The concept that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, at least as we now have it, did not first appear with Christianity's critics, as some have presumed, but instead appears as early as the first centuries B.C.E. or C.E. in the pseudepigraphical book 2 Esdras (otherwise known as IV Ezra).[1] Irenaeus and other Patristic Fathers held to this tradition,[2] so it was an odd thing for Mosaic authorship to be attacked later by Celcus (AD 177) and Porphyry (Adversus Christianos--3d Cent.), who largely follows Celcus, two secular antagonists to Christianity, in an effort to undermine the Bible's claims. It is unfortunate that such hollow attacks come from Christianity’s critics, since, as it will also poison the well for many in the modern era, people are not likely to distinguish between data marshaled for the purpose of polemic and the data itself. In any case, other observations were made by Jewish and Christian believers later on despite these attacks. Ibn Ezra (AD 1167) concluded that certain passages had to have been written by an author much later than Moses, since it refers to the Palestinian occupation of the Canaanites as an historical detail apparently no longer the situation in the author’s day, as well as finding passages that “referred to Moses in the third person, used terms that Moses would not have known, described places that Moses had never been, and used language that reflected another time and locale from those of Moses.”[3] Carlstadt declared, in 1520, that it made little sense to attribute the death of Moses to his own hand, and that the language is too similar to the preceding narrative to attribute his death as having been written by one hand and the law written by his own. Eissfeldt summarizes how some interpreters took the ball from there:
Attention was drawn to the various repetitions and contradictions and other literary defects of all kinds, particularly by Andreas Masius (1574), Isaac de la Peyrère (1655), and Richard Simon [1678], and they drew from this the conclusion that the Pentateuch as we now have it could not have come from Moses, but was the work of a later author, who certainly made use of notes by Moses, but added to them a great deal from other sources as well as material of his own.[4]
What is important to note about these pre-DH interpreters is that their arguments are based largely upon the idea that Moses did not write all of the Pentateuch because the repetitions, chronological sequencing, and literary style evidenced multiple, rather than a single author. Most of them suppose that Moses is a source for whomever the compiler (or redactor) may truly be; but he is but one source among many, and not necessarily the primary source at that. The criteria used to conclude this will be revisited later in our discussion, as it has largely been the same criteria modern scholars use to determine that the Pentateuch is but a pastiche of various authors with differing religious views.[5]
[1] 2 Esdras 14:21–48.
[2] Irenaeus sees Ezra as one who restores the entire Hebrew Bible, not simply the Pentateuch, as was likely the argument of 2 Esdras (cf. S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament [New York: Meridian Books, 1957], v, fn. and Succah 20a). Driver himself stated that it would not have been a far stretch to suggest Ezra as the Priestly redactor, even though no explicit biblical statement makes him such (Ibid., vi).
[3] Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 19. Of course, Ibn Ezra thought of it as heresy to claim that Moses did not write the Pentateuch as a whole (Ibid.).
[4] Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction. Translated by P. R. Ackroyd (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 159–60.
[5] Other recommended reading in the area: J Albert Soggin, Introduction to the Old Testament: From Its Origins to the Closing of the Alexandrian Canon. 4th ed. Translated by John Bowden (Louisville, KY: WJK Press, 1989), 92–95.
