Table of Contents
- What the Bible says
- The fragments
- Fragment 1: Waheb in Suphah
- Fragment 2: the Song of the Well
- Fragment 3: the Song of Heshbon
- How far the quotation goes
- What the book was
- The paleo-contact reading
- Scott Wolter’s “fragment”
- What I notice in the text
- The critique
- Where I stand
- How I use this in my research
- About the source
- Sources
- Scholarship and reference works
- Paleo-contact readings and critique
- Bible text (KJV)
The Bible quotes a book that no longer exists. It is called the Book of the Wars of the Lord. In Hebrew it is Sefer Milchamot YHWH.
It is named only once, in Numbers 21:14. What survives is a few lines of place names. Nobody has a copy of the book.
To me that single line matters. It shows that the writers of the Torah used older written war records about YHWH. The battles came first. The theology came later.
All Bible quotes on this page are from the King James Version (KJV), which is in the public domain.
What the Bible says
The Israelites are moving north along the east side of the Dead Sea. They camp at the river Arnon, the border of Moab. Then the narrator cites his source.
From thence they removed, and pitched on the other side of Arnon, which is in the wilderness that cometh out of the coasts of the Amorites: for Arnon is the border of Moab, between Moab and the Amorites. Wherefore it is said in the book of the wars of the LORD, What he did in the Red sea, and in the brooks of Arnon, And at the stream of the brooks that goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth upon the border of Moab.
Numbers 21:13–15 (KJV)
That is the whole certain quotation. It is a list of places, used to prove where a border runs.
The fragments
Fragment 1: Waheb in Suphah
The KJV line “What he did in the Red sea” is a guess. The Hebrew is et Vahev be-Sufah. Most modern translations leave the names as they are and read “Waheb in Suphah”. The NASB, ESV and RSV all do this.
The medieval commentators Ibn Ezra and Nahmanides took Waheb as the name of a place where Israel fought. The Aramaic Targums took it differently. They read “the book” as the Torah itself (Jewish Encyclopedia).
Richard C. Steiner, a Hebrew philologist at Yeshiva University, has another solution. He reads the small word et as an old imperative, “come!”. The line then becomes a set of travel directions (Steiner, Yeshiva University repository).
Fragment 2: the Song of the Well
Some scholars think the quotation runs on into the next poem.
Then Israel sang this song, Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it: The princes digged the well, the nobles of the people digged it, by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves.
Numbers 21:17–18 (KJV)
This is a work song about a well. The lawgiver is not named. If it belongs to the book, the book held more than battles. It also held songs from the march.
Fragment 3: the Song of Heshbon
The third candidate is a victory song over Moab. The Amorite king Sihon had taken Moab’s land. Israel then took it from him.
Wherefore they that speak in proverbs say, Come into Heshbon, let the city of Sihon be built and prepared: For there is a fire gone out of Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon: it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the lords of the high places of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: he hath given his sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites. We have shot at them; Heshbon is perished even unto Dibon, and we have laid them waste even unto Nophah, which reacheth unto Medeba.
Numbers 21:27–30 (KJV)
Chemosh was the god of Moab. The song treats him as a real god who gave his own people away. On the Amorites, see Amorite.
How far the quotation goes
Shalom M. Paul sums up the debate in his encyclopedia entry on the book. Some scholars limit the quote to verse 14. Others add verse 15, or verses 17 to 20, or the poem in verses 27 to 30 (Jewish Virtual Library).
What the book was
The title says it. It was a record of the wars of YHWH. Paul describes it as “an anthology of poems describing the victories of the Lord over the enemies of Israel”. The Jewish Encyclopedia suggests songs of victory “led by Yhwh”.
Scholars do not agree on the date. Paul lists three views: the time in the desert (Yehezkel Kaufmann), the time of Joshua, or the time of David (Sigmund Mowinckel).
There is also a debate about the title itself. The Septuagint and the Targums read “the wars of the Lord” as the start of the poem, not as a book title. The Vulgate and most modern scholars read it as the name of a lost book.
Some link it to another book. In Exodus, after the battle against Amalek, Moses is told to write the victory down.
And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
Exodus 17:14 (KJV)
The medieval scholar Moses ibn Ezra suggested this was the Book of the Wars of the Lord (Wikipedia). Others identified it with the Book of Jasher, the second lost book the Bible quotes (Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18). The 19th century theologian Joseph Barber Lightfoot was one of them. On Jasher, see Book of Jasher (Pseudo-Jasher) and the book page Book of Jasher.
Oahspe (1882) has a Book of Wars Against Jehovih, but it is about false gods warring against Jehovih and is not connected to the lost book in Numbers 21:14.
The paleo-contact reading
The Bible itself calls YHWH a warrior.
The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.
Exodus 15:3 (KJV)
Saul asks David to “fight the LORD’S battles” (1 Samuel 18:17). Abigail says David “fighteth the battles of the LORD” (1 Samuel 25:28). These are human wars, fought on behalf of a leader.
In several of these wars YHWH takes part directly. At the Red Sea he looks at the Egyptian army “through the pillar of fire and of the cloud” and “troubled the host of the Egyptians” (Exodus 14:24). Against the Amorites he throws “great stones from heaven” (Joshua 10:11).
So I read the lost book as a campaign record. It would have listed where YHWH fought, against whom and with what. That is exactly what Numbers 21 uses it for: a border, a river and a town. The poems that survive are about land.
