A Brief Pre-History of Observations That Led up to JEDP

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]

Thomas Hobbes (1651) in his work, Leviathan, concluded that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, except for those sections that the text says he wrote. Spinoza resurrected the interesting idea of IV Ezra that the biblical Ezra had to rewrite the Pentateuch after the exile, since it was destroyed—something God used to “update” and form in a new way in order to inform the now transitioned state of post-exilic Judaism. The discontinuity in terms of repetition, chronological sequencing, and textual disparity are due to Ezra’s desire to preserve the things he used from Moses’ own writings mixed in with his own, and the fact that Ezra was not able to edit the final text sufficiently.
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]

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[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. 4^th ed. Translated by John Bowden (Louisville, KY: WJK Press, 1989), 92–95.

Moses and the Pentateuch

Tradition had often assigned the Pentateuch to Moses. The law code often referred to by the Deuteronomistic history and prophets meant, for Second Temple Judaism, that Moses must have written down the law as it resides within the narrative, and therefore, perhaps the narrative as well.

Further muddying the waters was the assignment of the Old Testament into two or three sections: Law and Prophets, or Law, Prophets, and Psalms/Writings. This division can be seen as early as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The reasoning was, then, that if Moses wrote the law, then he must have written the entire narrative to which the term “Law,” as a designation of the entire Pentateuch, now refers. The Pentateuch was sometimes called the “Books of Moses,” and a particular narrative, e.g. a book like Exodus, was referred to as the “Book of Moses.” The New Testament also takes up these designations as references to the law, books and passages within some of the Pentateuch (although I don't believe, as far as I can remember, that a passage in Genesis is ever assigned to him in the New Testament).

All of these designations have explanations, however, that do not necessitate Moses as the author. For one thing, because the law is attributed to Moses does not mean that the narrative in which that law is now placed must also be. Second to this, because the law is attributed to Moses does not mean that even the law code as it has now been formed and taken its narrative shape by a subsequent scribe or author means that it did not originate with Moses. Finally, designating a book or section of Scripture as “the Book(s) of Moses” does not mean that Moses wrote them anymore than designating a section of Scripture as “the Books of Samuel” means that Samuel, who dies a quarter of the way through those books, means that Samuel wrote them.

In fact, the Pentateuch itself only states that Moses recorded three things in writing: the law code (Exod 24:4; 34:28; Deut 4:13; 5:22; 10:4; 31:9), in whatever form that originally existed, the Israelite battle with the Amalekites (Exod 17:14—although he only commands that it is to be written), and the course the Israelites followed up to Canaan (Num 33:2). There is no statement that he wrote the narrative, the levitical codes, the poetry, etc.

Furthermore, the Pentateuch itself indicates that Moses did not write it. A phrase continually appears throughout Numbers and Deuteronomy that so and so happened “beyond the Jordan” (Num 22:1; 26:3, 63; Deut 1:1, 5; 4:46–49). There is no question that the word bĕ(ēber means “on the other side of,” as when the narrative quotes the Israelites who are in the Transjordan, the phrase refers to the Cisjordan. Likewise, when the narrator refers to the Israelites in the wilderness by Moab with his use of the term, he is obviously referring to the Transjordan. Hence, if the author is saying that the things in the wilderness happened to Israel while they were on the other side of the Jordan, then the author is presently where? The Cisjordan, i.e., the place where Moses never sets foot.

On top of this, the narrative refers to Moses in the third person, speaks of him as the most humble man who ever lived, and speaks aspectually as a whole, as though the events of which the author speaks have already taken place and can be spoken of as completed events of which the author is no longer (or never was) a part.

It is true that the author of Genesis (as opposed to Numbers and Deuteronomy) uses the term to refer to the Cisjordan, but this may indicate, as many scholars today believe, that the book is written by one of the Diaspora. In other words, it is not Moses, but one of the levitical priests writing it during the exile. There is evidence of this, since Genesis also refers to the occupation of Canaan by the Canaanites as a thing of the past (Gen 12:6)—a reality that would not have been true in Moses’ time.

Having removed the idea that Moses must be the author of the Pentateuch if we are to maintain the whole of Scriptural integrity, the next post will deal with how scholars began to come to the conclusion that the Pentateuch evidences multiple authors, coming from different theological perspectives, rather than a single author or group of authors with a single perspective.

The Sources of the Pentateuch

My first few posts will be about the current state of the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis, otherwise known as JEDP, as it exists in the academy today. My future posts will go on to discuss some basic theories that have potential, and finally, my own theory that still retains the possibility of the Hypothesis, but deflates the necessity of it as an interpretive key to the text of Genesis specifically, as my interest lies in getting a lot of my pent up need to write down my interpretations of Genesis before I move on to something else. This is going to break new ground, so hopefully it will be interesting enough to capture the reader's attention.