could moses have written the first five books of the bible

Be it sufficient that Kasdim for the Hebrews was their reference to the Chaldaeans, as one can see in 2 K 25:13 -

quote:

---

And the pillars of brass that were in the house of Jehovah, and the bases and the brazen sea that were in the house of Jehovah, did the Chaldeans [Kasdim] break in pieces, and carried the brass of them to Babylon.

---

These Kasdim were in control of Babylon, ie they were Chaldaeans to use the Greek term. Then there's Ezr 5:12 which talks of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, the Chaldaean (Kasdy).The people referred to as the Kasdim were in control of Babylon at the time of those we refer to as Chaldaeans, ie they were the same people, so shifting the problem to one of names doesn't change anything.The Kasdim were in charge of Babylon for a few hundred years before 550 BCE. Ur of the Kasdim is an anachronism. Attempts to explain away the anachronism brings one to fanciful conjectures about whether Ur really indicates the Ur we know of. There is no doubt that Ur refers to the one we know, just as Kasdim refers to the group who ruled Babylon in the first millennium BCE, ie those the Greeks called Chaldaeans. Ur was, after all, in their territory.

But what is the tangible evidence for that pre-dating?? I work on a much later date for Genesis. These days the Joseph tales are often referred to as the Joseph Novella and related to a newly emerged Greek literary form. The table of nations (Gen 10) is also seen to reflect Greek pre-cursors.The Hebrews in Egypt (and the exodus tradition) presuppose a tradition in post-exilic Egypt which involves the re-interpretation of the Egyptian overthrow and expulsion of the Hyksos as referring to the Jews. Josephus in Contra Apion cites Greek authors who use the Hyksos traditions against the Jews in their era.It's very hard to explain the idea that there were two separate exits of non-Egyptian peoples into Canaan at about the same time without them being the same. I go for it being the same event, re-used by polemicists against the Jews in Egypt, which then is taken as evidence by Jews for (clouded) evidence of their ancient past and on which the Jews speculated.

We are told that some Jews went to Egypt after the murder of Gedaliah (2 K 25:26). We know for certain that there were Jews at Elephantine over a century later -- their correspondence archive has been found. The Babylonians had already started flattening the Jerusalemites. Maybe some decades earlier, when Jerusalem had a high point under Manasseh and then Josiah.I tend to think that the exodus tradition is post-exilic, which should mean that Genesis is as well. There was racial tension between native Egyptians and the Jews in Elephantine and probably wherever the Jews lived in Egypt for the sacrifice of the ram was important in Jewish cultic practice, while the Egyptians had a goat headed god, Khnum, so there was bound to be strife.The material that Josephus records in Contra Apion is of Egyptian literature which packages the Jews in the image of the hated Hyksos with interesting twists such as the leader of the Jews was an ex-priest of Heliopolis called Osarsyph who changed his name to Moses, or that the escaping group all had a disease. Pretty contemptible stuff aimed squarely at the Jews. I think the Jews in Egypt accepted the notion that they'd been in Egypt before and sanatized the Egyptian polemic giving virth to a Jewish version which was the basis of the exodus.Of course one needs an exodus to have a Joseph sojourn in Egypt. Some of the other Genesis traditions are probably earlier. Jacob may be quite early as compared to Abraham who gets a lot less press and is not represented much at all in the prophets, whereas Jacob is ever present.