Who Wrote the Pentateuch

A baraita in the Babylonian Talmud asks who wrote the books of the Bible and answers that Moses wrote his own book, the portion of Balaam and the book of Job. Josephus counted twenty-two sacred books in Against Apion and gave five of them to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind until his death. William Henry Green wrote that, apart from some ancient heretics who took offence at its contents, the authorship of Moses went unchallenged until recent times.

Julius Wellhausen named the Jehovist history book JE, made of a Jehovist part J and an Elohist part E, and called the priestly main stock of the law the Priestly Code. He took up Karl Heinrich Graf's view that the law came later than the prophets. His thesis was that the law of Moses is the starting point for the history of Judaism, the community that survived the fall of the nation, rather than for the history of ancient Israel. S. R. Driver held that Deuteronomy was written before 621 BC, when Hilkiah found the book of the law in the temple, and considerably later than the age of Moses. Driver wrote that these conclusions affect the form of revelation and leave its authority and its inspiration untouched.

Alexander Geddes, a Roman Catholic priest, laid down three propositions in 1792. He held that the Pentateuch in its present form was not written by Moses and that it was written in Canaan, most probably at Jerusalem. He dated it no earlier than the reign of David and no later than that of Hezekiah. He held that it was compiled from ancient documents, some of them as old as Moses and some older. J. S. Vater took up his work in a commentary published at Halle and treated the Pentateuch as a great number of separate compositions. Green counts thirty-eight fragments in Vater's Genesis.

The supplementary reading kept the Elohist and the Jehovist of the older documentary theory and joined them in another way. In it the Elohist wrote the groundwork of the Pentateuch, and the Jehovist, who lived later, made an enlarged edition that kept all of the earlier work in its form and language. Green names Friedrich Bleek, Friedrich Tuch, J. J. Stähelin, W. M. L. de Wette and August Knobel among its holders. Heinrich Ewald later made the supplementers a series of writers working at different periods, a scheme Green calls the crystallization hypothesis.

James Orr held that tradition and a strict use of critical method both lead to what he called an essential Mosaicity of the Pentateuch. He described the making of the books as the collaboration of original composers working toward a common end, in contrast with the idea of late redactors combining, altering and enlarging at pleasure. He held that Moses could have written the discourses of Deuteronomy in their present form, and he did not deny their editorial revision and annotation.

The Mosaic reading must answer the argument from Deuteronomy 34 in Hobbes's Leviathan and Spinoza's Treatise. In The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, Green answered that a later paragraph would prove only that it did not belong to the Pentateuch as it came from Moses. He held it far easier to assume slight additions here and there than to set aside the whole.

The documentary reading must answer James Orr's Problem of the Old Testament. Orr found no good reason to separate J and E as independent documents or to date them as late as the ninth or eighth century. It must also answer the words of Jesus about what Moses wrote. Driver answered in the preface to his Introduction that the purposes for which our Lord appealed to the Old Testament are not affected by critical inquiry.

The fragmentary reading must answer Green's Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, which finds that the sections refer to one another throughout. That cannot be so if each came from an independent source. Green adds that Heinrich Ewald refuted the fragmentary reading in his first publication, Die Composition der Genesis (1823).

The supplementary reading must answer Green, who judged in The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch that its simplicity proved inadequate to the complications that beset the critics who divided the text. Ewald and Hermann Hupfeld each tried to remedy it, and Hupfeld's Die Quellen der Genesis (1853) proposed a modified documentary reading.

The mediating reading must answer S. R. Driver, who held in An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament that P and JE form two clearly definable, independent sources and called that conclusion abundantly justified by the facts.