Scott Wolter’s “fragment”
Scott Wolter is a Minnesota-based geologist. He hosted the TV series America Unearthed (Wikipedia). He promotes a set of documents he says come from a Templar tradition.
In a podcast with Aubrey Marcus, Knights Templar Reveals DECODED Jesus Scroll, Wolter says the book has turned up. He says:
This scroll was hidden at the temple of the goddess sometime before the 10th century. It’s biblical in nature because the Book of the Wars of the Lord is mentioned in Numbers. But if you Google it today, it says there is no extant copy known to exist. Well, we have it now. But in 1898, they took it.
Scott Wolter, Knights Templar Reveals DECODED Jesus Scroll
“They” is a being he calls the angel K, whom he takes to be an extraterrestrial. He then reads a section aloud from photographs. It begins:
And the Canaanite king, his armies, and his cities were delivered to the Israelites at Hormma.
Scott Wolter, Knights Templar Reveals DECODED Jesus Scroll
In the text he reads, Moses sends 20,000 men of the tribe of Dan to the border of Edom. A goddess called Wisdom speaks from a cloud. Then comes the passage that interests ancient-astronaut readers:
Then did a silver beast descend from the cloud in the likeness of a great bird, and spat bolts of lightning from its wings into the water. And the horses of the chariots died, and the men of the chariots shook as with a palsy, fell to the waters, and drowned.
Scott Wolter, Knights Templar Reveals DECODED Jesus Scroll
The reading ends with “So it was written in the Book of the Wars of the Lord.” Wolter adds his own view of Wisdom: “Wisdom is the feminine, the consort of the Lord. There’s that dual-gendered god religion. That’s my interpretation.” On the idea of a female counterpart to YHWH, see “His Asherah”.
What I notice in the text
I compared the names in Wolter’s text with Numbers 20 and 21. They match closely.
- Numbers 21:3 ends with the Canaanite king defeated at Hormah. Wolter’s text starts there.
- In Numbers 20:21 “Edom refused to give Israel passage through his border”. Wolter’s Edomites “had denied the Israelites entry into Edom”.
- Wolter’s characters “Wahab” or “Wahib” match Waheb, the Hebrew name the KJV turns into “What he did” in Numbers 21:14.
- Wolter’s text ends “upon the banks of the Anan by the ridges of Ar on the borders of Moab”. Numbers 21:15 has “the dwelling of Ar” on “the border of Moab”, by the brooks of Arnon.
- Wisdom predicts a covenant between Edom and Israel, a great fort and “a thousand ships”. 1 Kings 9:26 places Solomon’s navy at Ezion-geber, “on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom”.
These links could mean the text is an old expansion of Numbers 21. They could also mean someone wrote it with Numbers 21 open on the table. The names alone cannot decide that.
Wolter also says a researcher told him the passage is the missing part of a story about “the sons of Dan traveling to Nod”. I cannot find that story in the Bible. Nod appears once, in Genesis 4:16, as the land where Cain went to live.
The critique
The writer Jason Colavito covered the same claim in December 2021. He calls the documents “the dubious modern documents he asserts to be copies of lost medieval originals”. He argues that the text borrows from Joshua 10:13 and from Erich von Däniken’s idea of an electric Ark (Colavito).
Colavito noted that Wolter had given no proof for the claim. I have not found a published scan or a scientific test of the scroll since then. In 2026 he published The Greatest Templar Tale Never Told: The Sinclair/Wemyss Journals. I have not seen whether that book contains this text.
Where I stand
I keep Wolter’s text apart from the biblical fragments. The biblical lines are old and certain. Wolter’s text is unverified and comes without a manuscript. I find it interesting as a modern retelling. It fits the paleo-contact view well, perhaps too well. Until someone shows the scroll, I do not use it as evidence.
How I use this in my research
The lost book is a reminder that the Torah is an edited work. Its writers quoted war records, songs and lists. Some of those sources called YHWH’s actions “wars”. I read the Exodus and the conquest the same way: as campaigns led by a powerful being with a strong interest in land. On YHWH’s rank among the Elohim, see The Hierarchy of YHWH. On the march itself, see Exodus.
About the source
The only real source for the Book of the Wars of the Lord is the Book of Numbers itself. Numbers is the fourth book of the Torah. It tells the story of Israel’s forty years between Sinai and the border of Canaan. Chapter 21 is the stretch around the river Arnon, just before the conquest of the land east of the Jordan.
For other lost and alternative texts on this site, see Books about Atlantis.
Sources
Scholarship and reference works
- Shalom M. Paul, “Book of the Wars of the Lord”, Jewish Virtual Library
- Isidore Singer and M. Seligsohn, “Wars of the Lord, Book of the”, Jewish Encyclopedia
- Richard C. Steiner, “The Book of the Wars of the Lord (Num. 21:14–20): Philology and Hydrology, Geography and Ethnography”, Yeshiva University
- “Book of the Wars of the Lord”, Wikipedia
- Numbers 21:14 in many translations, StudyLight
Paleo-contact readings and critique
- Scott Wolter with Aubrey Marcus, Knights Templar Reveals DECODED Jesus Scroll
- Jason Colavito, “Scott Wolter Claims to Have a Lost Book of the Bible with Aliens Inside” (2021)
- “America Unearthed”, Wikipedia
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