Moses was the sole witness to a god actually giving the commandments and may have been a tad delirious (see page161). Rather suspiciously, he had the priests set a perimeter around the mountain to ensure that no other person could see, or not see, his god.14 So even assuming the bible reports these events accurately—a rather large assumption—the divine authorship claim rests squarely on Moses’s word. This is Thomas Paine’s point in the Age of Reason: “When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to
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