Research Materials

The Torah's eighty-six literary units were composed as two-dimensional tables. This is the working record of an argument that their arrangement was designed in dialogue with the Egyptian Book of Gates — the composition painted on the walls of New Kingdom royal tombs.

The work is unfinished and published as it proceeds. Findings are recorded with their evidence, and failures are kept on the record alongside them. Corrections and collaboration are welcome — see the note at the foot of this page.

The book

The argument as continuous prose, for a general reader.

• Who Composed the Torah? — working draft Sixteen chapters, read in the browser. The Torah's units set out as tables the reader can look at, the divine names tracked across them, and the tomb wall brought alongside. Incomplete: the chapter on the Book of Gates itself is not yet written, because the research it rests on is still under way. A draft, and it will change. Also available as source markdown.

Start here

Three views of the structure, each readable without preparation.

• The Wall Map The Book of Gates' twelve hours in their three registers, with the Torah's three horizontal books set beneath them, station by station in one aligned scroll.
• The Torah Map All eighty-six units of the Five Books on a single plan — the horizontal axis of time across Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the vertical axis of place through Exodus and Numbers.
• Hours and Registers Scene counts per register in the Book of Gates set against the row-and-column format of the Torah units that face them.
• The Parallels Explorer Browse the evidence by unit or by hour. Certified findings can be filtered from proposed ones; withdrawn findings stay visible by default.

The record

Every claim, its evidence, and its current standing.

• A Reader's Map of the Parallels The whole comparison in prose, hour by hour. The place to begin if you would rather read than browse.
• The Parallels Database — plain language One line per claim, without notation or scene numbers.
• The Parallels Database The full machine-readable record. Also as a spreadsheet, and filtered to certified findings only in JSON and spreadsheet form. Derived from the ledger; regenerated at milestones, so it can lag the ledger between builds.
• The Hour Ledger The primary research file. Every entry carries who proposed it, what source it rests on, and whether it is certified, proposed, withdrawn, or read as an inversion. Struck entries are never deleted. Large. A working document, not a finished one.
• The Second-Pass Method What counts as evidence here: the layers of comparison, the standard a finding must meet, and how an inversion is treated.
• Ceiling and Floor — working notes The open question of whether Exodus and Numbers answer to the Egyptian sky books as the wall books answer to the Book of Gates. Staging notes, corrections included.

Published papers

Peer-reviewed work and progress reports.

• Moshe Kline on Academia.edu Where the papers and progress reports are posted, including the structural studies of Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy that the comparison rests on.
• The Covenant Code: A New Way of Reading the Writing Paul Hocking and Moshe Kline, Journal of Biblical Literature 144/2 (2025) 217–239.
• The Editor Was Nodding: A Reading of Leviticus 19 Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008).
• The Pentateuch as a Two-Dimensional Composition A short illustrated companion note — the quickest route into the structural claim.

The working files

Kept open because the method is part of the argument. These are internal documents and read like it.

• Editorial memory Decisions, voice rules, and a running log of corrections — most of them corrections to errors made in the course of the work.
• Change diary One entry per deployment: what was written, what was left alone, what remains open.
• Plan of record What is being worked on, what it waits on, and what has not been decided.
• How the database is built The build plan and audit procedure for the parallels database.