTW is about the age of our nation, do you think all those people had kept up with the knowledge of God? There certainly isn't any mention of it.
God bless,
Ted