Mosaic authorship

Moses, by José de Ribera(1638).

Mosaic authorship is the traditional ascription to Moses of the authorship of the five books of the Torah or Pentateuch - Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

The belief in Mosaic authorship of the Torah is found in the Torah itself which states, "So Moses wrote down this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and to all the elders of Israel." Deuteronomy 31:9

The belief of Mosaic authorship excluding the Torah's testimony is first found explicitly expressed in the Talmud, a collection of Jewish traditions and exegesis said supposedly to date to the time of Moses himself. The commentary section of the talmud though dates to 500 AD, and indicate that the authors of the later books of the Hebrew bible already accepted the idea that Moses had written the Torah. The Talmudic commentators advanced several versions of just how Moses came to write the Torah, ranging from direct dictation by God to a less direct divine inspiration stretching over the forty years in the wilderness. Later rabbis (and the Talmudic rabbis as well see tractate Bava Basra 15a) and Christian scholars noticed some difficulties with the idea of Mosaic authorship of the entire Torah, notably the fact that the book of Deuteronomy describes Moses' death. The later versions of the tradition therefore held that some portions of the Torah were added by others - the death of Moses in particular was ascribed to Joshua.

Mosaic authorship was accepted with very little discussion by both Jews and Christians until the 17th century, when the rise of secular scholarship and the associated willingness to subject even the bible to the test of reason led to its rejection by mainstream biblical scholars.

Origins and nature of the tradition

The Torah itself makes a statement of authorship in various verses. Notable among these is Deuteronomy 31:9,Deuteronomy 31:24–26, describing how Moses writes "this law" on a scroll and lays it beside the ark of the Covenant. Similar passages include, for example, Exodus 17:14, "And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven;" Exodus 24:4, "And Moses wrote all the words of Jehovah, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the mount, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel;" and Exodus 34:27, "And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel." Also Leviticus 26:46 states, "These are the decrees, the laws and the regulations that the LORD established on Mount Sinai between himself and the Israelites through Moses"

Joshua, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah all contain verses implying belief in Mosaic authorship of the Torah, indicating that the belief existed at the earliest during the time of Joshua, his book is traditionally said to have been written around the 1300's bc. Also because of the belief in Mosaic authorship is found in the book of Nehemiah it can be certain that this belief existed during the Post-Exilic period. It was certainly well established by the time of the Talmud (c. 200-500 CE), the authors of which held that Moses received the Torah during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. The early Christian church with its Jewish roots accepted the Torah, and Mosaic authorship, as part of its own spiritual inheritance.

The challenge of secular scholarship

Until the 17th century AD Mosaic authorship of the Torah was an assumption, not a subject of discussion. A few rabbis, and even fewer Christian scholars, questioned Moses's authorship of a few verses, notably those in Deuteronomy describing his death, but none doubted that the bulk of the Torah was by him.

This changed with the Reformation and the European Enlightenment, when philosophers and scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and Jean Astruc began to investigate the origins of the Pentateuch, and by the 19th century the idea was no longer entertained by mainstream academic scholarship (See however here where it is shown that the basics of Biblical criticism were already posited by Ibn Hazm in the 10th century). In the closing decades of the 19th century Julius Wellhausen put forward the Documentary hypothesis, the theory that the Pentateuch had its origins in four source documents composed at various times during the 1st millennium BC and not combined into the final Torah until c.450 BC, and this became universally accepted for almost a hundred years. Since the late 1960s the hypothesis has been increasingly challenged, but general consesnus among scholars ermains that the five books were composed towards the second half of the 1st millenium BC.

