The Ten Commandments are traditionally dated to roughly 1490 BCE, but the oldest physical manuscript that can actually be verified is the Nash Papyrus, dated to only about 150 BCE — a gap of over 1,300 years — implying the traditional early date is unverifiable and possibly a later invention retrojected onto Moses.

The dating logic here needs to be untangled carefully, because it conflates two different things: the date a text was *composed* and the date of the *earliest surviving copy* of it. The Nash Papyrus's 2nd-century-BCE date establishes a terminus ante quem — it proves the Decalogue text existed in that form by no later than c. 150 BCE — but a terminus ante quem for a surviving copy says nothing by itself about how much earlier the underlying composition originated, because a copy is, by definition, downstream of an original that must be at least as old as the copy and could be substantially older. This is not a special pleading move invented to rescue the Bible; it is standard text-critical method applied to every ancient document without exception, and the objection applies it to Scripture alone while implicitly granting every comparable ANE and classical text a pass it does not get. We possess no autograph of Homer — the earliest fragmentary papyri are Hellenistic (3rd century BCE), the earliest complete manuscripts are medieval (10th century CE, Venetus A), yet classicists still confidently date the Iliad's composition to the 8th century BCE on internal linguistic and dialectal grounds, not manuscript proximity. Likewise, no contemporary tablet from Ur-Nammu's own reign (c. 2100 BCE) survives; the extant copies of the Laws of Ur-Nammu date from the Old Babylonian period, roughly three centuries later, yet Assyriologists still date the code's composition to Ur-Nammu's reign based on the prologue's royal claims and internal legal content, not the copies' age. Demanding an autograph-contemporary manuscript as the *only* acceptable evidence of an early Israelite compositional date, while accepting internal/comparative evidence for every other ANE text, is special pleading against the Bible specifically. Independent of the (much later) Nash Papyrus, there is a genuine, dateable form-critical argument for an early, Late Bronze Age compositional context for the Sinai covenant material: the literary structure of Exodus 20-24 and of Deuteronomy as a whole (preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, deposition/public-reading clause, witnesses, blessings and curses, in that specific sequence) closely matches the documented structure of 2nd-millennium BCE Hittite suzerain-vassal treaties, and diverges from the structurally different, historical-prologue-dropping, curse-heavy 1st-millennium Neo-Assyrian treaty form (e.g., Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty). This form-critical observation, first advanced by G. E. Mendenhall and developed at length by Meredith Kline and Kenneth Kitchen, is a real, peer-engaged scholarly argument for locating the covenant document's structural origin in the Late Bronze Age, entirely apart from any manuscript-age question.

Jewish scribal transmission, once texts do enter the manuscript record, shows demonstrable fidelity over very long periods — the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaᵃ, c. 125 BCE) matches the medieval Masoretic Isaiah text with well over 95% consistency across roughly a thousand years of copying, evidencing a scribal culture oriented toward careful preservation rather than free invention. That same transmission culture, working backward from the Nash Papyrus and later Masoretic witnesses, gives independent reason for confidence that the Decalogue text was conserved rather than composed from nothing in the Hellenistic period. Combined with the treaty-form argument above, the honest position is that a Late Bronze Age origin for the covenant material is a live, textually and comparatively supported scholarly position — not merely an article of faith resting on manuscript silence.