Who Wrote the Pentateuch?

Who wrote the Pentateuch? For the longest time, and for most Christians today, the answer was easy — "Why, Moses! Of course!"

For scholars in the last two centuries, however, the answer was far from simple, and the many proposals for an answer had sometimes seem like a competition in imaginative creativity that, at points, verges on the edge of insanity, and makes one wonder, "Can anyone seriously believe that!" So, what is the story behind these changes and are we any nearer to a satisfactory answer?

JEDP & All That Jazz

For the first eighteen hundred years of her life the Christian Church—and for an even longer period of time, the Synagogue—was unanimous that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch; its more popular title, "the Torah of Moses," or simply, "Moses," was itself sufficient proof of the fact. Then the West entered what is now called the age of Enlightenment in the 18th Cent. The Enlightenment was, above all, an intellectual movement that exulted human reason as the yardstick by which all truths were to be measured. Within such an intellectual framework claims of divine revelation held no say. The first of the new intellectuals to apply the new approach to the Pentateuch was a French physician named Jean Astruc. In 1753 Astruc published a work that attempted to isolate the different sources Moses must have used to compose the book of Genesis. Astruc observed that, e.g., different parts of Genesis seem to have different preference for the name of God. It also struck him that different parts of the book evinced different styles and there were disagreements between parallel accounts of the same event (the creation in Gen 1 and 2, e.g.). Could these, and other observations, suggest different sources. Astruc's conclusion was that Genesis was written from two different sources: those parts with a preference for 'God' (Elohim) as the name of God must derive from a source he called E (for Elohist) while those with a preference for 'the Lord' (Yahweh in Hebrew) derived from J (the Yahwist).

Though Astruc's proposals were at first ridiculed, his idea soon caught on, and the next two centuries of OT studies was focused on what is now called the documentary hypothesis. Soon it was proposed that there was more than one Elohist; the second having a keener cultic interest such as genealogies and ritual legislations, and was codenamed P (Priestly). Others, however, thought that P was not just 'another' but was rather the common or primary source from which both J and E derived. This academic—and it was almost entirely academic, since the exercise added not an iota of insight that aided preaching or comforted the needy—dissection of the Pentateuch reached its classical accomplishment in the work of Julius Wellhausen, the high-priest of pentateuchal criticism, with his exposition of a four-source theory: JEDP, in their assumed chronological order (D, for Deuteronomist, who emphasized the centralization of worship in Jerusalem and the restriction of sacrifices to one place, and found predominantly in the book of Deuteronomy). If the main outline was already accomplished, the detailed work had yet to be done. Others thought they discovered other letters—B, H, J¹, J², L, and S—to swell the line-up.1 Not only passages but single sentence was divided up to show how only from the various sources could it have been constructed. If the sources were colour-coded, a printed version of the Pentateuch would have put any kindergarten colouring book to shame. In such a scheme of things, Moses disappeared and the author was nothing but a zombie stitched together with parts taken from multiple cadavers. If we take these scholars seriously then we must accept their assumption that whoever wrote the Pentateuch was smart enough to cut minute pieces from these various sources, arrange and paste them into a faith-inspiring heart-commanding pastiche but was not smart enough to actually write anything original, even if he had the (re)sources before him!

What was, however, more disturbing than the opinions these scholars were profferring, and the consensus for JEDP, was the culture of intimidation created in their tailwinds. Anyone who did not prescribe to the documentary hypothesis, in one flavour or another, were viewed as obscurantists, intellectual flat-earthers. Such was the heat of this intellectual tyranny more than a few found their academic advancement in universities and seminaries hampered by their objections to the hypothesis.