The Mosaic tradition in the modern age

Many of the supposed contradictions and inconsistencies said to exist in the Torah as noted by critical scholars have been well noted by the classical Jewish sources (and in part form the basis of the Oral Torah). R' David Zvi Hoffman in his commentary to Leviticus made use of rabbinic homiletical and exegetical interpretations as well as some of his own insights to explain the text in light of the difficulties noted by the critics. He also authored a book Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese (2 vols., 1903/1916 translated into hebrew and available [here| http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/tanach/reayot/tohen-2.htm]) pointing out several difficulties in the Wellhasuen hypothesis, most notably in his theory that the Priestly code (and hence th Jewish conception of monotheism) was of late post-exilic redaction. While his approach to biblical investigation was essentially the result of the conditions of his time and place, they have stood the test of time and are still studied.

Another scholar Benno Jacob developed a theory concerning the internal rhythm of the Bible, which is expressed by the repetition of key words in set numbers in the narratives of the Torah and its laws. The programmatic statement in his 1916 book, Quellenscheiden und Exegese im Pentateuch, illustrates his concerns:

The Bible’s means of representation (Darstellungsweise)] may be termed the semi-poetic or dichotomistic. It proceeds like poetry, but without its strict measure [i.e., meter], employing instead paired thoughts, patterns of words and clauses and syntax, in doublets, parallels and contrasts; it is rooted, when all is said and done, in the Semitic [way of thought], which grasps matters dichotomously. This manner of seeing, conceiving and representing dominates the Hebrew language and literature in its entirety, to its subtlest manifestations.

Several attempts have been made to reconcile the results of the documentary hypothesis with the traditional belief that Moses wrote the Torah. This approach accepts the facts that Bible Critics cite as proof of a composite document while differing on the interpretation of these facts.

R' David Zvi Hoffman points to a statement in the Babylonian Talmud Gittin 60a that states "Said R' Yochanan, the Torah was given in a series of small scrolls". This implies that the Torah was written gradually and compiled from a variety of documents over time. This may account for the composite appearance of the Pentateuch.

Dr. Mordechai Breuer's approach is as follows. The Torah must speak in "the language of men." But the wisdom that God would bestow upon us cannot be disclosed in a straightforward manner. The Torah therefore resorts to a technique of multivocal communication. Each strand in the text, standing on its own, reveals one aspect of the truth, and each aspect of the truth appears to contradict the other accounts. An insensitive reader, noticing the tension between the versions, imagines himself assaulted by a cacophony of conflicting voices. The perceptive student, however, experiences the magnificent counterpoint in all its power. To use Rabbi Breuer's example: Genesis 1 (the so-called P account) describes one aspect of the biblical understanding of creation; Genesis 2 (the so-called J version) presents a complementary way of apprehending God's creation of the world and of man. Each text, isolated from the other, would offer a partial, hence misleading, doctrine of creation. In their juxtaposition, the two texts point the reader toward an understanding of the whole.

In Revelation Restored, Dr. David Weiss Halivni develops a theory of Chate'u Yisroel (lit. Israel has sinned). He writes

According to the biblical account itself, the people of Israel forsook the Torah, in the dramatic episode of the golden calf, only forty days after the revelation at Sinai. From that point on, until the time of Ezra, the scriptures reveal that the people of Israel were steeped in idolatry and negligent of the Mosaic law. Chate’u Yisrael, as a theological account, explains that in the period of neglect and syncretism the Torah of Moses became blemished and maculated

This process, explains Dr. Halivni, continued until the time of Ezra, when finally, upon their return from Babylon, the people accepted the Torah upon themselves. It was at that time, R. Halivni claims, that the previously rejected, and therefore maculated, text of the Torah was recompiled and edited, by Ezra and his “entourage.” That this is what happened, Halivni claims, is attested to in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In addition, R. Halivni supports his theory with talmudic and midrashic sources which indicate that Ezra played a certain role in editing the Torah.

He further states that while the text of the Pentateuch was corrupted, an oral tradition preserved intact many of the laws of the Bible. This is why the Oral law appears to contradict the Biblical text in certain details.

See also

• Moses in rabbinic literature
• Moses
• Torah
• Tanakh