But, even as this curving up of the Pentateuch was going on persuasive arguments against the documentary hypothesis and for the unity of Genesis were mounted—though for some time simply brushed aside—by able scholars, both Jewish (e.g., Umberto Cassuto, M. H. Segal) and evangelicals (W. H. Green, O.T. Allis, E. J. Young). By the 1980's the tide had turned. R. Rendtorff had to admit in an article in German in 1976 that they "possess hardly any reliable criteria for the dating of pentateuchal literature. Every dating of the pentateuchal 'sources' rests on purely hypothetical assumptions, which ultimately only have any standing through the consensus of scholars." Less than ten years later, W. H. Schmidt would lament, "How united was OT scholarship for so long, how deeply divided now! . . . what was more or less self-evident and undisputed has become doubtful . . . Even the legitimacy of source division in the Pentateuch is contested." Of this situation, Gordon Wenham says, "there is no king in OT scholarship. Everyone is doing what is right in his own eyes!"2

Though Moses has not regained his reputation as the undisputed author of the Pentateuch, there was at least more openness to viewing the unity of the books with equanimity. At the same time there was also an increasing openness among evangelicals to think about more critically about a rigid view of Mosaic authorship. Gordon Wenham, surely an able scholar, thinks that J was "the last major redactor of the Genesis traditions," while Ross and Ross are both prepared to approve of J and P as serious contributors to Genesis;3 Today, the focus in Penteteuchal studies, as in most areas of OT scholarship—and what richness of insights has been the result—is on understanding the book/s of the Bible as a whole. Looking back on this whole sad era of OT scholarship, Meir Sternberg remembers it as:

two hundred years of frenzied digging into the Bible's genesis, so senseless as to elicit either laughter or tears. Rarely has there been such a futile expense of spirit in a noble cause; rarely have such grandiose theories of origination been built and revised and pitted against one another on the evidential equivalent of the head of a pin; rarely have so many worked so long and so hard with so little to show for their trouble.

The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985):13.

JEDP turned out to be just a lot of jazz.4

Moses as Author of the Pentateuch

Could Moses have been the author of the Pentateuch?

Moses certainly had what it would have taken to write the Pentateuch. He was brought up in the pharaoh's palace; would have had a fabulous education. He would have been familiar with scribal traditions to do the necessary research for writing those parts of the Hebrew history that predated him, i.e., the book of Genesis. He lived through and was a major player in the events from his birth until Israel arrived on the eve of their conquest of the Promised Land and, therefore, knew the events intimately (often painfully) that we now find recounted in the rest of the Pentateuch. Furthermore, there are multiple references in the Pentateuch itself to Moses writing down, e.g., "everything the Lord had said" (Exo 24:4), " these words, for in accordance with these words I [Yahweh] have made a covenant with you and with Israel" (Exo 34:27), "this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi" (Deut 31:9), "this song that day and taught it to the Israelites" (Deut 31:22), all of which now form parts of the Pentateuch.

So, yes, Moses could have written the Pentateuch. But, did he? Here the answer will have to be more finely nuanced.

First, it has to be noted that all the books of the Pentateuch remain anonymous. While, as we noted above, Moses wrote (and caused to be written) many parts that are now recorded in the Pentateuch, the books themselves remain anonymous. This anonymity, of course, would not have been out of character with Moses. Nonetheless, they are anonymous. This anonymity should not disturb us. We do not know who wrote the books of 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, etc. These facts do no detract from these books their authority as Scriptures. Neither should the anonymity of Genesis. Or that if someone were to demonstrate beyond any doubt that it was not written by Moses. As Derek Kidner wisely points out, ". . . the book shows a breadth of conception and a combination of erudition, artistry and both psychological and spiritual insight which make it outstanding, by common consent, even in the Old Testament. If its chief architect was not Moses, it was evidently a man of comparable stature" (Genesis).

Second, we should also notice that there are parts of the Pentateuch which Moses could not have written. A good example is the last chapter of Deuteronomy which recounts his death on Mount Nebo. It may be argued that Moses wrote that too because he could have prophetically predicted his own death. Such an argument is specious for it calls for an un-necessary miracle. A more serious approach is to accept that someone other than Moses wrote that.

Third, there are other reasons for recognizing that someone other than Moses was responsible for other parts of the Pentateuch. This is certainly the case with Deuteronomy in which Moses is always referred to in the third person. Further more, the perspective, as reflected in the introductory remarks at the beginning of the book, is that of someone living within the borders of conquered Canaan, rather than the Transjordan where Moses died.5

In conclusion we say, therefore, that the Pentetuch is Mosaic, i.e., they had their origin in Moses, and that, while we recognize that he probably wrote down many parts of it—and there are plenty of reasons why he should do so—the actual writing down of the Pentateuch may have involved other persons.